The emergency meeting was convened in the quiet of Ariana's London flat. Only three people were summoned: Dumbledore, Snape, and a very bewildered Harry, who had been brought by Dumbledore with the simple explanation that "Ariana has made a move of monumental significance."
They arrived via the Floo network, stepping into the familiar, minimalist living room. But the atmosphere was different. It was charged with a quiet, powerful sense of finality. On a table, displayed with clinical precision, were six small, black, and utterly inert obsidian spheres.
Snape's eyes, sharp and analytical, widened almost imperceptibly as he took in the sight. Dumbledore simply stared, his breath catching in his throat.
"The diary, the ring, the locket, the diadem, the cup," Ariana said, her voice calm as she pointed to the first five spheres. "And now," she gestured to the sixth, which still seemed to emanate a faint, residual coldness, "Nagini."
"You did it," Dumbledore whispered, his voice full of a staggering awe. "You went into his fortress, and you… you stole his very soul from under his nose."
"The operation was successful," Ariana confirmed with a nod. She handed the sixth sphere to Dumbledore. "This is for you to dispose of, Professor. That makes six. The primary network of Horcruxes is now dismantled."
Snape looked from the spheres to Ariana, his mind, accustomed to plots and deceptions, struggling to process the sheer audacity and success of her secret war. She had, in less than a year, accomplished what the entire Order of the Phoenix had been preparing to spend a decade fighting to achieve.
"But there is another update," Ariana said, her tone shifting. "The Nagini vessel was… unique. The Horcrux was not the only affliction."
She led them from the study into an adjacent, comfortable sitting room. There, resting in an armchair by a window, wrapped in a warm blanket and sipping a cup of tea, was a woman. She had dark, tired eyes and hair streaked with grey, and she looked at them with a wary, deep-seated confusion, like someone who has just woken from a century-long dream.
Harry and Snape stared, utterly baffled. But Dumbledore stopped dead, his face paling, a look of profound, sorrowful recognition on his face. He had not seen that face in over sixty years, not since a dark time in Paris when the world was on the brink of another war.
"Nagini?" he breathed, the name a question and a statement all at once.
The woman looked up at him, a flicker of a memory, distant and foggy, in her eyes. "I… I know you," she whispered, her voice still rough. "You are the old man… the one who fought Gellert."
"Yes," Dumbledore said gently. He walked closer, his expression one of immense pity and wonder.
"My dear woman. How do you feel?"
"She does not remember much," Ariana explained, stepping forward. "The Maledictus curse, combined with the soul-fragment, effectively suppressed her human consciousness for decades. I have removed the Horcrux and suppressed the curse. Her mind is her own again, but it is… fragmented. Like a book with most of its pages missing."
She then began to explain everything, her voice a calm, steady narrative in the quiet room. She told Nagini of the rise and fall and rise again of Lord Voldemort. She explained his obsession with Slytherin's lineage, how he had found her, a descendant of a cursed branch of magical nobility, and had seen her not as a person, but as a perfect, symbolic vessel for both his familiar and a piece of his soul.
Nagini listened, her face a mask of dawning horror as the dark, nightmarish gaps in her memory were filled with a terrible new truth. She had not just been a beast; she had been the companion and the container for the very darkest wizard of the age.
"And now…" Nagini whispered, her gaze falling on her own human hands as if they were foreign objects. "What am I?"
"You are free," Ariana said simply. "And you are family."
She looked at Nagini, then at Dumbledore. "There is one final piece of the history you must understand." She laid out the lineage, the connection she had discovered in the Gringotts registry. She explained how Credence Barebone, her great-grandfather, had loved Nagini, and how their bloodline had continued through a single, often non-magical, line.
Dumbledore further filling in the gaps, revealing the history of the magical adoption of Credence by Aberforth, his brother. Albus also told her of Credence's disappearance during the war with Grindelwald and her own news of going missing during the dark times.
"My father was the last of that line," Ariana concluded, her voice steady. "Which makes you, Nagini, his grand-mother. And my great-grand-mother."
Nagini stared at her, her mind reeling. This brilliant, powerful girl who had saved her, who had pulled her back from the brink of monstrous oblivion, was her own flesh and blood. A family she never knew she had. Tears began to stream down her face, not of sorrow, but of a profound, overwhelming sense of being found after being lost for so very long.
"All this time," Dumbledore murmured, looking between the two of them, the quiet girl with his sister's face and the resurrected woman from his own dark past. "The circles of history… they all lead back here. To you."
The strategic landscape had been utterly transformed. Six Horcruxes were gone. The final one, the one living inside Harry, now had a clear, viable path to removal. And they had a new, unexpected ally—a woman who had spent years at Voldemort's side, who knew his secrets, his fears, his habits.
Ariana stood in the center of it all, the quiet architect of these impossible victories. She had cured the incurable, neutralized the immortal, and reclaimed the lost. The war was far from over, but she had just handed the light side an advantage so profound, so decisive, that for the first time, victory felt not just possible, but logical.