An irregular black scar clung stubbornly to Bryan's palm like some maggot burrowed deep into bone, coiling ribbons of foul-smelling white smoke up into the surrounding air!
Bryan's hand trembled violently at the sensation. He could feel the stubborn scar actively draining his life force even as it spread, growing larger with every single passing moment.
With the house now restored to its original state around them, the ring itself still lay quietly undisturbed in the drawer.
And that open drawer, in the flickering wandlight, looked now like the gaping, bloody maw of some hideous beast, letting out a low laugh that made the skin crawl on anyone who looked at it too long.
Bryan's own magic fought with everything it had to hold back the relentlessly spreading scar, while the pure light from the tip of Dumbledore's wand poured steadily into his afflicted hand, desperately nourishing the flesh that had already begun visibly to wither and blacken beneath the curse's advance.
A sharp, sizzling hiss filled the air—
The scorching heat of active healing magic and the bone-cold, ancient malice of the curse strained violently against one another, and the sound they made together was like countless drops of water falling one after another onto a slab of red-hot iron.
Veins bulged sharply across Bryan's forehead, and cold sweat soaked thoroughly through his temples. The pain of three powerful, opposing forces pouring into his body all at once was, by any honest measure, no less severe than being struck by a full Cruciatus Curse.
The crown of the giant ancient tree shading the decrepit old house swayed slowly in the rising night wind outside, casting strange, shifting shadows that crawled across the walls and floor of the restored parlour in restless, uneasy patterns.
Dumbledore's own face had gone stoney pale at the sight before him, his tall, gaunt body was shaking without pause. Genuine fear and crushing regret had dimmed the usual brightness of his deep blue eyes to something dull and stricken.
No, this wouldn't do.
Only half a minute had passed since the curse first took hold, yet Bryan, cursed as he now was, already understood the reckoning of it: if things continued on like this, even if he ultimately survived the ordeal, his entire left arm would surely be lost to the spreading corruption.
"Get back—"
Drenched thoroughly in sweat, Bryan stared intently down at the black scar consuming his palm, which was spreading through his own flesh with desperate urgency of a drop of ink loosed into clear water, and forced the words out through gritted, straining teeth.
"Bryan, I—"
Dumbledore's own lips moved uselessly.
Across his deeply wrinkled face spread a look of genuine, bewildered helplessness that Bryan had never once witnessed on him before—like a Muggle-born child laying eyes on the full, overwhelming grandeur of the wizarding world for the very first time in their life.
"Get out of here—"
Giant drops of sweat fell from Bryan's cheeks as he spoke. He forced the words out between increasingly ragged, gasping breaths. "There's a method... worth trying. But I'm still unpractised with it. Your presence here will only interfere with the attempt—"
A look of agonised struggle appeared on Dumbledore's face at that instruction. He seemed to want desperately to say something further, but only managed a few weak, hoarse, broken breaths in response.
The holy white light still burning at his wandtip guttered thin and uncertain, and with a soft, quiet pop, Dumbledore vanished from the room and reappeared, an instant later, standing outside the house in the cold night air.
With the interference now fully gone, Bryan's brow furrowed tight with total, singular concentration, and in his own brown eyes—now cleared entirely of their usual violet haze—a sharp, focused gleam flared suddenly to life.
In an instant, a faint, reddish radiance surged out from Bryan's thin, straining body, rolling back across the surrounding world like a wave and embedded within that spreading light were dozens of individual points of golden radiance, glimmering steadily like distant, captured stars.
The crimson world continued spreading until it had swallowed the entire restored house whole, then stopped abruptly at its own natural boundary and the golden points of light suspended within that crimson void began, in that same moment, to pulse in some inexplicable, complex rhythm all their own.
Outside the old house, Dumbledore stared, utterly transfixed, at the crimson halo now fully enveloping Bryan from a distance. Across his own bloodless, deeply aged face, a subtle change came slowly over his expression as he watched.
Bryan still stood right there before him, visible through the doorway—and yet, to Dumbledore's magical senses, this young man he had so foolishly endangered now seemed, ridiculously, to exist somewhere extremely distant, as if occupying another world entirely.
And more than that unsettling distance, within the close embrace of that pulsing crimson light, Dumbledore found he could sense no trace of ordinary magic at all.
Even the ambient, ever-present magic that flowed freely and continuously through the surrounding natural world, the background hum every wizard learned to feel without thinking, had been entirely shut out by that strange crimson glow, as though a door had been sealed against it.
The dozens of golden stars flickered without pause throughout, and to eyes as experienced and knowledgeable as Dumbledore's own, it was plain, on careful observation, that the stars did not pulse in simple unison with each other—and yet, somehow, despite that apparent asynchrony, they answered one another across the space between them, together weaving something wondrous and entirely beyond his own comprehension.
Dumbledore's silver hair and beard danced restlessly in the rising night wind, and a single word rose, naturally into his mind as he watched.
A Field.
An utterly extraordinary Field.
It took Dumbledore only a single glance to arrive at that certainty—with his own vast store of magical knowledge, accumulated across more than a century of dedicated study, and the keenness of his senses, he grasped the fundamental truth of what he was witnessing almost at once, even without fully understanding its mechanism.
The white smoke that had been rising from Bryan's afflicted palm had faded away entirely now, replaced instead by thin wisps of distinctly ill-omened black mist.
And this particular change wasn't confined merely to his hand alone—there was also, unmistakably, the ring itself, still lying undisturbed in its open drawer. It too had begun to give off its own black smoke now, and considerably thicker than before.
The rising black mist gathered slowly in the empty air above the drawer into a twisted terrible face, one that seemed to be enduring some unending, entirely unbearable agony in its final moments.
The outline of that face writhed violently as it formed, as though actively evaporating even as it took shape, and the sound of air vibrating at some high, piercing frequency stood in for what would have been a shrill, tearing scream of pure anguish.
But in the end, after that brief, horrifying manifestation, the ghastly face dissolved away completely into nothing—along with the black scar that had been consuming Bryan's palm.
The golden stars still flickering steadily within the crimson void winked out, one after another in patient sequence, until at last, ordinary darkness reclaimed the earth once more.
A few startled jackdaws took sudden, panicked flight from somewhere in the surrounding trees, disturbing the returning stillness of the night with their sharp, complaining cries.
Bryan's shoulders heaved with the effort of several deep, ragged breaths. He straightened his own posture slowly, swayed unsteadily for a brief moment, then, with visible effort, managed to steady himself fully.
'It's done.'
Gazing down at his own left hand, restored now entirely to its former, unmarked state, Bryan felt his own pounding heart gradually, slowly begin to settle back into something resembling its normal rhythm.
It was honestly fortunate that he had used his own magic to cushion the initial impact of the blow. Had he touched that tyrannical curse entirely directly, without that protective buffer, the violent impact might well have stripped him of conscious awareness in a single instant and by the time he woke up to properly deal with the resulting damage, it would already have been far too late for any remedy.
Across the threshold of the half-collapsed doorway, Bryan and Dumbledore gazed steadily at each other, both their faces still visibly pale from what had just occurred between them.
Dumbledore's own lips trembled at the sight, and he seemed, in that moment, to have genuinely no idea how to properly begin explaining himself.
Looking into Dumbledore's guilt-ridden, stricken eyes, Bryan found that what welled up steadily inside his own chest was, more than any simple anger at the near-fatal mistake, something considerably closer to pity for the man standing before him.
His own gaze flickered briefly, then settled with quiet attention on the wand still held in Dumbledore's trembling hand.
"That's the Elder Wand, isn't it?"
After a brief silence, Dumbledore nodded once in silent confirmation.
Then he stepped forward unsteadily, crossed to a small patch of open ground entirely untouched by the surrounding nettles, and slowly, heavily lowered himself down onto a bare, cold stone, covering his face completely with both trembling hands.
In the desolate mountain woods, beneath the dim, distant moon, the solitary figure seated on that stone looked, in that moment, as helpless and lost as any frightened child.
Bryan's own lips moved slightly, but no words came to fill the silence.
He turned away instead and walked slowly back to the drawer, studying the ring resting quietly inside it with careful attention.
The protective magic that had shielded it was already entirely stripped away by the confrontation, and the fragment of soul that had been hidden carefully within the ring had been completely destroyed in the process. The ring was safe to handle now.
Bryan reached out and pinched the cold metal band of the ring carefully between two fingers, turning it over slowly in the dim, lingering light to examine more closely the irregular black stone set prominently into it.
One of the three Deathly Hallows—the Resurrection Stone, said in old legends to be capable of bringing the dead back to life.
Even Bryan's own steady gaze grew distant for a brief moment—but it quickly cleared again.
Bryan held the band carefully and slowly turned the ring further, studying closely the black stone embedded at its centre.
Like a black hole, it gave up none of its secrets to him, however carefully he examined it. He could find none of the usual magical structural markings that any crafted alchemical artefact ought to bear—as if this particular object were nothing more than an ordinary stone, simply picked up off some forgotten roadside by chance.
From another world.
Ravenclaw's own cool, clear voice rose in Bryan's mind at the thought.
After a long, considering moment standing alone with the ring, Bryan let his arm fall back to his side, turned, and walked back out through the restored doorway, stopping directly before Dumbledore's hunched figure.
Dumbledore still sat exactly where he'd lowered himself onto the cold stone, his face still hidden completely behind both trembling hands.
"This ring is safe now—"
Bryan said quietly.
His hand slowly lowered a moment later, and Dumbledore's tear-streaked, deeply worn face finally came into view.
"Nearly a century has passed, and compared to back then… I've made no progress at all, have I."
Dumbledore blew his own nose heavily into a handkerchief produced from somewhere in his robes, and said, full of an old, deep sorrow.
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