Nothing is mine.

This one comes five days after the last post! This isn't because I've finally messed up my posting schedule after the last year or so, but because I'm writing this story in a different style to the last, the average chapter length is about double. That and I want a little more time to write the original stuff those supporting me enjoy and some commissions!

But on with this one. Don't fret, as promised, the tone of this story will be far far lighter than the last. Just not all of it.


I Shall Not See the Shadows

Dust hovered in the fading light spilling through Dudley's bedroom window, sparkling almost like little specks of gold in the sun above a carpet strewn with discarded, half-broken toys, heaped clothes and scattered, dirty shoes, and when Harry cocked his head, he could see the corner of a small stack of magazines sticking out from under the edge of Dudley's bed; the bare, red-toenail-polished foot of some girl poked out into the light beside the tip of a bright green lighter. From somewhere else underneath Dudley's bed, the faint scent of old sugar drifted, mixed in with the thicker, clinging stink of unwashed clothes and shoes from the last week of August summer escapades at the club.

'Damp!' Aunt Petunia snapped from the doorway. 'The cloth is meant to be damp. Or all the dust is just stirred up. Honestly, boy, I've told you this a hundred times, you should know by now!'

Yeah, the dust is so dangerous. It's the dust that's out there trying to kill all my friends right now.

'Yes, Aunt Petunia.' Harry trudged out across the landing past her to the bathroom and swiped the dust cloth through the beads of water clinging to the inside of the sink.

She lingered in the hall, patting at the creases in her salmon-pink dress. 'Your uncle and Dudley and I will be leaving in a few minutes for our wedding anniversary dinner. When you're done dusting, there are still spam sandwiches that you didn't eat up yesterday. Eat them today or they'll go off and be wasted.' Aunt Petunia wrinkled her nose. 'Don't mess with anything you're not supposed to be messing with, stay in your room and do nothing… odd.'

Bloody spam. Harry stifled a sigh and returned to swiping away the dust on Dudley's small stack of books. Even Dudley won't eat it.

Aunt Petunia's footsteps stalked along the landing, creaking down the stairs above the cupboard, and then the front door shut with a sharp click.

He edged out of the room to the top of the stairs as the car engine roared to life on the driveway, waiting until the gravel in the pothole at the end of the drive crunched, then tucked the duster back beneath the bathroom sink and made his way down to the kitchen and the plate of foil-wrapped spam.

I hate spam. Harry eyed the bin with an air of longing. But it's probably the only thing I can eat without getting yelled at by Aunt Petunia.

With a long sigh, he pulled the foil off and crumpled it into a ball in his fist, forcing the sandwiches down in large bites, chewing and swallowing as swift as possible to avoid the bland taste.

Done.

Harry tossed the foil into the bin, swiped the plate clean with the sponge and dried it, tucking it back into the cupboard and trudging back upstairs to flop onto his bed and bury his face in his pillow.

Let me sleep just once without nightmares.

His heartbeat steadied and settled into a slow, deep throb, lingering in his ears as he breathed in the faint sharp scent of Aunt Petunia's washing powder. Sleep tugged at him with warm gentle hands, yanking him down into a deep soft dark somewhere beneath his pillow; a thoughtless oblivion beyond the lonely quiet of Privet Drive and the ever-gnawing dread that Harry eagerly embraced.

But Cedric's pale face waited there instead, his blank eyes forever lit with the eerie flash of the Killing Curse, his features frozen in that last rictus of fear, robbed of all the kindness and cheer he'd carried with him through the corridors of Hogwarts; he floated before blurred tombstones, half a part of the shining white mist that'd poured from the cauldron, half as solid as the grey, weathered tombstones stretching on into the distance.

'Harry,' Cedric whispered. 'Harry.'

Fear choked the words in Harry's throat, crushed them in a fist of biting ice-cold nails.

The gravestones grew dark beyond him, their shadows shifting, lengthening, and rose from the shimmering pale fog pouring from Cedric like great, ragged-winged bats taking flight; they were tattered withered things, floating just beyond the reach of sight, drifting in slow circles around Harry like the silhouette of a shark about a small boat.

'Harry.' Cedric's whisper came in a hoarse rasp; the frozen grimace of fear on his face split across his cheeks, swollen to bursting with fever-sweet, sticky rot, his eyes clouded white as bone, seeping corrupted milky tears. 'Harry.'

And the swarming shadows circled closer, trailing capes of ragged dark, their scabbed, withered fingers stretching out through the mist, twisted and grotesque as the misshapen, leprous toes of London's feral pigeons. The graveyard was full of their quiet rattling breath and thin wheezing; somehow it drowned everything, no louder than a whisper, but more than the howl of the wind in his ears.

'Harry…' Cedric's raw, thick gurgle came through it all like thunder ripping across the sky, ringing in Harry's ears; the skin of his face writhed and shifted, and in the gaping abscesses at his cheeks and beneath the empty, yawning socked of his right eye, thick, fat, pale maggots wriggled, burrowing through him, gnawing away so loud Harry could almost hear them chewing.

They chewed at him too, somewhere inside, within the grip of that cold fist of fear; tiny sharp teeth of ice taking little bites out of his soul.

Beneath the swarming dementors, the ground shifted, breaking open as if something burrowed up from below, and, in the dark, dirt spilling out, he saw Hermione, and Ron, and Sirius, and Mr and Mrs Weasley, and the Twins, and Ginny, rotted already near to nothingness, just crumbling bones and mud and worms and the clinging, dull strands of their hair plastered across the bare white bone of their skulls.

Harry flinched away.

And let a flash of purple light slice past his cheek so close it singed his skin as it streaked away over the snow toward the distant mountains and dark night sky.

'Pathetic.' Voldemort's whisper dripped with disdain as it cut through the gloom. 'Igor, you disappoint me at every turn. Face Lord Voldemort. Face Death with some dignity.'

Ahead in the thick snow, the tall, fur-swaddled figure of Igor Karkaroff struggled through the drifts, drenched and dripped from head to toe, his long white hair crusted with bits of ice and frost. Harry floated after him, his bare toes just brushing the cool white as he soared over the surface, the cold night wind tickling his skin.

Karkaroff twisted around, hurling desperate purple spells from his short dark wand, his eyes wide and full of fear. Flashes of violet magic tore past Harry, scorching long deep lines through the snow in soft sizzles and leaving small clouds of steam dissipating across the white drifts.

'My lord—'

'Lord Voldemort is no lord of yours.' Voldemort's small grin curved the corner of Harry's mouth up into a smile as the dread swelled in Karkaroff's blue eyes. 'You renounced him. You betrayed him. You betrayed those that remained loyal to him. And all the world will see the price of such an unforgivable act.'

Karkaroff raised his wand.

'Better, Igor,' Voldemort whispered. 'Show me your magic. Show me all your might. I will break it and send you screaming from this world to the embrace of Death that awaits all lesser wizards in the other.'

Purple spells hissed past Harry.

He let them go, even as they singed his scalp and seared holes through his dark robes, and drew his wand, caressing the long, crooked piece of yew with the tip of his finger. Karkaroff snarled, conjuring a lash of dark orange fire and sweeping it through the snow, melting it back to the bare rock beneath.

But Voldemort's little smile only spread a bit broader and he released a long sigh. 'Is this it, Igor?' He raised the yew wand. 'Bow, then, and ready yourself for your becoming. At my hand, you will be reborn in Death.'

Karkaroff grimaced, but folded at the waist, bent double by Voldemort's magic like Harry would bend the tip of a straw with his finger. He raised his wand, but Voldemort snapped his arm up in a blur.

A shimmer of force swept through the air, seizing hold of Karkaroff and yanking his limbs out straight, lifting him up above the snow to float in the night sky; it bent his fingers into fists, breaking them one by one in brutal crunches as Karkaroff screamed and squirmed, and his short dark wand plummeted into the snow.

'Hornbeam and dragon heartstring,' Voldemort whispered, summoning it to his hand with a crook of one finger. 'You fancy yourself a dragon at heart, yet you are but a fly, drawn to buzz about the heads of your betters, profiting from what they leave in their wake.' He curled his long, pale fingers around Karkaroff's wand and the wood crumbled to ashes, floating down into the snow. 'Your time as headmaster must have been illuminating for you, Igor, watching those destined for great things take their first steps beyond you. I wonder, did you truly appreciate the chance to shape the minds and views of those blessed with magic? Did you even try to break the silence the ICW would smother us in? Of course not; you were afraid. You were weak.'

Karkaroff spat at him, dribbling into his matted goatee.

'A last lesson for you, then, Igor. Children are the lens through which we best see our true selves. In them, too young to have learnt the shackles society imposes on us all, our purest nature shines through in all its savage beauty. And children—' Voldemort's lips curled back from his teeth into a cold grin '—they know what to do with flies.'

Karkaroff's limbs tore free from his body, spraying blood across the snow. In the bright, cold moonlight and beneath the distant silver stars, it gleamed black as it spurted onto the ground, black as the ink that'd poured from the diary.

Voldemort dropped the whimpering, keening lump of Karkaroff onto the blood-drenched snow drifts with a sneer. 'They tear off the wings and watch them crawl until they grow bored and squish them in their fingers.' The yew wand swept up. 'But Lord Voldemort will grant you wings, Igor. He will bless you with wings of blood and bone as you are reborn in Death, so in your last moments you might have the majesty of a dragon. And finally, those who see you will tremble with awe and fear as you so wished they would.'

A piercing shriek ripped from Karkaroff's throat as his ribcage snapped in half with a dull crunch, the broken ribs bursting through his furs; his severed legs impaled themselves onto the sharp points jutting through on either side of his chest and his dismembered arms swooped down, each seizing an ankle in its fist and stretching out from his chest across the blood-drenched snow.

Harry stared down at him.

From beneath the arch of those stiffening, bare limbs stuck on the gleaming, pale bones of Karkaroff's broken ribs, the blood spread across the snow like great tattered wings of pure black pitch.

'You will be my herald, Igor,' Voldemort whispered as the life faded from Karkaroff's blue eyes. 'Carry word of my return to all those who still doubt upon the wings I have gifted you. Let them see the signs and tremble.'

Something flickered between the mountain peaks in the night sky, a shadow passing across the light of the stars and the pale waxing crescent of the moon.

And through that little crack Harry had felt form only a few nights before, bubbled fear; it came cold and dark as water swelling from the depths of a drain, tugging at his heart like a thousand small chill hands, dragging at it, yanking it down toward those icy depths.

'Morsmordre,' Voldemort murmured, but Harry's lips stayed still, and with a loud crack, Voldemort vanished.

Somewhere in the distance of the bright stars and cold moon, that shadow lingered still, less than a wisp of smoke coiling on the breeze; it hung there with endless patience, as deep a darkness as the space between the stars, but emptier even than that vast imagined abyss of night, and brimming with insatiable hunger.

Harry stared up as, like countless curving fangs of shadow, the dark between the stars seemed to close in over those distant silver lights in the sky, ready to one day swallow each and every last one of them. Its gaze fell upon him, piercing through him, sharp as the clear moonlight on the snow but far far colder than any winter could ever hope to be; it pinned him in place, but, too frozen before it to yet feel the fear, it held him by the barest margin, like thin ice just taking his weight above bottomless black cold waters.

Yet through it, beneath him, between his feet, he could feel the crack running, a jagged wound carved deep through the frozen surface, slicing down into some unfathomable dark below the world that not even the stars could reach. And the shape of it was sharp, sharp and broad and sharp, and full of countless eyes and needle-pointed teeth; it smiled at him, from that crack within himself and from that dark beyond the stars, all endless creeping patience and hunger. But it called out to him, a cry less than a whisper, and, for some reason Harry couldn't name, it called to mind the silence of the setting sun, all fading flame and dying light, and so much said with nothing spoken.

Dread welled up through the crack within, bleeding from all the piercing eyes in its shadow and trickling through its razor-sharp teeth to freeze like ice in Harry's veins.

His feet stumbled a step forward through the snow; he tried to fight them, to pull them back, but they dragged him on toward it, and the crack crept a little wider with every step, spreading like that sharp smile until it stretched so wide Harry knew it must soon swallow him whole.

And the swelling dread bubbled up at the back of his throat at the thought of all those teeth closing over him as they had about the stars, bursting free in a raw scream.

His eyes snapped open in the gloom of his room as Hedwig shrieked and rattled the bars of her cage with her beak.

'What the fuck was that?' Harry whispered.

He felt all the eyes of that bottomless black unfurling in the shadows of the room, a cluster of piercing pupils as dark as the black gleam of blood beneath the moon and that single staring eye of the shadow and the sunset; the prickle of their gaze upon him sent a shudder sweeping down his spine.

What sort of dark magic is Voldemort doing? A fist of fear crushed his heart in its freezing fingers at the thought of Karkaroff's mutilated corpse sprawled across the snow. What if he goes after my friends? A little stab of anger tore through the dread. Why do I have to be stuck here where I can't do anything to help?


AN: As you may already know, I have a Discord server. That server has early access to three chapters and those supporting me get the great perk of helping me with my dyslexia by spotting the errors in the next twentyish chapters after that. Here's a linktree!

linktr . ee / mjbradley