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Ceremonies of Strife	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16218 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this writing.

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Chapter Thirty�The
King in Yellow

�� Draco
clenched his fists. He wanted to strike out at someone, but that would
accomplish nothing when they needed everyone here to fight Nihil.

�� Besides,
Ventus was watching him with bright eyes and utter confidence, and Harry had
despair in his half-smile. Draco couldn�t let Ventus down; he couldn�t show
Harry that Nihil was all-powerful and they were going to succumb. But he had no
idea, at the moment, what he could do.

�� Desperation
sometimes worked miracles, Draco knew. It worked one now. Bits and pieces slid
together in his mind, and then he had a new plan, assembled from a few shards
of their old ideas, fastened with new glue.

�� He turned
to Weasley. �Do you still have the hiding places that you mapped out
memorized?� he asked him.

�� Weasley
blinked at him, then jerked his head up and down. It wasn�t a nod, not
completely, but Draco decided that beggars couldn�t be choosers.

�� We�re
going to make the glamours,� Draco said. The words thrummed and rolled around
his mouth as he spoke them, making him feel
how right they were. �But we�re going to use them for a different purpose
this time. Instead of attracting Nihil, we�ll confuse him about how many of us
are actually on the battlefield.� He nodded to Weasley and Granger. �You hide
and wait for my signal. When it comes, start casting the glamours while Harry,
Ventus, and I attack.�

�� What�s
your signal?� Granger asked, eyes narrowed as if she needed all her brain to make
sense of Draco�s plan.

�� It�ll be
unmistakable,� Draco said dryly. �Trust me,� he added, when she sent him a
little frown. He took some pleasure in knowing that that was exactly what she
had trouble doing.

�� What kind
of glamours are we going to use?� Weasley demanded. �I can�t do the glamours of
the beasts, you know that.�

�� Can you do
the kind of fears that you had lying in bed at night when you were a child?�
Draco asked softly. �The floating bits of darkness that might turn into a
monster at any moment, the cold that came along with them?�

�� Weasley
caught his breath and nodded. �But I don�t understand,� he said. �What�I mean,
I don�t think Nihil is afraid of those anymore.�

�� We�re
going to convince him that we have an army of the living dead,� Draco said. �A
different kind of dead than he commands. We�re going to confuse him and
confront him with his worst fear: that someone can fight him because they�ve
discovered exactly the kind of tactics that he uses. Do your best with the
darkness, and in the meantime, we�ll do other things that convince him those
glamours are the dead.�

�� Weasley and
Granger stared at him in silence. Ventus nodded thoughtfully. �I can see where
the plan comes from,� she said, �even if I am not convinced that it will work.
But no one goes into battle knowing if their plan will work, not exactly.� She
gave Draco a smile that would have done credit to a cat licking cream from its
whiskers. �I�ll do whatever you need me to do, including adding to the
glamours.�

�� Draco nodded,
but most of his attention was on Harry, who had the most knowledge of
necromancy of anyone on the battlefield�well, anyone who was on their side. So
much of this deception depended on him.

�� Perhaps too much. Draco dreaded to see
Harry look up at him with betrayal in his eyes.

�� Harry took
a whistling breath and reached up to run his fingers along Flash�s spine. He
was shivering continually, and looked ill. Then he turned and glanced over the
hill again, the way he had been facing when he cast the spell. He was
shuddering now. Draco wondered if the frost that he knew had spread along the
walls during that one necromantic ritual Harry had conducted was touching him
now.

�� I�m sorry, Harry, Draco thought, even as
a smaller, meaner part of him thought that Harry was probably glad to have an
excuse to touch this Dark magic again. But
Nihil knows that you know some of this. You�re the only one who could
believably command our �living dead.�

�� Yeah, all
right,� Harry said. He turned and glanced sideways at Draco. �I was going to
ask why we didn�t simply Apparate back to the barracks, but��

�� Draco
nodded silently. Harry hadn�t finished telling his story about Nihil when
silent magic had washed over the battlefield. Draco didn�t test it until after
Harry stopped talking, but he had recognized it immediately. Anti-Apparition
wards. Nihil was taking no chances on their escaping.

�� Besides, to
flee now wasn�t to escape. Nihil knew Harry was here, and he would be able to
guess who had been with him. And as Dearborn, he had known most of them,
perhaps all.

�� Dearborn. That was still hard to deal
with.

�� Draco shook
the thoughts away. There were certain things that he couldn�t think about right
now if he wanted to remain sane, or focused enough on the battle to be of help
to Harry and the others. �All right,� he said. �Weasley, Granger. Hide and cast
your glamours.� He turned to Harry. �Set up a fake necromantic ritual, or a
real one. I think Nihil�s paranoid enough that he might decide you have
knowledge he doesn�t. You have to make it look as though you�re commanding the
glamours.�

�� Ah,�
Ventus said cheerfully. �So that�s the reason they all go silent around you and
glare at each other as if they�re blaming one another for a hidden problem,
Potter. You practice necromancy. Don�t worry, your secret�s safe with me.�

�� Draco
groaned, but there had been no way to hide it from her without going through
contortions that would take more time than they could afford right now. He
turned to Ventus. �Not a word,� he said. �You and I are going to be launching
attacks on Nihil�s army of the living dead, and I want to see what you can do.�

�� There was
no contest, he knew in a minute, not from the way Ventus�s eyes brightened and
she stood up as though someone had replaced her spine with a poker. She nodded
to Draco. There was more color in her face than he had ever seen before, and
she spun her wand with a lazy grace that made Draco think suddenly of Dearborn,
of Dearborn as Draco had known him before�this.

�� You won�t
regret allying with me,� she said.

�� The words
made Draco more confident than he liked to admit.

*

�� Harry stood
on top of the hill which he had cast the spell over, a circle of blood at his
feet, and watched Nihil come.

�� He had been
curious at first about why Nihil hadn�t simply attacked the minute Harry left
his mind. It would have been his best chance of crushing them, while Harry
still reeled from what he had learned and the others were more worried about
him than attacks from the outside. But when Harry saw what flowed across the
small valley, he understood.

�� Nihil had
wanted to make sure that there was absolutely no chance that Harry or any of
his friends would escape, and that meant preparing his largest set of forces.

�� The dead
marched in neat ranks, all of them looking like living people except the ones
at the very back, which Harry thought Nihil might have just animated. They were
more ghostly, or else they were shambling corpses. Not that it mattered, Harry
knew. As long as there was something of them left, they would fight to obey
Nihil�s will and destroy whatever he commanded them to destroy.

�� Harry
understood necromancy more than he liked to admit.

�� He took a
deep breath and stared at the ring of blood by his feet. Draco had insisted on
cutting his own palm before he and Ventus ran off into battle position, seeming
to think that the necromancy wouldn�t be as bad if the ritual didn�t use Harry�s
blood. Harry, of course, felt no connection to this as he had to the rituals
that he conducted on his own.

�� Or he
thought he didn�t. There was a very
faint dark vibration in the back of his mind that he was trying to ignore.

�� He looked
up again and scanned the marching ranks. He couldn�t see a sign of Nihil among
them, but he knew that the bastard wouldn�t be far. For one thing, his strength
would be needed for an attacking force of this size; it wouldn�t work if he was
further away. He had never been that distant from the attackers he sent into
the Ministry.

�� For
another, Nihil would want to see them die with his own eyes.

�� So Harry
held up his hand as he saw the first blurs of cold darkness drifting onto the
battlefield from Ron and Hermione�s glamours, and made a wide gesture that
someone from a distance could mistake as the wave of a knife, and brought his
foot down in the center of the circle of the blood. He would have liked to say
that he felt Nihil�s eyes on him and felt them widen, but that sensation was
like the dark shimmer in the back of his mind: something he shouldn�t pay
attention to. It wasn�t reliable.

�� He knew
Nihil would probably sense the deception if he spoke in Latin or English. But
he had another option.

�� He closed
his eyes, envisioning a snake, and hissed harshly in Parseltongue. The wind
around him seemed to grow colder, and when he opened his eyes, it was to see
the entire dead army pause in mid-step, their legs all lifted and held
motionless. They were staring up at him.

�� At the same
time, several of the small black blurs that Hermione and Ron had conjured
suddenly blended together. Harry stared. Had something happened to them? Or was
this a part of the plan that Draco had refined after Harry had separated from
the others?

�� The blurs
lost definition as they crowded into one shape: that of a giant snake. Its head
lifted, its tongue flickered out, and it appeared to taste the air in front of
the crowd of dead soldiers. Then it turned its head, eyes seeking Harry out.

�� Command me, it told him.

�� Harry swore
shakily, then swallowed and continued. He didn�t know what had happened, but he
did know that they needed to continue
the illusion, or there was the chance that Nihil would figure out what was
happening and overwhelm them.

�� Kill the dead ones, he told the snake in
Parseltongue. Spare the living.

�� He wondered
a moment later if he should have clarified the difference between the dead and
living to the snake, but since it turned and slithered straight at the dead
army, he reckoned it knew.

�� The snake�s
head darted out and over the man in the lead, who Harry would have thought was
a perfectly ordinary wizard if he had passed him in the street. For a moment,
Harry�s vision dimmed, as though he was seeing the man through a cloud. Then
the man�s head exploded and his body collapsed to the ground, as if someone had
sucked all the substance out of it.

�� The snake
touched another dead wizard, and it happened again.

�� Harry got
somewhat distracted, though, by the force of fiery angels that appeared in the
air over the battlefield just then.

�� They were
large figures, but undeniably human, made of flames, wielding swords and
soaring down on beating wings. Their laughter was delicate and so high-pitched
that Harry could barely hear it; it was a whisper of sound against the edges of
his senses. The grass burned and boiled beneath their feet, and where their
swords touched the dead, they spread burst after burst of searing white fire.

�� Another
laugh, more human, joined theirs. Harry turned his head.

�� Ventus was
running onto the battlefield, spinning sometimes in place to launch more curses
at the dead, her head so bright with a reflected corona of power that she
rivaled her angels in brilliance. Her curses cracked the ground beneath the
dead and ate them in miniature earthquakes. They made the dead thin and fade to
ghostly versions of their former selves that, as far as Harry could see when
Ventus got near them, could touch and affect nothing. Ventus pointed her wand
at one of the shambling corpses, and a swarm of flying giant maggots manifested
above it, feasting hungrily on the dead flesh.

�� Draco was
running into the valley from the other side, his voice triumphant as he shouted
spell after spell. He produced spectacular effects, too, Harry was the first to
admit: bodies that split in half, a tidal wave that drowned several of Nihil�s
people, mud that snared the legs of the dead and wouldn�t let them move
forwards. Politesse surged beside him, snapping and snarling and stinging.

�� But Harry
understood what Ventus had meant now when she said that she cared about battle
and nothing else. One would have to. You couldn�t hold anything of yourself
back if you wanted to cast spells like that. Dedication and nothing else fueled
them, pure power and pure obsession.

�� It was
beautiful. It was terrifying.

�� Is that the kind of power Draco wants?

�� Harry
shivered and turned back to the battlefield, watching as the snake, Ventus, and
Draco together devastated Nihil�s force, and wondered if Ron and Hermione were
about to come out of hiding.

�� Something
far worse happened�something Harry ought to have anticipated, especially when
they started doing far better in this battle than they had any right to expect,
but which was still a shock.

�� Nihil came.

*

�� Draco
panted and ducked the reaching arms of the dead, spinning around in a circle
that meant his wand came down in a deadly arc. An invisible sword took the
arms, and then another stabbed the corpse through the guts and put it out of
its misery. It fell, and any appearance that made it similar to the living
departed. Its face was slack, and it didn�t bleed.

�� Draco
wondered idly for a moment what death was like for the living dead, what
happened that made destroying the corpses effective. Did that shake the spirits
free of Nihil�s control? Or was he animating bodies, some of them, and not
really the spirits?

�� That was
more than he wanted to know about necromancy, though. He turned and aimed his
wand at the next enemy.

�� Then the
battlefield washed with a sickly yellow light, and there was an immense, empty
sound above Draco, like someone stretching his jaws in a yawn.

�� Draco
looked up.

�� Something
was visible in the air above him, something it hurt to look at. Draco wasn�t
sure that he ever saw its true form. His eyes rejected it violently, and trails
of blood crept down the side of his face when he tried to look beyond that, to
make himself see something else.

�� But the
yellow light centered on it, and the hollow sound repeated. The unvisible thing
began to descend.

�� Draco knew,
with the same stark, primal terror that he would feel in the face of a charging
nundu, that he did not want it to touch him.

�� He fell
back, casting every curse he could think of at it, including some he had used
in this fight and some he had never thought he would use against another living
being. But then again, he didn�t think this was a living being.

�� Every spell
either vanished into the unvisible whirlwind or simply bounced off. Draco had
to duck as his own Leg-Breaking Curse came back at him sharpish, and when he
rolled upright again, he was closer to the thing than he liked.

�� He fell
back again, and felt pressure and presence near his back. When he looked over
his shoulder, Weasley and Granger were standing there. Weasley was bright red,
Granger was pale, but they both had their wands pointed past Draco at the
thing.

�� What the
fuck are you doing?� Draco hissed at them. �You could have stayed hidden, and
there�s the chance that it wouldn�t have found you.�

�� I don�t
think Nihil�s that stupid,� Granger
said. Her voice was remarkably steady, although the smile she gave him trembled
and flickered out after a second only. �Besides. Do you think we�d leave you to
face this alone?�

�� Draco
closed his eyes and shook his head. He lacked the words to explain what he
thought of Gryffindor courage.

�� It�s
coming closer.� Weasley spoke as though his stomach was coiled up in his
throat, but his voice was calm. Draco had to admit that it was more than he
could have handled at the moment.

�� I know,�
Granger said, and Draco heard her fingers rap against her wand as though she
was trying to figure something out. �But I don�t know what to do to stop it,�
she admitted a moment later.

�� So much for that hope, Draco thought,
and opened his eyes in time to see Ventus leap past him and stride towards the
whirlwind as though she intended to arrest it.

�� I know
you,� Ventus told the thing. Her head was cocked so she was looking at the
thing sideways. Draco would be glad for that. He had seen enough to make him
admit that Ventus wasn�t an ordinary witch, but she would have been more than
human if she could have looked directly and not flinched. �You are the
surrender of death, giving in and giving up. You�re the opposite of fighting.�

�� The
whirlwind didn�t respond in any way. Draco wondered why he had thought it would
have. It simply floated closer.

�� Ventus
pointed her wand at it with a disdainful expression and said, �Alternum regnum!�

�� The
whirlwind shuddered, and drifted to a stop for the first time since Draco had
seen it appear in the sky. Then it began to move sideways, but more briskly
than it had been before, and Draco didn�t think it was going of its own free
will. A vicious hissing emerged from it, and bits of the sides projected out,
becoming easier to see, like flailing arms. Ventus laughed.

�� What did
you do?� Draco breathed. He was already thinking that he would need to take up
lessons with Ventus when they got back to the Ministry. She had bragged about
her skill, yes, and he had thought there might be something to that, but he had
never imagined this.

�� I�m moving
it into an alternate world,� Ventus said, as if that was an everyday occurrence.
�Nihil won�t have the same power in another world that he will here, because
the circumstances of his existence�if he exists�will be different there. He�ll
have to deal with at least a little confusion, and in the meantime, we can come
up with a permanent solution for defeating him.�

�� Draco
squeezed her shoulder, not sure how else he should react. �Thank you,� he said.

�� Ventus gave
him a look in which light and laughter blazed. �You never should have
underestimated me,� she murmured. �But I forgive you. You hadn�t seen me fight.
That is the key to understanding me.�

�� A loud
hissing noise in front of them attracted their attention. The whirlwind had
stopped drifting, and once again it was hard to look at. And now it was
accelerating towards them, in a way that told Draco all too clearly that
Ventus�s spell had failed.

�� Ventus,
undaunted, stood there firing spells at it until Draco dragged her with them,
but none of them had any effect. Whether Nihil knew how to fight them or had
somehow constructed a defense that made him immune now, Draco didn�t know, but
it was obvious they were all going to die.

�� Politesse
was barking and growling near his ankles, making little rushing motions
forwards as if he would charge Nihil, but Draco kept him back. He didn�t know
what would happen if the dog got close enough, and he didn�t want to lose him.

�� Even if we�re all going to die in a few
minutes.

�� Then what
had happened at the end of the war happened again, and Harry Potter saved them
all.

*

�� Harry had
shouted spell after spell when he saw Nihil come on the battlefield in the
middle of that thing. Harry had no
doubt this was Nihil, and not someone else. The sense of cold and darkness had
intensified in the back of his mind when the thing appeared, and it seemed that
the Mortal Affinity spell still lingered, because Harry saw the thing shining
with a bright obsidian corona.

�� The
sensible thing would have been to rush down the hill and join his friends and
Draco so that at least they could die together.

�� But he
couldn�t move from the ring of blood. His feet literally wouldn�t stir. Harry
bent down and yanked at them, swearing, and still nothing helped. He looked up
and around for the giant snake, wondering if the same magic that had made it
was keeping him prisoner here, but he saw no sign of it anymore.

�� What is going on?

�� He closed
his eyes and opened them, and when he looked again, he could see the black
vibration in the back of his mind as if it had moved out into the world and
come to life.

�� It flickered
all around him, visible as enormous black chains that manacled his legs to the
earth. More, chains stretched to his arms, his head, his shoulders. The magic
stared at him, and Harry swallowed. Nihil had somehow turned the necromancy
against him. It was keeping him prisoner here.

�� But the
magic reached towards him, then retreated, with much the same speed that Flash,
circling around his head, used.

�� Then Flash
landed on his shoulder and crooned into his ear, closing his talon reassuringly
near Harry�s collarbone.

�� Harry
licked his lips. Flash, at least, seemed to think everything was all right and
he could still do something about this. Flash wasn�t even lashing his tail as
he looked towards the floating thing that contained Nihil, or growling the way
he had when faced with Nemo�s beasts. He seemed to show only a minor curiosity.

�� Words
roared out of his memory, words that he had read in the necromancy book before
Draco burned it.

�� When a necromantic ritual has begun, it must
be completed. There is no force known to wizards that can stop it save the
shattering of the circle or the necromancer�s own will not to continue.

�� Harry
opened his eyes and stared at the blood circle around him. He had been able to
stop the ritual that Draco interrupted because he had honestly wanted to stop,
he was so horrified and ashamed at the thought of Draco seeing him.

�� But this
one�

�� Oh, come on!� he said aloud. �This wasn�t a real
ritual! We just set this up so that I could pretend to control the glamours and
Nihil would think that I was doing
necromancy!�

�� The black
magic thrummed around him, refusing to be placated, and Harry remembered the
snake. No, it shouldn�t have happened, especially when the glamours were only
illusions and not real living dead, but apparently the necromancy was convinced it was real.

�� Harry
turned his gaze on the thing that contained Nihil. He didn�t understand what it
was, any more than he was capable or experienced in the theory of necromancy
when compared to Nihil. But he remembered what had caused the snake to appear,
and he had will and desire to empower himself. Maybe that, combined with the
ring of blood, would be enough.

�� He lifted
his hand and extended it towards Nihil. Flash flapped his wings and crooned
encouragement.

�� Harry
hissed again in Parseltongue. Be gone,
enemy! Vanish!

�� The black
magic leaped over the circle and rippled out over the battlefield. The edge of
the tide hit the edge of the thing containing Nihil.

�� Harry felt
the strangest sensation. It was as if he was ripping apart thick, heavy cloth
with sharp fingernails. The cloth was reluctant to tear, and it was moldy and
covered him with slime as he got rid of it, but it did tear. He had the power.

�� His power
was not greater than Nihil�s, but it was different.
Perhaps it was necromancy conducted with Parseltongue fighting necromancy
conducted with Latin. Perhaps it was Harry�s strange little ritual fighting
Nihil�s well-prepared, usual rituals.

�� But
whatever it was, the thing tore apart, and Harry caught a glimpse of a
human-sized figure in the sickly yellow glamour before he vanished.

�� The yellow
light went with him, and the battlefield flooded with the sun.

�� And a dark
shimmer settled permanently into the back of Harry�s mind.

*

�� qwerty: Thank
you! I hope it lived up to expectations.

�� polka dot: Dearborn
was trying to find a way to use Harry and Draco�s compatible magic. It was
better than finding it suddenly turned against him.

�� Dragons
Breath: Yes, though the weapon they used to resist hell is not one that Draco
would have chosen to employ.

�� KadyRae:
Thank you!

�� Nihil does
not literally have two bodies anymore. He is a spiritual being who can flit
between many identities. That includes controlling more than one body.

�� SP777: Yes,
but you didn�t guess this!

�� Nusquam and
Nemo are not in this battle, but Nihil will probably send them as a scouting
force soon.
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Ceremonies of Strife