General Issue Disclaimer-y thing: Harry Potter is not mine. I was heartbroken when my lawyer informed me of this, but dem's da breaks. Harry Potter's friends aren't mine, nor are Hogwarts, wands, magic, Diagon Alley, Hogsmead, Tom Marvolo Riddle—known aliases include Dark Lord, Lord Voldemort, You-Know-Who, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and I-Have-More-Hyphens-In-My-Name-Than-The-Boy-Who-Will-Not-Die...

Author pauses to reflect: *Sigh*. I don't own anything recognizable from the books. All the people in this story are not real people or meant to resemble any person living, dead, fictitious, or other. Any resemblance to any actual person living, dead, fictitious, imagined, hallucinated, or other is purely coincidental. References to actual people living, dead, fictitious, imagined, hallucinated, or other do not actually reference a person living, dead, etc., but rather a literary construct that happens to bear a purely coincidental resemblance to said person that is living, dead, etc.

I do lay claim to Allie and a dementor named Bob, though I stand to make no profits on them. If I did stand to make a profit you would not be reading it here. So, to quote Chris de Burgh, "Don't pay the Ferryman."

In reference to the time line I did shift things a decade so Philosopher's Stone takes place in Y2K. I hope this preemptive warning helps.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
T. S. Eliot "little Gidding" (5) Four Quarters, 1945

Safe House Derra IV
Location: CLASSIFIED-TOP SECRET
November 25, 2021—08:42zulu
6,338 days since beginning of the Second Voldemort War
4,772 days after Disclosure.

"We lost James."

Harry looked up from the small desk in the equally small room that was nominally 'his'. Given the numbers of their people looking for shelter and the increasing scarcity of safe-houses the fact that he had a room to himself said quite a lot about how most of his allies felt about him…although Harry frequently wondered if what they were saying was that they respected him or that he'd become a pariah. Considering how many of them were dying, he reflected bitterly, there would soon be room aplenty.

"Which James?" he asked irritably. Part of it came from not knowing the people he was sending out to die for him for so little gain. It was easier to send people to their deaths when he didn't know them, and their casualty lists had gotten so long that it was rare for anyone to actually tell him who was lost. He didn't know them, there was nothing he could do for them, so why upset the boss.

Anyone else would have known that. Even Katie knew that, she just tended to ignore it in some half-failed attempt to 'protect him from himself', as Hermione put it. Some, she had insisted, needed to. He had asked her, once, why she didn't have the job, she'd certainly had it when they were in school. His best friend had crossed her arms and told him flatly that she wasn't she that he wasn't right, which, Harry thought, was really a sign of the times.

Katie Bell crossed her arms, "Prince James."

Harry winced. He deserved that. There really was only one 'James' that Katie would make it a point to make sure that he was told if—when he was lost. Part of him wanted to be grateful that she wasn't telling him all of the names, names of people he couldn't connect faces to, that they'd lost; another, louder, part of him wanted to hate her for it. Since he knew how…poorly he'd take that information if she gave it, he settled for not saying anything. Most of the time.

Two decades ago the idea that James Ogilvy would ever be three deaths away from sitting on the throne of the United Kingdom would have been…laughable. But then, two decades ago nobody had thought that Voldemort would have deliberately forced Disclosure on the magical world—in fact, most people who knew of Voldemort back then had been firmly convinced that he was dead, just a bad memory that could only haunt them in their dreams. Voldemort hated muggles. The idea that he'd expose the magical world to them was ludicrous.

Voldemort, however, had his eyes set on the Throne of Arthur.

The idea of the insane, powerful, and extremely evil wizard getting his hands on Camelot was a source of not a few of Harry's frequent nightmares. Camelot was Sealed for a reason. Unseal Camelot and you gained access to one of the most powerful magical sites in the world. Worse, Camelot controlled Tintagel, Tara, and Avalon.

Only the fifth and weakest of the Five had passed through the centuries unsealed, and even then most of its power had been locked away or subverted behind its guise as a school. With its power loosed Hogwarts was a fearsome Fortress, capable of withstanding nearly any assault, magical or not. With all of the Five unSealed they would amplify each other in such a way that they were more powerful than control of an five, any ten, ley nodes…excluding Atlantis and its brethren of course but they hadn't counted for almost ten millennia.

Five of the thirteen most powerful nodes (actually Fonts, which were to nodes what nodes were to ley line junctions)—nobody was quite certain how powerful Stonehenge was but it was traditionally given the thirteenth slot though the Arithmantists claimed that it could very well rival the power of lost Atlantis—in the world. Five of the seven Fonts in the Isles, all of which, for the moment at least (except for Hogwarts), were still Sealed. Only Stonehenge, capped off nearly ten millennia before, was left…and the Shadow Vale.

Hogwarts might as well have been gone. It still stood intact, but nothing had gotten in or out of it since, all the energy from the Font going into Hogwarts' wards. The British Isles' seventh Font was gone, forced to expend its power in a flash of light and death. The Shadow Vale wasn't technically one of the seven, like Atlantis and Mu and the rest it wasn't even a type of ley-line conjunction, but it was certainly accessible from the islands—and any number of other places outside of them. But desperate times or no, Harry wasn't ready to use the Shadow Veil.

Not even Voldemort was insane enough to loose its horrors into the world.

Fortunately Voldemort hadn't been able to press a claim on Camelot without someone noticing. The same safeguards that Merlin had constructed had likewise given even him pause. The wards, the fabled Walls of Camelot, would not allow anyone to press as claimant until the four Lines of Kings that Merlin had left after dissolving the Pendragon's High Kingdom were broken.

Unlike many of his plans he hadn't gone for flashy magic and orgies of destruction, well, not at first. The killings had picked up after his rebirth, but even then it have been kept quiet enough that even the muggles hadn't realized what was happening. An accident here, an illness there, a mother enspelled to kill her entire family and herself, a co-worker who poisoned the company coffee pot…he'd been killing those furthest from the throne for years before he revealed the magic to the muggle world in three days of fire and death.

Actually, if the notes Severus had managed to sneak, quite unexpectedly, to Harry shortly before his torture and execution (though such worlds failed to convey the full horror of the fate Voldemort had visited upon his greatest betrayer) were to be believed, then the campaign to eliminate all the claimants to the throne of the United Kingdom had begun well before Harry's parents had even started at Hogwarts.

A ghost of a smile traced across Harry's face as he recalled the heady days after they had first learned Voldemort's true goal, or at least one of his true goals. He recalled thinking at the time that Voldemort had made a mistake. That he had not only revealed the wizarding world to the muggles in such a way that they had to take action against him, but that it was also unnecessary. Three of the Lines had been broken centuries before, the crowns of Wales and Scotland were now both held by the Kings (or Queen as the case may be) of England and had been for centuries, and Ireland was now a Republic, and as for the fourth, well William had taken that one in righteous combat almost a millennia before.

"I didn't think you'd be happy about it," Katie said, drawing him back to the present.

"I'm not," Harry said. "Just a memory."

"Oh?" she asked.

"We thought he'd screwed up," Harry said. "That all four Lines of Kings were broken, and that he was wasting himself against the Windsors and the rest. That the Line of English Kings had been broken by William. Since the magic of the Line was passed by blood magic, and Godwinson dead at Hastings…"

Katie's eyes widened. "A bit before I joined you, I think. What happened?"

"Hermione, what else?" Harry asked with a shrug. "Turns out the consort of Edward the Second's was one of Godwinson's descendents, which restored the Line via the distaff side."

"So then he really needed to do It?" Katie asked.

Harry nodded silently as he remembered the three blood-soaked days when hundreds, thousands, had died; target of attacks, or killed trying to prevent them…or for just being in the way.

Nobody was quite certain how Balmoral's security had been breeched. A private residence of the Sovereign, it had been layered with protections both magical and mundane that the Queen's public residences simply couldn't have been (except maybe Windsor, but that castle was very nearly as old as Hogwarts with magical protections just as ancient and arcane). Instead of being the safe place it had been intended, it became a death trap. Everyone there, friend, ally, and Death Eater alike, had disappeared into a perfectly hemispherical crater a little less than two kilometers across and exactly half as deep centered on where the castle had previously stood—or to be precise, where Queen Elizabeth's parlor had previously stood. In doing so she became only the fourth English monarch to die in battle.

Despite a bid to save her family by scattering them around the globe, of the 54 people closest in succession—the living descendents of King George V—only two had survived, and Harry counted them lucky to have managed even that. The total spread throughout Europe and beyond was far worse.

Prince Charles had simply disappeared from his car while in transit; his head was discovered three days later, after most of the killing had ceased, on a pike mounted on the London Bridge. In Sydney, the Duke of York was found by the head of his security detail—untouched except for the removal of his eyes, the cause of death (including magic and poison) unknown. Half a world away in New York City, his daughters were hurried from the opera by agents from the United States Diplomatic Protection Service and placed in an armored limousine with an armed escort. When they arrived at the British Embassy, only their hearts, in neatly gift-wrapped boxes, were found in the backseat. The Princess Royal and her husband died in their home in when their bodyguards turned their weapons on them. In Hong Kong her son died when the car he was driving home vanished in a ball of purple flames that extinguished themselves five minutes later without a trace of what had burned. And in a sign of things to come, a meteor destroyed the hotel—and most of New Deli—where the Earl of Wessex, in town for a conference in the run-up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and his family were staying.

Prince Harry had survived because he'd been appointed as the Royal Family's liaison to the magical world (not that the muggles knew that, but then magic was a wonderfully useful thing). His guards had the most warning, and since the detail had contained people who could use magic (unlike most of the security teams) it had managed to make a proper trap for those sent to assassinate him.

At the time the Ministry of Magic was still denying that Voldemort was going to move the magical world into the open and had declined to provide more than minimal security to the most important muggles in the government. The Order of the Phoenix had been hard pressed to provide guards and meet its previously standing obligations and had few to spare.

"What are you thinking about?"

Harry started out of his reverie to find Katie staring at him. "I'm sorry?" he asked.

Katie frowned. "You've been doing that more often, Harry. You start thinking about the past and it's like the world has come to a stop for you."

Harry shrugged. "Battle Fatigue, Allie calls it. Post Traumatic Shock Disorder is Hermione's favored term, though how this can be anything like 'post' I have no idea."

"I thought the potions were supposed to prevent that," Katie said.

"Nothing really stops it," Harry said softly. "Delays, attenuates, takes of the worst of it. I've already talked to a Healer about juggling the dosages slightly, but I'm already so close to the maximum dosing for most, even exceeding it in a few cases. I'm reaching the end of what medical magic can do. Get me in a fight and I'm still good, but anything less takes more and more from me. Most of what I have left I keep for in front of the troops."

Katie nodded slowly. "Thank you for being honest, Harry."

Harry tried to smile, but came up short. "Lying takes too much effort and you're one of the few people I trust enough to talk about this stuff to so…" He shrugged. "You asked a question?"

Katie nodded slowly, "What were you thinking about just now?"

"It." He shrugged. "Fate, destiny, luck… why James didn't believe any of it and survived when those with a lot more reason to believe, or who were better equipped to survive, didn't."

"Prince James survived," Katies said, "Because he decided to take a walk and hadn't told anyone where he was going other than 'out of the office' to one secretary who was killed before she could be interrogated."

"And the hit team moved on to their next location before he walked into them," Harry agreed. "And then he managed to keep alive, and keep a low enough profile, that we were able to get to him a day and a half later and five minutes ahead of the Death Eaters sent to kill those they had missed in their initial attacks."

Which had left them in the end with one very young, very angry king—young in an experience sense, compared to Harry—who'd been trained to fight and even spent a couple months hunting insurgents in Afghanistan, but found himself too valuable to be allowed to do more than sit in a safe-house…and since then, two infant princes. Speaking of which—

"Has Henry been told yet?" Harry asked.

Katie shook her head.

"Okay, first, how does this leave the succession? After twins, I mean."

"There's the Duke," she pointed out.

It was odd, Harry reflected, how he could remember his earlier battles, but the latter ones all seemed to blur into one another. The Battle of Buckingham he could still remember with glass-like clarity. The Duke returning from a trip abroad, planning to stay for one night before going to Balmoral. The initial Death Eater strike team, prepared for the Order of the Phoenix, but not for the fact that, ostentatious uniforms aside, the weapons carried by the Coldstream Guards were quite functional. The desperate running battle in the halls and across the ground of Buckingham. Justin Finch-Fletchy buying them the time with his life for the rest of the Duke's shrinking guard detail to get out of a broad corridor Harry had never learned the name of. The arrival of reinforcements from Horse Guards and the Met, and the moment of despair as they turned their weapons on the Duke's magical guards even as the Duke picked up an assault rifle from a dead private and turned it on Marcus Flint who had slain the young soldier moment before.

Anti-portkey and anti-disapparation wards snapped up, preventing flight, and then Katie appearing overhead with not only her teammates on the Falmouth Falcons, but the complete rosters from the Wasps and Cannons as well. William, doomed by a flesh-rotting curse that they hadn't been able to counter, leading the diversion that allowed them to break out of the palace for the gardens. Aurors, at last responding but far, far too late as they apparated into the gardens between them and the Death Eaters, realizing they were in an impossible position, but then buying the time for them to cram three, four people to a racing broom or more. Enough time for the handful left to escape.

Those were, he decided, better days. At least better than they were presently.

"He was what, four hundred in line when this all started?" Harry asked, this time managing to draw himself out of his reflection before Katie could do it.

"Four eighty-five," Katie said. "We have to move him."

"It's too dangerous."

"It's more dangerous to lose them all if the safe-house is compromised. It's bad enough that the King insists on keeping the twins with him. With Prince James gone we've got all the Family that we know are still alive, in one place. If it is compromised—"

"I know," Harry snapped. He sighed and rubbed his forehead, though he knew it wouldn't stop the rapidly-forming headache. "Look, Katie, the Duke is a hundred years old. That may not be much for one of us, but for a muggle it's positively ancient, even with what magic can do to help him which isn't much since he has no natural magic of his own. Yes, we could move him, but the strain of magical transportation may very well be the thing that does him in. He still has that damn tracker Lucius managed to hit him with so we can't move him by non-magical means without uncovering him and letting them know we're moving him—and giving them a chance to ID not only the place we're moving him to, but the King's safehouse as well—and he isn't strong enough for us to remove it like King Henry and Prince James were. If it were ten or twelve years ago I might have said go for it; for that matter if we'd figured it out when he'd first gotten tagged it'd probably still be fresh enough that we could remove it without risking his health, but now?"

Harry shook his head. "As for the twins, they're less than six years old. Let them enjoy their family. It's the only one they have."

"Hannah—"

Harry glared at her, a trickle of the old half-remembered anger stirring in him. But compared to how angry he remembered being when he'd found out that his friends had agreed not to write to him after fourth year, this was like embers of a hearth fire gone mostly cold compared to a bonfire. "I know Hannah loved Neville. Well he's dead and there's no magic that any of us are willing to touch that will bring him back. Not even Allie, I asked, which shows just how desperate I am. The King wanted to breed magic back into the Royal line. I'm not so certain that it's possible if what Prince Charles told us about that Curse that was placed on the line—what, four centuries back?—was anything close to accurate.

"'When magic sits on the throne', you remember that part?" Katie asked. "We've all assumed that the only one who can actually unseal the locks has to be sitting on the throne, but nothing we have actually says that. It just says that a witch or wizard, not even a trained one, has to be on the throne. Which means that if King Henry dies we're fucked. It'll be years before the twins are old and powerful enough to undo the Seals."

"You know I've always thought Hermione misinterpreted that part," Harry said. "She doesn't do it often, I admit, but when she does it is harder to get her to admit it than it is to…well, pick something really hard to do. I'll go even one further and point out that there is nothing that says that 'Magic' has to be of a Royal line. Also, it says 'magic's throne', Camelot was Arthur's, not Merlin's."

Katie blinked. "Do you mean to say that you think we could have gained access to Camelot?"

Harry shrugged.

"Why didn't you say something before?" she demanded.

"I did," Harry snapped. "King Henry overturned me, end of story."

"And since when do you follow an order you don't believe in?" Katie asked, crossing her arms.

"Since it was my only choice!" Harry threw back at her. "What was I supposed to do? We were still dancing around each other, magic, muggle, all the rest. We weren't organized. I wasn't their war leader. I didn't know if we could take the damn gate and hold it long enough for Hermione and Luna and the rest to get us through. Do it and keep them and Henry alive. And face it, I screwed up and people weren't exactly happy with me."

"What you did—"

"Was wrong. I. Fucked. Up," Harry said. "I should have done my job, got Prince William clear like I was supposed to. I didn't, he died, end of story."

"So then why did you do it?" Katie asked, and Harry didn't need clarification to know exactly which 'it' she was talking about.

"Because I don't know for a fact that Hermione is wrong. Because I can see a lot of advantages in having a King, or at least members of the Royal Family, that is magical. Because it was something I could do at the time to gain back some of that trust, and because he'd be more likely to stay where it's safe if he had a couple of lives he was responsible for protecting if all else went wrong.

"It isn't as though we had a list of options to choose from. If Henry marrying Hannah was the price of securing the throne, even a little, that was a price I was, and am—"

"Are you even listening to yourself, Harry?" Katie asked. "You sound exactly like the way that you complained Dumbledore acted like."

"And what exactly am I supposed to act like?" Harry asked, suddenly very tired indeed. "Only twenty percent of my year is still alive—that's if you include Parkinson, Parvati after what happened to her, and Him¸ which I don't. Thirty percent of yours, only Luna is left from hers… Of all the people who were at Hogwarts with me—students in seventh year my first through those in their first year during my last, and teachers included—there are what, twenty still alive who aren't working for Voldemort or fled the country?"

Harry gave the book he had been studying, a feeble shove. "We all have our prices to pay if we're going to win. Mine is to send my friends out to be killed while I try to kill him. So far I've been more successful in the former than the later. Just…let me take some measure of relief in managing to save one of my friends."

"I was friends with her before I was friends with you," Katie said softly. "She lived across the street, and there are less than four months, and September 1st, between them." She smiled wistfully, "I had such a hard time explaining Hogwarts without telling her about magic."

Harry frowned, "I thought Hannah was half-and-half."

"She is," Katie said. "But I'm muggle-born and I didn't know that. She was so depressed when she told me that she'd be going to a different boarding school and that it'd be nearly impossible for us to write—I'd taken stationary my first year and had been sending hers to my parents so that she wouldn't be getting owls. That's why it was so funny when she got sorted…I pranked her good for that." Her expression hardened, "You didn't do her any kindness by setting her up with King Henry."

"I don't expect her to thank me and I won't be terribly upset if she curses me for it. As long as she can do so it means she's still alive," Harry said. "As for the Duke, no, he stays where he is. He's the only person we have left now that's able to exert anything like an influence on Henry. He's stopped listening to me though I can't say I blame him. Merlin knows he has more than enough cause.

"If Hermione's research team is able to figure out and bypass those Seals, if we can win through to the Gates and hold it long enough, and if nothing else crops up and it almost certainly will were we to try waking Camelot, he's going to have all of the mystical power of the Throne of Arthur behind him. Provided, of course," he smiled mirthlessly, "that what Padma thinks happened at Balmoral is actually what happened."

Katie snorted, "What would you have said in Hogwarts if you'd been told that one day Hermione would be working to bypass wards put up by Merlin to safeguard Camelot for Arthur's return?"

"Thinks its funny, do you?" Harry asked. "Do you really want Henry running around with all that power without someone who can make him stop and think?"

Katie froze, then shook her head. "No, you're right. If half the stories are true he's worse than you were when you were a third his age."

"He's not quite that bad," Harry said. "And he has some other things going for him. But he's lost more family than ever I did. I never had that much to lose."

"Family of blood, maybe," Katie said as she gently closed the door and moved to sit on his desk. "I know you, Harry Potter," she said softly as she brushed a lock of hair back to expose his scar. "You made your own family. A family of love and friendship instead of blood, but a family still. That's why you feel like someone's carving out your heart whenever one of us dies."

"So who else is left?" Katie asked gently after Harry didn't reply.

"There are a couple of people we never were able to confirm were dead. Most of them are near the bottom of the list and probably are, but there are two or three between Charles and the Duke," Harry said. "Avery's team missed Queen Margrethe of Denmark. We aren't sure why, Voldemort hasn't made a secret about wanting to end the Royal Family in deed as well as name, but there are a number of people that have been killed that he hasn't bothered drawing attention to. There hasn't been any announcement of her death or someone ascending to her throne, either."

"Europe is in so much chaos it's possible that no one can get the message out," Katie said. "Or even knows if she's dead or not."

"Or it's possible that the Danes took our warning a little more seriously than anyone else and got her squirreled away before Avery's team got to her. Or maybe it's something like what happened with James," Harry said. "An unscheduled trip, maybe an unannounced vacation or a change in travel plans, heck, maybe she was in the loo and the Death Eaters never bothered to check. But Avery missed the hit, and that was enough warning to get her away."

Katie nodded slowly, and Harry could see her eyes take on a hard, vacant cast as she remembered that day. "That series of strikes were targeted to eliminate the most people, and the most prominent, as quickly as possible. There wasn't a lot of follow up right away—magical tracking, that kind of thing."

"Exactly," Harry said. "Look at what happened with Henry, James, and the Duke. The initial teams went in and either went on to the next—as in the case of James—or got carved up. No response after the initial attack for a day and a half in the case of James, almost two for Henry, by then we had him and the others secure. Thank Merlin."

Katie nodded again, wordlessly this time.

The Duke of Edinburgh had been too old to go into the field, but his quiet, solid strength had done more for holding together the disparate coalition of former Ministry of Magic, Order of the Phoenix, DA, magical refugee, muggle military, non-magical refugee, foreign volunteers, and more than a dozen other groups, and turning them into a force that was capable of at least getting within spitting-range of Voldemort's allies. In the dark days after Disclosure, when it seemed like the rest of the world was going to disappear in a nuclear and magical fireball, the Duke, more than anyone else, had managed to drag the United Kingdom kicking and screaming through the chaos and into the new, darker, world.

"To be fair," Harry continued after a moment, "it wasn't really Death Eaters' focus at the time. They'd already removed a lot of the most distant persons—not that anyone recognized it for what it was—and his decapitation of the entire blood-line was orchestrated too tightly. There was barely time for his teams to make one hit and move on to the next."

"Well we knew that they thought that they'd be able to sweep up the rest at their leisure," Katie agreed. "And we thought it was all just a blow to the non-magical world's morale."

"Which it was, of course, we just didn't realize that it was also more than just an attack on public morale," Harry sighed. "And now that we know it isn't, we have to spend time and effort looking for each one. So does Voldemort, of course, but he's had more time and manpower to spare than we do."

Both lapsed into silence, Harry staring gloomily at his desk and Katie silently watching him.

"You'd have thought we'd have heard something if she's still alive," she said after it became clear Harry wasn't going to resume the conversation.

Harry shrugged.

"It wouldn't change anything," she sighed. "All it would do is keep us one more death away from what he wants. Waiting like this is a losing strategy."

"Never argued with that," Harry said slowly.

"Why doesn't he just break the Line?" Katie asked.

"Hmm?"

"Why doesn't he break the Line?" Katie repeated. "Like William the Conqueror did?"

"Oh, that," Harry said, feeling his ears heat.

"Harry," Katie said.

"Well, um, first off, he hasn't managed to kill the King, not like William did."

"He killed Queen Elizabeth, at least by proxy, and it wasn't like William the Conqueror defeated the previous king in single combat," Katie said.

Harry shifted in his seat. "Truthfully?" he asked. At Katie's nod he continued, "Because he has to actually hold the titles for himself, Hermione thinks. Now, Ireland's a wash, what with the Republic and all. If he wanted to, and we're not sure why he hasn't, he could probably claim England and Wales at this point by right of conquest. If he did there are couple of nifty little things we can do, but he's probably aware of them as we are. Scotland, however, has some very interesting caveats where its monarchs are concerned. And, well, I uh…" he mumbled something very quickly.

"What was that? I don't think I heard you," Katie said.

"Professor McGonagall may have, uh, borrowed, the Stone of Scone," Harry said.

"Barrowed," Katie repeated flatly.

"And, uh, St. Edward's Chair," Harry said, "And the Crown Jewels, and… well…" he shrugged.

"Wow," Katie said. "Professor McGonagall? Are you sure?"

Harry nodded.

"Huh." Katie regarded him for a minute. "That isn't going to hold him back though, not forever."

"True, but you knew that," Harry said. "What's your point?"

"My point is, what if there was another way?"

"Another way to do what?" Harry asked. "We can't put Harry on the Throne of Arthur—or destroy the damn thing which would solve that problem just as easily—until we can get past the Seals ourselves. We can't get past the Seals until Hermione can figure out how to undo them without blowing us up. Even if she accomplishes that, we then have to get past the second set of Seals which, as far as I know, none of us know how to do. As for Voldemort, what would you suggest; killing curse? I tried that. Black magic? We tried that too; along with plagues, nerve gas, a summoned meteor like the one that got Prince Edward and his family."

He gestured past her at the book he had been avoiding reading when she had walked in. "I've spent the past six years wallowing in some of the darkest magics known to human-kind after we decided that the stuff I was using wasn't going to work. I'm still no closer to defeating him. I've fought him seven times since the Department of Mysteries. Each of those times I've been lucky to escape with my life, most of those times I have very nearly gotten myself killed and I have nothing to show for it except still more dead friends.

"The one thing we haven't tried is the Shadow Veil. We could probably get in and access it—Allie could do it in a heartbeat but she won't because she's terrified of it—but you do remember what she said about that option don't you? I'm not about to trade one dark lord for another. Especially since…she's a friend."

Harry pushed himself up and stalked to the window. In contrast to his feelings and the world he lived in it was a bright and cheery morning. "He's abandoned using Horcruxes and reclaimed the three pieces of his soul that we didn't manage to destroy," he continued steadily as he gazed out at the grass, trying to remember what it felt like to walk through grass with bare feet. "Allie confirmed it. In fact she thinks that they would actually make him more vulnerable at this point rather than less, which is probably why he's reclaimed them."

"I suppose if anyone would know it'd be her," Katie agreed unhappily.

"So the one weakness we knew about is gone," Harry went on. "The one thing we have still going our way is that there's still someone sitting on the Throne of the United Kingdom. As long as that is true, he can't get past the Seals on Camelot.

"And if he gets Camelot he gets the three most powerful Fonts in the world. And we all know what he really has his eyes set on. Avalon is bad enough—you haven't seen it but Allie showed me one of her ancestor's memories, one of Merlin and the…thing he fought there."

"Atlantis," Katie said.

"Yes, and Mu, and Lemuria," Harry shook his head. "The pre-cataclysm Fonts are lost with the civilizations that grew around them. That's why it's called a 'cataclysm', Katie. Besides, would you really want to risk awakening the…whatever the hell it was that they ran into? What Voldemort could awaken if he got his hands on Avalon is bad enough." He turned and leaned against the wall.

"You do remember what Merlin said fourteen hundred years ago, after doing battle with something not of this world, that made him seal Avalon behind the Mists for the last time, don't you?"

"Yes," Katie said flatly. She cocked her head to one side, "Did Hermione ever find out how Lovecraft came up with that line? Was it really just coincidence or—" she shrugged and the look he gave her, "—I suppose it doesn't matter. Do you think he's going to summon an Old One?"

"I think it hardly matters what his intentions are if one of those breaches the barriers into this world," Harry said dryly. "There's a reason why going beyond the Outer Gates is verboten."

He sighed heavily as Katie moved up behind him and wrapped one arm around him into a loose hug, gently taking the book from him. Harry could feel the book silently pulsing with forbidden knowledge, and magic burned like a million trapped army ants under his skin. It wasn't the kind and wholesome magic he had first learned at Hogwarts, but the kind that let him wreak destruction without even using a wand. The magic that could have a person screaming in pain from the touch of a finger, or could steal the life from a person with a kiss.

But then Katie tossed the book tossed the book across the room in the direction of a bookcase with more tomes scattered on the floor around it. The nearly tangible connection between him and the book was severed instantly though he could still feel the urge to use the dark magic taunting him. That was one of their great dangers. The dark magics were heady things, powerful, easy to use, seductive. You could use them and never notice that the more you used them the more you had to use them until you were destroying everything around you for that oh-so-sweet high, which was so much better than having to face reality. Any reality. Katie's second arm joined the first.

For a moment Harry let himself sag against her warm body. "I don't know, Katie. I used to. I used to understand what he was going for; what his final goals were in the first war, for example. I understood his quest for immortality, as insane as it was. I understood the Horcruxes. I could even predict how he'd go about doing something, once I knew what that something was, as recently as last year. Now…" he shook his head. "I don't know what his goal is, but he has one. He always has a goal, however insane it might be. He isn't stupid no matter how much we might wish it."

He pushed himself away so that he could turn and look at her. "I don't know what he's planning or what he's going to do. I can't anticipate him anymore. He can torture me with our link, but I can't use it to read him. Not for the last seven months."

"We're going to lose, aren't we," Katie said softly. It wasn't a question.

Harry hesitated, and then slowly nodded his head. "We're going to lose. Not today or tomorrow, but some time in the next couple of months; maybe a year tops." He snorted and. "Hell, it doesn't matter. We've lost already. He doesn't need to kill Henry, or the twins, or the Duke, or even me. Even if I managed to kill him tomorrow the world is already so utterly fucked that if King Arthur himself showed up again brandishing Excalibur before him, all he could do is watch the world burn."

"America—"

"Has kept it from disappearing into a nuclear fireball, so far," Harry said. "But it's like trying to stop a firestorm by pissing on it."

"What if you could do it all again?" Katie asked after a moment.

"Do what? Lose?" Harry asked scornfully as he pulled away from her, and Katie let him go. "We already looked into time-travel, remember? You go too far outside of your proper place in time and temporal dissonance will kill even before quantum cascade causes your molecules to decoalesce. A couple of hours is safe, a week, even a month or so, is survivable, if you're willing to take the risk of meddling with time. We'd need years."

"That's only if you use conventional time-travel," Katie said.

"What other kind is there?" Harry asked.

"We might have another option, a ritual."

"Oooh, a ritual," Harry said sarcastically. "What a great idea. I had Allie work out the power requirements for long-range, long-time, whatever…time-travel once; I figured I could drop a note to myself or something since temporal dissonance will kill anything living or un-living we send through. How many virgins do I have to kill to gather the power for it?"

"None."

"How else are you going to power it?" he asked, crossing his arms. "It's not exactly like you can hook a magic circle up to the ever-convenient nearest power grid." He glanced at the unlit light fixture in the ceiling. It wasn't unlit because it was day. "Assuming there was a working power grid to hook it up to."

"With a barely-controlled temporal paradox," Katie said.

"I don't think I've seen one of those yet," Harry said. "How would you make one? Destroying time-turners doesn't do it. I destroyed so many in the Department of Mysteries—"

"A prophecy," Katie said.

"A prophecy told you how to invoke a barely-controlled temporal paradox?" Harry asked dubiously. "Go on, pull the other one."

"The prophecy states that you and he are destined to kill the other," Katie said. "To invoke a paradox we simply need for one of you to die, but not at the other's hand."

"I doubt he's going to die of old age," Harry said. "And it's pretty unlikely that I am going to live long enough to die that way. Besides, nobody except Voldemort can kill me, though I suppose I could try dying in an accident."

He frowned, "Would it be accidental if we did it on purpose?"

"Actually, there is one other person than him that can kill you," Katie said. "Or at least Luna thinks so."

"Oh," Harry thought about it for a moment before shrugging. "Well, if Luna thinks so…"

Katie nodded as he moved back to her, and this time it was her turn to lean into him.

"If she's right, if this works…" Harry mused. "Fred would still be alive, and George, and Angelina…"

"And Ginny," Katie cut in.

"Jealous?" Harry asked.

"I knew I'd have to share you with her…memory, before we ever got involved," Katie said.

"I meant that if this worked," Harry said. "Are you jealous of Ginny?"

Katie was silent for a moment. "No," she said finally. "I won't be. I won't remember." She leaned her head away so that he could see her face. "None of us will."

Part One of Four