HP: TSH — Chapter 309 - The Final Battle 2

The wind dragon dissolved. Colored glass clattered to the floor in pieces. The Death Eaters in the entrance hall had finally shattered that bat-like thing that kept "biting" at them from every direction, and they let out a collective breath.

Then they quickly realized that Praeris Prince had been holding back before. Destroying her wind dragon didn't weaken her. It gave her a reason to stop being restrained and conjure something far worse.

Praeris raised her wand. In the air above, flower-shaped flames bloomed one after another with a soft FWOOM, red-tipped and green at the base, hurtling down toward the crowd.

"Dodge! It's poisonous!" a Death Eater shouted.

Oh-ho.

Praeris glanced sideways. Sharp eyes on that one.

Or perhaps... she'd beaten this one before?

Either way, it didn't matter. Her magic wasn't what it had been years ago.

The flower-flames twisted mid-fall. One by one they stretched and warped into shapes like Ashwinder spirits, sinuous and searching. They moved as if they had eyes, hunting the Death Eaters the wind dragon had already cut open, and when they found them, the robes caught.

The Death Eaters tried to put the fire out. They couldn't. Once the Gloriosa Flame took hold of cloth, it behaved exactly like an Ashwinder hitting dry wood, it would burn through an entire house in one go. Or rather: an entire person.

The choice before them was tear off the robes and expose themselves, or keep burning. Neither was good. When the flames reached the flesh the wind dragon had already torn, they produced something worse than pain, a deep, buzzing numbness, a creeping itch, and then the dizziness came, and the legs stopped working.

The transfigured Gloriosa Flame left the entrance hall's Death Eaters without the strength to fight back. The DA and the other defenders subdued them one by one.

Satisfied the entrance hall was handled, Praeris pushed through the crowd and ran into the Great Hall.

It was packed. And utterly silent. Every person had pressed back against the walls, leaving the center of the hall empty. Harry and Voldemort stood facing each other across that open space.

"Everyone saw!" Voldemort's voice rang out, contemptuous and sharp. "I killed him with my own hands! That old bird who hid in the dark like a bat! Albus Dumbledore feared me — clung to life like the most despicable coward — and in the end he still died by my hand! His corpse is being devoured by beasts in the Forbidden Forest right now! He is never coming back!"

"You're right," Harry said calmly. "Dumbledore is dead. But you are gravely mistaken. What you defeated was an old man who chose to step forward and bear responsibility."

Harry's voice rose. "Dumbledore had long since lost his full power. He stood before you not because he could win, but because he had to. He knew he would die. He was not afraid of it. And that, is a power you will never understand." A beat. "You think you conquered a formidable opponent? No. You fulfilled the final glory of a great wizard."

"What childish, laughable nonsense." Voldemort's sneer cut through the silence. "You're saying he could have chosen not to die, that he came before me because he wanted to, not because my power left him no choice?"

"You could put it that way."

A voice from within the crowd.

The crowd parted on its own. The young witch standing at the Great Hall's entrance came into view. She looked so composed that she might have been commenting on something entirely unremarkable.

Praeris said, her tone cold and level, "Harry is right. But he left out the most important part. The reason that 'coward' you keep mentioning lived as long as he did, that was me."

Her appearance and her words landed like a stone into still water. For one unguarded moment, every Death Eater in the hall went blank. Voldemort's expression did the same.

"I witnessed all of it," Praeris said, her voice steady and clear. "What Dumbledore did was not clinging to life. It was a tremendous and painful undertaking. He endured every bit of that suffering — endured walking through the world as a wizard in shackles, constrained at every turn — for one reason. In his own words: for the lives of more people."

She turned toward the center of the hall. "Harry. Dumbledore was always at your side. He never left. He intervened in secret, again and again, to protect you and many Muggle-born witches and wizards. Even when you didn't know it was him. Even when doing so meant he had to come to me again and ask for my help."

Harry stared at her. Dumbledore had told him so much, but never this. Never the cost. Never the suffering.

And what about Praeris herself? Keeping a life tethered to the world was no small thing. Moving between Dumbledore and Voldemort, carrying that weight for years, how much had she borne, and never said?

Voldemort's gaze settled on her. It felt like being watched by a snake. Praeris did not flinch.

Voldemort's mouth curved. "So, Praeris. You were Dumbledore's spy all along. This great wizard, manipulated a student who hadn't even graduated into becoming a Death Eater, just to serve his schemes."

"Wrong again," Praeris said simply. "I was never Dumbledore's person. Not from the beginning, not at the end. I was never yours, either. I have wanted to say this for a very long time." A pause, precise and deliberate. "Professor Snape and I are loyal only to ourselves. To the choices we made in our own hearts."

"What made you believe I would be loyal to you at all?" Her voice stayed even. "After you humiliated me. After you oppressed my family. After you killed my mother, you expected loyalty?"

"Your mother?" Voldemort said the word as if encountering something foreign.

"Sylvia," Praeris said. "She was my mother."

The moment Praeris said killing my mother, Winnie's legs gave out. She slumped sideways into Pernell.

Sirius and Lupin caught her between them. And then they heard the name, Sylvia, and went still, staring at Praeris with hollow eyes. Another one of their friends. Gone.

Praeris didn't stop. She had opened her mouth for a reason: to strip Voldemort of the last of his composure.

"You thought you were honoring my talent. Giving me a chance to rise." She let that sit for half a second. "Please. I saw through it ages ago. All of it was lies. The Soul-Coagulation Potion bound you to those fragments of yours, and when the fragments were destroyed, the backlash came for you too."

"The power you took such pride in was defeated by courage and sacrifice.

The wisdom you took such pride in was defeated by love and unbreakable will.

Tom Riddle, strip away your self-appointed titles, strip away the fear hiding under all that hollow ambition, and what is left?" Her voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "A pitiful, utterly destitute wretch."

She'd held those words for over half a year. Saying them aloud felt like setting down something very heavy.

Voldemort lunged toward her in a fury, but Harry stepped between them. That kind-hearted boy was still, even now, trying to make Voldemort repent. Praeris remembered Dumbledore mentioning, once, that Harry had felt sorry for Voldemort.

Fool, Praeris thought.

She stood among the crowd and watched Voldemort die. As easily as any mortal.

Who is more of a fool than whom? she thought.

The hall erupted. Cheers, sobbing, bodies pressing together in relief and triumph. Through all of it, Praeris walked steadily toward Voldemort's body and extended her left hand.

Let the others have their celebration.

Right now, Praeris still had a task. She had to confirm that Voldemort was dead. If he wasn't, she would finish it herself.

Golden specks of light settled over his body, passed through it, and dissolved into the air. Praeris withdrew her hand. There was nothing left to confirm. He was gone, completely and without any possibility of return.

She sensed someone watching and looked up. Harry was being pulled at by the crowd, but he found her through the gaps and lifted his chin in a small, questioning gesture. Confirmed?

She smiled and nodded.

"Praeris! You reckless child!" Winnie flew at her and dropped to her knees, wrapping both arms around her legs and sobbing into them. "How could you, how could you do something so dangerous!"

Ms. Puli pressed her forehead gently against Praeris's cheek, smiling. "Darling. You were extraordinary. Even more than I imagined."

Then came Astoria, Grace, Millicent. Then Madam Pomfrey making her way down from the Astronomy Tower, and Meriel and Evan close behind her, and Professor Snape.

Snape pushed back his sleeve and bared his arm. The scar. The strange expression on his face was not quite a sneer and not quite a smile, but something with no precise name. "It's gone," he said. "More completely than seventeen years ago."

Voldemort's body was moved to another classroom. Professor McGonagall restored the tables and chairs with a few practiced flicks, and the Great Hall filled back in, but not in any orderly way. People clustered together wherever they found the person they wanted to be near.

McGonagall walked to Snape. She looked somewhat awkward. "I am very sorry, Severus. For the things I said when I was accusing you."

Snape kept his face rigid and cold and gave a short nod. "Minerva. It does not matter."

"It does matter." Professor McGonagall held his gaze, her voice steady. "For your reputation, and for the sake of my own conscience."

When Praeris decided to go somewhere, no one could stop her. She slipped out of the arms reaching for her to celebrate, let a Tracking Butterfly settle onto her bracelet, and moved against the current of the crowd. The butterfly led her through the press of bodies until it landed, finally, on a pale hand.

Draco was held between his mother and father. The three of them looked faintly lost, as if none of them were quite sure what to do with this strange new reality. But they held each other tightly all the same.

He saw the golden butterfly resting on his hand. He raised his head slowly.

"Are you injured?" Praeris asked.

"No," Draco said quietly. "I was extraordinarily lucky."

"That's as it should be," Praeris said. "You've always had good luck."

She didn't stay. She left the space to Draco and his family and walked out, through the entrance hall, around the grounds, past the greenhouses, in the direction of the Forbidden Forest.

"Praeris!" Harry's voice carried behind her. "Where are you going?"

"Somewhere quiet," she said without breaking stride. "Don't you find the castle unbearably loud? I don't like noise."

She glanced back. Harry, Hermione, and Ron had followed.

"We want to find Dumbledore," Harry said quietly. "I think that's where you're going too. You can find him."

"You guessed right," Praeris said.

Ron scratched his head. "Praeris, you seem... different from everyone else."

"People are different from one another," Praeris said. "That's nothing unusual."

"He means," Hermione cut in, having understood what Ron was reaching for, "that you don't seem happy. Not the way everyone else is. Praeris, being under Voldemort's command all this time, you must have suffered terribly. We've all been thinking about it."

Being looked at with that kind of concern was not something Praeris was comfortable with. "Not even a tenth of what Professor Snape endured," she said.

"Pain can't be measured that way," Hermione said seriously. "Can it."

Praeris looked at her for a moment. Then she turned and kept walking.

"I just," she said, "feel somewhat desolate."

"Desolate?" Hermione repeated the word carefully.

Praeris looked toward the distant tree line of the Forbidden Forest. "I spent a long time studying Voldemort. His soul, his ambitions, his ideals. And during that research, I came across some interesting stories."

"In the ancient East, there was a monarch of tremendous renown. He conquered kingdom after kingdom and built a vast, unified empire. His name alone was enough to make people afraid. And yet — like Voldemort — he yearned for immortality."

"He didn't succeed," Harry said, certain.

"No." Praeris's voice was quiet. "He commanded the wizards of the East to find an elixir that could grant eternal life, so that his dynasty's rule might last a thousand years, ten thousand years. And yet he died. Some say he died of illness. Others say his own ministers murdered him, and used the stench of fish to cover the smell of his corpse while they carried his body home. His dynasty survived barely more than a decade."

"No matter how powerful a person is in life, death reduces all of it to nothing. Power, glory, dominion, all of it becomes ordinary in the end. The more frantically someone tries to transcend death, the more surely and swiftly death overtakes them. The only thing they leave that lasts is a warning to everyone who comes after."

This was the harshest punishment a tyrant who sought eternal life could receive. What defeated him in the end wasn't a superior army, wasn't a more powerful magic. It was the most ordinary fate of all, the one he had spent his entire life trying to escape.

"Then you," Harry began, something shifting in his expression.

Praeris met his eyes, calm and unwavering. "I will destroy the Soul-Coagulation Potion. I will destroy every piece of my research on the soul. You will supervise me." A brief pause. "Harry. No one has the right to try to control another person's soul. Not even me."

The life of a powerful witch or wizard is a life spent walking on thin ice, always cautious, always in careful negotiation with the power they carry.

When Praeris had first resolved to step into the wizarding world, she had understood this. She had wanted to control her own power more than she had wanted anything else. When she had guided a powerful dark wizard toward his death, that understanding had never left her. She had stayed cold. Stayed careful.

Harry nodded, slow and heavy. "Then please supervise me as well. I'll put the Elder Wand back where it belongs. And I will never go near the knowledge of Horcruxes again."

"I'm glad you've already reached that decision." Praeris parted the edge of the Forbidden Forest, and something softened in her expression, almost a smile. "Then I can tell you something."

"Dumbledore never truly died. But I don't know whether he can wake. This is because of you, Harry, you are the Elder Wand's true master. Voldemort could never wield its real power. And because of that, he couldn't truly kill Dumbledore."

She did not mention the role the Soul-Coagulation Potion had played in keeping Dumbledore alive. She had no desire to make anyone hunger for it. No desire to be the reason another tragedy began.

➤ Next: Extra: Hermione and Krum