The vertical pupil of flame embedded in the void suddenly blazed with light, brighter than anything that had come before it.
As Bryan pressed his palm down in one decisive motion, thousands upon thousands of dancing fire-serpents split away from the edges of the black-red pupil all at once—almost as if the vertical eye had grown eyelashes of pure flame!
Wuuu wuuu wuuu!
The endless noise circling his ears surged all at once, rising to a pitch that scraped along the nerves, like a thousand banshees wailing in mournful cries.
The grey mist saturating this stretch of void began to seethe in response. It surged forward in wave after relentless wave toward the fiery eye, devouring the Spirit fire that Bryan poured out as fast as he could produce it.
Bryan's sudden burst of power also triggered a violent backlash from the spatial turbulence surrounding him.
The fierce power of space swelled in might all at once, gathering itself into something with teeth; every single second, Bryan endured the battering of countless spatial turbulences.
The spectacle of three forces clashing filled Bryan's eyes, and his brow furrowed.
The grey mist of death. The chaotic power of space. And his own Spirit fire.
Judged by the fundamental order of power each force belonged to, the grey mist of death was undoubtedly the highest, sitting above the others in a hierarchy that had nothing to do with raw quantity.
Even spatial turbulence, violent and ceaseless as it was, could not interfere with the grey mist of death—the mist sheltered the lands and monsters it had thoroughly claimed and corroded from that turbulence; they had already become part of death itself, and death did not touch its own.
And the power of space, in turn, ranked higher in tier than Spirit-fire.
Facing the crushing grip of these two greater forces at once, Bryan had more than enough strength to protect himself. But pushing the vertical pupil forward, driving it deeper into the sea of grey mist ahead, was a struggle with every single step.
Perhaps it was because the vast majority of the mist in this place had, in response to his intrusion, gathered itself around Bryan instead—but the monsters still living on the giant island fragment nearby no longer showed their former bloodthirsty excitement from moments before.
Instead they lay slumped on the broken ground, growing visibly listless and weak.
To these monsters, twisted as they were, the grey mist was the "water" and "sunlight" of their strange, borrowed lives—and with it pulled away toward Bryan instead, they withered accordingly.
The stalemate dragged on and the fierceness in Bryan's gaze grew sharper, refusing to soften even as the cost of holding this ground climbed.
The fiery red eyelashes wreathing the "vertical pupil" vanished all at once—but from the golden centre of the eye, a single pillar of flame carrying the unmistakable aura of total destruction suddenly shot forth aimed at the heart of the drifting ruin!
BOOM!
The overwhelming power contained within that fire pillar could not be dissolved even by the sea of grey mist surrounding it and it was pierced clean through in an instant, carving out a glowing passage through the churning grey.
Only—
As the flame sped onward toward the nearby island fragment, no ease showed on Bryan's face at the sight of his landing strike. If anything, his expression grew even more solemn.
Though he had broken through one full layer of the blockade surrounding this place, he could not avoid the constant, grinding battering of the spatial turbulence that permeated every inch of this realm.
And by the time the fire pillar actually reached the nearest island fragment, arriving there to deliver what should have been divine punishment upon these deformed, twisted monsters, the overwhelming majority of its original power had already dissipated harmlessly into the surrounding void along the way—not one part in ten remained of what had first been launched!
Whoosh—
The instant the diminished fire pillar pierced through the fragment's visible surface, a shadow of gloom fell abruptly across Bryan's face, replacing the tension of a moment before.
No effect.
What had actually been pierced through, he realized in the same instant, was only an illusory projection of the fragment—not the true, physical substance of the Avalon Island piece at all!
His mind had been swayed by the grey mist of death and by everything he had witnessed here, letting an old assumption slip past unchecked, and Bryan realized that he had made an elementary mistake.
The rules governing the void were worlds apart from those of Earth's ordinary space, and he'd let familiarity blind him to that basic fact for a crucial moment.
Those island fragments only appeared to be where his eyes told him they were. Their true positions existed somewhere different from what was reflected in Bryan's field of view.
Without exact spatial coordinates, it was nearly impossible for Bryan to locate the precise, actual position of these island fragments.
"Hah—"
Bryan exhaled slowly and let his raised hand fall back to his side.
It seemed his wish to utterly destroy this place could not, for now, be realized.
"The Twin-Serpent Staff."
Bryan, his gaze deep and shadowed now in the aftermath of the failed strike, spoke the words again, his expression showing a trace of weariness.
Leaving something like the Twin-Serpent Staff in Voldemort's hands was simply too dangerous—it was like a time bomb sitting in the world's lap, liable to explode at any moment and destroy everything within reach.
Voldemort ought to have already sensed the true might of the Twin-Serpent Staff by now. But he had no rational awareness of the danger it represented; he likely believed in his arrogance, that he could conquer the staff himself in time.
Just as he believed that, having created his Horcruxes, he had already conquered death itself.
Bryan was not one to deceive himself in matters like this, and he felt no secret relief simply because Voldemort had not yet found a way to control the Twin-Serpent Staff. A threat unrealized was still a threat patiently waiting.
If he could manage it, he would far rather have banished the Twin-Serpent Staff to the void as well, sealed away from the world—even if it meant he could not avoid an eventual fight to the death with the staff, or with Herpo, he did not want that final battlefield to be Earth.
The casualties such a battle could cause among Muggles and wizards would be in the millions, easily, if it played out in the wrong place.
But that was precisely where the deeper problem lay.
Once Cliodna had handed the Twin-Serpent Staff over to Voldemort, following whatever had driven her to it, there was little Bryan could do about the matter anymore.
Trying to seize the Twin-Serpent Staff back from Voldemort's hands would be far more difficult, and far more dangerous, than covertly destroying his Horcruxes one by one had ever been.
What was more, that staff possessed a will of its own, separate from either of their intentions.
No one but Voldemort, it seemed, could even touch it without consequence.
If every allied force were united and thrown at the task of seizing it by force, all at the same time, it was possible that the staff—still, for now, holding itself in some self-restrained state—would fly into a rage over the attempt, and wreak devastating destruction upon the natural world in retaliation.
Which was to say, in the end, he could only prepare for the worst outcome and hope to manage it when it came. This, perhaps, was exactly what Cliodna had meant to tell him by arranging all of this.
After a long moment spent turning all of this over, the weariness on Bryan's face grew more obvious; sustaining himself here in the void, fighting its rules and its forces both, cost him a tremendous toll every single second he remained.
Since he could not destroy these monsters or even properly locate them to strike, there was no longer any reason worth the cost of remaining here further.
With one final, deep, lingering look at the fragment of Avalon Island drifting before him, Bryan vanished from the void with a soft pop.
The clear night air rushing into his nostrils a moment later eased a little of the weariness creasing Bryan's brow.
The starry sky remained just as dazzling as when he'd left it, untouched by anything that had happened beyond it—but beneath that same sky, Stonehenge itself had been reduced to a heap of scattered ruins.
The Muggle in the guard booth was still fast asleep in his chair, snoring softly on, which meant that little time had actually passed out here.
After all, this was a site of world heritage—he owed the Muggles some kind of accounting for it.
Raising his hand, he swept his wand in a slow arc and restored Stonehenge to its familiar form. Then Bryan strode forward across the grass, his figure vanishing once more into the night settling over Salisbury Plain.
....
And so, another school day at Hogwarts had come to an end.
The brief stretch of free time before dinner was, for the students on any given school day, probably their most genuinely relaxed moment of the whole schedule.
Aside from the handful who stayed indoors by the fire, most students used this window to come out beyond the castle walls and unwind for a while, doing something that lifted the spirits after a day of lessons.
Some, for instance, gathered in little clusters of friends out on the grounds to chat idly about recent news from the school or the wider wizarding world.
Others, following a trend that had gradually caught on at Hogwarts over recent years, went to the Quidditch pitch to jog a couple of laps around the grass, working the day's stiffness out of their legs.
On the lawn separated from the pitch by a cobblestone path, some students took the chance to mount their brooms instead and fly a few lazy circuits in the golden evening light.
"Whoa!"
A cry of astonishment from Ron, ringing out from up in the sky, startled Hermione clean out of her thoughts as she sat cross-legged on the lawn previewing her Potions textbook, and she instinctively snapped her head up to look.
Seventy or eighty feet up in the air, a small figure with flying brown hair streaming behind her was rocketing straight toward Ron at a speed that seemed almost unreasonable for someone her size.
The brown-haired little girl moved as fast as lightning, closing the distance in a way that made several onlookers on the ground below draw in a sharp breath. She seemed to be trying to break through Ron's defence; at around fifty feet from him, she suddenly began to change direction.
Ron read her intent almost immediately and pulled back hard on his broom handle, angling to shift and block whatever line she chose to take.
But what happened next made even Ron who was, after all, thoroughly used to seeing Harry handle the Firebolt with ease—cry out in genuine shock.
At a full-speed sprint on a broom, fifty feet could ordinarily be closed in a little over a second, in a single smooth burst.
But within that single second and change, the brown-haired girl changed direction not once but three times in rapid chain, carving a jagged, dazzling zigzag streak of lightning through the air, and slipped past Ron, close enough that her broom's twigs nearly brushed his cheek in passing.
The dazzling breakthrough made even Hermione, watching from the ground, close her book without thinking and rise to her feet, drawn by pure reflex.
Before he was forced back by the rush of displaced wind trailing in her wake, Ron even felt the very twigs of her flying broom graze the tip of his nose, close enough to make him flinch.
"Oh, bring it on then—but you're not getting past me!"
Crouched in wait a little below and ahead of Ron, positioned to intercept, Harry's bright eyes blazed with spirit. He gripped tight the handle of the Firebolt he trusted above all else in the world, and held his breath, focused on the girl now bearing down toward him.
Facing Harry's cheerful "provocation," the brown-haired little girl who had just broken clean through Ron's defence gave a bright, delighted giggle at the challenge. Ten feet from Harry, she suddenly wrenched her broom handle straight upward and shot skyward without warning.
And Harry, living up fully to his reputation as the youngest Seeker in a century, reacted within a second—almost the very instant the girl pulled her broom handle upward, he had already begun his own matching move.
And yet the brown-haired girl's breakthrough wasn't going to be quite that simple to counter.
Using that split-second head start to climb past Harry by a full body's length, gaining just enough separation, she suddenly reversed direction—in under a second, she had completed both the sharp braking and the full turn, and shot back toward the ground at absolute full throttle!
"Beautiful!"
At the instant the two figures crossed paths in mid-air, one going up and one going down at full speed, Harry let out an admiring shout—
"But you won't shake me off that easily!"
Turning with an agility that matched Roya's own move for move, he changed direction in kind; before she could properly break past him and claim the win, he sealed off the gap entirely using the Firebolt's superior raw speed, closing the distance she'd just opened.
Now the two figures streaked side by side, matched and accelerating together along a dead-straight line, plunging toward the ground at a speed that made several watchers below instinctively step back.
Everyone watching this contest held their breath without meaning to, hearts clenched tight in their chests, waiting for whichever one of them would pull up first!
"Whoa!"
A gust of strong, displaced wind swept past directly in front of Hermione, knocking her clean off balance and sending her staggering backward, arms pinwheeling, about to fall onto the grass.
"Excellent—the Wronski Feint, both of them at once, but neither one fooled the other!"
Ron's excited shout rang out clear from high above.
"Careful, please, Miss Granger—"
Hermione, her body already tipping backward past the point of recovery, had already braced herself internally to make a fool of herself in front of everyone. But then a gentle, steadying force suddenly pressed against her back, catching her before she could go down.
With no time to spare for scolding Harry or calling out a warning to Roya to be careful, Hermione spun around at once to see who'd caught her, and her expression immediately turned to shock.
"Oh—Professor Dumbledore, Professor Slughorn, I'm—I'm so sorry!"
Only Dumbledore looked at her smiling warmly and entirely unbothered by the near-collision, while Professor Slughorn, beside him, watched with keen delight the two figures still locked in their contest against the sky, both of them wrapped now in the deepening glow of the setting sun behind the pitch.
"Harry has unmistakably inherited his father's gift for flying—oh, those were the years I racked my brains over Slytherin's Quidditch record!"
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