Under the pure white moonlight, space itself suddenly gave a strange, unnatural tremor and once the ripples had fully settled again, smoothing back into ordinary stillness, Bryan had already emerged from the void, standing where a moment before there had been only empty air.
Pat, pat, pat—
The wind wandering across the open plain tugged at Bryan's robes. The endless "green sea" stretched out before him in every direction, exactly as he remembered it from the last time.
He looked up. Far from any city's clamour, over this open wilderness a clear band of stars hung across the entire night sky.
Even across countless light-years of empty distance, its breathtaking splendour still stirred something like longing in him, an old.
The way back home lies among the stars—
In the clamorous stillness of the plain, Bryan shook his head lightly, setting the thought aside, and let his gaze settle on one particular spot ahead of him.
Ancient stones, steeped in the weight of ages beyond counting, lay sprawled and standing across Salisbury Plain.
Long ago, wizards of old had built this place as a mysterious arrangement meant to commune with the stars. Now it had traded that identity for another—a world-famous prehistoric monument.
Such an identity, Bryan supposed, wasn't exactly wasted, even if it was incomplete.
After a brief silence, standing at the edge of the field and simply looking, Bryan started forward toward the Stonehenge, his wizard's robes brushing against the tall grass with a soft rustle as he walked.
Around the Stonehenge, Muggles had erected a thin wire fence that offered no protection at all and could be easily stepped over by anyone who cared to try.
Just as before, exactly as he remembered from his last visit here, in the small gatehouse glowing with dim yellow light, a lone Muggle attendant was fast asleep at his post, snoring softly.
Pat!
So as not to disturb the Muggle's rest and leave any trace of tonight's visit, Bryan sent a Stunning Spell his way, as he had done last time.
He walked slowly to the centre of the Stonehenge, and let out a long sigh there, his expression was complicated.
Ever since he had first seen Gryffindor's shade here, standing where he himself now stood, the memories of Hogwarts' four Founders had come to him one after another.
The Twin Serpent Staff, too, had flowed out from here, through his own hands.
To Bryan, this place was the true origin point of a great deal of trouble.
Even now, standing here again, he sometimes wondered—if he hadn't gone deeper through that door all those years ago, driven by curiosity or fate, could so many of the crises since have been avoided?
His gaze, dark and searching, moved slowly over the fractured, interlacing lines etched deep across the stones' surface. Bryan shook his head again.
That kind of thinking was nothing but self-deception.
The complicated look faded from his eyes at last which shimmered instead with a mysterious violet mist, and his piercing gaze pierced clean through the stones' ordinary surface to the runes of magic carved within the massive blocks.
The flow of magic through those runes was not smooth. It stuttered and pooled where it should have run clean, like water forced through a cracked pipe.
That was no surprise, given everything. Last time he'd left this place, the space within the hidden realm beyond it had already collapsed in on itself, and the Stonehenge that served as the gate had even physically toppled over in the aftermath, several of the standing stones crashed down across the turf.
Though the Muggles had since put those fallen stones back roughly into place, on the magical level, the gate had suffered damage that no amount of careful engineering could touch.
Silently, without any gesture, a sliver of wood appeared in Bryan's palm.
Last time, Cliodna had used a carved stone pillar to complete the arcane magic runes within the Stonehenge, and so had opened the door properly, with the right key for the right lock.
But facing Voldemort now, watched at every hour, she clearly hadn't had the means to pass a stone pillar to Severus without it being noticed—so instead, she'd given him this instead: a single splinter of wood.
By the dazzling starlight overhead, Bryan studied the wood fragment resting in his hand, turning it slightly to catch the light.
Within what looked like an unremarkable splinter, intricate magical runes were etched at a scale almost too fine to follow, and countless magic nodes flickered in his sight like stars scattered across the fragment's tiny surface.
The wood itself, as a mere vessel, didn't matter in the end—it was disposable. What mattered was the "key" contained within it.
Restoring a key like that, compressing it down into something this small and this innocuous, couldn't possibly have been the work of a single day, or even several.
Cliodna must have planned this long ago, that she would eventually need him to come here again, and prepared accordingly, in secret, under Voldemort's roof.
Breathe. In. Out.
With each breath, the tangled thoughts crowding his mind were cast aside one by one, and the faint glimmer in his violet eyes gave way to cold detachment.
Venturing again into that world, the one annihilated within the chaos of shattered space, carried danger, danger he didn't underestimate for a moment.
And yet, if Cliodna had gone to such careful, patient lengths to arrange for his return here, risking herself to do it, she must have meant to remind him of something important enough to justify the risk.
Hmmm—
Magic poured steadily into the wood fragment, and the wood itself, having served its purpose as a mere vessel, scattered like sand caught in a sudden wind, dissolving from the edges. One by one, the tiny "stars" held within it flew free from the drifting dust, drifting toward the Stonehenge ahead.
Stirred by their call, the once-cold Stonehenge suddenly began to change in strange and wonderful ways.
In his magic-sensing vision, the stones turned gradually transparent, layer by layer, and within them, magic nodes like the countless stars set into a vast night sky began to flicker and flow in slow currents, finding their old paths again after long disuse.
The key had slotted into the lock.
Zzt, zzt—
Before Bryan, the inner frame of the stone gate began to shimmer with a hazy, uncertain light, gathering itself slowly at the centre.
The Mirror of Erised.
The effect of the one installed here, serving as one face of the gateway, was entirely different from the mirror the wider wizarding world knew and told stories about.
The glow radiating from the gate's inner frame began to spread steadily toward the centre. Just as it was about to properly form into the shape of a mirror, the smooth, radiant surface rippled violently like disturbed water struck by a thrown stone, and the whole system began throwing off sharp, crackling sparks in protest.
Bryan watched all of this calmly, entirely unsurprised by the instability. He'd expected as much.
Since the magical runes carved into the stones had already been damaged, badly, in the last collapse, it was only natural that the gateway would be unstable now.
Under his watchful, patient gaze, the gate expanded and contracted again and again, breathing in and out like something struggling for air, but in the end—it opened.
Hmmmm—
The gateway kept trembling even now, and the "light screen" Bryan had been quietly waiting for—the one that might show him a glimpse into his own heart, never appeared. It stayed hazy and indistinct throughout, refusing to resolve into anything.
After a moment's careful thought, turning the failure over, Bryan more or less understood why.
His soul had "matured" now, he realized, drawing near the point of breaking free of its shell. With him refusing it, whether consciously or not, it wasn't so easy anymore for the Mirror of Erised to peer properly into his heart the way it once might have.
A hollow opened at the centre of the trembling light screen then, dark against the shimmer, and then, amid the rippling, reassembled itself back into something whole. Seeing this happen, Bryan's brow drew faintly together.
After he passed through this time, he understood the gate would likely be destroyed for good—not only would it no longer be able to locate the small, lost world adrift somewhere in the void, but the Stonehenge itself, standing here on Salisbury Plain for thousands of years, would probably be beyond saving this time.
After all, transporting a wizard as powerful as himself into the void, and back, was no easy feat even for a gateway at full strength, let alone one already wounded like this.
Steadying his resolve once more, Bryan stepped through the gateway without further hesitation.
BOOM!
Just as Bryan had expected, the instant his form vanished into the gateway's shimmering surface, the ancient Stonehenge that had stood watch on Salisbury Plain for thousands of years came crashing down behind him in a single, thunderous collapse.
The once-utopian paradise, the Isle of Avalon, where all peoples had once lived together in harmony, had by now become a lost land, banished into the formless void by the Eternal Scar and everything that had followed from it.
Even the realm of death that Bryan had once glimpsed there, on his first visit, was gone now, erased along with everything else.
All that remained was a haze of grey mist shrouding fragments of shattered rock, drifting suspended and directionless in the boundless chaos of open space, going nowhere, going everywhere.
Barring some unforeseen turn of events, those broken ruins would persist adrift in the void for countless years to come—quite possibly longer than the entire remaining span of human civilization.
And today, this land of exile welcomed a visitor once more.
BOOM!
Even the endless "currents" that nothing else could interfere with—the grey mist that drifted only by its own patient, hungry will, rolling and unrolling across the open nothing like clouds across a grey sky suddenly surged all at once, after a single tremendous peal of thunder rolled flat across the emptiness.
Like a school of sharks that had just caught the scent of fresh blood in open water, it rushed madly, in a single coordinated mass, toward a rift that had opened in the void.
But before the grey mist could pour into that opening, it was driven back violently by an extraordinary, searing heat pulsing out from within that narrow crack in space—a crack whose upper and lower ends were parted by what looked like miles of empty distance.
BOOM!
Another thunderous tremor rang out across the void.
The void itself shuddered violently at the sound.
Then, deep within that vast, gaping rift—shaped like an upright, standing eye—a golden "pupil" suddenly appeared.
The moment the golden pupil fully appeared, it began spraying crimson flame out in every direction at astonishing speed. In an instant, the enormous "eye" suspended in the chaos of space had been filled entirely with searing fire.
And the radiance cast by this "Eye of God" bathed the entire surrounding region in the colours of sunset.
It wasn't only the grey mist that reacted—the surrounding chaotic currents of space, too, clashed violently against the flames pouring from the vertical pupil, colliding and folding over one another as if trying, in their blind way, to smooth over this astonishing rift before it could grow any wider.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
At the border of the "vertical pupil," where these three forces—the hungry grey mist, the churning currents, and the golden fire—pulled against each other in fierce contention, a heart-stopping shade of black-red bled slowly through the seams between them.
Tap, tap, tap—
As the footsteps grew clearer, , emerging from within the fiery vertical pupil, stepping out from its dazzling golden centre—a figure with grey hair and violet eyes descended into the void.
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