Harry appeared with a sudden burst of fire, the world around him snapping into focus. Cold wind bit at his face. His boots sank slightly into damp soil as he straightened himself, taking in his surroundings.
The graveyard was silent.
Ancient headstones jutted from the ground like crooked teeth, and mist clung low to the earth, curling around Harry's ankles.
For a brief moment, he just stood there.
He could hear his heartbeat—slow and steady; that was mostly Occlumency at work.
His right hand flexed, and the wand slid easily into his grasp. His fingers felt cold, but his grip was firm.
"Little Hangleton," he murmured. "Feels almost nostalgic."
He had stood here once before and fought the same man he'd be hopefully fighting again today.
Harry closed his eyes, centring himself, and just then, he felt something else.
He was coming.
Harry tilted his head slightly as the shadows shifted. The silence wasn't fractured, but the magic thickened and the temperature dropped.
And then he was there.
Voldemort appeared at the edge of the graveyard from the shadows, no sound, no flare of apparition or even fire. One moment, there was nothing; the next, Dumbledore, cloaked in black, stood beneath a leaning willow, pale as bone and almost as lifeless.
"Harry Potter," Voldemort said softly, his voice carrying unnaturally through the early fog. It wasn't loud, but it slid into the ears like cold steel.
"Tom," Harry greeted, his tone casual, almost friendly. His wand remained loose at his side. "Glad you came alone. I was worried you'd bring an audience."
Voldemort's lipless mouth curved in something that wasn't quite a smile. "You overestimate your importance. Curiosity alone brought me here."
"Curiosity kills snakes too," Harry said, stepping closer. Each word was calm—but the pulse of magic beneath his skin hummed like a cold and restrained storm.
They circled each other slowly, the way predators did. Their eyes met, red and green, and the mist seemed to recoil.
"I've been wondering," Harry said conversationally, "how long you can keep yourself together like this. Your magic's unravelling. You can feel it, can't you?"
Voldemort's eyes narrowed—just a fraction, but enough.
"I've been doing some thinking, and I've come to some interesting conclusions," he replied smoothly. "I know you raided Gringotts, Harry, as it definitely wasn't my most loyal follower, like the idiotic goblins believe. I know what you took! When you used so much of your magic a couple of minutes ago, I felt it, as you know. I felt the parts of my soul residing inside you."
"Okay," Harry said, drawing out the word. The wind stirred, whispering through the graves. "So you know, so what?"
"Then perhaps," Voldemort said, a little smile on his lips, "You share my own fate as well. How did the prophecy go? Either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives. I'd say it's quite accurate, wouldn't you? You're housing how much of my soul now? I assume it makes your magic quite unstable."
Harry was a little surprised to note that Voldemort knew about the contents of the whole prophecy, but after briefly thinking about it, it made sense. First of all, he could have gone to the Department of Mysteries whenever he wanted, and he also had access to Trelawney's mind for so long.
He was also more than a little miffed that the Dark Lord figured out Harry's mortality issue.
"Well, we've said enough, don't you think?" he asked, having had enough of talking.
A wand was raised.
The world exploded into motion.
Two spells—both green—clashed in the air between them with a sound like shattering glass. The shockwave tore through the mist, flattening the grass and shattering most of the nearby headstones.
Harry was already moving—side-step, shield, counterstrike—his magic fluid and instinctive.
Voldemort was relentless, moving with lethal precision. He fired a spell on the ground, and the earth began to move and twist.
Harry saw a huge head forming from the remnants of tombstones and didn't hesitate to cast an overpowered bombarda that tore through the manifesting animation.
Voldemort didn't bat an eye, though; he was already busy conjuring a small army of some sort of fire creatures that Harry had never heard of.
Harry allowed his senses to envelop the constructs and dodged two killing curses, guessing that they were a twisted form of lesser demons.
He also raised an anti-apparition ward that covered a very wide area, focusing mostly on stopping anyone from coming than leaving. It wouldn't do for Death Eaters to suddenly arrive, but more importantly, it'd stop Fleur from coming, even with Fawkes helping her.
Voldemort had just finished creating his small army and sent them forward before focusing on summoning actual demons.
'The fucking madman,' Harry cursed and thanked heaven that they chose to fight while the sun was up.
He flicked his wand back to its holster and drew with his fingers ancient Greek sigils on the air at the star's direction. Thankfully, Greece had given him something more than unwanted answers.
For a moment, the sun dimmed just a tiny bit, and a scorching beam shot from the sky at the graveyard.
The bad news was that Harry was as much of a target as everything else inside its big blast radius.
'Oops.'
Wand in hand again, Harry pulled as much of the air surrounding them and formed a barrier around him. He willed it to stay unchanged and created another barrier from darkness, followed by a purely magical sphere.
Voldemort had dropped his demon-summoning ritual, having first screamed some profanities, and created a similar defence to Harry. Instead of using the air, though, he used a surprisingly large amount of darkness.
Harry briefly wondered where all those shadows came from before he quickly dropped that thought stream, having to focus on not burning himself alive.
The beam came and left in less than a blink.
When it connected with the ground, it simply dematerialised everything and blasted a huge hole in the ground.
Somehow, both of the wizards' defences held up, but almost immediately crumbled afterwards.
The two found themselves falling to the ground, which was hundreds of metres down.
Needless to say, that stopped neither of them.
This time, Harry had cast the first spell, a well-cast Bombarda Diabolica, which was met with Protego Diabolica.
'How does the fucker know how to cast that spell?' he wondered incredulously. It was Grindelwald's spell, and he shouldn't have had access to it. Unless…
'Dumbledore.'
The fucker must have had its instructions, along with who knew what else, written down.
The blue sphere met a fire serpent of the same exact shade, and both spells tried to consume the other.
The result was a spectacular explosion that sent blue flames in every direction.
Harry commanded the air to hold him in place, noting that Voldemort started hovering.
"Fiendfyre," he cast quickly, hoping to overpower the infernal flames instead of extinguishing them. Trying to use Finite was also an option; however, Harry wasn't sure if he could whip up the necessary magical force to cancel an uncontrollable explosion of the demonic fire.
Harry's cursed flames created a huge semisphere that took the burnt of the infernal fire.
Thankfully, his spell held on until the blue flames fled back and simply ceased to exist.
'Huh, Voldemort used Finite,' Harry realised.
If he hadn't, the result wouldn't have been as clean…
Not waiting to see the man's response, Harry flashed behind him, the killing curse flying from both directions.
Voldemort flew downwards and towards Harry's previous spot, skillfully dodging the spells that followed him.
Harry didn't stop firing spells, though, and despite having seemingly missed tons of times, some spells were just meant to come into play later.
Voldemort batted his spells away and shielded whenever a particularly powerful spell came too close to hit him.
The next moment, both were trading ancient dark curses without breaking a sweat.
Harry dodged a spell that would make him see demons instead of humans for the rest of his life, batted a curse which would mummify him, and sent back a charm that'd slice him into small cubes.
Harry tried having the air press on him; however, Voldemort managed to stop the element in his near vicinity from responding to his command.
Suddenly, the dirt behind Voldemort came alive, and a ginormous hand tried to grab him.
The Dark Lord, momentarily surprised, moved out of its way and cast a powerful variation of the Blasting Curse, creating a deep hole in the earth. However, he moved into one of Harry's well-timed spells, immediately discerning the long trail it left behind.
With no time to successfully dodge and finding just which spell his enemy cast at him, Voldemort accepted the challenge and connected their wands.
The spells collided—and instead of exploding, they fused, forming a brilliant thread of molten gold that bound the two wands in a shimmering arc.
The air shuddered and the ground, which was tens of metres below them, cracked like ice, as if reality itself were struggling to decide whose will to obey.
Harry felt an unfamiliar pull… It was as if the wand was trying to draw something out of him and into that golden light. It felt like the wand wanted his soul.
No. Not exactly his soul. Voldemort's part.
Voldemort's eyes widened, a flash of both fury and something dangerously close to fear reflected in his now scarlet gaze.
He felt the pull too—the unwanted familiarity, his soul trying to get whole again.
"Impossible," Voldemort hissed, his voice distorted by the crackling energy. "You—You have three sevenths of my soul."
"A bit more," Harry said through gritted teeth. His arm trembled, the holly wood searing in his grip. "And I'll get yours too."
The golden beam between them pulsed once, twice—then split into spectral threads that rippled outward like veins of lightning.
The colour deepened, turning from gold to white fire, and the world around them seemed to bend.
The air grew heavy. Magic hung thick like fog.
Harry clutched his wand with both hands and pushed more and more.
Now that their wands had connected, Voldemort's soul shield had fallen, and Harry could sense his two soul pieces, along with Dumbledore's whole soul, inside his body.
He could also hear the dead singing again… and there was something else.
Harry felt it then, the ice-cold power dripping from the wand in Voldemort's hand, refusing to be used by him and calling for its rightful master.
He was flummoxed, wondering just why two of Voldemort's possessions felt eerily similar to his cloak. It didn't make any sense.
And then, to his immense horror, it clicked.
Harry knew about the Deathly Hallows; he basically had to, considering the rituals he had cast and undergone.
However, he didn't once believe that Death's infamous possessions were actually real because that was a crazy notion. Especially so since he owned one of them.
Alas, this was the case, and Harry wondered yet again what part fate played in his life.
Back to reality, the sphere moving between their connection was closing in on Voldemort's wand, and Harry could almost taste his victory.
'Come on, come on, come one!' he chanted in his head, pouring freely his magic and willpower to the link.
It was just a few centimetres away from him now.
A couple.
Just one…
Harry flexed his magic, aiming for one last push, feeling Voldemort's immense effort at pushing him back, and then…
His magic flared.
Harry barely had time to acknowledge what had happened and tried to do damage control.
Alas, it was too late, and Voldemort's resilient attempts pushed his spell, a killing curse, just a hair's breadth away from Harry's wand.
He wanted to scream, but instead, Harry pushed his own spell once more and felt another flare coming up.
With a lot of hesitation, he broke the connection and dismantled his anti-apparition wards before flashing away.
.
.
.
Discord Link... [https://discord.com/invite/NJ3WV9RVgR]
Patreon Link: [https://www.patreon.com/Mr_0ne] or do a Google search of 'Patreon Fake Violinist'
Chapter 131: It's Finally Over