Bryan, standing at the golden pupil of the "Vertical Eye," resembled some lord of flame set against the surrounding dark—his eyes, as he surveyed the void stretching out in every direction, held the light of a searchlight, carrying within it a cold, godlike majesty.
Rumble—rumble—
At the border of the Vertical Eye, where the three forces still ground against one another without pause, the grey mist and the turbulent currents of space struck against each other in a ceaseless, grinding roar like a train passing at full speed just beside a station platform.
"The Isle of Avalon."
Bryan murmured softly, his gaze sweeping slow across this whole stretch of the void.
Long ago, when he had first set foot on this island, Bryan had never actually had the chance to take in the full sight of this legendary utopia—he had gone straight along the narrow path Gryffindor had carved out for him a thousand years before, straight to the temple waiting at the island's heart.
Now, instead, with the Isle of Avalon shattered to pieces around him wide across empty space, he could see it all the more clearly.
The island's fragments floated in scattered, directionless disarray across the void, tumbling slow in silence.
The largest pieces were several times the size of the Hogwarts grounds; the smallest were still half the size of a Quidditch pitch.
As for the countless smaller stones circling the fragments in wide belts of rubble, there was no counting them.
The laws governing the void were unlike those of Earth's ordinary space; units of scale simply did not apply here in any way that made intuitive sense.
What seemed within arm's reach might, in truth, lie as far apart as the ends of the earth, and what looked distant might be close enough to touch.
But judging roughly by the size of those massive island fragments alone, the pieces of the shattered Isle of Avalon spread out before him likely stretched across tens of miles in total.
Even gathered back together, the island's original span must have covered several hundred square miles.
At only a few glances taken in, Bryan's expression had already turned grave.
First was the grey mist that filled this place.
The Twin Serpent Staff, even dormant had in the span of a few short months alone spread a force of death potent enough to leave the whole of Malfoy Manor barren of a single blade of grass.
Only wizards and house-elves of unusually strong vitality could still come and go from that estate at all without the mist working at them.
And the Isle of Avalon had lain sunk in "death" for more than ten centuries—even as Merlin and Gryffindor had each held the Twin Serpent Staff in check with the Holy Sword and Gryffindor's own blade.
Across that long, grinding span of centuries, the erosion wrought by the force of death upon this island had reached a point beyond all remedy.
Gazing at the island fragments suspended silent in the void, Bryan felt the corner of his mouth tighten.
None of this matched what he had once imagined.
The last time he had set foot here, the small pocket world Merlin had painstakingly created to conceal the Isle of Avalon from the rest of reality had collapsed.
Bryan had watched with his own eyes as the island, caught within that crumbling world, was torn apart by rending space and slipped away into the void beyond.
By all ordinary reckoning, an island fallen this way should have been shredded entirely by the turbulent currents of space until not even dust remained to mark where it had been.
That was precisely why, these past few years—though he had never once stopped puzzling over the whole affair—Bryan had never actually spoken of the Isle of Avalon again to anyone.
Yet what lay before him now made one thing unmistakably, undeniably clear: his guess had been wrong.
As for the reason the Isle of Avalon had managed to preserve even these battered remnants—Bryan fixed his gaze steady on the grey mist rolling toward him through the void like a slow, patient tidal wave.
Death had defended its own domain.
That was the only way Bryan could put it to himself.
The hunger for life he sensed radiating faintly from the surging mist before him was enough to unsettle him.
In the past, with his soul's power not yet fully whole, and always walking the path Gryffindor had already cut for him through this place, he had never felt this particular hunger so keenly.
But now, with Merlin's protection long since gone to ruin and the restraining power Gryffindor had once left bound within his blade gone along with it, facing this active, unleashed force of death entirely head-on, Bryan finally understood its full ferocity.
And that was not all that unsettled him tonight.
His gaze crossed the void and settled on the creatures perched atop those massive island fragments—creatures that were turning hungry, clouded eyes toward him. However sharp his expression remained on the surface, the corner of his eye twitched.
Thestrals. The skeletal frame of a Hungarian Horntail. The bones of a titan. A Hinkypunk. A giant wolf, withered and desiccated like something pulled from a tomb. An oak tree, its branches lashing, its whole body charred black from root to crown—
Some of these had always been dead things. And yet countless living creatures still endured moving among the island's fragments alongside them.
That defied the most basic sense of the world.
Never mind food, never mind water—in the void itself, even air could not be sustained for more than a few breaths, and yet these creatures—
No. Bryan caught the thought and turned it over once more, correcting himself. They were no longer creatures at all.
Bryan pressed his lips together and cast the thought aside.
The force of death, freed now of all restraint after ten centuries contained, had already twisted these things far beyond any recognition, remade them from the inside out into something the word "creature" simply couldn't stretch to cover anymore.
They no longer deserved that name. Bryan preferred to call them monsters instead.
His gaze flickered then, moving, and his thoughts turned to Cliodna.
Only Stonehenge could have let him locate this realm—which meant that in all these years since the collapse, Cliodna had never once returned to Avalon herself. She likely had no current sense of the state the island was actually in now.
So then, her reason for having Severus pass him the "key," for going to such trouble to arrange his return here specifically—
"A guess, then—"
Bryan murmured low.
She had been kept imprisoned by Voldemort in Malfoy Manor all this time, watching up close, day after day, as death consumed the estate around her. So she had drawn her own conclusions from that, inferred from what she could see with her own eyes?
"What was it you meant, bringing me here—letting me see all of this?"
Gazing out at everything within his sight, taking in the scale of it all over again, Bryan's hands, clasped behind his back in his usual stillness, tightened slowly into fists.
"Were you afraid that one day, Voldemort, through the Twin Serpent Staff, would discover—"
Brow furrowed deep, Bryan slowly shook his head, rejecting the thought even as he finished forming it.
Voldemort had only ever gotten his hands on the thing physically—he had never actually won the Twin Serpent Staff's submission. He could not command it.
If anything, every sign Bryan had gathered so far suggested there had been remarkably little real communication between Voldemort and the staff. The staff, for its part, paid him no mind.
"Why—"
Bryan murmured again.
It wasn't that he didn't understand, why the Twin Serpent Staff would willingly fall into Voldemort's hands and yet still refuse to be properly wielded by him.
What genuinely puzzled him was the vast, unaccountable gulf between the devastation visited on the Isle of Avalon spread out before him now and the devastation visited on Malfoy Manor in a matter of mere months.
A moment ago, Bryan had reasoned that Malfoy Manor had suffered its slow catastrophe precisely because the Twin Serpent Staff lay dormant there.
But now, standing here, surrounded by the true, unrestrained scale of what death alone could do given ten centuries and no restraint at all, he sensed something was off in that earlier reasoning.
The Twin Serpent Staff, held here on the Isle of Avalon across all those centuries, had endured the combined, continuous restraint of both Merlin and Gryffindor without a single pause and still, even restrained that thoroughly, it had wrought devastation on this scale.
And now, with the ancient seal finally broken, with the perfect, unprecedented opportunity to unleash its instincts without restraint, sitting quiet in Malfoy Manor—why did it hold back so much there?
This staff, after all, needed no master's permission to unleash its power.
Speaking of which—
The Twin Serpent Staff's true master had been Herpo. But then—turning to a question that had nagged at him for longer than this one—how had Herpo ever created such a thing in the first place, out of nothing?
In ancient times, certainly, the world had brimmed with magic far more abundant than it did in the thinner magic of the present age.
And the "Jellyfish World," drifting somewhere through the wider cosmos even now, had not yet withdrawn back then—legendary wizards of that distant age could draw upon that world's vast power to achieve feats entirely beyond the imagining of any wizard living now.
But that abundance, however vast, did not mean those ancient wizards had ever held anything resembling a god's authority.
And the grey mist the Twin Serpent Staff commanded, the mist that stood for death itself, had already surpassed any power a wizard could ever hope to master on his own.
However powerful Herpo had been, however deep and thorough his mastery of alchemy had run in his own time, he could never have laid claim, on his own strength alone, to authority over death itself. That was a line no wizard crossed. Unless—
"The Tablet of Destiny. The Deathly Hallows. And... the Twin Serpent Staff—"
Bryan murmured to himself, the pieces were arranging themselves slowly into a shape.
"All of them came from that world. Didn't they."
Otherwise—never mind the Twin Serpent Staff, with the sheer extent of magical knowledge Bryan possessed now, even Dumbledore himself, set to the task of creating something like the Resurrection Stone from scratch, something capable of reaching across the boundary to the dead, would not know where to even begin the attempt.
ROARR—
A savage, tearing cry from somewhere ahead jolted Bryan out of his thoughts, and his gaze snapped at once toward the nearest island fragment.
Bryan's eyes turned cold.
Sensing the presence of the living at last—the monsters, already remade wholly by death down to the marrow, surged all at once with a sudden, ugly excitement.
A titan's skeleton swung its massive bony arm and let out a roar in his direction, and across that whole stretch of drifting island, monster after monster bared reeking mouths in his direction, their clouded eyes fixed eerily on him now, hungry to tear him apart.
"Doesn't seem like there's much reason to leave you lot standing, does there—"
Amid the low murmur of his own voice, watching those shrieking, twisted monsters, Bryan's gaze went distant and indifferent, and slowly, he raised his right hand and brought it down.
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