24th June 1995, the Hogwarts grounds, 10:34 PM
The fire was out.
Where the maze had blazed an hour before, there was now only a vast black scar across the Quidditch pitch — the charred skeletons of the hedges still standing in their winding rows, smoke rising thin and grey into the night, the smell of wet ash heavy on the warm June air. The Aurors had come at last, a proper detachment of them, fanning out across the trampled grounds in their crimson-trimmed robes; and among them moved Sam's Unspeakables in their charcoal field-kit, lifting the unconscious dark wizards one by one onto conjured stretchers and binding them for transport. The captured dozen who had been abandoned by their fleeing comrades lay in a neat warded row, awaiting the Ministry's pleasure.
Luna stood at the edge of the crowd on the campus lawn, and her grey eyes had not left the bridge.
The students and families had not gone inside. They clustered still in their anxious knots across the grass, faces turned toward the smoking ruin and the dark beyond it, waiting for something none of them could have named.
A little apart, the adults had gathered. Sam, scorched and grim. Lupin, watchful. Verrona, her wand still in her hand. And Sirius — pale and sweating and thoroughly disgusted, having just been made to swallow a thick green potion to draw the residue of Crouch Junior's curse out of his blood, under the fierce and unrelenting eye of Remus Lupin, who had clearly informed him in no uncertain terms that he would drink it. Sirius grimaced, wiped his mouth, and glared at the bottle as though it had personally wronged him.
And Albus Dumbledore stood at the front of them all, tired in a way Luna had never seen him, his blue eyes fixed on the long stone bridge that led to the castle.
Then — three silhouettes appeared in the middle of the bridge.
There was no crack of Apparition. Instead a soft scatter of light, like starlight shaken loose and settling — Osian's signature, the way the Re'em moved through the world — and out of it walked Ethan Esther, with a great horned creature beside him bearing a still figure on its back, and a small golden bird circling above.
The crowd, after a held breath, cheered.
Then many of them faltered, because the creature was like nothing they had ever seen — vast and ox-shouldered, deep-furred, with two impossible spiralling horns that caught the torchlight. A few of the older, better-read among them breathed the word: a Re'em.
But Luna was already running.
She crossed the lawn before anyone could move, her feet light on the scorched grass, and reached Osian's flank as the great beast knelt to lower its burden. Ethan eased Harry down into her arms.
He was dreadful to look at. Spent past spent, his Atid Stella suit torn and filthy, dried blood at his temple and his forearm, his whole body limp and shaking faintly even in stillness. The healing potions he had taken on the walk had done their work as far as they could — the wounds were closing — but no potion could give back what the night had drained from him, and his magic was a guttering candle. His green eyes were half-open, unfocused, the vision going in and out.
But he knew her.
He smelled it first — the particular fragrance of her, lavender and something sweeter, the smell that had been on his pillow at Christmas and his sleeve all spring. Then the soft fall of dirty-blonde hair against his cheek. Then her face, swimming above him in the torchlight, her grey eyes spilling over.
His moon.
Harry managed a smile — small, crooked, utterly at peace — and let go of the last fraying threads holding him conscious, and slept in Luna's arms.
Luna gathered him close, one hand moving in slow circles against his back, and let the tears come without making a sound.
The others reached them in a rush — Sam, Sirius, Lupin, Hermione with Viktor limping at her side, Ron, Draco, Astoria and Daphne, Neville, Cedric, the whole anxious press of the Weasleys — a dozen voices half-rising at once.
Ethan lifted a hand. He met their eyes, and gave a single nod. He is alive. He is whole. He will sleep, and he will mend.
The voices subsided into shaky relief.
"Ethan." Sirius pushed to the front, his sweating face urgent, speaking for all of them. "What happened. Out there. What in Merlin's name happened."
"You'll know," Ethan said quietly. "Very soon. All of it." His amber eyes lifted past Sirius — to Dumbledore, who was approaching now with Snape at his shoulder, Minerva and Flitwick a pace behind.
Dumbledore and Ethan looked at one another for a long moment, two men who understood without speaking exactly how bad the night had been.
"Tell me what happened, Ethan," Dumbledore said at last.
Ethan's mouth curved, faintly, without warmth.
"Aren't we missing our most important guest?"
Dumbledore understood at once. His tired blue eyes followed Ethan's gaze across the lawn — to where a portly man in a lime-green bowler hat was trying, with conspicuous lack of success, to make himself small at the rear of the gathering.
Cornelius Fudge.
Every eye on the lawn turned with Ethan's.
Fudge's lips worked. For a moment it seemed he might simply melt backward into the crowd. Then, recovering, he came forward at a brisk officious trot, his hand already extended, his face arranged into its broadest and most reassuring smile.
"Esther! My dear fellow — what a dreadful business, dreadful, but it's over now, that's the thing, the children are safe, your boy is safe, and the Ministry shall take it from here, no need for any of you good people to trouble yourselves further—"
He ran out of words.
Because Ethan was smiling back at him — the courteous, level Atid Stella smile he gave across a negotiating table — but the eyes above it were the coldest thing Fudge had ever stood in front of. And when the Minister's gaze skittered away from that cold and landed, by accident, on the unconscious boy in Luna Lovegood's arms — on the dried blood, on the small girl's tear-streaked face and her grey eyes that lifted to meet his with no expression at all — the rest of the sentence died in his throat.
Ethan let the silence sit a moment. Then, while Fudge floundered, he slipped the small camera-device from Jasper's leg and passed it quietly to Verrona, murmuring a few words at her ear. She nodded and withdrew toward the Atid Stella tent.
And Ethan began, in a voice that was not loud and yet reached every corner of the lawn, to tell them what he had seen in the graveyard.
He told it plainly. The Cup as a portkey. The tombstone. Pettigrew, and the ritual, and the thing that had risen from the cauldron. The roll-call of masked servants. The duel. And the name, spoken without flinching into the listening dark.
Voldemort. Returned. In the flesh.
The crowd's reaction moved through it like wind through wheat — gasps, a few cries, faces going white, families drawing their children closer. Fear, mostly. The particular fear of people hearing confirmed the one thing they had spent thirteen years praying they would never hear again.
And then Cornelius Fudge began to perform.
"Now — now, let us all be calm," he said, raising his hands, his smile fixed and bright. "These are very serious accusations, Mr Esther, very serious, and made — forgive me — on no evidence whatsoever. Your word. That is all. The word of one man, at the end of a chaotic and frightening night, when we are all of us tired and overwrought." His eyes hardened a fraction. "Some might even say a man who has rather a talent for stirring things up."
"Crouch Junior," Sam said flatly, from beside Dumbledore. "Half the people on this lawn watched him stand next to Mordred Slythra and melt out of Alastor Moody's face. Will you call all of them overwrought, Cornelius?"
Fudge's smile thinned. "Barty Crouch's son is a lunatic, Faramundo, and a dead man besides — or so we all believed — and whatever was wearing his face, his testimony would be worth precisely nothing in any court. He and this Mordred fellow and the rat Pettigrew are a band of escaped criminals, nothing more. A regrettable lapse in Azkaban's security." He spread his hands magnanimously. "Which I shall personally see doubled. There is no cause for panic. The Ministry has matters well in hand."
"Remove the Dementors from Azkaban, Cornelius," Dumbledore said quietly. "Send an envoy to the giants before Voldemort does. These are the things that matter now."
"The Dementors—" Fudge looked genuinely scandalised. "Take away the guard of Azkaban? Treat with giants? Dumbledore, have you lost your senses entirely?"
Snape stepped forward. Without a word he drew back his left sleeve and held out his forearm, where the Dark Mark stood black and livid against his pale skin.
"It burned tonight, Minister," Snape said, his voice low and precise. "For the first time in thirteen years. He summoned us. It does not burn for a ploy."
Fudge looked at the Mark and visibly recoiled — then visibly decided not to believe it.
"Some — some piece of theatre," he blustered, backing a step. "Old magic, dredged up to frighten — I'll not stand here and—" He rounded on Dumbledore, and the politician's instinct for an enemy he could fight took over. "And as for you — you and I are going to have a very serious conversation about your fitness for your position, Dumbledore, encouraging this kind of hysteria—" He fumbled in his robes and produced, of all things, a folded copy of Witch Weekly, brandishing the lurid headline. "The boy is disturbed! It says so here! Visions, scar-pains, fits in his lessons — you expect me to take the word of a clearly unstable child — and your nonsense about his scar—"
A short, sharp, derisive sound came from Hermione Granger. Beside her Viktor Krum made a low contemptuous noise in his throat. And Ron Weasley said, loudly and with feeling, "He's the only one of us who's actually seen Vol—" Hermione's elbow caught him, but his glare at Fudge could have curdled milk.
Through all of it, Ethan Esther simply watched. He had not raised his voice once. He stood with his hands loosely at his sides and observed the Minister's flailing with the patient attention of a man watching a fish exhaust itself against a hook.
Fudge felt the gaze and turned on it.
"And you, Esther. You've stood there saying nothing for five minutes. Have you anything at all to say for yourself?"
Verrona returned at that exact moment, a brand-new Billywig-Camera projector in her hands.
Ethan nodded to her.
"Only this," he said.
The projection bloomed in the air above the lawn, vast and clear in the dark.
The graveyard. The fire. The bone-white face and red eyes of the risen Dark Lord. And Ethan, small and dark before him, and the cold exchange between them — Voldemort's offer, immortality, merely the boy, cut the leash; Ethan's bow, and his No; the Killing Curse, and the Galleon that ate it; and then the vanishing, the way a star goes out.
The lawn watched in absolute, frozen silence.
Hermione and Viktor held one another close. Molly Weasley pressed a hand to her mouth and let one tear fall, the other hand gripping Arthur's, who was himself trembling. Ron held a shaking Lavender, and was shaking himself. Cedric drew a white-faced Cho into his shoulder. Sirius, Lupin, and Sam wore the same grim stone expression as the unpleasant memories of the war resurfaced, itching the old scars imprinted in their minds. The Greengrass sisters stood on either side of Draco, who had gone the colour of ash and could not seem to stop trembling, both girls bracing him. Neville Longbottom sat down hard in the grass — and Verrona was there in an instant, an arm around the boy's shoulders, steadying him.
Even the Headmasters and Headmistresses, who had heard the stories of Voldemort but never felt the weight of him, wore faces gone pale and still.
And Cornelius Fudge reacted most of all. He stared at the projection with his mouth opening and closing, the bowler hat trembling on his head, and when the footage ended he found his voice in a high, cracking rush:
"Staged! It's — it's staged, anyone can fake a — a moving picture, this proves nothing—"
Ethan reached over and laid a calming hand on Sam's arm — for Sam had taken one furious step forward — and said, mildly:
"Take it to the Department of Mysteries, Minister. Verify it however you wish. It will hold up to every test your people can devise. It is real... You know... that it is real."
Dumbledore closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Cornelius," he said, and the weariness in his voice silenced even Fudge. "Stop. Before you make any greater a fool of yourself in front of these people."
He opened his eyes. He was not, Luna thought, watching from where she cradled the sleeping Harry, looking at an enemy. He was looking at a frightened man — a man who was not wicked, only weak, only so in love with his office that he would rather the world were safe than know that it was not.
"You are not a bad man, Cornelius," Dumbledore said, more gently. "But you stand at a crossing now, and the whole of what comes next turns on which way you step. Lord Voldemort has returned. That is the truth, and your wishing will not unmake it. We must prepare. We must act, and act soon, and act together."
He held the smaller man's frightened eyes. "I ask only one thing of you. When the choice comes — and it will come, again and again, in the days ahead — do not choose easy over right."
The lawn was silent.
Far off across the grounds, the last of the smoke rose thin and grey from the black bones of the maze, and dissolved into the warm and starless dark.