They stepped through the darkening portal and found themselves suspended in midair on the familiar wooden platform, the same one they'd stood upon at the tournament's beginning what felt like a lifetime ago.
This time, the champions had not been cast into some strange, alien space filled with ice or stone or deadly voids. They were back in the Forbidden Forest, and the ease of it was almost shocking after everything else.
Wisps of cloud drifted through the ancient trees like ghosts, blurring the depths of the forest into soft mystery. Yet above the mist, the canopy swayed in a gentle breeze, its rolling sea of green were lifting the spirits despite everything they had endured.
Harry gazed into the distance, where the towers of Hogwarts castle shimmered through the haze like a mirage.
After a long moment, he pulled his eyes away reluctantly, and they landed on the platform's edge. One eyebrow rose in surprise. Exhausted as he was, body and mind worn thin by challenge after challenge, a thread of genuine excitement crept into his voice despite everything.
"So, this time," he said with a smile, "we're playing Quidditch?"
Twelve broomsticks hovered at the edge of the platform in a neat row, waiting patiently.
"Cleansweep 2000?" Viktor stepped forward and gave them a single appraising look.
"No—Nimbus 2000. An excellent racing broom. One of the finest models ever made."
"Hmm. Twelve brooms—" Fleur counted them quickly.
"So, all four teams together, competing for the final key? All of us at once?"
Harry and Cedric both turned simultaneously to look at Viktor, and Viktor understood at once what their glances meant without a word being spoken.
He spread his hands and smiled genuinely.
"I will keep my promise," he said firmly. "I will help you win this key."
When it came to flying mastery, neither Harry nor Cedric could quite match Viktor Krum—the professional Seeker, the international Quidditch star. And with that reassurance, both of them exhaled quietly in relief.
"So, what do we have to do exactly?" Harry reached for a broom and ran his hand along the handle with affection. "Catch the Golden Snitch?"
His very first broom had been a Nimbus 2000, a gift from Professor McGonagall in his first year. He had never stopped loving this particular model.
WHOOSH!
The mist stirred suddenly and then burst apart as a dense, glittering swarm of small golden creatures exploded up into a sky with the last colors of evening—oranges and reds and purples bleeding into each other. They moved with uncanny speed, darting and moving through the air like living sparks of wind, like a cloud of golden fireflies.
"Oh! They're actual Golden Snitches!" Cedric rubbed his hands together enthusiastically, eyes bright with eagerness despite his exhaustion. "Find one golden key among a whole cloud of golden Snitches—yes, that must be it."
"Well, fortunately I already have one key," Fleur said, pressing a hand to her chest where the key rested safely.
She gave a small laugh. "I'm nowhere near as good at Quidditch as my little sister Gabrielle—she's the real flyer in our family but this challenge, I'll admit, is rather charming. No monsters to wrestle with. No ice creatures trying to kill us."
"Then let's do this!" Cedric swung confidently onto a broom.
Cedric swung confidently onto a broom and looked across at Harry with competitive fire in his eyes. "Whoever catches the key keeps it. If Viktor catches it, we draw lots again between our teams. Deal?"
"Fair enough," Harry agreed immediately, mounting his own broom.
Viktor's face broke into a rare, open expression of confidence—broader and freer than anything he'd shown through the earlier, brutal tasks.
"I have heard you both fly very well," he said, looking between Harry and Cedric with respect. "Harry. Cedric. Let's find out who's best."
"Ron would have loved this," Harry said with a grin that was both happy and sad.
Then he glanced over at Hermione, who was standing wearing a faint look of discomfort. She'd never been comfortable on a broom.
"Don't worry, Hermione, leave this one to me. I've got this."
Hermione rolled her eyes, but said nothing in response.
She knew perfectly well that Harry wanted a fair contest with Cedric and Viktor on their own terms. And she was honest enough to admit that her own Quidditch skills had no place in a duel at this level. She'd only hold Harry back.
And so, at Fleur's signal, three young men with exceptional mastery of the skies mounted their brooms and launched themselves into the air like arrows loosed from a string.
In the stands back at the forest's edge, Ludo Bagman roared himself hoarse with excitement. The student spectators roared and roared with him, each wave of cheering cresting higher than the.
But before long, the cheering curdled into gasps of dismay and then fell into a tide of disappointed sighs that swept through the Hogwarts section.
Several Hufflepuff students were in tears, their faces were buried in their hands.
"Oh—did I miss something important?"
Bryan strode back to the judges' box, a sealed letter tucked under his arm. On the giant screen, the scene playing out showed a cluster of students from three different houses swinging bludger bats with vicious intent, raining blows on Harry and Viktor from every direction as they tried to pursue the key.
"That young man—Cedric Diggory, is it?—took a bad hit!" Ludo Bagman turned to answer Bryan with a shake of his head, his face was showing genuine sympathy. "Hogwarts has lost a player, I'm afraid. He went down hard. Pity, too—he was flying beautifully before that. Just dreadful luck."
"He was caught off guard," Madame Maxime observed. "Your students came pouring out of the clouds with all those bludgers flying—after everything he's been through tonight, he simply wasn't sharp enough to dodge in time. The exhaustion caught up with him."
"If Potter falls as well," Vipor Dreghorn remarked coolly, though not without interest, "Hogwarts will be in a very dangerous position indeed. Krum would have free rein."
"Winning and losing are not the most important things here, Vipor,"
Dumbledore glanced sideways at the Durmstrang headmaster with a smile. "This is the first Triwizard Tournament in several centuries. I rather think Bryan's intention, in designing these trials, was to foster understanding and cooperation among our three schools. Not to create bitter rivals."
"That is indeed what I hoped for," Bryan said, inclining his head with a warm smile.
"I wanted to see these remarkable young people grow stronger together—not just as competitors, but as allies. Ready to face whatever difficult days lie ahead of them. And I suspect those days are coming sooner than we'd like."
Madame Maxime and Dreghorn fell briefly silent at those words. Something moved in both their expressions—recognition, perhaps, or understanding.
Durmstrang and Beauxbatons had come a long way to compete. Of course, both schools wanted to bring home the Triwizard Cup, to claim victory after centuries.
But neither headmaster could deny the truth of it: for the first Triwizard Tournament in centuries, to make it merely about winning and losing would be to miss the point completely.
Catching a single golden key among hundreds of identical Golden Snitches was not a simple matter, even for the best Seekers.
And that was before accounting for the students from the three competing houses, swinging wooden bats and sending bludgers screaming toward Harry and Viktor at every opportunity, trying to eliminate the competition.
Even a world-class Seeker like Viktor Krum who'd played professionally for years and a once-in-a-generation natural talent like Harry Potter found themselves unable to simply reach out and pluck the key from the air. Every time they got close, a bludger would force them to veer away.
But adversity, if you were clever enough and experienced enough, could be turned into advantage.
After failure after failure, near-misses and frustrating chases, Harry and Viktor finally came to the same realization independently.
They stopped chasing the key directly. Instead, they began using their extraordinary flying—feinting, baiting opponents, pulling interference players out of position, drawing fire from each other in a coordinated dance. They worked together without needing to discuss it, reading each other's movements instinctively.
One by one, the interference players were struck by their own teammates' misdirected bludgers and sent spinning out of the contest, eliminated by friendly fire.
At last, Viktor executed his signature move—the Wronski Feint, diving at impossible speed drawing every eye in the arena to himself in a single electrifying instant.
And in that heartbeat of distraction, while everyone watched Viktor, Harry dove from above. He plunged into the heart of the golden swarm like a hawk striking, and when he emerged seconds later, his fist was closed triumphantly around the key that would win Hogwarts everything.
The roar from the stands was deafening, overwhelming.
The sun was half-swallowed by the horizon now, and the crimson light that had painted everything red had dimmed to a gentle amber glow.
Viktor and Harry flew back to the platform, battered and barely standing, their bodies covered in bruises from bludger impacts.
"Here, Hermione—" Harry gasped out. He was wincing with every movement, his body was a map of bludger strikes and impacts, but he was still smiling as he pressed the key into Hermione's hand.
Her brown eyes were bright with unshed tears of pride and relief.
The moment her fingers closed around the cool metal, a torrent of dazzling golden light fell across the platform as if the last of the evening sun had chosen that exact instant to blaze with mystic radiance.
In the stunned silence that followed, a stone plinth rose slowly from the center of the wooden platform with a grinding sound, and upon it sat, enclosed beneath a glass dome that caught and reflected the light—
"Oh," Fleur breathed, her face covered with wonder as she stared at what lay within.
"I think that must be—"
"The Triwizard Cup," Viktor said softly, exhaustion and awe mingling in in his voice.
"The one who takes it wins the Tournament. Becomes the champion."
But, of course, nothing was ever that simple in these trials.
Three keyholes were cut into the base of the glass dome, arranged in a triangle, and everyone understood at once what the three keys they had fought so hard to win were truly for.
"I believe our three keys are meant to open the dome," Hermione said after a long silence.
Her voice was low and careful, analytical even now.
She looked at the others. They looked back at her.
Victory was right there in front of them, within arm's reach. Seize the other two keys by force, unlock the dome alone, and take everything. Claim sole glory.
A final duel? That was one answer, one path forward.
Everyone was turning the question over in their minds, the weight of the decision was pressing on them.
Hermione and Harry were, in truth, the stronger duelists—they'd proven that repeatedly. But they were also running on fumes and utterly exhausted. After everything the tournament had put them through—the glass bridge, the giants, the lighthouse, the lake, their advantage was far from certain.
It could go either way.
"We..." Fleur began, looking between Hermione and Harry with an unreadable expression.
She hesitated, the rest of the thought caught somewhere between hope and uncertainty. Did she dare suggest it?
Viktor stood with his head bowed, jaw tight, wearing an expression that looked very much like a man who deeply resented the only decent solution available to him.
Harry stared at the gleaming Cup, and the whole tournament played back through his mind in fragments: not a series of individual contests, he realized with sudden clarity, but a long and unplanned collaboration. They'd worked together more than they'd competed and saved each other's lives.
"What if—" he started, and then stopped and looked at Hermione.
She read his eyes immediately, understanding his thought before he finished it.
"What if... you wouldn't mind—" Hermione glanced at Viktor and Fleur, and a calm settled over her face almost at once, decision was made.
She smiled. "What if we claimed it together? All four of us?"
"Together?"
Viktor's head came up sharply, his expression was wide open with disbelief and something that might have been hope.
"You mean—?"
"Exactly what you're thinking, Viktor,"
Hermione's smile held steady. Beside her, Harry exhaled a long, easy breath and his own expression cleared, the tension was leaving his shoulders.
"Oh—" Fleur let out a soft laugh, smoothing her hair with one hand.
A slow, radiant smile replaced her look of surprise, transforming her face. "I think I'm beginning to like you very much, Hermione Granger."
"Then together it is," Viktor said, and the relief in his voice was unmistakable.
Three keys turned in three locks simultaneously. The glass dome dissolved in a wash of pale golden flame that didn't burn, and the Cup stood open before them in the cool evening air, its surface gleaming.
Harry looked around at all of them and his voice rang out with a warmth that filled the entire platform and seemed to carry to the stands beyond.
"Come on, then! All of us!"
"Let's put this year to rest—together."
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