"Go fight the dragon, just as she once fought her long battle against the Borderland.
"Headmaster Dumbledore, now is the time. Do not retreat."
That was what the black cat said.
Dumbledore felt something scalding flow down from his ever-calm mind, coursing through his blood until it finally ignited a fire in his chest.
"I have waited far too long for this chance, Mr. Green."
From somewhere, Dumbledore took out a stone.
It was cracked, and that made Dumbledore's expression rather grim.
"You don't need to care about that—"
The black cat glanced at it from its misty perch, then leapt onto Dumbledore's shoulder.
And so Dumbledore began to move. The man and the cat vanished instantly into the mist.
The Borderland was silent.
Mist spread as it always did.
A great deal of time had already passed, and everything that churned within the mist came looking for them.
Thread by thread, wisp by wisp, they seeped out of the white haze—silvery gray, carrying a rotten sweetness like lilies wilting at a funeral.
They slithered along Dumbledore's skin. They were not damp, but cold enough to make the old man's soul tremble faintly.
"They're here."
Dumbledore's voice was half murmur, half warning.
"Partis Temporus."
Blazing fire surged from the tip of the old wizard's wand, and even the mist retreated uncontrollably.
The flames circled the man and the cat, clearing a long corridor through the Borderland.
But mist was always pervasive, and a wizard's will was always limited.
"Am I far from her?"
Dumbledore did not seem to care about that. He asked gently instead.
"Six more hours, Headmaster Dumbledore."
The black cat vigilantly used its tail to throw away mist clusters that approached from time to time.
Time did not pass quickly. After two short hours that felt unbearably long to the senses, a mist cluster still arrived soundlessly at Dumbledore's side.
The mist churned before his tired eyes, gathered, rose, and gradually formed a human shape.
That outline was one Dumbledore would never forget.
"It was you."
she said.
Dumbledore's steps paused.
"It was you—"
More voices joined in. Sharp ones, low ones, sobbing ones, sneering ones. All the voices merged into a symphony.
The mist churned even more wildly. More and more figures gathered from all directions: Grindelwald's madly raised arm, Aberforth's furious face, and those timid eyes that had never once carried blame.
All their eyes held the same kind of mist, and the name of that mist was perhaps "remorse."
Dumbledore covered his face weakly, and fine cracks immediately appeared in the mist.
The figures formed by the mist surrounded him. Their arms began to stretch and deform, becoming countless ashen threads. They burrowed into his sleeves, grew against his skin, and tried to use his soul as soil.
He could feel his consciousness draining away like sand slipping through his fingers. Those threads were drawing out the negative emotions in his soul, fermenting them into thicker, heavier mist.
It was an endless vicious cycle: the guiltier he felt, the stronger the mist became; the stronger the mist became, the more despairing he grew.
He angrily raised his wand again, but the mist had already wrapped around most of his arm.
He could no longer feel his fingers.
"In the Borderland, wizards are given the name 'Tarnished.' For the sake of illusory memories, they willingly endure pain and wear down their minds in the strongest and sharpest thing of all—time. They curse the god of this place because it refuses to grant order."
Dumbledore's breathing grew heavy. Mist coiled around him, yet his steps did not stop.
"Just as she waited for me, I will reach her. Faded mist, I have avoided you for far too long."
The fire blazed like a wizard's vow, so fierce that even the black cat nearby was startled.
At that moment, it stood on the shoulder of a mountain-like stone giant, almost single-handedly resisting the boiling mist of the entire Borderland.
"I am going with him today, Borderland."
The black cat's voice was very soft, yet it shook the boundless mist.
The mist that had floated here for years had now become their greatest obstacle.
The black cat knew that a single cluster of such mist was enough to make a guilt-ridden wizard stop in his tracks.
A fragment of Voldemort's soul had disappeared into one such mist cluster.
Oh, right.
Could someone die in the Borderland?
Could a wizard's soul scatter once more?
As the stone giant's body blocked the ocean-like mist, the black cat still had time to think about this.
Fire dispersed her illusion.
As if she had never been firm to begin with.
Even as a mist form, Ariana could never bear to blame him even slightly.
Dumbledore's raised wand drooped a little.
But when he lifted his head, he saw three more people.
Standing at the front was his mother.
Kendra Dumbledore.
Tall, black-haired, her features as hard and proud as an Indian stone carving.
She wore the gray high-collared robe she had sewn herself, with that brass brooch pinned at the collar. Dumbledore remembered that brooch. When he was a child, he had always thought it looked like a beetle curled into a ball.
While she was alive, she had never allowed her spine to bend—not on the rainy night her husband was sent to Azkaban, not when she alone carried the luggage of three children into that stone house in Godric's Hollow.
Now, she stood in the mist, her back still straight.
But her eyes—those eyes he had never truly managed to understand—were looking at him.
"Mother."
Dumbledore's lips moved. His voice was so soft that even he could barely hear it.
She did not answer his call. Her gaze passed over his face, over his beard and half-moon spectacles, landing somewhere he could not reach.
Then she spoke.
"You stayed at Hogwarts too long."
Her tone was neither bitter nor warm.
"You came home less and less."
Kendra continued.
"First, you didn't come back for the summer holidays, saying the school had research projects. Then came Christmas, and you said you had to handle school affairs on the Headmaster's behalf.
"Later, there were fewer and fewer letters."
Her voice remained steady, so steady it was almost cruel.
"I told myself that Albus had an important future. I could not hold him back. I never held him back."
Dumbledore felt his throat tightening.
He wanted to say "I'm sorry," but the words were too light. So light that he did not even dare place them in the void before his mother.
The Borderland never wronged any wizard. The judgment endured by those who intruded here carried a stern justice.
What he owed her was not an apology. He owed her the evenings a son should have spent with her—the evenings when Aberforth silently cleaned the goat pen, when Ariana hummed softly upstairs, when she sat alone at the kitchen table with a cup of tea gone cold before her, listening to the wind of the valley seep through the cracks in the stone walls.
"After you left,"
Kendra finally brought her gaze back to his face,
"I missed you very much."
Dumbledore's hand, the one holding his wand, began to shake.
He could not bring himself to act.
He remembered the few moments of tenderness he had—when he placed first in his year at Hogwarts and his mother smiled, rare and faint; the morning he left for school, when she silently slipped three extra oatcakes she had baked into his trunk; another time, when he had been delirious with fever, and vaguely felt someone changing the damp cloth on his forehead. That hand had been rough, yet gentle as though touching something that might break at any moment.
"I had to let you go, Albus—"
Kendra said.
"You wanted to run. You used your talent and your future as reasons to escape what your father could not escape: a house full of people who needed care, a sister who could no longer leave, and a brother growing angrier by the day. You ran, Albus.
"I let you run because you were my son."
There was no resentment in her words, only a calm far harder to bear than resentment.
It was the calm of a mother who had seen through her child—his brilliance and his shadows—and forgiven him anyway.
"Go, Albus,"
Kendra said.
"I only wanted you to know that I missed you very much."
Dumbledore's expression became even more desolate.
He pressed his thin lips together and remained silent for a long time.
Before him, the black cat was practically fighting a war.
What it had to block was not merely the mist of one area. It even suspected that the entire Borderland's mist had arrived.
When the mist struck the stone giant, even that stone chest cracked open into huge pits.
Inevitably, some stray wisps of mist slipped through, and the black cat truly could do nothing more about them.
Dumbledore looked almost bleakly at the two mist figures nearby.
His father, Percival Dumbledore, stood within the mist.
He wore Azkaban prison robes, but there was no madness in his eyes—only a silence worn down by half a life of imprisonment, and a clarity so sharp it was almost frightening.
"The last time you came to see me,"
Percival's voice was hoarse, like stones grinding together,
"you said nothing. You only held my hand. At the time, I wondered whether my son no longer knew how to cry. I was glad of it, and saddened by it."
He did not step forward. He only stood there at a distance.
Dumbledore did not move either. They looked at each other across a stretch of void neither too long nor too short, as if separated by every iron bar in the world.
"You are braver than I was, Albus,"
Percival said.
"But I wish you were happier than I was."
Then he withdrew into the mist, as quietly as he had come.
Aberforth appeared last.
He had stood farthest away from the beginning, arms crossed over his chest, chin lifted high, that stubborn posture no different from the day of Ariana's funeral sixty years ago.
He said nothing. He only looked at Dumbledore with a gaze somewhere between hatred and grief.
In that one look, Dumbledore read all the things that could not be said: You will always owe me a goat—the one they raised together when Ariana was alive. You will always owe me a blanket—the night he ran out after the funeral, he had taken nothing with him. You will always owe me a beating.
Then Aberforth too retreated into the mist.
From beginning to end, he did not say a single word.
Dumbledore stood alone above the void. The mist was slowly retreating, like a tide admitting it could not destroy this reef.
He thought everything had ended, but a thunderous rumbling made him raise his exhausted eyes.
Another two hours had passed.
"I will never let you pass."
In the suddenly silent Borderland, Dumbledore heard a sound almost like a delirious whisper.
The mountain-like stone giant had collapsed. It weakly and futilely swung its stone arms, only to be pierced through again and again by the mist.
Those overwhelming waves of mist made Dumbledore understand just how small the few clusters he had defeated truly were.
"Headmaster Dumbledore, I can only ask you to run now."
At the same time, the black cat said,
"I am here. You do not need to."
The man and cat looked at each other. Dumbledore saw the cracked stone tablet hidden in the black cat's deep fur.
"I—"
Dumbledore closed his eyes. He had no face to look at this child.
"Teacher Gryffindor told me that happiness is like treasure guarded by a dragon on a magical island. To obtain it, one must go through a fierce battle."
The black cat spoke seriously.
"And there is always a moment when we must hold a sword for the one we love."
The cat's tail seemed reluctant as it tossed out a scarlet sword. Dumbledore instinctively caught it.
"For her, wear armor. For her, hold a sword. For her, press forward without retreat."
The black cat walked alone into the horrifying mist.
Dumbledore froze in place for a moment.
He felt a fire begin burning in his body once more.
A gigantic hand broke through from the depths of the mist, followed by a mountain-like body. Dumbledore saw the black cat struggling to drive the stone giant forward into the mist.
As for himself, he tightened his grip on the sword.
"Gryffindor's sword—"
Dumbledore murmured.
And so, Gryffindor's sword was once again wielded by a Gryffindor.
The commotion in the Borderland continued for a long time.
The battle between the black cat and the mist shook the vast field.
Fortunately, the Borderland was large enough—perhaps infinitely large—so no existence noticed the disturbance.
At the same time, night arrived early.
Long night had come, and apart from a few wooden cottages, the Borderland seemed dim and lightless.
A scarlet sword gave off a strange glow as it shuttled through the mist.
Thanks to most of the mist in the area crashing against the stone giant, there was not as much mist for Dumbledore to cut down.
But it was still enough to make his old arms and legs suffer.
He knew there was an absolutely sharp sword in the world beyond the Veil, but he had not known it was in the hands of that child Green.
What he knew even less was that it would provide such immense help to a wizard whose will had grown so weary.
Closer and closer.
Dumbledore could feel it.
At this moment, the mist on the horizon gradually shifted from ink-black to a faint golden gray.
Inside a wooden cottage with only four walls, the timid witch had just woken up. She was holding flowers and carrying out her daily prayer:
"Master of dreams and mist, bridge between life and death, symbol of eternal good fortune—I offer you flowers. To have flowers is to have good fortune—"
At that moment, a scarlet light pierced through the mist.
It stretched through the fog and fell to the ground, like a bridge of strange radiance.
Ariana's little head could not fully understand this sight. But the old man holding the sword, exhausted yet with eyes full of light, was a wizard she did not even dare dream of seeing.
He had grown so much older.
But that did not matter. She could still recognize him at a glance.
"Ah—ah—"
She must have been struck by a Body-Bind Curse. Otherwise, how could she be unable to move at all?
It was as if someone were humming beside her ear, reminding her of the god's song:
"If one day night becomes the prelude, and mist blurs the boundary, at the coming of dawn, the bridge will open for you."