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Act IV - Skin In The Game
Chapter 6: Endgame Part 1
That is not Hermione.
It was the only thought that managed to lodge into Harry's mind before he had to hastily raise a full-body Protego, just to survive the onslaught of spells that slammed at him with the force of a freight train. His shield buckled, but held. The hair on the back of his neck flared, and Harry leapt to his right, just as the floor morphed into a wide chasm with metal teeth that snapped shut. One second late, would have been one limb less.
"Hermione!" He snapped. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
In hindsight, there were a lot of other less blunt approaches he could take, but he didn't believe that he'd get any viable responses from any of them. And that was assuming there was still enough of Hermione in control for him to get a genuine response. If that tiara was anything like that diary that had possessed Ginny, he was dealing with a pretty dangerous artefact.
One with the power and resources of this entire room to command. Just like Riddle stood facing him in the Chamber of Secrets, with Salazar's mighty basilisk at his command.
"Stopping you," she said. "This is Rowena Ravenclaw's Prison of Possibilities, Harry, and you are deforming it. Destroying it. It is screaming for help. Can't you see?"
Well, thought Harry ruefully. She's not wrong.
"I'm not destroying the room. I'm destroying the illusions that that headpiece is creating. It's evil and⦠Look, just give it to me, okay?"
He took a step forward β
βand was nearly cleaved in half by a Sectumsempra from Snape's wand.
"Okay," he said. "That was naivety on my part. You'd think after all the crap I've been through, I'd have lost some of it. No matter."
A geyser of liquid frost left his wand, aiming for Snape, but instead McGonagall transfigured two gigantic fists out of the floor for Flitwick to animate them into intercepting Harry's attacks. Snape threw a massive fireball at him, but Harry met it head on with another freezing spell, and a well-aimed Ventus, using the mist to his advantage. McGonagall transformed the two arms into jaguars that came rushing at him, only for Harry's thestral to intercept them midway, and tore them to shreds.
And then two massive walls arose out of the floor and smashed into the thestral. The totem disintegrated, as did the walls.
"Damnit!" Harry grunted, and threw a set of wide-area blasting curses to distract his opponents, but found that he couldn't fool them even if he wanted to. Flitwick's spell chains moved like lightning, leaving trails of unearthly emptiness where they passed, and although Harry was fast on his feet, he found he could not approach him. The sheer force behind Snape's curses was pushing him backwards. The pressure of stepping in to attack threatened to crush him with every exchange made it feel like he was facing an advancing wall of metal that pushed forward and to move it back would require more strength than he had.
Spending his detentions sparring with Snape had given him a sound idea of what the man was truly like, and he doubted the man had ever truly come at him without holding back. McGonagall was a master of Transfiguration, and fighting her was like fighting an ever-changing enemy whose sole limit was her imagination. Filius Flitwick was a Dueling Champion with a nine-years undefeated streak.
All of them were absolutely dangerous opponents to face, and utterly lethal to fight against. Together, they were an almost undefeatable combination. The fluidity of Transfiguration, the versatility of Charms, and the power and violence of the Dark Arts β and each of them a ruthless Master of the subject. Facing them would be stupid even on his best day, and here, with the Room empowering them with limitless magical reserves, it was suicide by anyone's standards.
Even Voldemort would probably not bet his chances against this trio.
And still, thought Harry ruefully. Not the worst situation I've ever been in.
He eyed the tiara sitting on Hermione's head. It was the source of her power, as well as the Curse. But both of those facts paled before the fact that there existed something far, far malicious lurking deep within it. He didn't know what it was, but he did know that it had no right to exist. Every single fibre of his body was wanting him to give in to his instincts and plough his way through every obstacle, and annihilate that thing, and that which lurked within. That Hermione had allowed it to stain her mind, to infect her, made his inner predator snarl in indignation.
"Hermione," he said in a level tone. "That tiara is evil. Put it down and walk away."
Hermione scoffed. "Of course you say that, Harry. But it is really you that is in the wrong."
"Hermione, please," he requested. "You don't know what's going on. That thing is twisting you. It's infected with a curse that wants it to get rid of the Defence Professor. It's what me and Professor Dumbledore came to destroy. Or do you think even Dumbledore is somehow wrong?"
For the first time, he hoped that her blind faith in authority would come to his benefit.
Hermione shook her head in slight annoyance. "The Headmaster is a good man, and he trusts you. No wonder you prevailed upon him. I cannot let you destroy it, Harry Potter."
Harry noted that the three professors had stopped attacking him. If the Baron's words were true, then those were conjurations brought forth by Hermione's desires. But like every other form of magic, Dunamancy too had limits. Power wise, potential wise, or just plain conditions that needed to be met to get something done.
Power exacts a price, and not even Dunamantists got away with breaking that rule. Luna had said that to him in his dream.
So conjuring perfect facsimiles of all three professors, complete with their skills and fighting ability and making them fight him together as a team? No way that was a fanciful whim that the Room decided to grant. No, it would require Hermione's undivided focus, so if he could keep Hermione talkingβ¦
"Oh, and how are you going to do that? Last I checked, I was the Defence professor. Surely you can't think that wearing an old woman's tiara actually makes you more skilled at magic."
"Old woman's tiara?" Hermione repeated, flecks of anger in her eyes. The facsimiles around her tensed, readying for combat. Harry could only gauge that they responded to her emotions. How that happened was a mystery he couldn't bring himself to dissect at the moment.
"Do you even know what this is, Harry?" asked Hermione. The girl could never resist showing off. "This is the Diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw herself. The summation of her powers, her life's work. Through this, I can peer through countless futures, manipulate fate and destiny itself. Your aura is powerful. Far, far more than mine. But what chance at victory can you possibly have, when this Diadem can command Probability and Destiny itself?"
That gave him a moment's pause. Taking on arrogant, powerful opponents was one thing. Taking on ones who had done their homework and knew what you were and what power they were wielding was something else entirely. It was his turn to be rattled.
"Oh come on, Hermione. It's just a fancy piece of headgear with a lingering curse that makes you delusional."
Rattled, yes. But there was no way that Hermione, or the Diadem, could read his mind, bullshit Dunamancy be damned.
"Delusional? Delusional?" snarled Hermione, showing anger for the first time. "You are the one who's delusional, Harry Potter. All my life, I've known that I was special. My teachers always claimed that I was special. Even the professors here claim how special I am. Who found out about the Stone? Who helped you break past the professors' traps? Me, a first-year student. The entire school was sitting on its arse, waiting to be petrified one after another. It was I, Hermione Granger, the second-year Gryffindor mudblood, that found out about the basilisk. I was the one approached by the Department and entrusted with a Time-turner. You think you've accomplished so much, but the reality is that you only did that because I was with you."
"Hermione," said Harry softly. "I never claimed you weren't. Both me and Ron swear up and down that we'd have died ten times over if not for you."
"And yet I'm the one who's delusional, isn't it?" she screeched. "The ignorant mudblood that's always wrong. But guess what, Harry Potter? It's not me who's wrong, it's the world. Wizarding Britain! They don't care if muggleborns suffer. They don't ask what it is like to leave your family and your world behind, and embrace a new world. They don't think before casting us aside, just because we are not inbred. And that is why⦠that is why this needs to change. Things are going to be alright. I have looked into millions of possibilities, Harry Potter, and do you know what I've realised? When a sickness spreads that far, the only thing you can do is amputate. Yes, it will hurt, but trust me, it's the only way."
Harry didn't know what was worse. That there was so much bitterness in his best friend's voice that she was frankly discussing potential genocide, or that she was actually smiling as she did that.
"With this Diadem, and with the power the Prison of Possibilities gives me, I will find the ideal path. I will create a new world, a better one. One where there is no bigotry. One where archaic traditions do not hold progress back. One where no one will call me a mudblood. One that knows not what it has lost, but what it has been given."
Her smile widened.
"A grateful world."
"And how do you know that your path is right? Because that wicked abomination is whispering that in your ears?"
"How do Iβ" Hermione began with a snarl, rage and disbelief on her features. "The Diadem β"
"I sensed the Diadem activating barely minutes at best before I encountered you. Are you telling me that you somehow processed millions of possibilities within that time period? You're talented, Hermione. Maybe genius, even. But you're still human. That much information would've fried your brain fifty times over."
He'd know. Sharing headspace with an Awareness as powerful and expansive as the Sunken Vault had given him a healthy respect for the mental limitations of the human mind. It was why he had begun looking for ways to develop himself on a psychic level without needing to subject himself to brute-force Legilimency.
"The Diadem β"
"The Diadem does not amplify intelligence, Hermione," barked Harry. "Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure, yes, but no one mind can think of everything. The Diadem draws on the power of the Family Magic of the Most Ancient and Noble House of Ravenclaw β Dunamancy. Only a true heir of Ravenclaw could use it, and forgive me, you are not it."
"WHY?" Hermione snarled. "Because I'm just a mudblood?"
"No," said Harry evenly. "Because the Ravenclaw line ended six centuries ago, and no one has enough Ravenclaw blood in their veins to claim the name for itself."
"Then I might as well claim it," said Hermione. "It does not change anything, Harry. I am special, and I have always searched for my true worth. This Diadem, this Roomβ¦. It is mine. It chose me. And I will not give it up. Not even for the great Harry Potter."
As she spoke, two more facsimiles of each of the professors, bringing the total number to nine, stood in front of her, wands raised. Harry shifted into a combat stance, the wand raised slightly forward, and the blade held back close to his chest.
"I will not stop until I destroy that thing, Hermione."
"Oh I know that," said a smiling Hermione. "You wouldn't be Harry Potter if you stopped trying."
She waved her hand, with that the facsimiles attacked.
Albus Dumbledore sighed, watching as the eleventh necromantic golem was crushed by his conjured army of blast-ended skrewts. The cross-bred species was indeed fantastic when deployed against golems of magical nature. He really ought to offer Hagrid a pay raise just for coming up with that.
But even that happy thought couldn't stop him from feeling irritated at Tom Riddle's efforts to break himself out of his mirror dimension.
"You are as powerful as ever, Dumbledore," said Voldemort admiringly. "All my life I watched you from the shadows, wondering how the insane old fool could match Dark Lord Grindelwald in his prime and defeat him. All this time I thought you had simply gotten lucky, but no, you are the real deal."
"And now you flatter me," said Albus, even as he conjured floating torches of huge whips of white fire. A dozen of those whips lashed towards Voldemort, flailing like the fiery tentacles of the Kraken of legend. Voldemort smilingly waved his wand in an infinity-like motion, and the fiery whips morphed into a dozen snakes, all hissing and spitting at Albus as he commanded them with Parseltongue.
Elemental to species transformation, Albus noted. Amplified with his connection to Parseltongue. What a waste to see such a gifted mind lose itself to the darkness!
On the other hand, something had changed. Something vital had shifted in the Room of Requirement. While his mirror dimension still held strong, Tom's connection to the Room had magnified.
"You feel it, don't you?" asked Voldemort. "My vessel out there has a new Host. One who will fulfil my purpose and slay Harry Potter. Oh, I see. I see it now. The Boy Who Lived, isn't it? A moniker for the one baby that survived Lord Voldemort's killing curse and vanquished him in '81. You were right, Dumbledore. There was just so much that I didn't know."
Another host? Albus cursed internally. What unsuspecting victim had this new horcrux lured in now?
"You cannot hold me here anymore, Dumbledore," said Voldemort. "My new Host is leading the charge against Harry Potter, and try as he might, he would not be able to strike down his best friend, just like you couldn't do with yours. This is why Love is a weakness, Dumbledore. It turns men into fools."
"No Tom," said Albus, smiling. "Had you accounted for Love, you would not have lost everything on that night you failed to kill him in 1981. The love of a mother for her child resisted you. Love is powerful, and dangerous. Love drives people to violence and passion, gives them strength. It made them into fools, yes, and sometimes fools can do what the wise cannot."
Inwardly, he thought back to the changes in Miss Granger over the last few months. He had been momentarily distracted with Miss Li being the one to cast Abstract magic in the Defence classroom, and had almost forgotten that it was both her and Hermione Granger that had studied it together. Then he remembered the utter conviction in Miss Granger's voice as she accused Harry in front of everyone.
"The curse finds a way to prevent the Defence Professor from continuing his job," he said softly. "It could not affect Harry directly, so it affected those that would be best served to resist him."
Like a certain muggle born with absolute ideas over right and wrong. The portraits had informed him of the constant verbal skirmishes between her and young Harry, especially involving Miss Greengrass. The Room needed someone with a firm will to utilise its powers, and Hermione Granger was nothing if not stubborn.
"Even so, there is little reason for me to stop fighting," said Albus. "After all, if you are here with me, engaged in a spellfight that requires your fullest attention, you cannot guide your host perfectly, can you?"
Voldemort threw his head back in scornful laughter. "I am a Legilimens of the seventh-tier, Albus Dumbledore. Bifurcating my mind is β"
"Possible for one person, yes," said Albus. "But you are not a person, are you, Tom Riddle? You are a shard of his soul, torn asunder from the whole. You have no body, you have no mind. That is why you seek a host, to use their faculties because you cannot use your own."
He laughed as Voldemort glared daggers at him. "A word to the wise, Tom. Miss Granger's orderly mind makes her an ideal student for almost every discipline of standardised magic out there, but it also renders it inflexible. Rigid. Unbending. She'd make a poor conduit for any psychic, or dare I say, Abstract magic, Host or otherwise."
Voldemort responded to his provocation with a deafening thunderclap that started a trickle of blood from his right ear, while he transfigured a stone claw that speared its way through Tom's abdomen from behind, only for the false body to regenerate back. A flick of his wand, and the claw turned , and Tom transfigured it into a raging twenty-foot tall fiery serpent that lunged at him.
Albus flicked his wand, casting an overpowered Vanishing charm, and the serpent dissipated midway.
"A fine attempt," he noted with the air of an examiner asking an OWL student to multiply a ferret into a flock of flamingos. "Perhaps I'm looking at this wrong. This could be an opportunity for us to bond, teach you a few things about battle-transfiguration."
"Do. Not. Mock me!" bellowed Voldemort, and sent consecutive blasts of fiendfyre with all the grace and subtlety of a butcher going at a carcass. It was childish, pitiful but the sheer power behind it was undeniable. Shields, magical or otherwise, could not stop it without being obliterated in the process.
So instead he apparated every step out of the way, and attacked the Dark Lord from sixteen different angles. By the time Tom had deflected through every single one of them, he had failed to realise the floor had been turned into quicksand and he was sinking into it.
"You are always overdependent on your power, Tom," chided Dumbledore. "That is your real problem. You have a phenomenal ability to read a battle or perform miraculous feats in magic. Instead, you bolted towards the Dark Arts, which only took your emotions and led them astray. Made you violent. I understand you dislike me for some reasonβ"
"Some reason?" Voldemort snarled. "You have always been a thorn on my path, Albus Dumbledore."
Albus sighed. "It's not all that funny if you get angry."
"DIE!" rang Voldemort's voice as he called upon extensive reserves of magic to conjure massive tendrils of darkness and shot them at him. A fine turn of the wrist, and Albuss employed the ambient energy around him to conjure more than fifty metal spikes that shot at Voldemort, who vanished into the darkness to evade them.
"This is truly disappointing, Tom," he said. "Come out of the shadows and face me. I was having more of a good time when you wore my friend's face. At least he didn't choose to fight me with endless cheap tricks."
A thrust of Legilimency came at him, but Albus brushed it off with ease., He threw a few bludgeoners and bone breakers at Voldemort as he shot out of the floor and transfigured the ground into a giant clawed aimed at his head.,
It would have struck Tom in the head, but a presence simply burst into existence behind himbare fractions of a second after helping him block it.
Where there had been nothing, there was now a raging hurricane of raw magic and intent even wilder than anything Tom had thrown at him, in the form of a giant of red lightning.
Albus apparated instantly, letting the bolt of lightning pass through where he stood and shattered the hastily created shield of Voldemort in front of him. The Dark Lord screamed as the bolt of power crashed him against the invisible border of the mirror dimension, before he dropped unceremoniously to the equally invisible floor.
"Interrupting a duel?," Albus lamented. "Still, interrupting a duel? I thought you had better standards than this, Gellert."
The new arrival, another faux-Grindelwald stepped out of the shadows. Something was odd about this one, compared to the other illusions before this. For one, he looked entirely too smug for some reason.
"Come now, Albus, old freund," said Gellert. "You are supporting the Blight that is doing its best to destroy the Room. Surely you don't think the usual rules matter anymore."
Albus sighed. "That is no reason to not be polite. But you seem to have wounded your own backup quite terribly in your attempt to kill me. Foresight has always made you disregard your allies, Gellert."
To his surprise, Gellert actually looked angry. "Are you an idiot, Albus? I was trying to kill him."
Albus looked at the half-incinerated Dark Lord, and blinked. "You β"
"That schlingel has been mucking with the Prison of Possibilities for decades now, old freund. The Prison is supposed to be called in only in need. Its continual existence in the Timestream only lessens its power. With the curse exclusively focussed on killing the Blight, and its Awareness trapped in this mirror dimension with you, the Room was able to act by its own accord."
"That cannot be true," said Albus, closing his eyes. "The Room needs a user to enact its mysteries."
"The Room needs a user's imagination to enact its mysteries. Their desires. And right now, it has enough to act in autonomy. But not for long. The Prison recognizes you as the Headmaster of Hogwarts. That fool over there has been draining the wardstone and unless you do something, the Prison will cease to exist, and what will be releasedβ¦β"
"What?" asked Dumbledore curiously.
Gellert's face took on a curious expression. "You are the Ward holder of the castle, Albus Dumbledore. But the secrets of the Prison of Possibilities are only for its Warden, and that is not you."
Albus frowned, but nodded. "Very well. But that doesn't explain why the Room created you of all people."
"Shit's gone crazy."
"...Fair enough."
"Undo this dimension of yours," said faux-Gellert. "Return to the Room. Stop that⦠Blight, lest he and this schlingel's toy destroy it all."
As Pandora Lovegood was fond of saying, Life was all about making informed choices and staying true to them. Sometimes your choices were good, and sometimes they were bad, but in the end, it all ended up to the question of being able to truly own your kink and being upfront about it. She would go on and on about how in Causality, there was no such thing as Chance, how the future was nothing but the final result of these infinite number of outcomes influenced heavily by certain factors, and if you knew them all, you could control Fate itself.
Why, there was even this theory that claimed that a blibbering humdinger flapping its wings could cause a tornado in a different part of the world, if it hit the currents just right.
Which was completely ridiculous.
Blibbering humdingers didn't have wings in the first place. They were actually modified ears that allowed them to sense rotfangs when they were close by.
No, Luna knew the truth. It was a dabberblimp.
She had tried telling the curse breakers how they were approaching things the wrong way. About the little dabberblimp that was sometimes playing hide-and-seek from the seventh floor. There was only the Headmaster's office there, and Professor Dumbledore did not have spectrespecs to help him recognize a dabberblimp when he saw one. The Headmaster was a busy man, and Luna didn't want to waste his time, so she had silently ordered a pair of spectrespecs for the man as a Christmas gift.
She hoped he'd like them just as much as the woollen socks she had sent him last Christmas. It was a weird thing to send the Headmaster, but it felt like a good idea. Even Eddie, the staircase that led to the seventh floor, agreed with that.
She watched Harry Potter as he walked up to Eddie's floor. Luna had gone out of her way to avoid Harry Potter since that time she met him on the train. She had even missed most of his classes, even though she really liked his teaching. But ever since Harry Potter had become the Defence Professor, the dabberblimp on Eddie's floor was being a little too mean. Luna understood loneliness, but it was just being nasty. She knew that something about Harry Potter about him made the nargles around her head keep zooming and spinning all around, without ever doing anything else. It was enough to drive anyone dizzy, and Luna was never fond of carousels. And when they didn't, the things around Harry Potter would go into a cannibalistic frenzy and eat up her nargles. Luna didn't know what those things were, but she was sure they weren't crumple-horned snorkacks.
She could empathise with the dabberblimp. Maybe she'd go talk to it sometime. Harry Potter was weird, in a funny kind of way. For one, he had absolutely no wrackspurts zooming around him.
Then she saw Hermione Granger get up and follow Harry Potter, and frowned.
Hermione Granger was not unintelligent, but she was painfully limited, narrow, close-minded. She prided herself on being realistic and practical. Logic and reason were what ruled her mind. Someone like Harry Potter, whose very existence was so myriad that it bordered on the impossible and the unknown, and often ran over logic like a wrackspurt over a nargle before backing up and running over it again, was not something she could so easily compute. Even her own nargles were streamlined and followed definite paths, unlike Daphne Greengrass whose nargles at least preferred moving in curves and loops. But neither were any better at figuring out Harry Potter, and kept running into wrong conclusions.
Luna had almost offered both of them butterbeer necklaces infested with some of her own umgubular slashkilters, but neither girl could see them, and umgubular slashkilters didn't stay around people that didn't believe in them.
But events were unfolding. Just as they always had, just as they would on a thousand, thousand other outcomes exactly like this one. And somehow, they all ended up at this point.
Luna frowned. Maybe it was time to go talk to that dabberblimp. Preferably before the not-snorkacks zooming around Harry Potter ate its nargles. This time, for good.
And maybe, if she was lucky enough, she could bring a friend for it too.
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