Harry woke late morning the next day. He groaned as he opened gritty eyes to stormcloud-filtered sunlight. His head felt tight, as if it weren't quite big enough for his brain. But he knew the physical discomfort was the smaller problem; it was also a sign that he was running out of time, and in too many ways.

Resolutely he pushed away those dark thoughts and sat up, stretching carefully. Then he leaned over to trace Severus' cheek with one gentle hand. "Good morning," he smiled. "You know," he continued lightly, "If you ever accuse me of being lazy again I'll have to hex you." He stayed for a moment more, content to simply linger over the other man's peaceful countenance: the black lashes lying against pale cheeks, the sharp hawkish nose, the thin stubborn mouth relaxed in sleep.

He gathered the calm of the slumbering face to him greedily against the bleak memories of the past three weeks. He shuddered, touched the sleeping face once more. There were no scars to testify to the sacrifices the war had demanded from this man, and even the mark Voldemort had carved into his servants was gone. Severus would be glad, he thought, but he didn't know, truly, how he felt about that. Swallowing past the tightness in his throat, Harry finally stepped reluctantly away and went down to cook his meals for the day.

He made pasta—something easy to ingest, because he knew he would want food even less after today's excursion than yesterday's. The very thought of it made eating breakfast difficult, but he told himself sternly to keep his mind on task and went to check his wards.

A meticulous inspection of the protective charms revealed nothing, so it was with relief that he returned upstairs. His stomach had finally settled. He sat down on the edge of the bed by Severus' side and picked up the book he'd dropped on the floor last night. Holding the smooth weight of it in his hands, he inhaled deeply and slowly exhaled, centering his mind on the core of magic wound tightly within him.

"Salazar Slytherin," he hissed to it in Parseltongue. The emerald snake on the cover opened its eyes and hissed quietly in reply. He held out his finger, and in a flash the snake had sunk one long fang into it. It flicked out its tongue to taste the blood. The cover fell open, revealing the spotless blank pages of the journal. Harry held his finger over the book to let a single drop of blood fall onto the pristine page and hissed, "November sixteenth. Shuon Eynan."

The blood soaked into the page and faded. Instantly, words in a thin, elegant hand began to scrawl in crimson across the page. When the words stopped he took a deep breath and began to recite the ancient spell while simultaneously clearing his mind of everything but the single desperate need which had driven him onto this path. Nothing else mattered. By the end of the spell he had descended into a trance so profound that he no longer felt the weight of the book, only the swirling words he wrapped around himself strand by voice-woven strand. When he reached the end of the spell he snapped, "Dragonsweyr!"

The earth dropped away from underneath him with a sharp crack. He soared, free of all limitations, all boundaries, wrapped in an exhilaration as piercing as the long heedless dive for the Golden Snitch.

When he opened his eyes, he was standing in front an enormous black-stoned castle. It loomed ominously before him like a black sinuous scar against the snow-covered earth. It lay coiled in brooding silence, a great ebony serpent surveying all the land that fell beneath its shadow. In the morning sunlight he could make out the runes that twisted across every inch of the walls like glittering scales, a deliberate warning to all who approached its domain. The winter-bound forest behind and the sheer cliff fall before the castle only served to accentuate its harsh, angular lines. This castle had been the home of powerful Dark Wizards for centuries. It had been Voldemort's last stronghold.

The wizard who had built the castle had raised it in a conscious reflection of his own dark, brutal power. And yet that wizard from the remote past had also given his creation unexpected hints of beauty: in the spiraling, soaring towers thrusting defiantly into the sky, in the large windows casting muted jewel-toned light into ceilingless halls, in the way it seemed to gather shadows unto itself with a grace as alluring as the serpentine darkness that permeated the castle from beneath its foundations.

Aurors in their red robes disturbed the calm chill morning with splotches of frenetic activity. They crawled about the grounds like a mass of fireants, busily dismantling the castle's protective spells layer by layer. Harry ignored them. None of them truly understood the Dark Magics they were pretending to study, because they would never soil their hands by actually using them. That was why they could never hope to breach the protective spells woven into the very stones of the castle, and why the castle would never let them into itself or allow them to touch its true secrets.

Harry walked up to the front door. He paused for a moment, revealing himself, allowing the castle to sense his intentions. Like Hogwarts, Dragonsweyr had a consciousness that measured and appraised him. But he could not ask a favor of this castle with its dark past and deeper mysteries.

Instead, he would have to become its master.

He blasted the great oaken front doors open with an arrogant, violent burst of power. Then he strode into the great hall and waited for the castle to respond to his challenge.

Shouts of alarm rang out from behind him. He allowed his lips to twist into an ironic smile. The ants had finally realized that a snake had invaded their little ant hill. He raised an eyebrow at the empty air. "Well?" he said.

A huge gush of wind swept across the castle grounds, carrying each and every one of the unprepared Aurors over the edge of the cliff. Apparently the castle didn't want to be interrupted in their little contest. Well, neither did he. He spared a moment to hope that the Aurors had the wits to cast levitation spells on themselves before they hit the river below—then his attention was abruptly jerked back to himself, for the testing had begun.

Darkness wrapped around him like the cool coils of a python and left the taste of sweet musk on his tongue. It tightened around him slowly with the mesmerizing rhythm of a serpent's seductive dance. Narrowing his eyes in concentration, Harry threw out a shield that expanded in a sphere around him. But the darkness merely seeped through his wards. It slithered through his mind, stealing away all knowledge of light until he was drowning in a sea of darkness. One by one, sunlight, moonlight, starlight, candlelight, wandlight faded from his mind, smothered by the suffocating coils of the serpent. Darkness alive with hunger enclosed the core of magic within him, drawing upon it greedily with hissing pleasure.

Fighting against the loss of his magic with all his strength, Harry clutched tightly to one last memory—a light born in darkness and which the darkness could not take away from him. He cupped his hands around the sound, the impression, the dream of his mother's voice when he had known of nothing but darkness, stroking it gently, drawing from it memories of other times, other places: the warm, glowing fire Hagrid had lit to cook sausages for him on his eleventh birthday, candles dancing in the air at the Sorting, sunlight glinting off the golden orb of the Snitch in the corner of his eye, a sword born of blue fire flashing with runes, moonlight turning Draco's hair to silver in the moment before he raised his wand, the light in his heart at the beginning of a dance at Christmas.

As he called more and more light to him, the darkness receded from the corners of his mind until he could close his palms around it and draw it to him. Then he gave back to it his memories of darkness: the Mirror of Erised as he had first found it, wrapped in shadow and reflecting his heart's desire, the sweet venom rushing through his veins in the moment before he cast the Killing Curse, the depths of Severus' eyes in the brief, precious moments when he allowed the barriers to fall away, the deepest mysteries of Dragonsweyr when they arose out of stone and acquired shape in the lesser shadows of the night.

The darkness drew back, satiated, and revealed once more the sunlight streaming through the open doorway behind him.

The castle paused, considering—then he could feel it calling.summoning.

They arrived in dignified, eerie silence: pride in the arrogant tilt of their heads, the ostentatious ornamentation of the dress robes they wore even in death. They had been lords in their own ages, the greatest Dark Wizards of their times, feared and hated by commoners and kings alike. Indeed, some of them had ruled as kings, some played kings against each other like pawns on a chessboard, others wielded more power than any king could hope to have. All of them were intimately versed in power, in holding men's lives like chess pieces in their hands.

The ancient lords of the castle had come to pass judgment on him.

They arranged themselves into a half-circle facing him, floating on an invisible dais that forced him to look up at them as one of their vassals would have, centuries or more ago. The black, mirror-clear floors, shimmering with orange flame from the torches upon the walls, could hold neither their reflection nor his. No sound disturbed the procession of ghosts as the final wraith floated into place with solemn ceremony. Harry lifted his head in silent challenge as he felt the ghosts pushing at his mind like wolves testing the strength of a lone elk in the depth of a winter forest. For several heartbeats Harry was aware of nothing but the unseen struggles of an inwardly-turned battle.

Finally the ghosts retreated from their attack. One portly wizard dressed in voluminous faded purple robes shot with gold stepped forward. His small, pig-like eyes glinted with cruelty. When he spoke, the wound that circled his neck gaped and stained his robes with a gush of rusty congealed blood. "Who are you that dares to disturb our peace?" he rasped in a hollow voice as dry and cold as a frozen corpse.

Harry stood calmly beneath the ghost's venomous glower, studying him carefully. "Claudius Pertennius," he finally returned quietly. "Pertennius—the Impaler. Blood from your sadistic perversions ran from the castle and stained the river crimson while you were Lord here."

"The blood of the weak," the ghost replied negligently, seemingly unaware of the blood that dripped from his own robes to stain the black marble floor beneath his feet with a pool of crimson.

Harry continued as if he had not been interrupted, and this time his tone held as much of the acid of contempt as that of the ghost.

"Pertennius—the Fool. Cursed to death by his own son while he slept. I will not give my name to a blind buffoon."

There were faint snickers of derision from the other ghosts as Pertennius withdrew back into the circle with a murderous glare. The blood faded from the spot where he had stood.

His move. Heart pounding, Harry swept his eyes around the half-circle until he came to a woman dressed in faintly glimmering but plain blue robes. Her stern grey eyes met his without any change of expression. "Cygnus Vepres," he called out to her, and she stepped forward.

She had been a powerful witch in her time, crushing her enemies with a ruthlessness that had earned her the epithet of "Merciless". Yet when she'd been Lord of the castle she had not held the orgies of pain and torture others preceding and following her had. Instead she had spent her days in quiet research. She'd been a cold, emotionless woman whose only passion had been the invention of the deadliest poisons known to the wizarding world. Severus had spoken of her with academic admiration.

Harry knew that she would at least judge him fairly.

"My name is Harry Potter," he told her formally, holding her gaze evenly, "and I would be Lord of this castle."

There were hisses of outraged fury from some of the other ghosts, but he ignored them. Vepres was the only important one right now, for she would speak for all of them until a judgment was pronounced.

She had not reacted to his name.

"Heir of Godric Gryffindor," she said in a dry, precise voice as spare and strong as the steel blade of a hunter's dagger, "no child of Light can ever reign as Lord of this castle. You must know this. Why have you come to disturb our peace?"

"I have passed the castle's first test." Harry pointed out. "I defeated your former Lord, and I am as much an heir of Salazar Slytherin."

It'd taken him a very long time to realize that the Sorting Hat had been right about the Slytherin in him. But as a young wizard of twenty, four years into full-scale war with Voldemort and studying with the secretive free-elves, he'd realized that the world was so much more complex—held so much more darkness, so much more light, went so much deeper than he'd ever guessed as a student. That realization had forced him to reevaluate much of what he'd thought he knew about the world. That in turn had allowed him to make peace with Draco Malfoy, his old Slytherin nemesis, who to almost everyone's surprise had openly defied his father and entered the war beside Albus Dumbledore.

A similar change had not affected his relationship with Severus Snape, former Potions Professor and now comrade in the war against Voldemort. To their mutual relief, they had not been required to work closely after the disastrous Occlumency lessons in Harry's fifth year. Harry had continued his training, while Snape continued to act as spy for Albus. But unlike with Draco, the two years' distance between Harry Potter and Severus Snape had not eased the many more years of hostility lying between them like a well-camouflaged viper. It had simply hidden itself to wait for the right moment to strike—the night Harry first used magic to kill.