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This is the last chapter of this first arc, Easy as Falling. There will be a sequel, to begin posting in a few days. However, I am putting the name of the sequel at the end of this chapter, as it otherwise constitutes a spoiler for this chapter.

Chapter Thirty-Nine—Feathers on the Wind

Harry was drowning in fire, dying in fire.

It kept happening, no matter how many times he forced the pain aside and tried to take control of his magic. It ate him. The black spears were through his kneecaps, and he could feel all the old scars flaring to life: the burning of the locket on his chest, the words on the back of his right hand shrieking in his mind.

The half-thrilling headache of the scar on his forehead piercing his mind, and his head, while he still had one.

The magic was all around, and now Harry knew what it had been like for Yaxley when he was dying, for Fifernum when she was punished, for Rosier when Harry had compelled him to perform. This was more power than any one human being should possess. This was more than he had known he contained, even with the storm of flame around him and the way he bore down on Yaxley.

And he could still think, but that was one small island of coolness and sanity in the middle of pain. He knew he was dying. He couldn't not be. He had only survived this long, past the initial instant of agony, because some of his magic was trying to fight for him. But it was only as strong as the power fighting against him, and the spell that must have been on Yaxley continually drained it into that power's own cycle, pouring down on him the barriers that he had a moment ago been using to try and shield himself.

He was dying. There was no way that he could stay alive.

Except he had come this far, held it off for this long, and Harry knew that should not have happened, either. He should have been consumed in an instant, as Yaxley had been in the moments before the spell was triggered.

Which meant there must still be something he could do.

Harry gasped and reached out, feeling, flailing, grasping. There was that cycle still going on, the magic falling on him, being raised up by his core, being drawn into the attack. And the attack would not cease until he had been destroyed, Harry supposed. It was his sheer power making his body so resistant to the flames, preserving his mind.

A cycle. A cycle of death that was fed by the very force that made Harry try to live, that tried to keep him alive.

There was something there. Harry clung to it, and used the thoughts that had so far been solely thinking about his situation to remember it, to meditate on it, and to call it up as a possible solution.

And there it was. The measure, the moment when he had seen the cycle begin, the fire taking and consuming, and then falling into ashes, while life rose up from it.

He knew what he had to do. And he waved his hand, and bade his magic do that instead of protecting him.

The magic wavered around him, as hesitant as the serpent he had conjured to abandon him. But Harry insisted, and the magic hissed and slid away, wrapping around him, channeling the pain and grasping the power, creating instead of resisting destruction.

The fire billowed around him. Harry could feel himself sliding away. He knew what he had done, but he found it hard to remember why he had done it. He closed his eyes, or at least slipped some of his attention back, and felt the flames pressing closer and closer. He knew they were roasting bones, cooking his organs, curling inwards and reaching for his heart. Now that it had him, his magic was going to enjoy this, slow and cruel.

Harry had never thought he was sadistic. Then again, the magic on Yaxley that punished anyone trying to kill him had joined with his own power. Perhaps that was what made it so.

He was going. He was fading. It was hard to think, to reach out in his thoughts towards Draco and Ron and Hermione and the others and apologize to them. If this didn't work, then he would die. He would leave them without protection.

I'm sorry.

And then the magic seized the cycle that was turning his magical core into his own worst enemy.

Harry felt the moment that the power pulsed and changed. It was still a cycle, but now it didn't have a destined end, which was consuming him. The core pulled, and the magic throbbed back and forth between Harry and the spell Yaxley had used, and now it was flowing in continuous energy—destruction and the ending of destruction, Harry as one pole of the cycle and the spell as the other.

The spell lashed in response, but it wasn't attached to a body anymore. Yaxley was dead. Harry had survived his death by much longer than the Ministry ever could have expected him to.

The spell wavered. Harry reached out to it, now that he could, now that the cycle was giving him breathing space, as the power poured through him without wishing to destroy him. He expanded his magical core until it felt like he was trying to breathe with three sets of lungs.

He welcomed the power inside him.

The curse hissed and coiled close, and melded with him. Harry cradled it the way he would have cradled a poisonous serpent. It could bite him, and it would, but he had the chance to survive the bite because he could speak to the snake and ask it how to get better. And it would bite him again and again, and he would heal, and then he would command it, and then it would bite him again.

The cycle, sustained and flowing between them, turned towards the high point. Harry could feel himself healing, skin crawling back over bones, burns reversing themselves as the magic that had caused them withdrew.

But the withdrawing magic had to go somewhere. Harry tried to absorb it back into his core, and found that he could not. After a moment, he understood why. He had the curse there now. It took up some of the room in his core that his own magic had once occupied. And he couldn't let it go, or it would resume its mission to destroy him.

He had to do something. He could feel the cycle beginning to tip again, ready to turn into a straight line and burn him once more.

I know what to do.

And he did. The idea of the cycle had sparked it in the first place, and the idea of the flames was ended now. It had been a metaphor, a memory, but it would have to be real. Harry spread his hands and fanned his fingers out, and breathed between them, dreaming of flame.

It blasted outwards, riding his breath. It circled back to him, and took flame from his power. It reached down to the earth, and sucked greedily at the dirt that had almost been the scene of Harry's grave. Harry would have given it water from his tears, but they had been burned dry. With a huge effort, he opened his mouth and spat out a little saliva.

The water hit the creature, and it rose.

Harry opened his physical eyes, shaking. He didn't know how long he had been still, imprisoned in magic, or behind walls of flame. He didn't know whether he might have hurt some of the spectators to the duel; he thought that the ring of magic created by the Baron's Blood rules would probably fade once Yaxley was dead.

But when he turned his head, he realized that he stood alone on a trampled space of ground, and a burned space of ground, and the rest of the crowd was staring at him from a long distance away. Harry smiled grimly. He wouldn't want to be next to him, either, if he was one of those people without his power.

In the meantime…

He tilted his head back and spread his hands towards the sky where the pillar of black flame was still glowing. He thought he knew what form the creature, this externalized being of malevolent magic, would take, but he didn't know for sure. Nothing else about this encounter had gone the way he suspected.

But this one did. The flames drew in close towards the center. The head grew on a long, slender neck and swept out into a thin, narrow muzzle, then a nose, then a beak. The feet were made of brilliant red flame, solidified and trapped and glowing like the flame he had wrapped into crowns for Draco's parents.

The wings were glorious, shifting, dark things, the shadows flickering with light, the opposite of the shadows cast from a normal fire.

A black phoenix hung in the air, and looked consideringly down at Harry.

Harry held his hands up towards it, and, because he couldn't do anything else, laughed. In joy. In welcome. Not in fear. This was the absurdity of the situation, that the Ministry had tried to kill him, and Yaxley had probably agreed because he wanted revenge on Harry for the fall of his Lord, and in the return, they had enabled something newer and Darker than they had ever intended to exist in the open air.

The phoenix continued to watch him. And then the long, thin black beak flicked once, and it flew down and alighted on Harry's shoulder, as if he had passed some test. The span of its still-spread wings was enough to encompass both shoulders at once.

Harry turned his head into the night-pulsing feathers, feeling the shadows that still trailed from and accompanied it, and understood. He had passed the test of accepting and not rejecting the phoenix. Had he done that, it probably would have flown away and wreaked destruction on the people around him.

The phoenix's feet flexed, digging into his shoulders, and Harry flinched. Yes, make that definitely wreaking destruction.

Finally, the murmurs of the people watching him made him stand, and turn his head.

They were watching him, gaping, with such horrified looks on their faces that Harry wondered why they hadn't run away. Then he wanted to laugh again, this time at his own naiveté. These were the same people who read the Daily Prophet every day despite knowing that it was full of lies, and trusted in the Ministry despite seeing how it turned on its people and abandoned them at any whim. What had he expected?

"What is that thing?" someone called, either bolder than the rest, or with curiosity stronger than a lot of sins.

Harry carefully shifted his balance under the bird, which clacked its beak at him again. It could tear him apart, Harry knew. It wouldn't, but it could. And it might. This was the dangerous and unpredictable side of both his own magic and the spell that Yaxley had tried to use to consume him, and now it was externalized. His control over it was by no means perfect.

But it was kin to him. Family, in a weird way. Harry knew that it would prefer to get along with him and not harm him.

"A black phoenix," he answered the asker, turning and showing his teeth in a smile that they were welcome to mistake for happy and bright if they wanted. "Don't you see the resemblances?"

"There's no such thing…"

But Harry could see the man's hands trembling. He shook his head. "There wasn't an hour ago," he said. That seemed a safe bet; Harry truly had no idea how long he had spent inside the duel with Yaxley and then the flames, but he thought it was less than that. "But there is now."

The phoenix stirred on his shoulder. Harry looked around, wondering if it had sensed danger and wanted to warn him. The Ministry could hardly have expected Yaxley's trap to fail, not when they had probably released him from Azkaban in the first place, but someone else could have shown up in the meantime.

The phoenix, though, was straining forwards, and making soft crooning noises under its breath. Under her breath, Harry was suddenly sure, although he didn't know how. The knowledge had simply arrived in his mind like a firework in the air.

Well, maybe there was a reason that he had never wanted another owl after Hedwig.

"What?" he asked again, and turned to follow her gaze. Her eyes were hard to get a grip on, sometimes black and sometimes gold and sometimes red.

She was focused on something Harry hadn't allowed himself to take in before now, lying a sad little distance away. A pile of blackened and bloodied meat. Harry swallowed. Yaxley's corpse. He couldn't even say exactly how the man had died, only that the magic he flung had apparently all been fatal at once.

"What about it?" Harry asked. He didn't think there could be any possible clue to who had sent Yaxley still on that tattered thing. It would have burned.

She looked at him.

And Harry knew.

The balance weighted and swung back and forth in his mind for a long moment. This time, unlike accepting the phoenix, it was a much more public act, and much more unforgivable. There were people who would be horrified by it as they hadn't been by the killing of Yaxley.

How many of those people are going to forgive you anyway? whispered the voice of his common sense. They hated you for being an abused child that an enemy could use. They hate you now for keeping Hogwarts open and resisting them. And if other people turn against you in hatred and anger, the results aren't going to be much different from turning against you in fear. They already won't send their children to Hogwarts, and they won't become teachers, and they won't do anything except absorb stories about you.

If someone turns against you over this, it would be something else later.

Harry swung his arm forwards.

She was there, his black phoenix, his shadow-darling, crowding along his elbow and springing into the air, wings flashing out as though this was her glory, launched like a hunting hawk. She flew to Yaxley's corpse, and she settled beside it, and she began to feed.

There was a low sound through the people watching him. Too low to tell exactly what emotion was causing it. Harry turned and held up a hand. A link of flame spiraled out from it, connecting him to the black phoenix, who looked up once, chanted a low sound of her own, and went back to eating.

"I'm a Dark Lord," Harry told them quietly. "And I was fighting to the death, and Yaxley used a Dark spell that meant his death was going to kill me. This is what happens next."

He waited, his eyes moving over them. Still they didn't flee, and he wondered what would make them do it, as he waited for them to react.

Draco could feel the sharp tingles racing down his spine, as if he stood bathed in a flow of ice-water. Beside him, Rosenthal was still and silent, but he knew her own mind was racing as his was.

Draco thought he understood some of the magical theory behind what Harry had done to survive the curse. Phoenixes burned and died and rose again, and Harry had turned himself—and the spell—into something that could, too. Impossible to know how much of his real Darkness resided in that phoenix, bound to a living form apart from him.

But he wasn't disowning it. The bond of fire that stretched from his wrist to the phoenix's leg, like a jess about it, said so.

And what he could do with power claimed, with power that had been turned, even at the last moment, upon his enemy and not upon the people watching…

Draco came forwards and slipped to one knee in front of Harry. Harry's startled gaze focused on him. Draco knew why. He still wore a glamour, and Harry would wonder who in creation was stupid enough to swear an oath to him over this, instead of screaming and running away in terror.

But no one else had yet, either. Draco thought they were frozen with the newness of the thing. If this Dark Lord was now immortal—and Draco did not believe he was, only that he was new—it was in a way so different that they were waiting for a cue as to what was supposed to happen next.

Draco raised his hands in front of him. "I would claim the protection of your court, my Lord," he said. "Because, of course, you will form one."

He hadn't bothered to leave the auditory glamour on his voice. Harry's eyes snapped back to him, and then he took in a deep breath and nodded to Draco. The phoenix, which had looked up once, cast Draco a glance of critical approval and went back to picking through the carrion.

"Then I will grant you that much," Harry said. "The boundaries of my court are Hogwarts. Not beyond that." He glanced at the people still watching. "Not Hogsmeade. I promise, I swear by my flame, that I will not take your homes from you. Unless you ask me to."

Ah. Draco shivered and thrilled, nearly overcome by the power that thrummed in those words.

Harry stepped up to him, crossing the boundary of where the dueling-ring had been for the first time. He let his hands rest in Draco's, palm to palm, and Draco met his eyes and nodded, encountering the silent question waiting there.

Are you sure you want to do this?

Draco would not do this in his own face, under his own name. He had to remain free and able to deal with Harry on an equal basis in everyday life. But this was very much not everyday life. This was the battlefield where a black phoenix and a Dark Lord had been born.

He could not swear a formal oath here. But he could make a pledge, and he curled his fingers around Harry's in response.

"You are welcome in my court whenever you choose to come," Harry said. "You are under my protection, and those who hurt you physically have me to fear." He glanced over. Draco looked with him, and saw the phoenix had raised her head again, mantling, the lovely feathers spreading and the crest along her neck trailing down like a flowing shadow.

"Me," Harry said, his voice as firm as though he was building a stone wall, "and Persephone."

A fitting name, Draco thought, and bowed his head. "Thank you, my lord," he said, and stepped back.

And then Rosenthal came forwards, and knelt. And behind her came a trickle of others.

Not nearly everyone who had watched the battle. Some of them were backing away now. Draco had expected that. They were still too cautious, too frightened, to commit the freight of their lives to Harry's hands.

But as Persephone rose from her meal and hovered over them, singing a song like the trickle of dark water in caverns far from the sun, Draco knew there were enough.

Enough to bring a legend from the cinders.

The End.

To repeat from the beginning of the chapter, this story will have a sequel. It'll be called Black Phoenix, and will probably start posting next week.

Thanks for reading.