What Else Can We Do?

Part 1:

The Dreamers

Chapter 7:

'The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms'

-'The Hollow Men' by T.S. Elliot

I'm alive.

The thought echoed, never more felt than right now, and through the pain of it, there was a longing that could not be denied.

He stared ahead, gaze following the lines of the wooden floorboards he lay on. His shoulder was supporting his weight while his elbow pressed painfully into his side. He had a strange moment of knowing that something was profoundly wrong, but the thought, the feeling, was dismissed when his attention was drawn to a far more interesting elsewhere.

He didn't know why but he had never taken the time to focus on what it was like to feel his eyes moving in their sockets, up and down, slick and sliding past half-open eyelids. He sat up slowly, rubbing at the corner of his eye, uncaring when his hand came back covered in a black oil.

Harry, something in his mind seemed to whisper, and it was a thought that stood its ground against all others, no matter how captivating. I'm Harry, in this thing of blood and bone - this body, he corrected, wondering absently why the distinction mattered. Words were words.

He looked around and saw a young woman sitting next to him, her eyes skyward. He followed her gaze and smiled at what he saw: an impossible spectrum of colours scattered across the deepness of space, an ocean of stars falling as one, the rushing roar of an oncoming wind that had torn apart worlds, explosions of light and darkness as the colours twisted, meshed and fought. Time was in disarray, each moment stretched apart into actions that took a never ending and infinite instant to complete.

He looked down and the effect was broken.

The young woman was staring at him, like she had forgotten and remembered him all at once. Hermione, a thought murmured before it disappeared like smoke. He mouthed the name, liking how his mouth moved to form the word. He glanced around when he realised the word was missing something, another name that his mouth knew before his mind did: Ron.

There he was, standing next to a living shadow that had taken human form. Long dark hair fell from the shadow's head, past face and shoulder until it met the floor and merged with it like roots of a tree. It had pale skin that was almost transparent, so much so that overlapping webs of blue veins could be seen hiding underneath. Yet for all of these things that shouldn't have made it so, the creature was beautiful. And it was staring straight at Harry with eyes like burning coals.

'Welcome to the Dreaming,' it said, tilting its head up slightly with a fond smile as it gestured at the impossible sky above. 'I have been waiting for you to wake up here for a very long time. For a century or a heartbeat, I can never tell . . .' It looked down at them again. 'But time doesn't matter. You will soon be ours, one of our kind.'

'You're an incubus,' Hermione whispered, but in the sudden silence it was like a shout, echoing in the dark. 'You're the daemon.'

'I am Azadeh,' the living shadow said without feeling. 'I am your maker. And now your teacher.'

Harry frowned, watching as one of his index fingers spelt out all that had been said, tracing letters in the air. 'What did you mean by 'soon'?'

'You have to finish what was started,' Azadeh answered.

'Voldemort,' Harry simply said, his mind churning with the poison that word held.

'The enacted prophecy is keeping you chained to the Waking. You can never truly leave it until you are free of its bonds.'

Harry looked to the side at the growing shadows swarming closer along the floorboards, but a hand drew him back gently by the chin. 'I will teach you to control your power. You have nothing to fear from dreams or nightmares. Not anymore. They are your playground, your spider's web.'

'Can I trap Voldemort in it?' Harry asked.

'No, the time for that is beyond our grasp,' Azadeh said, his hand falling back to his side. 'Riddle turned himself into something that has no name. He no longer dreams. But that does not mean you cannot bring his kingdom to ruin.' His grin became too wide. 'You can take those closest to him and trap them in a forever-dream, unable to escape and left knowing that their bodies will perish. You can torture them with their worst nightmares over and over again until their minds break. You can take his strongest and toss them aside as a drooling mess of insanity after you're done with them. You can do many things here, my children. Many, many things.'

Hermione was on her knees, reaching for and then touching Azadeh, her eyes wide and dark. Ron was still at Azadeh's side, silently watching the daemon, his expression unreadable, suspicious perhaps, but his hands still gripped a tendril of his hair as if it were a life-line, an apron string.

'Our gift lies in dreaming. It is the only way we can tap into the Waking where we feed off and manipulate mortals as we like,' Azadeh continued. Harry couldn't rise up above the welling silence in his chest that drowned his words, not when the grabbing shadow-like nightmares were still there, just beyond the halo of light that surrounded Azadeh. 'But our power is a double-edged sword. If we go too far and kill a mortal, our power diminishes until we cannot keep the Dreaming at bay. We are consumed then. This is for our survival, and a way to keep the balance, since mortals are necessary for our very existence.'

'Then why did you tell us otherwise?' Harry said, his hands curling into fists, feeling the bite of claws dig into his palms. 'What's the point in having this power when we cannot use it to defeat - '

'You three are exempt from this as you are neither human nor incubi,' Azadeh cut in before Harry's anger could take hold. 'You are something unspeakable. But something necessary.'

'There is a catch though, yeah?' Ron asked quietly.

'As there is with all things,' Azadeh replied. 'The balance must be maintained. The more you use the power of the incubi, the more you will Change until your humanity is gone.'

'Will the Change happen even if we don't use the power?' Hermione asked.

'The Change is inevitable. What has begun cannot be stopped.'

The silence swallowed Harry's anger, his questions and threatened to take him whole. So he reached up and took Azadeh's hand then, knowing that if he was to be damned then he was going to give his nightmares – of the cupboard, of Voldemort, of Cedric, of Sirius falling through the Veil – the only thing they deserved: nothingness.

Suddenly everything went a blinding white as a devouring light spread and burned what it touched, conceived from a feeling and born with word, taking the shadows, his darkest nightmares, with it.