The End of the Beginning - 1. The End of the Beginning

The End of the Beginning

by Albert Nothlit

Disclaimer: this is a work of fan fiction based on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

The young wizard trudged through the snow and tried to keep the sharp bite of the cold at bay. His heavy, fur-lined boots threatened to crunch their way through the tattered wooden lattice of his snowshoes with each and every step. He had seven layers of clothing on, plus mittens, a heavy hood, snow goggles, a scarf, and a heavy pack that shielded his back. So much clothing – yet it was not enough.

A mild blizzard had raged a few hours earlier, and though it was long gone, a stubborn layer of wispy gray clouds hovered in the sky, diffusing the timid sunlight before it even hit the ground. As a result of this, the temperature had been steadily dropping and the wizard did not need a thermometer to know that it was very, very cold. His fingers and his toes had become numb a while ago, and it was only the prospect of the towering mountain range getting closer all the time that kept him going.

Every step was a challenge. Out here, in the wide and lifeless expanses of the last continent, the wind had a ferocity which the wizard had never encountered, not in the savage wilderness of the Hebridean coastline, and certainly not in the relatively mild downs of his native England. Here, the wind was a physical force which he had to fight to make his way forward, the same way he fought to remain above the thick layer of snow. The harsh whites and grays of ice, snow, and sky would have long blinded him if not for his polarized goggles. The cold would rob him of his body heat in an instant were he to stop moving. Without a doubt, Antarctica was the most dangerous, most isolated, and most beautiful continent he had ever visited.

The young wizard made it all the way to the foothills of the mountain he intended to climb, just as his energy ran out. As he dropped his pack, exhausted, with sweat dripping from his brow only to freeze halfway down his forehead, the wind died down all of a sudden. Where before there had been a constant dull howling, now there was only… silence. It was a silence that rumbled with magnificence, an awe-inspiring note of nature as its most basic and elemental self. There was no sound and therefore no life here because there could not be any life. Looking around the immense snow-covered plains, crevasses, and valleys he had already crossed, the wizard was struck with a solemn sense of meaninglessness. What could he be, when measured against such enduring majesty? What could he hope to learn, compared to the wisdom of the mountain nearby? What could he do, faced with such uncaring beauty?

The wind picked up again, slightly, and his moment of contemplation passed. A quick look at his watch showed him that it was almost midnight. He had stopped moving for a few seconds at most, and already he was shivering again.

“A rather brisk Antarctic summer, I must say,” he mumbled to himself. Then he set to work, preparing his camp.

It was backbreaking labor but the wizard was thankful for the chance to do it. Like the endless march before, physical exertion distracted him, keeping his mind from going places it should not go. Not yet, anyway. At the mountaintop, there he would allow his mind full freedom. There, he would remember. Not before.

He busied himself by setting up the tent he had carried in his pack, which he secured to the snowy ground as well as he could. As additional protection against another blizzard or simply stronger wind, the wizard built a small buttress of snow as cover for the exposed side of his tent, the other side shielded by the towering bulk of the mountain foothills. His mittens were completely soaked through by the time he was done, and he barely had enough sensation left in his fingertips to manage the remaining tasks, like setting up the gas stove, taking out his considerably diminished rations, unfurling his sleeping bag and his second sleeping bag, and digging a discreet latrine an appropriate distance away.

Still shivering, he took off his outermost layer of clothing and hung it on an improvised rack close to the stove. He turned on the stove itself and for the first time in months allowed it to function at full blast. Fuel consumption was not a problem anymore. One way or another, he would reach the mountaintop the following day. Then he would not need things. Not anymore.

As he waited for his meal of rice and dried meat to become edible under the stove’s heat, the wizard held his hands out to the roaring gas flame as close as he dared. Slowly, under the combined effects of the stove, the insulation offered by his tent and the double sleeping bags into which he had put his legs, heat returned to his body. He experienced the sensation with relief and slight wonder. Why should he even care whether he was cold or not? He had come here to not care anymore. And yet, why did it feel so good to just stretch, letting the warmth suffuse his muscles and joints, rubbing the day’s exhaustion away from his chafed shoulders? He had no answer, and least of all could not understand the degree of enjoyment with which he ate mouthful after mouthful of warm rice once his dinner was ready. The rice was a little stale, even after having been frozen for so long, and yet it was so good to eat it. When it was all gone he moved on to the jerky, salty and chewy and unbelievably nourishing.

An hour later, after having finished all preparations for sleeping, the wizard lied down inside his tent. He kept the forward flaps open so as to let in the heat of the trusty gas stove still chugging along even after all this time. The wizard surprised himself by nearly smiling, lying down in his nestled sleeping bags, his hands crossed behind his head. The muggle who had sold him most of his snow gear had been the last person the wizard had spoken to, and that had been more than three months ago. He still remembered his conversation with the muggle, an Argentinian gaucho who had simply refused to believe that the wizard was actually going to Antarctica on his tiny boat, with minimal additional equipment. In the end, the transaction was made, and the gaucho’s last words had been a far-off shout as he rode away on his horse: ‘If you come back alive, I’ll buy you a beer!’

Much had happened since that day. Many times, the wizard had thought he had overestimated his own physical capabilities, but he had a goal in mind and somehow, with a mix of determination, preparedness and sheer luck, he had made it to the mountain at last. And not once had he succumbed to the temptation of using magic.

The wizard fell asleep promptly, snoring a little, giving himself up to the wholesome rest of those who are truly tired. Outside the sun never set, but remained hidden behind gray clouds that swirled and merged with one another as they followed the wind. The gas stove did all it could to provide heat, and for the first few hours the wizard was able to get true rest, something which he had not been able to get since his journey into Antarctica had started. The gas fuel, though, was soon spent while the stove worked at full blast. After that the welcome radiating warmth that had filled the tent began to dissipate at a slow but steady rate. Four hours after falling asleep, the cold woke the wizard up. He sat up in the tent, shivering, and looked at his watch. He had planned on sleeping for at least six hours, or eight if he could manage, because he knew he would need every ounce of his strength in order to climb the mountain. He needed to sleep. He just couldn’t do it inside a refrigerator.

The temptation came again, quick and with unexpected force. Before he knew it, the wizard had reached under his shirt with his right hand, down to grasp the thin stick of wood that hung like a pendant over his chest, secured around his neck with a simple piece of string. At the contact, the cold appeared to wither away. The empty vastness of Antarctica suddenly seemed merely interesting, not threatening at all. The mountain, so intimidating the day before, was just a hunk of rock.

“No,” the wizard whispered, his voice hoarse. Determination flashed in his eyes and he let go of his wand.

His heart was pounding as if he had been running. The temptation was still there, whispering, but he had made a promise to himself and he was going to keep it.

No matter what.

It was 8 AM on the wizard’s watch by the time he decided to give up on trying to rest and take on the final challenge of climbing the mountain.

Getting ready for the day was much easier than before, since he would be leaving most of his equipment right where it was. There would be no need for a tent, or a spent stove, or a pot or even sleeping bags where he was going. All he took, aside from his clothes, was a climbing axe and a walking stick. The snowshoes were already strapped to his boots. He ate a bland, cold breakfast from one of his remaining ration packets, and started on his way.

He was in no hurry. In any other place except here, climbing a mountain this size required careful planning so the climber would have time to go all the way up and back down before the sun set. Here, the sun would remain in the sky all day long and all night too, and –

“Do not think about it yet,” the wizard interrupted himself. “At the summit. At the summit.”

Climbing was surprisingly easy at the beginning. The slope of the mountain was gentle, and two and a half hours later, the wizard was already well above ground level, breathing steadily, not even feeling cold. The sun was shining brightly as opposed to the day before, and the snowshoes soon became unnecessary. The wizard was now climbing the living rock of the mountain itself, which was frozen in places but never enough to be dangerous or to make climbing impossible. He navigated a series of tricky, meandering paths on his way up, and the physical exertion was such that the wizard simply discarded his bulky outer jacket after a time. It allowed him greater freedom of motion and he suspected he would not need it anymore.

The wizard came upon a cluster of fossils, clearly visible in the ice-and-rock strata as he climbed the steeper slope about midway to the mountain summit. He stopped for a moment to admire the intricate convolutions of what had to be hundreds of ammonites, all but perfectly preserved, their shells still iridescent even after millions of years. Muggle paleontologists and collectors liked ammonites because they were pretty, but the wizard knew of a way to prepare a potion of ammonite shell dust and dragon blood, which, if exposed to enormous pressure and seven sudden shifts in temperature at very precise quantities and intervals, would become a glowing red core, the precursor to –

“Not. Anymore,” he whispered, loosening his scarf to free his face. After three months of not being able to shave, his cheeks and jaw were covered by a thick auburn beard. He had never allowed his beard to grow out before. He guessed he looked about as different on the outside as he felt on the inside from the person he had used to be… Before.

That person would have been excited at discovering the ammonite fossils. That person would have been thrilled to climb a mountain which, as far as he knew, had never been climbed before. The young wizard was in the deepest, most forbidding depths of the Antarctic continent, where no muggles ever came and few wizards did. This mountain had no muggle name, nor would it ever have one. The person he used to be would have named it, proudly, stamping his family’s name on the annals of history forever.

The wizard flinched. Even the thought of the word family made it unbearable to remember. Better to go on, to keep climbing. Better to push his body to the limit instead of allowing his mind the slightest amount of freedom.

He kept going, using his walking stick and axe more and more often. In some places the only way forward was straight up, and he risked his life more than once but appeared to barely notice it given how little thought he invested in braving rock and ice. He simply kept moving, his brow furrowed, his mind dark. The day was sunny and the blue sky overhead was more beautiful than any jewel could ever hope to be, yet the wizard did not see it. The more he climbed, the more the view all around him grew, offering a breathtaking look over an unspoiled, primordial landscape. The wizard knew this. He knew he should feel giddy with awe at the beauty of nature, but it all seemed gray to him, devoid of color whatsoever. The mere fact that he had made it all the way here should have made him feel accomplished, or strong, but instead there was only darkness.

The wizard caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned to look, half expecting to see a hovering, decayed shape reaching for him with putrid hands, its eyeless face hidden under a ragged hood. Yet there was nothing there, nor had there ever been.

“Or perhaps I cannot see them anymore,” he growled under his breath. “It would serve me right. Maybe one of them is following me, has followed me since…”

He could not finish the thought because at the end of that sentence there was only pain and loss. Instead he kept climbing, looking around him every now and then, just in case. He was alone, however. The darkness trailing him was not something he could escape, any more than he could escape his own shadow. He did not need a soul-devouring creature hovering just out of sight, like some twisted version of a hide-behind, to experience the hopelessness and despair that was crushing his heart with its relentless pressure. His thoughts were like a muggle minefield where, no matter which path he took, there was bound to be a nasty surprise just a few thought-hops away. The surprises would be miniature explosions of pain, of anger, of desperate longing, but most of all of pure regret.

A shard of ice would catch his eye, for example, its pure blue-white sheen shimmering in the sunlight, and he would be reminded of summertime in England, of the pleasant buzzing of insects around the village in the heat of noon, of sending and receiving letters with such anticipation even though his correspondent was staying just a few houses away. The young wizard would be reminded of his correspondent’s razor-sharp gaze, of his foreign yet impressive sense of style, and of that eager smile, at once innocent and dangerous, which had made the wizard feel something he had never allowed himself to feel before. It was like a spark setting a roaring bonfire ablaze, terrifying, intoxicating –

Deadly.

The image flashed before his eyes even though he had promised himself not to think of it just yet. Raised voices. A flurry of curses. And her eyes… Oh, her eyes…

A sound escaped the young wizard on the mountain, more of a whimper than a groan, but he clamped his will down tight and prevented himself from breaking down. He had not cried since that awful day and he was not about to begin now. Crying would solve nothing. For him, there remained only penance for his terrible crime. Humility for his unforgivable arrogance. And despair where once there had been love.

The last section of the climb was brutal. Several times, the wizard was certain that he would have to Apparate on a higher ledge which he simply could not reach, or blast away a sheet of ice which made passage impossible, but he kept to his word and slowly, patiently, found a path he could follow with only the help of his hands, his feet, and his axe. He was so high up now that he kept panting, gulping in huge breaths and all the while feeling as if he were not getting enough air, which he knew was probably the case. Around 5 PM, his energy simply gave out and he was forced to take a break. He sat with his back to the icy rock, wishing he had not dropped his heavy jacket earlier, and took out a packet of jerky from his shirt pocket.

It was only when he had the jerky in his hand, though, that the wizard realized he was parched. He had not drunk anything since the morning. There was ice all around him, and several depressions were filled with compact snow, but he had no way to melt it at all. And as if on cue, now that he had acknowledged thirst, it came roaring out from his chest, demanding it be satisfied. He even reached inside his shirt, but jerked his hand away.

“‘Water, water everywhere…’ I’m no ancient mariner, I’m afraid.”

His voice was raspy. His tongue felt sluggish in his mouth. He ran a hand through his beard, thinking desperately on what he could do. Sleeping on the mountainside with no protection was suicide, and besides, it would prevent him from reaching his goal. He was hungry, starving even, but all the food he had left was dry jerky and he would have to quench his thirst before he could eat it. He glanced up and behind him, to ascertain how much farther he had to go. There was not much left, in fact – but only now did he realize, with a sinking feeling in his chest, that this side of the mountain offered nothing but a sheer cliff face for the last half a mile or so. The rock appeared smooth, almost unnaturally so given its altitude and exposure to the wind. No ice clung to it at all.

He would not be able to climb that, not the way a muggle would. Maybe if he had more time he could devise a plan of some sort, but the thirst kept on distracting him and now he noticed that there was a growing pounding between his temples, the beginning of altitude sickness without a doubt. The wizard lowered his gaze, gulping in mouthfuls of thin, freezing air, and considered his options.

He could give up, certainly. It would be just another great failure for one of his proportionally great plans. He could go back down the mountain to where his equipment was, rest, and attempt to climb a few days later with full equipment, spacing out the climb over three or four days and hoping he would find a way to climb that last bit of sheer rock.

Or he could use magic. This time he actually took out his wand from under his shirt and looked at it, admiring the slender wooden frame he had once loved so much. With this wand, he had performed minor miracles. It had been his instrument of power, his key to higher learning, the tool with which he swore he would change his destiny and that of those he loved. One word, one thought, and he would be warm, his thirst quenched, his aching muscles relaxed, his ragged breathing eased.

The young wizard shuddered and put the wand away. That thing was a murderer’s weapon. He had sworn he would not use it until the very end and he was going to keep that promise no matter what. Setting his jaw in grim determination, he eyed a bank of snow nearby. He crawled over to it, took off his mittens and the wool gloves underneath, and scooped out a handful of pristine white snow. It was freezing cold against his fingers, but the wizard was nothing if not stubborn. He held onto it, even when the cold on his skin turned to pain and then to worrying numbness, until he couldn’t hold it anymore. Then he ate several mouthfuls of slush, keeping it in his mouth as long as he was able to so it would melt somewhat. Despite his efforts, after he had finished eating the second handful of snow, his shivering had become rather violent. He knew his core’s temperature was dipping down dangerously and his thirst was not even close to being quenched. With shaking fingers which had lost all feeling, he forced himself to eat two jerky slices, chewing them with thorough patience, and sighing with gratitude when he had swallowed the last bite. The food and the snow would not keep him long, and certainly would not be enough for him to figure out a way up the remainder of the mountain. He was already feeling sleepy despite the cold, a dangerous sign that he would not last much longer. By now it was too late for him to go down the mountain to his camp. He could only resort to magic.

With a shaky sigh, the wizard realized nature had beaten him. He had intended to conquer this unknown Antarctic mountain using only muggle tools, but he was too weak and too ill prepared to do so. It was yet another lesson in humility learned too late. If he had not been a wizard, this would have been his death. Instead, he was now forced to use that which he swore he would not use after that terrible day, not until he reached his destination. The wizard gathered his strength and grabbed the rock behind him to steady himself. It took him nearly five minutes to get up on shaky legs, and the pounding in his head had been replaced with a kind of giddy lightheadedness which worried him even more. He stepped back from the mountainside, until he was standing just over the edge of a fatal drop, and looked up. He took off his snow goggles to see better and realized it had not just been his imagination. The mountaintop was too smooth, too forbidding, too inaccessible to be a natural formation. Magic always leaves traces, and to the wizard they were clearly visible - not with his eyes, or with any of his normal senses, but with that part of him that was capable of magic. The more he looked, the more he became convinced that he was seeing traces of ancient magic indeed, something no human could ever hope to comprehend fully. There was an unknown force protecting this isolated mountaintop at the end of the world. The wizard could only wonder what could be so precious as to be hidden away in a place like this.

Seeing that his last hurdle was magical in origin made the wizard’s decision easier. He still would not use his wand, or Apparate, since the magical protection around the mountaintop was certain to make both of those things fail. Instead, he would use his very last weapon, his pride and joy during his years at Hogwarts when he would amaze his fellow Gryffindors by doing something only a few other wizards could do.

The young wizard collected his thoughts and reached deep within himself. The magic was there, vibrating, as if eager to be used, and all it took was a mental tap to unleash the energy the wizard had suppressed for so many months already. He fixed an image in his mind, took a deep breath, and changed. The Animagus transformation was almost instantaneous. One second, the wizard had been a clumsy, exhausted, two-legged human being. The next, he was free.

He was much smaller now, but a quick look around with his flexible neck revealed a breathtaking array of tiny details his dull human eyes had missed. He glanced up and focused, zooming in on the mountaintop with the natural ease of the predator. It was not that high up. And it was not that cold anymore.

The wizard flexed his talons, digging them briefly into the snow beneath him, and then launched himself off the mountainside with a graceful, instinctive jump. As soon as he was in the air, animal joy surged through his heart and he spread his wings wide, feeling the wind whistling through each feather tip, dipping down in a controlled dive for the sheer pleasure of doing so. It had been a long time since the wizard had last flown, and he had forgotten just how wonderful it could be. With the first flap of his powerful wings he slowed his descent somewhat, but he did not stop falling entirely. It took a lot more effort than normal to regain the height he had lost, and the wizard thought belatedly that it must have something to do with the extreme altitude at which he was flying. This was not Britain, after all. This was nature primordial.

The wizard had to rein in his natural instinct to fly further down and look for something to kill. He was hungry, and his mind pounced on longing images of curved talons tearing into flesh, of a beak ripping apart steaming chunks of still-warm meat after a successful hunt. With slight regret, the wizard imposed his human brain over the natural instincts of his animal form and began flapping in a way no bird of prey would ever do: straight up, tirelessly, fighting against the thin air and the growing exhaustion in his chest muscles. He was climbing a mountain, after all. And the top was just in sight.

It took nearly a lot of energy to rise above the summit. The effort of flapping constantly was making him feel dizzy, but the sight of the mountaintop below him was reward enough to energize him for the final descent. With his improved vision no detail escaped his sight. The summit was a relatively small and jagged expanse of windswept rock, much of it frozen along its southern side. It was a barren place, the only colors around being variations of steel gray. As opposed to the steep, polished rock face leading up to it, the summit appeared to be perfectly natural and devoid of any particular magical threat. Relieved, the wizard stopped his arduous ascent and spread his wings fully, coasting down in a tight spiral to a land on his ultimate goal.

He was less than three feet away from the summit when he encountered the barrier. It staggered him; the feathers on his right wing were pressed against each other unnaturally, and for the briefest instant the pressure spread throughout his entire body, testing, feeling, threatening to break him. The wizard cried out a primal scree of defiance in response and at the sound the pressure vanished. He had a fleeting impression as of another raptor facing him down, and the animal side of himself responded in kind. The two predators stared each other down, unmoving, for the space of a heartbeat. Then they both lowered their heads in recognition of the other’s strength. The magical barrier vanished. The wizard was able to land, at long last, on the mountaintop at the end of the earth.

He transformed back into human shape as soon as he touched the ground and he collapsed, panting, still feeling the exhaustion of chest-and-wing muscles he no longer had. He paid no attention to the dry slicing wind that cut deep as it blew across the exposed summit. He concentrated on regaining his breath, on steadying his mind, on lowering his heartbeat. It took several minutes, but he was able to regain control of himself and stand up properly to look around.

His human eyes seemed pathetic in comparison to the ones he’d had just a few minutes ago, but they sufficed. He was able to see all around him, 360 degrees of absolutely desolate majesty. Even though he had traveled through Antarctica for months already, this was the first time that it struck him just how big the last continent really was. How many secrets were hidden beneath the icy wasteland? How many wizards had ever come here to try and find out?

Probably less than a handful, he thought bitterly to himself.

It was something he had noticed after spending a few years at Hogwarts. Everything was learned by rote, each generation teaching the next one from decaying books if any were to be found, or from their own memory in most cases. Nothing was new, nothing was ever discovered or invented. A reverence bordering on maniacal servitude permeated each and every witch and wizard’s way of thinking: the stalwart belief that ancient magic was powerful, infallible, mysterious. The older the knowledge, the more powerful the spell. New books were written by average wizards based on incomplete facts, taught by professors with a thorough yet limited mastery of their subjects, and their contents were absorbed halfheartedly by students more interested in Quidditch matches than on testing the limits of their own wondrous gift, the gift of magic. The name of Merlin was brought up at least once a day in some saying or another, but since that great wizard, that great inventor, that alchemist of magic itself, who else had come along?

The young wizard snatched his wand away from his neck and held it carefully in his pale, long-fingered hand. Thoughts flashed by, too fast to follow. He had thought he would be the one. The next…

“It does not matter now. I am here. And this is the end.”

He cast his mind away from the dreams of a teenager drunk on his own glory and forced it into the stormy waters of the great tragedy his arrogance had caused. He would not suppress the memories this time. They would come, he was sure. And he was going to drown in them.

His body shivered on the mountaintop, but his eyes were turned inward, to that beautiful British summer so long ago and yet so recent, to the mysterious foreigner, his correspondent; the first person with whom the young wizard had been able to speak, to truly communicate. He recalled the liberating feeling of letting go, of lowering the guard he had learned to keep up since he was a young boy to defend against the attacks of misinformed strangers. He remembered the vibrant notes of his own infatuation, and the echoes of something he began to think might be love.

Then the fight. Three male voices raised, shouting, demanding, pleading. Fists slicing through the air, wands forgotten. An insistent, disturbing female keening getting louder all the time. One of the male voices hollering for all of them to stop, a note of desperation in it. Then, wands pulled out of robes – and chaos. Exploding china, the dull roar of a curse barely missing him, his retaliatory rage, and in the next instant, life as the young wizard knew it ended.

There was a flash of deadly green light, but the wizard never knew whether it hit anyone. He never knew whether he had cast the spell without thinking or whether it had been one of the others, but it didn’t matter. Even as the curse flew past him, the young wizard’s eyes fell on hers and he realized the complete horror of what they all had done.

There was a blast of ravenous darkness tearing everything asunder. And then nothing but silence in the summer day. Now and then a plank of wood from the devastated room would break off to clatter on the ruins below, but for nearly a minute the wizard simply lay there, looking up at the sky, not really understanding what had happened. When he finally got up, the tragedy hit him with its full force. He found death, recriminations, cowardice, tears, and a venomous searing guilt that would never let him go.

The young wizard blinked and for an instant was almost surprised to find himself on the mountaintop instead of back in his home village. The recollections had been very intense, yet another curse of his magnificent memory. It was like living it again, except with the dread of knowing what would happen in the end. He had dared to dream big, to think he was strong enough to change the world – and the world had changed him. He had dared to be arrogant, to think he could talk down to his own family – and he had been mercilessly shown just how stupid he really was.

He had dared to love someone – and all he had brought about was death.

The wizard’s grip tightened around his wand. He had planned to be crying at this point, to finally let loose with all the sorrow he had kept bottled up as he traveled through the world, alone, like a muggle. Now that he was here, though, with the end just a few minutes away, he found that the tears would not come. He did not know why, but he had not been able to cry since the tragedy. Not at the funeral, not at the hasty abandonment and betrayal of the foreigner, not at the myriad insults and imprecations his crying brother had shouted in his face. At first he thought he was being strong, stoic even, but now he realized that it was as if his heart were completely frozen by anguish. He felt miserable, but in a cold, detached way. He had kept himself away from the truth of his loss for so long that now he was not even able to comprehend it.

The young wizard’s shoulders sagged. He was tired. He was tired of running away, tired of fighting against the guilt, tired of having the same nightmare every time he closed his eyes, tired of feeling, of knowing, of living the fact that he was an absolute failure. The fact that he had soared so high in the eyes of others before the tragedy just brought him crashing down all the harder when his wings betrayed him. Now, true emotion was buried under plate after plate of adamantine mental anguish, inaccessible, all but gone. If he was not going to cry, then that was fine by him. He had not come to the most desolate corner of the world to find solace, after all. He had come to find oblivion.

Walking back to the summit’s edge, the wizard positioned himself firmly. He hardened his resolve and discarded layer after layer of his protective clothing until he was left wearing only his knee-length underwear trunks and a sweat-stained cotton shirt which flapped loosely about his gaunt frame in the Antarctic day.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, to no one in particular. His voice was dull with hopelessness. Then he acted.

There was a reason he had come to this mountain in particular, a twisted one, but it had been his driving force nevertheless. If he was going to end his days, he was going to do it in the most dangerous place possible, somewhere where no one would be able to find him or know what had happened to him for centuries to come. He had first read about this mountain in a forgotten book of the Hogwarts restricted library section, a volume bound in the segmented shell of an unspeakable Dark creature. There had been many disturbing drawings among pages tightly packed with row after row of spidery handwriting in ancient Latin, but none more so than that of the tallest peak in the last continent. The book had called this mountain The End of the Beginning and the Beginning of the End. It was the oldest volcano in the world, the simmering energy of the magma plume underneath it of particular destructive force because it was magical in origin. The mountain which encased it did not move, even if tectonic plates themselves moved about the surface of the planet over millions of years. This mountain was the last remnant of the primordial source of the Earth’s magic: the end of the beginning – the end of the violent period after the young planet was formed when all there was on the surface was magma, ash, and acid rain. After billions of years of chaos, the planet coalesced into a world where life could form and grow and evolve, while this mountain bore witness. And the book foretold that, after an age of ages, after a billion of billions, the dormant volcano would erupt once again, and herald the destruction of all life on Earth. The beginning of the end.

The wizard’s wounded imagination had latched onto the idea of ending his own timeline at a place which was both beginning and end, and so he had come to the mountain no muggle could ever hope to find, let alone climb, so he would be alone to face the punishment he deserved for bringing about so much pain to others.

The shivers were nearly uncontrollable now, but the wizard needed his grip to be steady for this next part.

“Aeris.” A sharp skyward jab of the wand completed the spell.

It was a very old incantation made new by the wizard’s resourcefulness. Originally a weak attempt to prevent drowning by preserving a microscopic barrier of atmosphere around a wizard or witch, Aeris had fallen out of favor in the Middle Ages with the discovery of the Bubble-head charm, gillyweed and other ways to make underwater travel possible. The wizard had experimented with the original incantation, though, enough to modify it so it would now become a true atmospheric preserver around the caster, leveling temperature, pressure, humidity, heat, and air composition. As long as his concentration held, the spell could theoretically allow him to visit the deepest trenches on the ocean floor, the most arid wastelands, and the highest mountain tops without any trouble at all.

He stepped forward a couple paces, barefoot now, but his feet were not freezing anymore. His ears popped. As circulation returned to his limbs and the air around him became richer through the spell, he was able to think more clearly. The book had not said how far down the magical volcano shaft was to be found, and there was still the puzzling element of the magical barrier which would have prevented ordinary Apparition on the summit. There might be more danger here than he expected, but he acknowledged, with a wry smile, that it was precisely danger he was seeking.

Wordless, he used his wand like a conductor’s baton, moving it swiftly up and down over the rocks with what appeared to be random movements. As he did so, he kept casting a simple Echolocating charm of his own invention to gauge the relative density and depth of the rock below his feet. He walked all the way to the center doing this, and it was only there that he finally perceived a change in the echoes he was receiving through his wand. Far below, under layer after layer of tough frozen rock, there was a hollow chamber.

The wizard nodded to himself. It was about 500 feet straight down, difficult but not impossible to manage. If he was right, the hollow chamber would lead directly to the searing-hot magma pools that had remained hidden from the world for millions of years. It would be a fitting end. And the wizard was tired of dragging around the weight of his own existence.

His piercing eyes narrowed with concentration as he suddenly gathered his energy, sharpened his mind to a single point, and pointed his wand straight down. He felt the bubbling power collect within him, channeling into his instrument of power, and the word that left his lips rent the air with the absolute strength of his will.

“Reducto!”

Like a bore of red-hot steel, the wizard’s Reductor curse speared the ground, caught it, and drilled it open. He kept his concentration as sharp as the tip of the magical arrow of energy which followed his command, and instead of the rock exploding randomly like it would under an ordinary curse, it simply melted, following along the path the magic was drilling, deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain. Sweat beaded on the wizard’s brow and his legs began shaking when he was halfway through. Gritting his teeth, he willfully ignored the exhaustion which threatened to set in and kept going. There was no need to repeat the curse; the strength of his spell was such that it had established a feedback loop between target and wand tip, reinforcing itself, driving ever deeper, punching through foot after foot of solid rock despite the formidable resistance.

The wizard fell to his knees under the pressure but the angle of his wand never wavered. He kept the energy flowing and the tide of his concentration never ebbed, not even for a second. He knew he was close, and despite the fact that he knew what it would mean to reach his goal, he could not suppress the faint thrill of excitement at realizing that he was strong enough to reach the heart of this, the most inaccessible mountain in the world.

The feedback loop stopped. The young wizard stumbled, threw out his hands to catch his fall, and almost let his wand roll over the glowing edge of cooling rock in the shaft he had drilled. He snatched it back up, rolled onto his back, and tried to calm down his breathing. It took a long time, almost an hour if he had to guess. He was certain that he had drilled all the way through, but he had never maintained an unbroken flow of magic for so long and it had very nearly overwhelmed him. Simply breathing was an achievement at first, but after the hour had passed he felt strong again. Reinvigorated, even. He had not used magic in so long that there was a pleasant tingle in his body, like the welcome greeting of a friend he had not seen for a while. With a last deep breath, the wizard hopped onto his feet, approached the now-cool edge of the shaft, and looked down.

“Lumos.”

Even with the added light from his wand, all he could see at the bottom was darkness. It was really deep, and there was no way of knowing what lay down there. His Echolocation showed him only an open, hollow space, but it offered no details.

If he wanted to know what awaited him at the end, he would have to jump.

He attempted to Apparate down the tunnel, twisting in place, but the predatory gaze he had sensed earlier slammed into him and he staggered as if he had been dealt a physical blow. There was no doubting it anymore: down there, there was something which did not wish to be disturbed. The wizard’s natural impulse was one of unbridled curiosity, of the desire to widen his knowledge and find out what kind of creature possessed magical power of such magnitude as to be able to seal an entire mountaintop from unwanted visitors. He might very well be on the brink of discovering something for the very first time, a privilege few wizards ever had the chance to do. Although he tried to chase it away, the wish for new knowledge was too strong within him. He decided to allow himself this one last good thing. He would learn something new, and then forget everything forever.

The wizard tucked his arms close to his body and jumped down the shaft. There was no hesitation in his motion, even though he had no guarantees whatsoever that he would be able to cast a spell which would prevent him from falling all the way down to his death 500 feet below. He did not attempt Apparition anymore, but instead gripped his wand tightly and whispered,

“Wingardium leviosa.”

The charm was aimed at his own body, but the wizard altered the flow of magic as it was being cast to prevent his relative density from decreasing too much. He made it so his fall was controlled, with constant speed, rather than simply floating for a few moments and then falling. It was a complex bit of magic since he now had two spells to manage at once: the one he had just cast, and the Aeris charm he was still maintaining in the back of his mind. To accomplish both he emptied his mind of all other thoughts and felt, as though from a great distance, how his body descended down the shaft he himself had drilled into the mountain. He made it so he would fall slowly enough to be able to react when he finally reached solid ground, or in case of an unexpected obstruction. He was prepared for either case.

He was not prepared for unexpected beauty.

He felt no change in temperature because of his atmosphere spell, but as he went down he saw a reddish glow at the bottom of what had to be the hollow chamber he had sensed earlier. When his body cleared the tunnel entirely, however, he realized that the chamber was far larger than his clumsy spell had been able to show him. But the thing that broke his concentration was the breathtaking display of elemental beauty that he was suddenly able to see. For a second, his eyes roamed over a cavernous space so large that the entire Hogwarts Castle would probably be able to fit inside with room to spare. The ceiling was a jagged array of geometric stalactites which looked almost like claws, their sharp ends pointed straight down at the glowing pool of magma which oozed over small islands of rock, shifting from red to yellow to white as it moved, drowning the entire chamber in the glow of the fires inside the Earth itself.

The wizard was taken aback and lost his dual spell equilibrium. As a result, he dropped like a stone the remaining distance to crash, painfully, smack in the middle of one of the smaller islands of rock. Grimacing, he staggered to his feet and almost at once bent over again. The fall had not damaged him, but now that he was inside the chamber, he realized that the effort of maintaining the Aeris charm about himself had grown by at least one order of magnitude. With wide eyes, he strengthened up slowly and took in everything around him. He was inside somewhere so deadly to human beings that a large part of his energy was being spent simply in fighting against what was undoubtedly blazing heat, enough to vaporize him the instant he lost his concentration. This place had probably never known sunlight, and yet it had always been lit from beneath by the sluggish rivers of magical magma which had permeated everything in here over millions of years. Rock which should have melted ages ago remained solid, and magma which should have cooled long ago continued to glow. Even the harsh, uneven walls of the chamber thrummed with elemental magic, as he was able to ascertain by reaching to his left and running his fingers across the surface. The wizard had come all this way to find an easy, instantaneous end, a way to atone for his past mistakes, but never had he thought he would find something like this. The mere thought of documenting it, and going back to Britain to write a book on –

No.

The wizard frowned, the reddish light from below giving the impression of wrinkles on his youthful face. His mistakes were unforgivable. To go back would be to face that which could not be faced, to live a life not worth living, to spend each and every day in the agony of guilt and regret. He could not do that. The mere thought of spending one week, let alone one year or an entire lifetime feeling like he usually felt was too much to bear. He had already decided, after all. He had come all this way… And now here he was. Nobody would find him in here for a very long time, if there was even anything of him left to find. Nobody would know. He would be forgotten, and that was good. He did not wish to touch anyone else’s life anymore. A person like him would bring only darkness to the lives of others. Better to end it here, in a single painful instant, and not harm anyone else ever again.

All he had to do was let go. The second he stopped channeling his protective charm, the searing heat would destroy his body. He would explode as the water in him instantaneously turned to steam, then become ash, then nothing.

Just a little step now. Let… go.

He took a last, deep breath. As he let it out, he lowered his wand. He looked around him one last time, found the place in his mind where he was still channeling magic, and –

“Ah!”

The cry was involuntary. From behind the largest rocky island, a pair of golden eyes was watching him. Surprised, yet somehow not scared, the wizard watched back as that predatory gaze, one which he knew very well already, fixed itself upon him. It felt as if he were being judged, right then and there, by a creature capable of looking into his very soul. After a heartbeat, the golden eyes became imperceptibly softer in their look and the wizard found he had been holding his breath. He was able to gulp in air once, only to let it out again in another cry, this time not of surprise but of absolute awe.

The wizard fell to his knees out of an instinctive need within him to show respect to a magical being of such magnificence. As the eyes retreated and then rose up again, over the lip of the rocky island, he was able to behold the creature which had made its nest on the most inaccessible mountaintop in the world, keeping it safe through the ages with its powerful magic.

The female phoenix jumped up into the air and flapped once, lit from below by the light of the Earth’s molten core. She was so beautiful that the wizard could only admire her, mouth agape, as she hovered effortlessly in the searing air of the underground chamber. Her wings were intricate arrays of razor-sharp feathers that looked almost metallic under the red light, enormous limbs when compared to the size of her body, making her look threatening in a primal, undeniable way. From her lithe body armored with feathers which were subtly different from those on her wings, two long, gold-scaled legs moved forward and back, ever so slightly, with every single one of her flapping strokes. Her legs ended in wicked curved talons, jet black, glistening like obsidian over a fire. Just behind them, like a prize no wizard could ever hope to reach, three beautiful tail feathers stretched all the way down to the ground, thicker than the other feathers, each one of them a unique work of art in shades of ruby, gold, and amber. Their underside was incredibly intricate, like filigree of spun gold glowing softly with an inner light of its own. The magic held in those three feathers alone was beyond comprehension. But it was her head which truly took the wizard’s breath away.

Her sinuous neck was extended forward as she looked at him, appraising still, her golden eyes drilling into his soul. Just in front of them, a golden beak was held tightly closed, glinting and appearing to change its color depending on the kind of light it reflected. The short, amber-hued feathers on her head swept back, around her eyes, and on to the mark of her status and age, that which the wizard doubted anyone else but him had ever had the honor to witness: Her crest. It was a semicircular array of feathers around her head, a wreath around a queen’s neck. Yet this queen was wreathed in flame. Like a peacock’s tail in miniature, the feathers fanned out to create an impression of size and power which, in this case, was no illusion, for each of the long, ruby-colored feathers ended in a tip of blazing fire. It was no ordinary flame which framed the majesty of this airborne queen. The wizard could feel the power surging forth from her crest, drowning out everything else about her, beautiful though she was from beak to tail. He was still on his knees, looking at her, drinking in the vision of a creature which could very well be the oldest magical being in the entire world.

Female phoenixes were rare enough. There were males in England which were routinely sought after for wandmaking, but the young wizard had only seen one female, and that after a school friend had made him swear not to tell anyone about her. It was that friend’s family’s greatest secret, and the wizard had been impressed to see a female, even from afar. Yet she had been small, for all intents and purposes identical to a male except for the beginnings of a little crest around her head. That female was hundreds of years old according to the wizard’s friend, and the only one in Britain. A priceless creature if there ever was one.

And yet, this one, right here, was a true queen. The magic emanating from her was ancient, as ancient as the red-hot magma encased in this chamber since the End of the Beginning. She had probably lived here for millions of years, dying, being reborn, and dying again in the endless cycle of the fiery phoenixes. Her age was incalculable, her life experience incomprehensible for someone as insignificant as him. She was magic incarnate, power and beauty, toughness and fragility, patience and frenzy combined.

The young wizard got to his feet slowly, keeping his head bowed as he would when meeting a hippogriff. The phoenix queen hovered above him, flapping almost lazily, showering him with sparks from her wingtips every time she did so. After he felt the pressure from her gaze ease, the wizard looked directly at her again. He wanted to tell her something, but realized it would be meaningless. He had disturbed her enough. The best thing he could do now was leave, if he dared.

The precarious equilibrium between the gazes of phoenix and wizard held, stretched taut, for another heartbeat. Then a deep groan of the rock above them made the wizard look up, just in time to see a hairline fracture spider its way across the cavern roof from its origin at the edge of the tunnel he had made. The fracture stopped halfway over the largest rocky island and it was followed by brief silence. Then a rumbling, ominous vibration of the ground itself betrayed the fact that the fracture was only the beginning. There was a deafening snap of rock breaking apart above the wizard’s head, a sudden widening of the fracture, and then complete silence. Even the tremors stopped – for a moment. Then the ceiling of the cave collapsed.

An enormous chunk of rock detached itself from above, crumbling as it did so, and the wizard barely had time to throw himself out of the way. He landed on thick, gelatinous lava and groaned at the sudden drain in his energy as his Aeris spell fought to keep him from combusting. The giant rock hit the ground a second later with earsplitting intensity and the force of an earthquake. Dizzy, blinking away dust and grit, the wizard managed to grab the edge of the largest rocky island and pull himself over. He rolled a couple of times to avoid any more falling debris before climbing to his feet and looking around.

Now almost directly above him, the phoenix queen still hovered as if nothing had been the matter. The wizard turned to look at the tunnel entrance he had created only to find it had been completely blocked by the cave-in. His magical drilling must have destabilized what had been a carefully balanced geologic formation and now the cave itself was full of debris, ranging from large slabs of rock to tiny stones that rolled all the way to the lava pools only to begin melting immediately.

“I am so sorry,” the wizard said to the phoenix. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

He raised his wand. Reparo would certainly not do the job, but if he combined it with another spell somehow, he might be able to fix the worst of the damage. In order to give himself a better vantage point, the wizard backed a few more steps away from the rubble, towards the center of the main island.

On his third step, the phoenix swooped down. It was only sheer animal instinct that made the wizard duck at the last moment, realizing he was being attacked. Her talons nicked the top of his scalp nevertheless, leaving twin wounds that burned like fire.

“Wait!” the wizard yelled. “I can fix this!”

He took another step back and she fell on him again, eyes blazing, talons forward.

“Protego!”

She pierced the Shield charm as though it wasn’t even there. This time one of her talons sliced the top of the wizard’s right shoulder, his wand arm. He cried out in pain and almost dropped his only means of protection. He didn’t understand why she was attacking him all of a sudden when she had been so calm before. What had he done? What had changed?

She was turning around for another attack, gliding through the air in the effortless way no other bird could ever hope to match. As she came around, the wizard saw her predatory gaze and felt fear. She was in her element here. The heat fueled her own flames, heightening her magic. Here, he was prey.

Panicking, the wizard stepped back again – and his foot sank on something soft.

The phoenix screeched, in real anger this time, plain in the magical echoes of her voice. She swooped down again and the wizard was forced back, narrowly avoiding another fiery scratch. As he fell, though, his hands sank through the same soft material he had felt before. He looked behind him and saw ash. It was a circular hollow full of smoldering ashes into which he had fallen, right in the middle of the island. He had not noticed before because the ashes were so similar in color to the rock that they blended in almost perfectly. Everything was gray… except for that.

He gasped as comprehension crashed down on his mind. Hidden among the ashes, he could see a fragment of ruby red, a hint of a curved surface.

This cave was the phoenix’s den, certainly, but he had just stumbled right into her nest.

He crawled away as fast as he could, throwing himself to the ground for the second time in a very short while to avoid another airborne attack. He understood now. The phoenix could have killed him several times over already but she had merely scratched him, trying to force him away from the precious thing that was hidden in her nest. The wizard’s theory was proven correct when, as soon as he was a safe distance away, the phoenix queen stopped attacking him at once and hovered, now at shoulder height, halfway between him and the nest.

“Sorry,” the wizard told her. “I didn’t know it was your nest. I apologize, I truly do.”

The golden eyes drilled through him as if weighing the truth of his words. Then they slid away from him, implying acceptance and grudging tolerance.

But in the next instant, the phoenix screeched louder than ever.

She surged forward and the wizard braced himself for an impact, but she was paying no attention to him. Confused, he followed her path and realized she was hovering above one of the nearer chunks of rock which had broken off from the cave ceiling. She was circling it, snapping her beak at empty air, her tail feathers stiff behind her and her crown flaring with bright flame. She made a couple of swooping attempts at the boulder itself but never actually touched it with her talons. It was as though she was… afraid.

The wizard approached carefully. This particular boulder lay across the nearest magma channel from him, close enough to the edge that part of it had already begun to soften and glow as it melted. There was a crack down the middle of it from the fall, although the boulder itself was still in one piece for some reason.

“What on Earth…?”

He looked up at the distressed phoenix and back down at the rock. He got as close as he dared and cast a careful Scrubbing charm with a wordless flick of his wand. The charm got rid of all the dirt which had accumulated over the rock for millions of years.

When he saw what was left behind, the wizard’s eyes widened in shock.

There was a strange metallic sheen to the boulder. The thing itself was about as long as the wizard was tall, thick on the side yet compact. There were deep scores on its surface, and the entire lower section of it looked as though it had melted and cooled in sudden and extreme temperature shifts. The ruddy light from the magma was somehow absorbed by the huge chunk in a way that made the wizard shiver. He did not need to cast an Alchemy spell to know the origin of the object which had been freed from its rocky tomb by the cave-in. It was a thing which had not come from Earth. It resembled metal on the outside, but no metal or alloy from this planet could ever have such a terrible aura about it.

The crack down the middle of the meteorite widened suddenly, making the wizard jump. Above him, he could hear the frantic flapping of the phoenix queen and he wondered whether she knew something he did not. She was ancient, after all. During the Beginning, she must have seen hundreds of thousands of meteorites strike the surface of the planet. If she was alarmed now, then it must be because there was danger around. Something which posed a threat even to her.

There was a wet squelching, a ragged snap, and a hiss as of pressurized air escaping. The meteorite broke cleanly in two… and revealed horror given form.

It came from the dazzling and unexpectedly complex innards of the meteorite. Now that the wizard could see its cross-section, he realized that the layer of metal was actually very thin. It encircled a much thicker layer of dull rock, which gave way to an intricate lattice of a material impossible to describe, at once reflective and dark, three-dimensional yet flat, spidering around the inside of its rocky capsule like the fractally distorted surface of a caterpillar’s cocoon. The cocoon itself was relatively thick, covering nearly the entire inner volume of what was left of the meteorite, except for the very center. There, the strange lattice gave way to a spherical space no bigger than a fist. Something oozed out of that space, slowly, falling at first and then stopping only to fall again in a different direction, ignoring the laws of physics entirely. It was a black sludge unlike anything the wizard had ever seen. He could understand why the phoenix had been scared. That thing, that strange liquid, was something even worse than Darkness.

As it oozed down, it also appeared to evaporate, which would make sense given the extreme temperature inside the volcanic cavern, but the vapor it created made the wizard tremble just by seeing it. It gave off cold, a deep, penetrating numbness that ignored his magical barrier entirely. It was not physical cold, either. It was something more ominous, more paralyzing. He felt as though his soul itself was experiencing each and every frozen coil of the black vapor that rose to the cavern ceiling. There, the vapor did not disappear. It pooled and shifted, neither liquid nor solid, like a twisted mockery of human memory in a Pensieve. Sometimes it appeared to form complicated patterns in a single dimension, two, three, and a few times the wizard sensed patterns which went beyond that, to an additional dimension he could not comprehend.

He stole a glance over his shoulder. The phoenix queen hovered very close to him, all signs of animosity forgotten as the two of them looked at a thing which the wizard was certain had no name. Goosebumps on his skin made him shiver in response. He was in the presence of a fragment of something which was Nothing. He was certain of it. Not many wizards cared to follow muggle science, but he did. Astronomy had revealed to much of the world things which centaurs and wizards had known for centuries: the Earth is not the center of the universe. It is part of a family of planets circling a single sun, and further away there are other suns, countless, even within the relatively small limits of the Milky Way galaxy. Nevertheless, telescopes allowed the muggles to see further than any magical being had ever cared to watch. They had discovered asteroids between planets. They had seen dozens of comets. They had also looked beyond that and seen other galaxies, nebulae, and all kinds of interstellar anomalies. Muggles had recently proven that the universe was expanding with their direct measurement of universal background radiation, proof that the universe had begun with what they humorously called the Big Bang.

The wizard knew all of this. He also knew that certain muggle mathematicians were working out equations and models to explain such things as time dilation, gravitational fields, singularities, and many other physical phenomena. Their theories, while carefully designed, would remain flawed because they lacked certain critical knowledge which made it possible to understand the universe itself. In this area, the wizard believed he was alone among his peers since he knew of no other magical being who had embarked in the study of Nothing.

The universe was full of stars, yes, but by and large, these stars and their planets, asteroids, comets and so on represented a very small fraction of the total substance of which the universe was composed. In the dark spaces between galaxies, even larger clusters of what could only be called dark matter existed. This dark matter emitted dark energy, and were muggles ever to discover it, they would only be able to do so indirectly. Dark matter could not be seen because it was not matter but something else. It was the opposite of matter in a way, but its true nature remained a mystery. Stars and galaxies in the known universe attracted one another. The larger the object, the larger the gravitational pull. Dark matter, however, pushed things away. It was the terrible, inescapable force which drove the expansion of the universe to its ultimate destiny of complete isolation, an incomprehensible collection of things that are not. This dark matter was not necessarily evil, or at least not in the traditional sense. Good and evil, light and darkness, were both manifestations of the universe the wizard could understand. Even magic, with its good and bad sides, was simply two aspects of a force that could be shared by certain inhabitants on any planet. The Void that came from beyond the stars, though… It was inimical to life. It was as indifferent to good as it was to evil. It was annihilation.

The remainder of the thick sludge pooled on the rocky surface of the cavern island, forming a perfect circle between the two halves of the meteorite from which it had come. Neither the wizard nor the phoenix moved at all while the strange liquid evaporated. It took perhaps thirty seconds in total for the entire thing to become black wisps which were now spreading out over the entire cavern roof, losing consistency and color as they dissipated. If the trend continued, it would not be long before the vapor vanished entirely into nonexistence.

The wizard was not looking at the vapor anymore, however. He was looking at what it had left behind.

Motionless on the rock, seven transparent orbs rested. They were tiny, hardly larger than a cherry, but instead of a pit each of the orbs held something inside, a fragment of the roiling, icy nothingness of the Void. In the space of two heartbeats, the wizard realized with growing horror that the orbs were transforming, ever so slightly. Each of them was sprouting pair after pair of legs.

The phoenix queen screeched and dived straight at the cluster of things come from beyond the stars. She was fast, but the orbs were faster still. The wizard screamed in animal terror as the seven transparent creatures plopped onto their rows of short, squat legs and scurried away in all directions like cockroaches fleeing from sudden light. The phoenix struck the ground right in the middle of them, hard enough to crack the rock under her onslaught. The wizard caught a glimpse of her talons piercing the soft transparent membrane of one of the creatures, which burst open like a rotten plum. The Void inside the victim vanished into true nothingness as soon as it made contact with the air. It had been a quick, clean kill. For a moment, the wizard dared to hope.

Then he realized there were six more to contend with. He looked everywhere, desperately, knowing that if the things chose to hide there would be no finding them since they were so small. He finally spotted one of them as it ran straight into the fiery river of molten rock which separated that island from the one the wizard was standing on. He rushed to meet it.

And he stopped dead.

The second the creature touched the magical magma, it began to grow. As it moved, increasing in size, it left behind a disgusting layer of cracked, dry rock, jet black and dead. The wizard watched in horrified fascination as the creature advanced in a seemingly random zig zag. Every second it spent on top of the magical energy which had burned ceaselessly for millions of years, it grew even more. In its wake there was nothing left. And now the wizard could see, out of the corner of his eyes, the black zooming paths more of the creatures were leaving as they fed upon the magical energy of the Earth itself, draining the chamber as they went.

The creature he had watched first stopped zigzagging and aligned its body straight towards him. The wizard realized that the thing was now about the size of a large orange, big enough for him to see the intricate detail of its repulsive body. It was shaped like a giant isopod from the ocean depths, a nearly cylindrical body with evident segments along its back. The legs were short, thick, and articulated like those of a millipede. Its outer membrane was still mostly transparent, although now it looked cloudy, allowing for only a partial look at the core of black, roiling Void in its center. Where an isopod would have antennae, the creature had nothing. It was blind, its front end indistinguishable from the rear, and yet the wizard felt deep inside him that he was now the target of the creature’s hunger. He backed away and raised his wand. The phoenix queen flashed by his field of view for an instant as she dived yet again, hopefully to kill another creature. He could spare no attention for her, however. He sensed that an attack on him would come any second.

The thing looked like a disgusting, swollen grub as it waved its dozens of legs in the air, trying to climb the shelf from the magma to the rocky island where the wizard waited. It managed to do so after some effort and plopped down with more force than was needed, rolling all the way once before managing to grab the soil with its legs. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been for the trail of desolate emptiness it had left on what had been the Earth’s oldest source of magical magma. The molten rock still glowed, but interspersed in its flow there was now a jagged path of black which was not melting. Even the ground of the rocky island itself, though mostly devoid of magic, appeared to flinch at the touch of the creature. It turned ever so darker in its wake, easy to see now since the creature appeared to have locked on to the wizard and it rushed forward as fast as its legs could carry it.

The wizard aimed.

“Reducto!”

He had intended to blast the creature apart. The spell hit it… and it was absorbed. The thing kept coming.

“Petrificus Totalus! Stupefy! Incarcerous! Flagrate!”

He cast four spells in quick succession, his wand a blur, so fast that no wizard would have been able to block all four. The petrifying spell was absorbed, just like the attempt at Stunning. The ropes from the Binding conjuration burst out of the ground, wound themselves around the creature, and vanished. The fiery rope from the fourth spell disappeared almost instantly and the creature grew as it drained its power. It developed an additional segment and its cloudy membrane became completely white. At the same time, the wizard felt magic power being leeched from him and it was only by using the entire force of his will that he was able to sever the connection.

Sweating, he stumbled back. He knew true fear at that moment. He was certain that, were he to touch the creature, the protection from his atmosphere spell would vanish. Worse than that, however, would be what happened if he allowed the thing to latch on to him and drain all the magic from his body. He was not certain he would even die. A wizard’s soul has a spark of magic in it, the same spark that animates ghosts. As such, would the creature be able to siphon it away? Would it be… like a dementor’s kiss?

“Get back!” he shouted at it, desperate. His mind raced. “Duro!”

The Transfiguration spell was absorbed just like the others.

There was an angry screech from the phoenix somewhere behind him and to the right, but it might as well have been on another planet. The wizard’s entire world had shrunk to himself, the creature, and the diminishing distance between them. The thing was moving unhurriedly now, as if certain of its kill. The trail it left behind was a testament to its one and only purpose, something even worse than evil, because at least evil was the flip side of good. This here was no evil. It was consumption, annihilation. The spawn that had burst forth from the corrupted meteorite was composed entirely of –

“Drainers.”

The wizard spoke the word aloud and everything stopped. For the space of a single heartbeat, each one of the surviving creatures simply halted wherever they were. The wizard’s eyes darted up and down and side to side, taking stock of as much as he could watch. Two Drainers were clinging to the ceiling. Two more were standing on magical lava pools. There was one just underneath the phoenix queen, and the one in front of him. For that instant, all six of them appeared to look at him with their abominable, eyeless heads. The wizard felt a rush of relief at realizing that Drainers were not immune to all kinds of magic after all. He had just Named them, and by doing so, he had given himself and all magical creatures of his world a measure of power over them.

It was one of the most ancient forms of magic, and one of the most powerful, used by fledgling witches and wizards in the time before history. When language among Homo sapiens was yet to be developed, they had discovered that linking an utterance and a thought to a being or thing granted them power over the object of their attention. If their magic was strong enough, they would be able to Name something for all time. The particular word might change as language evolved and mixed with others, but the core of the Naming remained unaltered. The young wizard knew that it had been a common practice between magical people in the past to hide their true names from one another, precisely because the words held so much power. Knowing someone’s name would have allowed an enemy to manipulate his victim anyway he saw fit, regardless of protective charms. Desperate for protection, an isolated wizard might choose to Obliviate himself so even he would forget his name. A sufficiently skilled Legilimens could break through memory loss, however. Uncovering hidden names became an increasingly brutal practice with a few evil winners and countless devastating losses. It was only after Merlin’s Change that the nature of true names was altered and modern magical society was able to take shape, with curiosity instead of fear of one another, cooperation instead of fighting, learning instead of conquest.

But at this moment, the young wizard was faced with something no one else had ever seen before. By Naming the vile creatures, he had anchored them to his reality even if they were inimical to it. The bond was a double-edged sword: the Drainers would be deadlier than ever, linked as they were to the primal magic of the world. Should they escape, even a single one of them would be able to drain the entire planet through that link, given enough time. However, the link also made it possible for the wizard to sense them better, to understand them. It was barely a shred of hope, but it was hope nevertheless.

The heartbeat ended. Savagery broke loose once more.

There was a bright burst of flame near the ceiling and a particularly angry caw coming from the phoenix queen. At the same time, the Drainer nearest the wizard surged forward on its many legs. Soundless, its rushed approach was much more menacing than a lion’s roar.

The wizard acted without second-guessing himself. He raised his wand, collected the power he felt at its tip, and directed it down through his own body. He boosted the power of the spell with his own magical essence and pushed it further down, past his core, through his legs and the soles of his feet. Willpower alone overcame the resistance separating him from the living rock of the cavern. Magic flowed from him into the ground itself.

The wizard focused on the approaching threat and narrowed his eyes. The ground rumbled as an echo to his words.

“Avara manus.”

He stabbed forward with his wand, guiding the energy, and the next instant the rock around the attacking Drainer came alive. With the cracking and snapping of giant boulders being torn asunder, a hand made of living rock burst out of the ground, palm facing upward, exactly where the Drainer was standing. The hand was at least ten times bigger than the wizard’s, but when he clenched his own hand into a fist, the clawed fingers of the rocky hand mimicked his motion with irresistible force, trapping the creature, threatening to puncture its disgusting membrane as soon as one of the claws made contact.

But the contact never came.

The wizard felt it as if it were happening to his own hand. The magic animating the Transfigured rock was leeched away hungrily, with dizzying speed. The clawed fingers were only halfway closed when they stopped moving altogether and the hand froze in place like a helpless parody of a sculpture, inert and useless.

The wizard’s eyes widened in shock. That had been one of his most powerful Transfiguration spells, a hand which could move too fast to see, strong enough to crush the life out of any wizard and tough enough to shield him even from the Killing Curse. But he had no time to waste mourning. The Drainer scurried between the gap of two rocky fingers, its cylindrical body squishing and expanding as it pushed itself through the narrow space. It was maybe four paces away.

The young wizard blinked. Magic could not hurt them because it could be drained. But… What about objects which possessed no magic in and of themselves?

The Drainer put on a final burst of speed, close enough now that the wizard could see what appeared to be individual plates developing on its mushy back. His wand was already moving before he had fully formulated his plan, but his instinct had never let him down before. With hope burning in his chest, he slashed at the air with his wand.

Diffindo. Accio.

Soundless, his double spell hit one of the claws of the drained hand. The harmony between the incantations was such that the instant a clawed chunk of rock was severed, it was already hurtling towards him at top speed.

The Drainer was one pace away.

Mutare.

In the fraction of a second it took for the rocky claw to reach him, the wizard twirled his wand in a closed loop, tracing the infinity symbol. The ferocity of his concentration achieved something he had done only once before in his self-taught Alchemy sessions. Instantaneous transmutation. The entire claw segment’s composition was altered by his magic. Electrons were swapped around. Neutrons were distributed and protons forced together. The energy of the nuclear fusion was collected into the claw tip, but the wizard allowed it to disperse into the aether. No magic could ever kill that thing… but a metal claw certainly could. As the transmutation ended, the rock now ended in a wicked claw made of steel, polished to a mirror sheen, sharpened to the width of a single molecule.

The creature leapt at him right as the claw reached his wand. This time, the wizard shouted.

“Repulso!”

Faster than a cannonball, the claw shot forward and down with an incredible burst of magical energy. An instant later, the wizard severed his charm entirely.

The Drainer was impaled by the claw and sent flying so far back that both projectile and creature ended at the very edge of the island. The claw had gouged a deep cleft in the rock as it went, along with bits and pieces of milky white membrane. Panting, wand held at the ready just in case, the wizard approached until he could see everything properly. The steel claw had cleaved the thing in two and left almost nothing except for some shriveling pieces of leg segments behind. Looking up, the wizard could see the black vapor of the Void in the Drainer’s core dissipating as well. It was dead, completely gone. It may have been able to withstand powerful spells, but not a simple sharp projectile.

A shiver made him turn around. He saw nothing on the ground, but then another Drainer dropped down from the cave ceiling and landed between him and the phoenix nest. At first the creature appeared indecisive, weaving back and forth as though considering which prey was best. Its behavior confirmed what the wizard had already suspected: the flash of ruby he had seen earlier among the ashes was indeed a phoenix egg.

“Over here!” the wizard shouted. “You want me!”

The sound appeared to decide the Drainer. It slowly turned around with a smooth wiggling of its many, many pairs of legs. This Drainer was different from the one the wizard had just killed. A carapace had grown out of the incipient plates he had observed earlier, covering it entirely in a segmented shield of deepest black. Its legs were also black now, and longer than when the creatures had been white. Now the myriad appendages looked powerful instead of clumsy, sharp and deadly instead of stubby. Its body was raised more above the ground, nearly at knee level, and the Drainer was larger too - far larger than any arthropod on modern Earth would ever be. As it approached, the wizard was irresistibly reminded of a giant pill bug, something grown to monstrous proportions and made terrifying because of that simple fact. Although the Drainer still had no eyes, it had developed what appeared to be sharp, twitching mandibles underneath its front end. They sliced at thin air, again and again, the closer it got.

This time the wizard was ready for it. He Summoned the same claw he had already used, aimed carefully, and shot it forward with as powerful a Repulsor charm as he could manage. An instant before impact, he severed the magical connection like before so the projectile could not be drained. There was a sharp, high-pitched impact as of metal hitting metal.

The claw bounced off and fell into a lava pool, where it immediately began to melt.

Horrified, the wizard watched how the Drainer had protected itself by rolling into a tight ball about as big as a Quaffle, exactly like a pill bug would do when threatened. There was a dent on one of its hard exoskeletal segments, but it wasn’t even a crack.

He looked all around desperately. The phoenix queen was fighting one of the Drainers at the far end of the island. Two more were running around everywhere there was lava… And the wizard was made aware of a change that had been so gradual he had not noticed it in the middle of the battle. It was getting darker inside the cave. As the Drainers sucked out the magic from the molten rock, it cooled and became solid ground, completely dead and devoid of magic and light. In fact, where before there had only been a few islands in a sea of lava, now it could only be said that there were some lava pools in the mostly cold, rocky ground as light waned and shadows grew.

The Drainer nearby uncoiled, its legs waving obscenely in the air when it ended up falling on its back and had to right itself. The wizard had only a few seconds and he was out of ideas. He could not conjure items to fight with because the items themselves would be magical and useless against a Drainer. He could Transfigure the rock around him and attempt more projectiles, but he was already near the end of his magical stamina after performing so many complex incantations with little pause. There was nothing he could do. Even a muggle would have a better chance against a Drainer than he could at the moment, since a muggle would probably carry a gun. No magic could ever win.

There was a harsh screech, a heavy thump, and then a horrible cracking sound. The wizard looked to the left instinctively and saw that the phoenix had pounced upon her prey, grabbing it from behind. She took great care to keep her magical feathers out of its reach as the monstrous pill bug thrashed on the ground. She forced the monster flat against solid rock after some effort and then used her talons and beak to rip apart one of the plates covering its back. The second it was done, she plunged her beak into the weak spot in a single expert, deadly motion.

The Drainer trembled once. The phoenix came up with the Void globule inside the creature and crushed it in her beak. The Drainer stopped moving instantaneously and the Void dissipated. The phoenix screeched in victory and defiance and flapped up, gaining altitude to find another enemy.

No magic can destroy them, the wizard thought to himself, feeling an idea form in his mind. But raw nature can. Beak and talon. Predator and prey.

He swallowed. What he was about to attempt had, to his knowledge, never been done before. And yet it was the only way. If he wanted to fight, he would have to change.

There was no choice at all. The wizard fragmented his concentration into two sections of equal importance, balancing them both with all the magical skill he possessed. The first fragment was devoted to maintaining Aeris. With the second fragment, he transformed. He pictured talons, a beak. Huge wings, larger by far than his body, and a nimble, mobile head. He guided the Animagus transformation while simultaneously keeping the protective magic about himself and he was shocked yet relieved when the change was complete and he had not burst into flames from the intolerable temperatures inside the cavern. He had done something of which there was no record at all. An Animagus could not cast spells in animal form – but he had just proven that a previous spell could be maintained by the careful balance of thinking simultaneously of retaining his avian form and funneling energy into the protective shield.

The Drainer closest to him regained its footing, surged forward, and hesitated for an instant, appearing almost confused to find a bird of prey where before there had been a human being. That moment was all the wizard needed.

He unfurled his wings and took off with a hop and a powerful beat aimed straight down. Very few non-magical birds were able to take off vertically from a standstill, but he was one of them. Once airborne he flapped hard several times until he was almost level with the cavern ceiling. He coasted forward until he was positioned exactly on top of one of the few remaining pools of lava and used the strength of the hot air rising to keep himself aloft as he assessed the situation.

The phoenix queen was fighting with a larger version of the Drainer the wizard had just been engaged with. The thing had clambered halfway up the rocky wall, making it harder for her to reach it. A second Drainer still rested on top of one of only two remaining lava pools, growing, feeding with magic. The last enemy was approaching down below, silent and blind yet unmistakably threatening. The wizard had a feeling it had locked on to his energy signature and would not let go until it reached him.

If he had been human, he would have smiled. Instead, he screeched out his challenge and dived.

Air rushed silently past his feathers. He tucked in his legs and made his body compact and streamlined, taking advantage of gravity at the same time he calculated his trajectory and point of impact. With hearing ten times as sensitive as that of his human self, he made minute adjustments to his wings in response to the scurrying of the creature below. It took him less than a second to become the living equivalent of a bullet accelerating down with pinpoint accuracy. A heartbeat later, he let go of his actions with his human mind and let instinct take over. This was his specialty, after all. Striking from above for the kill.

Animal reflexes roared to life inside him as the bird of prey he had become locked on to its next meal. Silent as death, he fell as fast as he could until the instant before impact. At the very moment he hit the Drainer, he thrust out his legs and smashed them into the carapace of the blind creature, adding his own strength to the brutal force of the crash and forcing the prey to bear the brunt of the shock. His razor-sharp talons broke through the Drainer’s armor as if it were nothing but the skin and fur of a small rodent. Using his same momentum, he clenched both sets of four talons and shredded the tough outer layer of his prey. The Drainer was stunned, but only for a moment. Then it thrashed violently, arcing its body in extreme ways that revealed the repulsive, whitish connective tissue between its individual segments. The bird of prey reacted without thinking. It plunged its beak as far down as it would go in the hole it had created, looking for the spine or the heart.

The nodule. The Void nodule.

The human thought was heard, but only dimly through the red-tinged haze of a raptor thirsting for warm meat. The feedback from his beak and nostrils made no sense. The inside of the prey was not hot. There was no blood. He could only feel something chilling, something which made even a fearless bird of prey hesitate. The human part of the wizard used this brief hesitation to assert control. He gripped the carapace of the Drainer even tighter as the thing tried to coil itself into a ball, while at the same time he dug further in. He pecked and tore through the strange emptiness and cold slime that were the creature’s innards until his beak bumped against something elastic yet resilient.

I have it.

He clamped his beak down on it and tore it out with a violent jerk of his neck. The Drainer stopped moving at once, and as soon as his head was free, the wizard closed his beak on the nodule. It offered pitiful resistance before it burst open. The wizard flapped away for a couple paces, clicking his beak to rid his tongue of the brief but unforgettable taste of the Void. That was the hunger driving the mindless shells that were the Drainers. It was a thing whose only purpose was to annihilate. It fed on magic, and –

The wizard paused. He had not realized it while his mind had been filled with bloodlust, but he felt… cold. He could still breathe, but although his sense of smell was almost nonexistent in his animal form, he could still perceive an ugly and pungent, metallic odor in the air. Understanding came at once.

I no longer have Aeris. The Void took it.

He jumped up to gain altitude. The only reason why he hadn’t combusted was because there was almost no lava left. In fact, the cavern had cooled with unnatural speed and he could see the culprit as it gorged on the one remaining outlet of magic in what had once been the scorching abode of a phoenix queen. That Drainer had grown, far more than the last one the wizard had killed. And as it had grown, it had changed.

The creature was probably as long across as a human being by now, with row after row of spiked legs supporting its bulbous, cylindrical main section. Its carapace plates were far thicker now, and each of them was lined by forward-facing spikes. At the end of its body an appendage had burst forth, weaving sickeningly in the dim twilight which soon diminished as the Drainer consumed the last of the magic lava’s energy. The appendage was flexible like a tentacle, yet plated like the tail of a scorpion. On its tip, it flared out like a nightmarish version of a carnivore flower. There were at least a dozen stiff hairs branching out from a funnel-shaped central piece, and at the end of each of the hairs there was a multifaceted, unblinking eye. The funnel was lined with teeth, and it collapsed upon itself regularly as if eager to latch onto something to devour.

Revolted, the wizard flapped to get as high as he could and prepare for another diving attack. He turned his neck for a fraction of a second to look to the right, where the phoenix, now with several feathers drained black, was entangled in a ferocious fight with a slightly smaller version of the other Drainer. She weaved to and fro, dodging the tail stabs that the creature rained down on her. A single mistake could cost her far more than her life.

The wizard halted his ascent, spreading his wings wide. In the time it took him to flap once to position himself correctly, the large Drainer left its spot on the lava pool leaving only a tiny crack of heat and light. The cave was nearly pitch black now. Then it advanced to position itself right underneath the wizard, stealthy under the cover of darkness.

Were I any other bird, you would have the advantage now, the wizard thought. But I can still see you, monster. I can see you clear as day!

The wizard followed the path of his enemy as it approached. He noticed, with a twinge of horror, that there were two leathery flaps protruding from the midsection of the Drainer’s carapace. They looked unfinished, as if the creature had run out of energy before he could finish growing them. Yet there was no mistaking that they were incipient wings.

No time to waste.

The wizard was scared, but threaded through his fear there was something else, something he thought he had lost forever. It was the will to protect others, even at the cost of his life. He could not allow this Drainer to escape. Left unchecked, it would grow until it devoured the entire planet, then the moon, then more planets until it finally darkened the sun itself. The enormity of the devastation it would be able to unleash was almost beyond comprehension. It needed to end here. It needed to end now.

He tucked in his wings, angled his body and dropped like a stone. The second before impacting right between the Drainer’s wings, he thrust his legs forward and slammed them into the carapace of the creature.

The impact jolted him so hard that he nearly lost balance and had to flap to correct his stance. It felt as if he had crashed against a solid wall, and glancing down, he was dismayed to realize that his talons had not even scratched the surface of the black carapace.

A sudden current of air.

His animal instinct forced him to jump out of the way, and not an instant too soon. The grasping, segmented tail of the creature slammed into the very place where he had been standing. Flapping with awkward urgency, the wizard watched as the tail sucked greedily on the spot for a moment and then let go. It retreated, but the flower of eyes all around it flexed and moved this way and that, looking for him. Soon they found him and the creature struck again.

The wizard twirled in midair and brought his talons to bear on the thinner section of the tail as it flashed by. He managed to hold onto it and squeezed tight. The creature below him squirmed and whipped its tail back, but the wizard did not let go. He clamped onto the tail with the wicked tip of his curved beak and shredded a fragment of it. At the same time, he squeezed the claws on every talon through the plating and had the pleasure of feeling the creature shudder in what must have been unmistakable pain. Emboldened, he let go of the tail with his beak, angled his body back, and thrust his beak forward to sever the appendage once and for all.

The Drainer curled itself up into a ball. The motion was so sudden and so forceful that the wizard was thrown off and sent spinning until he crashed against the rocky ground. Dazed, he used his wings to prop himself up and looked back. The Drainer was uncoiling, and at the same time, twin black leathery flaps finally broke free of the prison of its carapace, articulated with segmented bone supports. They were the membranous structures for wings it had begun to unfurl already, as it flapped them with sickening, wet crunching noises. It managed to raise its front half a little bit off the ground under its own lift, but then it crashed back down. It was clearly not able to fly – yet.

The wizard flapped hard to rise in the air, but he had not covered more than his own human height when the Drainer was already upon him again. He had no momentum whatsoever, yet brought his talons forward and raked the creature’s carapace while at the same time twisting his body to avoid the thrust of the deadly tail. The clash brought forth sparks, dazzlingly bright in the chilly darkness of the cave. Without allowing him a moment’s reprieve, the Drainer turned around and tried again. The wizard flapped in a way no bird would normally do and made use of his lightning fast reflexes to grab the whipping tail and sink his beak into it. He had grabbed it nearer the base this time, where the carapace plates were thicker. He barely managed to gouge a narrow wound before the savage thrashing of the Drainer sent him flying through the air again. He flapped frantically and managed to gain some altitude, which he used to his full advantage. He climbed all the way to the ceiling of the cavern and dived again, aiming only for the creature’s tail.

He saw everything as if lit by floodlights, even under the meager light coming from the remaining crack in the ground and the fire from the phoenix queen’s crown. The Drainer’s tail was whipped up, as high as it would go, opening its many eyes to fix them on his incoming shape. The wizard was able to make out each globous lens, and each individual tooth inside the funnel of the creature’s maw as he tucked his wings against his body for the fastest dive of his life. Each and every scratch from the Drainer’s legs against the ground was registered by his sensitive hearing and he compensated for the motion as he fell. The wizard waited until the very last second before arcing his body up, feather tips trailing a smooth current of displaced air, and once again slammed his talons into the –

Wham.

Pain. Something cracking, motion, going too fast. Black. Motion again.

If the wizard had been human he would have screamed. Instead he hurtled through the air, silent, long enough for him to regain consciousness after the savage blow from the Drainer’s tail. Like a whip, it had struck him in midair and now he was tumbling uncontrollably. The wizard tried to open his wings but all he got in response was pain. Then he crashed against the cavern wall.

Consciousness almost slipped away from his mind but he managed to cling onto it. His reward was agonizing pain. He was upside down. And he could hear something scratching, getting closer. He panicked and hopped back onto his talons, and this time even the bird in him screeched in pain. One of his wings was broken. The other one had almost been torn off. There rose in him a different kind of violent panic, adding to the first one. It was the total certainty of death from a cornered animal. He was a bird of prey with no wings. He was already dead.

The wizard’s ears detected motion. His nimble neck swiveled a full half-circle and he looked behind him, upon the charging shape of the bloodthirsty Drainer which was rushing forward to finish him. Its weight was enough to make the ground rumble. Its tail swished through the air as if voicing its mindless hunger.

I came here seeking death, the wizard reminded himself. But not like this. Not without a fight!

He overpowered his animal instincts with an act of will and hopped forward, gnashing his beak as threateningly as he could. The Drainer resembled an ironclad train with no brakes as it rushed at him, but the wizard met it head on. Just before impact, he hopped sideways and forced his broken wing to flap. It was excruciating but it worked. The Drainer surged past him and screeched to a halt, its sharp legs digging into the stone with the sound of dozens of jagged fingernails on a chalkboard. Stumbling, the wizard managed to regain balance just as the Drainer curled in around him, trapping him in a curve made of abominable carapace plates. Now that it was so close, the wizard could truly see the complicated array of scythe-like mandibles on the underside of the monster’s front end. They moved ceaselessly, silently, and it was these that the Drainer brought forward in order to finish its prey. In the split second before the deadly lunge that was sure to come, the wizard hissed out his defiance and faced his executioner with a beak open for attack.

The Drainer struck. The ground trembled.

Wildly, the wizard pecked at air twice before he realized that he was not dead yet. What was more, there was a light above him which radiated warmth. A light bearing a struggling horror.

The phoenix queen hovered overhead, her crown aflame. Each downdraft of her powerful wings pushed hot air down onto the battered form of the wizard, who looked up at her in wonder. Her feathers reflected the golden light and her eyes were full of menace. She had never looked more magnificent, or more terrifying, that at that moment while she clutched the squirming body of the Drainer in her talons.

She was incredibly strong. The Drainer was easily twenty times her own body size, but she held her own and resisted its attempts to curl up into a ball by tugging hard enough on its carapace that the wizard heard something crack. Looking at the enemy now, the wizard realized that he had not yet been able to look at the full underside of the Drainer yet. Aside from the mandibles, it was completely transparent and it looked soft. Vulnerable.

The wizard locked eyes with the phoenix queen. She clicked her beak impatiently while looking back at him with the ferocious intensity of an apex predator. The message was clear. He ignored the pain in his wings and hopped closer, obeying the unspoken command. The phoenix brought the Drainer down until its rows of scrabbling legs were almost touching the ground but not quite. Maybe his wings didn’t work anymore, but the wizard still had talons and a beak. He could still kill.

There was sudden motion on his right. The wizard looked up just in time to see the phoenix dodge the savage downward strike of the captive Drainer’s tail by flattening her body. He screeched, trying to warn her, but again she looked at him with a determination that would not tolerate any questions. The wizard jumped up and attempted to stab at the underside of the creature while avoiding the dangerous legs, but the Drainer was suddenly lifted way up, higher than he could reach it. Alarmed, he hopped back and saw a fight to the death. The phoenix queen had been forced to fly higher to avoid the tail, and now she dropped almost all the way down, narrowly missing the whip once again. She did not let go and did not allow the creature to touch the ground. When the next attack came, she glowed very brightly for an instant and flapped so hard that the wizard was almost thrown back by the surge of hot air. She rose up to the ceiling while still carrying the thrashing horror. The wizard realized she was attempting to position the two of them against the cavern stalactites so the dangerous tail would be of no use.

She flapped once more, with incredible power. There was a crash as both phoenix and Drainer smashed against the rock overhead. Then the two of them came hurtling down.

The wizard lost no time. He hopped forward, flapped awkwardly despite the pain and was very close indeed to the impact site. The Drainer smashed against solid ground far more violently than a simple free fall would have meant. Recognizing the fact that the phoenix queen had given him this opportunity, the wizard dived straight in.

The creature must have been stunned, because there was no attempt to coil into a ball or to stab at the wizard with one of the many legs as he plunged the curved end of his beak into the rubbery membrane of the Drainer’s underside. It was tough, but not tougher than mouse flesh and sinew. He slashed open a vertical wound and used it as a foothold for his left talon. The far greater strength of his main killing tools meant that he was able to tear open a wider gash before long and use both legs and his beak to demolish the resistance preventing him from reaching his goal.

The Drainer shuddered as the wizard finally broke through. He sensed motion, but ignored it completely and plunged his head into the entrails of the thing. He used his talons to push, gouge, and slice at any resistance while he pecked at the strangely geometrical entrails all around him. He could see them, and it did not occur to him that it was strange until he realized that the Drainer’s innards themselves gave off a sickly glow. By its light, meager though it was, he was quickly able to discover a pulsating sack right above him, threaded by what looked like veins which bent and split at unnatural ninety-degree angles.

This time there was definite violence in the motion of the Drainer. The wizard pushed his entire body into the creature and grabbed the fleshy sack with his beak. Upon tearing it open, a flood of cold, black liquid permeated everything, coating even his own eyes and leaving him blind. Now panicking, since the cold appeared to seep into his very soul, he pecked and tore until he was able to get his head inside the sack. He clicked his beak randomly, searching for resistance, but the inside appeared to be empty. And he was running out of air. He had to go back. He had to try some other –

Something small and rubbery bounced against the side of his beak. He snatched it out of the air with a raptor’s reflexes, while gripping the Drainer’s cold innards with his talons as hard as he could to withstand the wild thrashing the creature was now doing. The wizard’s feathers were soaked now. When a particularly violent buckle ripped his entire wing off for good, he very nearly passed out. But he held on. There was one thing left to do and it was a very simple thing. He just had to close his beak.

He forced it shut with all the ferocity left in him and the Void nodule burst open. The vile, cold taste he had experienced before filled his tongue, but with it came the certainty that the Drainer was dead. The wizard felt how its entire body went limp as its core was destroyed and all he could now perceive, even despite the pain, was relief. He forced his way back out of his fleshy, ooze-drenched prison, and although it took a very long time because of the awful pain in his stump and in his broken wing, he made it at last.

The cavern was quiet and dark. After shaking off enough of the dark ooze to be able to see, the wizard realized that the Drainer had landed dangerously close to the phoenix nest in its death throes. No damage had been done, however. And now, as his augmented sight zoomed in on all the carcasses strewn about, he realized the entire ordeal was over. All seven Drainers had been destroyed and they were no longer a threat to the world.

The wizard considered transforming back to avoid the pain, but he sensed that the phoenix queen would prefer to acknowledge him in this form. Hopping carefully, anticipating her impatient and regal look, he made his way around the monstrous corpse of their mutual enemy. He gave a wide berth to the mandibles which, although motionless now, still looked incredibly dangerous. With a couple of more brave hops, he landed at last on the other side of the creature.

No!

His bird form screamed the word his brain had shouted in horrified surprise. The ruthless clarity of his raptor vision revealed the reason why the Drainer had not prevented him from tearing open that initial gash in its underside. It had not been stunned, as he had supposed.

It had been feeding.

The wizard felt an entirely different kind of panic supercharge all of his nerve endings as he transformed back into human shape. The darkness was impenetrable for his natural, inferior eyes, but the image of the phoenix queen crumpled on the ground was burned into his memory forever. The avid tail of the Drainer had attached itself to her back like a monstrous leech, and yet she must have kept her iron grip on its carapace, since the wizard had been able to kill the creature only because it hadn’t been allowed to roll into an impregnable ball of iron plates.

In the dark, he saw a flicker of a flame where she was and hurried forward. His feet felt clumsy under him, but they were faster than the talons of a flightless bird.

“Curare brachium.”

He cast the healing spell on himself as he walked and felt the immediate relief in his right arm. He Sealed the stump of his missing left arm to deaden the pain and prevent any blood loss for the moment. He would have to go to Saint Mungo’s at the earliest opportunity to have it regrown. The process would be painful for certain.

Lumos.

His silent command revealed the brutal scene before him and yanked his attention back to the crisis at hand. He was horrified to realize that most of the plumage of the phoenix queen had turned black, everything except for a few feathers around her neck and her head. He tried to fight back tears as he Vanished the corpses of the Drainers with a savage slash of his wand. He fell to his knees and was just in time to cradle the head of the phoenix on his lap as the hollow traces of the despicable creatures returned to Nothingness and Everything.

“No…” he croaked, his voice trembling. “No, no, no!”

The magnificent crown of flame which had taken his breath away when he had first laid eyes on the phoenix queen had been extinguished, drained of all magic by the monster. Even as he watched, another one of her golden feathers was claimed by the black stain that was spreading through her body, signaling her inevitable end. By the light of his wand he could see the wound that the Drainer had left behind. There was cold emanating from it, even though there was no Void left to guide it. The last of the phoenix’s magic would simply drain away and there was nothing he could do…

“Fight it!” the wizard shouted. “Please, fight it!”

She looked up at him with eyes that conveyed the acceptance of what could not be avoided. Even in her condition, she managed to communicate without speaking. The wizard realized she felt no fear. It was he who was trembling.

“I can save you,” he whispered desperately. “I can –”

She lowered her head again. Inky blackness claimed most of the feathers in her head. The wizard felt her breathe in, and out.

That was it.

“No. No.” The wizard raised his wand, wild. “Incendio!” The Conjured flames shot forward and impacted the phoenix, but instead of reviving her they were merely absorbed by the horrid substance that had taken hold of her body. “INCENDIO!” He put his entire magical energy behind the spell and a torrent of flame nearly engulfed him. When his energy gave out and the heat dissipated, though, she remained motionless on his lap. Dead.

The wizard’s wand clattered to the ground. A phoenix was dead. Because of him. He had committed one of the most unspeakable abominations in the magical world, a crime not even withstanding a dementor’s kiss could atone for. Phoenixes were immortal creatures, revered since the earliest history of wizardkind for their power and magic, but even more so for their ability to be reborn even after death appeared to claim them. Each living phoenix was precious and irreplaceable. As far as wizards knew, they almost never reproduced. All phoenixes were wild and needed no protection, however. Even the most formidable enemy would be vanquished in the end by a creature that could be reborn from its own ashes as many times as it was necessary.

All of that was valid for an ordinary phoenix a few thousand years old, like the ones which could be found in Britain. But what the wizard had done had no name. He was responsible for the permanent death of a female, and not just any female. He was certain that the phoenix queen had been the most ancient one of her kind, one of the only magical creatures who could actually remember the end of the beginning, born of the heat and light of a newborn planet taking shape.

I killed her. It was my fault.

He choked down a howl of sorrow and covered his eyes with his one remaining hand, pressing the palm down, hard, over his face. Bitter tears flowed through his fingers. He increased the pressure, now digging his fingertips into his own flesh, squashing his broken nose under his palm without even noticing the pain. His ruthless logic and formidable intellect were merciless in the reconstruction of the events that had led to the tragedy he had caused.

I wanted to punish myself.

I chose to come to Antarctica.

I chose to come to this mountain.

I felt the magical resistance of the phoenix queen and I did not leave.

I drilled through ancient rock in my desire to satisfy my curiosity.

My drilling dislodged the meteorite.

If I had never come, the Drainers would have remained trapped as they had been for millions of years.

I killed her.

His nose throbbed with pain and he had a horrible echo of the very same thought experienced in another place and another time. Right after the funeral.

I killed her.

He saw himself in his mind’s eye, walking away after the brawl between brothers which had scandalized everyone at the wake. He found a dark corner and tried to cry, but found he couldn’t. The only thing he could think of was what his own brother had shouted in his face: that it was all his fault. The wizard knew deep down that it was true. It was his fault for being arrogant. It was his fault for dreaming about conquering the world. It was his fault for neglecting his sister. It was his fault that the horrible darkness had broken away from her. It was his fault she had died.

And now, here he was. A murderer once again. Having caused another irreplaceable loss in the world.

I killed them both.

It was my fault.

Tears came in earnest this time as though the dam had finally been cracked open and he could no longer repress the throat-rending howls of pain and misery that escaped from his lips. He bent over the motionless body of the phoenix queen and cradled it like he had cradled his sister’s body, and the two tragedies fed one another in a vicious cycle and mingled in his mind until he realized he was teetering on the brink of insanity. A human being could not bear so much pain, wizard or not. Each heartbeat was living agony, with fresh thoughts stabbing him like spears driven into his flesh. He replayed everything he could have done differently here in the mountain and back at his home village. He heard every imprecation which had been directed at him. He shouted the fact of his own guilt to himself with violent thoughts, adding to his pain and sorrow. Soon he had fallen down on the cold ground of what had once been the inextinguishable source of the Earth’s magic. Even that he had destroyed.

He felt dizzy. He was hoarse from screaming and moaning, making sounds that did not seem human anymore. His one hand still supported the head of the phoenix queen and he found he could not let go, because to let go would be to accept the enormity of his crime. There was no punishment fit for one such as him. The wizard realized that not even death could atone for what he had done. He shut his eyes tight and gave himself over to despair. The pain kept coming, relentless. He accepted it and demanded more. He was not fit to live. He was not fit to love.

Then something changed.

The wizard opened his eyes, his head still resting on the hard ground. Something was different in the cavern, but he did not know what it was. He remained as motionless as possible, his chest still heaving in the aftermath of his outburst, and tried to determine what it was. The sensation was strong, like something flowing into him which crashed with the thunderstorm of his anguished feelings. It was… It was…

Warmth.

The wizard’s eyes opened wide in shock as he realized that the source of the warmth was coming from his hand. Where the phoenix queen… rested.

In the near-absolute darkness, the glow was at first a hint of visual input and then a bright lantern shining through black-tinted glass. The wizard’s mouth dropped open as he realized that the phoenix queen was not dead yet. She was shining from within, even though her feathers were black.

The wizard scrambled onto his knees, hoping yet not daring to hope. The phoenix queen opened her eyes. She looked up at him for a very, very long moment. Then she moved her head ever so slightly until it bumped against the wizard’s hand. She paused for a moment and then gave another feeble push in the same direction. A longer pause was needed before the next push, weaker than the last. All the while, her golden eyes did not leave the wizard’s own.

One last push made the wizard’s hand slip off the edge of a now-familiar hollow in the cavern floor. His hand sank an inch or so before landing on something soft and flaky, which remained inexplicably warm.

The phoenix queen rested her head on the ground and looked at him with deep intensity. A heartbeat later, the wizard understood. He nodded solemnly in her direction and sank his hand deeper, sifting through the ashes with his fingers. It was only a few seconds before the back of his hand brushed against something solid. He grasped it carefully and pulled it out.

The wizard could not suppress a gasp of awe.

The phoenix egg he held in his hand was the most beautiful object he had ever seen. The shell was flawless and transparent like glass. Spiraling around it was a whorl of raised-relief ruby which no man-made jewel would ever come close to imitating. And inside… He could see into the egg itself, and in fact its light bathed the cavern with a beautiful red-gold glow. Yet the phoenix egg showed him not the developing hatchling, but its essence: inside the shell, there was a miniature whirlwind of fire and ash. It shifted and turned in mesmerizing patterns, occasionally offering just a glimpse of something golden at its very center. The phoenix egg was like hope made corporeal. It was beautiful enough to take the wizard’s breath away and to dampen the storm of emotions in his own heart.

The phoenix queen stirred and the wizard hastened to bring the egg to her. She closed her eyes for a moment, resting her head against it, and then pushed the egg away. Back into the wizard’s hand. She looked at him, still speaking volumes without saying a word.

The wizard nodded, crying now because he understood what she wanted.

“I’ll take care of it for as long as I live,” he vowed to her. His heart was breaking.

That was when she began to sing.

The wizard was stunned by the mournful beauty of the melody the phoenix queen was gifting him with. He watched as the glow coming from her body shifted from red to orange, then yellow and finally white. She began to give off not just warmth, but heat, and to the wizard’s utter astonishment she managed to hop upright. And still she sang.

It was music that touched his heart and soul as it echoed off the cavern walls. She sang of eternities beyond memory, of strength, of patience, of wisdom. She sang of joy and hope reborn millions upon millions of times. As she did so, the wizard could feel the egg in his hand responding to the voice of a mother. The phoenix queen appeared to sense this and she flared out her wings, black now yet glowing from within, in magnificent defiance of the fate that had befallen her.

My fault.

But the phoenix’s song changed as soon as the wizard’s thought was formed. She looked at him now, with ferocity and intensity but also with respect. She sang to him of being strong in the hunt, of learning from mistakes, of becoming even stronger. She sang to him of wounds and enemies, but also of the warmth of the nest. She sang to him about defiance.

Tears still flowed down the wizard’s cheeks as the phoenix queen jumped up and flapped several times until she was hovering high above him and her egg. Her song was about overcoming obstacles now. About finding strength in weakness and growing because of it. Each flap of her powerful wings bathed the wizard in warmth as she defied the cold and darkness around them with the power of her own life. The wizard realized what was about to happen and fear clutched at his heart.

Her song, slower now, spoke to him about death. There was no fear in her notes, not even because she was the one creature who should have been immortal. She sang of death as a friend, as a powerful thermal current which would lift her wings and bear her aloft in the air, beyond the world and everything she had known, and into something… new.

The glow about her body appeared to die down, but it was being concentrated inside her chest. Her song was barely audible now.

I’m sorry. It was my fault. Always.

She looked right at him at that moment, and her gaze softened into her equivalent of a smile. Her song grew bittersweet, and yet was all the more beautiful because of it. Now she was singing to him about forgiveness. About giving others a second chance.

An instant later, the glow in her chest reached maximum intensity. Her song was interrupted and the wizard felt the colossal effort the phoenix queen placed into this final act. He barely had time to brace himself before she released all of her remaining magical energy in a blinding nova that obliterated her own tainted body, and yet freed the soul within. The blast of heat and light was strong, but not deadly. In its aftermath, the wizard realized he could breathe a little bit easier. He blinked his eyes quickly and looked as soon as he was able to, but there was no trace of the phoenix queen left, not even ash. She had died, then. Truly and completely – but on her own terms.

As the warmth dissipated, cold took its place. The memory of the phoenix song was still inside him, in his memory, but the darkness was creeping back into the wizard’s soul. He was alone, again. He was guilty, again. One more bitter tear slid down his cheek.

There was a crack.

And the wizard realized that he was not hearing the phoenix song in his memory only. Blinking, disbelieving, he watched as the fire and ash inside the egg he was holding whirled violently, sending out sparks. The shell cracked again, then burst open. And out of it, phoenix song came out.

Resting on the palm of his hand was a newborn male phoenix. The wizard’s heart skipped a beat. The instant the hatchling looked into his eyes, the wizard felt a magical bond being forged for life. And the hatchling was magnificent. This was his very first birth, so instead of being ugly and naked, it was instead a miniature version of a fully grown phoenix. His red and gold plumage took the wizard’s breath away. He could already imagine that he would be a fitting descendant of his powerful mother once he had reached adulthood.

But it was the phoenix’s song that truly reached his soul.

The wizard did not know how, but the hatchling continued his mother’s song right where it had left off, and sang to him about forgiveness. The wizard opened his heart to this tiny phoenix like he had not done to anyone else and let him see the wounds of the past. He was not judged. The hatchling flapped energetically instead, to hover level with the wizard’s head. As he undertook his first flight, he sang of the beauty of love. His song was like a magical torch shining on each and every dark corner of the wizard’s mind. The phoenix sang about loss and mourning, because even though he was a hatchling he knew what it was like to lose a mother – and yet, he still sang about forgiveness. The bond between wizard and phoenix grew stronger the more they shared, and when the wizard admitted, deep in his heart, to having felt the hopelessness that led to suicide, he received love in return.

The phoenix sang to him about a future together. His song sublimated the wizard’s sorrow into something beautiful and the wizard realized at long last that he was hurting so much because he was still able to love. The realization was shared by them both, and as the wizard cried healing tears, the phoenix sang about hope.

It was a long time before the song was over, or perhaps it was not long at all. All the wizard knew was that, when the young phoenix settled onto his palm, he felt whole again. He knew he would remember his losses, and his guilt, but now he had gained a measure of wisdom.

He placed the hatchling on his shoulder and bent over to pick up his wand. He lit it and surveyed the cavern which had once been a phoenix nest.

And could one day be so again, he thought to himself. Already, he saw bits and pieces of the seemingly dead rock crumbling away to perhaps reveal lava pools underneath. The magical source of magma deep below him had barely been scratched by the onslaught. There was hope here, for the future. And there was also hope for himself.

“Hold on tight,” the wizard said to the hatchling.

Then he turned in place and reappeared on the mountain summit with a crack. There was no barrier to Apparition anymore.

“Aeris.”

The wizard looked around one final time. The snowy Antarctic landscape seemed more beautiful, somehow. The sky above was limitless.

He felt the phoenix shiver on his shoulder. Phoenixes tend to not be very fond of the cold.

“Oh, forgive me,” he said, picking the hatchling up and stuffing it unceremoniously down the front of his shirt. He chuckled, and then marveled at the fact that he could laugh again. “You’ll be comfortable there.”

The wizard turned north and began walking. He had come to this place feeling alone in all the world. Now he left it with the warmth of a friend for life, snug against his breast, and hope still singing in both their hearts.

The End

Note from the author: I believe this is the first time ever that I write fan fiction, and while I do not expect for it to happen many more times, I did have fun writing this story. It is particularly important for me because it has been about six months since I stopped writing because, just like our young wizard, I have been feeling as though an invisible dementor was shadowing my every move. When you are so far down in the darkness of your own thoughts, light cannot reach you. Words, advice, beauty and nature – nothing can reach you. It is no use running away from what begins as bad thoughts and bad feelings and soon becomes numbness of the soul. My own soul is not magical but there is a spark of light inside it which I like to call hope. I thought I had lost it, but I am trying to recover and rebuild myself from the ashes of what I used to be. I am also not a phoenix, but I am inspired by their strength and there is more than one way in which one can be reborn.

This story, then, is about everything I’ve been going through, spoken the only way I know how: by telling a story. As a protagonist I have used the character who has always been dearest to me because I see myself in him in so many ways. I lack his Gryffindor courage and his wonderful wisdom, but I have been guilty of arrogance, of clutching my secrets too close to my heart, and of having ruthless logic and intellect which can sometimes be more of a burden than a blessing. I could learn a lot from him, and I deeply respect the work of the author who created someone who touched my soul. That is what writing is all about.

Thank you for reading.

-Albert Nothlit

P.S. – I chose that Animagus transformation for the young wizard because, although specializing in Transfiguration, we are never told which animal he transforms into. At the same time, people in the books constantly complain about never knowing how such an important character can come and go out of Hogwarts, unseen, when he does not want to be seen. A powerful Disillusionment charm would do the trick, of course, but I like to believe instead that we have seen him coming and going from Hogwarts many times already… every time we look up at breakfast time, for instance, should it strike his fancy to deliver the mail. 