2The End of the World
OR
In the Beginning
The world must be ending, Harry Potter thought to himself, as he looked around the razed and burning Hogwarts grounds. The death toll was uncountably high, everyone he loved snatched from him what felt like aeons ago, and yet here he and Voldemort still stood, neither allowing the other access to the other's back, trapped in a deadly stalemate. It had all gone wrong. It had all gone so horribly, horribly wrong.
He nearly tripped on Ginny's corpse, which gave Voldemort an opening, but Harry dodged in time. Still, the sight of the woman he loved lying there, face down, in the dirt, sparked the first emotional response from Harry in hours. But it wasn't rage, the righteous anger that had fueled the Cruciatus he had cast upon Bellatrix Lestrange. It wasn't hatred. It was sorrow, grief, what Dumbledore called love.
No more. No more shall die for me! he thought, as if that thought would do any good. It might, even; he was not alone any more than Voldemort was. In the distance, he could hear the manic cackles of the aforementioned psychopath, as the duel against Neville continued. The problem was, even if they won, it would be a Pyrrhic victory; win or lose, the Wizarding World itself was dead. There would be insufficient wizards and witches left alive to rebuild.
He had always had powerful accidental magic; he knew this, but it had seldom acted once he had started school, despite the constant fear and frequent bouts of anger that usually birthed such sporadic bursts of energy. Perhaps it had been saving itself for this, when all those he loved most were dead or dying, and despair threatened to chain him down, immobile, to the ground. For, now, it flared to life, as if it were itself a separate animate force.
Harry didn't know it, but he began to glow as the magic took hold...and time seemed to grind to a halt. A myriad possibilities, presents, futures, flashed by before he could grasp their significance, here and gone in the blink of an eye, in a place where time and space were meaningless. He didn't notice when Voldemort vanished from in front of him, didn't observe the cessation of Lestrange's mad cackle, didn't think it odd that there was no longer ash and dirt beneath his feet, that there was nothing underfoot.
Driven by the depths of his emotions, the world twisted, buckled, as if rent in two by massive hands, and there was nothingness all around him. It was very colourful nothingness, but devoid of identity or sense. All was silent, as colours whizzed by him in blurs. And into the nothingness came mind, a familiar presence, that had never before had an identity, or a name. He knew it was his magic, and remembered only then the rumour of the increased strength of magic that came to the wielder of the Elder Wand.
And he who gathers all three shall be Master of Death, he thought to himself.
You seek for a world without the troubles that currently assail you. What sort of world do you wish for?
And now the magic had a voice, strong and resonant, a light amidst darkness, stillness amidst ceaseless motion.
I just want a world where this has a happy ending, he said. Where they didn't die—my friends, my allies, the good guys. A world where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and my friends don't all die around me. A world with Ginny in it, and Ron, and Hermione, and Sirius, and Professor Lupin. A world where being my friend isn't a death sentence.
Pieces continued to be torn off pieces, colours from colours, sounds from sounds. The Forbidden Woods built itself back up before him, unburnt, uncharred, unpopulated. Empty, save for the trees, the grass, the flora of the land. And, turning, he was unsurprised to see the Black Lake, but no Hogwarts. He watched, looked around, as his magic continued to tear apart the world, replacing it with a new one, where everything known would be at once familiar and strange.
He caught sight of an adorable creature scurrying out of the woods, that reminded him oddly of a beaver, but it had hooves, and pointed teeth. A small lizard with floppy ears and a stinger tail scuttled across a rock. What was going on? What was going on? What was going—?
And what of this—? asked the magic, distracting him watching the emergence of the curious familiar-strange fauna now in the biomes around him. Something strange leapt out of the lake, but he turned behind him, to his best guess as to the location of the voice that was his magic.
A television screen seemed to stand before him, and he stared at it. He'd never watched more than a few hours total, and had little knowledge of how the devices worked. First the Dursleys, and then the magical world, had robbed him of the opportunity, but he didn't need to know. The screen was a part of his magic, and his magic was attuned to him.
He watched.
He watched.
He watched, as years in their tens, hundreds, thousands flashed past, here and gone, saw himself, recognised himself, in a hundred different shapes and sizes, guises, as red hair, and blond, were supplanted by brown (and the rare jet black most familiar to him). He watched as people in the societies that sprang up began to spontaneously be born with certain different eye colours, each inclined to a talent with a different one of the four classical elements: fire, air, water, earth. Yellow echoing the no longer extant Gryffindor's gold, fire; brown for Hufflepuff bronze, the air; blue for Ravenclaw, the water; green for Slytherin, the earth.
Mighty societies arose, wielding these elements, instructed by various sources, forgotten spirits that had existed long before Harry was born, teaching men how to properly use these gifts. Inevitably, the usage turned eventually to conquest. War. Harry watched with bated breath, mouth dry.
And still he saw himself, somehow recognised himself, despite the difference in skin tones, in clothing styles and hair styles, eye colours, no consistency, an ever-changing form, even his sex was inconsistent. As he watched, he recognised others in addition to himself. There was Fred, and here was Remus, there was Luna, and here was Malfoy (ugh!).
And was that? Could it be? It was! Sirius! Alive, and well, and smiling, yellow-eyed, and youthful, with none of the gauntness caused by Azkaban. And here was Hermione, her nose in a book. And there was Ron, picking a fight with Malfoy. Possibly because Ron's eyes were yellow, and Malfoy's were green. Or perhaps there was a lingering animosity, forgotten in the dust of millennia. But he let the memory pass him by, and time sped up again, years passing in minutes, although time no longer held any meaning. It zipped by him, past him, never affecting him, until it slowed without his willing it, and he looked, with practiced eyes, now, at the metaphorical lay of the land.
Here he was. Harry grimaced at the sight of Voldemort, handsome and doubtless charming, still possessed of both hair and nose, seated behind a literal wall of fire. Bellatrix knelt before him, a triumphant smirk spread across her face. She had not yet gone utterly mad, but he nudged time aside, pulling at it as you might pucker up a bit of cloth, and saw madness lying in her future.
Neville Longbottom stared out into a chasm leading down into infinity, brooding. Harry tried not to stare at the scar marring a face that would otherwise probably be quite handsome. He knew how it felt to have people staring at a scar. It looked painful, though. He considered chastising his magic for creating such a world, but Neville was only one person, and perhaps he'd heard Dumbledore preach too much about the "Greater Good".
He found Ginny speaking to...Harry, himself...nearby, Ron staring lovingly at a boomerang, while a female version of Draco Malfoy leant back against the sunlit walls of what Harry was realising was an abandoned temple. She (he?) seemed unperturbed by recent events, as though they happened often. He saw that, while she wore shoes, these shoes had no soles. Strange.
He watched them for awhile, watched them bicker and squabble, until Neville came back in, and the air filled with tension, as everyone, wary and uneasy around him, demanded to know what he'd been doing, and where he'd been. It looked as if it might come to blows, but he managed to defuse the situation, and then, leaning back, he tilted his head back until it hit the wall, crossed his arms, sighed, and then began to meditate. Harry was pretty sure it was mediation, anyway.
Well, at least, despite the gold eyes shared amongst Neville, Bellatrix Lestrange, and Voldemort, Neville was still on their side. If that had been the only problem, he could have dealt with it.
Where were Hermione? Remus? Sirius? Where was Luna? Were his parents alive and well here?
He traveled far afield, in space and time, grinned as he watched Sirius train Ron in the use of swords. He learnt that Professor Lupin was actually Ron and Ginny's father. All three were members of the "Order of the White Lotus", as was Dumbledore, Neville and Bellatrix Lestrange's uncle.
There was too much wrong with that last sentence to start analysing it.
He watched with a sad smile as Ron fell in love with a girl Harry didn't recognise, saw her ascend as the Moon Spirit, and Ron eventually fell for another stranger. At least he found happiness, Harry mused to himself.
Luna Lovegood was a chipper, hyper girl who could block people's ability to wield magic; she started off as one of Lestrange's allies, but defected when her friend...Hermione! did. He'd already seen that Ginny had magic, but Ron did not. There seemed to be no consistency to it, but similar things had happened before. Ginny had had no magic two lives ago, but now she was brimming with it. The only person whose magic stayed, no matter what, was Harry himself.
The magic had done with humouring him, dragging him on a breakneck pace into the future, where he saw that Voldemort's final penance for his crimes, both then and now, whatever those meant, was to be stripped of his magic by Harry himself. Harry nodded his approval of this punishment—the man who had prided himself only on his magic, for whom magic was (then and now) the sole marker of a man's worth, was now cast down to live as a muggle.
Suddenly, despite the world's flaws, Harry was well pleased.
It is to your liking?
Harry stared at dawn breaking behind the furious Voldemort, and then, the world building itself up, advancing, moving forwards with new technologies, to the modern age.
Oh, yes. This will do, he confirmed.
And on that day, the Avatar Cycle began, with the first avatar: Harry Potter.
End
