Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, Hogwarts, Gringotts, the Leaky Cauldron or anything else in JKR's wonderful world. Except for the little pebble just to left of the front doors of Hogwarts. I put that there. I might own that. Maybe. But probably not.

The Power He Knows Not

Harry Potter stood straight, looking at the man across the clearing as he raised his wand. He didn't close his eyes as that pale piece of wood pointed at him; he'd promised himself not to give Riddle that satisfaction, not to show fear in front of him or the rest of the people ranged about him. He would look death in the face and accept it if it meant someone else would be able to kill the bastard about to kill him. If it meant they would have a chance to stop the madman.

Hermione. He thought of his longtime friend, the one who had always stood by him, supported him; put his needs ahead of her own. The one he would miss the most. I'm so sorry. I never realized! Never knew!

"Avada…"

Thoughts of her calmed him. He actually relaxed; the corner of his mouth turned up in a little smile. For you, I can die. Be happy. I hope you can beat him and be happy for the rest of your life.

"… Kedavra!"

He expected to die. He expected the glowing green curse to hit and kill him. He expected Riddle to probably gloat to his followers that he had killed the only one who could defeat him. He expected his own body would be paraded in front of the defenders at Hogwarts, to demoralize them, sap their will to fight and make his victory easier.

What he didn't expect was for the curse to burst from the end of Riddle's wand and immediately slow to a stop less than a meter from the end of it and just hang there like a fairy light.

Then he noticed it wasn't just the curse that wasn't moving: nothing else was either. Riddle, his Death Eaters grouped around him, the slight breeze that had been at his back, the leaves of the trees; nothing was moving.

"You know, Potter," a feminine voice came from behind him, "just standing there and letting him throw killing curses at you isn't really as stupid an idea as it sounds." He whirled around to see her: long blonde hair, beauty that wouldn't look out of place on magazine covers, school uniform without robes, blazer or tie. "At least in your case, anyway." She sat comfortably on an exposed root that erosion had uncovered in the side of the small rise the tree grew from.

"Greengrass." He stated. "What are you doing here?" With her being a Slytherin he was immediately distrustful, but things weren't adding up. As far as he knew she had never acted against him in any way other than those stupid buttons during the Tri-Wizard and he could see peer pressure behind that, but here she was now, at Riddle's meeting place despite Hermione once telling him her family was historically gray.

Then there was the little matter of her being the only thing besides him that was moving. Her presence here was confusing and her answer to his question only confused him more.

"I came along to help you off that son-of-a-bitch before he gets us all killed." She replied. "I'd have done it sooner, but I never knew when the two of you were going to be together until it was too late." She smiled mockingly. "It helped a lot when he announced to the whole world where and when he'd like to meet you for a little chat."

"I hate to burst your heroic fantasy bubble, but I didn't come here to fight him." He explained, not a little sarcastically at her idea of helping him fight Riddle. "I came here to let him kill me."

She just shrugged. "Like I said, in your case that's not as stupid an idea as it sounds, and I'd give you a fifty-fifty chance of surviving with that thing in your head. What would happen if you did survive and he found out is anybody's guess but fortunately we don't need to worry about that because you don't need to let him kill you Potter: you're not a horcrux."

His jaw dropped as he stared at her. "How do you know about that?"

"I've known about it since the night of our sorting, when I felt it in you." She answered calmly. "It's old dark magic from the time of the Egyptians but in case you haven't noticed there aren't a whole lot of ancient Egyptians running around and there's a reason for that." She stood up and walked over to Riddle. "They stopped using it because the soul isn't supposed to be split and there are bad consequences when it is. It will keep you from passing on but after eighty or ninety years you start going insane, turning darker, crueler before going more animalistic. Eventually you become worse than a werewolf without wolfsbane: mindless, savage, attacking anything that moves, until your body just starts to fall apart from lack of care." She looked at him. "Splitting his so many times appears to have sped up the process. If the horcrux isn't destroyed you're left as a mindless, malevolent spirit, a ghost or a wraith, trapped on this plane, unable to move on. A true fate worse than death."

"How do you know all of this?" he demanded. "Even Dumbledore didn't know most of that." A thought suddenly struck him. "And how did you do this?" he waved a hand around indicating their immobile surroundings. "And what do you mean I'm not a horcrux? I've got a piece of his soul in my head."

The corner of her mouth curled up in a half smirk. "Tell me, Potter. Do you get a bruise paste if you just drop a whole flobberworm into the brew without finely dicing it first or a pepperup potion without grinding the scarab beetle to a fine powder when you add it?"

"Uh, no?"

"Exactly. It's all about the proper preparation." She turned from him and stepped back to Voldemort again. She pointed at him. "He didn't go there to turn you into a horcrux that night; he went there to kill you. Killing your mother probably split his soul but you weren't prepared to serve as a container for it. Think of it as wine in a glass. You're the glass. You hold the wine, but you can still pour it out without harm to you. If you'd been prepared properly the wine would have become a part of you, seeped into the very glass you were made of. That's why soul containers need to be destroyed to kill the horcrux: you can no more separate the soul piece from it than you can separate an ingredient from a completed potion. His continued existence and its connection to him gave it enough power to survive and leach off of your magic but as you got magically stronger it's been losing the fight for years and when he dies your magic will overpower and destroy it. It's a lot weaker now than it was seven years ago." She suddenly smirked at him. "It's probably going to hurt like a bitch; it will fight to survive after all, but it shouldn't be able to kill you."

He stood staring at her for several long seconds. "How do you know all of that? How did you do this?" Again, he waved his hand around.

She looked around. "Well, this was relatively simple: I just sort of pushed the two of us out of the moment in time we were in, forward into the very tiny period of… not time I guess you could call it, between that moment and the next one. For us it's as if time has stopped but they'll never notice because it hasn't for them."

"As for how I know what I do…I was old before Hogwarts was built, before the founders' great, great, great grandparents were born. I knew some of those ancient Egyptians and they told me about the horcruxes."

Harry stepped back from her, eyes narrowed with suspicion and snapped his wand into his hand though he kept his arm down. He didn't know of anybody with that kind of power, that kind of knowledge…who was alive. "Who are you?" he demanded.

She smiled. "I mean you no harm, Potter." She laughed at his suspicious look. "Really, Harry, you have no reason to be afraid of me. I mean it when I say I'm here to help you kill Riddle. I'd have done it myself if it weren't for that damn prophecy. You know, 'neither can live while the other survives'."

Now he was more than just worried. How did she know everything she did? He brought his wand up. "Who. Are. You?"

She shook her head as she smiled and chuckled. "I am Daphne Greengrass, heiress of the Most Noble house of Greengrass, daughter of Cyrus and Roxanne, sister of Astoria."

"Not if you're as old as you say."

She frowned. "I'm exactly who I say I am Potter. Who I was in a past life is another matter entirely."

He said nothing, merely waited and glared at her.

She regarded him intently for a moment and the corner of her mouth curled up and she gave him a courtly curtsey. "I was last known among mortals as Morgan of the Fae."

He gaped at her for a few seconds before his mind, and some French lessons Hermione once gave him, offered up a translation. "Morgan LeFey!"

"I much preferred my own name however: Morgana."

"You killed Merlin!" he blurted out, his mind running without any conscious thought.

"No, I stuck his arse in an oak tree." She replied, still smiling. "But let's be fair, he started that fight and he left me so wounded I couldn't do anything for over a hundred years." She walked over to her root and sat down again. "Do you have any idea what it's like to do everything by magic your entire life, then suddenly have to learn how to do it by hand? By yourself? In the dark ages?" she shivered dramatically. "Yuck!"

"So, what are you doing here?" he asked, uncertain how to proceed. After all, if she was telling the truth, and considering what she knew and what she could do, then she was the Darkest Lady, and most powerful, historically known to the magical world. Two of them really and one of them was regarded as a goddess.

"I told you: I'm here to help you kill Tom Riddle."

"And then you kill me and take over the world."

She sighed with exasperation and gave him a sour look. "I guess I should have expected something like that." She muttered. "No," she stated forcefully, "then I help you take over the magical world."

"I'm not going to do any such thing." He drew himself up. "With or without your help."

"Then everyone you care for, and the rest of the magical world as well, will probably be dead, or worse, in the next thirty or forty years, if that long." Her voice was flat and dry, devoid of any inflection in its sincerity.

The confusion was back. If she wanted to help him take over the magical world then she wouldn't be planning to kill everyone and if she wanted Riddle dead then he wouldn't be doing it, so what did she mean? "Why do you say that?"

Her answer shocked and scared him. "Because the muggles terrify me."

He felt his legs turning into rubber, as if he'd been hit with a jelly legs jinx but before he fell bum first on the ground, she waved her hand and he landed in a comfortable armchair instead. Morgan LeFey was afraid of muggles? Morgana, the most powerful witch ever known? People prayed to her she was so powerful, and muggles scared her? How was that possible? He couldn't begin to understand what that might mean.

Something she'd said earlier suddenly came back to him. "What did you mean when you said Tom was going to get us all killed earlier?"

"Potter…Harry, you're muggle raised, you've lived among them, you know them and what they're capable of. What do you think would have happened if Voldemort had taken over the magical world, then declared war on the non-magical one like he planned?" she asked. "They outnumber us hundreds, even thousands, to one. With their hand weapons they can kill us far outside the range of any cast magic. Their big weapons, their cannons, can kill us from miles away! If they know where we are, they can blow us up and we'd never know where it came from!"

She sighed. "Even if we didn't get in a war with them, they will find us. They can do things now I never would have imagined anyone who wasn't magical could do. Take their cameras for instance: they're putting them everywhere. The Ministry's obliviators are busier than ever keeping the Statute of Secrecy, but what happens if someone miles away from them doing their job can see them doing that job? Questions will be asked, especially if they have witnesses to the event that required the obliviators to be there in the first place who categorically deny witnessing that very event."

"Muggles are paranoid, Harry, and they can be ruthless. You just have to look at their history to see that, what with all their wars and a lot of their regimes and leaders."

"You seem to know a lot about them, Greengrass, or Morgana. All these years and you just now decide they scare you?"

She stared hard at him, as if looking deep into his soul, though he felt no probes, nothing to indicate she was using legilimency against him. "Immortality is boring, Harry." She finally said. "Day after day it was the same old thing. Nothing hardly ever changed. Glaciers moved faster than the Fae changed anything and if muggles came up with a new idea once every century that was quick indeed." She told him. She leaned back against a root that reshaped itself for just that purpose. He was impressed by her skill. "After my fight with Merlin I was drained, magically, mentally and physically. Arthur had broken my armies and Merlin had nearly defeated me. I could barely do a lumos and the weakest Muggle probably could have killed me with very little effort. So, I hid, stayed out of sight and recuperated. I didn't see an intelligent being for over fifty years. When I did it was to discover that I had become a legend, along with Merlin and Arthur and most of his knights."

She shifted her body. "Do you realize that back in those days if you lived to be fifty years old you were considered to be ancient? Thirty was old age, about the average length of a lifetime. Anything past that was just extra time." She got a pensive look. "There was hardly anyone alive who remembered me. Morgana lived on as an evil sorceress, used to scare children into behaving, but me…I had been forgotten. I was just a woman, a traveler that no one looked twice at unless it was to leer at me and lust for my body."

She must have noticed his expression as he considered her statement. "I'll have you know I was hot back then, even by today's standards." She said with a pleased, haughty expression. "I didn't look like this, but I was good looking."

He wondered about that. Self-transfiguration perhaps? Some spell? She was obviously powerful, changing her looks didn't seem out of the realm of possibility.

But she was continuing. "I kept a low profile; I didn't treat Muggles like puppets, I didn't torture or kill anyone who annoyed me, I merely enjoyed the fact I could walk around without some glory seeking idiot trying to kill me or people screaming with fear and running at the sight of me. And I discovered something."

"What was that?"

"Muggles make things."

He chuckled and rolled his eyes. "Of course they do." He proclaimed.

She smiled back at him. "No, I mean they invent things. If they have a need and they have nothing to fulfill it with, they invent something to do what they want. That's the difference between the Fae and the muggles. The Fae have magic, they didn't need to invent anything. Call upon magic and they could have anything they wanted. If they saw something they liked they could just copy it. I don't think any Fae had invented a completely new idea in thousands of years."

She stood up and began pacing. "The Muggles though, they did it all the time. Granted, it was usually just a tweak of something they already had but occasionally, maybe every hundred years just as an example, they came up with something totally new, something that had never been seen before. The idea fascinated me. I traveled the length and breadth of the land looking at what they had. I crossed over to the continent and traveled there, even going to Rome. I hadn't been there in hundreds of years and I was astounded by what I found. The city was huge! Even sacked and plundered by invading armies the number of people living there was amazing. Their buildings, the baths and fountains, the aqueducts to supply their water, everything they had invented to provide for such a large number of people was impressive. Even in decline I could see how great it had once been."

She looked off to the side for a moment before looking at him again. "I found myself fascinated with what the muggles had come up with and I wondered what else they would think up, but, like I said, it was a slow process and having to wait years or decades for something new to happen was not something I was looking forward to. Like I also said, immortality is boring." She glanced over at the Dark Lord. "If he knew just how boring it really was, I don't think he'd be trying so hard to achieve it."

"He probably wouldn't believe you." Harry commented with a glance at the man in question. "So, what did you do?" he inquired. "I gather you did something to let you come forward in time faster than normal."

"I performed a ritual that let my spirit fly free of my body, to drift for a thousand years before entering into another body…" She grinned wryly. "I kinda overshot by a few hundred years."

Harry stiffened. "You possessed her?" he growled out, his experiences with that phenomenon leaving him with a severe dislike of the results. "You took over her body for your own use?" His thoughts on her good or evilness came back to the fore."

"No!" she said in a voice tinged with exasperation at his assumption. "This is my body! I was born to it. It is and always has been mine. Haven't you ever heard of reincarnation?"

He looked at her doubtfully. "So, there's no other Daphne trapped inside your head?"

"Not that I'm aware of." She sniffed. "But let me tell you, having all your skills and abilities, your power, awareness and memories really sucks when you're trapped in the body of a newborn baby. I couldn't do anything!"

He felt a grin forming as her eyes narrowed. "What are you thinking, Potter?"

"You needed your nappies changed?" He was almost ready to laugh at the thought.

Her scowl was really intimidating. "Keep that line of thought and I may reconsider who I help win this war." She growled at him.

He kept grinning but asked, "So what happened?"

She sighed. "I was two before I could do any magic at all. I could feel my magic within me, but I couldn't access it much less control it. I was two before I could even do any accidental magic. I was five before I could control it and it wasn't until I was seven that I could begin scrying."

"Scrying?" he asked in a confused voice. "What were you scrying?"

"Everything!" she exclaimed. "I told you I came forward to see what changes had taken place. I could see what had happened in the magical world and it fascinated me. Two thousand years ago there were witches and wizards, but they were usually single people, alone and scattered, learning their magic as best they could by themselves. By the time I took my little trip several hundred years later they had started getting together, but their numbers were still small. Hogsmeade would have been considered a large community back then."

"But what I was reborn into was an entire culture of magical people!" she looked excited. "Thousands of people, with their own government and a life separate from the non-magical ones. I couldn't believe the advances that had been made. They dwarfed even my best hopes of what they could do: what they've learned about magic, how it works, the principles behind it, the laws that govern it, the vast number of spells and enchantments they've developed. It took my breath away to see what they had accomplished that I couldn't wait to see what the Muggles had done, what they had come up with, even though I truthfully didn't expect them to be nearly as advanced as the magicals. I mean, we had magic! They couldn't possibly have been able to achieve nearly what we could do."

She suddenly laughed sourly. "Boy, was I wrong about that! My first target was Londinium, London. It was the largest city in Britain when I passed on and I thought it might rival Rome when I returned. What I found blew my mind. It was three or four times the size of the ancient Rome I remembered, with buildings larger than anything the Romans had built, bridges that would have made them drool with envy, streets, roads and highways the likes of which they could have only dreamed about, not to mention the vehicles using them. Their ships are gigantic, and they can fly hundreds of people at a time in just one of their airplanes. They've put their own little moons around the world for all kinds of purposes and even sent some to study the other planets."

"It sounds like you spent a lot of time scrying." He said.

"Every chance I could get." She replied. "I'd always believed that with magic I could do anything, that I was better than anyone else because I had it and they didn't, or that I was at least more powerful than them. When I was finally old enough to get around on my own, I discovered wands and potions, the floo, apparition and portkeys, not to mention all of the new spells I had never even imagined. People understood magic, why you can do some things and not others, in ways I had never believed possible or even thought about. Naturally, I thought we had to be more advanced than the muggles. Then I started looking at them."

"They're a lot more advanced than you thought they'd be, aren't they?" he said, knowing what she'd found.

She nodded. "A lot more advanced, and unlike us they study everything, from the very smallest thing known, to the entire universe, from the very beginning of existence to when it might end. Their collective knowledge is so vast it's almost inconceivable and they're always adding to it. If something catches their eye that they don't understand, they study it. Nothing is too trivial to be studied." She suddenly stabbed a finger in the direction of the unmoving statue that was Tom Riddle. "And that stupid arse wants to start a war with them!"

She stood up and strode over to glare at the man. "The idiot is too arrogant to even consider the fact they might be more powerful than he could ever imagine. They've raised the act of war into an art form. Just a few years ago they had a war where one side killed hundreds of thousands of the other side with the loss of only a few hundred soldiers on their own. They could obliterate this valley and everything in it in seconds, but do you think he would believe that? Noooo! Because he has magic and he's so powerful he could kill hundreds in an afternoon!"

Harry smiled and almost laughed out loud at her sarcasm laced diatribe against the Dark Lord, but he fully appreciated her feelings behind what she was saying. "So that's why you're so afraid of them." He stated. "You scryed the future and saw what would happen if he did start a war with them."

With one last, disdainful look at Riddle she turned towards him. "No. I can see the past and the present for they are set, they have happened, and unless someone can go back to the past and change it, it will remain that way." She explained. "But the future is fluid, affected by too many things. It is ever changing. Five, ten minutes from now? I could probably say with a fair amount of certainty what would happen in any given situation, maybe. I scryed the outcome of the battle at the school last night and this scenario never even came up." She shook her head. "No, I have looked at the muggles and what they do, how they act with one another. Their countries are always looking for an advantage over each other, what bigger advantage could there be than to have magical soldiers in their armies, as spies, as living, thinking weapons that can find their own way to any target? There are too many muggleborns that leave our world and return to theirs for me to believe they don't know about us. I told you about their cameras, but that's only one way they can find us. I'm sure there are others I don't know about. When we are discovered, when we're exposed to the world, our way of life will end. We'll be too big a commodity not to use for their purposes. Maybe not in England, not at first, but in other countries not so scrupulous magicals will be used to further their aims and England will have to follow suit to protect themselves. Or just for our own protections. History tells us they feared us hundreds of years ago, killed us if they could simply because we were different, could do things they couldn't, who's to say that won't happen again?"

She stepped up to him, stared into his eyes. "That's why you have to take over the magical world, to rule it, so we can drag it out of the past where wizards were superior and into the present where we can at least be equal to the muggles. They can do so many things we can't, so many we can and never thought they would be able to, they are superior now, in numbers, in abilities, that our culture would never survive intact the way it is."

"The purebloods will never believe that, however. Many of them would fight to preserve their privileges, their standing in society and the muggles would fight back. But like happens all too often, that brush would paint us all the same color. Light, Dark, Neutral, Pureblood, Half-blood, Muggleborn, they'd see us all as the enemy."

He stared back. "But why me? Why should I always have to be the one who fixes everything? I've lived with that damn prophecy for years. I just want a life of my own once I kill that bastard, to do what I want without being bothered, told what to do."

"What about you?" he exclaimed. "Why don't you do it? You're Morgana, a goddess. You're powerful; you can do things like this!" he spread his arms and indicated the still scene around them.

She laughed coldly. "Morgana, the Dark Lady? The destroyer of Merlin? Enemy of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, would be ruler of Olde England? That Morgana? Harry, I'd be held up as far, far worse than the idiot over there by most of the people and I really can't stand the thought of all the boot licking toadies trying to curry favor from the other side. I've changed from who I was to who I am now, but people won't believe that. They'll only believe what they've been taught about me for their entire lives."

She stepped forward again, laid her hand in the middle of his chest. "You, however, you would be a hero to them. You saved them once, now you're about to save them again. They'll lift you up as a savior, higher than Dumbledore or even Merlin, give you anything you want, beg you to rule them because you are the light in the darkness. You don't have to be a tyrant, but you'll be able to change our world, make it better, fairer, more equal. You'll make it ready to meet that other world on equal terms when it finally does find us."

She lowered her hand and stepped back again. "There's more." At his raised eyebrow she continued. "I can help you, teach you all the things you need to know, politics, social mores, how to be a Lord to better rule. I can also teach you the old magics, the deep magics of the fae, lost and forgotten over the centuries. You'll be able to do things like this." Imitating his earlier gesture, she indicated everything around them. "You're powerful, Harry, more powerful the either Dumbledore or Voldemort and I can teach you how to use that power."

He listened to her, thinking about what she was saying, what he could do with her help. He didn't know if he trusted her, she was Morgana after all, but she certainly seemed different than what he'd ever heard about her.

"There's something else, Harry."

Her voice broke him out of his musings, not because of what she said, but because of how she said it: softer, sultrier, with a hint of promise in it. His eyes widened in surprise as he focused on her again and her clothes…flowed! He'd seen transfigurations before, but this wasn't like any of them. As with the root she'd sat and leaned on earlier there were no wand movements, no incantations. The material of her uniform simply altered in waves from wool and linen into a soft diaphanous fabric that wound around her neck, crossed over her breasts and around her waist to hang down in front to the top of her feet which were now in open, heeled golden sandals with ties that wrapped around her calves up to her knees. Gold jewelry appeared: delicate filigree bracers on her forearms, earrings and necklace, a gold chain belt around her waist. Her hair pulled itself into an elegant updo and lipstick reddened her lips.

He stared at her, arousal causing a tightening in his trousers. She was a sensual vision of loveliness, a mixture of elegance and promise of carnal delights, every teenage boy's dream. So much skin was exposed, begging to be touched, caressed but at the same time she had the air of a lady, proper, sophisticated, not sluttish or whoreish at all.

Her very presence beckoned him, and he wanted her.

"I like you, Harry." She said in a low, enticing, voice as she stepped towards him. "You are so very different from most of the boys. You're honest and brave to a fault, a true gentleman with integrity." She breathed as she pressed herself against him, raised her hand with a ring on her middle finger attached by a gold chain to a bracelet on her wrist and lay it on his cheek.

He was frozen, unable to move, not because of any spell or enchantment, but because if he moved, if he touched her, he'd be overcome by her very femaleness, and the overwhelming desire he felt would break him, make him take her and press her to the ground and ravish her.

"I'm a virgin in this body but I have many lifetimes worth of knowledge of how to use it and I would be more than willing to teach you what I know."

Her warm breath caressed his lips, her scent was almost overpowering. Yet, he knew this wasn't an enchantment, not a spell. This was simply her…and he wanted her.

"I want to teach you, Harry." Her lips barely touched his and his arms went around her, pulled her gently, but tightly, to him. Her eyes showed her approval. "I want to make you happy, Harry." She said in a low tone as their lips came together.

He thrilled at her touch, her willingness to make him happy…

…like…he would…he would be happy…with her…her…

…Hermione!

She felt the difference in him as he tensed up, pulled back to stare into his eyes with a look of concern…

"Shite! I just blew it, didn't I?" The remark came in a normal tone of voice, resigned but not angry.

"I love her." He told her quietly.

"Granger? Please tell me it's Granger and not Weasley." She had a sad little smile as she spoke. "I'd hate to be beaten out by that little bitch and not be able to kill her."

"You don't mind I love Hermione?"

She lay her head on his shoulder even as her clothing changed back into her school uniform. Her hug became one of comfort and closeness, no longer that of a lover. "Of course, I mind." She told him, truthfully, he thought. "But at least she's worthy of you. She wants Harry; she wants you. The Weaslette only wants the Boy-Who-Lived and the fame, and fortune, that goes with him." She pulled her head back once again and looked him in the eye. "I could give you so much, Harry Potter: power, knowledge, glory, me." She smiled. "That you give it up because you love her is just another reason I want you for myself. I've seen knights in shining armor and they never lived up to the hype." She brought her hand back up to his cheek and gave him a chaste little kiss on the lips. "You, however, are who they coined the phrase for."

He saw the tear as it slid down her face as she stepped away from him. "I didn't mean to hurt you, Daphne."

She smiled again, that same sad little smile. "I've watched you for a long time, Harry. You show me that there are people who are willing to do the right thing and not the easy thing." She chuckled suddenly. "That was one of the few things the Headmaster ever told you that was right. I can give you up to Hermione. Like I said, she's worthy of being lifted up and carried off by her white knight. But I warn you…"

In the blink of an eye she changed, dark black robes replacing her uniform, her silver blonde hair turning black, an unfelt wind whipping hair and robes about and revealing the dark lady of legend. "…hurt her, destroy my image of the good man I believe you are, I will find you and you will not like what happens!"

As quickly as she had changed, she changed back. She grinned at him. "Now, let's take care of this wanker and his toadies so you can get back to the castle and claim your true lady love and ride off to your happily ever after."

He turned to where she was pointing and looked at Tom and suddenly grinned.

She saw his grin. "What?"

He looked at her, then at Tom and back to her before laughing. "The power he knows not!"

((((((OOOOO))))))

. . . Kedavra!" The spell left the end of his wand…and Potter vanished. He didn't move; he didn't apparate; he didn't port-key; he simply vanished!

He was puzzling out that mystery when the sounds of collapsing bodies caused him to turn…to see his entire inner circle dead on the ground, a large hole in the middle of each of their foreheads.

"My Lord!"

Malfoy's startled shout caused him to spin about… and the last thing Tom Marvolo Riddle, self-styled Lord Voldemort, the most powerful dark lord in centuries… ever saw in a living body was the point of the knife that sliced through his right eye, punched through the back of the socket and slammed into the inside of the back of his skull.

((((((OOOOO))))))

Harry watched the body of his own personal nightmare fall to lie in a heap on the ground before giving a quick glance to where Nagini lay writhing in the dirt. No spell he had available to him could destroy a horcrux but he was willing to bet with her mouth and nostrils sealed and the business end of a nylon zip tie pulled tightly around her neck and the other end around a stake in the ground to hold her in place, the great snake would die just as surely as any other animal deprived of oxygen would. Past her he could see the bodies of the Death Eaters lying on the ground. The Lancia piercing spells he'd cast at each of them had taken them all down at once when Daphne/Morgana had restarted time.

He turned his head and looked down his outstretched arm to where his wand pointed directly at Lucius Malfoy. He could actually see the man trembling as he glared unspeaking at him.

"Now, Potter. . ." the blonde started, raising his hands as if to shield himself.

"You picked the losing side, Lucy." Harry interrupted him. Malfoy's eyes widened in fear as he looked into the young man's eyes. "Diffindo!"

When the head had stopped rolling down the small hill on which he stood he turned his gaze to the only other person left standing in the clearing other than him. Narcissa Malfoy met his eyes calmly, considering she had just watched him behead her husband in a cold and calculating manner. "Is Draco alive?" she asked quietly, as if he didn't hold her fate in his hands . . . or care that he did.

Caught off guard by the totally unrelated question, Harry replied "Yes, he is."

She closed her eyes with a small smile and sighed heavily in what was clearly relief before she opened them again and pushed the sleeves of her robes up, revealing clear, unblemished skin on her forearms. "I did not take his mark, but I have done things that warrant Azkaban at the least and death most surely in the eyes of some. In my defense I will only say I did everything I did in order to protect my son." Suddenly, she dropped to her knees before him and bowed her head. "I await your judgment."

He looked down at her and remembered when she had done nothing but stand and watch as her sister carved those letters, that word, into Hermione's flesh. He remembered the screams of his best friend as she cried and begged for help, mercy and relief.

She may have done things to protect her son, but she had done nothing to protect another's daughter. He raised his wand. White knight be damned.

((((((OOOOO))))))

They parted before him like water before the bow of a moving ship. Here and there in Riddle's army some apparated out, unhindered now that the wards preventing it were down. He didn't care, neither looking left nor right. He saw the fear in their faces, and he didn't care about that either, not as long as they got out of his way.

That fear could have been because of his confident strides through their midst; even unarmed amongst his enemies, they were determined and unafraid. It might have been at his expression; the scowl he wore was one to terrify lesser beings. The blood running down his face from where his scar had burst open helped with the fearsome visage. The sight promised horrible death and destruction to any who interfered in his journey.

They didn't need to know that expression was there because of the kick-arse headache he was only just getting over from the destruction of the soul piece in his scar. Daphne had been correct in her prediction it would fight for its continued existence once it was alone. With one last quivering twitch Nagini had indeed succumbed to the lack of oxygen and the final horcrux had given an earsplitting scream of denial of its demise before the snake's body had exploded…a scream echoed by the shade that had risen from Riddle's body only moments before.

Its last supporting connection gone the soul piece had been overwhelmed by his magic, but it had been several minutes as it fought to survive, long, agonizing ones.

The rush of blocked magic pouring into his core had helped some; a small dam could hold back a lot of water after all, but it was still an experience he did not want to ever revisit again.

It could have been any or all of these things causing the parting of the army in front of Harry, but in all probability it was more likely what was trailing behind him causing the effect: floating behind him at a set distance like a macabre balloon was Riddle's body, a halo of severed heads, Malfoy's, Bella LeStrange's and Rosier's the most prominent among them, circling his own. That Harry had killed them was evident; that he'd had to go through the dark lord's inner circle to put the knife whose hilt still protruded from his eye where it was, was demonstrated by the bodiless heads. That he'd been close enough to the man to actually do it and to survive with nothing more than a minor head wound and still have enough power to wandlessly float the evidence of what he'd done was more than enough to ensure that nobody wanted to get in his way as he walked up to the school.

He passed through the crowd at last and up to the steps of the castle before he turned to face them. Without a word or gesture the floating display crashed to the ground, Riddle's body landing bonelessly in an undignified heap, the heads bouncing and rolling in different directions. When he spoke, it was as if he'd used a sonorous though again it had been without word or wand.

"If you're still here in thirty seconds I'll make you like them." His voice rumbled deep and menacing across the grounds.

Pandemonium. Witches and wizards apparated away while those who couldn't, werewolves, giants and other dark creatures, literally trampled one another in their urgency to be any place other than where they were.

They weren't all gone at the end of his time limit but those left were trying very hard to be so.

Seeing that none of them were going to try and stick around he turned and strode up the steps to where the school's defenders stood waiting. "Mister Potter…" Professor McGonagall began with a tired smile, but he ignored her as he aimed straight for the one person he wanted, needed, to see, to be with. Taking her face between his hands he pulled a very surprised Hermione Granger into a searing kiss. She stood frozen and unresponsive for a few short, terrifyingly long seconds before wrapping her arms around him, drawing him close and returning it.

"Oi! Potter! What do you think you're doing with my girl?" an incensed Ronald Weasley shouted at him only to stop, wide eyed at finding himself at the very tip of Harry's wand.

"Shut your face Weasley." Harry snarled at him. "I've forgiven you a lot over the years for the way you've treated me at times, talked about me and even done to me. But starting right now I will not forgive you for the way you treat Hermione. She is not yours, she is her own person, one who can make her own decisions despite what you may think otherwise." He turned back to the beautiful young woman in his arms as a chastised Ron fearfully backed away.

"Hermione, I've only just realized in the past little while that I am madly in love with you, that I have been for quite some time. I can only claim ignorance and stupidity in not knowing before now and telling you just how much I want and need you in my life. Hermione Granger, will you marry me and let me spend the rest of my life trying to make you happy?"

The smile she gave him was absolutely radiant. "Yes, Harry!" she cried happily and pulled him in for another kiss.

It was some time before the cheering died down and the congratulations ended before they could escape into the castle. At Hermione's suggestion they started for the Room of Requirement and a long period of much needed sleep but before they reached the central staircase, they were accosted by one of the last people Harry wanted to see.

"Potter!"

Harry turned to see Draco Malfoy step out of an alcove, wand pointed directly at him, his face a mask of rage. He wanted to hex the other young man into a trembling heap but gave an exhausted sigh instead. Draco's father's head was one of those lying in the courtyard after all. "Malfoy, go find your mother." He said tiredly. "She's worried about you." He turned the two of them back towards the staircase and began walking away.

Behind them Draco gave them a surprised look then one towards the main doors before looking at the departing couple once again as if uncertain what to do.

He was almost running by the time he reached the doors.

They reached the main staircase but upon spying a group of people there, all Slytherins with a certain blonde among them, Harry frowned in thought, and stopped. "Miss Greengrass." He called.

She turned and noticed them. Her face was her usual Ice Queen mask. The others in the group stopped talking as they all looked in surprise at the two of them. "Mister Potter." she replied.

"Regarding our last conversation," he started, "I think I made known my total disagreement on some of your points of discussion and am not inclined to change my mind." She simply looked at him with an air of total indifference. "However, with other of your points I am in total agreement. Should you wish to resume our discussion at a later date I am certain that anything else can be… negotiated."

He saw her left eyebrow twitch upward just a touch, in surprise, confusion?, as her eyes flicked quickly to Hermione then back to him and then he saw her mask slip…just a bit: the corner of her mouth rose ever so slightly in a barely there smile. "I look forward to a resumption of our talk, Mister Potter." she stated with a small, crooked nod of her head.

He gave a slight nod back and then started up the stairs.

"What was that about, Harry?" Hermione asked, looking confused and obviously wondering when he had ever talked to the Slytherin Ice Queen.

With his arm around her shoulder he pulled her close and kissed her temple. "The future, Love, and hopefully a better one."

They continued climbing.