Chapter 34:

The Sword in the Stone

Voldemort woke up in chains.

This was not, despite what some people may think, a novel experience for him. You don't spend decades freedom fighting with small groups around the world without being captured from time to time. Now, being chained up by a longtime friend and ally? Very novel. At least when it lacked the kinkiness that this situation deserved. But for the life of him he couldn't guess what he'd done to enrage this Lady of House Black, but he was fast realizing he just had that effect on them.

"Good morning Tom. All recovered from your portkey?" Walburga asked sweetly.

Yup. She was pissed. Was she on team Morrigan too? How the hell would that have happened?

"You must know how your recent actions look." She went on. "Killing the only other remaining Knights and leaving such a message for the media to find."

She picked up a newspaper and threw it at his feet. He couldn't quite read the title from his chained position but he assumed it detailed the nice eulogy he had given Fenrir. Yada yada disease destroyed is mind, yada yada werewolves would not be utilized in the war any longer, yada yada werewolves need help not war, yada yada the Morrigan werewolf sanctuary does good work. He wondered if Hadrian had gotten word of it yet. He sure would like to see/hear his reaction.

"And now here you are, destroying your anchors to immortality." Walburga said. "Have you abandoned your mission, or have you simply forgotten it and given up?"

Tom sighed, allowing himself to show his tiredness.

"I have done neither, Walburga." He said. "I have merely failed it, as have we all."

She punched him then. It was an impressive jab, just as impressive as Bella's and Narcissa's. Now all he had to do was cross paths with an irate Andromeda and he'd have earned a shiner from each woman of house Black yet living... then again, there was little Nymphadora who wasn't so little anymore. Hmmm. And Sirius was courting that duelist. Perchance he had three more black eyes waiting for him in the future.

"You failed? How can you fail when you have all of eternity to accomplish your mission." Walburga the Chatty continued. "You who conquered death, and yet are now set on unconquering it."

"Your eternal guardian, I know." Tom said. "Like Salazar's basilisk at Hogwarts, ready to be unleashed on any army foolish enough to siege Hogwarts, I was to protect the sacred bloodlines and be your most powerful defender, when needed."

"So you DO remember." She said. "You achieved half of it, to find the secrets of immortality and lead us to a world without death. So why are you undoing that success?"

"Because it was my success in that that led me to failing my other task." Tom declared. "I have failed to protect them. They are all dead."

She sighed exasperatedly.

"Yes Tom, people die." She said in a mocking tone. "But they all lived long lives in pursuit of worthy goals. Did they not?"

Tom laughed, his normal mirthless laugh.

"Long lives? Fenrir was the longest lasting after me and he was in his seventies!" Tom roared. "Remind me again, what's the average wizard lifespan?"

She shrinked away at his tone, and blinked at his question.

"That's right, one hundred and sixty, with a quarter of us living longer than that. None of them made it halfway, and you think this a mere coincidence?" He demanded.

"Don't give me that tripe! You're undoing your immortality because you are tired of living, tired of fighting." She demanded. "Don't take me for a fool, I've seen it before. Men who make war lose themselves in it and cannot go on living. You sit there serenading me with your woes and regrets of our friends and lovers passing on before their time and yet opt to follow in their footsteps like a coward! They died fighting! They died in service to something they believed in, which I know, is a foreign concept to a wretch like you who thinks the length of ones life determines its value."

Ouch! Now that one stung. Leave it to Walburga to plunge the knife exactly where it hurt the most. He must have shown how much he felt it, because she sighed and switched tactics.

"You are hurting, Tom. I get that." She said. "But what I don't get is why you didn't come to one of us with that hurt? We are your friends. That's what we are for. They all love you. I still love you. Hell, Orion still loves you. You have all the time in the world, why throw it away?"

That last name was a sore topic, and Tom knew she hadn't meant it as a barb, but it still felt like one. He let it go. She must have realized the faux pas, because she knelt down and placed a hand on his cheek.

"Do you truly believe our tactics had nothing to do with their early deaths?" Tom asked, looking up but still leaning into her touch. "We have been going about things the wrong way, our tactics have been reprehensible. And my Horcruxes were the wrong path to immortality. Like you said, I have all the time in the world. Even with a mortal life I have another century to find a better way to extend human life, to conquer death. But the Horcruxes must go."

She removed her hand from his cheek and backed away from him.

"I don't believe you Tom, your handsome good looks alone aren't enough to make me believe your words alone. I'm not a little girl anymore." She said. "I want your word. You've never broken that, and I know you won't start now. I want your word that if I help you regain your mortality, you won't seek death. I want your word that you won't die before me, at the very least. And I remind you, us witches live longer than you dumb, irresponsible wizards."

He snorted at the boast. He knew he couldn't lie to her; he knew that if he gave that promise he would have to keep it, and it was a painful promise to make. On a fundamental level she was right, he was tired. He was very nearly ready to go on. Could duty and his word keep him going? Yes. Would it be orders of magnitude more torturous than his life thus far? Also, yes.

And yet, his mission must be carried out.

"You have my word, Walburga. I will live to sit on your bedside as you're withered and ugly and your great grandchildren mourn you." He promised.

She swiped him over the back of his head for the lip there, but his shackles fell as she did so.

"Very well, Tom. Let us go visit the Rainbow Serpent, shall we?" Walburga said.

"I somehow always forget that the seasons are flipped down here." Voldemort complained as he shivered from the frigid breeze.

"Are you a wizard or aren't you?" Walburga teased.

"Well, I would cast a warming charm on myself but warming charms always feel better when a lady casts it on you for some reason." He said. "Kinda like how food cooked by somebody else tastes better."

"That or maybe you're pants at cooking?" Walburga suggested. "And also the whole not able to cast spells around here thing?"

That was a distinct possibility. Fortunately the black, rocky ground they were half climbing along was already beginning to warm up from the afternoon sunlight. So it preventing him from casting said warming charms were a moot point. And as they crested the last hill of black granite their goal came into view.

A great Olga, surrounded by black boulders on all sides, sat in the middle of the draw formed by the rocky hills on either side. It wasn't as large as Uluru, or as decorative as Kata Tjuta. Much like Uluru and Kata Tsuja, it had been created by a rainbow serpent as a marking stone above the cave and water system it had dug itself in the rock below. Unlike Uluru and Kata Tsuja, it was still inhabited and was surrounded on all sides by the mysterious cursed stone of Kalkajaka. Which made it a perfect place to hide something from wizards and Muggles alike.

As an active Olga still inhabited by a wild rainbow serpent, the wizarding government of Australia and aboriginal mages protected the entire area from Muggles. As a Kalkajaka it kept all but the most suicidal wizards away.

Nobody knew for certain where the black stones came from, but all enchanters and alchemists knew for sure wizards created them. The leading theory was that it was some kind of equal and opposite enchanting method. By binding two such slabs of granite, they could strengthen a positive enchantment on one by simultaneous casting a dark curse on the other.

It held up in theory, and had been proven through experimentation. Problem was, none of the positive counterparts had ever been found and there was evidence of a wizarding society large enough ever having existed in Australia who could have produced so many billions of these wretched stones in such piles all over the continent. These stones that made all wizards, witches and even squibs feel as if the magic in their veins had turned to wriggling worms and wanted to burst out through their chest. Merely using magic around these things could kill a wizard or witch. It also completely incapacitated any sensory abilities.

And that wasn't even the greatest of the defenses he had places around his Horcrux.

They neared a freshwater stream and he spoke in parseltongue.

"I have returned, great mother." He spoke to the water.

Then, they stood there and patiently waited. And waited. And waited some more. He was about to speak again when the water's surface finally exploded upwards in a deluge of water. Always the melodrama with the bigger snakes.

And she was even bigger than he recalled, and he once again hoped he'd have the chance to introduce her to Salazar's equally large basilisk. Sure, experimental breeding was illegal, but since when did he care about illegality?

Rainbow serpents were effectively giant white-lipped pythons. That was it. Their dark scales iridescent, reflecting a rainbow sheen. There was also the small matter that their scales were elongated, halfway to being feathers. They were still very much magical creatures, however. As their gigantism, like giants, was born of magic and their scales made for excellent wand cores. The core of his spell wand came specifically from her, actually.

There was also the small ability they have to eat stone and regurgitate it into solid masses. Hence how they carve out these tunnels and use the material to form Olga's.

"It has been too long, speaker." She said.

"Indeed, it has." Tom said.

The unlikely trio breached the water's surface and they were deposited on cold, hard stone.

"Thank you, beautiful." Tom said to the rainbow serpent between coughs and sputters for the long swim through her watery tunnels.

He hadn't even said it in parseltongue, but she nodded in understanding all the same.

He picked himself up off the floor and helped Walburga do the same. With that done he cast a drying charm on her then himself. Inside of the Olga they were free from the influence of the black stones and thus it was safe to do magic again. And they were now past all of the protections Tom expected anybody to be capable of getting past.

Without the ability to cast the bubble head charm outside from the black stones nobody could manage that swim unless they'd thought to bring gillyweed along. And even if they had gillyweed, they'd have to swim through the underwater tunnels and do so without getting murdered to death by his colorful friend. Still, more protections awaited.

Walburga gasped as her eyes adjusted to the giant underground snake den.

"Is it expanded?" She asked.

"Yes. By a lot." Tom said.

It was a deliberately weak expansion charm too. One designed to collapse if any of the traps are triggered.

Tom had gotten the idea from alchemy, the simplest technique of which is to compress elements into higher elements with spatial expansion charms. Take a small space, like the inside of a jar, and expand it to twice the size. Fill it to the brim with Aluminum then simply collapse the space expanding charm and the two parts of aluminum will combine into roughly one part of iron... with a WHOLE lot of radiation as a byproduct. Most early alchemists simply killed themselves from radiation poisoning with the first experiment doing this, later ones wizened up and stood away from containers used for this job but still died of radiation over time because they had no concept of radiation.

Unfortunately, the technique only worked for elements with a positive proton count, so you can't use it to create copper, silver or gold. That couldstill be done by first creating higher, trans uranium elements and letting them decay to the elements you want, which is a complicated alchemical art requiring decades of experiment and trial and error - usually using time slowing containment wards to examine these elements before they decay. That was time Voldemort simply didn't have. The primary ingredient for the sorcerer's stone is merely whatever element lies in that mysterious island of stability at the end of the possible periodic table.

It makes sense if you think about the symbology, and thus, magical applications for such a material.

It did confuse the crap out of Muggle archeologists whenever they found ancients cities or towns of people fallen dead in the streets with more background radiation than Chernobyl though. That could happen when a particularly zealous alchemist tried to transmute literal metric tons of lead into similarly large quantities of element one hundred and sixty-four. Big risk to the statute of secrecy that wizard archeologists work tirelessly to find before Muggle ones do. Such sites are then, sadly, destroyed.
The space expanding wards within this Olga were not strong enough to cause transmutation of elements, but it was designed to collapse under certain circumstances. Pop quiz! What happens to the human body when the air pressure of the closed space they're in suddenly multiplies one hundred-fold? That image in your mind right now? That's about right.

"That looks a little vulnerable, just out in the open like that." Walburga commented, pointing to the center of the wide-open space.

Tom looked to where she pointed and, sure enough, his horcrux was exactly where he had left it. Embedded into a singular black stone, imported from its many siblings outside, was the sword of Godric Gryffindor.

"That's by design. Mind your step." Tom instructed her "On second though, remain here with our lovely friend."

Tom patted the rainbow serpent before walking towards the center of the room.

He reached the edge of where the traps began and, with a wave of his wand, blew away all of the dust covering each tile. With another wave of his wand he shot a lumos orb to the ceiling illuminating the entire room. Makes it much easier to read.
"so it's password protected, but with stone tiles?" Walburga asked. "Does each one have to be activated in a passcode?"

"Right in one Walburga!" Tom said with a smirk in her direction.

"Are they double encoded to be activated by charms and curses cast on them?" Walburga asked further.

Damn. That was actually a good idea. He could have programmed them for really obscure spells too.

"Nope, just with a bit of dexterity." Tom told her before turning back around and looking for the correct letter. "Let's see here.. I!"

He spotted the ninth letter of the alphabet and hopped on over. He heard Walburga groaned from behind him.

"Next is E!" Tom said as he leapt to the next later.

"Really Tom?!" Walburga demanded.

"S! And yup. Really!" Tom concluded as he made his third leap.

"Indianna Jones?! Are you a child?!" Walburga yelled after him.

"Only at heart, love. E!" Tom told her as he finished. "And another S. What does that spell?!"

Walburga groaned again instead of answering. As she did so every crack around the lettered tiles made a soft glow before turning white. It was now safe to walk on them.

"Didn't have space or mechanical knowhow for the buzzsaws, ditto for the invisible bridge." Tom said cheekily. "It's safe to come over here now, you won't have to watch your step."

She did so, walking over to him with her arms crossed and in quite a fuss. Why must ladies begrudge men their fun?

"How did you design it to be pulled out?" Walburga asked as she stood in front of the legendary artifact. "Passphrase? Fingerprint recognition? Does it need Veela blood since Excalibur was made by them?"

"None of the above, Walburga." Tom told her. "I embedded it into the rock with a banishing charm so hard that the stone melted around it and fused to it. The only way to get it out is to outright carry the sword, rock and all, out of here. Or else somehow shatter the rock."

Walburga actually looked him up and down with an unimpressed expression at his explanation.

"You're not going to take it out of here?" She asked.

"Not today." Tom told her. "Today I just came here to touch it. I ought to be out of commission for a few hours afterwards, so be warned."

"And what? I'm just supposed to stand around here while you do that?" Walburga demanded.

"I brought snacks and a few books in the pack. Help yourself." Tom told her with a shrug. "And you can use magic over there, we can't over here. At least not safely. But I would recommend not using magic at all out of fear of triggering the space expansion charm to collapse."

It was true, so close to the cursed, black stone any spell he cast risked spiraling out of control and triggering the space expansion warn to collapse, killing them both... which would likely destroying the rock containing Gryffindor's sword. In hindsight, he probably just should have sent in a conjured animal and had them do exactly that, then just walked in and picked it up. How had he missed such a blatant hole in is defenses? They really were otherwise perfect.

If anybody had managed to deduce it was there, they would have had to get through the stone hills, swam up to thirty minutes through the underwater tunnels without the bubblehead charm or getting killed by his rainbow serpent friend, deduced that the space expansion charm was designed to collapse, then they could have easily figured out this little oversight. So, his cleverness in putting in a Muggle reference no wizard would understand would have gone unappreciated.

He was still trying to hide his surprise at Walburga having seen it herself. He refused to ask her about it.

"Alright. No time like the present. Please don't slit my throat while I'm unconscious." Tom asked jokingly.

"And be stuck in this death trap with your snake friend? Not a chance." Walburga joked back.

"Oh, and please move my body away from the stone. I don't like the prospect of waking up from a nap next to it." Tom asked further.

"Stop stalling. The sooner you drop the sooner I can leave." She demanded.

Tom shrugged and sat down on the ground just next to the stone. He took a deep breath and concentrated. He remembered the Fabian brothers, who had fought bravely and in doing so brought unto him the Sword of Gryffindor. Their deaths had been tragic enough to warrant splitting even his tattered soul by then. He had regretted killing such brilliant young men even the day of that battle over such an inconsequential safehouse.

With those thoughts firmly in mind, he pressed a single finger against the flat of the silver blade, just below the G. Then, blackness.

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