The Dragon's Roar
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Chap. 15: The Dragon's Roar
Before Ron knew what was happening, his old Defense Professor's wand was blurring even faster than it had been before. A half-dozen spells were launched toward the manor house in the time it took him to incant one or two, almost all of them flying unerringly toward the great greasy git himself. "Get Hermione out of here," Remus shouted, "I'll hold him off, but she's got to maintain the spell, or we all die with the Death Eaters!"
"Got it," Ron answered, a Protego shield appearing not just in front of him, but Hermione too as he fought to deflect as much incoming fire as he could. Only, the one he'd cast by her flickered, and vanished, pulled into the stream of flames connecting his best friend's wand with the raging inferno that was consuming this side of the manor house.
"Shite," he swore, ducking on instinct as his own magical barrier fractured and split into splinters of sparkling blue-white light under a barrage of magic that had come from the side. He returned fire, Stunners, Cutting Hexes, and even a few darker ones he'd learned from Harry in the D.A. Somehow, one of them must have connected with the Death Eater hiding in the dried, thinned-out hedge maze, because the attacks stopped coming.
Ron couldn't tell if he wanted it to be a Stunning Spell, or something more harmful, potentially lethal, that hit the enemy.
He didn't want to be a killer, but... in this circumstance...
"I can't hold it much longer, Ron," Hermione groaned, and he looked over to see her brow furrowed in concentration, sweat beading there far beyond what the furious heat was creating on his own. "It's... too strong! I can't focus any harder! How- how do I stop it?"
"You can't!" he called out to her, "You have to stop feeding it magic, but if you let go it'll eat the whole house, and us, too! That's why it's forbidden, Hermione!"
Remus, ahead of them now, hadn't stopped his assault on Snape through the broken windows and burning walls. Their former Potions Professor seemed unperturbed, somehow, trading spell-fire with almost casual disinterest, wand held in a new, silvery hand, while the other held some sort of rune-inscribed chain as he whispered words not in their direction, but up at the head of the dragon that towered over him, as it pulled itself free from the confined space it had been in before.
"How did they even get that thing down there?" Ron half-shrieked to no one in particular, casting the Shield Charm twice more again. The one on Hermione had no more effect than the first, whisked away after just an instant. His, thankfully, lasted a few seconds longer.
"I don't care!" Hermione growled, "Ron, stop the magic! Stop them from casting at me! It's- that's what's too much! It's absorbing their spells, and I can't- I can't hold much longer! They have to stop!"
"But I have to protect you!"
"I can protect my bloody self, Ronald Weasley! Stop the Death Eaters, before we all die because of my stupid mistake!"
Ron swallowed.
She was right. She always was, mistake or not.
Fiendfyre fed on magic, and it was eating the magic coming her way. Most of it, anyway.
She...
Hermione was brilliant, he had to trust her to hold out, for now.
So, against all instinct, all sense of self-preservation, Ron nodded. "Alright. I'm going in, dragon or not. Be safe, Hermione. Love you."
"Love you too, idiot," she snarled, "Now get in there! Remus! Help Ron! Forget Snape! Focus on the Death Eaters around him for now!"
If the werewolf heard her, he didn't show any sign, nor did the spells he was casting toward Snape slow in the slightest as he continued to run across the desiccated lawn, past the line of burning grass and into the black ash caused by the heat of the inferno that was far too close to any of them. Ron cursed again, and broke into a run himself.
He couldn't stop to think, to consider, to plan. There were too many streaks of light coming toward him, like a muggle kaleidoscope, an entire rainbow that seemed to spring up constantly from the manor, spreading out around him, toward him, in all directions. Between he and the building, Hermione's cursed fire raged, Remus seemingly intent on diving straight through it to get to the barely-visible foe who had taunted, and been taunted by, his best friends for years.
Did he even see the dragon?
Ron's shield charm shattered again, and he felt an impact to his left leg that made it seize and lock. He tumbled to the ground, writhing in agony. No... not just agony. Acid on his nerves, electricity in his veins, fire and cold and void-hell-darkness ravaging every muscle.
Cruciatus.
Someone had tagged him with an Unforgivable.
Somehow, despite the pain, worse than any he had ever felt a thousand, a hundred-thousand times over, Ron knew what it was. Knew that the person casting it would not care, could not care, that using such a curse would cause them to spend the rest of their life in Azkaban.
Another flash of silver. A hand, this time, not an arm. Pettigrew.
The pain faded, as Peter Pettigrew, the man he had once called Scabbers, his beloved (and less-beloved) pet rat, pulled his wand up, panting.
You have to mean it, the fake Moody had said.
If that pain told Ron anything, as he fought his way to his feet somehow, his whole body rebelling against him, it was that Peter Pettigrew held no love for Ron, despite his continued existence being, in part, to Ron helping convince Harry and Sirius both to spare his life.
"Good," he growled, his voice deeper, raspier, than it should have been. Blood flecked out onto his arm as he coughed. Something inside him had torn from screaming. His throat, maybe. Hopefully. "I hope he regrets serving Voldemort, and knows he'd have been better off with the Dementors."
Then he was up and staggering, stumbling, trying to run forward once more.
He didn't realize that out of his pores oozed not blood, not sweat, but a strange, keratin-like shell composed mostly of tightly-bonded carbon molecules. Didn't realize that his armor had manifested almost entirely until another brilliant crimson- and blue-glowing swirl of magic splashed against his torso, just below his sternum. He staggered back from the force of it, off-balance for a moment, then ran on.
More magic hit him, and most simply bounced away. Direct hits were absorbed, sometimes slowing him, sometimes hurting, but most did not.
He didn't dive into the raging flames. Ron was not stupid. Remus had finally seen some sense and gone around to the far corner of the manor to get inside. Ron did the same, with a last glance at Hermione.
She was still radiant, glowing white-orange, hovering in the air, her bushy, glorious hair smoking at the tips with lightning still playing around it, but she'd also somehow fallen to a knee as if she were on the ground. Her wand was still steady, but he could see her lovely chest heaving with effort.
More magic than before was zooming toward her, before being whisked away or into the fire.
Ron swallowed, turned toward the cracked, smoking house at the edge of the Fiendfyre, and touched the wall of the Malfoy home with the tip of his wand. "Confringo!"
Stone, plaster, and wood blasted away and out from him. On the other side of the wall, a woman screamed.
Then he was through the gap with dust and debris still falling all around him. A simple spell, and he'd done that much damage? The protections on the house, on every wizarding home, were basically gone, then. Probably eaten by Dumbledore's clever use of Portkeys, and then Hermione's flames.
Ron spared that barely a thought, however. There were three Death Eaters in the room. Two on the ground: a woman, who had a splintered chair half-embedded in her leg, and a man, who seemed to have been knocked over the head with a vase that was now broken around him, but largely unhurt. Dazed, at worst. The third was another woman, one he recognized from recent reports in the Daily Prophet as Calissa Brahms, a recently-joined Death Eater who had come from Austria to join 'the cause'.
She snarled, and the wand she'd held against the open window to try and kill Hermione switched to him. Ron didn't hesitate. He sent two Stunners and a Disarming Jinx toward her, but all three were deflected with growling and flicks of her wand, barely-formed sounds the only incantation she needed, if they were that at all. He didn't speak Austrian. German? Eh, it didn't matter. He was just distracting her, though.
Ron was tall to begin with. Now, covered in his armor, he stood as tall as Lilith herself in her true form, or maybe even higher. He would have to duck under the tall door-frames anyway, thanks to the antlers, but he still towered over the woman as he hurried in her direction.
The man was on his feet first, snarling and growling in what was definitely a Germanic language, as he simultaneously sent a violently-blue curse in his direction, and swung a haymaker with the other arm. Ron thought he should have, would have, been knocked to his back from the punch, clumsy as it had been, for the man was huge and his movements fast.
The fist actually caught him first, and cracked against his jaw. Something snapped, along with Ron's head moving to the side a couple of inches. The spell hit a moment later, and searing, burning pain enveloped his lower left body... but nothing compared to the Cruciatus Curse.
Ron's left forearm smashed into the man's neck a moment later as he kept running, in and down, and the man was on his back a moment later, shouting himself, his shattered hand clutched desperately in the other, his wand on the ground. Glass jaw, huh?
Ron smirked at his own joke as he reached the woman, who was now looking at him in terror as she saw how quickly he'd dealt with the other man. "Scheiße! Das ist ja ein Dämon! Die haben einen Dämon hervorgerufen!"
"I'm no demon," he snorted as he raised a clawed hand, intent on ending her as quickly as he could, "And welcome to jolly old England."
Then the hand came down, and her screaming cut off in a gurgle of red and four long lines that appeared across her cheek, jaw, and neck.
He swallowed. He hadn't just killed someone with a spell.
That had been his own hand. As up-close and personal as one could get. He had just ripped out her throat.
Ron scowled down at the terrified woman, who still tried to scream, to cry out. He watched, transfixed, his clawed, bloody hand clenching and relaxing as it dripped a little. Bubbles of red, deep and crimson ran from her mouth, nostrils, and the deep gashes in Brahm's throat, pooling and running all over the floor, and his ripped, torn shoes. When had he grown taloned feet? He hadn't had to replace his shoes when he had transformed at Hogwarts... his mother was going to kill him.
A spell, a Bludgeoning Hex just like he'd used to open the wall, caught Ron's left temple, just below where his antlers mounted. He rocked to the side, and slowly looked in that direction. The woman with the chair in her had somehow gotten a spell off, and the man was struggling to his feet, the bloody mess of one hand dangling at his side, swelling, purple already. His other held his wand tightly in a white-knuckled grip.
Ron's wand came up too. His Hellhide was great at absorbing spell energy, as far as he could tell, as well as physical impacts. How good, he wasn't sure he wanted to test. But he would have to trust it a little more, at least. If the monster Nott had broken his chest-plate enough it had taken some real effort to heal, then most wizards were simply not capable of really hurting him that way. At all. The dragon, though, was another story, he remembered, as the gas lighting fell from the ceiling between he and the Death Eaters, accompanied by another roar of fury from the beast.
He was over it as quickly as he could, hurling himself with strength he should not have possessed over the fixture in a single bound, bloody claw outstretched, and another bludgeoning hex on his lips.
Harry winced as the dragon's left foreclaw raked through the crumbling, burning wall of Malfoy Manor, sending a spray of rubble and cinders toward Emmeline Vance and Filius Flitwick, who threw up a nonverbal shield charm of such power that it formed a shimmering white-and-gold dome over their two-person fire team that sent half a ton of burning, former house scattering around them in a semicircle, and even made the dragon's claw itself rebound.
It roared again, the massive, green-scaled head angling down to exhale a gout of white-hot fury that only added to the damage the house, and both sides, were sustaining. There was a sound like a fairy's bell, only a thousand times louder, as the fire struck the dome. Then it bounced off, too, straight up into the sky for hundreds and hundreds of feet.
Dark storm-clouds, already gathering because of the huge amounts of magical energy tossed about, not least Hermione, who still glowed like a beacon off to Harry's left, suddenly broke into a peal of thunder as the dragon-fire first made them glow brilliant orange, then blasted through the vapor like a cannon against paper.
As the dragon's breath tapered away, the shield fell, and Flitwick snarled, "You'll have to do better than that, Scalekin, to bring down a Magus of my power! Have at you!"
Were Harry not already someone who held Flitwick's dueling record, his kindness, and his determination (not to mention a rather staggering intellect) in the greatest of respect, he might have thought the high, squeaking voice issuing such a formal challenge to a dragon, of all things, was comical.
But Harry did, in fact, respect Flitwick a great deal, and knew exactly what kind of wizard he was. The dragon, apparently, did not, for it snorted in some facsimile of wry amusement, before the long neck snaked down and attempted to snatch the part-Goblin up in its jaws.
Flitwick only grinned, almost cruelly, as he vanished between the jaws.
Harry gasped.
If Emmaline Vance, the gray-haired witch he mostly knew from one Order meeting he'd attended a few days ago and an old photograph when she was younger and a fair bit prettier, was worried, she didn't show it. Instead, she kept her focus on at least two other Death Eaters inside the manor on the opposite side from the dragon, doing her best to protect herself from both of them while avoiding the dragon's idle, stomping claw.
Then she threw herself away from another, more deliberate, tail-swipe that sent a red-shelled Ron flying out of the building to roll against the scorched grass a hundred feet from the house, accompanied by a fine mist of several Death Eaters and their robes. The spiked tail, just three unlike the Norwegian Ridgeback he'd had to face two and a half years earlier, missed Vance by less than a foot.
Some kind of lurid brown spell cut into Harry's right shoulder, reminding him he was under fire, too, and he turned his attention away. Vance was alright. Ron... Ron would be alright. He was strong, in that armor. He could surely take a dragon's tail-swipe... right?
He saw Remus grappling with the long, dark-haired Severus Snape, attempting to bodily haul him out of one of the burning windows, both men punching each other, wands forgotten, with the other hand.
Unfortunately, Sirius saw him, too. "Snivellus! I'm coming for you, you fucking bastard! Time to pay for selling out James, Harry, and Lily, you prick!"
Harry found himself groaning, ignoring the bleeding hole in his shoulder, as he deflected six spells intended for his godfather, who was suddenly too distracted to even protect himself.
"Go after him, Harry! I need your help, both of you, before I hit that door," Kinglsey called, "He can't get distracted, but I doubt he'll listen to me!"
Harry nodded, "On it," and tore after his godfather, leaving the large, dark-skinned Senior Auror to hold his own, at least for a few seconds, against three Death Eaters or more, under cover of a sturdy, spell-reinforced doorway.
Severus Snape was in trouble. He didn't want to be. He had been left with twenty-two Death Eaters, and a dragon, to hold as long as he could. The objective had never been to keep the manor against all comers, of course.
They could stand to lose a dozen or two 'reward girls'. In the grand scheme of things, that was just a drop in the bucket of his hated master's plans, and Snape never really cared for such things anyway, aside from the one person he'd ever truly loved.
Like many, he had enjoyed them from time to time of late, simply as a form of stress relief. Besides, when someone such as the Dark Lord ordered you to go have fun with them... it was kind of expected.
He was only supposed to slow down the assault, to give a few more minutes to those evacuating the important things: Voldemort's personal effects, his spell research library, and the fuck-meat his master actually valued somewhat. It was too bad Narcissa was no longer among that group, but she was already dead, and he wouldn't be able to save his old friend. She, at least, had been tolerable company, nearly his intellectual equal before the Dark Lord had rendered her all-but a vegetable through Imperius conditioning, good only for sex.
Lucious... well, he had only ever been a useful contact and tool, as far as Snape was concerned. The conniving, back-stabbing 'first Death Eater' had lost his position of power a long time ago, no matter what the Dark Lord had told him. That he had been reduced to a piece of meat himself, though his mind was left more or less intact due to a strange compliance with the Dark Lord's Imperius that even Narcsissa hadn't possessed at first, was simply proof of that as far as Snape was concerned. Thus, his usefulness was at an end.
The house? Eh. It was nice enough, but no great loss. There were others. The Yaxley home, for example, was already warded. Snape would appreciate it.. if he escaped. It was almost time. They had put up almost a convincing-enough defense.
But he had not expected Remus Lupin's speed at spell-work. Severus Snape was not so foolish as to believe Lupin was incompetent, no. Even Black and Potter were reasonably skilled with a wand, if they lacked certain subtleties that made him a superior duelist. He had not been prepared for the ferocity the werewolf had unleashed, however, and the chain that had held the dragon had momentarily slipped from his fingers.
It was rampaging against its long captivity now, and the death of its mate six months earlier. He had to watch out for that, and Lupin.
Then he heard that name, that hated name, come out of Black's mouth again. He was no sniveling coward! He was braver than any Gryffindor, proven again and again by what he had sacrificed, over and over again, to keep Potter's spawn alive. To keep them all alive, Black included.
Well, no longer. He was done being Dumbledore's plaything. The old man was dead anyway. He was done being anyone's plaything. He'd had enough on the night he lost his arm, now weeks ago. Yes, the Dark Lord had replaced it with some sort of quicksilver, enchanted thing that served somehow even better... but it lacked feeling, and he knew it was twisting him, somehow, making him more loyal. At least, it had been, until the love potion he'd brewed for himself, slightly modified, had replaced it.
Now he was loyal only to himself, at least until he could fashion such an arm for himself. It may take some time, but he could live with that.
As long as he survived, of course.
The tail-slash had caught him off-guard, nearly sending him sprawling. Lupin seized that moment to yank at his robes, pulling him half out of the window. A fist crashed into his face- how crude!
He punched back, unable to reach his wand, and then unable to bring it to aim at Lupin amid the repeated blows. Like a muggle. How low... like his father had done to his mother, to him. Both of them were so weak...
He was not.
Snape twisted in the air, and for a moment, knew they had lost him. He had not disapparated, or used a Portkey.
He was simply above them, hiding in the smoke. A tiny, six-inch-wingspan bat. Specifically, an African Fruit Bat. Harmless enough, if you weren't such a fruit... and black of wing, black of fur, able to easily mingle with the rising smoke, riding the updraft higher and higher...
Freedom.
For now, at least. He would still have to kowtow to the Dark Lord. For now. Until he learned the secrets of the arm he needed under his full control. Until Potter somehow brought Voldemort low, and then was finished off by he, Severus Snape. Or until Voldemort brought Potter down, and was vulnerable.
That prophecy was rubbish, anyway. It said 'neither can live while the other survives,' not, 'they are immortal until one of them kills the other'. Dumbledore and Voldemort were both too optimistic. Fools.
He was not. The prophecy said both could die. It would be one of them dying that allowed the other to become immortal, it would not seal that fate immediately. Besides, 'at the hands of the other' was such a... loose term. He would have time, Snape new, to work out a plan. Perhaps a plan to feed to Potter. Or a plan to feed to Voldemort. Either way...
It would be at his hand. And both would die. He knew it. The battle continuing to unfold below him was alright. Just fine. He could capture Granger for his personal use later. She would be a fine enough vessel for any progeny, should he choose to have them. For now, let her revel in the power granted by the dark magics she had unleashed. Let her get a taste of what he would offer later.
And maybe, if he was lucky, Weasley, Potter, Black, and Lupin would all get themselves foolishly killed by the rear guard. He could only hope. Even one of them would be nice.