"You have to go," Vivienne said. "Soon."
She had her arms around Hermione still — the embrace had not entirely loosened — but her voice was practical now, and a little sad, and entirely resolved.
Kevin's father explained it: the space wasn't infinite. Two resident souls at a time was the limit the bracelet had been designed for. Kevin and Hermione being here displaced that balance. If they stayed too long, the bracelet would begin trying to correct for the overcrowding in ways that wouldn't benefit anyone.
Hermione understood instantly and began to pull back, apologising, but Vivienne held on for another moment.
"Don't apologise. I'm glad you're here."
Kevin looked at his parents.
"Once I deal with Voldemort," he said, "I'll figure out how to bring you back properly. Not as soul-fragments. Back."
His father raised an eyebrow. "We've been dead for over a decade."
"I know."
"The bracelet mechanics are reasonably well understood by about three living people."
"I know."
"You're going to do it anyway."
"Obviously."
His father laughed. His mother did not laugh, but she looked at Kevin with the particular expression of someone who has been completely defeated by their own love for a person, and has decided to let that be alright.
"Live well," she said. "Both of you. That's the whole thing. That's all of it."
She pressed their hands together, Kevin's and Hermione's.
Kevin squeezed Hermione's fingers. "We will."
There was no good way to leave. They left quickly, which was almost the same thing.
The path of light from the bracelet led back the way Hermione had come. They followed it together.
The valley had stopped resembling a valley.
Three of the most powerful wizards in the world had been in it for nearly fifteen minutes, and the evidence was distributed across every available surface — craters and glass-smooth scorch marks and a spur of the eastern ridge that had simply ceased to exist. Lightning cracked across the interior of Dumbledore's containment wards in horizontal forks. The air smelled of ozone and stone and something older and harder to name.
Voldemort had stopped trying to win outright.
He'd recognised, within the first three minutes, that he couldn't. Not directly. Dumbledore fighting at full commitment was one matter. Grindelwald having switched to his side — apparently — was another. Both of them together were too much to simply overpower.
So he'd let them work.
He deflected and repositioned. Sent Grindelwald's spells on angles that would trouble Dumbledore. Sent Dumbledore's counters on angles that would trouble Grindelwald. He was unhelpful in a very precise and calculated way that kept both of them occupied enough not to notice what he was doing beneath their feet.
The cursed array had been ready for several minutes.
"Albus, work with me —" Grindelwald pivoted behind a rockface as Dumbledore's moonlight shockwave swept through. His voice had an edge in it now, which Kevin would have found interesting. "Take Voldemort first. I'll explain everything after —"
Dumbledore sent a boulder at him in response.
Grindelwald blasted it apart. The rubble ricocheted, Voldemort redirected it, and the whole cycle repeated.
And repeated.
Voldemort held very still in his mind. Counted down.
The array bloomed.
Purple light erupted from the ground in a circle that covered the entire valley floor — not an explosion, not a flash, but a slow and thorough flowering of dark magic that wrapped around the living things within it and squeezed.
Dumbledore and Grindelwald staggered simultaneously. Their own spells went wrong — the magic turning against the casters, blowing back through channels it should have flowed freely through.
Both of them coughed blood.
Voldemort exhaled.
"I won."
The Killing Curse at Dumbledore. A stone wall, barely holding it.
Fire from below. Grindelwald trying to fight through his own disrupted magic to counter it and failing.
Voldemort watched the two of them — the two wizards who had defined the last century of magical history, who had shaped the world he'd had to claw his way through, who had stood between him and everything he'd wanted — and he watched them struggle in his array, and he felt something that he did not name because naming things gave them power and he was not in the habit of giving power away.
He raised his wand for Dumbledore.
Thump.
He lowered it.
Thump.
The sound was coming from the wrong direction.
All three of them — Voldemort, Dumbledore, Grindelwald — turned, or looked, or went very still in the way of people whose attention has been seized against their will.
Kevin's body lay where it had fallen. Motionless. Face down in the snow.
Thump.
A heartbeat. Slow and irregular at first, then steadying.
Dumbledore's breath caught.
Grindelwald turned away, and the expression on his face was not what anyone present would have predicted.
Voldemort stared.
Kevin's lips moved. Barely.
"What makes you think," Kevin said, to the snow, to the valley, to no one and everyone, "it's over."
He pushed himself up from the ground.