Nothing is mine.

Shorter one, I'm afraid, but as I promised to those asking on Discord and in DMs, someone's back from the dead!

Vert

A stabbing, throbbing agony ripped through her skull, burrowing into her brain like maggots, and she pressed her fingertips into her temples, holding her breath through each lance of pain as they dwindled to a dull ache.

She opened her eyes and sucked in a rasping breath through a sore, raw throat, breaking into harsh tearing coughs. Was I screaming? She swallowed with a wince, pressing fingers to her throat. Why?

A plateau of smooth stone full of frozen ripples and eddies lay from her feet to the white crags crumbling down to the forest below. That host of bare winter branches stretched away to the horizon over rolling hills and the flash of sunlight off winding rivers.

'Where am I?' A darkness hovered among her thoughts, a deep well of it, but nothing rose up from the black. 'Who am I?'

Between the toes of her dragonhide boots, a single scrap of parchment fluttered, trapped beneath the tip of a long, thin pale wand.

My wand? She bent and picked it up, but it felt strange in her hand, too long, too thick, the wrong weight. Not mine. Staring into the emerald swirl cut into the slim silver ring, she unfolded the piece of parchment.

Six words in elegant, neat script looped across it in black ink.

'You have no name but Vert,' she whispered, turning it over to find it blank and crumpling it into a ball.

Is that really me? Just Vert?

She patted the pockets of her loose, dark robes down, dug deep into them, but found nothing, tugging the collar out, she glimpsed a simple plain cotton black bra and smooth pale skin stretching down to tight dark shorts at her hips.

Just Vert. Her gaze returned to the ring. Green like this ring. She took hold of it and something bubbled up from the well of her mind, rising out of the deep dark like a single wisp of mist. I mustn't take this off.

'Why?' she rasped at the smooth stone plateau. 'Why not?'

An image seeped from that black gulf in her head, a tall figure in dark robes and a bright golden mask. Harry Potter. I cannot take off the ring because of him. Her sense of foreboding swelled. If I do, everything is lost.

A little shiver swept through her. 'Why?'

'A very good question.' A soft voice carrying a strange double timbre tugged at her thoughts, yanking upon the deep darkness at the heart of her mind. 'What magic would require such great lengths to evade? What charm would prevent the pursuit or change of purpose? Only the strongest of enchantments. Only an oath upon the soul.'

The air shimmered like heat haze in the desert and before her upon the stone, sat a great sphinx; its green eyes burnt like wildfires from within the symmetrical woman's face atop the broad, muscled shoulders of a lion.

'Am I Vert?' A hoarse whisper escaped her raw throat. 'What do you want?'

'You have no name but Vert. But once, perhaps, as another, you made a promise. And now that bond is severed, for they ally with Grindelwald…'

Harry Potter. Some instinct caught the name before it left Vert's lips, but others crept from the darkness.

'Violette,' she murmured. 'Lemon Sorbet. Henri Dufort. Henri Delacour.'

The sphinx's smile spread wide, curving up to its ears to reveal a maw of sharp curving fangs. 'Just so. I wish to drink his dream, to taste it like a drop of the sweetest nectar upon the tip of my tongue, and you seek to kill him, must kill him to become anything more than Vert once again, so I offer you my aid, the insight of the Scourge of Ephesos, the knowledge of a Keeper of Secrets and a Seeker of Truths.'

'Why?' Vert asked. 'Why do I need to kill him?' Her throat stung and tore and she pressed the tip of the wand to it. 'Vulnera sanentur.' The pain dwindled.

'He betrayed you.' It tapped the smooth stone beneath it with one curved, glass-like claw. 'Left you for dead amongst the flames, the victim of a twisted magical oath so tightly bound that you cannot even feel your fury, cannot recall your gift. While the other survives, you cannot live.'

'Where is he?' Vert demanded, staring down at the long thin white wand in her hand.

'Beyond your reach,' it purred in a two-timbred tone that tugged at Vert's thoughts like the wind at her robes. 'Come to eclipse the legacy of Rome, a worldchanger born from a screaming red storm beneath the sea and the dying light of a setting sun, driven by such strength of purpose that no single soul can stop him.'

'But I must,' she whispered; the certainty rose from that deep darkness, welling up from it like a bead of bright red blood from the tip of her finger. 'He has to disappear.'

'If he cannot be stopped alone, you will need to find allies.' The sphinx stretched, arching its back like a great cat, its long curving claws screeching across the stone like nails scoring through glass; Vert flinched from the grating scream and shuddered. 'Or find him enemies.'

'Grindelwald.'

'What better wizard to set at his throat than the only one who can claim to be his better.' The sphinx's smile spread very very wide, a gleaming grin of sharp, curved fangs. 'Grindelwald is old now, less a threat, perhaps, to a woman blotted out and bound, than what his left hand might one day become...'

'But he has not become it yet,' Vert whispered. 'If Grindelwald kills him, then it is done. And if he overcomes his foe, then I and any allies can kill him at the moment of his victory.'

'Mithras is the name he goes by now.' The sphinx laughed, a high wavering note of mirth. 'One more layer of spice and sweetness to the flavour.'

'Mithras…' Vert tasted the word, but it came without sweetness or spice, just a faint bitterness bubbling up from the black pit of her memories. 'Why are you helping me?'

All those sharp teeth curved into a broad smile. 'Because I want to. It amuses me. And because I wish to drink his dream at the moment of its perfect maturation, when its taste and my triumph is at its most exquisite.'

'Why?'

'I am a Keeper of Secrets. If there are no more secrets, what becomes of me?' Its green eyes burnt with a fierce smouldering fire. 'These would-be worldchangers come one after the other, stumbling through the ruins of Rome seeking to undo my birth, but I have devoured them all and I will devour this one too.'

An enemy's enemy. But not a friend.

'What good are friends to Vert?' Its two-timbred voice tugged at her thoughts like the claws of a cat at a ball of thread. 'There is only one way to be the woman you once were again. A betrayal must be avenged.'

Harry Potter must die.

She swept her eyes across the plateau and the trees, searching for some familiar feature, but found only the endless spill of the winter forest. 'Where am I?'

The curved claws slid away and the sphinx rose to its feet, spreading huge dark wings of black feathers. 'The scorched ruined palace of a white prince of the sunset, where the unknown died.'

'My unknown?' Vert asked, but the deep darkness denied her its secrets. 'Me?'

The sphinx's sharp smile spread from ear to ear, showing off all its many fangs. 'Mithras has heaped all his dreams upon the sacrificial pyre of his ritual; its light he seeks to make a beacon of, one bright enough to lift the veil of my secret. If you wish to destroy him, it must be before he lights the pyre, and he was just one last step away, so it will not be long now…'

AN: Maybe not quite the person who everyone was hoping, though! xD Anyway, if this short one and the return of the sphinx, one of my favourite pieces of this story, aren't enough, you can follow the linktree to Discord for at least a chapter more, and, indeed, to find a whole stack of other stuff, too!

linktr . ee / mjbradley