Grindelwald watched the archway Harry had disappeared through for a moment longer, then turned back to the old man standing among the smoking craters of the courtyard.
"The last time we stood this close, Arcturus, you still had black hair and you didn't need a cane to stand up," he said. "You've grown old."
Arcturus rested both hands on the head of his cane and looked Grindelwald up and down. "And you look exactly the same as you did that day."
Grindelwald smiled and began to walk a slow half-circle around him, stepping over the molten groove his hellfire had cut through the stones. "I have to applaud you. A boy with no magic to walk through wards that have stopped armies, a distraction loud enough to pull my whole garrison onto the walls, and Albus's little toy in Harry Potter's pocket so that I can't simply leave. It's the best plan anyone has put against me in fifty years." He stopped and faced Arcturus again. "But you must realise it won't work. You've brought old men, schoolchildren and a Ministry that already lost the war into my home, and every one of them will die here."
Arcturus didn't know Harry had managed to trap Grindelwald here an artefact, in fact he didn't know how Harry was alive at all let alone what Dumbledore was doing. But it didn't matter, let the old man plot.
"Perhaps," Arcturus said. "I've buried a great many people because of you, Gellert. Friends I went to school with, men I fought beside, and my niece Dorea, who was the kindest person our family ever produced and who died screaming because of you. I was at every one of those funerals, and at every one of them I promised I would be the one to put you down." He lifted his cane and set the tip back on the stone. "I've had a very long time to plan for today. Death is too easy for someone like you, so I'm not going to give it to you. What I have in mind is far worse."
Grindelwald's smile stayed where it was, but his grip on the Elder Wand shifted up.
Footsteps pounded through the archway on the far side of the courtyard, and Macduff came through it first with his wand already out, followed by Zabini, Carrow and Creedence. Lyra came last, holding a dead guard's wand in place of the one Neville had cut in half, and went straight to Grindelwald's side.
At the same moment, more footsteps came through the gate on the opposite side of the courtyard and Bellatrix burst through it with her wand raised, Andromeda a step behind her and Tonks beside her mother, then James Hawkthorne, Alastor Moody limping as fast as his leg allowed, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Charlie Weasley and Jean Lecoust, all of them bloodied from fighting their way through the outer courtyards.
Both groups stopped with the width of the courtyard between them and every wand came up at once.
Bellatrix's eyes went straight past the acolytes to her grandfather. "Where is he? The whole castle's saying Harry is here!"
"He was here a minute ago," Arcturus said, without taking his eyes off Grindelwald. "He's gone to the dungeons to free the Delacours."
Bellatrix went white, then red. "You told me he was a prisoner!"
"And now he isn't, but he's on his own down there." Arcturus raised his voice so the whole courtyard could hear it. "Kill his disciples, all of them, and then go and help Harry. Leave Grindelwald to me."
Grindelwald didn't look at his acolytes when he answered. "Don't hold back. Not one of them leaves this courtyard."
Bellatrix fired first, a stream of purple light straight at Lyra's chest, and Lyra, who had seen it coming three seconds earlier, was already stepping aside so that it went past her and blew a hole in the wall. Lyra fired back three curses in a line at the exact places Bellatrix would move to. Bellatrix dodged two of them and took the third on a shield that cracked straight down the middle.
Andromeda stepped up beside her sister and fired a stunner at the spot where Lyra was standing while Bellatrix fired a severing curse at the spot where Lyra was going to be, and Lyra had to throw herself flat on the stones to get under both of them. She rolled, came up on one knee and fired at Bellatrix's head, and Bellatrix swatted it into the sky and laughed.
"You've got my family's face, girl," Bellatrix said, advancing across the ground with her wand already moving, "so let's find out if you've got the family talent to go with it."
Macduff drew his wand across his own left forearm, and the arm dropped off at the elbow, hit the ground and swelled into a mountain troll that stood fifteen feet tall with a tree-trunk club already in its fist. He laughed and pointed at Moody and Kingsley. "Squash the cripple first!"
The troll charged and Kingsley fired a Bludgeoning Curse into its knee that made it stumble, and Moody fired a Blasting Curse into the other knee that dropped it face-first onto the flagstones hard enough to crack them, then limped straight past it while it was still getting up, firing a stream of hexes at Macduff that Macduff had to throw himself sideways to avoid.
Macduff came up swearing, cut a line across his own thigh and dropped a second summons, a snarling pack of three wolves that went for Kingsley's legs. Kingsley shot the first one in the air, kicked the second away and let the third bite into his coat while he put a curse through its skull, and every wound he gave them opened up across Macduff's own body as the summons fell apart. Macduff staggered with blood running down his leg and kept grinning.
Aurelius let the black smoke pour out of his hands and over his arms and shoulders until his whole body dissolved into a swirling cloud with a spinning ring of teeth where a face should have been, and it roared across the courtyard at James.
James slammed his hand onto the ground and a wall of ice rose up in front of him, and the cloud smashed straight through it but kept coming, so James stepped back onto the footprint he'd marked when he first came through the gate and vanished, reappearing while the cloud tore through the space he'd been standing in. He fired a Reducto into its side, which went straight through the smoke without hitting anything solid, then he ran along the wall and marked his footprints as he went.
"What are we going to do there's no body to hit!" Jean shouted across the courtyard.
"Then we find something!" James shouted back, and teleported again as the cloud came round for him.
Carrow went for Tonks and Charlie. She fired chains of curses from both hands at once, one from her wand and one wandlessly from her empty palm, the spells coming from two directions faster than either of them could track, and Charlie took a slicing hex across the ribs before he got his shield up.
Tonks grew a foot taller and twice as broad in the space of a stride, her muscles swelling under her robes, and ran straight through three of Carrow's curses with her arms crossed over her face having grown tough scales over them, then threw a punch that Carrow had to throw herself sideways from and the punch went into the courtyard wall and brought a section of it down. Charlie spat on both palms, slapped them together and pointed his wand at the ground under Carrow's feet, and her boots stuck fast to the ground as if they'd been glued there.
"Now, Tonks!"
Tonks swung again, but Carrow ripped one foot out of her boot and threw herself backwards with a blasting curse that caught Tonks in the chest and knocked her ten feet back into a pillar.
Zabini went for Jean Lecoust, the two of them trading curses across a crater in the middle of the courtyard, Jean firing everything he had and Zabini batting it all aside with small flicks while she walked round the edge of the crater toward him. Jean had fought two years of this war and he knew exactly when he was outmatched, so he stopped trying to hit her and started blowing up the ground in front of her instead, forcing her to watch her environment instead of focusing on him.
In the middle of all of it, with curses flying past them in every direction and the ground shaking under their feet, Arcturus and Grindelwald stood ten yards apart and did not move.
A stray blasting curse from one of the acolytes flew straight at the side of Arcturus's head, but Arcturus lifted his cane an inch and let it hit the wood, and the curse burst against the cane without so much as scratching it. A curse from Bellatrix went wide and straight at Grindelwald's back, and a flicker of blue flame ate it before it reached his robes.
"Your people are going to die," Grindelwald said.
"As long as they take yours with them it'll be a fine trade," Arcturus said, and tightened his grip on his cane.
Grindelwald fired first, a Bone-Breaking Curse aimed at the centre of Arcturus's chest, and Arcturus turned it aside with the flat of his cane so that it struck a pillar behind him and split it down the middle. He answered with a Piercing Curse at Grindelwald's throat, and Grindelwald swept it away with the Elder Wand without looking at it.
Then Grindelwald flicked the wand three times in quick succession and sent a Blood-Boiling Curse, an Implosion Curse and a Gouging Curse across the gap on three separate lines. Arcturus slid his left foot back half a step so that the Implosion Curse passed an inch in front of his chest, caught the Blood-Boiling Curse on the head of his cane, and cut the Gouging Curse in half with a Severing Charm.
"Oppugno," Arcturus said, and the rubble of the split pillar rose off the ground behind Grindelwald and flew at the back of his skull in a storm of jagged stone. Grindelwald raised his free hand and every stone stopped a foot from his head, sharpened into a steel spike and reversed, flying back across the courtyard at Arcturus. Arcturus put up a Shield Charm and let them bounce off before he let the shield fall.
"Transfiguration," Arcturus said. "Here I thought that was Albus's speciality."
"I've had a great deal of time to practice." Grindelwald brought the Elder Wand down in a diagonal. "Lingua Putrescat!"
A thin grey beam shot across the courtyard at Arcturus's mouth, and Arcturus snapped his cane up in front of his face and let the curse strike the wood, where it hissed and died. He lowered the cane and looked at Grindelwald over the top of it.
"The Tongue-Rotting Curse," he said. "That's from the library at Grimmauld Place."
"Indeed it is... a rather foul curse is it not." Grindelwald fired again, "Ossa Cava," a pale yellow jet that would have hollowed out every bone it touched, and when Arcturus stepped aside from it Grindelwald followed it with "Sanguis Nigra," which would have turned his blood to tar in his veins, and then "Pellis Vermium," which would have filled his skin with flesh-eating grubs, each curse aimed a little ahead of where Arcturus was moving.
Arcturus dodged the first, shielded the second and cut the third out of the air so that the two halves burned black holes in the stone. "I spent a very pleasant summer in that library many years ago. Your father invited me as a guest, and I copied a great deal of what was written. Your Ministry would frown on almost everything I found there," Grindelwald commented.
"The Ministry is full of cowards who are afraid of their own shadows," Arcturus said, and twisted his wand. "Tenebris Vorago."
The same black torrent he'd turned on the castle's shield roared out of his wand at a fraction of the size, and Grindelwald met it with a jet of white fire, the two spells locking in the middle of the courtyard and grinding against each other.
"On that, we agree," Grindelwald said.
Arcturus broke the clash first, sweeping his wand to the side so the darkness curved away and tore a trench through the ground on Grindelwald's left, and Grindelwald let his fire go at the same moment and sent it after Arcturus as a long whip of flame. Arcturus stabbed his wand at the ground in front of him and the stones tore up out of the earth and stood on end in a wall that took the whip and blackened. The next second the wall blew apart as Grindelwald put a Bombarda Maxima through the middle of it, and Arcturus was thrown back and landed on one knee with his cane planted in the ground.
"I wonder... do you still say it?" Grindelwald asked, walking forward through the smoke. "That little family motto. The one stitched above every door in that dreary house."
Arcturus pushed himself back to his feet. "Toujours pur."
"Always pure. Always unchanged. Always dying, it seems." Grindelwald spun the Elder Wand in his fingers. "Anguis Nigrae Flammae."
Ten serpents of black fire burst out of the tip of the wand, each as thick as a man's arm, and hit the ground already moving, fanning out into a circle around Arcturus with their jaws open. Arcturus drove the tip of his cane into the ground and cast "Glacius Maxima," and a sheet of hard white frost ran out across the flagstones in a ring, freezing all ten serpents in mid-strike and snuffing out their fire. He swept his wand in a circle and transfigured the frozen serpents into ten spears of black iron, then flicked them back at Grindelwald together.
Grindelwald didn't move. "Protego Diabolica."
A ring of blue fire rose up around him and the iron spears melted into droplets as they crossed it, spattering on the stones. He stepped out of the ring and fired a Killing Curse without pausing, the green light crossing the courtyard straight at Arcturus's heart, and Arcturus got the head of his cane in front of it and the curse burst against the wood and the cane didn't so much as crack.
Grindelwald's eyes narrowed at the cane. "Quite the remarkable cane you have there."
"As the house was built, so it stands," Arcturus said, and fired back.
For the next minute they exchanged spells so quickly that the space between them was never empty. Grindelwald cast Confringo and Arcturus answered with a jet of freezing water at the pressure of a waterfall that smothered the explosion in steam and punched through the far side of it at Grindelwald's head.
Grindelwald fired an Entrail-Expelling Curse through the steam, and Arcturus dropped under it and fired a Blasting Curse at the ground beneath Grindelwald's feet that threw him backward off his feet. Grindelwald turned the fall into a roll and came up firing a Piercing Curse, and Arcturus took it on a Shield Charm that cracked and broke, the curse cutting a line through his sleeve and across the muscle of his upper arm.
Grindelwald conjured a flock of black ravens with steel beaks and sent them diving, and Arcturus burned them out of the air with a single sweep of Fiendfyre that he snuffed out a moment later, then transfigured the falling ash into a cloud of needles and drove it across the courtyard with a gale from his wand. Grindelwald sealed himself inside a sphere of hardened air that the needles rattled off, burst the sphere outward to throw the needles back at Arcturus, and followed them with another Bone-Breaking Curse. Arcturus dodged the needles and took the curse on his cane, but the force of it spun him half round, and the Bludgeoning Curse Grindelwald sent after it caught him full in the ribs and threw him into the base of the fountain.
He lay against the stone for a second with his hand pressed to his chest and his breath coming short. Then he pushed himself up.
Grindelwald watched him do it. "You were always a talented duellist, Arcturus. But talent isn't enough anymore, is it? You're slower than you were, and I'm a great deal stronger. You know how this ends."
"I do," Arcturus said.
Grindelwald's next spell came at him, a Severing Curse aimed at his throat, but instead of blocking it Arcturus reached out and let the tip of his wand touch it.
"Innate Technique: Toujours Pur."
The curse stopped dead in the air a foot from his neck and stayed there, a thin crescent of white light hanging perfectly still over the ruined flagstones.
*Toujours Pur allows Arcturus to fix anything he touches in its current state. Once fixed, it cannot be broken, moved, altered or undone by any force until he chooses to release it. Every object he holds fixed draws a constant cost from his magic, and the stronger the thing he fixes, the greater the cost. Living beings with magic resist it with their own, so he can fix only small parts of them, and only with great effort.*
Grindelwald stopped too and looked at the frozen curse for a moment, then at Arcturus, and a smile spread across his face. "Oh, how splendid," he said. "I had almost forgotten about that nasty little technique of yours."
He stepped round the frozen curse and left it hanging behind him as he advanced. Grindelwald fired a Blasting Curse but Arcturus touched it with his cane and it stopped as well. Grindelwald fired two more, and Arcturus stopped the first with his wand and ducked the second, which blew a crater out of the courtyard floor behind him.
"Toujours Pur Technique Extension: Still Life," he said. "Anything you send at me and I touch stays where I leave it. The spell keeps all its power and all its direction. It simply waits."
Grindelwald looked at the two hanging spells. "Why tell me?"
"Don't pretend you don't already know the rule about disclosure." Arcturus reached into his coat and pulled out a folded sheet of parchment, snapping it open between two fingers.
"Toujours Pur Technique Extension: Heirloom."
The parchment went rigid, its edge fixed so hard and so fine that no steel would ever match it, and he used his wand and threw it. It crossed the courtyard spinning. Grindelwald tilted his head so it passed his cheek, but a thin cut opened across his cheekbone, and the parchment carried on into the wall behind him and sank into the stone up to its middle.
Blue fire touched the cut and closed it.
Arcturus drew another sheet and threw it, then another, then a handful of Galleons from his pocket that he fixed as they left his hand so that they flew like knives. Grindelwald tried to burn the Galleons out of the air and found he couldn't, because they wouldn't change their state, and had to throw himself sideways out of their path. They struck the wall where he had been standing and punched straight through it.
"Toujours Pur Technique Extension: Perpetual," Arcturus said, and flicked the last coin with his thumb, fixing not its form but its momentum as it left his hand. Grindelwald threw a Shield Charm in front of it, but the coin clashed with it and eventually went through the shield without slowing, through the edge of his robes and on through two walls behind him before it disappeared into the courtyard beyond. A thread of blood ran down Grindelwald's side where it had gone through him but blue fire closed that wound too.
"You always did find a use for anything," Grindelwald said, and thrust the Elder Wand forward. "Fiendfyre."
The cursed fire roared out of the wand in the shape of a chimaera, lion's head and goat's body and a snake for a tail, and came across the courtyard at Arcturus with its jaws open. Arcturus planted his feet, let the chimaera come until its heat was scorching his face, and put the tip of his wand against the roof of its open mouth.
The chimaera stopped in mid-leap with its jaws wide around the end of Arcturus's wand, every lick of fire along its body frozen in place and the heat gone out of it. Arcturus stepped round it and left it standing in the middle of the courtyard.
"No flame shall warm you," he said.
Grindelwald laughed. "You're going to fill my courtyard with ornaments."
"I've always liked a well-furnished room," Arcturus said.
There were five of them now, spells and fire hanging motionless at the places Arcturus had stopped them, and Grindelwald's eyes flicked across each one as he moved, noting where they were and stepping round them. He fired a Severing Curse at Arcturus's legs, and when Arcturus stepped over it Grindelwald flicked his wand at the ground and the stone under Arcturus's feet turned to boiling tar. Arcturus sank to his ankles in it and Grindelwald fired a Killing Curse straight at his chest. Arcturus couldn't pull his feet free, so he fixed the air in front of his chest in a flat pane, and the Killing Curse struck the pane and burst. Then he fixed a second pane beside the first at knee height, dragged himself up out of the tar onto it, and stepped onto a third he fixed higher still, climbing out of the pit on plates of solid air.
"Toujours Pur Technique Extension: Glass House," he said, stepping down onto the ground.
Grindelwald clapped slowly. "Look at you. You can't even step out of a puddle anymore without building yourself a staircase. How old are you now, Arcturus? A hundred? More?"
"Old enough to outlive my loved ones and young enough to kill you."
"And yet here you are, wheezing like a winded horse. I remember you as quick dullest." Grindelwald brought the Elder Wand round in a wide arc. "Expulso Maxima!"
The whole courtyard floor between them burst upward in a wave of broken stone that came at Arcturus shoulder-high, and Arcturus didn't have time to move. He put his wand in front of him and the wave broke around it, but one slab caught him across the side of the head and knocked him over, and before he could get up Grindelwald fired a Bone-Shattering Curse into his chest.
Arcturus's ribs broke with a crack that carried across the courtyard, and on the far side of it Andromeda screamed his name in the middle of her own duel.
Arcturus lay on his back and while he should've been experiencing a shattered ribcage and likely several other ruptured organs. He was fine.
*Toujours Pur Technique Extension: The Portrait*
This technique allowed him to freeze parts of his body to their current states and he had done so before the battle for his most vulnerable areas. He climbed to his feet, straightened his coat and looked at Grindelwald as though nothing had happened.
Grindelwald's smile went away for a moment. "The Portrait. I'd forgotten that one too."
"It isn't as fancy as your healing but it gets the job done," Arcturus said.
"Then I'll simply break you again."
Grindelwald sent a torrent of fire at him, and Arcturus met it with a blast of freezing water from his wand and fixed the leading edge of the ice where the two met, so that the fire hammered against a wall of ice that couldn't melt while he moved round it. He touched a broken piece of stone with his cane as he passed it, fixed its momentum and kicked it. The stone flew at Grindelwald and wouldn't slow, and Grindelwald had to roll under it. As he rolled Arcturus fired a Severing Curse that opened a long cut across the back of his wand hand, then crossed the last of the distance faster than Grindelwald expected and touched the cut with the tip of his cane.
"Toujours Pur Technique Extension: Cicatrice."
Blue fire poured out of the wound and did nothing. The cut stayed open, blood running freely down the back of Grindelwald's hand and over the Elder Wand. He stared at it. More blue fire rolled over the wound and it still didn't close.
"No death shall free you," Arcturus said, "and no flame will close that. Not while I'm breathing."
For the first time in the fight, Grindelwald took a step backward.
Arcturus pressed forward, and now he was the one firing faster. He pressed the tip of his cane to the stones under Grindelwald's feet. "Magic Technique Reversal: Blasted from the Tapestry." The stones lost their form and crumbled into loose sand, dropping Grindelwald to his knees. Arcturus fired a Gouging Curse at his face and Grindelwald barely turned it away. The next one, a Flesh-Stripping Curse, hit him in the left arm and peeled the skin and muscle off it from elbow to wrist.
Grindelwald screamed, but blue fire washed over the arm and rebuilt it in a few seconds. Arcturus fired again and hit the same arm with a curse that turned the blood inside it to acid, and while Grindelwald's attention was on healing it Arcturus touched the cut on his wand hand again to make sure it stayed open.
Grindelwald looked at the cut, still bleeding and still refusing to close. Then he looked at the arm Arcturus kept hitting.
He raised the Elder Wand and cut his own left arm off at the elbow.
It dropped to the ground at his feet, and he reached into his robes with his bleeding wand hand and closed his fingers round something in his pocket. Red sparks crawled out of his clothing, over his shoulder and down to the stump, and a new arm grew out of it, bone first and muscle after and skin closing over the top, until he flexed the new fingers in front of his face. The red sparks moved to his wand hand next, and the fixed cut split wider and then burned away entirely along with the skin around it, and new skin grew back where the fixed wound had been, with nothing left for Arcturus's technique to hold.
"You can fix a wound in place," Grindelwald said, breathing hard. "You can't fix one that no longer exists."
Arcturus looked at the red sparks still crawling along Grindelwald's sleeve, and his grip tightened on his cane.
The fight became so chaotic it started to spread outward.
A Blasting Curse from Grindelwald that Arcturus dodged carried on and hit the pillar Tonks had crashed into earlier and brought it down, and Tonks and Charlie had to throw themselves clear, while Carrow took the chance to put a curse into Charlie's shoulder. A lash of Fiendfyre that Arcturus deflected blew across the back of the troll Macduff had summoned and set it alight, and Macduff howled as the burns opened on his own body. The shockwave from one of their clashes threw Bellatrix and Lyra apart into the rubble, and James had to teleport twice to escape a wall that one of Arcturus's Perpetual stones brought down.
Five of Grindelwald's soldiers came through the eastern archway at a run, saw their master fighting an old man and decided to help. They opened fire on Arcturus from the side, five Killing Curses at once.
Arcturus didn't turn his head. He touched the first curse with his wand, the second with his cane as it passed his shoulder, and stepped into the third, and all three stopped in the air around him. He dodged the fourth and took the fifth on his cann. Then he released the three he'd frozen, and they carried on along the lines they'd been flying, which by now pointed straight back at the archway.
"Stay out of this," Grindelwald snapped at their backs, and turned back to Arcturus.
Arcturus had eleven frozen spells hanging around the courtyard now, and Grindelwald had long since stopped paying attention to them, stepping round them the way a man steps round furniture. Arcturus tugged the glove off his left hand with his teeth, let it drop onto the ground, and pressed his bare palm against his chest for a moment, feeling his heart beating under it.
Then he raised his wand and cane together.
"Simple Domain: The Drawing Room."
A circle fifteen feet across spread out around him on the flagstones, its edge marked by a line of dust, and Grindelwald's next spell, a lance of hellfire, reached the edge of it and stopped dead in the air.
*A Simple Domain is a barrier technique that neutralises the sure-hit effect of an enemy's Domain Expansion. Arcturus's Simple Domain does more. Within the circle of The Drawing Room, everything counts as touched by him. Every spell, every stone and every breath of air inside it can be fixed at his will without contact. It cannot be moved while it stands, and the cost of holding it grows with every second.*
Everything inside that circle was now within his reach, and he used all of it. When Grindelwald fired a Killing Curse, Arcturus fixed a pane of air across its path and the curse burst against it. When Grindelwald conjured a wave of fire around the edge of the circle, Arcturus fixed its leading edge and the rest of it piled up behind the frozen flames with nowhere to go. When Grindelwald tried to transfigure the ground under the circle, Arcturus had already fixed the ground, and they refused to change. Every spell that entered the circle stopped, and Arcturus left them hanging there, and when he had enough he released them all at once back at Grindelwald, who had to throw himself across the courtyard to escape the barrage.
"It's like you're making me dance," Grindelwald said, landing in a crouch.
"You always liked dancing didn't you."
Grindelwald came back at him faster, circling the edge of The Drawing Room and firing curses from every angle, and for the first time the fight was even. Grindelwald could not get a spell through the circle, and Arcturus could not get close enough to touch him while Grindelwald stayed outside it. They went round and round each other in the middle of the wrecked courtyard, spells piling up in the air around Arcturus and then flying back out in volleys, while the acolytes and the British and French fought through the smoke around them.
"It won't last," Grindelwald said. "You're an old man and you're burning through your magic like kindling. How long can you hold that circle, Arcturus? Another minute? Two? Then it falls, and so do you The Black name ends with you. There's no one left to carry it who deserves it."
"As the name was written, so it remains."
"There's nothing left to remain. Look at them, a mad witch, a blood traitor and a child. Your house is finished, and so is the world it was built for." Grindelwald spread his arms wide. "When I'm done there will be a new spring for our kind. The old order will burn, and something better will grow in its ashes."
"No spring shall come," Arcturus said, and his knee buckled.
He dropped to one knee in the middle of his circle and The Drawing Room flickered. The line of dust on the ground broke in two places, and half the frozen spells inside it trembled. Arcturus pressed his hand to his chest and his breath came out ragged.
Grindelwald saw it and moved.
He knew better than to fire a spell that would only stop at the circle's edge, so he crossed the broken line on foot, fast, into the circle, and brought the Elder Wand down toward the top of Arcturus's head at point-blank range with a Killing Curse already forming green at the tip.
"Toujours Pur Technique Extension: The Returned Curse."
Arcturus released every frozen spell in the courtyard at the same moment.
It wasn't only the ones inside the circle. The Severing Curse he had stopped at the very start of the fight, the Blasting Curse above the fountain, the chimaera of Fiendfyre, the Piercing Curse, all eleven spells that Grindelwald had spent the last ten minutes stepping round came back to life together and flew along their original lines. Every one of them had been fired at Arcturus from somewhere in the courtyard, and every one of them now converged on the spot where Arcturus knelt and on the man standing over him.
Grindelwald understood it an instant too late. He abandoned the Killing Curse and threw up Protego Diabolica, the ring of blue fire rising around both of them, and the eleven spells struck the ring from every direction at once. Holding it took all of his attention, and for that one instant he stood completely still.
Arcturus fixed the air around Grindelwald's wand arm, then around his legs, then fixed the ring of blue fire itself so that it could neither fall nor move. He came up off his knee, never as spent as he had let himself look, and put his bare left hand flat against the side of Grindelwald's face.
Grindelwald's eyes went wide.
"Maximum Technique: The Mausoleum of the Noble House."
Grindelwald stopped.
It wasn't like freezing a spell. The colour stayed in his skin and his eyes stayed open and fixed on Arcturus's face, but nothing about him moved. His chest didn't rise, the blood on his hand didn't run. The ring of blue fire around them stood frozen in the air in the shape of flames. Even the loose threads at the hem of his robes, lifted by the wind a moment earlier, hung motionless.
*The Maximum Technique of Toujours Pur fixes the whole of a living being at once: body, blood, magic, technique and breath, everything except the mind. It requires bare contact and the complete incantation, and it releases every other object Arcturus is holding fixed in the same instant.*
Arcturus took his hand away from Grindelwald's face and stepped out of the ring.
Across the courtyard every duel faltered. Macduff lowered his wand and stared. Zabini's mouth fell open. Carrow stopped with a curse half spoken. Aurelius's cloud of smoke halted in mid-rush and drew back into the shape of a man.
"My lord," Lyra said.
She shoved herself up out of the rubble where she had fallen and ran straight for Grindelwald. Bellatrix was faster, stepping into her path and firing twice. The first Bone-Breaking Curse took Lyra in the left knee and the second in the right forearm, and Lyra went down screaming with her borrowed wand skittering across the stones. Bellatrix walked two steps closer, raised her wand and hit her with a Bludgeoning Hex that lifted her off the ground and threw her across the courtyard into the far wall, where she slid down and stayed.
Arcturus didn't watch any of it. He was looking at Grindelwald.
"You spent a hundred years so sure of your immortality," he said. "You were so sure you would never lie in the ground beside the people you put there. Congratulations, Gellert. You never will. I left you your mind so that you could be here for every second of it. You'll stand in this courtyard while your army rots and your castle falls down around you. The grass will grow up through these stones and over your feet, the snow will bury you every winter and melt off you every spring, and you'll be awake for all of it, forever."
He tilted his head slightly.
"You heard every line, you know," he said.
"Toujours pur.
As the house was built,
As the name was written,
No flame shall warm you,
no death shall free you,
and no spring shall come."
"I spoke the entire incantation to your face one line at a time, and you gave me the opening for every one of them. You always did like the sound of your own voice."
He turned his back on Grindelwald.
"Slaughter them," he said to the courtyard. "Every one of his followers. None of them leaves."
Bellatrix grinned and raised her wand, and across the courtyard every duel broke out again at once.
Before the first curse had crossed the courtyard, a red spark jumped off Grindelwald's sleeve.
Then another, then a dozen, crawling out of his robe pocket and over his chest and down his arms, and wherever they touched him thin white fractures opened across the surface of his skin and clothes. The frozen blue flames of the ring cracked along with him. Arcturus spun round and saw it, and his face went grey.
The Stone had been running when he fixed Grindelwald. Grindelwald had been drawing on it to heal his hand, and the Maximum Technique had frozen him in the middle of that channel. The Stone wasn't part of Grindelwald and it hadn't been fixed, so it had kept pouring power into a body that couldn't use it, and the power had nowhere to go.
The fractures spread across Grindelwald's face. The red sparks became a storm. The stones under his feet began to change by themselves, turning to gold and back to stone and back to gold, and the air around him began to shake.
Arcturus raised his wand and pressed it to Grindelwald's chest to reinforce the technique.
The Mausoleum held for half a second longer.
Then it broke.
It shattered off Grindelwald in a blast of red light that threw Arcturus off his feet and across the courtyard. He hit the fountain hard enough to crack its basin, slid down it and landed on the ground. He tried to get up but he couldn't. He pressed his bare hand to his chest, and his heart, which his technique had held for ten years and which the Maximum Technique had released along with everything else he had been holding
Grindelwald stood in the middle of the courtyard with red sparks pouring off him in sheets.
He looked down at his own hands.
Then he started to laugh.
He laughed until he had to bend over with his hands on his knees and his hair hanging in his face, the red sparks still cascading off his shoulders, and every fighter in the courtyard stopped to stare at him.
"Ohhhh Arcturus," he said, straightening up and wiping his eyes. "You're only the second wizard in my whole life who has ever come close to beating me. Do you understand what you nearly did to me?" He laughed again. "I have spent a century running from death, and you found the one thing even worse than it. You'd have sealed me inside my own body and left me there awake forever, and for a man like me there is nothing on this earth more dangerous than a technique like that."
He stopped laughing, and his face went still.
"I've been playing with you," he said. "I'm done playing now."
He lifted the Elder Wand above his head, and the red sparks around him turned deep black-red and began to climb the wand.
"Every city ends in fire.
Every age ends in ash.
Burn, and be made clean.
Magic Technique Reversal: Hellfire Tide."
Fire came out of the wand in every direction at once, a wall of black-red flame that rolled outward across the courtyard as high as the battlements and melted everything in its path. Bellatrix threw up a Shield Charm and Andromeda added hers behind it, and the fire slammed into both and drove them back across the stones.
Moody and Kingsley shielded together. James, Tonks and Charlie all threw up a shield together but they weren't as strong as the others so they struggled. Grindelwald's own people shielded too, Zabini and Carrow and Macduff and Aurelius throwing up everything they had, and a dozen of his ordinary soldiers who came through the arches too late to raise a shield were caught in the open and burned to ash where they stood.
The fire didn't touch Grindelwald. It didn't touch the space around Arcturus either, because Grindelwald held it back from there. He walked through his own flames toward the fountain, the fire parting around him, and stopped over Arcturus, who lay against the cracked basin with his hand on his chest.
"It's time to say goodbye to the Head of the House of Black," Grindelwald said, and pointed the Elder Wand at his heart.
"NO!" Bellatrix screamed.
"Grandfather!" Andromeda screamed with her.
They both threw themselves at the wall of fire, Bellatrix pouring curse after curse into it to blast a way through and Andromeda casting a torrent of water with both hands, and the flames threw them back. Bellatrix got up and ran at it again, and it threw her back again harder.
Green light began to gather at the tip of the Elder Wand.
That was when a snowflake landed on the fire and didn't melt.
A second one landed beside it, then a hundred more, then thousands, falling out of the sky over Nurmengard where there had been no cloud a moment before, and wherever they landed on the Hellfire the flames went white and cold and stopped moving. Grindelwald looked up.
An old man in plum-coloured robes was descending out of the sky over the courtyard, standing on nothing, one hand held palm down toward the fire and the other holding his wand across his chest, his long silver beard blowing in the wind.
"Glass, turn over.
Show me the winter
that stands behind this fire.
"Innate Technique: Through the Looking Glass."
The whole courtyard shimmered, and for a moment it looked like two courtyards laid over each other, one full of fire and one full of snow. Then only the snowy one was left. Every flame of the Hellfire Tide, from the walls to the battlements to the edges of the shields that had been holding it back, was now snow, falling over the ruined stones and settling on the shoulders of everyone standing in them.
Albus Dumbledore touched down in the middle of the courtyard between Grindelwald and the fountain, brushed a few flakes off his beard and looked around at all of them.
"I'm terribly sorry I'm late, everyone," he said. "The Alps are very large, and nobody can Apparate anywhere near this castle at the moment. Something of mine is responsible for that, I'm afraid, so I really have only myself to blame."
Macduff was the first to move. He roared, slashed his wand across his own leg and began to summon something enormous out of the blood, and Zabini, Carrow and Aurelius came at Dumbledore with him from four sides at once, Carrow firing Killing Curses and Aurelius dissolving into his cloud and rushing forward.
Every one of them was standing in the snow Dumbledore had made, and every one of them was covered in it, on their shoulders and hair and robes and boots. Snow had fallen straight through the middle of Aurelius's cloud and was drifting inside it.
"Glacius," Dumbledore said.
It was a spell first-years learned.
Every flake of his snow that had settled on one of Grindelwald's people froze solid and grew. The snow on their boots froze them to the ground, and the ice climbed up their legs. The snow on their shoulders froze their arms to their sides. Macduff's summons froze before it had finished forming, and Macduff with it.
Carrow's hands froze into blocks of ice mid-curse. The snow inside Aurelius's cloud froze from within, and his smoke body became a statue of grey ice in the shape of the monster, unable to move or reform. In the space of a breath the four acolytes were standing in columns of ice that reached their chins none of them able to move a finger.
Dumbledore slid his wand back into his sleeve and turned round to face Gellert Grindelwald.
For a long moment neither of them spoke. Snow kept falling between them and settling on Grindelwald's shoulders and in his hair. Dumbledore looked at the face he had known since he was eighteen, which hadn't aged a day, and Grindelwald looked at the old man with the long white beard who had once run beside him through the fields of Godric's Hollow.
"Albus," Grindelwald said.
"Gellert."
"I had hoped you wouldn't come."
"You didn't leave me much choice."
"No," Grindelwald said. "I suppose I didn't."
He was quiet a moment longer, looking at Dumbledore, and then he laughed, a short surprised laugh he tried to hold back and couldn't.
"What's funny?" Dumbledore asked.
"My protégée gave me a prophecy some months ago," Grindelwald said. "She thought I would be defeated by Harry Potter. Eyes of six, with blue so bright, shall pierce through lies and end the night. I have spent months planning around that boy." He shook his head. "But there was more to it. The Phoenix bound in chains of old shall hide its flame, though wings are bold. Yet love's old scar shall make the kill. It is the flame that ends it all." He looked at the snow on Dumbledore's shoulders and then up at the sky Dumbledore had come down out of. "I'm starting to think it was never really about the boy. I think it was about you."
"You know how dangerous prophecies can be," Dumbledore said.
"I do," Grindelwald said. He glanced at the column of ice holding Lyra, who was staring at him with tears freezing on her face, and something in his expression shifted. "I told her not to chase it. I told her that when you try too hard to escape a prophecy you run straight into it. And then I let her talk me into sending Tom Riddle after the boy to get round it. I've been rather foolish, Albus."
"You were always at your most foolish when you were frightened."
"And you were always at your most dangerous when you are grieving." Grindelwald turned the Elder Wand over in his fingers. "You're look to be very sad today my friend."
"I am," Dumbledore said. "Louis Delacour was a good man and so were a great many of the people you've killed."
"Is that why you're here? For the dead?"
"I'm here for the living as there are a great many of them in this castle who don't need to join the others." Dumbledore turned his head without taking his eyes off Grindelwald. "Bellatrix, Andromeda, take your grandfather somewhere safe. Andromeda, his heart is failing. Do everything you can."
Andromeda was already running through the snow to the fountain, dropping to her knees beside Arcturus with her wand out and her hands on his chest. Bellatrix hesitated, her wand still pointed at Grindelwald.
"Harry's in the dungeons," Dumbledore said, "Take whoever can still fight and go to him. Nymphadora, you too. All of you. This courtyard is about to become a very bad place to be."
Bellatrix looked from Dumbledore to Grindelwald and back, then lowered her wand and went to help Andromeda lift Arcturus between them. His eyes were half open, and as they lifted him he looked past them at Grindelwald and his lips moved but no sound came out.
Moody took Tonks by the arm and pulled her toward the eastern archway, and Kingsley, Charlie and Jean followed, walking backward with their wands still raised. James was the last to go. He looked at the two old men standing in the snow for a long moment before he teleported to a footprint he had marked beside the archway and was gone.
Grindelwald watched them leave and did nothing to stop them.
"You're letting them go," Dumbledore said.
"None of them matter now." Grindelwald brushed the snow off his sleeve. "Only you ever did. You know that."
"I know."
The courtyard was empty now except for the two of them, the columns of ice holding the acolytes along the far wall, and the snow still falling over the ruined flagstones. Somewhere far below them in the dungeons something exploded, and on the outer walls the battle went on, but in the courtyard there was only the wind.
Grindelwald raised the Elder Wand.
Dumbledore drew his own.
(AN: Been a while since I did anything with this story. I do like it just think the beginning is a bit shit. Anyway thought I'd just finish the arc and maybe see how I'm feeling. Anyway hope you enjoy.)
Support if ya want.
Patreon /captainalfie78works