Chapter Text

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Haley, Sean, Hermione And Telantes, Magical London

Present Day

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Sean and Hermione climbed aboard my rigging without much further protestation. Telantes scrambled from his position on my head to one in Sean’s pocket, and I heard my husband mutter under his breath about protecting two children in this upcoming battle. I sympathized with him- I really did. My instincts rebelled at the thought of putting anyone else into danger I should be handling for them. But thinking about it like that was telling a story about me, the hero who saved the world. We needed to shape a story about a world that saved itself and that meant at some point we had to get out of the way. Not that far, though- I wasn’t about to let them ride up there on my back without every protection I could afford them.

Which was, to put it mildly, substantial. The rigging and harness system I and my clone-sisters had invented in Second Ingenium was enormous. It probably weighed a ton in and of itself, and had taken the better part of a couple hours to fasten- luckily when shape changed it simply melded with my body, so I didn’t have to constantly re-equip it. It was essentially a series of knotted rope ladders with attached wires for carabiners to be hooked into, leading to woven baskets at two positions on my back and one on my chest that would serve as quite comfortable perches for the platoon or so of spell-slinging heroes that I’d hoped would be accompanying me on this mission, whenever it came- unfortunately my husband informed me that they’d be headed our way two hours in the future. We’d have to make do without them. He also let me know about Voldemort’s modification to the meme, and I swore openly at that. “If that’s going to happen in the next hour, it’s almost guaranteed to swoop in and overtake the local hordes at some critical moment. This better not be some dramatic turn that’s supposed to make me reevaluate my commitment to nonlethal force, god damn it.”

I took off and they braced in their seats. I wasn’t actually much faster than I’d been before my Awakening upgrade- Pathfinder simply didn’t have tables that scaled as high as I’d gotten. With a Strength score in the mid-hundreds I had the ability to lift something on the order of 70 million tons - I’d heard that the Great Pyramid weighed around 6 million, so eleven or so of those simultaneously. I should have been able to exert enough lifting force to exceed a Saturn V rocket by an order of magnitude- but instead, I was merely flying at 200mph instead of 170mph. It was frustrating to say the least. I called back to my passengers. “Husband of mine, can you Apparate us to London? The wizards are already there and we can’t take the time to fly to Westminster from Scotland.”

He considered. “Well, I don’t recall any studies of people trying to apparate a dragon the size of a battleship, but that might actually work in our favor. My magic seems to think it’s possible.” It was still odd to me hearing him refer to an aspect of himself in the third person like that, but it was a minor quirk among the things he’d picked up while we’d been apart- most charming among them, to me, being a slight English accent. I stopped woolgathering and nodded approval to him to try- he took a firm grip on Hermione, and placed an outstretched hand on one wing, and whoop. It felt like all the breath had been smashed out of me at once, like my body had suddenly been forced through a narrow rubber tube, like I’d turned inside out and pulled apart and placed back together again, and then it was over as soon as it began and we exploded out the side of a house in the middle of a quiet suburb. Literally exploded- by the time I’d regained my senses and some altitude, the pieces of the poor structure had rained from me onto the neighborhood below. “Sean, what the hell?”

I couldn’t turn to look back at him but I could hear the embarrassment in his voice. “Sorry, sorry- I envisioned us appearing in the bedroom I started out in. Not really an appropriate place for a flying dragon to materialize.” But it was a good thing we had- I hadn’t even begun to get my bearings before tracers began to stitch up and towards me.

“Shit! Hang on!” I cried, and threw a Prismatic Sphere around myself while ascending to put some distance between my body and the weapons batteries. They’d tracked his house down, of course, and placed an armed cordon around the damn thing in case he or I tried to use it. Damn! I kicked myself for not thinking ahead even as I noticed a telltale white puff and streak of fire rising from the ground nearby. I didn’t bother to dodge- at subsonic speeds I was not going to avoid any air-to-ground missile they cared to fire at me, and I trusted in my natural armor and damage resistance to ignore anything short of WMD-level effects. My passengers were surrounded in the shields I’d used to neutralize nuclear weapons, so they’d be fine. Sure enough, the missiles impacted with the force of a spitball and we sailed onwards and upwards, out of the trap. A far cry from Piper’s arrow knocking me out of the sky, a month ago. But they know we’re here. Another thought occurred to me. I sure hope they didn’t station anyone inside the house. So damn hard not to kill anyone, at this size. We couldn’t go back and make sure- we had to get to the Ministry. More difficult than I’d have thought, from up here. “Sean, can you point me to Westminster from here?”

He thought for a minute. “Well, I’d say generally South and East of here, but we don’t need to look too hard,” he said, tapping my side to get my attention and then pointing where he wanted me to look. Sure enough- enormous black clouds were gathering over a river, what I assumed was the Thames, to our south. “That’s not Matt, the thunderbirds won’t be in place for a while yet,” my husband called. I agreed silently and rolled over to tack towards the disturbance, my passengers gripping tight- Hermione shouting with fear and excitement, Sean simply gritting his teeth and getting ready for the fight of our lives. Whatever they’ve got there, conventional arms are only going to be the beginning.

We were halfway there in minutes- long before we arrived it was clear that the gathering storm was indeed magical in nature. It swirled about the buildings of downtown Westminster, dwarfing Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. “You know I’m not actually sure where the Ministry is-” I said, scanning the surface.

“I can see the auras,” said Sean, indicating a fairly nondescript looking area off of the central government district. “It’s going to be entirely underground- we want the door on the deepest level. You could shrink down and take an elevator.” He said that with such deadpan humor. “But you’re absolutely going to do something flashy, aren’t you.” Oh, he knew me so well.

“We have to get there first!” Cried Hermione, pointing further East. Fawkes squawked in alarm, still on her shoulder. Two jets were screaming in on our position- damn, they’ve got air support? After the incident with the submarine I shouldn’t have been surprised, but still- I wasn’t sure what they thought air to air missiles were going to do when the surface to air varieties had failed so spectacularly.

“Ignore them- keep your shields up, stay in the bubble. It’ll be fine,” I said, while throwing a couple additional defensive spells on myself- A Mirror Image to no-sell any direct fire, a Displacement, to make me harder to hit, and a Contingency to transform the first hostile missile to enter in range into butterflies. That last, I instructed my Council of Haleys on the other side of the ring to maintain- I could only have one Contingency at a time, but it would help. I also told them to do what they could about the jets- I didn’t have the spell range but a few targeted Wishes would do the trick. Seconds later the streaking fighters were replaced by sparrows, their pilots harmlessly expelled and drifting downwards from high enough (I hoped) to activate their chutes. That left only the two missiles they’d managed to get off. The first puffed into harmless colored insects the second it entered our range.

The second nearly killed us all.

I’d considered that it might be nuclear-tipped, given how little I knew about conventional weapons. I thought I’d had some experience with nukes. But when the second missile detonated- well before it entered range of my protection- it was like hell had been transported to Earth. One moment there was a white object streaking towards us, and the next the sky around us became a fireball, hotter than the sun. It was angry. In that brief instant it roiled with beings, claws and faces manifesting, reaching out, and falling away in milliseconds. Time stood still as I tried to get my wings up to shield my passengers from the initial flash. Slow, too slow. The Prismatic Sphere would neutralize heat and force, but I feared that just the light of it was going to tear them apart.

Time resumed. I was immune to the heat, though the flash dazed me- but I was still vulnerable to claws, if given sufficient force, and the creatures riding the blast tore great rents in my hide as they passed, even as the pressure wave picked me up and slapped me out of the sky like a child throwing a toy. We hit the ground at many times the speed of sound and I left a long bloody furrow through the ground and buildings of the city as I spread myself out, trying to slow us down without reducing my passengers to a bloody paste or flinging them from my back. This time, I had enough contingencies in place to ensure that no one killing blow would end my husband, Hermione, or Telantes, but recovering their cloned selves would have taken time. I spread my arms and legs, taking further damage as I let the rubble of the city grind against me, slowing my momentum. I was still far from dead by the time we’d slowed, and my husband was still shouting, which I took as a good sign. We slid to a halt and heals began to flow from the other side of the gate, repairing damage done to me. The expanding fireball and blast wave washed over us, obliterating a substantial portion of the city and releasing a flood of ragged black ghosts . I couldn’t see much in the devastation, but judging by the numbers the whole city would have been swamped by them. Soon they’d find us again. “Blinded! Healing it!” Sean called, and I didn’t waste any further time. Between him and the bird, they’d be fine. Additional heals would be incoming from the simulacra, and I was already back to full strength after the work they’d done.

But the nature of the attack unsettled me. “That was a magical nuke, Sean. They’ve been preparing for us. It was packed with dementors. ” And there was no telling how many people it had just obliterated, detonated over one of the most densely-populated cities on earth. No doubt they’d all have been taken by the Concept so I could take it as a blessing, but- that kind of megadeath could never be anything but an atrocity, to me. The rising column of flame and smoke was a backdrop to our confrontation that would be seen across all of England.

“A demonstration of sincerity,” called a voice, and I whipped my head around to see a black bearded man with a wizard’s staff and cane walking out of a hole between dimensions nearby. “To illustrate to you the cost of-”

I didn’t waste time chatting with the motherfucker, who was undoubtedly going to turn out to be the Merlin that Telantes had warned me about. Time Stop took me out of the flow that he could react to. I had my simulacra throw as many Merciful Delayed Blast Fireballs as they could- a hundred beads of force surrounding him with non lethal bombs, timed to detonate the instant that time resumed. “Already reconsidering my no-kill stance and we’ve been in combat less than two minutes,” I muttered, positioning myself immediately behind and above him. This probably wouldn’t kill him, regardless. Probably.

From his perspective, he emerged from a portal and barely completed his first sentence when the Statue of Liberty sized dragon popped behind him and a wave of detonations washed over him as her feet came down with millions of pounds of crushing force. I think it was more extreme than he’d expected- he didn’t die outright, but when I lifted my front claws from the hole they had punched clear through into the tunnels beneath the city, he was no longer present. “Shit,” I said out loud. “It’s not just Gretchen here.” We had their portal tech back in second Ingenium- so whoever was here, they must have come in by train.

Sean was still alive on my back, holding Hermione tightly as she clutched her aching head and tried to recover her wits. “The Coordinator or whatever it’s called behind all this knows that this is the one battleground it needs to win, today. Everyone you told me about is probably here.” He thought for a second and I knew what he was about to say. I was already shaking my head when he said “We should split up.”

“Not even an hour ago by my timeline, you were telling me that was the worst possible idea. Now I feel pretty inclined to agree, Sean. You two- three, sorry Telantes- wouldn’t last a second out here. We’re in a race for that doorway. Once we get close enough they’ll have to moderate the weapons they use for fear of damaging it.”

He shook his head and pointed towards the gathering storm over Westminster. “ Getting close is going to be a bigger challenge than you suggest. Look.” I lifted my head above the nearby buildings and saw what he was indicating. The stormclouds had begun to part. They were clearly unnatural, what was going on with them? Something occurred to me- Merlin. Of course. This was London, the seat of power for the nation he was the near-mythological founder of, and Harry Potter, the story in which he had been given demigod-hood over an entire second society. The Last Son of Atlantis was at the height of his capabilities here. But what he was doing with them-

He might have come in on the train, but he was going to bring everyone else first-class. He’d opened a series of doors miles wide in the air above the city. Coming through was my worst nightmare made manifest. Two brass cities of the Efreet, fresh off the battles in my home dimension, surrounded by flying armies of blue-eyed genies, swarming in numbers so thick they looked like locusts. Separately, the entirety of Delmutt’s advanced society- captured by the Concept and turned against me with all of their hypertech- flooding down in their own wave of carriers, flyers, and drones. And finally- what was that? It seemed to lurk on the far side of the portals, too big to come through- it was enormous, so big that I could see portions of it laying behind every portal, but it was smooth and mechanical and dressed in layer after layer of force fields. “It’s Aslan’s army all over again, but a million times worse, and this time half of them are our friends.” I was having a crisis of confidence. “Sean, I don’t think I can fight them all if I don’t turn the rest of my simulacra loose. But if I do-”

He finished my thought. “There won’t be a city left to fight over. It’s going to kill a lot of people, if you fight all of that. It’s a problem, dear. What if we just- didn’t ? What if we, I don’t know, go invisible and teleport straight to the door, smash it, and be done with this?”

It was an option. As the armies formed up, I took time to consider it, but ultimately found it wanting. “No. We can’t leave all of this in the hands of the Concept. If I go big enough I can probably neutralize most of them without injury. Those I can’t- the Infomorphs will be backed up, the Efreet we can probably bring back, if Matt’s resurrections are an indicator. But the people of this city- I can’t simply write them off.” Despair gripped me. “It’s just too big to keep everyone safe. But I can’t fight this battle without thinking about tomorrow.”

Sean’s eyes lit up- I’d triggered something for him. “Yes you can. Yes you can. Haley, do you trust me?”

I nodded. “With all my heart.”

He gave me a quick hug from his position on my back. “Teleport Hermione and I-” an angry squeak sounded- “And Telantes and Fawkes, sorry, teleport all four of us as close to the Ministry as you can. Then, go nuts. Show them exactly how far beyond strength you’ve gone. No mercy. Don’t worry about casualties. Just don’t wreck the Ministry building or the floors beneath it. Can you do that?”

I could, but I wasn’t just going to let myself go killing people. I said as much, but he smiled and patted me. “They’ll be fine. Long run, they’ll be fine. Trust me. I wouldn’t set you up to fail in this.” That was true. Alright.

I squared my shoulders and faced the looming threat. “Sean, I’d better see you again on the other side of this. If you die on me a second time I will come and find you, do you understand?” He kissed the back of my neck and grinned silently. I wished up a pair of short-wave radios for emergency communication and handed him one. Then I sighed, shook my head, and teleported them away. I’d pull as much of the heat off them as I could. And I’d make a statement, here and now. To the Concept, or the Coordinator, or whatever it wanted to call itself, I had a message. “You haven’t been very interested in talking so far. So maybe I’ll just tell you my side. No matter how hard you fight me- this world is going to save itself. You and I, we’re just a side show today.” I reached down and grabbed a light truck off the road I had crashed into. “But you’d better hope you win. You and I both work through other people, but the reasons we do it- I don’t even know what you want, ultimately, but I know that it’s totally incompatible with what I want, a world where everybody’s safe and secure and in control of their own lives. If I walk out of here I’m coming for you and you’re going to learn why half the people you mind controlled today already thought I was their god.”

Right. No mercy, he said. I really hoped he understood what he was asking. I hefted the truck, took careful aim, and heaved. I couldn’t apply all seventy million pounds of lifting force, of course- but I applied a few. The truck departed my hand in pieces, shrapnel traveling at roughly mach thirty, crossing the distance between myself and the armies of the Infomorphs and Efreet in the blink of an eye, tearing a cone of red ruin through one formation. This wasn’t a lone hero versus an army- this was an army hopelessly outmatched by godzilla, and she’d brought friends. “Come on then. Let’s get started.”

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Sean, Hermione and Telantes

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We found ourselves on a side street off the main thoroughfares of downtown London, just around the corner from the Ministry. For a while, Hermione and I didn’t move at all- I maintained a Disillusion charm on myself, and she stayed under the cloak of invisibility. The few humans we saw around us- all taken by the Concept, at this point, but apparently not directly involved in the battle- were clearly on high alert for anyone coming our way. But that wasn’t what stopped us.

We were transfixed by the sights in the sky- it was the battle of Ragnarok incarnate. Haley had finally turned her simulacra loose, and they in turn had abused their summoning abilities. An army of angels, demons, and dragons the size of entire city blocks met in the air against millions of drones, genies, and the indescribable lava-based super-weapons of the floating fortresses. Explosions and streaks of fire lit the evening sky and turned encroaching shadows into midday light. Pieces of debris plummeted down and obliterated whole buildings in their passage. We couldn’t tell from where we were standing, but it sure sounded like somewhere far away in that fracas, additional hell-nukes had been detonated and quickly obscured by prismatic counters. The sound of it was so brutal that the glass at street-level was near totally shattered in the first few exchanges, and all of us on the ground needed magical hearing protection to avoid being deafened.

“It’s like someone took a whole war and compressed it down to just a few minutes!” Shouted Hermione, hunched beneath her cloak next to me. She’d finally got Fawkes to join her under there, though he’d squawked enough about it. Being the owner of one of the other Deathly Hallows in the form of the elder wand, I apparently had less trouble detecting her than others might have. That was good- I didn’t want to lose track of her if things got any more chaotic.

I waved her forward towards the Ministry. “Time’s wasting. They’re probably well on their way to the ninth sub-basement by now. Haley will do what she does- we’ve got to do our part now.” Easier said than done. We exited the alley and were immediately confronted by our first major obstacle. Instead of Concept-possessed mages, the street before us was crowded by dementors. Released by the bombs to roam the city, they weren’t searching for us after all, or behaving randomly. They flocked, surrounding the Ministry in a great turning river of torn black cloaks and clutching, skeletal fingers. “Oh, I really don’t like where this is going.” Those on the edges noticed something about us, even beneath my invisibility, and dozens began to peel away, approaching. I could feel the chill of their presence encroaching on the tips of my fingers and toes, the beginnings of entropy creeping into my soul. I wasn’t convinced, as some of the researchers I’d read had been, that these things were death incarnate, but they were certainly anathema to living beings.

Hermione turned to me desperately. “Your patronus! You’ve got to use it!” She followed up by trying to cast her own, managing a weak light that was extremely impressive for a first year student but still nothing in the face of so many of the weightless, ragged monsters. I whipped out the Elder Wand and did not bother to speak the incantation. My magic leapt through it, emerging into the real world brighter and more solid than ever before- the moonlight reflection of the dragons doing battle above us. She was shining so bright as she came roaring out that the dementors nearest to her were blown to pieces, like cobwebs before a storm wind. She dove into the rest, tearing apart those too foolish to get out of our way. I could hear shouts as the zombified humans nearby realized that something was going on.

“Alright, stick close and I’ll get you across this river,” I told my young student and her flaming bird sidekick. “Once we’re inside there’s a very real chance we’re going to be split up. You need to do everything you can to get into that bottom level and stop Gretchen from walking through the door. You understand me? Don’t wait for me. If it looks like I’m going to die, just keep moving. It won’t be the first time and I’ll come back from it, some day. This is about getting you where you need to go.” She looked conflicted at that but nodded grimly, and we marched onwards and inwards, the tide of silent death parting around my silver-white dragon as we began to cross the street to the ministry. Even the mind-controlled humans balked at crossing that expanse- we would have some seconds inside before they made it to us.

Halfway through there was an interruption- a terrifyingly hot and bright explosion in the sky. I couldn’t help but glance up. Apparently some of the forces in the air had seen the disturbance we were making in the dementor flow, and come down to take a pass at us. They’d been intercepted by one of the Haleys. The heat we’d felt was her breath- she opened her mouth and a cone in front of her ceased to be, every atom inside of it converted to forms of strange matter by the absolute heat that she emitted. Nothing of the original attackers remained, and I made a mental note to get us treated for radiation poisoning before the day was out, but that wasn’t what stopped me in my tracks. “Oh no.”

Away and above our more local conflicts there was a squad of Haleys winging for one of the great storming portal-gashes in the sky, in a V formation. They were headed for that god-machine on the other side, the one too big to come through in one piece. Then the thing in the other world opened fire- invisibly, or perhaps simply so fast that I couldn’t perceive it- and the squad disintegrated. Most melted into snow as they died but one, that could only be the real Haley, fell from the sky gouting blood and fire, crashing to the streets a mile away from us but still so heavy that we felt the impact through our feet. “No!” I shouted, and took one step in that direction before I realized my job here overrode all other concerns.

“We’ve got to help her!” shouted Telantes, and leapt from my pocket with the remainder of the vial of Swooping Evil venom that I’d procured from Snape clutched in his furry paws. I grabbed for him but he slipped my grasp, and vanished underneath the roiling, floating sea of dementors. I could only pray he was too small and alien to grab their attention- there would be no pursuing him now.

“Should we go after him?” Asked Hermione, concern clear in her voice. She wanted to help as much as I did, I knew.



Every instinct said yes. But I restrained myself. “No. She’ll be fine. If she’s right about all of this, he’ll get to her when she needs him. We need to stay focused here.” And if she dies, there’s nothing in the universe that will keep me from her. We carried on, and took our first step across the threshold of the Ministry. Just in time, too- behind us on the other side of the dementors, I could see the first hints in the eyes of the Concept-taken humans of an oncoming tide of green.