Advanced chapters on my [email protected]/Saintbarbido.
(Loth's P.O.V.)
The Great Hall quieted like a forest before a storm.
No thunder. No shout. Just stillness.
Students turned their heads in confusion. A few shivered without knowing why. Only a handful—Luna, Harry, a few professors—seemed aware of the figure suspended silently in the center of the hall.
Death.
Tattered black, faceless. No bones. Just a presence under the tattered cloak—ancient, weightless, watching. It didn't speak. It didn't need to.
Then, slowly, Dumbledore rose from his high-backed chair.
Props to the Headmaster, his gaze was calm, eyes twinkling with a trace of steel. He stepped down from the staff dais, adjusted his half-moon spectacles, and approached the entity in the air like one might a polite guest who had taken the wrong seat at dinner.
"Ahem," he began, voice as smooth as always, "I must inform you that this is an institute of learning. If you wish to enroll a student, or perhaps deliver post-mortem correspondence, we would prefer that you do so through the official owl post."
His eyes flicked up toward the still-hovering form. "Crashing a meal is considered rather rude."
The figure did not respond.
It simply raised one bony, mist-wreathed finger—
—and pointed.
Directly at me.
Or rather, the invisible me, perched silently above the floating candles.
The illusion dissolved as I dropped my invisibility.
I descended into everyone's view, Anodite form glowing faintly lavender- under the atmospheric hall lights. The students gasped. Some backed away. Others froze entirely.
I gave Dumbledore a nod of reassurance. "It's here for me," I said plainly. "I'll handle it."
Before the Headmaster could protest, time fractured around me.
The motion in the hall halted.
A fork paused halfway to a student's mouth. A candle's flame froze in mid-flicker. Dumbledore stood mid-turn, robes caught in a swirl of still air.
I was the only one moving.
Mist coiled beside me.
From it, Hecate stepped forward—calm, elegant, her violet gaze critical. She didn't smile.
"So," she said, her voice echoing despite the silence, "how exactly do you plan on stopping an Elder Spirit?"
I didn't respond. Despite my curiousity at her sudden appearance, there were more pressing matters.
She gestured lazily toward the black figure. "The Horsemen are not ghosts, Loth. They are remnants of primal divine function. Nature's aspects of the END given form. Agents of Apocalypse. That one—" she nodded to Death, "—cannot be killed. None of them can."
"I'm aware."
I didn't look at her. My focus was on the entity still floating at the heart of the room. My increased perception with Aura Sense could not even pierce the gray smoke around It.
Hecate's voice became softer. "Even Low Gods fear the Horsemen. They're bound by ancient contracts, and you've broken the seal that kept them in slumber. The Elder Wand was a prison, not a wand."
I lifted my arm.
Magic thickened in the air.
I pulled, drawing threads of leyline power from the ground. Immense natural magic transferred into me through every stone in Hogwarts.
A glow began to burn from my chest outward, condensing into a point at my palm—sharp, radiant, pure.
The Anodite beam exploded forward, sharp and blinding.
It screamed through the air, aimed straight at Death.
But—
Just before it struck, the beam halted.
Stopped.
The black finger rose once again. The light folded into itself, sucked away, vanishing into nothing.
Gone.
I felt the energy lose it's life, like a breath I could never get back.
Hecate tilted her head slightly. "You're not listening."
Still, I said nothing, even as her words found echo elsewhere, ringing with truth.
In the Chamber of Secrets, Pestilence, in the form of Slytherin's Basilisk animated by necromancer plagues, snapped through solid anodite barriers as it chased my soul fragment through the tunnels.
In the Room of Requirement, the swarming mist-bugs—Famine—consumed every magical attack my other soul fragment unleashed upon them. It did little to halt their advance and in a minute, that fragment would be surrounded, overwhelmed and consumed. The Room of Requirement would soon follow.
There was no doubt.
I couldn't kill them with magic.
But maybe—just maybe—we could contain them.
Behind me, I felt time break again.
Hecate vanished without ceremony. And Death moved.
Its scythe spun—slow, deliberate.
Then came the swing, powerful enough to vibrate the mist.
The death beam that followed slashed outward like a wild silent scream, crashing against the layered protections of the Great Hall.
Shields collapsed one after the other—wards, runes, even Dumbledore's residual enchantments shattered like sugar glass.
Only one thing held.
My own Anodite Protego—a dome of crackling pink light—expanded outwards, catching the beam before it could devour the Ravenclaw table.
The energy buckled, but held. Barely as I kept sending it more power to replace what death consumed.
The shield shivered around the students and staff like a bubble of defiance.
I had them. They were safe.
Death paused, intrigued by the pulsing dome.
I didn't wait and projected my voice across the entire hall, clear and commanding.
"Headmaster. Go."
Dumbledore hesitated only for a breath, then nodded once.
With a sweep of his hand, the professors moved, guiding stunned students toward the exits.
The Hall emptied like a tide pulling back from shore.
But just before the last wave left—just before the doors closed—
Luna turned.
She looked at me, eyes wide, her mouth moving silently.
"Careful," she mouthed.
I smiled at her.
A small thing.
Simple.
"I will," I said softly.
And then the doors closed.
I turned back to Death.
Alone now. The real battle just beginning.
The scythe moved again.
This time with intention.
Death raised its arm in silence, and slashed downward. A death arc—thin, jagged, pure entropy—sliced into the first layer of my Anodite Protego shield. It didn't explode. It didn't even slice it apart.
It erased.
Like chalk wiped off a board.
Another swing followed. Then a third layer died.
Each death arc sheared away more, unmaking my magic as though it had never existed.
I kept reinforcing it, drawing in more of my core, all to hold the line whilst figuring out a plan—but the dome trembled, down to the last layer.
Fortunately the Grand Hall was empty.
I switched from offence to containment. All around the hall the Mist stirred.
Unlike the outside world, this was no ordinary fog
The Hogwarts Mist was like an eldritch force, threaded with Wizardly magic and latent will. Ot could do more than create illusions-something I'd first noticed during my leystring travel.
I pulled it in.
Drew it through my hands, my chest, my veins. Let it fuse with the shield.
The weakened Anodite Protego pulsed once… and grew stronger. Where death arcs struck, the outer layer of mist warped the blows, blurring their edges. For a moment, the dome stopped receding.
Under my control, it molded shapes and encased Death in a mist reinforced Anodite Protego sphere that tanked the death blows. Containment success.
Behind me, a familiar voice spoke again.
"You learn fast."
I turned.
Hecate stood on the dais now, arms folded, watching.
"You figured out that the Mist here is special," she said, stepping closer. "It's ambient interpretation. A culmination of wizard presences over millenia. This kind of Mist exists only in magical spaces like Hogwarts."
I didn't answer. I was too focused on holding the spell.
She glanced at the writhing dome. "Clever. Using this aspect of nature to counter a spirit like death, also an aspect of nature. But that buys you minutes, not a win."
My silence was her invitation.
"You want to know how to stop Death? I'll tell you," she said softly. "But only if you swear your Divine existence to me. Your name, your source, your purpose."
My grip on the mist intensified.
"No."
Hecate's expression didn't change. But the flicker in her eye told me she hadn't expected that.
I didn't need her bargains.
Instead, I reached inward—into my other selves and coordinated to contain the other Horsemen.
The one deep underground was still locked in combat with Pestilence. The reanimated Basilisk moved with jerky, unnatural strength collapsing the tunnels. Its necrotic breath was clouded with infectious miasma that melted the chamber's wards and stone alike.
My fragment there surged with mist, reinforcing the Protego shield that sprung up between the cracked stone columns and caged in Pestilence.
Another self hovered within the Room of Requirement, swarmed by ever-consuming Famine, protected only by a shield. The mist here was denser, more reactive.
The shield exploded outward, first pushing off the swarm before pulling them into an upgraded containment sphere—mist enforced and sealing the swarm inside.
Famine contained.
The final piece of me, standing above the Astronomy Tower under the blue light of the Fiendfyre headed to meet a meteor, extended a directional tether—feeding mist-channeling energies toward the others. Coordinating. Balancing.
Three Horsemen. Three cages.
All bound by the same blend: Anodite magic plus Mist.
Not permanent. But stable. For now.
I returned to myself in the Grand Hall, feeling the strain, the tension of holding four threads at once.
Hecate tilted her head.
"You think you've won? You can't kill them, Loth. Not through will. Not through tricks. I'm your only chance."
I met her eyes for the first time.
"I'm not trying to kill them," I said. "Not yet."
"Then what are you doing?"
I exhaled slowly, gaze still locked on Death beyond the shield.
"I'm showing them that if I have to face nature itself...then I'll use Unnature to beat it. And I'll do it without you."
The air rippled with an Unnatural heat. For a breathless second, even Death stopped moving.
And from the air—deep, sharp, primal—a phoenix screech split the sky.
It wasn't Fawkes.
It wasn't anything earthly.
It echoed through the hall, through the mist, through the bones of Hogwarts itself.
Hecate looked up.
Her expression changed. Almost as if she could see past the illusory ceiling and see the blue sun ascending to pierce heaven's wrath.
"…Impossible," she whispered.