“Ah, but this is no longer my world, James,” the young man replied breezily. “With Judith’s help, we can create an all new world.
One crafted in our own image. We have the key. And the key is our very own Petra Morganstern. She will open the way for us. And then we will throw away the key forever. No backsies.” He tittered.
James retreated another step. He chilled under the force of Odin-Vann’s madness, and yet a tiny surge of hope fanned out in his veins. Petra was still alive. If only he could find her…
“Relashio!” he shouted, stabbing his wand up again and firing with lightning speed.
Odin-Vann’s arm jerked up from the shoulder, following the force of his wand, and a bolt of green flashed, snuffing James’ spell in mid-air. He was laughing again, moving steadily closer.
“Petrificus Totalis!” James cried, putting all of the force he could muster into the spell. “Levicorpus! Incarcerous! Convulsis!”
Each spell exploded and obliterated bare inches from his wand as Odin-Vann’s jerked in his upraised hand, firing the prescribed counter-jinxes of its own accord.
“You really don’t know when to quit, do you?” the young professor laughed delightedly. “There’s that arrogance that I’ve come to so loathe in people like you. The assurance that somehow, some way, you must win. That you are the good one. That you are right. It’s truly unbearable, you know. But it’s entertaining, at least.”
James strained forward with his wand, now only ten feet from the approaching professor. He drew breath to call his next spell, resolving to resort to unforgivable curses out of pure desperation, when a series of footsteps suddenly sounded from behind Odin-Vann, clambering down the spiral stairs of the headmaster’s office. They were heavy, and yet James instinctively knew by the sound that they were not Merlin’s.
“James!” the figure’s voice called in surprise, clambering to a stop at the base of the steps.
It was Ralph.
Odin-Vann’s left hand shot up and back, fisted on a second wand. “Stay, Mr. Dolohov,” he ordered, his eyes not flinching from James. “There is no need for you to share Mr. Potter’s fate.”
“That’s a laugh,” Ralph scoffed in a brittle voice. “Like any of us are going to survive this night! I’ve been waiting for the headmaster for almost an hour, but it doesn’t look like he’s coming back at all. Without him, we’re pretty much done for.”
As he spoke, Ralph raised his wand and fired a nonverbal spell at Odin-Vann. It was deep blue, arcing like electricity.
Odin-Vann’s left hand twitched, pulled his arm up, and fired the counter-spell, obliterating Ralph’s attack.
The professor smiled at James, one wand pointed back at Ralph, the other leveled at James’ chest. “Crucio,” he said, almost conversationally.
James flinched, but the spell wasn’t aimed at him. From Odin-Vann’s second wand, a belt of searing green struck Ralph and drove him back against the stairs, where he crashed heavily, half across the steps, jerking in agony. He gasped and tried to scream, but his chest locked and his teeth clenched, reducing his cry to a strained, desperate groan.
“I meant to thank you, Mr. Dolohov,” Odin-Vann said over the crackle of his spell. “You found the one potential flaw in my wand.
Nonverbal spells. Thanks to you, I have been able to calibrate and overcome even that.”
“Stop it!” James shouted, raising his own wand again. And then, before he could reconsider it, he repeated Odin-Vann’s spell: “Crucio!”
He had never attempted an unforgiveable curse, even on a practice dummy. The green bolt that fired from his wand was weak, frayed, without focus. Odin-Vann’s right arm flicked up with the force of his wand and the counter-spell fired, easily extinguishing James’ curse between them.
Ralph rolled and tumbled off the steps to the floor, still smothered in the grip of Odin-Vann’s Cruciatis spell. He gasped and groaned, and James thought he was trying to form words, even through the blinding haze of pain.
“NNNnn-nuh… nnnNIGHT!” He forced the word through helplessly gritted teeth.
Odin-Vann bared his own teeth at James and intensified his spell. It pulsed lime green and Ralph screamed.
“Stop!” James shouted, his own wand still pointed at Odin-Vann helplessly. It was no use. “You’ll kill him!”
“Everybody dies,” Odin-Vann said with sudden, grinning ferocity. “Let’s just hope that they lived while they had the chance! I admit, I have my doubts!”
Ralph writhed and arched his back on the floor. He gasped a whistling breath and strained again, struggling to speak.
“Nuh… nnnNIGHT… Quh-QUIDDITCH!”
James frowned in terrified confusion, his fist aching on his useless, outstretched wand. What could Ralph possibly mean? Was he going mad with pain? Why in the world would he spend his last, desperate words talking about something as inane and stupid as Night Quidditch?
The Cruciatus curse lanced into him, boiled over him, enveloped the big boy in unspeakable, maddening pain.
And then, somehow, James understood. His mouth dropped open as the realization washed over him. His mind raced, searched for exactly the right option, the one final gambit that would either turn the tables or doom them all. Resolved, he stabbed forward with his wand one last time.
“Osclauditis!” he shouted.
The spell was a lance of white. It struck Odin-Vann’s right shoulder, and his arm snapped rigid, the elbow locking straight.
His eyes shot wide with shock. Jerkily, he looked down at his right arm, and the wand in his hand, now pointed firmly and helplessly at the floor. It hadn’t fired the counter jinx.
There was no counter jinx. Not for game magic. The bonefuse hex could only be dodged, never countered.
The Cruciatus curse extinguished from Odin-Vann’s left-hand wand as the professor’s concentration broke.
“How—!?” he began, raising his eyes back to James, but James fired again.
“Novistenaci!”
The fingers of Odin-Vann’s left hand spasmed with the blast of the Knuckler hex. The secondary wand they had been holding clattered to the floor.
“How are you doing this!?” Odin-Vann demanded, his face turning furious.
“Game magic,” James answered, narrowing his eyes, “doesn’t appear in the Caster’s Lexicon.”
Odin-Vann roared with rage. He lowered his head and charged, aiming to ram James physically, to tackle him back onto the ruined wall behind him.
“Expeliarmus!”
This spell did not come from James, but from Ralph. James saw his friend still sprawled on the floor before the headmaster’s stairs, but with his head now raised, his wand outstretched and shaking weakly.
The wand in Odin-Vann’s right hand jerked up to deflect Ralph’s spell. The professor’s shoulder and elbow, however, were still locked rigid by the bonefuse hex. With a terrible, grating snap the bones broke, wrenched upwards by the force of the enchanted wand as it performed its duty.
The professor screamed and collapsed, even as his wand fired the counter jinx, snuffing Ralph’s disarming spell. His broken arm went limp again and he forced his fingers loose, dropping the wand before Ralph could coax it into action again. He cradled his broken arm against his body and faltered to the floor, moaning pathetically.
Ralph staggered to his feet and braced himself against the headmaster’s stairs.
James lunged forward and grabbed both of the professor’s dropped wands. With a decisive twist, he broke both wands at once and threw down the pieces. They clattered senselessly.
“That was dead brilliant thinking, Ralph!” James exclaimed as he ran to help his friend. “Are you all right?”
“Ungh,” Ralph moaned and clutched his head. “I don’t think I’ll ever be all right again. Sincerely.”
“Everything’s gone completely upside down,” James declared, “I’m sorry, Ralph. You were right all along about Odin-Vann.”
“You think?” Ralph wheezed, and laughed f
eebly.
“Have you seen Petra?” James asked earnestly. “Finding her is our only chance. Odin-Vann and Judith mean to kill her and end everything. He has some sort of delusion about becoming Judith’s new host and starting an all new version of our destiny.”
“He can’t kill Petra,” Ralph shook his head, finally standing up straight. “She has a Horcrux. He knows that better than anyone. And how can he start any new destinies? The Loom is destroyed.”
“He’s the one that destroyed it,” James nodded darkly. “But no matter what, Petra is the key to everything. I thought she might have come here, to Merlin, looking for her father’s brooch.”
“Merlin’s been a little busy,” Ralph shrugged and nodded toward a nearby window. “What with the whole world coming down on the castle like a plague. Centaurs, Merpeople, Muggle explorers and news people. I was looking for him myself, to finally tell him everything we know. He’s here somewhere. Just not in his office.”
James’ face hardened and he raised his wand again. He turned back to the decimated corridor and trotted to where Odin-Vann lay, his arm broken and his wands destroyed.
Only the professor was no longer there.
“He disapparated or something,” Ralph said angrily, coming alongside and glancing around. “Had to have.”
“Or she took him,” James muttered. “Judith. She needs him.
He’s to be her new host. Or her pet human. Either way, he’s essential to whatever her plan is.”
The castle shook again, quaked violently with a sustained shock, but this time the violence was accompanied by a gust of wintry, ice-flecked air. It whistled through the broken wall and streamed through James’ and Ralph’s hair.
James’ eyes widened. He glanced at Ralph.
“Petra!” they both said in unison.
“We have to apparate!” James added breathlessly. “The entrance hall!”
Ralph nodded and swallowed hard. James could see that his friend was nervous about testing his apparating skills under such conditions.
James gave him a bracing grip on the shoulder. “You know the entrance hall as well as you know your own house. You’ve been there a thousand times. You can do this, Ralph. On three!”
Ralph nodded, firming his jaw. “On three.”
“One…” James said.
“Two…” they both said together, gripping their wands in preparation for whatever they would find waiting for them.
“Three!”
The world snapped away, whirled wildly, and reasserted itself with a shock of speed and noise. James’ feet struck the stone floor of the entrance hall and something immediately bounced off his head. He blinked, stumbled backwards, and raised a hand to his brow, probing to see if he was injured.
A muffin rolled at his feet. It appeared to be blueberry.
“Elf work is for elves!” a chorus of tiny, angry voices cried, and more muffins sailed through the air. They pelted the walls, bounced from portraits, pattered and rolled down the staircase steps.
“We have quite enough to handle at the moment without your little elven uprising!” a shrill voice exclaimed. James turned to see Professor McGonagall near the stairs, her wand raised warningly. A line of other teachers stood with her, looking variously confused and impatiently harried. “I will say this only once more!” McGonagall shouted. “All of you, back to the kitchens for your own safety!”
“Safety is not our concern!” a tiny voice called back. James turned to see Piggen, his face pained but resolved. “Without service for all of our kind worldwide, death is a preferred option!” Turning to the line of elves behind him, he yelled, “Muffins away!”
Another barrage of baked goods streamed through the air.
Dimly, James sensed Ralph pulling on his elbow, dragging him out of the space between the professors and the elves. Zane, Rose, and Scorpius huddled in the shadow of the stairs, their eyes wild.
“James!” Rose gasped, grabbing his other arm and pulling him into the nominal protection of the balustrade. “What happened?”
“I saw Odin-Vann,” James answered as briefly as he could. “But not Petra. She’s got to be nearby. We felt her magic at work.”
“We felt it, too,” Zane said, and pointed to the closed doors of the great hall. “From in there. Sounds like a war-zone!”
James made to break away from the group, to run across the muffin-littered floor toward the great hall, when the main entrance doors blasted inward next to him, breaking from their hinges, swinging and falling away before a concussive shock. One of the falling doors barely missed James as it slammed down, throwing up a cloud of stinging grit. Light glared and the throttle of an engine roared. The gunmetal-grey off-road vehicle plowed into the entrance hall, bouncing over the broken doors. Its windscreen was smashed to a cloud of cracks and its front end was mangled almost unrecognizable, singed black and smoking. Only one of the headlamps still worked, stabbing its glare up at the staircase.
“Attack!” Piggen cried shrilly, and a barrage of biscuits, rolls, scones, and even pots and pans arced toward the vehicle, bouncing and clanging from its blackened and steaming bonnet.
“They drove their blasted vehicle through the fiendfyre boundary,” McGonagall announced. “We’re breached! Hogwarts is breached!”
The vehicle’s doors sprang open and people began to tumble out, running in all directions, their faces wild with terror.
From the darkness beyond the smashed-in entrance, shadows moved. The clatter of hooves approached. Voices bellowed and shouted.
One of the Muggles did not run away. He stumbled into the centre of the entrance hall, his figure illuminated brilliantly by the vehicle’s headlamp. He was thin and tall, with angular features and sleek dark hair, now mussed and wild. James recognized him immediately. It was the rogue Muggle reporter from his first year, Martin Prescott.
“I knew it!” Prescott shouted hoarsely, triumphantly. He balled his fists, raising them into the air. “I knew it wasn’t a dream! I was here!
I was here!”
McGonagall rolled her eyes impatiently and stunned him with her wand. Prescott tumbled to the floor still grinning, his hands still fisted in victory.
“Protego Maxima!” McGonagall called next, striding past the smoking vehicle and aiming for the door. A burst of blue light formed a shield. Behind her, Professors Shert, Votary, and Heretofore surged forward and added their strength to the charm, defending against the approaching centaurs.
The castle boomed again. The ceiling of the entrance hall cracked along its entire length. Broken plaster and chunks of masonry rained down. Portraits tilted and fell from the walls. Windows broke and shattered all around.
“Potter!” One of the portraits commanded in a steely voice.
James turned to see a painting of a very ugly farmer standing in a field of blooming Spynuswort. The farmer’s face was vaguely recognizable beneath his wide-brimmed hat.
“Your brother is not in the castle,” the painted figure said quickly. “Every other student is accounted for except him.”
“Albus?” James asked, his mind spinning.
“Albus Severus, my namesake,” the disguised portrait of Snape said. “And our names are not all that we have in common. His loyalties are divided. You must find him.”
James shook his head. “No, it’s Petra I have to find! She’s here, in the Great Hall! I have to warn her!”
“No!” Snape insisted, his eyes blazing from the painting. “For once in your insipid, reckless little lives would one of you Potters listen to me!? The headmaster has divined the truth! Odin-Vann, whom you were lucky enough to best, was the Architect. But your brother is the Ransom! Without him, their plan fails! Find him right now, Potter!
This is not about his safety, but the balance of worlds!”
James was shaking his head, barely listening now. Another deep shudder shook the floor and broke chunks from the ceiling. The Great Hall doors wrenched open as a blast of icy wind and furious light exploded
through them.
James forgot about the portrait of Snape. He broke away from the wall, angled around the smoking vehicle, ducked behind the defending teachers, leapt the unconscious figure of Martin Prescott, and pushed through the crack of the huge wooden doors.
The Great Hall beyond was dark, creaking, full of motion, a wrecked shamble of shocking destruction.
Every window was broken, jagged with shards of glass and bent metalwork. The ceiling was laced with cracks and missing huge chunks, its enchantment flickering and fading, showing mere fractures of marching storm clouds and approaching lightning. The floating candles spun and bounced from the walls, many broken, most with their flames extinguished, streaming ribbons of grey smoke.
The tables were forced against the walls, wrecked and smashed together.
The rose window was intact, but flickering with fire and laced with cracks.
In the centre of the floor, Merlin and Petra faced each other, each breathing hard, each staring at the other with furious intensity.
Merlin’s staff was raised in his right hand, its runes pulsing with green light. Petra’s hair was wild around her face, her left hand raised palm out, fingers splayed. It was clear that the duel between them had descended to brute attack, a stalemate between equal powers and level cunning.
“Go to your common room, James!” Merlin ordered, his voice cracked, strained.
“Obey the headmaster,” Petra seethed, not taking her eyes from the sorcerer before her.
James clambered forward instead, getting between the two, raising both of his hands.
“Petra…!” he began.
The rose window exploded in a cloud of glass as something huge bashed through it, taking its pillars and supports with it. The head table broke under the weight of the object as it slammed down, and James dimly saw that it was a tree trunk, freshly torn from the ground, its roots still clotted with earth. A monstrous shape wielded the trunk, following it through the raining debris, head down and shoulders hunched. It was a giant, its eyes wild with fear, its hairy free hand fisted into a knuckly boulder, ready to fight.
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