Title: The Wastes of August
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: None, gen
Wordcount: 3000
Content Notes: Major character death, angst, present tense, surrealism, Harry as the Master of Death
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Harry came back from death with the ability to look into the future. And he can see the general decay and decline of the wizarding world, exposure and war with the Muggles, and the extinction of magic in a few decades. He takes action to prevent it.
Author's Notes: This is the last of my "From Litha to Lammas" fics for this year.

The Wastes of August

Harry sits on the grass in front of Hogwarts, staring out over the grounds.

It has been nearly three months since the Battle of Hogwarts. It is the first of August. It is a sunny day with a few clouds lurking near the horizon, and the air still and heavy and hot. To anyone else's eyes, it would look like a perfect day.

Harry's eyes are no longer human.

He can see the grass broken and abraded, bleeding twisting streams of magic into the air. It's that way right now. The curses that escaped from so many wands at the Battle of Hogwarts are poisoning the soil and twisting its future. In thirty-six years, no more grass will grow here. Even now, the land is suffering from lack of anyone who knows how to heal it. Such specialties come from blood and bone and sacrifice, and wizarding Britain forbade those practices long ago.

It might not have mattered, if not for the battle. Most of the time, the land can regenerate itself slowly, because not so much Dark magic is spilled in any one place. But this time, there was too much.

When he turns his head, Harry doesn't see the castle of Hogwarts with the repaired lines of stone gleaming on it. He sees broken towers, shattered windows, corridors that have been silent so long that even magical walls retain no echo of human voices.

Fourteen years. Time for two more classes of students to enter as first-years and leave as seventh-years, their eyes shining, bright and full of hope. That's when the first stones will fall, as the Muggles direct explosive devices against them.

The war with Voldemort went on too long, and alerted factions within the Muggle government who are not the Prime Minster and didn't already know about wizards. They're working on ways to defeat the Muggle-Repelling Charms and the other spells that keep Hogwarts and Diagon Alley and wizarding homes hidden even now. They'll manage it. They'll destroy Hogwarts.

Wizards will fight back. Harry turns his gaze to the horizon.

He can see so many images. The polluted red sunset over a dying world. The hovering light of the present moment. The flare of the Thousand Suns Curse, which a desperate wizard will unleash when the Muggles corner him in Diagon Alley, and which will destroy every human and non-human animal in Britain more thoroughly than any nuclear weapon would ever manage.

There will be no more deer on this island for decades. No birds for years. They will try to colonize it, cross the water and through the air, but it won't work. The magic will be waiting for them, and it will strangle them.

And Harry can look up and trace, with his eyes, the paths of the winds, invisible to others, that will carry that poison further away and around the world. It will not be as bad in other places as in Britain, but the Thousand Suns Curse was meant to destroy, which is the main reason no one has cast it in centuries. Bits of the magic will burrow into soil and taint it. It will grow, like a plant, spreading out and killing animals first. Then humans. Magical humans will actually die faster, as they're more sensitive to it.

And in the end, there will be a world swept clean of life. Plants are spared by the Thousand Suns Curse, which specifically seeks the end of animate life, but in time, without any animals to pollinate them, with the soil that they need to grow in hot and glowing, with the air itself changed and sun and rain altered and streaming away from their usual patterns, they will die, too.

All because of Voldemort.

Voldemort won, after all.

Harry draws his knees in to his chest, and blinks. The eldritch sight drops away from his eyes. He can see the sunlight and the clouds and the grass the way everyone else does.

He can see, but he can't prevent. Being Master of Death will let him remain invisible to Muggles and call the spirits of the dead for wisdom and have ultimate power over most spells. But it doesn't let him change the future. If he found and killed the wizard who was going to cast the Thousand Suns Curse now, someone else would cast it.

Idiotic pureblood Dark families and keeping around books that have spells like that in them, Harry thinks.

But that makes Voldemort an idiot, too, and Dumbledore who didn't stop him as soon as possible instead of delaying eleven years while Voldemort was bodiless, and the Death Eaters, and the Muggles who will doom Hogwarts. And Harry an idiot, for not taking the one course open to him.

Harry opens his hands. Simply because he wills it, the Elder Wand is in his right hand in seconds, and the Resurrection Stone gleaming in a new, black ring on his left hand. He was a fool to think he could drop the Stone in the Forbidden Forest and lose it forever that way.

Harry crosses the Wand over the Stone, and closes his eyes. In seconds, the Cloak appears, too, draping his hands, and then a cold wind passes him and darkness surrounds him and the sounds of life freeze into terrified stillness.

"Master of Death."

Harry opens his eyes and looks into the shifting blackness of Death.

It never assumes a human form; just because he's human is no reason for it to be. (And in truth, Harry wonders how human he is, now, when he's woken from sleep to find himself a disembodied, drifting collection of particles in the corners of the room, and his friends searching frantically for him). Death takes the form of a dense, massive black hole, light bending into it, all the colors of the world stretching towards it as if called.

Harry gazes at it, and is not afraid. He's not even precisely afraid of the future he's seen if the Thousand Suns Curse is unleashed. What he moves through is not fear, not precisely.

"I've called you because I want to know if I can turn aside the death of my planet," he says.

"There is no way except through sacrifice. Killing is no sacrifice."

Harry nods. He already reached that conclusion a few weeks ago, but he wanted to make absolutely sure that he considered everything from every angle before he acted. His friends wouldn't forgive him if he threw his life away needlessly. "And would the sacrifice of my human form and the life that I might lead among humans be enough?"

Death is silent. Harry waits. He doesn't know if it's considering something, if it has any mind at all, or even if perhaps it's already speaking and his slow human senses simply take a few minutes to comprehend what it's saying.

He has more patience than he used to, less temper. Less emotion altogether. Hermione has commented on how quiet he seems. Harry hasn't told her that it's not because he's brooding about the war, not exactly. It's more that he came back from dying without that kind of thing.

"No Master of Death has ever given up the human form so soon after achieving the Hallows," Death says at last.

"Did any of them ever live through the death of a world?" Harry asks, mildly curious. It won't change his decision, but he does wonder, sometimes, about the people who achieved the title before him. There has to be one.

"Yes. There have been other worlds than this, Master of Death."

Harry nods. "And others gave up the human form." Again, he knows it's implied based on Death's words, but he wants to make absolutely sure, so that no one can say that he's dashing into this.

"Yes. For ends that seemed good to them."

There's no judgment from Death. No interest, either, if Harry's judging the tone correctly. It's a force. It's part of the world. It has no more morals than a stream, or a rock, or an eagle.

Or Life, either, if Harry's correct.

"You didn't answer my question directly," Harry says gently. "Would the sacrifice of my human form and the life I might lead among humans be enough?"

"No."

"Then what would be?" Panic doesn't flutter in Harry's heart. It's too fast, too bright an emotion. He wouldn't describe himself as the black hole that Death manifests as, but deeper, colder, darker than he was before? Oh, yes.

"Giving up your immortality."

Harry pauses. "I did not realize that the sacrifice I was speaking of would not include that."

"If you let your human form go now, you would scatter to the far corners of the world, but you would retain consciousness as you did when you scattered the other day and the humans searched for you. You would remain aware. You might renew some soil, but the death of this world would still happen."

Harry smiles. "I don't want that. I'm talking about true surrender, true sacrifice. I give up everything, and my spirit releases its hold on this world along with my body. My magic pours out and saturates the world."

"Why would you do this?" Death still doesn't sound interested, but perhaps there are things it wants to know, or things it has to know. Harry won't guess at the motivations of a force that is the end of whole universes.

(That's something else he won't forget, the first time he gazed into the bodily form of Death and let his sight pass through it the way it passes through the veils of time in this world. He saw how vast the universe was, how tiny the speck of Earth is in the middle of all the teeming darkness. There are no words for that. There is no reason for Death to be concerned with this one world, and no reason for past Masters of Death to have cared about surviving their own).

"Because I came back from death no longer mortal," Harry says simply. "I died to save them, and my desire to stay alive died with me. I think some of my ambition and my desire to live was tied to the Horcrux, because Tom wanted to be immortal so badly. I'm ready to yield it. I'm ready to see my family again."

He marched into the Forest sure that's what would happen. Now, if only in the privacy of his head, he can admit that part of him is disappointed it didn't.

"Even after you survived, you remain unafraid of death."

"Yes? I thought that was something that applied to every Master of Death."

"No. Most of them have wanted to be immortal." Death is silent for long seconds. Then it says, "Yes. The sacrifice of your human form, your immortality, and the life that you might have had among humans will be enough."

Harry bows his head and holds it there in respect, not because he has to, but because he wants to. By the time he looks up again, the great black hole has faded away.

It doesn't matter. He has his answer.

Harry gives his life away near Dumbledore's tomb. It seems appropriate enough.

He wrote notes and a will, telling his friends what's happening and why, and letting them know who he wants to have his money and his wand and all the rest of it. His wand, the holly one, not the Elder Wand. Harry is taking no chance of anyone mastering the Hallows any time soon. He doesn't want Hermione, or Ron, or George, or Ginny, to be faced with his choices and his knowledge.

The Hallows will travel with him and then scatter to different corners of the world. Maybe someday someone will reunite them again. But Harry won't see that in any shape or form.

There will be nothing left of him, after today, to see that.

Harry leans one hand on the tomb, and lets the sensation of the stone diffuse through his fingers, whirl through him as the last thing he feels. Warm marble, square walls, and then everything is fading as he scatters over a wider and wider area.

His magic sinks into the soil near Hogwarts, and the wounds leaking poisoned foulness into the air begin to knit and close. Harry knows the soil will renew and there won't be harm in living on that earth anymore, for anyone, but he can't see it. He is moving on.

The rising particles of his being brush through Hogwarts, and the vision of the future that he has diminishes, wavers, and realigns. Now there will be people walking these corridors and teaching children for centuries. Harry thinks he even sees centaur children mingling with the others, but he can't be sure. It's gone. He's moving on.

There is an incredible distance between the different parts of himself here, but that just gives him many pairs of eyes to see through. The colors swirl past him, leaping and clashing and changing. Harry looks down on London as he flies over it, as his magic dives into Muggle minds and excises the knowledge that they had about wizards from Voldemort's war.

It will never glow with the light of the Thousand Suns Curse. Maybe some other wizard will destroy it someday, but he has prevented that. There will be no war with the Muggles, and thus no despair great enough to make a Dark wizard unleash that doom.

The Forbidden Forest passes beneath him. Creatures roam there who will never be killed by Muggle guns or bombs, or experimented on. Harry looks down on them and finds it good. Or some part of him does. Already the name "Harry" is wisping and tattering away from him, the depth in the name leaving him behind.

His magic swoops down on the ragged protections of the Ministry for Magic, and presses in close, and raises them shining and new again. Wizards come dashing outside and stare around, because some of them were aware of that surge of power even if they have not the slightest idea what it meant. Then they stare at the protections, and some of them back away and draw their wands.

His magic goes on. It's not his problem what they think. They will know from the notes he left behind.

Even the concept of writing begins to seem foreign as he soars to the outermost edges of the British Isles, and over them, and beyond. Did he write? Did he have hands? He must have, he knows that, but the world around him is green and wide and has no hands, and the Master of Death is fading like a sunset.

There are dragons beneath him, Common Welsh Greens and Hebridean Blacks, and some of them rear back, roaring and spurting gouts of flame. They will continue to do so. He bought them centuries.

Even the concept of time sounds like a distant bell, and each time it rings, it grows fainter.

Beneath the earth he travels, and over the trees, and veins of magic speed with him and glow. He brings them back to life. Wounds heal, poisons fade, old places that still bear curses from past battles no one now remembers shimmer and vanish. Green spreads beneath him.

He wonders, for a moment, if the Master of Death title isn't fitting, and if he should be called the Master of Life.

The notion of titles is another bell, ringing, fading, disintegrating.

The life he had, the life he chose, falls away from him. One moment more he remembers Ron's face, and Hermione's, and Ginny's. Sirius falls to his death through the Veil. His mother stands in front of Voldemort, and Voldemort laughs. Professor Dumbledore drinks the poison that he told the being to feed him and cries out in anguish.

A chorus of bells rings and then fades. It is for the dead to forget the living, and for the living to remember the dead.

The world spins beneath him, green and blue and white and brown, covered in streamers of cloud. He remembers the touch of rain on his face, and the passing of water through his hands. He hears the roar of a storm, for a moment.

Then he is the storm. He is passing on, covering the world, and spreading out, further and further and thinner and thinner, perhaps to be of some good to the distant dwelling stars. One of the stars is named Sirius.

The moment comes when he lingers before the thread that binds him together snaps.

He is spread in millions of particles across the wasteland. He is life and death and the world and the earth and the water and the fire and the air and billions of human and nonhuman lives at once.

He tastes what it is to be Master of Death.

And then the string snaps.

Memories cascade past him and through him, over him, down to the basic level, the open core, and he doesn't know his name. He knows that he has laid troubles to rest, and some people will be safe because of him, and then the concepts of people and safety likewise speed away and he is spread and he is tattered...

And the Master of Death has gone.

The End.