Shadows of the Endless Day
Incarnation of the Stars
His eyes were tearing, whether for sadness or simply for the blinding light, he did not know. He tightened his grip
around that leather stick - no, sword - between rapid blinks and light-beclouded shapes, he made out the red-gold
pommel, the dark leather-bound grip, the crossguard and the iron blade stretching down into the parched earth
underfoot. His face rested on the sun-warmed metal of the pommel; it was a foreign, humming warmth that called to his
magic, which, still shaken from their displacement, responded only weakly.
The air was still and heavy on his skin. Perhaps after being engulfed by the perpetual motion of restless time, life's normal pace would seem slow and plodding and comparison.
Foreign voices, almost guttural in accent, murmured. Harry had neither the strength to decipher the words nor lift his head to meet their faces. Bright shadows dancing on the patch of earth he saw told him they were shifting, moving, circling.
He waited until strength had slowly seeped back into his limbs before looking up. The silver chain, which had burnt its pattern around his neck was cooling; still the pain was distant. He didn't know whether to dread it's inevitable arrival or be thankful it was still at bay.
Finally, he looked up and slowly, the brightly haloed shapes solidified into a circle of twelve armoured men. The backlight cast dark shadows; he could not read their faces, but their chain-mail was stained brown with a proven threat of blood.
Slowly, painfully slowly, Harry balanced himself on his feet, leaning heavily on the sword as he did so. His feet proved trustworthy, but his hand still rested heavily on the sword's pommel.
One of the men stepped forward, drew his sword and uttered an angry sound of challenge. Though the word itself held no meaning, the voice and its aggression were too familiar to be mistaken.
Harry's hand slid over the pommel and wrapped his fingers firmly around the grip of the sword the earth had half-swallowed.
Another shout of anger, or perhaps a challenge. The man's companions remained silent, almost immobile as his unsheathed blade drew a broad, cruel arc in the air. And though the face was still shadowed, Harry could feel the man's eyes on him.
Carefully, threateningly, Harry readjusted his grip, opening his hand and slowly curling each finger in turn around the warm leather. He was aping one of Godric's agitations at the dawn of battle. With the Founder's enormous, scar-whitened hands and legendary sword, it was a promise of death, but Harry had neither and had not the Godric's mastery of the weapon to uphold his claim.
The man stepped closer; the measured step of a wary swordsmen. He spoke more unfamiliar words, his voice softer, more mocking, almost serpentine, but with equal anger.
This was a game Harry was familiar with; Voldemort liked to toy with his prey too.
The earth yielded easily the sword.
His skin tasted liquid light as the blade slid out. His magic, felinely lethargic before, now sang colours into his ears in a song of awakening and recognition. It meant nothing to Harry, but the knot power that wound itself around him like thread around a spool and tinged midnight the mist around him, he knew only too well.
The sneer on the man's face didn't even flicker. If he felt the sheer physical weight of the magic that the sword was drawing to itself or saw at all the splurge of firework and lightning that it called, he did not show it.
There was something familiar in the way the twist of his mouth, in anger of his eyes...
The man's sword came slicing towards him. Harry sidestepped. The blade's edge whistled past, worryingly close, ready to sink its iron teeth into his flesh. The cold wind that it breathed along his skin sent shivers down his spine as he remembered other blades that were just that little bit closer.
Nimbly, Harry ducked, turned and jumped in avoidance. Memory of his previous swordfight, resurrected by the sword in his hand, stilled his hand. But even those horrors were not enough to stop him from searching for that old rhythm inside himself - the rhythm of the sword.
Left sidestep. Jump. Sidestep. It came back, filling his mind with its cadent commands, with an blade whistling an accompaniment. Harry followed his mental instructions the voice dictated. It was the old way again, though it felt different. There was an eyeblink of hesitation. As he skirted beyond the man's sword, only he knew how it was striking closer, increasingly so.
The sword swung negligently in Harry's hand. He tried to keep it between the man in bloodstained armour and himself, but it wasn't important. It was never more than a prop for him in most fights - a glamorised wand. It was something to distract the enemy with, to fend him off with until he was ready to hurl a spell. Godric had despaired over such tactics, but even he had to admit they worked.
The light-haired man handled his blade with great fluidity; there was nothing angular about his strokes that melted into each other as he drew arcs after deadly arc in the air. He raised a mocking eyebrow at Harry's sword and spat a string of words through a sneer-distorted mouth.
Staring down a long, elevated platform and finding at the end of it, his sneering opponent standing on a waning moon, wand raised and ready.
The young man's movements quickened, sharpened. He shuffled forwards. With no corner to be forced into, Harry gave the space willingly.
In a stone vault, in the womb of the earth, stood alone a young man crumpled on the floor, his face downcast and all one could see was head of straw-silver hair. Words. Then he raised his head and sneering, he unsheathed his sword.
The young man was no longer aiming at Harry, but at the sword in his hands, as though he was trying to make Harry employ it. It was as though Harry's victory lay in his inaction. He voiced frustration in that unfamiliar tongue; the sneer remained only as a force of habit as he blade struck shadow after shadow.
Without a wand, the spell was much harder to weave. A little like trying to make fire out of sunlight without a hand glass. Magic there was in plenty with the strange sword he had pulled out of the ground singing away in sounds only skin can hear, but a spell unlike rampant outpourings of destructive power took a certain delicacy of touch and concentration.
Across the clutter of books, cauldrons and apparatus, a pallid face sneered him. The dim light of the room with its boarded windows made ghostly the features. A paper bird fluttered to him and mocked him with its animated scrawls.
The man paused, allowed Harry to step back. Though slightly breathless, the young man held still his shoulders and there was no waver in his blade, poised between them. The pause gave Harry the break he needed and a stunning spell quivered on Harry's lips.
The light-haired man sidestepped; the light finally fell fully on his face and for the first time Harry saw clearly the sneer that twisted his lips.
It was the sneer.
Harry swallowed the spell along with the gasp that gathered at his throat; he could not betray such a weakness. Another two steps backwards bought him time to recover. He understood now: this could only be resolved in one way. He crouched lower, tightened his grip on the sword and tried to mirror the sneer on his opponent's face.
When the blade whistled close again it was met with like.
Harry's arm shook with shock. His opponent's blade slid off the flat of his own. The metallic ring jarred against he ears, though he had heard it so many times before.
Harry had brought his sword into play. He remembered all too clearly the long ribbons of flesh, chalk-white bone splintered and leaking marrow, the endless smears of sticky blood and the dark cavities in the human soul, but that fear of his own capacity for bloodthirst fed too his craving for redemption. If he could face again that sneer and prove the more human of the two, perhaps...
The young man's sword flowed back with keener aim; Harry dodged and swept his blade in attack.
He understood now Godric's fondness of mundane weapons; the soaring magic was becoming a distraction. The bejewelled sword he had pulled out of the Sorting Hat was as magical as his toothbrush. Magic had its limitations. Until the metal bit flesh, the magic could but intimidate, as brilliant and as harmless as the northern lights that festoon the sky with shimmering colour.
The fair-haired man made a sound at the back of his throat and shouted at the onlookers. From the tone Harry knew the words were not seeking interference, so he spared not a glance to the other men - those silhouettes he has seen against the light.
His opponent's sword flew in reply, but this time Harry did not allow the old rhythm to settle. He interrupted it with attacks of his own, staccatos to the beat. He did not meet each blow with a parry, neither did he answer each attack with one of his own; a rhythm would be too comfortable. This was no tired drill nor practice. It was not supremacy of skill he sought, but resolution.
The fight became a messy percussion of failed attacks as the air around him seemed to bristle with metal, his opponent's blade weaving close. The young man circled Harry, danced in and out of his reach and drew what seemed like symbols in the air. His flourish seemed to belie his fluid efficiency; he fought as an art.
Suddenly, Harry pulled back. He tamed the surging magic in his veins and forced a grin.
It was a moment before the pain was felt, before the blood flowed, before the man realised and touched a hand to the cut. Blood trickled down the young man's arm from a long wound down his shoulder. Harry caught the first drop of it on his clean blade and with a theatrical slowness he showed it to each of the eleven spectators.
They murmured among themselves. Harry caught but two words: "Uthyr... Artorius..."
One of them bowed stiffly and gave him with equally exaggerated slowness a leather scabbard and belt.
The sword slid smoothly into the scabbard and rested comfortably at his hip. Its worn appearance spoke of long histories among heroes, but he didn't know the stories. Vaguely he knew there was someone of his acquaintance who would know, but that thought itself was fleeting, lost in deciphering the flood of magic that the sword and scabbard oozed. It was unmistakable. Yet whilst the magic of the sword was destructive, that of the scabbard was of growth and creation. He moved to touch it to the fair-haired man's wound, but the man stepped back firmly in stubborn refusal.
All eleven of the gathered men wore pointed leather caps and armour of some description. What he had first mistook for chainmail was leather with metal and horn disks sewn onto it, creating a suit of scales. The blood, however, he did not mistake.
"Artorius..." said one of the men. "It is as She had foretold..."
"And to think, brother, that we doubted her..." muttered another. His features mirroring his brother's.
Understanding flowed from the scabbard's magic.
"The stars... is he still among they who gather around the lyre-player?" asked one hesitantly.
"How could he? He is among us now. He stands as flesh..."
"We know not blood... he has shed only the Dragon's," said one, giving his companions a toothy, canine grin. He turned to Harry. "Artorius, be you flesh or flame, our pledge to follow remains as stone. You shall have always my sword at your side."
The young man who Harry had fought glared. "Sosruquo, would you betray my father-"
"Would you betray the heavens, the stars, the moon, the sun?" interrupted Sosruquo. "Come, Artorius. We shall seek she who had parted the mists for us and unveiled your coming. She is our Setenaya."
"And you too, Dragon," said a tall man, whose red hair peeked from beneath his cap. " Temper your mettle, lest a brittle blade you become."
They pressed the reins of a horse into his hands and feeling a curious gravity to his actions, Harry mounted the horse and he followed as the thirteenth horseman.
Author's Notes:
Many apologies about the delay...
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