Heroes know that things must happen when it is time for them to happen. A quest may not simply be abandoned; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever; a happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.

~ The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

Dirt crunched beneath her feet. They exploded in dry clusters, stones pricking the bottom of her soles, but she continued. Her body felt heavy. She wasn't sure why she was walking. Something stirred the back of her mind, through the red dust of dunes, impelling her to move. She remembered nothing but the darkness of the land and that one remaining faith.

The wind was dead. What moved her hair came from beneath her, sand in her skin. She was parched, belly-sick, and weary with no rest. Lids hooded, the heat of the ground was the only thing that moved here, other than her. She'd passed dunes that became canyons that became adobe that became cities and not seen a single soul. No so much as a bird or an insect.

The dryness carried itself down the back of her throat, into her eyelids, into her shoulders. The sky was red, always red. It was skin. The skin of this endless country without eye, stretched and stretching. Shadows slanted the buildings, or maybe the shadows were buildings and the broken teeth of glass and metal she saw were the edges of crooked glass. Distorted mirrors.

She dragged her feet, popping blisters. A trail of blood followed her.

The path that carried her might have been straight, but she wasn't sure. She didn't think it existed in a place that could call things straight. Some distant part of her that remembered truths but not why they were truth knew that dunes could not become the slack-jawed skyscrapers, knew that lands were not desolate like this. But the part of her that lived, embroiled on cracking dust and the scalped remains of a dead sun's light, did not care about a lost society's reality. She had been walking, in a place where time did not exist, on a road that went backwards and upwards and forwards and downwards all at once. It did not matter that she could not stop, that she wasn't really moving at all.

This was the world. Everything was ghost.

The city, with its gutted cars and tilting telephone poles, slid into suburbia. Another evolution she didn't stop to understand. The towers twisted to houses, beneath the browning light. The ground had grown up around them. Stumps, the roofs sliding off to expose the organs of faded furniture. Echoes of the dust they had come from, that they were becoming, was in each dulled and drooping window, the frames of their doors. Death hung over every hearth.

Something pricked the back of her mind, like a needle to a blister. An old memory surfaced. And she realized that she knew this place. Before oblivion. (God, if there was even such a thing.)

The streets were shadows of another. The lampposts. The mailboxes. It was Godric's Hollow.

Long past her time, she thought. She didn't understand. This was centuries later. It had to be. The death of the world. But here was her old village. The rows of houses she knew so well. The weathervane that old Mr. Thompson refused to take down despite his wife's hatred of the thing. The Godlebee's cadillac. It was too familiar. Too different. She didn't understand.

Breathing fast, she turned, and there was the old home. The one that had been sucked through a void. Board by board, by the stones in the foundation, she'd seen that house deconstructed and disappear. It sat at the end of the road, like it had been dropped there by a bored toddler.

She ran, her feet matted by scabs above scabs, iced with dust. The door was open, tilted on rusty hinges. The front steps creaked beneath her weight. Lily searched the hall, not even sure what she expected to find. The interior was spared the red dust of the land, the picture frames faded but untouched. It was so quiet. Lily held her arms. Empty. Dead.

Tears pricked her eyes. They overwhelmed her. Her breath came in a rattle, and she almost lost everything. Something. Something warm and wet, like small hands, stoked inside her, and she was able to calm herself. She wiped her face and sniffled. Not knowing why anymore than why she walked or why she was here, she climbed the stairs.

Dust coated her hands, the simple grey dust of disuse. The landing had four doors, all closed except for one. It was a crack, faint light. Lily inched forward, not sure why, not at all sure why her chest was tight, that the lids of her eyes (so heavy with old tears and older dust) were wide. As she crept forward, her hand reached and pushed open the door.

It was a nursery. Color that might once have been blue. The crib was tipped over, but otherwise the room was serene. Lily stepped inside. There were clues of an old life - toys, pictures made with cracked paint - all covered in a layer of dust, faded from light that might have existed a thousand years ago.

Lily knelt on the floor. A blanket had spilled from the crib, crumpled on the floor. And slowly, she pulled it.

Her breath came and went through her lungs like great stampedes, filling caverns with tornadoes. And still it did not relieve.

A boy, calcified. A perfectly preserved mummy. He could be sleeping. Trembling, Lily could not look away, could not dare touch him. Finally, finallyfinallyfinally, her hand reached, almost without consent, and touched his head. His hair parted for her, soft as down. She patted it down again, touching his cheek. It was still and cold. He was so perfect she could count the lashes in his eyes. Lily gathered him up.

He didn't move. Lily took the child's limbs and tucked them against her waist, pulling him up like a sack. Glancing over her shoulder, she stole him from the stillness, running back down the stairs.

Darkness flared in the corners of her sight. She was sure it hadn't been there before. She broke though the door. Looking up, she knew something was different. The whole trek, she'd been terribly, terribly alone, the one inhabitant of a dead world. Now, she felt it, something coming. Moving on its belly over the shred civilizations. Towards her. Towards her.

Following the footprints she'd left behind, Lily took one step. And another. The child felt like a stone. Her hips felt brittle, her arms sagging. What an age was she? Was she old? Was she grey and whittled, bleached bone tugged the last of her petrified baby across the land. And the thing that rode her trail, licking up the scabs broken from her feet, she could only feel a fear of it. The future was stark and bitter before her. Lily retraced her footsteps and undid the spool. All her centuries unraveled before her, unmade with her burden. She swallowed the dryness and marched, the sounds of her bones knocking together a macabre worker's song.

To come so far. She had memories of mountains, of civilizations built and collapsed in the breath of her walking. She held the child. Time passed in whorls. The cities, the houses, the adobes, the rocks, the sand - all one long blur, a monster coming behind her. Closer.

No direction but a trail of blood. And she prayed and hoped and prayed, without even understanding what it meant to do so.

The blood began to thin. The beginning of the journey she taken lifetimes ago. At the last of the blood, Lily begged to stop. So heavy. Everything. But her legs no longer knew how to stop. They knew nothing but the repetitive motions of her shuffle through the sand. So she continued, moving her mouth around a sound she didn't know was bubbling anxiously from her chest.

When she was nothing but a needle, tied together on grains of sand, the word came through the spindle.

"Shames. Shames," she whistled, dragging the boulder through the sand. "James."

Like a pinprick of light, something snagged in her soul. Something narrowed and focused and the whittled-woman wavered. Like a splitting dream, something returned. A grail filled.

"James," she said, just to hear the sound, a bell knocking inside her ribs. The toll struck louder, and she remembered that she was a woman, a human.

"James!"

The trunks of her feet, no longer even meat, pounded. The feeling traveled up her legs into her hips and pooled in her belly. And she remembered what a woman was, that there was no end of the world.

"JAMES!" she screamed, hugging her burden close.

Sound echoed around her. Bouncing off and back to her, Lily became Lily, and she searched for the door. She hobbled on the stubs of her feet, holding out her son.

"JAMES. MY JAMES!"

A hand reached out. It came through nothing to her. Wide-spread and asking. For a second, she knew, with no doubt or suggestion, that it was God.

She held out her boy, reaching on the edge of her mangled feet. The serpent was behind her. She could feel it opening its maw. Nothing but darkness, down down down.

The hand took her son. Relief flooded Lily. So weary, she started to drift down. She started to fall, eyes closing in surrender, before the hand snatched back at her. It fumbled incoherently, frantic and mad for her face. More annoyed than awed, she made to bat it away. Instead, the fingers sank into her skin, sweaty and violent. A taste of humanity she had forgotten.

James. No god. But James.

She dangled in her husband's grip, no strength left in her limbs to boost her up. Dizzy and failing, Lily saw another hand enter Hell, groping her shoulder. The arms stretched until James' torso threatened to come through the barrier.

The mouth coming around her shoulders, James gave a mighty pull and yanked Lily off the ground. He pulled her up. The door shut on her ankles

They tumbled backwards onto the ground. Lily stared at the grass. She'd forgotten that color. She'd forgotten anything but sand. Her fingers stretched on ground, cool and full of dew. The body beneath her groaned, hands around her waist. There was another, a boy, legs trapped beneath her husband. His dizzy face, pale and shocked.

James pulled her back, even as she scrambled, reaching for that green, and cried out when he saw her face. She imagined she'd gotten old. There was no counting the time she'd spent in the world below. Lily sat up.

"Your feet," James cried.

For the first time in a millennium, she looked down at herself. Her ankles ended at a nub of red and black, crusted over and worn to the quick. There were no feet. She couldn't feel them. They were only slabs of ground, calcified meat.

"Where's my baby?" she asked, looking to James.

The man's eyes were full of tears, biting his hand trying to control himself. He looked up at her, crows nesting in the corners of his eyes, and slid his gaze to Dumbledore.

The sleeping boy. She'd thought him a baby, but returning to sanity, she saw now that he was a toddler. Four or five. Resting peacefully in the crook of Dumbledore's arm. His nakedness was swaddled in the headmaster's cloak. He was almost pure. There were no signs that he'd been kidnapped and stolen from Hell. He had a baby's porcelain skin, hair far darker than any English child, shining blue in the light from the sconces.

James stood. When Lily tried to as well, he made a horrible noise and lifted her up instead. She would have cared before... Before. Now, she was ambivalent. What was lying in someone's arms when you'd seen the world degrade into nothing. James followed her reaching hand, took her close to the boy. She swept her fingers through his hair again.

With great certainty, she knew that this boy was going to die. Everything great and small perished. But it would not be before his time. What purposes her poor child had to fulfill were fulfilled. No Fate. No immortal to call him up for war. The extraordinary was finished with him. He could live any manner of life he chose.

Lily smiled. She pressed a kiss to his forehead. Something inside her - whittled to the bone - was pleased, at last could rest.

o.O.o

"So this is him?"

Lily hobbled to the bedside. She walked with crutches, still not used to the spells that would allow her to float her weight across the room like a ghost. She leaned over the bed. The boy Lily had pulled from Hel was napping against Dyre's body. He'd awoken to no stimulus, his only movement to wrap himself around his body.

She could not blame Sirius' disbelief. The child was ephemeral. There was a glow in his features, unnoticeable except when the lights were dowsed. It was a reflection of light, like the moon, coming from a source they could not see. There was a peacefulness on his face, the kind of sereneness when you thought time didn't matter anymore. That and only that proclaimed him a piece of soul.

Remus sat on a chair across the bed, staring at the two, elbows on his knees, hands covering his mouth.

"Only part," she said. Sirius' gaze, without his consent, traveled to her face and glanced back down again quickly.

Lily's feet were not the only thing scarred. She hadn't felt any of it, but her tears must have created tracks in her face. She looked more like a monster than a woman now, but like a great deal else since she'd returned, she found such things moot. The ravines in her face were not so different than the scar Dyre once wore on his back. She didn't mind the resemblance, bearing only a fraction of what her son had. She felt like she'd worn her tears' scars for over a decade. It almost felt like a relief to have them open to the world now.

Severus hissed between his teeth, glaring at Sirius with the heat of a forge. He had taken her scars almost as hard as James, vowing to find some manner of potion to heal her. Rather than argue, Sirius looked away shamefully.

Lily looked at him. "Do you think they're disgusting?" she asked softly.

He puffed his chest and vowed wholeheartedly that he didn't, not understanding that she teased until she started to laugh.

"Oh, Padfoot," she said, touching his cheek while she balanced on one crutch. "It's just flesh. It rots like everything else," she said bored, turning away to look at her prone son. She sat on the bed, removing her crutches, and brushed his bangs, revealing the smoothness over his right eye. She cried for centuries to get these, while his had been thrust upon him.

It had been a week since she'd traveled Below. A week had healed most the insanity, but she thought she'd never be quite human again. She couldn't think the same way. Even now, she was sort of proud that she'd marred herself so in a way no mage could cure. For her little time in this universe as a single being, she'd made something that would last.

She hummed gently, sorting her son's bangs, while the men exchanged uneasy eyes over her.

They convened later that evening, without Lily, to discuss their next course of action. In possession of the body and the soul, they needed only the spirit to revive him, but not everyone was sure he could be revived even then. The soul had been taken from Hades. Did even of them even know if it was Dyre? Or if it was some changeling monster, another ploy of the Norns to unleash havoc on the world? They raged back and forth.

Draco sat apart. He'd climbed up in the casement, crammed against the window, and refused to look down. It had grown dark. There were fireflies on the ground, nipped and gobbled by some lucky beasts. He watched the light appear and disappear.

What he thought of all this, he didn't know. He felt dead. He didn't really have any hope that Dyre would return, no matter what they said. No matter watching Lily emerge from that hellhole, scarred and bleeding and grey. He wasn't even sure he wanted him back after so long. It just all seemed to complicated.

He will know the way.

Bugger all. He didn't know shite. This wasn't his fault. He hadn't been the one who lied. He didn't know anything. Anything at all.

His knee knocked the window. These things were usually locked but the hinge came loose. The frame opened, spilling in the night air. Draco moved to shut it. He'd rather not draw their attention away from the scrabble below. When his fingers touched the iron, something white fluttered.

Standing on the eave was a raven. A white raven. It was small, with pink in its beak and legs. Against the dark of the night, it stood out like a beacon. Draco stared. It cleaned beneath its wing.

It looked at Draco, just once. Then, it hopped on the sill and dove. It gained altitude and rode the night, carried away from Draco to the north. Shell-shocked, Draco could only sit there, hand still on the window's lock.

"Draco?" his mother called from below.

She seemed alarmed that her son was dangling halfway out the window, and she'd attracted most the attention he'd wanted to avoid a moment before. Draco looked at her, still stunned by his revelation.

"I know where he is."

"What?" she said, moving as if to magic him down.

Draco left the window open. He looked down from his height, leaning over the wall. "I know where he is," he said, near giddy and somewhat solemn at the same time. "I know where Dyre is."