Daphne nodded and stepped aside, drawing two flasks of pre-brewed potions from a small bag hidden beneath her robes. She'd prepared them herself, I don't know when or where, but they were needed as a sort of magical paint for the runic ritual scheme. Drawing her wand, Daphne gave it a flick, opening the flasks with magic, and with a second flick sent the potions flying out in a thin stream, mixing mid-air and settling in the thinnest of layers across the runes and lines carved into the floor.
"Done," she nodded to me and tucked the empty flasks back into her bag.
"Excellent."
Now it was my turn to take up the wand.
The task, in truth, was simple, yet complicated all the same. I needed to charge every runic circuit with the full range of energy available to me. The phoenix would need to do the same, since somewhat different energies were available to us respectively. Yes, I could draw on the phoenix's dark energy through our bond, which let me employ Dark magic without consequence, but such a transfer remained a transfer all the same — the energy ends up subtly different in the end.
The phoenix beat its wings, perched atop the basilisk's skull, and released its own energy in turn, yet not a single drop of magic strayed beyond the bounds of the runic scheme on the floor — neither mine, nor the phoenix's.
The skeleton began to darken, to spark, the runes flaring green, then blue, then darkening so completely they seemed to swallow the light entirely. The phoenix seemed to sink bodily into the skeleton, vanishing into a black haze that filled every hollow within the bones.
The basilisk's skeleton jerked and curled abruptly in on itself, like a millipede, into a tangled mass of bones shifting slowly like gears. It looked like some manner of machine without beginning or end — no tail visible, no head, only endless ribs, spine, runes, and… the loud crunching and hollow clatter of bones filling the Chamber of Secrets created an oppressive impression.
Letting out a breath, I put away my wand and held out a hand to Daphne, who'd been watching the whole process with interest, even admiration.
"Come on," I drew the girl's attention. "This'll take a good while yet."
"Yes… yes, it will. Let's go to the lake. Did you bring something warmer?"
"Of course, though I can always transfigure something."
"No need. Minimal magical clothing's required there. You know that — you helped design the runes yourself."
We threw on warm coats and hurried out of the Chamber of Secrets.
Lights still burned in Hogwarts' corridors — plenty of time remained before curfew — though the sky outside had all but gone dark in the west by now. Barely any students were about, right up to the entrance hall, where a cluster of fourth-years had gathered, engaged in a mock duel with sparks and their variations. A couple of them had even been posted as lookouts.
We passed easily through the entrance hall and left the castle through the main gates. They genuinely don't close until curfew. Barring emergencies, or the castle going into siege mode.
The mountains of Scotland aren't like a city, with its night-time lights and glow against the sky. Out here, it's dark enough to lose an eye by. And yet the Forbidden Forest has a curious tendency to gladden travellers with a thin night mist, giving off a soft, otherworldly glow, while overhead the sky always stays perfectly clear, barring the canopies of the towering old trees.
We had no need to light Lumos or any other illumination charms, and the path down to the lakeshore, though neither smooth nor even, gave us no real trouble. Daphne took my hand to lead me through the isolating barrier — she was its owner, after all. A step, and…
"Hm…" I couldn't help a sound at the sight of the tall stone arch.
A typical enough arch, made of stone, five metres tall, narrow. It stood in the middle of a massive combination of runic circles. A full moon hung in the sky, flooding the lake's surface and everything around it with its otherworldly light, lending a blue tint to every object.
"…honestly, I'd expected the runes carved onto a two-dimensional arch on the ground," I said thoughtfully, circling the runic ring, studying the arch.
"It was simpler for me to transfer the schemes onto a three-dimensional object," Daphne walked beside me. "In the end, three-dimensional runic schemes are precisely where I excel most. Aside from potions."
"Better than me, even."
"No one can be perfect at everything."
Coming to a stop, I began mentally checking over the resulting runic model — whether everything had been accounted for, whether every condition would be met, and so on, while Daphne simply came up beside me, took my hand, and rested her head on my shoulder.
"I'm tired… honestly. But it's all frightfully interesting," she said quietly.
"You've done an enormous amount of work. I can't even think who else could hold such runic complexes in their head, mentally map them onto a three-dimensional model, and transfigure it accordingly."
"Runes come astonishingly easily to me. Perhaps my Scandinavian ancestors' blood is finally making itself felt?"
The question was rhetorical, clear enough from her tone, though it was genuinely worth wondering about. Transfiguration, fairly closely related in its classical form to how Daphne worked with runes, came to her far worse in comparison to those very same runes.
While a corner of my mind mused over that particular oddity, I'd already finished checking the runic scheme Daphne had created, found no errors, and turned to her.
"Looks like everything's in order. Will you be activating it yourself?"
"Hm?" Daphne looked up at me and smiled. "I can't put out that much magic all at once. It'd take me a good two hours to activate. Better you do it."
"As you like. Then…" I stepped back a couple of paces with Daphne and drew my wand, pointing it at the starting rune in the scheme laid out on the ground. "Shall we?"
The massive scheme, built from a vast multitude of runes etched into the ground, began filling rapidly with magic. A soft white glow spread from rune to rune at great speed, until the entire array was lit. The stone arch seemed to vibrate, and light from the runes began climbing upward from its base until every rune had been activated.
The low hum grew louder, the pebbles on the shore trembled, and the calm surface of the water broke into fine ripples, clearly visible in the moonlight.
A sharp crack, like tearing fabric, sounded before the faintly visible smoky vertical crack appeared in the middle of the arch. It widened almost instantly to fill the whole arch, becoming an almost transparent, murky veil, while the space around us began filling with a haze of the energy of death. Not the kind bound up with torment, torture, forced killing — not the kind that drives one mad — but death as a phenomenon in itself.
The air turned cold. Breath came out as visible vapour with every exhale.
"Chilly," Daphne observed, gazing intently into the veil. "Are you sure we've done everything correctly?"
"Given that last time, on this very shore, we encountered something resembling a 'guide' to death," I said thoughtfully, "and encountered it precisely on Samhain, then we've thinned the boundary correctly. By the way…"
"There's something visible in there," Daphne cut across my words. "Look closer."
And I looked closer. Within that semi-transparent veil, one could indeed make out a white sky studded with black stars, grey earth, countless smoking shapes resembling people. They wandered across fields, endless fields, in which something grew in ranks, white… Asphodel, or some other similar flowers.
These images seemed to overlay reality itself, when viewed through the arch.
"Indeed," I nodded in agreement. "Fields of asphodel."
"You were saying something, before."
"Yes, right. We thinned the boundary. Seems there's something connected to death on the other side. Only it's rather odd, actually…"
There was plenty to think about here. The runic complex we'd built was meant to thin the boundary only to the point of visual perception — not into the dimension of death itself, and certainly not into a place of that sort, some kind of depot for souls, akin to purgatory, but simply into the nearest dimension most closely related to our own. By the laws of creation known to my elf shard, a living, blossoming world, full of every kind of flora and fauna, could not, by definition, have such a dimension as its nearest neighbour. Simply impossible — otherwise the world would have long since become nothing but a wasteland.
And yet nothing would have stopped an extraordinarily powerful wizard, of some transcendent level of strength and skill, from creating just such a layer over a planet, a continent, or at least a single region. To what end? Well, the possible purposes were essentially limitless.
"Honestly, I expected to see something different. This shouldn't be here at all… Unless what we're seeing wasn't created artificially…"
The concentration of death energy spiked abruptly to absurd levels, and the world around us changed in an instant. My eyes stung from the sudden shift in colour. The sky turned white, the stars shone black, every other colour vanished, leaving only shades of grey. And the terrain itself… Fields? The murmur of water behind us…
We spun sharply toward the sound, as though something were crawling along the ground.
"Amusing…" a strange, faceless voice rustled through the air.
Before us lay a river. It seemed infinitely wide, yet narrow at the same time. Across the river, out of that infinity that somehow lay within arm's reach, a bridge of near-black tree roots had grown, and continued growing, while atop the bridge a figure formed itself out of black and grey mist, wrapped in a billowing black shroud.
"And there's the owner of this 'artificiality,'" I stated, or so it seemed to me — my own voice came out just as faceless, just as rustling.
"And why am I not surprised," Daphne spoke in a similarly altered voice, though pitched somewhat higher, "that getting mixed up with you would make life so much more unpredictable."
The shrouded figure finished forming and drifted, in a floating sort of step, to the edge of the bridge, stopping a couple of steps short of the ground. It went still, as though studying us. The sensation was distinctly strange — as though the entire universe had turned its gaze upon you, though not with any particular intensity, more in passing. And that gaze pressed down all the same.
Yet neither I nor Daphne, as far as I could see and feel, showed any fear — consciousness didn't dim, and our thoughts remained crystal clear.
"By all logic," Daphne spoke, "I ought to be frightened."
"There are no emotions in death," the figure rustled.
"Have we died?" Daphne glanced at me, but didn't wait for an answer. "I don't feel as though we have."
"Nor do I," I nodded, not taking my eyes off the shrouded figure. "Let's introduce ourselves. I'm Hector Granger, and this is my beloved, Daphne Greengrass. Hm… I said that plainly enough, though I'd meant to put it rather more generally."
"There is no lying in death," the figure rustled. "Knowing that, is there anything you'd care to ask of Daphne?"
"No," I answered. "I prefer trust."
"And you?" the figure turned its attention to Daphne.
"Likewise."
"You two are amusing. It's been a long while since anyone forced their way through the boundary quite so brazenly," the figure rustled on. "What brought the two of you here, then?"
"Studying a phenomenon — the appearance of a guide to death," I said, plainly, since there was nothing else to say. "Though I'd anticipated an entirely different outcome, and certainly not a direct breach like this. The boundary turned out to be… rather flimsy."
"That's the influence of your star system on the planet's energetic parameters. On this day, the boundary thins," the figure answered indifferently. "On any other day, you wouldn't have achieved anything of the sort with so primitive an energetic construct."
"Your speech is rather articulate," Daphne remarked.
"Precisely to the extent that you're capable of understanding it. If one's interlocutor can't grasp the words, the dialogue loses all meaning."
"You know," I mused for a moment, "I have a great many questions, but given you've declined to answer even one of them, I take it you won't be answering most of the others either, correct?"
"Obviously. Look around you. You're capable of guessing a good deal on your own. In this case, the simplest, most obvious assumption will prove correct."
Looking around, I saw exactly what I'd seen through the arch — endless fields of asphodel, and the smoking shades of people wandering across them. The fields were endless in the most literal sense, and the number of shades just as uncountable. One of the more clearly visible shades nearby, quite thin already, finally crumbled away entirely, turning to black smoke, flickered like an unseen spark, and vanished.
"Hm… well, the arch has gone," I stated the obvious and turned back to the shrouded figure, while Daphne looked around with evident interest. Good thing there wasn't a trace of emotion left in me, only reason. "Will we be able to get back?"
The figure merely twitched a finger, and behind it, on the far side of the bridge — which had suddenly taken on a perfectly comprehensible, tangible size — our arch appeared, through which the familiar, colourful world of the night forest by Hogwarts could be seen, with a good portion of Hogwarts itself visible too.
"Seems we'll have to cross the bridge," Daphne noted the obvious. "And you're standing on it."
The figure merely nodded.
"Any conditions?" I asked.
"No."
"And you'll let us through, whenever we like?"
"Yes."
"What's the catch?"
"There's no catch. But are you certain you want to leave, just like that?"
"For now, all I'm certain of is that I want to leave, in principle."
At my remark, Daphne nodded and added:
"As do I."
"You two are amusing," the figure repeated itself. "The last time the living found their way here, they spouted all manner of nonsense and foolishness, entirely unable to govern their own minds, despite the clarity of thought guaranteed here."
"Perhaps," I found myself, unusually for me, offering up a thought, "clarity brings an ordered mind still greater order, and a chaotic one still greater chaos."
"An interesting thought," the figure nodded.
"You asked whether we wanted to leave 'just like that,'" Daphne spoke up. "What would leaving 'not just like that' involve?"
"Various things, child," the figure swayed, its long, tattered shroud billowing in the air, dementor-like. "Perhaps you'd like a reward for such great mastery of magic, seeing as you managed to arrive here yourselves, rather than through an anomaly, like my past guests?"
"I'll decline, I think," Daphne shook her head. "I don't consider myself to have achieved mastery, even by England's standards. In your eyes, judging by what's already been said, I don't even merit mention."
Nodding at the soundness of Daphne's reasoning, I gave the same answer, if more briefly.
"Same here. I'll decline."
"No interest in gifts? Amusing. Then perhaps strength? Power?" the figure's attention clearly settled on me. "Hm… pointless offering that to you, really."
Daphne shook her head as well.
"I'd rather achieve everything myself, or together with Hector."
"Amusing," the shrouded figure repeated that word rather too often, to my mind. "The two of you could be considered powerful wizards, in the world of the living. And the powerful, in my experience, hunger for still more power."
"There's no such thing as a free lunch," I said, somewhat to my own surprise. Truly, there's no lying, and no emotion, in death. "If you insist on offering gifts, a bargain would suit better."
The figure said nothing, plainly waiting for more.
"For instance," I decided not to keep the figure waiting, "you offer something in exchange for carrying out a request, or a task."
"I have no interest, no purpose, in the world of the living. Everything runs its course, everything has its beginning and its end. And yet your spellcraft has led to certain consequences. Correct them."
The figure was suddenly a single step away from us, its hands outstretched, its fingers, quite ordinary save for their grey colour, touching our foreheads. But neither Daphne nor I so much as had time to react — nor, in the end, could we even move. We felt only cold, freezing straight through.
"An advance."
The figure vanished at once, along with the sensation of cold and the pressure of that alien attention.
"The way's open," I stated the obvious and, taking Daphne's hand, led her forward.
There was no need to lead her, in the end — she walked alongside me under her own power. The bridge, the arch, a step forward…
The ordinary world greeted us with the noise of the forest, and my body registered pain, cold. I couldn't even manage to speak. A moment, the ground rushing up, and darkness.
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