They landed lightly in the exact center of Merlin's great circle of standing stones, and Harry blessed Hermione for her attention to detail. For the Dragon was dancing even now in the skies above their heads, and the Phoenix was rising from the ashes of a dying sunset to meet them. From their vantage point they could see Aurors interspersed among the dark shadows of the giant stones, searching for some nameless thing of power residing only in Auror Ademeus' imagination. A shout came from one of the Aurors, and eyes turned in their direction. Harry cursed succinctly to discover that the Sword had suddenly begun to glow in his hand, which even his invisibility cloak couldn't conceal.

"Can't you turn that thing off?" Draco demanded in a loud whisper.

"I think it's supposed to be like this," Harry replied dryly. Then he shook his head a little, trying to follow a faint melody that had appeared at the edges of his mind, but the notes he caught sparkled like a handful of rubies in his thoughts before fading away.

Draco nudged him urgently. "Think you can hurry up with the communion there? We're about to have company."

Harry looked up to see several Aurors running towards them, wands drawn. "Hold this," he murmured to Draco, and raised the Sword. Draco gingerly twined his fingers around Harry's on the hilt. Harry took a deep breath and curled his other hand against the naked blade of the sword, pressing until a thin line of blood welled from his palm. "I call upon the Light sung by the Phoenix and the Darkness dreamed by the Dragon," he intoned. The Sword flared, and the music in his mind crescendoed. "Take us to Dragonsweyr," Harry commanded firmly, and the ground dropped out from under him.

The wind winged past and around them like flurries of silk stirred by a song echoing through a thousand years of silence. Harry took a step forward blindly into the darkness, bringing Draco after him. The wind reversed direction. Another step, and light welled upward from the emptiness beneath his feet, flashing red behind his closed eyelids. He stepped onto solid ground, and the melody died to a whisper. Harry opened his eyes.

The wind had carried them into an enormous stone hall, patterned and shaped by the shadows of giant onyx columns disappearing from eyesight into the darkness of a ceiling that stretched upward into infinity. Steady torch-flames bespelled upon the columns and the gold-veined black marble walls shimmered in the reflection of the polished obsidian floor, leaving Harry with the eerie impression that they were standing underwater.

Their breaths frosted the air in front of them as they slowly turned, seeking a direction in the pattern of shadows along the walls. Harry felt the tingle along his spine and up into his neck as his magical sixth sense alerted him to an awareness that had suddenly uncoiled from the castle's shadows to regard him with an almost tangible menace. He felt Draco freeze beside him, his grip on the Sword driving the blood out from both their hands.

The presence approached, brushing against them both with a dark power that left a smoky aftertaste of bitter ashes in his mouth. It loomed over them, poised to strike. Harry raised the Sword in defiance, refusing to be intimidated, and pushed at the awareness with his mind. It seemed to draw back a little, leaving them room to breathe, and Harry advanced with Draco at his side. The sword blade caught the flicker of torch light within its mirror surface and suddenly seemed to draw all the flames in the room into a firestorm that danced up and down the bright metal. It strummed a single deep note in Harry's mind and blazed into an arc of light that burned away the shadows around them. The dark presence dissipated like dry, rotting leaves at the touch of fire, leaving only ordinary darkness behind.

Harry expelled a long breath through his mouth and cast his mind around the hall, searching for other dangers. He came up with nothing. After a moment, Draco, too, shook his head. "Which way?" he mouthed, taking his hands away from the sword and drawing his wand.

Harry shook his head wordlessly. The Sword lay quiescent once more in his hand, with only the occasional hint of reflected flame dancing down its blade. He closed his eyes and plucked the sword-strand in his mind, formed a question without words. There was no denying that the Sword was bound to this place, and it was the best chance they had.

The Sword's answer was immediate, intense as something returning to a home from which it had long been exiled. Harry stumbled as the high keening of longing rippled through him like a cold blue flame. Draco steadied him with one hand on his elbow, and he managed to gasp out, "Below us. A chamber."

They moved silently across the room as if they were shadows stalking in the footsteps of shadows, following the pull of the Sword on Harry's mind, but they encountered not one of the Death Eaters the Dark Lord had gathered in this place. The lack of guards along the way only served to increase the tingling of unease along Harry's back and the sourness of growing suspicion in his stomach, not lessen them.

They found the long stairway descending into darkness after passing the silent testimonies of countless doorways opening into lightless, lifeless rooms. They paused at the top of the black marble stairs, and Draco finally voiced their fears. "They're gone, aren't they?" he stated flatly.

"Yes," Harry replied softly. "They're gone."

"Will they be ready in time?" Draco asked.

"They will," Harry said firmly. "We have to believe that." He paused. Then he asked quietly, "Malfoy, why didn't you join your father? Why didn't you join Voldemort?"

Draco gave him a long sideways glance. "Isn't it a bit late to be questioning my loyalties at this point, Potter?" he drawled.

"I'm not—I mean..." Harry shrugged. "I just suddenly wanted to know."

Draco met his eyes. "Then get us out of this alive," he said. And then, under his breath, "We're going to break our necks just trying to get down those stairs."

As if in response to his words, blue-tinted flames embedded in the walls to either side of them sparkled to life, illuminating the first few gold-veined stairs. Harry and Draco looked at each other. "Why do I get the impression that we're being invited to step into a trap?" Draco frowned.

"You wanted light," Harry pointed out wryly. "Besides, we have no choice."

After a moment Draco nodded, and they stepped onto the first stair. They moved together, step by step, down the spiraling stairway, following the blue flames that lit the path before them and extinguished themselves behind them.

Harry felt more than saw the danger that lurked at the bottom of the stairs, alerted simultaneously by the venomous, bone-chilling cold misting upward and the discordant chord of the Sword in his mind. He and Draco backed away until the Sword faded to only a murmur in his mind, and the poison of despair no longer ate into his determination.

Dementors. Beside him, Draco inhaled noiselessly.

"Can you cast the Patronus Charm?" Harry murmured out of the corner of his mouth.

"Not well," Draco admitted quietly, wand shivering slightly in a bloodless grip. They walked out from beneath the cloak. Harry carefully folded it and placed it on a stair beneath a gold-veined wall shimmering slightly in the blue light.

"We have to get through somehow," Harry said grimly, but they stared at each other helplessly, asking the same question in their minds: how could the two of them get through all the dementors Voldemort had gathered in this castle?

The sudden imperative warning of the Sword in Harry's mind finally shocked him into movement. "Dementors, behind us," he whispered urgently as he pulled Draco after him. "The room is very close. I'll summon my Patronus to keep them off us. We'll have to make a run for it."

Draco didn't bother to answer. Harry, with the bones of Draco's wrist warm in his hand, could feel the other man's tightly-chained terror as they plunged recklessly into the poisoned space of the dementors.

Harry loosed Draco from his hold and reached for his wand. But the Ayrgen Sword suddenly flared into blue flame once more. Harry's gasp was lost in the song of the Sword in his mind, strong and resonating with command. He stepped off the last stair and swung at the nearest dementor with the Sword in a double-handed grip. Light burst from the Sword and crashed soundlessly into the cowled dementor. For a moment the dementor seemed to glow from within; in the next it had shattered silently into a thousand pieces of shadow sizzling with blue light. Harry swung the Sword again, and more arcs of blue fire exploded from its tip to incinerate all the dementors in their path.

A muffled sound from behind him alerted Harry to the approach of the dementors down the stairs. "Expecto Patronum!" Draco croaked desperately, and Harry whirled to see silvery mist bursting out of the tip of Draco's wand, barely warding off three dementors who had hesitated heart-stoppingly close to where they stood. He thrust the Ayrgen Sword past Draco straight into the cowled body of the closest dementor. In the sword's blue weirdling glow, he could see the mouth of the dementor stretched grotesquely in a soundless scream. Then the faceless creature imploded, followed a moment later by the two behind it, pierced through by a merciless spear of blue flame.

The command faded from Harry's mind, and his body suddenly recognized the amount of power that he Sword had demanded from him. He staggered, clutching the Sword fiercely to stop it from dropping out of his nerveless hand.

"Potter!" Draco whispered sharply. "What's wrong with you?"

Harry crumbled down the wall, the Sword cradled in his lap. Spots whitened his vision for a moment. "N-noth...," he mouthed faintly, closing his eyes. The ground dropped beneath him, and reality pulled away from him nauseatingly. He clutched at the pommel of the Sword desperately. "I..."

After a while the room stopped spinning around him, and he tentatively opened his eyes. Cold sweat glistened on his face and shivered down his clammy back. "I'm all right. I think—just too much magic expanded too fast," he managed grimly as he stood. "And that was only the first obstacle."

"Not a trivial one," Draco murmured, gripping Harry's elbow to keep him steady. "And one that Voldemort was counting on."

Harry nodded slightly, brushing sweat-darkened hair out of his eyes. He considered for a moment, then slid the sword into the air at his back, where it promptly vanished. "Let's hope," he muttered, drawing out his wand.

Draco raised an eyebrow at him. "Neat trick. Maybe you should've done that with the dementors, too, instead of shooting off all those flashy lights."

Harry rolled his eyes. "I didn't hear you complaining."

"Too busy covering your arse," Draco smirked.

"And when has that ever shut you up?" Harry asked archly. Then he added, "Thanks, Malfoy."

They moved forward cautiously, but encountered no further sign of either Death Eater or dementor. They stopped before the doors of the room Harry had sensed from above. He lightly touched the intricately-carved oaken surface, feeling his skin tingle with the power radiating from Voldemort's wards, the heat like intense burning sunlight. His mind staggered at the sheer strength of it—and then at the realization of how Voldemort had gathered that power. He suddenly recalled how the dementors had crowded around this space, less as if they had been guarding it, and more as if they had been...feeding.

"Oh Merlin," he whispered. "Merlin."

As if the doors of the ancient castle had been listening, the wards rippled apart, and a crack of light appeared between the oaken faces. Then, slowly, with hardly a murmur, the doors swung inward.

Voldemort looked up at them, a dagger already dripping with blood held poised in his hands, and smiled. "Welcome," he rasped in a dry whisper. "You have arrived just in time to see the judgment of a traitor and my ascension to everlasting power." The door slammed shut behind them.

Harry looked up to see the bloody and twisted, barely-human lump and the broken, discarded pieces of what had been a wand lying upon the altar before them. Then he opened his mouth and screamed.

*~*~*

A voice he barely recognized as his own wrenched out of him as the images coalesced too clearly into his mind, the relentless succession from Severus' capture to his rescue twelve hours later—and this time, Harry saw it all. He could not close his eyes to Severus' torture any more than he could close his ears to the screams that clawed their way up the man's throat every time the pain finally shattered his iron control.

"How prettily you shatter, little traitor. Do you imagine that they will get here in time? Do you think that your sacrifice will be of any use at all to your precious Forces of Light? On the contrary, it is only I who can truly appreciate the perfection of it. Stubborn, noble soul. You will resist me to the last, will you not?" Laughter. "Exquisite pain. You will surrender your soul to me in the end."

Silence, when the body screamed without a voice and the soul begged for release. Yes, even souls could be destroyed.

[[center:***]]

The castle was still, waiting. The images had receded. Harry pushed back the keening gathered around his throat and shakily stood. He summoned fire from the torches, and the hall flared with so much light that all the shadows within it were burned ruthlessly away. The ghost, when he called her to him, was a transparent shade without substance or reality: a mere wisp of memory from a past preserved only in dusty tomes of forgotten history.

"Show me the castle," he commanded her in a hollow, tattered voice, hoarse with his own screaming, and she nodded sharply in acquiescence. He followed her while she opened room after room, exposing the castle's secrets methodically, efficiently to its new master.

"What are you seeking?" the ghost asked. Trust Vepres to be curious.

"A man," Harry replied shortly.

"A Death Eater?"

"Yes." He choked back the rest of the explanation with effort.

"You must have hated him a great deal to bind the castle just to look for him," Vepres commented thoughtfully.

Harry paused and looked over at the ghost floating by his shoulder. "There are more powerful things in this world than hate," he told her softly, in a voice that no longer shook.

She was silent for the rest of the journey.

[[center:***]]

They came to the Sorcerer's Chamber last. The wards across the entrance had dissolved along with their creator into nightmare, and the giant oak doors swung open at Vepres' command. The chamber within was empty. Harry shook a little with a vicious, broken relief. He entered the room, stirred a power so saturated with the stench of blood that he could almost see it as a red mist hanging in the room.

He stood at the exact center of the Chamber and faced the obsidian altar. He cupped his hands before his chest, concentrating power within them until even the wraith flinched from him. Harry stared unblinking into the epicenter of the writhing mass of light, feeding it with his fury and feeling the heat of it scorch his mind clean of pain for a single blazing moment. Then he tore his hands apart. "Extermino diruo totus!" he cried, his voice cracking, and the power exploded. Flames engulfed the stone slab, the shackles upon the walls, writhed across the gold-veined floors like crimson serpents. The metal melted from the walls to drip like silver rain unto the floor. The altar cracked clean across the middle and fell with a thunderous crash. Unsatisfied, Harry fed the fire single-mindedly until the stone itself crumbled from the heat into a pile of black dust upon the floor.

When the fire finally died, Harry turned to the ghost still waiting at his side. "You and the other wraiths will seal this chamber," he told her, with the soft savagery of a falcon in its despair. "I bind you to this with my name. No one will ever enter this room again while I am alive."

The ghost bowed silently and vanished. Harry sank to his knees upon the reflectionless floor and closed his eyes.

[[center:***]]

The sun was setting behind grey storm clouds over London. Harry opened his eyes to a headache that was even worse than the one from the previous day. He staggered to the bathroom, sank to his knees on the cold tiled floor and retched dryly until he felt as if he had managed to heave up his spleen.

When he was done he went back into the bedroom and gulped down his pills. The pain cleared sluggishly from his head. As soon as he could stand without feeling as if his head were about to split open, he stumbled over to Severus. He drank in the sight of the other man's peaceful face, no longer twisted with pain. He raised a trembling hand to touch one pale cheek. "I'm sorry," he whispered in a voice that shook just as much as his hands. "I'm being selfish, aren't I? You've named what you wanted, but I—I can't let you go. Not like this. I can't."

He renewed the healing spells and rose, showered, then went downstairs to check his shielding charms. Still no sign of tampering. He'd saved the food for last, knowing that he needed time to allow his stomach to settle before making the attempt. He concentrated his thoughts firmly on the morrow, the final journey, while shoveling food mechanically into his mouth. It at least allowed him to eat without choking. When he was done he picked up the plates and stacked them in the dishwasher, then went back upstairs.

He climbed into bed carefully and turned to lean his head against Severus' shoulder. "I've missed you. Severus. I waited for you to come back. I feel like I barely lived this past year. Without...you...I..." He bit his lips, hard, and closed his eyes. "No victory was worth that," he whispered. "Voldemort's death was never worth your soul. Oh Merlin, nothing is worth that. Not the entire world."

Not the entire world. Oh, Severus. Severus, Severus...

Tears slid steadily from his beneath his lashes onto the pillow, leaving cold, wet tracks down his cheeks. Eventually, he slept.