16th January 1996, Hogwarts, deep night
Harry came out of the vision like a drowning man breaking surface... gasping, upright in the dark, his scar burning with a hot itching prickle that would not settle.
Ilvermorny. The cliff. Mordred's smile. Even Dumbledore is soon dead.
He sat for exactly three heartbeats, forcing the blue-moon calm down over the panic, sorting what mattered. 'The vision could be false. Dad said so. But false or true, he has to KNOW... and he has to know NOW.'
He was out of bed before the third heartbeat finished, the Invisibility Cloak sweeping over his shoulders, and then he was through the portrait hole and running... soft-footed, trained, keeping to the Squad-free routes out of pure habit... across the sleeping castle toward the west wing, where the school housed its esteemed guest.
He came round the last corner and stopped dead.
The door of Ethan's rooms was just closing, and Argus Filch was shuffling away from it down the corridor, lantern in hand, Mrs Norris at his heel. And his face... Harry, pressed invisible against the cold wall, caught it full in the lantern light as the caretaker passed within feet of him... his face was doing something Harry had never seen it do.
The permanent scowl had come loose. Underneath it moved a strange weather of things: uncertainty, and an old, worn disappointment, deep as a groove in stone... and threaded through both, faint and fierce and almost painful to look at, a sliver of hope. The face of a man who had been offered something he had spent fifty years teaching himself to stop wanting.
Filch turned the far corner and was gone.
"Come in, kiddo. The corridor's cold."
Harry let out a breath, scratched the back of his head under the Cloak... 'one day I'll manage to sneak up on him, one day'... pulled it off, and followed his father inside.
Ethan's guest quarters were handsome, high-windowed, and comprehensively buried. The great desk... the table beside it, armchair, and a portion of the floor... had vanished beneath a mountain range of parchment, every sheet stamped with the small starburst emblem of Atid Stella.
Requisitions, contracts, warding schematics, correspondence: the sediment of a company whose owner had run away to play professor.
Harry looked at the paper mountain, then at his father, and smiled wryly.
Ethan looked at the paper mountain, then at his son, smiled wryly back... and waved one hand. The entire range rose, shuffled itself with a sound like wings, and stacked itself into a single neat tower in the corner, where it stood radiating silent reproach.
"Lupin's revenge," said Ethan. "He forwards it all. Every day. I believe he's enjoying himself." He was already pouring tea, two cups, the fragrant calming blend. "Sit. Now... what did you see?"
No preamble. No why are you out of bed. Harry sat, wrapped his cold hands round the cup, and gave his report the way he'd been taught... complete, ordered, exact: the cliff, the sea, Mordred at the parapet like a man on holiday. Bode, and the thing that could not be taken, only given or fetched. Avery. June. And then the turn, the smile, I divined it to the foot, the castle folded into the black mountain...
"Ilvermorny," Harry finished. "They were looking at Ilvermorny, Dad. Tonight. It felt like... it felt like now."
Ethan had gone very still while Harry spoke.
Now his eyes changed, the starlight rising in them, swift and vertical, no theatre in it at all and his lips moved, a murmur pitched below hearing, question after soundless question, while the light behind the amber flared and steadied and flared again. Harry sat silent and let him work, and watched the small cost of it gather at the corners of his father's eyes.
After a long moment, the starlight banked. Ethan let out a heavy sigh... the sigh of a man setting down one weight and picking up a worse one.
"It's true, isn't it," Harry said quietly. "The vision. It's happening."
"Parts of it I can confirm. Parts of it are fogged... Mordred's fog; you'll remember what I said about him making things expensive to see." Ethan set down his cup. "But the shape of it holds. Yes. I believe it's true, and I believe it is tonight."
"Then what is it?" Harry leaned forward. "The thing he's crossed the world for. What's at Ilvermorny that's worth all this... what does he think will kill Dumbledore?"
Ethan's voice went grim. "What do you know about Isolt Sayre?"
Harry blinked at the turn, and reached for it... history read at Ethan's own table, years ago, and Robert's stories layered over it since. "Founder of Ilvermorny. Irish witch... she ran to America, from an aunt who... Gaunt. She was a Gaunt."
His eyes widened slightly as the pieces began sliding. "Descended from..."
"From Salazar Slytherin. Yes." Ethan nodded slowly.
"And what almost nobody troubles to remember, because it reads like a footnote, is what Isolt carried when she fled. She stole it from her aunt the night she escaped, it crossed the Atlantic in her pocket, and for years it was the only wand at Ilvermorny... a school of two children and a wand of a founder."
His amber eyes held Harry's. "Salazar Slytherin's own wand. Snakewood. And its core, Harry... a Basilisk horn."
Harry's breath went out of him. Awe and horror arrived together and sat down side by side.
"That's the first reason he crossed to America," Ethan said. "His ancestor's wand. Slytherin's heir, come for Slytherin's own instrument... a wand steeped in a thousand years of exactly his kind of magic, with a core out of the king of serpents, answerable to Parseltongue. In his hand..." He didn't finish it. He didn't need to.
"But..." Harry was shaking his head, hunting through memory. "Robert told me about this. Ilvermorny's founding story, they all learn it... the wand was buried. Isolt and her husband buried it in the school grounds, and it... it died. Sprouted. It wilted into a tree, the snakewood tree, it's been growing there for centuries. There's no wand any more. There's just..."
He stopped.
Ethan was watching him with the particular patient stillness of a teacher who has asked the question and is waiting for the student to hear it.
"...Why did it turn into a tree?" Harry said slowly. "Wands don't do that. Buried wood rots. Why did that wand sprout... and why is the tree still alive, three and a half centuries on, when snakewood doesn't even grow in that climate...?"
"Because the wand never died," Ethan said quietly.
"It slept. The wood transformed; the tree is the wand, grown a body around itself, its leaves curing every ill... you've read that too, I expect... because the power in it never went anywhere. And the core... the Basilisk horn... has lain dormant in the heart of that trunk for three hundred and fifty years, dreaming, waiting for a voice it recognises."
His face was granite. "The tree is not a monument, Harry. It's a scabbard. And if Voldemort has gone there in person... then he believes he has the means to draw the blade. To wake the core, unmake the tree, and reconstruct his ancestor's wand out of its own living ashes... And I am very much afraid that he is right. Parseltongue, and blood. He has both."
Harry sat with that, cold to the marrow. A second wand. Slytherin's wand, on top of his own, on top of everything else. 'Even Dumbledore is only an old man with a stick.'
"You said the first reason." Harry looked up sharply; he'd caught it, the way his father had meant him to. "What's the second? Why else would he go to America?"
And here something changed in Ethan's face... the grimness going older, and more personal.
His eyes narrowed, and behind them Harry watched a memory surface from a long way down: torchlight, jungle heat, a season in China that Harry knew only in outline, a masked man in midnight blue.
"Because MACUSA's most secure prison," Ethan said, "holds a man who knows things no one else alive knows. About creatures. About where the rarest of them can be found, taken, and used. A man who spent twenty years building the greatest trafficking network the world has seen, and whose head is a complete atlas of everything that network ever touched."
His voice had gone very quiet. "You've heard his name before, kiddo. It's stitched to two members of this family."
Harry went still.
Jasper... a golden Snidget, last of a plundered species, rescued as an egg from a poacher's crate.
Osian... a Re'em calf taken from a slaughtered herd, raised on bottle-feeds in a London kitchen. And behind both of them, always, the same shadow, the name from the story of the compound, the organisation Ethan and a French prisoner had burned down together...
"Asmus Drazkan," Harry said.
"Asmus Drazkan," Ethan agreed, and the name sat in the warm room like a cold stone. "Rotting, these five years, in a MACUSA cell... which Rachelle and I both preferred to a grave, and which I am tonight rather regretting."
He turned his cup slowly. "Think like Mordred for a moment. You are building armies of the discarded... dark wizards, wild ones, the hungry. You are gathering creatures to your banner wherever the Ministries have taught them to hate wizards.
And there is one man on Earth who holds the map to every rare beast, every hidden population, every buyer, handler and cage-smith on five continents... and your enemies have conveniently gathered him into a single cell, in the very country you are already visiting." The amber eyes lifted. "Slytherin's wand is the errand Voldemort came for. Drazkan, I suspect, is the errand Mordred came for. Two birds. One ocean."
Harry's eyes shone dark with contemplation... Jasper asleep on a perch in Baker Street, Osian's warm bulk, and the man whose trade had orphaned them both, about to be shopping-listed by the enemy.
His hands had closed into fists on his knees without his noticing.
They sat in silence a moment, the tea cooling.
Then Harry breathed out, long and heavy, letting it go the way he'd been taught to let go of what he couldn't reach tonight... and as his mind loosened, it snagged on the earlier thing, the strange face in the lantern light.
"...Dad. Why was Filch here?" He asked it sheepishly, half-expecting to be told to mind his business. "Middle of the night. And he looked... he looked like something had happened to him."
Ethan chuckled, and took a sip, and some of the night's weight lifted off him visibly... a man glad of a better subject.
"Something has. Or may." He settled back. "I've been recruiting him, these past weeks. For an attempt... an Atid Stella project. Built specifically for Squibs."
Harry pondered that, turning it, finding no shape for it. Ethan gave him the thread to pull.
"Go back to the theory. The one you taught the others in the basement, that I taught you at ten. Your innate magic as a coiled thread..."
"...the coil spins when you cast," Harry recited, automatic, "and your threads reach out and catch the threads of the world, and the incantation tells them what to do..."
"Just so. Now." Ethan's eyes had begun, faintly, to gleam... the lecture-gleam, the taking-magic-apart gleam.
"The whole world assumes a Squib is a person without magic. An empty vessel born to a full family. But suppose the assumption is wrong. Suppose a Squib has the coil... has the thread, has magic sitting in them, real as yours or mine... and what's broken is only the mechanism. A coil that doesn't spin true. A malfunction in the winding, so the threads can never be gripped, never directed, never cast."
He tilted his head. "Not an empty vessel. A locked one. And then ask yourself the next question. Wands are conductors... amplifiers and channels, tuned for ordinary coils. So what if someone built a wand tuned for the broken ones? A conductor designed, from first principles, around exactly that malfunction... a key cut for that specific lock?"
Harry's jaw dropped.
He sat there with it, the size of it opening in front of him... Filch's face in the lantern light, fifty years of mops and confiscation-cabinets, a whole population of people told from birth they were nothing, and his father in a guest room quietly designing them a door... "Dad, that would... that's not a product, that would change... everything would..."
"It would," Ethan agreed mildly, "if it works, and I'll thank you to sit on the excitement, because most of it is still theory. The conductor design is embryonic. The malfunction model is a hypothesis with three competing versions. The only piece I'd call solid..." and here he touched two fingers lightly beneath his own eye, and the meaning was plain: I have looked, with the Sight, in the way only I can look "...is the first premise. Squibs are not empty, Harry. I've seen the magic in them... dim, and knotted, and locked... but there. In every single one I've ever examined. Including the man who just left this room."
He picked his tea back up. "Which is what I told Argus tonight. You saw his face. That's what it looks like, being told at his age that the thing everyone swore was missing was in him the whole time... and being asked to help us find the key. He said he'd think about it.... He'll say yes. Hope's a patient creature. It only needs the once."
Harry nodded, slowly, and filed the whole of it away... and understood, in passing, one more small mystery of the term: why Argus Filch had grown so strangely distant from Dolores Umbridge, the great despiser of half-breeds and lesser beings, in the very weeks a certain blue-coated gentleman had begun treating him like a man.
"Now." Ethan set down his cup with the soft click that always meant the visit was ending. "Thank you for tonight, kiddo. I mean that. Running it straight to me, complete and fast... that was exactly right, and it will matter. And the rest..." he held Harry's eyes "...you leave to us now. To me, to Albus, to the Order, and some people across the water. Not to you. Yes?"
"...Yes." Harry said it reluctantly, and meant it anyway, and stood. At the door he paused. "Dad. Robert's there. And Selene. At Ilvermorny, right now, they're both..."
"I know," said Ethan quietly. "Go to bed, Harry."
When the door had closed and the boy's soft footsteps had faded, Ethan Esther stood a long moment at the tall window, looking out at the January sky... hard, clear, brilliant with stars over the black grounds... and his reflection looked back at him with eyes full of things he showed no one: the arithmetic of distances and time zones; a wand three hundred and fifty years asleep; a man in a cell he had chosen to leave alive; two children by a fountain an ocean away; and underneath all of it, old and quiet, the particular grief of a Seer who can see the shape of a blow coming and cannot reach far enough to catch it.
Then he raised one hand.
The Patronus poured out of the air silver and silent... a great night owl, wings wider than the window, its light washing the paper tower white... and hung before him, waiting.
"To Albus," Ethan told it. "Wake him. Ilvermorny is attacked tonight; the target is Slytherin's wand beneath the snakewood tree, and I judge the vision true. MACUSA must be roused through every channel he has, faster than owls, faster than protocol. And tell him the second errand: Drazkan. The prison as much as the school. Go."
The owl went through the window-glass like moonlight through water and was gone across the grounds.
And Ethan sat down at the cleared desk, drew a fresh sheet toward him, dipped his pen, and began... in a swift, even, tireless hand, as the candle burned down... to write to the Order.
The same hour... Mount Greylock, Massachusetts
Ilvermorny was burning.
Not everywhere... the great granite castle was too old and too strong to burn everywhere... but across the snowy campus, clumps of fire bloomed orange against the winter dark, and between them figures duelled without pause, spell-light stitching the night in every colour, and the sound of it rolled off the mountainside like a storm that had come indoors.
Robert Thornwood crouched behind a mass of fallen masonry with his back to the cold stone and Selene Goshawk in his arms.
His face was stained with soot and cut in two places, and he barely felt either, because Selene was pale... grey-pale, wrong-pale... her breath coming quick and shallow, and down her left arm, where the curse had caught her, the skin was marked with a spreading scrawl of thin dark lines like frost growing under the surface, and nothing he knew would stop it, everything in him had narrowed to the weight of her and the distance to the hospital wing.
He risked one look over the rubble.
The professors were fighting like heroes... he could see Charms and Transfiguration back to back on the fountain steps, carving order out of chaos... and being held, that was the obscenity of it, held and pinned by attackers who weren't even good. Robert had duelled in a Tournament; he knew skill when he saw it, and Voldemort's foreign rabble didn't have it.
What they had was numbers, wave after cheap expendable wave, dark wizards bought on three continents with trinkets and promises, spending themselves to keep the school's defenders busy... while through the middle of the campus ran a single blasted corridor of ruin, a straight line of casual annihilation pointing into the heart of the castle, where the two who mattered had already gone.
'We were just sitting by the fountain,' he thought, and the sourness of it was like bile.
Twenty minutes ago. Selene laughing at something, the snow blue in the dusk, the most ordinary evening of the year... and then the sky had torn. The wards... Ilvermorny's mighty wards, the pride of three centuries... had lit up overhead like a struck bell, and shattered, visibly, into drifting flakes of dying light, ash of magic sifting down over the snow... and through the wound had come a single colossal bolt of purple lightning, down from the boiling cloud onto the highest tower, and then the smoke-shapes pouring in, and the world had ended between one heartbeat and the next.
Rage filled him, useless and vast. He wanted to be out there. Every trained nerve in him howled to be on the fountain steps with his teachers.
Selene made a small sound against his shoulder.
Robert gritted his teeth until they creaked, and looked down at her grey face, and chose... the way he had been choosing every thirty seconds since the sky tore... and gathered her tighter, and broke from cover, running low and fast along the ruined cloister toward the hospital wing.
He made it ten strides.
The dark wizard came out of a doorway to his left, sly and unhurried, wand already up, and Robert saw the curse gather... saw it and knew, with the cold clarity of a Seeker judging a dive, that carrying
Selene he could not dodge, could not shield in time, could not...
The curse leapt... and bent.
It swerved off its line as though the air itself had taken hold of it, swatted aside into a wall where it detonated harmlessly... and Professor Howard stepped out of the smoke between Robert and his killer, wand moving, and Robert had never in five years seen his Head of House like this.
Howard's face... dry, wry, unshakeable Howard, who marked essays in green ink and confiscated dungbombs with a sigh... was transfigured with a cold and absolute fury, and the curse he returned was nasty, was nothing that appeared on any syllabus, and it took the sly dark wizard off his feet and through the doorway he'd come from, he did not come out again.
"Hospital wing," Howard said, not turning, already tracking the next threat. "Run, Thornwood. Don't stop. I have this side."
"Professor..."
"RUN."
Robert ran.
...
Deep in the castle's heart, in a courtyard open to the ripped and boiling sky, it was quiet.
The snakewood tree stood alone in the centre of it, as it had stood for three and a half centuries: black-limbed, glossy-leaved, serpent-sinuous, unnaturally green amid the January snow, older than the nation around it.
The two figures who came drifting down into the courtyard as columns of black smoke resolved before it, and stood, and for a moment... genuinely... marvelled.
"Oh," said Mordred Slythra softly, "it's lovely."
Voldemort said nothing. He had gone very still, his head tilted, in the manner of a man listening... and then his lipless mouth curved, slow and terrible, into a smile of pure covetous delight. He could feel it. Beneath the bark, beneath three hundred and fifty years of rings, deep in the heartwood of the trunk: a pulse. Slow as centuries. Asleep. Alive. The horn of the king of serpents, dreaming in its wooden scabbard, and every beat of it rang against his blood like a bell recognising a bell.
He stepped toward it, and the tree's last defence rose... a dome of layered light, ward within ward, three centuries of accumulated protection blooming out of the ground to shield the school's most sacred thing.
Voldemort waved his wand almost absently.
Black smoke poured from the gesture in a solid mass, a battering wave of it, and crashed against the dome... and the wards that had stood since Isolt's daughters were young shattered like sugar-work, layer after layer, collapsing in a cascade of dying light that drifted down over the snow as glittering ash.
"STOP!" The voice rang off the courtyard walls, harsh with fury.
In the archway stood a man in his late middle years... broad, iron-grey, his wand already drawn, his robes bearing the Vice-Headmaster's clasp of Ilvermorny... and the rage on his face was the rage of a man watching his life's charge desecrated.
Voldemort did not so much as glance at him. He simply kept walking toward the tree.
Mordred turned instead, smirking, and strolled to meet the Vice-Headmaster with his hands loose at his sides. "Good evening. I'm afraid the Headmaster's office is closed..."
"You send a child." The Vice-Headmaster's lip curled; his contempt was total, armoured, supremely confident... a duelling champion of his generation looking at a boy of seventeen. "Stand aside, whelp, and perhaps MACUSA will house you somewhere with windows. I have no time to waste on the apprentice."
Mordred laughed... a genuine, delighted chuckle. "And I was told Americans were polite. Tell me, does the arrogance come with the clasp, or did you have it fitted separately? You're rather old, sir, for all this excitement. Do try to keep..."
The Vice-Headmaster attacked, and the courtyard came alive.
And Mordred Slythra, for the first time in a long while, was surprised.
The old man was powerful... and worse than powerful, he was inventive.
His style was nothing Mordred had catalogued: Transfiguration braided through curse-work at speed, the courtyard itself turning traitor... flagstones erupting into stone hounds mid-curse, snow lashing into whips of razored ice, the very air hardening into walls a half-beat before Mordred's counters landed... each transformation sheathing a genuine curse inside it like a razor in an apple.
Mordred gave ground, smiling, reading, and his mild foresight... the thin prophetic whisper that had kept him untouched through a dozen fights... sang its warnings a half-second ahead as always...
...and the old man's rhythm broke pattern, a feint inside a feint, the stone hound he'd conjured detonating into a spray that was itself the curse...and Mordred's foresight shrieked too late, and the blow took him across the chest and hurled him the width of the courtyard.
He came up on one knee in the snow, ribs alight, blood in his mouth, and for one heartbeat the pleasant mask was gone and something very cold looked out from under it. Then he laughed... shakier than before, and meaning it more... and withdrew, fast and low, falling back across the courtyard to Voldemort's side.
"He's good," Mordred said, wiping his mouth. "My lord, do hurry."
Voldemort was not listening.
As he stood before the snakewood tree with one white hand laid against its bark, caressing it, almost tender... and then he opened his mouth, and what came out was not words but a long, sliding, sibilant hiss, rising and falling, intimate as a lullaby: Parseltongue, spoken by Slytherin's last heir to Slytherin's sleeping wand.
Across the courtyard, the Vice-Headmaster... advancing, wand raised... slowed. His eyes narrowed. He did not understand the sound, but something in the marrow of him did, some animal recognition of an ancient key turning in an ancient lock, and a cold premonition walked up his spine.
The tree answered.
A hum rose from it, deep and woody, felt in the teeth more than heard... and the great black limbs began to sway, though there was no wind... and then, from the crown downward, swift and silent and terrible, the snakewood tree that had stood for three hundred and fifty years wilted. Leaves greyed and poured down like dead moths. Limbs shrivelled, softened, slumped into powder.
The whole ancient body of it collapsed in on itself in a sighing cascade of pale ash... and there, hanging in the centre of the falling ruin where the heartwood had been, revealed like a bone, was the core.
A single horn, long as a forearm, darkly lustrous... and vibrating, now, quick and eager, dormancy shed like a skin, three centuries of sleep ending in a shiver of awakened vitality.
The ash did not settle.
It rose... spiralling, gathering, drawn inward around the horn in a tightening helix, compacting, becoming... wood out of ash, form out of ruin, snakewood reborn around its serpent heart... and then the spiral snapped inward with a sound like a held breath released, and into Lord Voldemort's waiting hand dropped a wand.
Long. Black. Sinuous as its namesake. Warm as a living thing.
Voldemort's scarlet eyes shone. He could feel it accepting him... no, more than accepting: recognising, pouring itself open to him, a millennium of his ancestor's craft flooding up his arm like dark water finding its level, and his own power rising monstrous to meet it, and the two currents braiding into something that made the torn air of the courtyard shudder.
The Vice-Headmaster felt it too.
His lips quivered. Cold sweat had broken across his brow, and every instinct sharpened by forty years of duelling was screaming a single word at him, and the word was run... and he was a teacher of children standing in the sacked heart of his school, and so he gritted his teeth, and did not run, and attacked instead with everything he had ever learned.
It was magnificent.
The courtyard rose at his call one final time... the walls birthing stone colossi, the ash and snow whirling into a hunting storm of blades, a dozen transfigured horrors converging from every side with a killing curse threaded silent through the heart of the pattern... the masterwork of a master, all of it loosed at once.
Voldemort raised Salazar Slytherin's wand, and answered with a single spell.
It came out as a ray... green, but not the clean green of the Killing Curse; something older and hungrier, a deep venomous luminance like light through a serpent's eye... and where it passed, the world simply died.
The stone colossi it touched did not shatter; they withered, rock crumbling to gravel to sand to dust in the space of a breath. The storm of blades greyed and dissolved. The snow blackened and boiled away; the flagstones beneath the ray's path cracked and bleached, colour draining out of them as though the light were drinking it; the dead grass at the courtyard's edge withered further into nothing at a speed the naked eye could follow; even the threaded killing curse... a thing that should yield to nothing... simply wilted in flight, guttering out like a candle in a sealed jar.
And then, through the unmade remnants of everything he was, the green ray reached the Vice Headmaster of Ilvermorny.
He died on his feet, eyes open.
He was still standing... grey, drained, statue-still... for a full second afterward, before he fell; and his open eyes, to the last, were filled with horror, and with one bright unbearable grain of unwillingness: the grief of a guardian who had seen the blade drawn from his keeping, and could not, at the end, do anything at all.
Silence, in the courtyard. Ash sifting down on the snow.
Then... footsteps. Many of them, fast, converging from three directions through the castle's arteries.
Mordred, one hand pressed to his ribs, tilted his head and tsked. "MACUSA's hounds," he said. "Faster than modelled. Someone warned them." A flicker of genuine irritation crossed the pleasant face... 'someone'... and was filed away for later. "Which also means our hirelings outside are done for. Ah well. That's what they were for."
The Aurors of MACUSA burst into the courtyard from three archways at once... a dozen of them, wands blazing with ready light... and stopped.
They saw the sacred tree of Ilvermorny, gone... a circle of bare scorched earth and drifting ash where three centuries had stood.
They saw the Vice-Headmaster, grey and fallen. They saw the tall pale figure standing at the centre of the ruin with a black wand in its hand, and the smiling boy beside it, and shock and fury and... beneath both, honest and human... fear moved across every face.
"TAKE THEM!" the Senior Auror roared, his eyes blazing with rage, and a dozen spells leapt as one.
They struck Voldemort's shield and died on it. All of them. The shield did not flare or strain; it simply accepted the barrage the way a lake accepts rain, and Voldemort and Mordred stood behind it, and smirked... twin expressions, master and apprentice, unhurried men consulting a timetable... and Mordred drew from his coat a length of blackened chain, and held it out, and Voldemort laid one white finger upon it.
"Ilvermorny thanks you for your custody," Mordred called pleasantly to the Aurors, "of both our withdrawals."
And the two of them dissolved into a column of black smoke that punched upward through the torn sky and was gone.
The smoke that remained rolled outward across the courtyard, thick and dark, and the Aurors... who had seen what the smoke's masters could do... fell back from it, shields raised, none willing to be first into that dark.
The Senior Auror cursed, viciously, and slashed his wand, and a conjured wind tore the smoke to rags.
And there was nothing left to fight. Only the battered courtyard, bleached and cracked. Only ash on old snow, already blowing.
Only a dead guardian with open eyes, and a circle of bare earth where, for three and a half centuries, the most sacred and secret treasure of Ilvermorny had stood... and stood no longer.