Chapter 13
"That was... unexpected," said Sirius.
"Where am I?" asked the woman.
"You're in Salazar Slytherin's ritual chamber," said Sirius. "Now, the big question, who are you?"
"My name is Nagini," said the woman. "I... I have... had ... a curse on me. I have always been able to turn into a snake, but as I grew past puberty, I had to spend more and more time as a snake, and eventually I became all snake, and my human thoughts and feeling suppressed. I... that means I am free! No more eating humans to dispose of the bodies of those he kills! Free!"
She burst into tears.
Sirius did his best to comfort her.
"Am I correct in thinking that the horcrux left her?" asked Harry, sharply.
"If that's what the black, oily, image was," said Severus.
"It is," said Regulus. "Same as the locket."
"What's to be done with her?" asked Harry.
"We take her home," said Sirius. "Only place she's safe from both Tommy and from the twinkling twazzock."
"Are we safe from her?" asked Hermione, pointedly. "My parents are there."
"Are we safe from you?" Sirius asked Nagini. "We plan to kill your former master."
"Thank the powers!" said Nagini. "Oh, it is like waking from a horrible dream where I enjoyed biting people! I... I have been angry for so long, and... I am not an angry person. At first, I met him as I wandered the world, my mind overruled by the snake, but still there... he was possessing a snake, and we spoke, and he confessed he was a man... and I was so lonely! And he used me... and he put a part of himself in me, and it made me hate..."
"That'll be the horcrux," spoke up Cor. "Remember how I hated when the horcrux was in the house."
Sirius shuddered, in memory of the malevolence of the elf, Kreacher, who was now Cor.
"Yes, it makes a difference," he said.
"He trapped me; I want him gone," said Nagini, with a shudder.
"He'll miss her," said Harry. "We need to hurry with the other ritual."
"You need to recover your magical strength," said Sirius, forcefully to Harry.
"He will wonder where she has gone, and why he cannot feel her," said Severus. "And I fancy he will send people to look for her body, which of course they will not find. We have a few days in hand, and I will have Karkaroff here as soon as possible."
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Voldemort felt his connection with Nagini be wrenched from his mind, and he screamed in pain. This was worse than the destruction of any of his other horcruces, and he raged as he came out of the initial agony. More than one death eater felt the lash of the cruciatus curse, and Voldemort swore and cursed that Lucius and Severus did not answer his call. He sent all those death eaters out to find his familiar's body, and see what they could discover about who had killed her.
They found no body of a snake.
"Well, I'm not going to tell him," said Avery.
"You think I am?" said Rookwood. "Make Bella tell him."
"Where is Bella?" asked Nott.
"Taking off her knickers for snake-face," said Bella's husband.
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Voldemort did not often welcome Bella's advances, but this time he decided to let her seduce him.
His last and most trusted horcrux was gone; but if Bella got pregnant, he could possess her child and make another horcrux with it, and then have a new body to go to if he should suffer any... accident.
Bella might not have enjoyed herself as much as she had hoped, but wild horses would never drag that out of her. She could please her lord, and that was sufficient.
And the other death eaters blessed her for keeping him distracted whilst they all bravely found other things to do than to pass on the lack of a snake's body.
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Karkaroff arrived in Britain, and sent a message to Sirius; he was rapidly collected and transported to Grimmauld Place.
"I'd like a little more information, Black," he said, nervously.
"You want to be rid of servitude to Tommy Riddle, I provide it," said Sirius. "What more do you need to know?"
"What you demand as the cost," said Karkaroff, bluntly.
"Using your dark mark to reach others," said Sirius.
"What, to summon? But he would know, blyat!" said Karkaroff.
"Not to summon, but I can't tell you about it," said Sirius.
"Very well," said Karkaroff. "Blyat, I am too trusting, but I fear him finding me, Bozhe moy!"
He was less happy when sat – and held – firmly in the ritual circle and Harry began hissing softly. He was even more horrified when the snake on his arm wriggled obligingly out of the skull and into a large chunk of crystal, where it was followed by other snakes writhing through his magic and out of the skull. The crystal, which started off as green as Harry's eyes, was gradually filled with a smoky darkness filled with stars.
"Well, that worked," murmured Sirius to Hermione.
"I told you it would," said Hermione, who had worked with Sirius to prepare a power storage crystal attuned to Black blood. The snakes represented the magical cores of the death eaters, and Harry was draining them, one by one, through Karkaroff, who was now screaming at the pain of the magic of others coursing briefly through his veins.
"Snake-eyes will start to notice soon," said Severus. "Then he'll reach out to his people and find there are some missing. Then he'll draw on the ones left, and through them, Potter can draw him. Now his last horcrux is inoperative." His eyes went to Nagini, who was attending, but who as clinging tightly to Emma Granger. Nagini was not a witch, but though she had been alive for decades, appeared to be no older than her late twenties. Harry had shrugged; no doubt magic knew what it was doing.
Harry gave a hissy sort of chuckle, which did not bode well for Voldemort, and Karkaroff screamed and screamed as with some effort in the chanting, and siphoning power from the stone ritual storage crystal, Harry raised the level of the chant, and Karkaroff's arm began screaming too. Harry pulled through several more snakes, as something foul and dark lay writhing in the tattooed skull's mouth. The chant changed and Karkaroff whimpered and passed out as the skull came away from his arm and hovered above the skin. And the hovering image merged with what was in its mouth, the ugly head of a wraith form of Voldemort himself, screaming, throwing parseltongue insults and imprecations, which Harry ignored as he forced the whole off the skull and shrieking into the air.
"No! No! I cannot die, I cannot..." it wailed despairingly as it vanished into nothing.
The skull image just crumbled away.
Harry sat down hard.
"We appear to have the power of forty-seven magical cores for the use of house Black," he said. "And I was able to pull out Tommy's roots inside Karkaroff without killing him, which was a bonus."
"You... blyat, I would not have volunteered if I knew that was a risk," said Karkaroff.
"That's why I didn't tell you," said Harry. "Viktor Krum seemed to respect you, so I wanted to save your life if I could. Every other marked death eater is either a squib, or dead now. Unless I missed a few; which is possible, but their power is broken."
Indeed, in the old Riddle House in Little Hangleton, a construct was slowly breaking up into bone powder, a human hand, slightly the worse for wear, and a few rather used potions ingredients. The death eaters with him had screamed, clutching their arms and then their chests as their cores were ripped from them. Voldemort's blood, based on Harry's, enabled him to dedicate all the power over those Voldemort held in thrall, into his Black blood and hence into the storage stone. The cells which had not implanted in Bella's womb yet would never even become a baby as she died, weeping.
"So... it's over? He's gone for good?" asked Daniel Granger. "Am I alone in finding that... anticlimactic?"
"Anticlimactic operations are those which have been well-planned; trust me, I've been an auror," said Sirius.
"I am free!" said Karkaroff. "Are you sure there's no price you want from me?"
"You paid it in the extra pain to allow me to kill your former master," said Harry. "Yes, Dad Dan, he's gone now, gone for good. Now all we have to do is to deal with Dumbledore."
"All, he says," said Sirius.
"Well, if you arrange for Hermione and me to sit our OWLS, so we can be officially free of schooling, I will write him a letter, formally withdrawing from school, now that the prophecy has been fulfilled. And then? If he chooses to mess about chasing me, he can spend his energy in futile and fervid endeavour."
"Futile and fervid endeavour? Who died and made you Snape?" said Hermione, throwing her arms around Harry and kissing him.
Harry enjoyed it, and came up eventually for air.
"Well, if swallowing a dictionary makes you kiss me like that, I must do it more often," he said.
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Magical examiners to sit the OWL exams could be procured at any time of year at the ministry – for a fee. And Harry and Hermione sat, and aced, all the subjects they had signed up for. Which mystified Albus Dumbledore more even than that they had taken their exams early, as Harry was not even officially studying Ancient Runes or Arithmancy, and averaged a 'T' in Trelawney's class for turning in essays predicting Klingons on the starboard cheek as a result of perturbations in Uranus, or a fortuitous combination of soft nougat, toffee, and chocolate under the influence of Mars.
He actually made an effort just to thumb his nose at Dumbledore, and produced an E level OWL paper in Divination. Hermione got O; but then she managed to produce so much research, or what Harry called 'bullshit' that the examiner's eyes glazed over. Harry always claimed he gave her an O in self defence. Both of them told of a graveyard and a ruined house and dead death eaters, having worked out beforehand what each would say, and enjoyed hamming up visions in a crystal ball.
On due consideration, they decided they wanted tutors to take their NEWTs, and to catch up to speed in muggle subjects as well, so they could go to university if they wished. They poached Severus to teach potions as Dumbledore had no hold on him anymore, and as he was actually a good teacher with small groups who wanted to learn. They planned to ask Neville, Luna, and the Greengrass girls to join them in their small and exclusive school.
Potions without fear was something Neville would have to get used to, but Severus could spend the rest of the school year rebuilding a better relationship with the boy.
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Harry wrote to Dumbledore, in addition to writing a formal withdrawal to McGonagall.
Headmaster Dumbledore.
I have tendered my withdrawal from Hogwarts School to Madam McGonagall, as deputy head, as per protocol; this letter is a courtesy matter to you.
Now that all the horcruces have been destroyed, including the one in Nagini, I have been able to defeat and finally kill Voldemort with the aid of runes and arithmancy, subjects you tried to deny me when I first wanted to switch from divination. I told some lovely stories though to pass divination, and hopefully the DMLE will follow that up to tidy up the mess that disrupting the dark mark made on Tommy Tiddle's Tattoo Troop. So, the prophecy is fulfilled. Go and look in the DOM, old man; the globe is black. He's gone. I am not your little martyr, to fulfil your interpretation of the prophecy, that I must die before he can be killed. As with so many things, your interpretation was flawed, because you are a man defined by hubris, an overweening pride leading to downfall. Your dumbing down of the curriculum, your fear of pureblood ritual and muggleblood hybrid vigour have contributed to hundreds of deaths in both encouraging the rise of Voldemort and in the inability of those you have brainwashed and trampled to take him down before he became a threat. And to jealously guard to yourself a prophecy which you misinterpreted from every moment since it was made.
I will be sending a copy of the above to both the Daily Prophet and the Quibbler for publication because the public needs to know that even if you survived the deaths caused through the dark mark when Tom Riddle died – do you have a clean left forearm? I have been wondering – that you are at best a bumbling old fraud and at worst an evil man, in your own way a dark lord, setting out to control our youth by limiting traditionalists and new blood both. I expect to hear that you have resigned from your post as headmaster, or I am sure that the Board will have something to say about removing you bodily. As the Board include my godfather, Cyrus Greengrass, Frank Longbottom and Lucius Malfoy, whose miraculous recovery from being one of the Tattoo Troop due to enlightened self interest, and who is pledged to follow the Potter-Longbottom-Black Alliance, I suspect you will not last very long if you do not step down voluntarily. I give you a week to announce your retirement, before the above is sent to the newspapers. You have wrecked the Weasley family by tampering with Molly and with Ginny, and that I cannot ever forgive, as Ginny might have been a nice kid if not brainwashed. Ron... well, he might have grown up nicer if his mother had not been under your control. You tainted my first experience of friendship, old man, as well as having made sure it was my first experience by keeping me a prisoner in conditions nobody is permitted to keep animals. I despise you from the bottom of my heart, Alfuck Poncyface Whaddyacall Barfbag Bumblebee. I wish I had the chance to do a dump on you so I could also despise you from the heart of my bottom. You are vile. Now get out before I make you get out. I plan to live now, not merely survive, and if I have to turn aside from doing all the things a normal teenager should be doing to get rid of you, you will discover that I can be very unforgiving. You preach forgiveness, with your mouth not your heart. I believe in forgiving my enemies as soon as they are dead.
Hamilcar Potter-Black.
A/N ok one more chapter to go.