Disclaimer: Hogwarts etc belongs to JKR.
AN: Before I start I recommend reading Secrets on my profile page as it kinda explains step by step what's mentioned only very briefly here. It's by no means fundamental to the story, but I can imagine that if you don't get it you'll go all wtf?? on me. But yus, it's a pretty easy read so it's not like it'd take long.
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Chapter One
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Grey blur, both mental and physical as her consciousness struggled to find its footing. There were voices. (That came first.) Foreign voices conversing quickly in urgent tones.
Dull ache, soul deep and spreading as unthought knowledge sped from nerve to nerve, burning as it went. There was pain. (That came second.) Screaming fatigue that went further than flesh and bone.
She groaned.
The voices stopped and then resumed, quicker and firmer, but she heard none of it. The floodgates had opened, memories carving fear and hate on the insides of her skull. (That came third.) Memories of faces and voices, all dark with panic and sharp with power. The rancid taste of dark magic filled her throat like bile and she retched.
And then she cried.
Because somewhere deeper than conscious thought dared to venture she knew something.
She could feel it, every fibre of her being reaching out towards that vile truth that was too harsh to even consider, let alone believe.
It was gone. (The death of magic.) (The war is over.)
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The day of the final battle dawned much in the same way as any other would so soon after midsummer. White clouds parted on the pink tinged horizon and slowly the sun rose, bleeding colour into the twilight realm of early morning. Much of the country still slept but on the Salisbury Plains, along with many green places across the British Isles, birds and insects were readying themselves for the day ahead.
Humanity slept and nature hummed but there were a few alert and ready. Sybil Trelawney had woken to scenes of blood and spell fire and sat, eyes vacant, staring into her crystal ball. Ron Weasley woke to the sound of his friend screaming in his sleep and had spent the rest of the night pacing the hall, wand in hand. Ginny Weasley woke from a dream she couldn't quite remember, tears streaming down her cheeks and an iron fist clutching at her stomach and Hermione Granger, lying still in the next bed, had barely slept at all.
On that morning, that most average yet fateful of summer mornings, Harry Potter had slept until nine. And it was only then, with his eating breakfast, head down, that the limbo of the previous night lifted.
"Today?" Ron had asked.
Harry nodded, but never once looked up.
Potions bottled. Apparation. Hushed voices. It had begun.
They reached the 'altar' with the rest of the Order, dressed in traditional black robes and gaining strange looks from the muggle tour-guides and tourists alike. While Harry fretted and the aurors and spell casters worked Hermione had told Ron what the muggles believed of the place they stood.
"Stonehenge. It's a mystery to them, I think that's half the reason it's so popular. Second most visited heritage site in England." She turned to look at the cluster of stones behind them, "They think it's a temple to a sun god, or a place of assembly, they don't really know to be honest. Muggles' grasps of astronomy leave much to be desired. They know it was significant, but with no knowledge of magic it's difficult for them to work out why."
He followed her gaze and shifted slightly. "Do you think it'll work?"
She stayed staring into the middle distance. "It has to."
Muggles came and went, presuming the oddly dressed party to be particularly enthusiastic tourists or some 'New Age' teenagers. No one asked questions, not even when the site's manager spontaneously decided to bar public entry.
Road officially closed they waited and with beginnings of nightfall they were not disappointed.
There was a sickening crunch followed by the sharp smell of melted asphalt. She'd watched as Voldemort snarled, ripping up the fences that scarred the face of the ancient magical monument and melting the tarmac path that surrounded it. The car park and the two roads that bracketed Stonehenge from the rest of the plains were reduced to rubble and as aurors and Death Eaters alike flooded in from across the country he stood back and he laughed.
It hadn't been like the night by the Astronomy Tower, of that much she was certain. There were endless parallels: the ancient observatory standing at their midst in the same way the tower once had, werewolves clawing at faces with human hands, children doing the jobs of warriors and a child and the leader of an army facing each other at the heart of it all; but this time the spells struck harder and when people fell they didn't move again.
She'd seen Harry stand on that altar stone and throw down the vial in the way he knew he must. She'd seen Voldemort curse him and seen him still standing seconds later when she finished off her own enemy. She'd seen them sneering at each other and then she'd seen nothing as she was dragged into the real fray, spitting curses she'd never thought she had the heart to use, all in an attempt to stay standing.
The taste of blood filled her mouth but she knew at once it was not blood but magic. Magic in its rawest and darkest of forms. She killed that day. More than once. (More than she ever wished to remember.) (Eighteen. She killed eighteen times.)
There had been screams and gasps and mud between her fingers as she tripped over a corpse in her haste to get away. There had been darkness shot to pieces by the firework light of spells. There had been face after face of nameless enemies and suddenly there had been him.
The first thing she'd noticed was how tired he looked; how his face was pale and drawn and so different to the selfish boy she knew. The second thing was the spell forming on his lips. She dived left and it missed.
He'd bowed then, mocking her, though the simple mockery bound them in combat more intense than any she'd experienced before: a true wizard's duel. They used everything they'd ever learnt: transfiguration, Windgardium Leviosa, potions incantations as they kicked mud in each other's eyes. When disarmed that threw punches, when stunned they sent nonverbal spells, when tired they dove away and cast up enchanted images of themselves and ran, but they always found each other again, in the heat and sweat of the battle they'd be reunited and the fight would go on.
He was the first to change the rules. She'd taken his wand and not knowing what else to do she ran with it. He'd rugby tackled her to the ground and with a gut wrenching twist of her navel she found herself lying on dry leaves, him rolling off of her, grabbing his wand and yelling a spell. She'd thrown up her barriers not a moment too soon.
And so it continued, every time they made bodily contact they tandem apparated the other to some far off place or back to the battlefield or simply a few feet to the right to throw the other off balance. Thinking back on it later she'd appreciate it was a miracle neither of them had been spliched.
The streets of Paris, arctic tundra, London Bridge, back to the Salisbury Plains, Paris again, a forest, a beach, the foothills of a mountain, a ski resort, a church. The list grew and exhaustion mounted. Staggering they threw pathetic hexes, at Hermione's direction landing back by Stonehenge. Standing and gasping curses she saw Ron running towards them, yelling something she couldn't quite make out. In the distant stone-ringed arena Harry battled on. And then she saw Malfoy panic, seeing Ron running and thinking it was to help her, but no! He was trying to tell her something! He was almost close enough for her to hear but Malfoy was looking left and right for an escape route-
"It's gone wrong! The potion! The charm! The stones have altered it! The net's fraying, Hermione! We have to get him out of-"
Malfoy slammed into her ribs and she opened her eyes to see pine needles and deep blue night.
A snarl grew in her throat and she threw herself at him.
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Their plan had been a simple one, built on and built on by the combined forces of Hogwarts' ex-professors. Hermione had explained it to McGonagall and the woman had pretty much taken over from there.
Stonehenge was Britain's most impressive prehistoric monument; the mystery of its ring of stones had plagued muggles for centuries. Aligned perfectly with the rising sun of the summer solstice it practically buzzed with elemental magic throughout the summer months. Hermione's theory was to harness this ancient power hub and help Harry use it to cleave Voldemort's final piece of soul from his body.
A potion was mapped out and then brewed, when spilt on the altar stone and focal point of the circle it was designed, with the aid of the natural magic lingering within the henge, to draw the weakest piece of soul away from its host body. This had to be Voldemort's as it was a mere fragment.
It was dangerous. It was always going to be dangerous. No one had tampered with the magic of Nature herself since long into the past. Stonehenge had lain dormant for millennia and suddenly calling it into action was like waking an ancient dragon in an attempt to get it to carry you into battle.
The problem, however, came not from the henge. Nor was it what Ron suggested, for their charms lay entirely intact. The flaw was ancient and simple: "Know thyself" - here both sides failed.
When the shadow of the new moon spilled over the crest of the stone lintels the potion and its accompanying charm began to do their work. But it was not Voldemort who fell to his knees.
You see, Harry Potter was not the only inhabitant of his body, and as strong as his soul may have appeared from the outside it could not contend with the degree of fundamental repulsion between two individual pieces of a single severed soul. What it all came down to was the night seventeen years ago when Harry Potter became the seventh horcrux of Tom Riddle. When the weakest soul was drawn to the altar by the magic of the ancient temple the repulsion between the fragment of Riddle in Harry and the fragment of Riddle in Voldemort was stronger than the will of Harry's soul alone. And as a result Harry's soul left his body.
The situation was a mess. Harry's soul had left but his consciousness remained, a weak presence driving the force of the remaining soul within his chest. The battle continued with Voldemort ignorant to the display of magic before him and it was there that things grew far worse than any recorded incident in all the ages of wizardry.
Two fragments of the same soul were fighting each other to the death; it went against the very grain of humanity and shook Nature to her core. In unison both duellers fired Avada Kedavra and in a burst of emerald light Stonehenge's lintels cracked.
Amplified by the deep-rooted magic of the monument the shockwaves emanating from the two figures threw their power right the way around the globe. Unseen by muggles, barely sensed by animals, it ripped the magical core of every witch, wizard and magical person across the planet into shards.
Harry Potter's body died, Voldemort was no more and across the world the death of magic drew screams of tortured loss from the breasts of every magical person.
The war was over.
And so was magic.
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She was coughing and gasping and sobbing all at once. Her ribs ached as spasms wracked her body and all senses reached a state of hyper-alertness with not one of them delivering messages her brain could understand. The confusion was acute and painful; endless minute sights, sounds and sensations of the world around her reverberating within the walls of her head.
The great sense of loss that engulfed her from the moment the shockwave passed bore down on her once more until she felt she'd never be in control of herself again.
White light burnt before her eyes and those foreign voices swam into focus around her, syllables refused to form words she could understand and she felt for the first time cold sweat leaking through her skin. It was like even her flesh was crying at the loss.
She writhed and twisted, not knowing what it was she was trying to avoid until the firm grip on her arm was followed by the sharp, dizzying sting of a needle. The shock stilled her at first and as she slumped back, the drug kicking in, she felt again the gaping hole resting over her heart. Wondering dumbly if they'd stitch her back up, fix her like doctors were meant to she drifted back into nothingness.
All around her the team of medics stood back; alarm fading as the girl's breathing calmed.
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AN: Any thoughts?
If you've read it please review it!