Prologue - Where The Circle Ends
A curious, infinite, whiteness or perhaps blackness, the colour that all colours are before they learn their true name. That was all that remained of the Department of Mysteries. Everything it was, everything it had been, carved away and devoured. Everything, except the Veil.
It stood firm, quiet and silent, as unchanged as the time the Ministry was been built around it.
The heart of the enemy, the beating realm it commands had been cut, but even then it did not die. Therefore, there was only one thing left to do. The rush of the blade slowed and Harry Potter surfaced.
One step.
The tattered black fabric fluttered around the archway, as if in anticipation.
Two steps.
The whispering grew louder.
Three steps.
Beyond the Veil flickered nothingness, a no-colour, an aching, blank absence, like static set aflame.
He stepped through.
On the other side was darkness, but not really. Darkness has a colour. He floated in blindness, in oblivion, but he can still sense the surroundings.
Somewhere far, far above, was existence. It is seeing and knowing. It's reality.
Others lied below. Things that once existed. He can sense their movements, sending great waves through the oblivion he floated in. Now and then, one makes a mad scramble back toward existence, only to fall short.
And further below, a flash of red-
Sight returned and fractured.
-shadows lurking out of view, a train station too clean-
His surroundings are all or nothing, everything and yet blank and void and -
The word slips from his mouth before he can bite it back.
"Mum?"
Lily Potter smiles at him, her eyes his eyes. "Harry," she says. He reaches out, but stops half-way there. There's something about her smile that tells him. Or the tilt of her head, or something that echoes within him that he can't explain. He draws his hand back.
"You can't come this way," not-Lily says, "You know that, Harry." She had odd pauses in between her words, odd phrasings and lilts to her expression, the words themselves were said correctly but it was as if she didn't know how to properly inflect on a sentence .It's a razor-thin veneer, cobbled together from a dozen pieces and slipped on like a garment.
"I know," he says, taking in the details of the thing wearing his mother's face. He knows what it is. The entity, the being, the nameless, vast thing that is less of a deity and more of an inevitable fact. "But I don't know why. Riddle's horcruxes died readily enough. Masters of the Hallows have fallen before, those who united all three and those who didn't."
The smile he gets is almost sad, and for a single moment he wishes this was his real mother. "You faced death and you chose to turn away. The train left without you, shall we say? Well now it's gone. You've missed your train, you're stuck at the station. And I'm sorry… but there isn't going to be another train for a very long time."
His breath leaves him in a rush. He searches Lily's face for answers that are not there, "I see. Will you take him then?" He pointed to the plundering star trapped beneath them. Tom Riddle's soul had grown into something incomprehensibly great, and even here, it burned a seething red, trying to force its way into existence.
"There are things, agreed upon, that should not exist. He is one man, one single flash of light, there for a moment and blink and he's gone, for all his stretching and all his toils and mortal coils he should be nothing more than this. And yet… he persists." she responded, but it was strangely coloured, tainted dark with bitterness and a sharp whip like anger.
He laughed. Neither can live while the other survives. "To think that I thought the Veil would work."
She stalked forward, her motion boneless and fluid, graceful in a way that humans were not meant to be graceful.
"All things end, and he is no exception. Even a circle would end if you cut it." Before Harry could move she was running her fingers over his face, cheeks, eyelids.
"You still burn so brightly, so bright I fear you will go out, but you never do." Death whispers, reaching out, its fingers resting just above his shoulder, "So Master of my Hallows, continue to do what you do best."
And then it pushes him. It's gentle, the press of fingers against his shoulder sending him ever so slightly off balance and then his world tilts and he steps forwards, Elder Wand humming in his left hand.