Chapter Text
The Killing curse rebound- it should have been the end. The victory… it wasn’t.
10 years later…
Harri limped towards the plinth, air coming shallow and thin in the cold air. She knew what she had to do, what the remaining option was. Everyone was dead. Well not everyone, but everyone who mattered, who fought, who cared. The war should have ended 10 years ago, the ‘Final Battle’ as the newspapers had briefly reported, should have been final. But it wasn’t. It was only 7 days after the battle that Voldemort was resurrected after all.
Harri gritted her teeth against the memories that filled her brain. The dead, the dying, the tortured and raped, the children, the disfigured or infected. Her loved ones as Inferi before they learnt they should have burnt the bodies when the people fell. And the sheep that bowed to the Dark Lord, that refused to fight and chose not to flee. They and the death eaters were who remained. That was what Harri told herself.
She had become ruthless in the last 10 years, gone was the child who couldn’t cast the cruciartis curse, she had tortured and maimed and killed in the years gone by, she was ruthless. Yet this would be beyond all she had done before.
Harri realised she had been standing at the plinth for several minutes already. Minutes she could ill afford. This room lay deep in the Department of Mysteries, much deeper than her fifth year explorations of the department had been. It was a forbidden room. It was a room created to house a failsafe that no one should ever use. But what other option was there.
Wizarding Britain was lost, so utterly, so completely that Harri knew what she was doing was the only way forward. It was only a matter of time before the muggles discovered the existence of magic, and then all the magic societies around the globe would be hunted. It could be the end. Or Harri could stop it here, now, forever.
The plinth was round, made of a solid silver-like stone. It reflected the faint light of the few candles in the darkened chamber. The top was flat and no object stood upon it- the plinth was the weapon. On its surface lay circle after circle of runes, lines blended and twisting, turning in on themselves to create something powerful. And deadly.
Harri breathed in and out. She could do this. She would. And may mother magic judge her for she knew what she was about to do would be unforgiveable to any alive. Harri pressed her hands to the edge of the circle top, and the stone sliced through her palms. The plinth began to glow.
She watched as the blood began to pool and run through the runes, from the outer circles to the inner ones, closer and closer to the centre, as the plinth grew brighter and brighter. Harri vaguely heard banging from the chamber door, but it was too late, far too late. A humming grew from the very earth beneath the plinth, growing louder like static and wind and rain mixed together. Her blood neared the third last circle. Pressure like 30 thunderstorms compressed filled the chamber. Second circle. A stifling heat of hottest desserts rippled into existence. Last circle. The humming grew, a thudding beat of a heartbeat, a thousand beats of a humming birds wings.
Her blood touched the centre.
Everything stopped for a single heartbeat. And then the light exploded, the heat turned cold, the earth stopped living. A rushing sound like the winds of the earth all came towards this spot- and.
Screams filled the chamber, thousands of them, Harri wanted to cover her ears her eyes, the screams of thousand beings, the screams of animals and plants, of merfolk and centaurs, of unicorns and of babes, children and people. The sound of a sentence worse than death for all those magical in Britain.
The sound of magic being ripped away from any that dwelled on the islands of Britain. Being ripped from the very earth. The end of magical Britain.
It took a minute for it all to end.
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Harri sat there for hours looking at the plinth that had ended the war.
Ripping the magic from living things hurt, of course it would- she hadn’t expected to feel the earths pain as she did so.
But it was fair, Harri thought. Fair that the one to use this creation would be the one to experience all the pain and still live.
Most had died from having their magic taken. Harri would say about 95% of living magical beings had died. All the plants had died. All the lesser sentient but magical creatures too. But the beings- only 95%. Of the remaining 5%? 3% had gone insane- they were blabbering messes that would never ever recover. 1% had become comatose, they would never awaken. And the last 1% had survived, if you wish to call it that. They were squibs. That in itself was not such a big issue though. The big issue was that they were meant to have magic, they would feel like their link to life had been severed. Worse than a missing limb, a part of themselves was gone and would never return. Harri instinctually knew that most would succumb to deep depression or suicide within a matter of years or months.
The plinth had ended the war. There was no magical Britain left. Voldemort was gone, he was one of the 95%. No exposure to the muggles. And no foreign wizarding nations would come to claim the land. This land was empty of magic and would feel wrong to any with magic who stepped on it. Harri could attest to that.
The nature of the plinth was that the one who used it, the ones who were in the chamber at its time of use- they would retain their magic. So Harri alone was the last magical in Britain.
Harri wished she was dead.
She didn’t know how to move from this spot. What would she do now? Submit herself to the International Confederation of Wizards, run, live as a muggle? She didn’t want to be here. She wanted the end that she had given everyone else. She couldn’t feel anything anymore but the wrongness of the earth upon which she sat.
It may have been days later that she finally moved. And she was not conscious of her actions till she opened the door to the chamber and saw the dead who lay outside it. Her first instinct was to burn the bodies. Then she realised no one could make them into Inferi anymore. She smiled as she stepped over and around the corpses. It felt strange to not burn them. Habits were hard to break. People broke more easily.
She had drifted to the end of the corridor when she sensed it. It which shouldn’t exist.
Magic.
She quickly walked towards it, turning twice before reaching the door with a simple rune carved on it. The Jera rune. Harri stroked the two triangular lines, trance-like, in an anti-clockwise motion, and the door opened.
Inside was ice. The room was covered in frosty ice. The department held all kind of mysteries, but Harri hadn’t expected this. Jera meant many things, fertility, harvest, cycles, years—Time. And in the frozen room suspended by pure magic was a time turner made of ice. There was no sands in its hour glass, it looked empty, or more like filled with air. Harri walked around the hanging time turner her mind only half on the object in front of her. Possibilities floated through her head, Sirius and fifth year, Cedric and fourth, or Halloween 1981. She could prevent it all. She could stop so much death and destruction, save everyone. She could stop Vold-
Harri stopped walking. She could stop Voldemort. She knew where he was born. She could stop him before any of it began. One death, a million lives saved. She could stop him.
As if reacting to her thoughts the room began to warm, the magic holding the time turner shimmered, and Harri reached for the device of ice, thinking nothing more than the December night upon which Tom Marvolo Riddle was born. Ice touched her skin and the world span out of time, taking her along with it to another one.