Chapter Text
The world spat him out.
Cedric hit the grass hard, ribs jolting. Cold air harshly flooded his lungs. The smell of smoke and blood coated his nostrils. His hands scrabbled for purchase; His nails dug into damp earth. And, another body slammed down beside him.
His glasses lay askew and broken, his limbs folded wrong, and his head lolling as if the life had poured out of him mid-fall and hadn’t bothered to tidy him up afterward. For a heartbeat, the world was silent. Then, it roared. A tidal wave of cheering crashed over the stadium. Thousands of voices erupted into celebration. Fireworks exploded overhead painting the sky in gold and silver. It was deafening.
Cedric blinked through the crowd’s thunderous joy, trying to understand where he was, what he was seeing, and why his heart pounded as if still trapped in that graveyard with a monster rising before him. He pushed himself to his knees. Every motion felt a half-second delayed like wearing a suit of someone else’s skin.
The cheering continued. They thought he’d come back victorious. His gaze fell to Harry again. Lifeless eyes fixed on the sky with a vacant, glassy stare. The stranger inside Cedric had seen that stare before on gurneys, under harsh police lights, and behind yellow tape in the ruins of his childhood home. It was the expression of a person whose story had ended mid-sentence. Coiling dread pooled in his abdomen.
He opened his mouth to warn them, to say, “There was a resurrection ritual! A creature rose from a cauldron! You don’t understand what’s happened,” but all that came out was breath. Nothing coherent slipped past his lips. The noise swallowed him whole.
Then, a piercing scream cut across the cheers like a blade. A second scream joined it. The waves of cheering buckled, stumbled, collapsed under the weight of horror finally understood. Faces turned toward the center of the field. Fireworks cut off mid-explosion. Gasps rippled through the crowd. The mood flipped in an instant as joy curdled into terror. The stranger felt it physically like the stadium itself was exhaling in shock.
Harry’s friends were the first to reach them. A girl with frizzy hair and panic-bright eyes dropped to her knees beside Harry. Her fingers trembled as she touched him. A red-haired boy made a strangled sound that didn’t belong in any language. Someone shouted for the headmaster and the Ministry. Hands closed around Cedric’s shoulders, pulled him upright, and demanded answers he couldn’t give. Cedric’s father was there, somehow already there, clutching his head and staring at him with a trembling mixture of relief and devastation.
The stranger tried to speak. He tried again and the words wouldn’t form.
Everything felt too loud, bright, and crowded. The emotional weight in the air was suffocating: grief, terror, disbelief. All of it pressed into him as if trying to force Cedric’s appropriate response out of him.
He didn’t have one. He didn’t know Cedric. He didn’t know this world.
He knelt again beside Harry’s body because it seemed like the expected place to be. A shaking hand touched his back.
“Cedric,” someone whispered shakily. “What happened?”
He looked up at her, at all of them, and the truth rose unbidden:
“I don’t...” His voice cracked, foreign in his own ears. “I don’t know how to say it.”
Dumbledore’s arrival was quiet compared to the chaos. Storm blue eyes widened with shock as they fell on Harry. The headmaster knelt beside the boy’s body. He laid a trembling hand upon Harry’s chest. For a moment, no one breathed.
Then Dumbledore’s face broke, but not in sobs or sound. It was the terrible, aging silence that deepened on the lines in his face and cracked his brow into a furrow.
It was the first time the stranger saw what this world felt for Harry; It could not be described as hero worship, idolization, or obsession. It was love. The raw, communal agony of losing someone so loved crashed through the stadium like wildfire.
He felt utterly alien in its glow. Their grief was a language he didn’t speak. As the screams, sobs, and shouts built into a hurricane around him, he understood something with cold clarity: Whatever he was meant to do here, it began with a death that wasn’t his.
The screams did not stop. Harry’s body lay between them like a broken axis the world kept trying and failing to spin around. He swayed when he stood. The ground felt unstable, as if the grass might give way and return him to the graveyard at any moment.
Officials were pushing through the crowd now with robes trimmed in officious colors, expressions tight with urgency and dawning fear. At their center, the Minister of Magic’s pale and bristling eyes darted from the body on the ground to Cedric’s face.
“What happened?” the Minister demanded. “What happened in there?”
Silence rippled outward. Thousands of people held their breath. Beside the Minister, Albus Dumbledore stood very still. His eyes were fixed on Cedric. Blue eyes filled with expectancy, weight, and waiting. Cedric felt the scrutiny like a blade laid gently against his throat.
The image of the graveyard rose sharp and undeniable. He catalogued what he had seen: a graveyard, cauldron, bone, blood, flesh, and a white, white body reforming from nothing.
“A man performed a ritual in front of me.” His voice carried strangely across the stadium. It cut cleanly through the air.
“Another man was created from the ritual. He summoned others. People in dark hoods. They answered him.”
A murmur shuddered through the stands.
“And then,” Cedric continued, each syllable deliberate, “he killed Harry Potter.” The sentence left his mouth and echoed twice. He felt it reverberate through bone and blood and through marrow that was not originally his. He felt the truth of it strike twice like twin bells tolling.
He killed Harry Potter.
He killed Harry Potter.
For one nauseating instant, he was outside himself, above the field, and above Cedric’s body kneeling in the grass. He saw the shape of it. Harry’s small frame lay broken on the ground and somewhere beyond the veil another boy collapsed in the same green light.
Because he had died. He had felt it. He had stood in that graveyard too. The world tilted. He gripped the edge of his focus like a drowning man gripping driftwood. He inhaled. The sound of his own breathing was too loud. Around them, the words spread like contagion.
“Harry Potter is dead.” It was a mantra passing from mouth to mouth.
“Harry Potter is dead.”
The Minister stepped back as if struck, aghast. “That’s absurd,” he breathed reflexively then glanced at Harry’s body and swallowed the rest. But, the crowd had already accepted it. Harry’s friends were sobbing openly now.
Dumbledore had not moved and his blue eyes never left Cedric.
“What man?” the Minister pressed. His panic sharpened into anger. “Who was it?”
Cedric swallowed. “Lord V-” His own lips faltered to form the words. He mouthed them with renewed determination, “Lord Voldemort. He used a Killing Curse.”
The crowd recoiled as one organism. The Minister’s face was drained of color. “You’re saying You-Know-Who—”
“I am stating,” Cedric said.
The declaration hovered, thick and electric. Dumbledore did not flinch and his gaze further sharpened.
Cedric felt it then. He faltered mid-breath. The stadium tilted again. His balance went strange and the world narrowed at the edges like ink bleeding inward. For a moment, he thought it was simply the press of attention or the flood of noise and light, but something warm slid down the side of his neck. He reached up instinctively and his fingers came away wet and red. Heat blossomed belatedly across his skin. Blood flowed from a thin line along the side of his neck and slipped darkly against the mustard fabric of the tunic blooming in a slow, horrifying stain. He had been hit. The Killing Curse had not struck Cedric cleanly in this world, but something had. However, he hadn’t felt the impact. He just realized, distantly, that he must have been hit with something in the graveyard.
His ragged breathing grew loud in his own ears. The air scraping in and out of lungs suddenly felt insufficient. Cold crept through him with vicious speed and drained the warmth from his limbs. Sweat coated his skin, slick and clammy under hundreds of watching eyes. He staggered a step. The Minister recoiled instinctively.
Someone shouted. “Make room! Move aside!” A man broke from the faculty and ran toward him.
“Merlin’s beard, he’s bleeding!”
Cedric tried to steady himself, but his legs felt distant and unreliable. The roar of the crowd had dulled into a low, pounding hum. A strong hand caught his arm.
“He needs to be taken to the hospital wing,” Moody barked. The limping professor’s hand closed around his elbow, magical eye whirring violently in its socket.
“Easy,” Dumbledore murmured.
Cedric looked up at the Headmaster. For one brief, destabilizing second, he wondered if Dumbledore could see it. The stranger standing behind Cedric’s eyes.
His breath fogged faintly in the night air despite the summer warmth. His pulse thudded too slow, too fast, and then scattered entirely. He glanced once more at Harry’s body as it was lifted carefully from the grass. He felt no tears, but rather the weight of consequence. The world had just been told its nightmare was back and he had been the one to say it. As he was being led away to the castle, somewhere deep inside the borrowed cage of Cedric Diggory’s ribs, another truth rang hollow and undeniable:
Harry Potter was dead.
Harry Potter was dead.
And, somehow…
He was still here.
They did not turn toward the hospital wing. That realization came slowly like a detail surfacing through fog. Cedric’s shoes dragged faintly against stone as he was half-walked, half-carried through torchlit corridors. The castle’s walls seem to tilt inward and outward in an uneasy rhythm with the pounding of his pulse. The smell of iron, his own blood, clung to him. He trailed after the Defense professor to the left, through another corridor, and up stairs. Even in his disorientation, some deeper instinct stirred. A thin filament of warning tightened at the base of his skull. The path they took felt too isolated. The distant roar of the crowd had faded completely swallowed by stone and distance.
They stopped before the heavy wooden door of Moody’s office. They were quite a distance from the hospital wing. He tried to voice the thought, but his tongue felt heavy. The professor’s hand clamped firmly around his upper arm and pulled him inside. The door shut with a solid click. Locks slid into place.
The room smelled of dust, magic, and old leather. Instruments cluttered every surface: foe-glasses, dark detectors, maps with pins and threads marking invisible wars. The magical eye in Moody’s scarred face twirled restlessly in its socket as if independently alive.
Cedric’s knees buckled, and Moody pushed him into a chair. The movement was rougher than necessary.
“You’ve lost blood,” Moody muttered. “We’ll deal with that in a moment.”
The warning murmur in his subconscious grew louder, but his body lagged behind the realization. His limbs felt weighted. His heartbeat echoed too loudly in his ears.
Moody leaned forward, hands braced on his knees. The magical eye fixed unblinkingly on Cedric’s face.
“What happened?” The question came sharp and direct.
Cedric forced air into his lungs. “A ritual,” he said. The word seemed to thicken the air between them.
Moody leaned closer. “And then?”
There was barely leashed eagerness there. Despite the haze, Cedric’s mind offered a rational explanation: He’s an Auror. He hunts dark wizards. He’s processing the threat. Of course he would be intent.
Cedric’s throat felt dry. “A white body,” he said slowly. “Slender. Inhuman. It rose from a cauldron.”
It was subtle. A soft exhale was barely audible as Moody’s shoulders loosened the slightest fraction.
“He got his body back,” Moody said. The words were not fearful. They were tinged with reverence. With a glint in the magical eye and a brightness in the normal one, there was excitement bleeding through.
And in that instant, the puzzle assembled itself. Icy fear flooded Cedric’s veins, chasing out the wooziness with brutal clarity. Every object in the room snapped into focus: the wand resting loosely in Moody’s right hand, the faint scuff marks near the door, the faint tremor in the professor’s wand arm. Cedric was not safe.
Moody’s lips twitched. “The Dark Lord has returned?”The professor's voice was threaded with anticipation.
He needed time. Cedric’s eyes flicked to the door, the windows, the desk, and the trunk in the corner. Moody was still waiting for his response.
Cedric’s mind replayed the graveyard in brutal detail. The shift as the circle of hooded figures descended, the pale creature reborn from bone and blood, and cold voice sliding through the air. A high, cold hiss in the graveyard admonishing the summoned for turning their backs and not remaining loyal.
Cedric’s pulse thundered once, hard. The lies easily formed on the tip of his tongue. “He told me…” Cedric began, voice faltering deliberately. “He told me he wanted his most loyal there. To reward them.”
Moody’s mouth curved faintly.
Cedric let the words fall between them. “But there can be no loose ends,” he finished quietly.
He watched for the twitch. He did not blink. It came. Moody’s wand arm shifted. His muscles tightened in preparation. The atmosphere in the room changed instantly like air before lightning strikes. Moody’s hand darted toward his wand. Cedric moved first.
He threw himself forward with everything he had left, slamming his weight into Moody’s chest. They crashed backward into a table as instruments clattered violently to the floor. The wand flew from Moody’s grip and skittered across the stone with a sharp crack.
They hit the ground hard. Pain flared white-hot along Cedric’s ribs and his vision sparked with brief stars. Moody was stronger than he looked: solid, brutal, efficient. They grappled in tight quarters as limbs tangled and furniture splintered under the impact. Cedric aimed for the jittery eye, but he was too slow.
Moody rolled, driving a forearm into Cedric’s collarbone. The impact forced the air from his lungs in a strangled gasp. Blood loss had weakened him more than he’d realized. His limbs trembled with effort. Moody’s hands found his throat. They closed hard. Cedric’s head slammed against the stone. Fingers like iron bands constricted his airway and cut off his breath with terrifying efficiency. Moody’s magical eye spun wildly, the normal one alight with zeal.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” Moody hissed, voice low and furious. “Loose ends…”
Cedric clawed at the hands crushing his windpipe. His body screamed for oxygen. The room blurred, narrowed, and tightened to the pressure around his throat. He had miscalculated. He had believed intellect would be his shield, but he had forgotten something critical. Fanatics do not think like scholars.
Moody leaned closer, grip tightening. Cedric understood with absolute, bone-deep certainty that if he did not break free now there would be no second chance. Then, he heard shuffling.
The door did not open. It detonated.
Wood splintered inward in a violent burst and shards scattered across the stone like shrapnel. The frame groaned as its hinges screamed in protest and the barrier between corridor and office ceased to exist.
“Stupefy!” The word cracked through the room like a gunshot.
A bolt of red light struck Moody square in the chest and hurled him backward with bone-jarring force. His hands tore from Cedric’s throat as if burned. The pressure vanished so suddenly that Cedric’s body did not immediately understand it was free. The stone rattled. Instruments fell from shelves. Moody’s back hit the far wall with a sickening thud and his body crumpled sideways.
Cedric lay where he had fallen, lungs spasming uselessly, throat screaming for air that would not come. A ragged, tearing gasp ripped into him. He rolled onto his side and coughed violently and each inhale scraped raw against bruised cartilage. Tears blurred his vision without permission. His entire body trembled in delayed reaction.
Bootsteps crossed the shattered threshold. Professor McGonagall arrived with robes billowing and a face carved from fury. Professor Snape was close behind. His expression sharpened to something lethal and assessing. And before them was Dumbledore. The room changed around the Headmaster.
Heat rolled outward as if the very air had caught flame. It was the kind of heat that precedes lightning. The dark detectors overhead began to spin frantically, glass eyes flashing, metallic arms twitching in agitation. Magic filled the space. Dumbledore did not shout or rage openly. His anger was colder than that and it settled into the room like frost spreading across glass.
“Incarcerous.”
Ropes burst from the air itself. Thick, binding cords snapped tight around Moody’s limbs and torso. They wrapped with ruthless efficiency as they dragged him upright and slammed him into a chair that scraped across the floor to meet him. The bindings tightened until wood groaned and Moody’s arms were pinned immovably against his sides. The magical eye frantically spun.
Dumbledore stepped forward. His gaze did not flicker to Cedric at first. It was fixed on Moody with terrible, crystalline focus.
“Professor McGonagall,” Dumbledore said, his voice low and edged with something that did not need volume to be feared. “Take Mr. Diggory to the hospital wing.”
McGonagall was already kneeling beside Cedric. Her hands were firm but not unkind as she helped him upright. The world tilted again when he rose and his knees threatened to buckle beneath him. His neck throbbed with each pulse of his heart. Blood had soaked through the front of his tunic entirely now. He dragged air into his lungs in shuddering pulls, forcing himself to remain conscious as McGonagall steadied him.
Snape’s voice cut sharply behind him. “Headmaster.”
“I am aware,” Dumbledore replied.
Cedric felt the force of that awareness like a current in the air. As McGonagall guided him toward the ruined doorway. Cedric glanced back.
Dumbledore loomed over Moody. The temperature in the room seemed to drop despite the lingering heat of magic. More ropes tightened around Moody’s chest.
“Send for the strongest Veritaserum available,” Dumbledore said quietly. There was no doubt in his tone. “And alert the Ministry that they will require courage tonight.”
McGonagall ushered Cedric into the corridor. The doorframe crackled faintly behind them as residual magic dissipated. The hallway felt too narrow and bright. The noise had died and was replaced by stunned silence. The castle itself seemed to hold its breath.
Cedric leaned heavily against McGonagall as they moved. His body felt hollowed out, drained, and every muscle trembled in aftershock. Each step sent a spike of pain from his throat down into his chest. Cedric closed his eyes briefly in relief as McGonagall steered him down the staircase. He allowed himself one horrible, fleeting thought: He had escaped death’s clutches twice in one night.
The hospital wing doors swung open with a rush of lamplight and antiseptic air. Cedric barely registered the change in temperature before the brightness forced his eyes to narrow. The wing was quieter than the corridors had been, but not empty. Curtains were half-drawn around several beds and shadows stretched long in the late hour. Two figures sat in beds near the far end. Viktor Krum straightened first. Fleur Delacour turned a fraction slower, pale hair catching the light like silver thread. Both of their gazes snapped to him at once. Their expressions shifted in unison from guarded expectation to something sharper when they saw the blood soaking his collar.
Cedric felt their scrutiny like physical pressure. They had been in the maze too and expected answers as well.
Madam Pomfrey materialized from behind a screen with the efficiency of someone long accustomed to emergencies. One glance at his throat and she inhaled sharply.
“Merlin, what have they done to you?” she muttered, already guiding him toward the nearest bed.
He allowed himself to be seated. The mattress dipped beneath him. His legs felt numb as though they no longer fully belonged to him.
Minerva remained close for a moment, her presence solid and grounding. She looked older than she had minutes ago. The lines around her mouth deepened and her eyes tightened with carefully concealed anger.
“Mr. Diggory,” she said quietly.
He met her gaze.
“I am… deeply sorry for the encounter you endured,” she said, voice low enough that Pomfrey’s bustling did not drown it out and Krum and Fleur could not overhear. “We are handling the matter. I must ask that you refrain from speaking of it until we have sorted the truth of it.”
The request was phrased as courtesy; But, it was not one. Cedric’s pulse thudded painfully in his throat. A professor had attempted to kill him and she was asking for silence. His mind flickered rapidly through possibilities: political fallout, ministry involvement, or something far more complicated.
He nodded shakily. “Of course,” he said. His voice sounded smaller than he intended.
Minerva’s eyes searched his face as if gauging the sincerity of his compliance. Whatever she found seemed sufficient. She squeezed his shoulder once, a brief, firm pressure, and then straightened.
“I shall return when I am able,” she said. And she left with a quick stride and unhesitating purpose. Her robes snapped sharply behind her as she exited the wing. There was no doubt where she was going. As she left, her steps carried her in the direction they just came from.
Cedric exhaled slowly once she was gone. The questions rang loud and unanswered in his skull. But he had no time to unravel it.
Madam Pomfrey had already begun. She waved her wand in tight, precise motions, and murmured diagnostic charms that hummed faintly against his skin. A warm golden light passed over his throat. It stung where it met torn flesh.
“You’ve lost a concerning amount of blood,” she scolded briskly, though her hands were gentle as they tilted his chin upward. “And there’s bruising along the windpipe. You are very fortunate.”
He thought of rope around Moody’s wrists and a thick wooden door exploding inward and Dumbledore's fury engulfing the office in his rage.
Fortunate indeed.
Pomfrey pressed a cool cloth against the side of his neck before uncorking a small vial. The sharp, clean scent of Essence of Dittany filled the air.
“This will sting,” she warned.
It did more than sting. The potion touched the gash and searing, bright heat flared across his neck. He clenched his hands in the bedsheets, but did not cry out. The torn flesh knitted visibly beneath the liquid and his skin bonded in slow, miraculous increments. As she worked, murmuring more spells to soothe swelling and restore what blood she could, he became acutely aware of the room again.
Krum sat rigid near the foot of his bed, arms crossed, and dark eyes narrowed in deep concentration. He was not a man prone to outward panic; his stillness felt coiled. Fleur had moved closer without him noticing. She stood near the adjacent bed, hands clasped tightly before her. Her gaze was not merely curious. It was intent. They were watching him the way duelists watch an opponent who has just survived something catastrophic. Perhaps wondering why he was alive when the other boy was not.
The Essence of Dittany cooled against his skin now. The bruising remained a faint violet collar around his throat. Madam Pomfrey fussed over him with increasing agitation. She checked his pupils, pressed fingers against his wrist to measure pulse, and muttered about reckless professors and irresponsible administrations.
He let her. He let the attention anchor him in something practical. But beneath the surface of it all, beneath the healing spells and the sterile brightness and the weight of Krum and Fleur’s gazes…a deeper unease took root.
Dumbledore had asked for Veritaserum. Truth was being extracted. Silence was being requested. And, Cedric’s mind raced to connect the dots.
He lay back against the pillow as Pomfrey adjusted the blankets around him. His skin felt cold despite the warmth of the wing. A shift of restless movement had his eyes darting to the other occupants of the room. The other champions did not look untouched by the maze.
Up close, Cedric could see it clearly now. Krum’s robes were torn at the sleeve with a long slash darkening the fabric where something sharp had grazed him. There was dried blood crusted into his hairline. Fleur’s usually immaculate composure had fractured; her pale skin was drawn tight with exhaustion and a thin cut ran along her forearm where brambles or worse had caught her. Even standing still, she seemed to sway faintly as if her body had not yet decided it was safe. Fleur was the first to break the silence.
“Is it true?”
Her soft but unsteady French accent wrapped around the words. There was no confusion about what she was asking. She was asking about Harry.
Cedric felt the answer rise in his throat like something sharp. “It’s true.”
Saying it was like taking a blow. Each time the words left his mouth something inside him recoiled. It struck him anew with brutal force. Harry Potter was dead.
Krum shifted where he stood, jaw tightening. “And he is back?” he asked.
His voice was low, thick with an accent of his own, but there was iron beneath it. He did not say the name and did not need to.
Cedric nodded. He could not trust his voice to remain steady a second time.
Krum let out a bitter, almost animal sound. A half exhale, half curse. His shoulders hunched slightly as though bracing for a future he had hoped not to face. Fleur sank slowly down onto the edge of her hospital bed. For a moment she simply stared at the floor, unseeing. Then her composure shattered. Tears welled and spilled unchecked down her cheeks. She covered her mouth with her hand as if physically restraining the sob that tried to tear free.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered, the words trembling.
Cedric blinked at her. “I’m sorry,” he heard himself say in return.
He wasn’t certain what he was apologizing for. For surviving? For bringing Harry’s body back? For being the one to speak the words that made the horror real?
The apology felt inadequate and misplaced, but it was all he had.
Madam Pomfrey noticed Fleur out of her bed and moved quickly to guide her back with gentle firmness. She pressed a small vial into Fleur’s trembling hand, then another into Krum’s who accepted it without protest. She returned to Cedric’s bedside and held out an identical potion.
“Sleeping Potion,” she said briskly, though her eyes were kind. “You have all endured trials and tribulations tonight, but right now rest is the priority.”
A parchment unfurled midair beside her and hovered obediently. A self-writing quill scratched across it in neat, looping script as Pomfrey began another series of diagnostic spells.
Cedric noticed. She had already examined him once. Now, she was doing it again. A faint hum brushed over his skin as her wand traced deliberate patterns. The parchment filled with notes rapidly. The lines appeared faster than his eyes could follow. Pomfrey’s mouth tightened. Her brow furrowed.
Cedric’s gaze sharpened. “Is something wrong?” he asked quietly.
Pomfrey paused. For a moment, the only sound in the wing was the faint scratching of the quill and Fleur’s muffled breathing from across the room.
“I think,” Pomfrey said carefully, “that we all could use a little rest.”
That was not an answer. She adjusted her spectacles and ran the diagnostic charm again. The parchment responded immediately. Her expression pinched further.
“My findings are not detecting any magic,” she admitted at last, lowering her voice. “It could very well be magical exhaustion, of course. Severe depletion can mimic such readings.”
She hesitated. “The results are no different than those of a Squib.”
The word settled between them. Cedric did not flinch. It was not a surprise. Whatever spark animated this body did not feel natural in his veins. It felt borrowed and studied rather than lived in. If the instruments could not detect it perhaps they were not wrong.
Pomfrey searched his face for alarm and found none. That seemed to unsettle her more than outrage would have.
“I will monitor you for changes,” she said firmly. “Magical reserves can recover unpredictably after trauma. You are to rest. That is not a suggestion.”
Cedric nodded. He accepted the vial from her hand. The potion was cool and faintly sweet against his lips. There was an undercurrent of bitterness, but it slid down his throat smoothly. Warmth spread instantly through his limbs.
Across the room, Krum had already downed his own without ceremony. Fleur lay curled on her side, clutching the blankets close, eyes squeezed shut as tears continued to slip silently down her face. Cedric leaned back into the pillow.
Suddenly, the room felt distant as if separated by gauze. He had intended to stay awake. To think. He intended to analyze the events that violently blurred by him this evening; however, the potion was stronger than his will. His thoughts blurred mid-formation. The last thing he registered was the faint scent of antiseptic and Dittany lingering in the air. Sleep claimed him before his head fully settled against the pillow.
Sleep does not take him gently; it drags him under as though something has hooked its fingers into the base of his spine and pulled.
He is seated at a long oak table beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Bodleian Library. The air smells of dust and vellum and centuries-old glue. That particular fragrance of scholarship clings to places where the dead speak through ink. Shafts of muted daylight filter through high windows and fall across an occult manuscript cracked open before him, its margins crowded with cramped Latin annotations and woodcut illustrations of funerary rites. He has a presentation to prepare, Death Rites in Pre-Modern Europe, and the weight of it presses on him with the familiar, mundane anxiety of academia. He has been here for hours, copying passages, translating archaic script, and tracing the evolution of burial customs from pagan to Christian, from communal pyres to sanctified ground.
The quiet is normal and Bodleian is always quiet; but, this quiet is peculiar. It is absolute. There is no shifting of wood as the old beams settle. No distant cough. No whisper of turning pages. No faint creak of leather bindings adjusting in their places. The silence is not an absence of sound; it is an absence of life.
Across the table from him, where no one had been a moment before, something is seated. He does not see it at first; He senses it. The air grows thin and frigid as though the temperature has been siphoned out of the room. The light around him is quickly snuffed out without wind. A presence gathers like ink spilled into water: dark, hollow, devouring the edges of light.
His gaze lifts slowly.
A robed figure floats opposite him. The form is indistinct and yet horribly defined as if shadow itself has chosen a shape. Its hood is cavernous and swallows any hint of face and the deeper than shadow black of its robes is not cloth but tattered edges.
How had he missed it?
His chair scrapes violently backward as he shoves himself to his feet. It’s too loud, sharp, and cracking through the suffocating silence like a bone snapping. His heart slams against his ribs and each beat reverberates in his ears.
The figure hums and it laughs. The laughter is thin and splintered like shards of glass being crushed beneath a heel.
“Wh-” He begins, but the word fractures in his throat.
The figure moves. Its arm extends from the folds of its robe and as it does the tattered fabric peels away from the limb. There is no flesh beneath. Long, pale, skeletal fingers sharpened to cruel points venture forward. The hand thrusts forward and spears through his chest.
He gasps because of the sensation. There is pain, but there is another chord that accompanies it like a bassline. Something fundamental is being disturbed, dislodged, and scraped from the inside out. His ribs are not bone but doors being forced open. As though his heart is being bypassed for something deeper and older, the bone digits breach until they find their mark.
He cannot scream. The skeletal hand withdraws and clutched within it is an orb. It is gray and brittle and webbed with fine fractures like an egg about to collapse. Its light is faint and guttering. It pulses weakly once, twice, and he knows without knowing how that it is something that once belonged to him.
“This is what remains,” the figure rasps, its voice dry as wind over a crypt.
The orb trembles and then it shatters. Dust filters into the air and glitters briefly in the dim library light before dissolving entirely. The hollow inside him yawns wider. He sways and reaches out to clutch at the table feeling stripped and diminished as if something that anchored him has been carved out.
“This,” the figure continues, lifting its other hand from within the veils of its cloak, “this is what I can give you.”
In its palm rests another orb. It is an incandescent emerald alive with coiled energy humming with restrained force. The color is unmistakable. It carried the same violent brilliance that tore through the graveyard. Fear roots him to the floor, but somehow he forces the question past the dryness in his throat.
“What are you giving me?”
The skeletal hand lunges again. The green orb slams into his chest. There is no puncture this time. It passes through him like light through glass. Then, it is inside.
The hollow is gone. In its place is overwhelming fullness. Power floods him in a suffocating rush. It presses outward against skin and bone as though his body is suddenly too small to contain it. He staggers, choking on the sensation.
“What have you done?!” he cries, voice raw.
“Repairing the chasm,” the figure answers. “A badger’s bones, a snake’s mirror… and now a lion’s echo.” The words reverberate unnaturally in the vast silence.
“These are your parts. Hallows not my making.”
“Hallows?” Cedric demands even as his knees threaten to buckle. “Why do I need these parts?”
The library fractures. The shelves bend like wax under flame. The ceiling tears open. The world shifts violently and images slam into him in rapid succession.
A unicorn is sprawled dead in a forest clearing as silver blood pools beneath its flank. Bending over it is a figure cloaked in black. Hisses fill his ear as a massive serpent rears in blind fury; Its eyes are clawed out. Wings flutter ablaze against a darkened chamber followed by the piercing cry of a phoenix. Howls rip through moonlit air while a treacherous man's bones fold inward as he transforms into a rat. Behind him, the dragon bursts into flight and smoke and fire trails as it gives furious chase.
Each vision strikes like a hammer. Alien and yet intimate memories crash into the forefront of his mind. They do not belong to him and yet they are lodged in him now and thread through the green brilliance that fills his chest.
“To summon,” the figure replies.
The images collapse into a black void.
“To retrieve.”
The words echo into nothingness.
Cedric’s lungs seize. He jolts upright in the hospital bed with a violent gasp, air knifing into his throat as though he has been drowning. The white curtains around him ripple faintly. The scent of antiseptic and potions replaces dust and vellum. His heart races wildly, but his chest is intact.
The fullness lingers.