**Domain Expansion: Cycle of Burning Rebirth.**
The world went out like a snuffed candle and for half a heartbeat there was nothing. No courtyard, no ground, no sky. Then all of a sudden fire came up out of the dark in a ring miles wide, and the dark became a plain of grey ash under a sky burning an endless orange.
Pyres stood at even intervals around the horizon, each one a tower of flame taller than Nurmengard's keep. Between them the ash drifted, but not down. It lifted off the ground and rose into the burning sky, where it caught, flared, and fell back as fresh ash to begin the climb again.
Neville didn't stop to admire any of it.
His arm was already moving already sweeping through the space where Lyra Black's throat should have been.
Yet the blade cut air. His left hand, the one that had been locked around her neck, closed on nothing. The skin of his palm was still warm from her, but his fingers met only ash.
"Shit."
He looked up and saw the ward stone still in the air, turning end over end in the gap between him and where Grindelwald had been standing. Neville's legs coiled and fired and the ash exploded behind him. He crossed thirty feet before the stone finished its turn, hand outstretched, fingers a foot from it, six inches, two.
Then it vanished.
His hand closed on nothing for the second time in as many seconds, and his momentum carried him another twenty yards before he dug his heels in and skidded to a halt in a spray of grey.
"Fuck!"
"You'll never be able to get it anyway."
Neville turned.
Grindelwald stood a hundred yards away at the exact centre of the ring of pyres, as though he had never moved. Lyra was at his shoulder, one hand pressed to her ribs, her eyes fixed on Neville. Blue fire crawled along her side where he'd broken her but as Neville watched, she straightened, and the pain went out of her face.
Behind them both, the ward stone hung above a pillar of white flame.
"What is this?" Neville said.
"This?" Grindelwald opened his free hand to the burning sky, the pyres, the rising ash. "This is my soul, laid out where you can see it. My domain. Everything in here burns, and everything that burns returns to where it began... creation and destruction."
Neville looked down at himself and wondered why he was still alive. He'd heard of domain expansions and knew that being caught in one was practically a death sentence, yet for some reason he was alive and well.
"You're wondering why you aren't dead yet," Grindelwald said. "Well you see a domain's sure-hit follows magic the way a hound follows blood and you have none. As far as my domain is concerned, you are a piece of furniture, no different than a chair." He tilted his head. "It really is remarkable. Arcturus always did always know how to find the most interesting people."
"So your fire can't touch me." Neville rolled his shoulders and brought the sword up. "Then I just need to kill you."
He ran forward and the ash burst under his boots. He was faster than he'd been in the forest, faster than he'd been in the corridors, faster than anything that had ever run on two legs, and Grindelwald stood at the centre of it all with his hands folded yet despite running he did not get any closer.
Ten seconds.
Fifteen.
The pyre on his left went past again and Neville looked down and saw his own footprints ahead of him in the ash.
He stopped dead, turned, and went again. Harder. He cut left, then right, then doubled back, zig-zagging, trying to find an angle he hadn't thought of. Each time he came out where he had started, with the ash settling around his knees and Grindelwald a hundred yards away.
"You can stop," Grindelwald said. "Or carry on, if it amuses you. It certainly amuses me."
Neville stopped running and glared at Grindelwald.
"This is my domain, and while a lesser wizard might have trouble with it, I completely control the space you are running through. Every inch of it. You are running around the rim of a circle, Mr Longbottom, and I am standing at its centre. You could run until your legs gave out and you would never be one step closer to me than you are now."
"You know my name."
"I know every pureblood name in Europe." Grindelwald took a slow step forward. "Augusta Longbottom's grandson. There were rumours the Longbottom heir had been born with nothing. A Squib, they said though I confess I pictured someone smaller."
"Hate to disappoint."
"Why are you here if I am ask?" Grindelwald spread his hands. "Why fight for Arcturus Black? For France? For a Ministry that would have forgotten you existed the moment you left hogwarts? I have seen the way they look at people like you, you owe these people nothing."
"They call you a Squib," Grindelwald said. "I would call you a warrior, a true representation of magic for only wizards can be born with a body like yours. You are not a lesser wizard, Neville and I would not treat you like one if you join my side."
Neville laughed bitterly.
"I don't have a side."
"Everyone has a—"
"No." Neville planted the point of the sword in the ash and leaned on the pommel. "My gran wanted a grandson who could do magic. Hogwarts wanted a student who could hold a wand. The old man out there wanted someone who could walk through your walls, so he's paying me to do it. None of them wanted me." He shrugged. "I've been on my own since I could walk, and I'll be on my own when I'm dead."
He lifted the sword out of the ash and drew the flat of it slowly along the sleeve of his coat. Under the cover of his sleeve, his thumb pushed the ward-breaker into the gap where the crossguard met the blade. It slid into the notch and seated there with a faint click.
While Grindelwald could control space in here, he was using magic to do it. His sword was capable of undoing magic so it shouldn't be affected by the folding in space if he lets go of it.
*Get it against the stone*
*It does the rest*
"A man with no side," Grindelwald said, "is simply a man who has not yet been offered enough."
Lyra's eyes went wide. Her hand came up. "My lord, he's going to—"
Grindelwald lifted two fingers without looking at her. "Not now, Lyra.".
"Arcturus pays you in gold, I imagine," Grindelwald went on. "I can pay you in something rarer. A world where nobody ever again looks at you the way your grandmother—"
Neville threw his sword. His back foot drove down and the ash beneath it cratered to bare black rock. His hips turned, then his shoulders, then his arm came over like a catapult arm, and every ounce of strength his body had been hoarding went into the hilt as it left his hand.
The sword flew point-first, straight as a ruler, at the pillar of white flame.
Grindelwald tried to fold space around the sword yet the moment he tried he felt his magic pouring off the blade like rain and not affecting it. His head then snapped round and the Elder wand came up in his hand. A Shield Charm bloomed in front of the pillar, layers three deep. Yet the sword went through all three like they were barely there to begin with. Grindelwald twisted his wand and the space around the pillar folded in on itself. Grindelwald then tried to move the ward stone instead, but it was too late and the point took the ward stone dead centre.
For a moment there was no sound at all.
Then the device in the crossguard flared gold, and the runes carved into the stone flared with it, every one of them, blazing up white as if the stone was screaming. Then the stone split along the line of the blade and both halves dropped into the white flame and went dark.
Somewhere beyond the domain, there was a boom that shook the ash off the ground.
Neville straightened up and dusted his palms together.
"Your space moves me," he said. "But it's still magic so my sword was essentially immune—"
Neville stopped talking as he felt a shift in the domain, the ash that has been floating up the entire time stopped and hung in the air, and the fires that had dotted the environment had all froze. At the centre of it stood Grindelwald. He didnt look angry. There was no snarl, no shout. But his eyes had gone cold and even Neville could tell there was a rage building inside him.
The world lurched and suddenly Neville was standing close enough to Grindelwald to smell the smoke on his robes. The tip of the Elder Wand pressed into the soft skin under his jaw.
"You have cost me more with one throw," Grindelwald said, "than the entire French Ministry has managed in a year."
Neville swung.
He put everything into it, the same everything he'd put into the sword, his fist driving at the centre of Grindelwald's face from less than two feet away. He hit Grindelwald and watched as his face exploded into dozens of meaty chunks yet a second later they rearranged themselves back and his head healed. "Like I said before, Mr. Longbottom this is my domain and in it I am an immortal, even if you were to use that sword of yours I'd rise from the ashes."
"Thats impossible..." Neville muttered.
"The fire might not be able to find you," Grindelwald said. "But I can. Goodbye, Mr Longbottom."
Red light began to gather at the tip of the wand.
CRACK
Above them, the sky cracked.
It started as a single point then the pucker deepened into a dimple. The dimple turned blue and then it caved in on itself with a crunch that went through Neville's teeth. Cracks raced out from the hole in every direction, bright white lines splitting the sky like ice on a pond.
Someone dropped through the hole.
White hair.
Black combat robes.
Eyes the colour of a winter sky.
His lips were moving as he fell
"Storm that sleeps above the peaks,
open your eyes.
Every cloud a quiver,
every bolt a spear.
Fall upon my enemy,
and leave nothing standing.
Fulgur Mille Lanceae!"
The domain shattered as lightning came down like rain. Hundreds of bolts, a thousand, each one a spear of white fire driving straight down at the patch of stones around Grindelwald. The first ones hit and the stones burst. The ones after them hit the craters the first ones had made.
Grindelwald had to look up. He had no choice.
The instant the Elder Wand left Neville's throat, Neville dropped and hit the stones, rolled under a lance of lightning that scorched the hair off the back of his neck, and came up beside the white pillar that was already crumbling to embers. The sword lay across the split halves of the ward stone. He snatched it up without breaking stride and blitzed outside the shattered domain.
"Not my fight," Neville muttered, and dropped over the other side.
In the courtyard, Grindelwald raised the Elder Wand to the sky and the lightning started to bend. It happened bolt by bolt, then all at once. Every spear still in the air curved away from its path and swung toward the tip of the wand. The bolts poured into a single point above Grindelwald's head. They piled on top of one another, a ball of white light the size of a man, then the size of a Quaffle, then a fist. Grindelwald turned his wrist slowly and the ball kept shrinking, crushed smaller and smaller until it was a spinning marble of light so bright it cast black shadows at noon.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then blue fire closed around it, and it was gone.
The storm clouds overhead thinned to nothing. The last rolls of thunder chased each other off across the mountains.
Grindelwald lowered his wand and looked across the ruined courtyard.
"Harry Potter."
For once in his life, he looked genuinely surprised.
"I buried you if I'm not mistaken," he said as he studied Harry with open curiosity. "It seems your reputation for surviving the Killing Curse is not unwarranted."
Harry flexed his fingers. "I always do manage to get Exceed Expectations what can I say," he said with a shrug.
Somewhere behind the keep, something exploded. The boom came from beyond the outer wall, and after it came another, and another, and then the whole castle began to ring like a struck bell. With the ward stone destroyed, the shield was gone, and everything the French and British had been pouring into it for the last half hour was now pouring into Nurmengard itself. A tower on the northern wall lost its top in a shower of stone. Spellfire streaked over the battlements in red and gold and green.
Then came the cracks.
Dozens of them, then hundreds, up and down the length of the castle. Apparition, loud as gunfire now that nothing was stopping it. Over the far wall Harry could see figures flickering onto the battlements, wands already lighting up, and Grindelwald's men scrambling to meet them.
Grindelwald listened to it all without looking round. His hand tightened on the Elder Wand. "I would love to stay and play, Harry," he said. "Truly. I have questions I would very much like answered. But there are nuisances at my door, and it would be rude of me not to answer." Blue fire began to curl up around his ankles as he got ready to flame away.
Harry fired before it reached his knees. A severing curse at the legs. A bone-breaker at the wand hand. A bolt of lightning at the chest, and a Reducto behind it with a blasting curse to cover the lot. Five spells in under a second, every one of them on a line Harry's eyes had calculated to the inch.
Grindelwald didn't even turn his head he flicked his wand and dismantled the five's spells as easily as if they were snow.
"No," Harry said. "You're not going anywhere."
He reached into his robes and brought out a small object that clinked in his palm. Two rings of dark iron, each a little bigger than a Galleon, interlinked like the links of a chain, and around them were runes etched into them.
The blue flames stopped climbing and Grindelwald found himself unable to flame. Grindelwald stared at the rings. The colour went out of his face in a way that had nothing to do with the anger he felt.
"Where did you get that?"
"Where do you think?"
"We made that in Godric's Hollow," Grindelwald said. "The summer we met in eighteen ninety-nine... he said he'd thrown it into the sea." His eyes lifted to Harry's. "He kept it. All this time, he kept it."
"Like I said you're not going anywhere," Harry said again.
He twisted the two rings against each other. The runes lit up, one after another, running round both circles like a spark along a fuse. A pulse went out from his hand and a sphere of dense grey magic spread out through the courtyard, through the walls, through the keep and the towers beyond.
Harry slipped the rings back into his robes, patted the pocket, and winked.
Grindelwald's wand came up so fast Harry's eyes barely tracked it.
"Flames of Rebirth Reversal: Hellfire!"
A lance of dark red fire no thicker than a man's arm shot out of the Elder Wand and crossed the courtyard faster than the lightning had fallen, vaporising the stones in its path and leaving a groove of molten glass behind it, but it stopped dead six inches from Harry's face, the flames spreading sideways across the empty air in front of him and piling up until the stones on either side of his boots glowed red, while Harry stood inside it without a single hair on his head so much as stirring. The lance burned itself out and the last of the fire died a few inches from the tip of his nose.
Harry glanced down at himself and then back up. "Was that it? I didn't feel a thing."
Grindelwald stared at the empty air between them for a long moment before he spoke. "Infinity. I see now... the Killing Curse never touched you, because it couldn't reach you, it seems you've unlocked the Potter technique." He almost laughed. "Albus, you old fox."
"Took me a while to get there," Harry said.
"It doesn't matter." Grindelwald raised the Elder Wand. "Infinity is only a wall, Harry, and I've burned through every wall I've ever encountered."
The stones under Harry's feet started to heat up, and his eyes picked out threads of gold and white magic being drawn up out of the stones and the walls and the foundations of the castle, pouring into the tip of Grindelwald's wand.
"Ash to ember.
Ember to flame.
Flame to the first fire,
the fire before names,
the fire that lit the—"
A torrent of black magic came roaring out of the smoke at the far end of the courtyard and smashed into the gathering threads, tearing them apart before the chant could finish, and Grindelwald staggered one step before twisting his wand and splitting the torrent down the middle so that it burned two trenches through the courtyard walls on either side of him.
Arcturus Black walked out of the smoke with his wand in one hand and his cane in the other.
"Gellert."
"Arcturus," Grindelwald said, lowering the Elder Wand slightly. "I wondered whether you'd come yourself or keep sending children."
"I wouldn't have missed this." Arcturus didn't take his eyes off Grindelwald. "Harry."
Blood was running from both of Harry's nostrils now and a pounding headache was building behind his eyes, which meant he had four minutes left at best, maybe less, but the Six Eyes were still taking in the whole castle at once, every spell and heartbeat and ward, and deep beneath the eastern wing through yards of solid stone he could see Fleur's silver magic with Yennefer's beside it.
"Leave him to me," Arcturus said. "Go and free your friends."
Harry looked at Grindelwald and then at the old man with his cane, and for a second he thought about arguing, but he nodded instead, flooded his legs with magic and shot across the courtyard so fast the stones cracked under his feet, disappearing through an archway and down toward the dungeons.
Grindelwald watched the archway Harry had disappeared through for a moment longer, then turned back to the old man standing among the smoking craters of the courtyard.
(AN: Decided to at least finish this arc before I decide if I wanna rewrite it. Anyway hope you enjoy.)
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