Author's Note

Take heed, friends. Things will get a little bleaker before they get brighter. This chapter and the next might be a bit heavy. If depression and/or loss are sensitive subjects for you, feel free to opt out of this chapter. But take heart: It gets better, here and in real life.

Chapter Two
A Cruel Universe

I have done it again! I have lured forth another secret of magic and tamed it, mastered it. One hears many things in a long lifetime, and I have heard all things. Stories of worlds not our own have been told for millennia, quite often following a man as he embarks on his heroic quest or is banished to a foreign world by angry, merciless gods. I know better. I know these tales, while embellished with fancy, bear truth in their provenience. There are other worlds — I have seen them! I have walked their roads and been burned by their suns; I have breathed their air and drank their waters; I have seen their people and bedded their women; and I have returned here, to my world of origin, to write of my otherworldly experiences.

Harry skipped the bits where the Author explored, in great detail, his conquests in these other worlds, sexual and otherwise. He skimmed the theoretical part, not understanding most of what was written. He resumed, some pages later, when the Author finally began to explain the practical aspects of the so-called ritual.

The underlying magic of the ritual, while complex in theory, is quite straightforward in practise. Truthfully, it is rather simple, something which surprised even myself, considering the end result. It is almost beyond my comprehension that the fabrics of two very different yet similar universes could be sown together with a magical thread by such a simple rite. Fundamentally, this ritual, this otherworldly ordinance, creates a link between two worlds, this one and a neighbor, running parallel to us, bonding their temporal lines together and preventing branching. This allows the wizard to cross between the two worlds at will in a way much like Apparition.

The more Harry read, the more unsettled he became. If there really were other worlds out there, alternate universes filled with nearly identical people, then within those worlds were alternate versions of Harry, of Voldemort, of Ron and Hermione, and everyone else. An entire world with its own entire set of problems—a world that might not yet have been consumed by darkness as this one had. Was that why Voldemort had abandoned ship and hopped across the pond to such a world? To give himself a second chance at conquering wizarding Britain? Since he'd made a massive fuck-up of this world, was he going to hit the reset button and try again? Was it game over and time to start a new game? And what if—what if—Voldemort had indeed crossed over into another universe? Would there be two Voldemorts there now? Or would he just pop into his second self's body like some kind of possessing ghost? Either way, that other world wouldn't stand a chance. Everyone Harry knew would die all over again.

Angrily, Harry flipped the pages, unable to continue with such thoughts. His eyes alighted on another ritualistic diagram, this one infinitely more complicated, with instructions several pages long. More words and phrases popped out at him: escape and dangerous and travel through time and forward or backward and years at a time—

Harry slammed the book closed and, in a fit of rage, threw it with a mad bellow. It crashed through one of the windows and skidded across the earth outside. Hufflepuff's portrait gave him a reproachful look. Harry didn't care. Glass crunched beneath his feet as he marched to his room, intent on forgetting everything about the book.

It was three days later when Harry repaired the window and retrieved the tome.

He'd tried not to think about it, about the possibilities it represented. Summoning the dead, alternate universes, reversing time—it was too much for him to bear. The hopeful concepts poked at his heart, which was determined to remain cold and detached as if to protect itself from crippling disappointment. But the thoughts kept coming. Eventually, Harry had been forced to think on the matter during a long, hot bath. Now his mind was plagued with moral dilemmas. Assuming the Author wasn't simply a nutter and that Voldemort really had gone to an alternate universe, wouldn't it be irresponsible of Harry not to follow after him? Wouldn't it be a crime against humanity to let Voldemort wander free? It was too much to hope that an alternate Dumbledore, just as strong and wise, would be there to thwart him, much less two Voldemorts! Was Harry to sit back and relax whilst another world was doomed to Voldemort's cruel plots? And what if Harry just traveled back in time and zapped Voldy-thing dead when he was weak and vulnerable and hiding within the Riddle house? Wouldn't that prevent any of this from even happening in the first place? But would Harry have even gone back in time to change it if Voldemort had died years ago? Would it even accomplish anything at all, or would time, in order to prevent such a paradox, just reset to a point before Harry traveled back in time to begin with? The what if's and but's kept looping in his brain, begetting a migraine.

He'd decided to at least attempt something from the tome—the "Book," he'd taken to calling it, or sometimes "Grimoire"—at least to determine that something written within wasn't fiction. If one of the potion recipes or rituals worked, perhaps the rest did too, including that—what had the Author called it?—Otherworldly Ordinance.

So here Harry was, in one of the castle's broken courtyards, attempting some Dark spell to create an Inferius. Just one, mind you: Nothing he couldn't handle on his own if the thing turned against him. The courtyard, once magnificent, now only consisted of a few standing pillars and piles of debris on cracked stone, as if someone long ago had begun to clean the place up but abandoned the endeavor shortly after. The ground was littered with the skeletons of those who'd died during the battle eleven years prior. Harry had singled one out—it might have once been a Death Eater, or maybe an unnamed student no one would remember—and began the spell.

The incantation was long and fraught with dangers should he mispronounce it, but he'd practiced without his wand. Now he held the length of hawthorn before him, first waving it over the skeleton, then spiraling it a few words later before making a crude jabbing motion. A series of transparent, spider silk-like threads shot from the end of his wand, latching onto the skeleton's limbs like strings on a marionette. Then the threads disappeared, and the bony, fleshless remains of the body stirred. It raised itself onto its knees, then it planted one foot on the ground, kneeling. Its empty skull rose; if it had had eyes, Harry was sure they would've locked on his own.

Huh, thought Harry. It worked.

The Book evidently held some truth.

The skeleton was missing a left hand, but Harry could see the appendage creeping in from a short distance away, its fingers pulling the hand across the ground like a spider with half its legs missing. It picked its way to the living bones, and when it was close enough, the skeleton bent down with its remaining hand and affixed the detached extremity to its corresponding arm. Without muscles to hold the bones in place, they shouldn't have been able to move at all. It was like magnets the way the bones stuck together, except that it wasn't: It was magic.

Harry had originally wanted to attempt this on the giant squid. He'd been halfway down to the Great Lake before realizing that cephalopods didn't have skeletons in the sense that mammals did. Strangely disappointed, as he'd been inexplicably in love with the spectacle of the idea, he'd turned and walked back to the castle. How cool it would have been to have reanimated Hogwarts' oldest, non-spectral resident.

The skeleton rose to its full height, just taller than Harry.

Harry had always been rather short. He had no doubt it was due to his lack of a proper diet as a child. Children who were routinely half-starved didn't grow up to be six feet tall. As it was, Harry was five-foot-seven at best, probably not even that. Nor was he especially muscular; in fact, he wouldn't mind losing the twenty or so pounds he'd acquired at his gut. He had thought, when he'd gotten onto the Quidditch team as a child, that he'd grow muscles, as those in sports usually did; he'd been disappointed to learn that Quidditch wasn't a sport one gained muscle or lost weight playing.

Therefore, Harry was able to look the skeleton evenly in the eye sockets. "Can you understand me?" he asked.

The skeleton did not respond.

"Can you even hear me?"

Silence.

"Hmm…"

Harry procured the Book from a loose pocket and flipped to the Inferius page. It wasn't very informative: it gave short instructions on creating an Inferius; glossed over the differences between human and animal Inferi and also the details concerning vertebrates versus invertebrates; it listed a series of enchantments that could be given to an Inferius to make it act in certain ways, like avoiding fire, taking lethal action against the enemies of its master, and to prepare shepherd's pie; and then a brief how-to on instructing one's new pet Inferius.

"Aha! Let's see… I need to give you a command… Well, no, you wouldn't really respond to questions, would you? Er, don't answer that… Right, so…" Harry snapped the Book closed and looked at the creature before him. "Sit!"

The skeleton sat.

"Lie down!"

The skeleton crawled onto its back, arms at its sides.

"Roll over!"

Its bones clicking and clacking, the skeleton flopped onto its ribcage.

"Good boy!" Harry praised.

He returned his nose to the Book. If the Author's Inferius spell worked, then he'd have to try something else, something a bit more outlandish to test its validity. He daren't attempt anything too drastic, such as time travel or world hopping, but perhaps he could find something else…

The skeleton was still lying face down on its hollow belly. "You can stand up now," Harry told it, and it clambered noisily to its bony phalanges.

Harry studied the creature. He couldn't tell by looking at it whether it was a man's skeleton or a woman's, nor a boy's or a girl's. He was sure an expert could have told him, but Harry was only about fifty-fifty sure that it was a bloke. And Harry was tired of calling it "it."

"You'll need a name," he said, though he wasn't sure why he was speaking to a creature that could neither understand nor respond in any meaningful way. "I'm thinking Robert. Or Dave. Steven? Julia?… How about Alejandro?" He chuckled with dark humor as he briefly considered naming it Susan.

The Author's magical secrets consumed the next week of Harry's life. He spent every spare moment poring through the Book's pages. He didn't understand half of what he read, and most of the half he did was lost in the shuffle as he went from one secret to the next in a form of brutal intellectual whiplash. It was rather like reading a cookbook well above one's culinary ability, and Harry wasn't much of a cook beyond basic breakfast items, like eggs, bacon and sausages—those he was a wizard at.

The old Grimoire was stuffed full of strange magic. The Felix Felicis enhancement, it turned out, was meant to compound the effects of the luck potion over a longer period, but it wasn't permanent, and anyway you needed a perfectly brewed sample to complete it. So that was no good. And then there were other trials, ones meant to harness different aspects of nature: bending light, compressing gravity, fusing elements, speeding the aging process of a tree to make it grow strong and sturdy in a matter of moments, reversing the process to make a person younger, or to live indefinitely.

The last was an explicit, step-by-step guide to creating a Horcrux—the exact same recipe from Secrets of the Darkest Art.

Most practices were in the form of rituals, or "rites," as the Author preferred, but there were a good number of potion recipes and spell incantations. Some rites were rather simple in construction, whereas others consisted of weird and complex symbols and shapes. There wasn't a lot of offensive magic; the Book seemed to explore lesser known or deserted avenues of magic, prioritizing them over well-known thoroughfares like astronomy and herbology. Perhaps the Author had been a scholar, Harry thought, or maybe he simply wished to write down every secret of magic he could find.

Plenty of the pages were devoted to necromancy; Harry skipped those with disgust. He'd only created an Inferius to see if the spell was legitimate, and while Harry could destroy the risen skeleton at any point, he'd grown disturbingly attached to the abomination in the short time they'd spent together. And really, what harm was it doing? It wasn't like Harry had awakened the disintegrating skeleton to fight for him. Though, he figured it was probably rather disrespectful to the dead owner of the skeleton for Harry to keep it animated as it was. Oops.

Harry figured the Author was likely a man, given that his account of his sexual exploits in other worlds focused on the women he'd slept with, though it was entirely possible the Author was a woman. Homosexuality was as common in the wizarding world as it was in the Muggle world, or at least it had been in Britain, as far as Harry knew. He couldn't say what it was like during the period the Book was written, but the wizarding world, as he knew it, had always been rather tolerant, if not open, about human sexuality. Harry didn't know why that was. What had happened in wizarding history to bring about such open-mindedness when much of the Muggle world, usually so progressive, was still struggling to accept it?

In any case, the wizarding world, for the most part, didn't discriminate based on sexuality, ethnicity, gender, or even religion. They did push Merlin's existence quite passionately at times, not unlike many Muggles professing Christ. In fact, Merlin seemed to have taken Christ's place in wizarding religion in Britain; they'd simply traded one prophet for another. Harry couldn't say definitively one way or the other whether Merlin had ever truly existed. It all came down to faith, or lack thereof, in the end. Ultimately, about the only things the wizarding world held prejudice for was the so-called quality of one's blood and the amount of Galleons in one's vault, and not all of that prejudice came from old-fashioned pure-blood families of Slytherin affiliation.

For a moment, Harry was lost in nostalgia, remembering a time when hearing the term Mudblood directed at Hermione was about as bad as things got. That was a time before Killing Curses and prophecies and Horcruxes. Harry very much wanted to return to that time. He'd give anything to witness Malfoy accuse Hermione of being a "filthy Mudblood," simply because of its one implication: Everyone he knew would still be alive.

He shook himself from his daydreams and pushed the Book aside. He'd been up for hours poring through it, determinedly this time, rather than mindlessly flipping through pages. His eyes were heavy and sore from reading. Moonlight streamed through the round windows hovering near the ceiling. It was long past bedtime, so he turned off his wand-light, pushed away from the table and, without bothering to close the Book—he'd be back in the morning, after all—shuffled to his room.

"G'night," he said to the skeleton, who stood with a broom, sweeping the already swept floor. He didn't look up as Harry addressed him.

Harry lay in bed that night, his eyes getting heavier and heavier, but he was unable to sleep. Newly risen bodies wearing Time-Turners haunted his mind. A graveyard horde chased him from Hogwarts as he beseeched them: Send me back! Send me back! He exhaled, and the veil of unconsciousness, which had been drifting so close, fluttered away again.

Harry yawned. Insomnia was no stranger to him. After all the shit he'd seen, it was a miracle he could find sleep at all. Often times to combat his sleeplessness, he'd gather his things and Apparate away, selecting a location on a map at random and scouring the place for signs of Voldemort. But now Voldemort was gone, or at the very least he was finished with this world—the full implications hadn't quite struck Harry yet. He'd devoted his life to defeating Voldemort; now he was a hunter without prey to hunt. What was Harry to do with himself?

His uncomfortable, foot-jabbing boots were laced up and jabbing his feet as he wandered Hogwarts' remains. He was restless. He felt he should be doing something. But he was conflicted. Voldemort was both gone for good and still a threat. He imagined that he'd have held a party the day the Dark Lord departed this world, but now it didn't seem appropriate. He would've been the only guest, of course, but he'd have tried his hand at baking a cake, with ridiculous, pink sprinkles, and he'd have tried his best to eat the whole fucking thing himself, and he'd have put up ribbons and banners and balloons and god knew what else. Hell, he'd have even bought himself a present: an ugly jumper probably, or a pony.

Harry stood in a dark and dank doorway. The old Potions classroom was the same as ever. It made sense that the one place that held the majority of his worst experiences from his schoolyears would survive the apocalypse. It was only natural. Obvious even. The universe liked using Harry as a cosmic punching bag. It always had. It still did. The universe had delivered a pair of quick jabs and was now following up with a brutal uppercut to the jaw; Harry could only cringe and brace for impact.

The classroom, though dusty and dim, looked as if it might receive a class full of N.E.W.T. students any moment. Cauldrons were spaced evenly across long, low tables. Silver scales and tiny little weights sat here, phials and ladles there. The blackboard still had chalky words written upon it, analyzing the contradictory behavior of dragon blood when paired with Soma, and the potential the combination might have for advancements in modern healing potions. It was clear that an essay would have been given at the end of the class: Write two feet of parchment on the properties of dragon blood and how Soma might affect blah-blah-blah and yada-yada-yada.

His wandering eventually led him onto the dark grounds. The stars had always been beautiful up here, pinpricks of light bringing the black sky to life like a fleet of immortal fireflies, though he never had much opportunity to stargaze before; weary Astronomy lessons at midnight usually drained the wonder out of it. The grass was wet with dew, and somehow his left sock got wet: His boot had a hole in it. A white shape loomed in the darkness, blurry and distant at first but growing all the clearer. The white of Dumbledore's tomb was stark against the darkness. Harry hadn't visited in quite some time.

But it wasn't Dumbledore he came to see: Off to the right, possessing the same magnificent view of the lake as Dumbledore's tomb, were two graves, side by side, marked by the most elaborate polished marble Harry could find in London. The headstones gleamed, almost glowed, in the darkness. A few pretty violet flowers grew where the marble met the earth—carnations, Harry suspected, though he was certainly no botanist. He'd simply thought them pretty and transplanted a couple; now they bloomed and proliferated without his input. The writing on the headstones was elegant, precise, and cut deeply into the stone to ensure the longevity of the words. Harry had taken it slow, one letter at a time, not wanting to rush things and make an error, just in case it didn't look right after a Mending Charm. It had taken him three weeks to finish the graves of his best friends.

He sat on the ground, entwining his fingers in the grass that grew over the final resting places of Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. He made a fist, clenched his fingers for a fleeting moment and then pulled away, the damp grass slipping through his fingers. He repeated the process over and over, though carefully, so that he never once uprooted even a single blade. Tears did not fall, nor did sobs escape. Harry had moved past sadness and anger for those he lost long ago. Now he felt only regret and longing. Or that's what he told himself, anyway, on insomniac nights like this.

Theirs were the only two graves Harry had dug. Hundreds of decomposed corpses littered Hogwarts, filling courtyards and hallways and towers and staircases and lurking under the rubble of fallen walls and floors. Harry felt ashamed that he hadn't buried the rest as he had Ron and Hermione, but time had simply gotten away from him in his grief. Ginny was in the Great Hall somewhere, he knew, where Bellatrix killed her, but he wouldn't have been able to tell her skeleton apart from the dozens of others. It was too late for them now. All Harry might do is jumble them all into a mass grave and cover them with dirt. But he refused to at this point; he decided it was better to leave them where they lay, as a reminder to any who might come along after he was gone, rather than put them in the ground where they might stay, forgotten to all. It wasn't like he could tell them apart for individual headstones anyway.

Few had escaped the battle. Most of his generation had perished there. One of the Weasleys had retreated—Harry thought Bill might have—but Harry never saw him after that. But Remus, Tonks, Hagrid, Neville, the Order of the Phoenix, all the teachers, most of the Death Eaters, including Draco Malfoy—they were all dead. Even poor, innocent, sweet little Luna hadn't made it out. Voldemort had won the day, but it had been a Pyrrhic victory, nearly a Cadmean one, a victory so costly that, in hindsight, it wasn't much of a victory at all. What had it actually accomplished? Nothing. Not a bloody thing. Whatever objectives he had completed had been eclipsed by the obliteration of his own forces. In the end, it had all been a complete waste.

A stray pang of loss pierced his gloomy exterior and hit him square in the heart: all the young lives cut bitterly short, all the happiness that would never be found, all the love that would never be had by those who died.

His heart broke. Tears fell. Sobs escaped into the night. It was as if the last decade hadn't occurred.

He cried for Neville, who never really achieved his greatest potential. He wept for Luna, who never got to explore the world for her creatures. He wailed for Ron and Hermione and the life they never got to spend together, for the children they might've had but never would. He keened for Ginny and the future they might have had together. He didn't know if the two of them would have gotten married and all would have been well, but he lamented the shattered possibility.

He was sick and tired of being smacked around by the universe like a sodding bag of sand. It was long past time he started hitting back. He was going to punch the universe in its fucking face! And he knew just what he'd do.

He was going to go back and save them all.

Leaping to his feet, he strode with purpose back to the castle and into the Hufflepuff common room. He cracked open the Book, eyes ablaze with savage determination, and flipped to the middle, where resided the ritual he sought.

He would do it, he told himself; he could and he would. It was like a mantra, filling him with confidence.

Harry had felt he should be doing something: This was that something.

He hadn't known what to do with himself: He'd do this.

At last he found the long-winded recipe. Its extraordinarily complex diagram filled the entire top half of the page. The diagram was asymmetrically circular and consisted almost entirely of numerous circles and rings, with a dozen little glyphs drawn along the inside of the outermost curve. Words written in a flowing foreign script formed a pair of geometric shapes, a triangle within a square. Also there were a pair of other triangles, seemingly beneath the rest of the shapes and drawn so faintly Harry could barely make them out. The circles and rings and other shapes were colored: white, yellow, green, blue. It all looked quite intricate and delicate and, in a strange way Harry couldn't fathom, rather beautiful. It was certainly aesthetically pleasing; Harry could imagine some rich connoisseur of art hanging a likeness of the diagram over his bed to inspire profound emotion in the easy marks he might bring home.

Harry flicked his wand in the direction of the girls' dorms and summoned a pad of paper and a pencil—quills were useless with ink in such short supply these days. He began listing things he'd need for the ritual, and he jauntily wrote Shopping List at the top.

- Two pieces of phoenix flint
- A hummingbird trapped in suspended animation (?)
- Three timepieces of significant sentimental value
-

Harry stared at the next item, written in neat, stately letters, as if it wasn't at all foreboding: a soul.

Harry swallowed thickly.

He half hoped the recipe only required that a soul be present during the ritual, his own in this case. But he knew the truth. He knew what the recipe called for, even without flipping forward a few pages to find it explicitly stated in the final step at the very end of the instructions: 11. The Summoner must stand in the centre ring and sacrifice a soul to trigger the final stage of the rite.

Harry wondered if an animal's soul would work. Animals had souls, didn't they? Harry didn't know. Maybe he could use the soul of a rat or a cockroach or something, he contemplated, as if the smaller the creature, the less meaning its soul held. Still, he wrote it down and continued with his list.

- A soul
- Seven Jobberknoll feathers
- White, yellow, blue, and green chalk
- A fire crab shell
- An oak branch alight with Heliopath fire

Wait. Wasn't that one of Luna's creatures? Harry tapped the eraser of his pencil against the table, wondering. He shook his head and returned his eyes to the Book.

Evidently, the brewing of a potion was involved—a really difficult potion, by the looks of it. He scanned its listed ingredients. His mouth dropped open.

Powdered Crumple-Horned Snorkack horn

Harry was gobsmacked. The Crumple-Horned Snorkack was, perhaps, Luna's favorite creature; she spoke of them most of all. Harry knew for certain they didn't exist. They were imaginary, like Nargles and Wrackspurts. He read on.

A quarter ounce of unicorn blood

Harry swore. Even if he could locate a mythical Snorkack, how in the bleeding hell was he supposed to drain the blood of a unicorn? Unicorns were notoriously difficult to catch. And wasn't there some curse that came along with killing one? Harry didn't particularly fancy becoming cursed.

Seven hellebore leaves

Nine daisies

Eye of newt

Two fairy wings

A whole, unhatched phoenix egg or a pair of healthy Demiguise eyes

Harry sighed. Of those five, only the last item would pose a problem. The leaves, daisies, eyeball, and fairy wings were rather basic potion ingredients; the phoenix egg, however… Harry hadn't even known phoenixes laid eggs! He supposed it might be obvious, phoenixes being birds and all, but if someone had told him that they spontaneously burst into being with a flash of fire, he would have believed them. The Demiguise eyes would likely be the easier of the two to find, but did he need them or the egg? Would either work? He flipped ahead in the Book: The egg was for backward passage through time while the eyes were meant for going forward.

The rest of the items the Author called for Harry already possessed: a silver dagger, a silver ladle, dragon-hide gloves, a crystal phial. He wrote everything down, as well as the basic ingredients he already had stored away in his potion kit, and marked them with little checkmarks. Then he set his pencil on the table with exaggerated delicacy and looked over his list with shrewd eyes. With the exception of a couple of abstract items, like sentimental timepieces and a "hummingbird trapped in suspended animation," whatever that was, most of the items on the list were manageable. Harry already had quite a few of them and knew where to get a few more. But a Snorkack horn?… Unicorn blood?… Heliopath fire? These weren't something you could buy in your average potion shop, never mind the fact that Harry didn't think two of the creatures existed!

Slowly, Harry began to laugh. It began as a faint chuckle. Then it grew to a hearty chortle. Finally it turned into a full-blown belly laugh that saw Harry slapping the table with his palm. Harry laughed in disbelief. He laughed at the absurdity of it all. He laughed so he wouldn't cry. Hufflepuff was giving Harry a queer look, and even the Inferius had paused in its sweeping.

"What?" Harry loudly demanded of them. "Think I'm mental, do you? Think I've gone bloody mad?"

The Inferius resumed its sweeping.

Hufflepuff opened her mouth as if to gasp as his audacity to shout at her, though no sound came out. She looked away and turned her nose up at him in the custom of the affronted nobility. She was an elegant woman, large and beautiful, dressed in brilliant robes of flowing gold. A wide band encrusted with sparkling gemstones held together her wild, vermilion hair, which was actively trying to escape its bonds.

Harry huffed. "Maybe I have."

In truth, it wasn't the first time Harry thought he might've gone mad without realizing it. How could anyone be completely objective and honest about their mental state? That was another thing Harry lacked: someone to tell him when he was being a nutter. What he needed most of all, he thought, was a partner: someone to communicate with, someone that would respond to his ideas, someone to keep him in check and tell him when he was daft or impulsive or right. There were a few people he thought of right away—Ron would have been ideal, or Hermione or Dumbledore—but they'd moved on from this world. There was no way to reach them wherever they were. If there was…

Harry stilled. Cold washed over him like a wintry draft. He sat at the table in the Hufflepuff common room, yet his eyes saw trees. Ghosts fluttered by, invisible to all but him, and lent him comfort and courage. Later, Harry had wondered if they'd truly been there at all. Perhaps it had all been a trick, an illusion, an evocation created by the Stone. The Dementors had seemed to steer clear of him, but maybe that was because they couldn't sense him as he walked apathetically to his doom.

Harry had dropped the Resurrection Stone in the forest that night. Was it still there? He hadn't seen it since; he hadn't looked for it. Now he wondered if the Stone, rather like it had the night of the battle eleven years ago, might give him the strength to carry on. His little spark of hope was flickering, threatening to put itself out of its misery, and this just might bring it back to life. He just had to find the Stone.

Driven by some shadowy feeling he couldn't identify, Harry bolted from the common room, sending his chair clattering to the floor in his haste. He ducked beneath the broken front door and marched down the steps and across the lawn. Into the trees he went, his wand, lit and glowing, clutched tightly in his fist. He felt no fear of the monsters that he knew lurked within.

Of course, it would have been far less dangerous if Harry had waited until morning and braved the trees during the daytime when there was sunlight aplenty. Most of the creatures within were probably nocturnal as well. And large. And hungry. So what if after all he'd been through in his life Harry was a little desensitized to danger? A part of him welcomed it, the danger, the risk, the potentially fatal end of his grand, life-long quest. He'd never speak of it aloud, but Harry knew that part of him possessed a dark wish to die and leave the world forever. At least that way the world's problems, Voldemort included, would finally be out of his hands. Let someone else deal with it all. Harry was tired.

He struggled to remember the exact path he'd taken through the trees that night. The forest had looked very different then. The trees were many and invited little starlight in. The forest floor was thick with thorny undergrowth; it was difficult to go anywhere off the path, though anyone who kept to it had to endure the brambles and low branches that made it quite the ordeal, and traversing the place at night was near suicide, with the many sneaking gnarled roots and half-hidden stumps that were invisible in the blackness.

Now the canopy was destroyed; where once had been a thick ceiling of leaves was a void through which the sky was visible in patches. The understory was likewise barren, and it lent the Forest a haunted look. The trees were trapped somewhere between life and death, standing tall and bold but naked, never in leaf. Harry wondered if the Forbidden Forest had been constructed with magic, or if Hogwarts' magic made it flourish, and maybe because of the destruction, the forest had begun to revert.

The deer and squirrels and hares and other nonmagical beasts had long abandoned the forest in favor of greener places, and the foxes had followed them. Few creatures remained. Acromantulas had descended from the treetops to spin their webs closer to the ground to catch stray creatures foolish enough to get caught in one. Last time Harry had entered the forest, he'd spotted a centaur, not long dead, stuck fast to a web; Harry had gotten out of there before the giant arachnid came to check on its trap. That had been the first time Harry had seen a centaur since the battle. Privately, he thought they'd all left when the unicorns departed. The Thestrals remained, eating whatever they could scavenge or pick out of the ground, but their eerie visage didn't brighten the forest any. A bugbear also had claimed the deadened woods as its home; Harry had seen it sneak beyond the tree line at times, looking for food. The thing filled Harry with dread every time he saw it: he had once refused to step foot outside the castle for an entire week when he saw it lurking about the remains of Hagrid's hut.

Let it come now, Harry thought. I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid of anything anymore.

Harry tried his best to remember and follow a route he'd taken only twice before: once as a second-year and again as a wanted man. The lack of identifiable landmarks made it difficult— Ah! But there was an odd tree stump with a wide fissure in it just over there, with a hopeful, solitary little vine trying to wind its way out of the cleavage. Harry remembered the look of that stump; spotted mushrooms still grew at its base, just as before. It seemed mushrooms were just about impervious to rather drastic environmental changes. Hardy little buggers.

A trio of wolves howled tandem in the night. A shiver crept up Harry's spine at the sound.

There was no moonlight to see by. Harry held his wand aloft like a torch—the fiery kind, not the electrical kind. The old skeletons of small creatures—birds, mostly—began popping up more and more frequently. Harry must've been getting close.

And then all of a sudden he was there, staring at the hollow. He hadn't had much of a chance to examine it the last time he'd been here. It was timeless; it hadn't changed in the sixteen years since Harry first came here. The webs remained, most of them high up in the treetops, but a few newer ones were present nearer the ground, though Harry didn't see any giant spiders at the moment. The domed web had been cleared away, likely when the Death Eaters set up camp during the battle. Had it been there even then? Harry couldn't remember seeing it. Then again, he didn't remember a lot about the clearing that night, after he dropped the Stone, mainly just him and Voldemort and the Killing Curse. Where had he been when he dropped it?

Click, click!

Harry searched the ground for the treasure. The Stone was black and so was the night, but in the luminescence of Harry's wand light, it should've made itself visible by a sparkle or some such. He inched his way across the ground, crouched and hunched. His back quickly began to ache and his hamstrings burn.

Something cracked in the forest—or had it clicked? Harry was halfway across the clearing now. He hadn't dropped it near the center, but perhaps it had rolled or bounced or been kicked, or blown by the wind, or carried by the rain?

Harry was poking around where the dome-shaped web—click—had once been, when something grabbed him from behind and tossed him into the air. A shout involuntarily left his throat. His arms flailed, looking for and failing to catch hold of anything but air. He landed hard upon his back, the air rushing from his lungs like water from a busted dam, while his eyes bulged. He gasped and coughed, trying to regain control of his respiratory system so he could stop heaving long enough to think.

Click, click!

Something—Harry couldn't tell what, there was so little light—grabbed his foot and yanked him closer. Click, click, click! His hand brushed something hairy, and he jerked it away, feeling around for his wand. He could see it, still lit but dim, resting nestled amongst crisp, dead leaves that had refused to decompose, but it was far out of his reach. He kicked out with his legs and struck something squishy. The creature—Please don't let it be the bugbear!—uttered a sound between a squeal and a shriek, high and jittery, that rang a bell in Harry's memory.

Clawing his way to his wand, Harry seized the weapon, along with a fair bit of dirt, aimed it at his attacker and shouted, "Arania exhumai!" The Acromantula was blasted off its many legs and sent crashing through the trees at the edge of the hollow.

Harry waited, breathless, for several tense minutes for it to return. But it didn't. At last, when Harry's breathing had calmed somewhat—the adrenaline surging through his system left him trembling—he returned to his task, though he kept an eye on his surroundings.

He lost track of time. He hadn't a clue how late it was, and he wasn't interested in checking his watch to find out. He knew it was long past midnight. For so long was he searching that he didn't initially realize that the clearing was beginning to brighten. It wasn't until he stood up and arched his back, his spine popping wonderfully, that he saw the sky had turned pink. Just how long had Harry been out here?

It was morning. Even as he watched, sunlight peeked through the dead treetops, illuminating the forest in a way Harry had never seen before. A glint caught his attention, peeking through the dirt at the opposite end of the clearing. Could it be? Harry hesitated. He'd come into the forest with the intention of finding the Stone, yes, but that was when his recovery of the Stone was still hypothetical. Now that he was faced directly with the possibility of holding it again, of seeing his friends and family for the first time in years, he wasn't sure he could. Of course he wanted to, but did he deserve to see them after all he'd done—all he hadn't done?—after he failed each and every one of them?

The sun brought a gleam to the Stone in a way Harry's wand light hadn't; it was a sharp, infinitesimal pinprick of white. It winked at Harry almost conspiratorially. Harry had the fanciful notion that the Stone was about to leap free of the dirt and shout, You found me! My turn as seeker! One, two, three…!

Harry scooped the Stone out of the earth and brought it to eye level. It hadn't changed. He wondered if it was some power of the clearing, that things within were immutable. Hidden in his shadow, the Stone no longer glimmered. It lay, half concealed, amidst the dirt in his hand. He shook the dark, mineral-rich grains through loose fingers until only the Hallow remained, cold and heavy, in his palm.

With a few deft finger movements, he could summon a legion of literal ghosts from his past, if he wanted. He pocketed it instead.

The sun pained his eyes when he emerged from the Forbidden Forest. He made his way, squinting, up the sloping lawn. He felt like he could drop at any second. He was panting with fatigue. His back felt as if he was playing vehicle to a Wampus Cat. His hands and knees were scraped, and his fingernails were black with dirt. His face was salty with sweat. Grime streaked the lenses of his glasses.

Then Harry was back in the common room, and suddenly he wasn't so tired. In fact, he felt electrified—anxious beyond belief but electrified all the same.

One look at his black fingernails made Harry incredibly self-conscious. He wasn't going to see his loved ones again for the first time in years when he looked like a bum. He marched himself into his bedroom and drew another glorious bath. He was determined not to emerge until he was presentable, and he refused to cast the Softening Charm, lest he fall asleep in the tub. An hour later, after scrubbing himself clean and shaving his beard off—and looking more himself than he had in a good, long while—Harry returned to the common room.

Did he want to do this here? It felt a bit neutral doing it in the common room in front of Hufflepuff's portrait. Maybe his room would be more personal. Did he want it to be more personal? Should he go outside where the utter destruction of Hogwarts was plain to see? Not bloody likely.

The common room it is, then, he thought.

So there he was, standing before Hufflepuff's portrait and her rounded fireplace, as he had been for the past ten minutes. He'd once again lit a fire, partly to ward off the chill of the situation and partly to make the room seem warmer and more inviting. He'd sent the Inferius away—what a great impression that would've made! His arms were at his sides, his head was down and his eyes were locked on the black device in his hand. The Stone weighed heavily in his palm as if he held a Bludger one-handedly. Harry didn't know if he had the guts to go through with it.

He turned it once. It wasn't terribly difficult.

He'd see everyone again. He couldn't wait, truly. They'd hate him. He knew they would, for getting them all killed. But he was excited to see their beaming faces. Unless they weren't beaming; Harry would rather not see the betrayal, plain as day.

He turned it a second time. It was much harder this time, like toppling an entire grand mahogany table from one end, dinnerware and all.

They probably wouldn't even come; they'd refuse to. Harry didn't think what was left of his heart would survive the experience if they did. He would order the Inferius to put him out of his misery. Now he began to panic; he was struck by the sudden realization that he didn't want to see them again. Not if they'd hate him and scream at him and curse him to oblivion.

He hadn't realized when he'd closed his eyes. His muscles were tense, ready for the ghostly punch he was sure to receive, courtesy of the universe.

He turned it a third time.