9:03 PM, June 13th, 1992.
"Don't flatter yourself," said the voice of Voldemort. "We're declaring war on the whole world."
With that one line, along with a massive pit dropping into his stomach, Silver was immediately and completely convinced that he'd made a massive mistake. Or at the very least, his plan to redeem Lord Voldemort had failed.
"Um," said the objecting voice of Memory. "No we're not!"
Silver had been about to say something similar out loud, but...
Funnily enough, Memory's words kicked his contradictory and argumentative mind into gear, and he realized it might not be as bad as it sounds. Yeah, we kind of are, he thought to himself.
The three of them were sort-of declaring war on the world, weren't they? Some wizards would certainly see it that way. Maybe his mentor saying that didn't mean he wasn't redeemed?
Not that there was time to think about it right now. In the span of about five seconds, an army of aurors arrived on the scene, quickly surrounding them.
To Silver's surprise, Riddle dropped his invisibility. Was he trying to take sole credit for their joint effort? (Not that Harry minded.) Or did he just not care to keep up the magical effort of hiding himself when faced with the Eye of Vance? Or was Riddle trying to fool the rest of the aurors?
Moody is part of Dumbledore's secret vigilante group; they might be able to convince him to keep quiet about the extra two invisible ponies he'd seen, if they contacted him quickly enough...
The arriving aurors launched volleys of shield-breaking spells that screamed towards them in an angry tidal wave of colour. Silver felt Memory flinch at the attack. He flinched himself. But nothing seemed to affect the pink dome.
"Is there a reason we're still here?" Silver whispered.
And just like that, they appeared in an empty warehouse in a flash of teleport.
Amelia Bones threw up a privacy barrier and demanded "Who's behind it, Alastor?" the moment the retired auror flew back through the window.
An hour ago, she'd asked him to aid in the defense of Azkaban as an emergency consultant, hoping this time wouldn't be a disaster. She'd learned her lesson about Dumbledore. She might have considered calling in the old meddler if it looked like Voldemort was behind it again, but the brightest and biggest Patronus charm that the world had ever seen suggested that anybody except him was responsible. Dumbledore himself being involved in this attack seemed more likely than Voldemort.
Like last time, she'd used a Time Turner to arrange for arrival in Azkaban as quickly as possible, mere moments after the guards first reported it and opened the one-way vanishing cabinet.
Even before the cabinet's door had opened, the world was silver Patronus light the moment she arrived. Nothing could be seen at all. She had to order her aurors to operate by feel, slowing down everyone to a grinding halt – everyone except the man wearing the Eye of Vance. Alastor had exploded into action the moment the one-way vanishing cabinet brought them to the guard room of Azkaban, completely ignoring the light. She knew this because she knew him and because she'd felt the wind from his wake, not because she'd seen him leave with her eyes.
On her end, shading charms didn't work. Charmed potions goggles didn't work. Solid walls didn't work. It was like the every inch of the world was solid silver light, and Alastor would later tell her that was because they'd been inside a massive corporeal Patronus charm.
Right now, his report was clipped, covering only the most important information. "Three culprits," he said, his eye spinning wildly.
"Did you recognize them?"
A sharp head shake. "Weren't human. Magical horses with wings and horns, two with feathers, one with bat wings. Spoke English. Horse-shaped Patronuses, too. Batty was bigger than the other two, about as tall as Albus. Maybe a bit taller. I think one of the smaller ones was responsible for the big Patronus."
"Did you capture them, or did you have to kill them?"
His expression soured. "They got away."
"WHAT?! You let them escape?!"
"They vanished, Amelia," said Alastor, utterly serious. "Completely gone. Didn't fight their way out, either. Don't know if they could have. They had a powerful shield that blocked everything I threw at them. And they could make themselves as invisible as a Deathly Hallow. I doubt the others saw the smaller two. Batty revealed himself, though."
She had that feeling of dread in her gut again, the one that had made her want to consult Albus Dumbledore months ago. It was the feeling she got when powerful and unknown parties were doing impossible things that threatened Magical Britain. The feeling compounded when it was more than one impossible thing.
"Did you put a trace on them?" she asked immediately.
"Couldn't get through the shield," he said unhappily.
"Did they take any prisoners with them?" she asked next. If they had taken Rabastan Lestrange, she would instantly know who had orchestrated the attack.
Another sharp head shake. "If they did, my eye didn't see it. I don't think this was a prison break, Amelia. Batty said they're declaring war on the whole world."
Her grimness doubled, and with it doubled her determination to catch them before they did any damage. "Are there any leads on where they went?"
He nodded. Finally some good news. "I didn't see any floating corpses in the pit-" what? "-and I don't think it's because they scattered. I'd bet those three are going Dementor-hunting. Couldn't tell you where they'll start, but I can guess some of the places they'll hit."
A string of curses went through her head.
She had arrived with the intention of stopping another prison break. She already had aurors securing the prisoners in their cells. But she gave a few more curses at just how bad it had gotten. She had expected a simple attack, not a declaration of a world war. Some would say this didn't qualify, but the perpetrators clearly saw it that way, and so would the Wizengamot. Even the ICW would probably manage to set aside their differences and agree.
She was already thinking about warning other countries, knowing it was above her paygrade, wondering if the emergency would let her and Barty get away with immediate action anyway, calculating if the thirty-minute delay of convening an emergency session of the Wizengamot for approval would be too much time to waste, but even all of that wasn't her immediate priority.
She grasped her communications mirror and gave a series of orders that would occupy almost the entire staff of the DMLE with prison security, where they needed to be, rather than horse-hunting, where she wanted them to be.
Next would come the unpleasant part. Involving the Unspeakables and the Department of Mysteries in setting up an ambush at the Ministry of Magic was half-baked, but it was her only plan. If the horses attacked the Dementor in the Ministry, the Unspeakables might be able to capture them. Assuming she could even get a good trap set up at this late hour.
"You need my help containing the prison?" Alastor asked, sitting on his broomstick and looking like he was ready to take off. "If not, I've got to go. Voldie might make his move soon. I already used the spare hour that Albus said I could use in an emergency, so I can't help you with anything else tonight. I'll have to show you the memory of what they look like tomorrow. Call Albus if something else comes up."
She didn't stop him, because she didn't need his help containing the prison. She only gave another curse at the idea of Voldemort making the night's disaster even worse somehow.
"Just taking advantage of the moment," Riddle Tome answered Silver's question as they stood in the warehouse. "I would have preferred not to reveal our ability to bypass the wards of Azkaban, but I suppose we were out of options."
"You couldn't have fought your way out?" Silver asked, trying not to be distracted by the mane of eye-hurting void that seemed to spill endlessly from his mentor's head and back and tail, as if that specific part of him were a live Dementor. Or, well, a dead Dementor. No, they aren't dead either, they're Death. A deathly Dementor?
"I could have fought," shrugged the thestral, the pull of his void mane growing slightly larger. Then it diminished to barely noticeable levels. "But who would have contained the prison riot? Us?"
"...I guess you have a point," Silver allowed. "So, quick question-"
"No time," Riddle denied. "We've delayed enough as it is. The longer we take, the more time we give the wizards of the world to defend their Dementors."
"What about my phoenix?" Memory demanded.
"Unless you want to hide her forever," Riddle said, "you should not let your phoenix be seen with your pony form. Not for a while. Once we go back to our human forms, I shall return her to you, but she should stay in my cloak until we are finished with the Dementors. Trust me, it's quite comfortable."
Without giving them another word in edgewise, his cloak extended towards them like a living thing, and they disappeared in a flash of phoenix fire the moment it touched their fur.
They launched from location to location, flashing from foreign land to foreign land. They stayed just long enough to destroy all the Dementors at each place and left the very next instant.
The most disorienting thing was how quickly they would go from midnight to high noon to evening to morning and back to night again. They were teleporting around the entire world, and that meant jumping time zones. And since it was phoenix travel, there didn't seem to be a limit on distance, only on whether Riddle had been there before.
Silver didn't have much time to think as he destroyed Dementor after Dementor. He didn't really want to think about anything else. But he forced himself to spend all of his spare mental capacity on threat assessment, just in case.
The fact that they were traveling by phoenix meant that Memory's newest companion, at the very least, did not hate Riddle Tome. That's a promising sign.
Thanks to the doubt instilled by Riddle's words at Azkaban, Silver was beginning to wonder if it was possible to fake a Patronus somehow. Voldemort would have had plenty of time to figure that out. But maybe he had done it honestly after all. If Memory's phoenix did not mind being directed by Riddle Tome, then either (a) it's the first wise phoenix in existence, able to tolerate evil for the sake of practicality without its master forcing it to do so, or (b) the phoenix doesn't think Riddle is a bad person/pony. That would mean Riddle had just been having fun / being dramatic when talking to Mr. Moody, and the phoenix was happy to help him declare war on the world('s Dementors).
Silver was fine with that too, so it probably was all good.
Although not every jump to a new location involved the phoenix's help. They would occasionally have to teleport away, and/or teleport to a location, probably because anti-phoenix wards were active. Silver had worried about guards and magical barbed wire, but his mentor seemed to account for that. On four occasions, he told Silver to destroy the Dementors while they were standing very far away, barely within sensing distance, and it was only thanks to his large Patronus that he could do it.
Silver quickly lost count of the number of destroyed Dementors. Ordinarily he would keep score, but his Gryffindor side didn't care for points, only absolute victory.
Soon enough, they began feeling fatigue. The true Patronus Charm does not permanently drain your life when you use it to destroy death's shadows, but it does temporarily drain your life, just like spells temporarily drain your magic. If you empty your life completely in a short amount of time, you die. If you don't die, your life slowly refills. It's only when you use the Patronus to revive someone that you permanently sacrifice a portion of your life, just like the Unbreakable Vow permanently sacrifices a portion of magic.
Destroying Dementors isn't a sacrifice. It doesn't cause permanent harm to the caster, as far as Silver has been able to understand. It only causes temporary exhaustion. You just have to be careful not to go over the edge and drain yourself completely in a short amount of time.
So far, everything has been going close enough to how Silver had pictured this day playing out, over and over in his head for almost a year now. And this part in particular, the part where they get tired and maybe have to stop for a while, is how it seemed to be playing out for Memory.
Only Silver himself wasn't getting tired like he'd been expecting. Not on the life end of things, anyway. His magic was beginning to ache, but his ability to pour his life into the spell seemed limitless. He hadn't questioned it when he made the big one at Azkaban, and he isn't complaining now, but he is noticing.
"Hey," he said during a lull in teleportation. "Mem, I think you've done enough." Best to use their aliases while they're like this, though using names at all during a mission is bad practice, so he shortened it. "It's dangerous to push yourself. I can do the rest."
He expected her to insist that she keep helping, but she simply nodded in relief and slumped a little.
"I can drop you off in a comfortable bed," said Riddle. "Or you can tag along and watch. But I should warn you that I'll be waking you soon. We have something important to discuss, both about how we will handle your return, and how we will handle my own."
She didn't take long to consider it. "I'll watch."
Soon after Memory stopped directly contributing, they began to hunt wild Dementors, not ones contained by structures and expectations.
Silver had no idea how Professor Riddle was locating them, just that he was locating them. Sometimes they'd appear far away from the target Dementor, well beyond Silver's ordinary sensing range, and then they'd have to fly the remainder of the distance. Sometimes they appeared very far away and Professor Riddle would perform a quick series of phoenix flashes, teleporting kilometres across the sky with each jump, likely going to each new position by seeing it with his night-adjusted thestral eyes, or his glasses-enhanced daylight vision, depending on where they were in the world.
As far as Silver knew/suspected, phoenixes can take you anywhere you've seen, so long as fire can ignite there. Silver severely doubted that a phoenix can flash into the Mariana Trench, or into outer space.
But that didn't matter right now. Silver also severely doubted that the Dementors of the world would take up residence in remote areas. Not even wild Dementors would do that. They had enough pseudo/borrowed/expected intelligence to roam places where people actually live sometimes, i.e. not underwater or in outer space. This theory was not disproven a single time in their entire hunt. Every wild Dementor was always near or within at least one human settlement or tribe.
Professor Riddle's "That was the last one" seemed to come out of nowhere. Equally out of nowhere was the return to the warehouse. Up until that moment, Silver had mostly just been thinking about 'the next Dementor', and he had a brief sense of disorientation as he recalibrated his goals.
His cloak floated off of his body and into a mokeskin pouch that Professor Riddle had produced from his own cloak, and then the pouch was floated to rest at Silver's hooves.
"What about the other two last ones?" Silver asked as he picked up the pouch that he'd been forced to leave in Equestria, since you couldn't take physical objects into the Astral Plane. "Where are the Dementors we spared?"
"One for the ministry," said his mentor. "One for the ICW. Both are likely heavily guarded, and there is a good reason to spare them, like I said earlier. I'll handle that situation later. For now, we must soon return to Hogwarts. We technically have until whenever the Quidditch game might end, but I would prefer we do it at the stroke of midnight, to make the story more believable. That gives us less than two hours."
"What story?" Memory asked, her own invisibility cloak floating off of her and into the thestral's black one.
"Before that," Riddle said, "I have something to give each of you." Four wands emerged from his robes. "Return to your human forms, please."
"A backup wand?" Harry asked after an animagus transformation, accepting the two that were floated to him.
"Not backups, per se," said Riddle Tome. "Those are Elder Wands. They were made with wood from a whomping willow and cores of goblin metal, which ponies call mithril. They are more powerful weapons than any ordinary wand."
There was a pause.
"Oh, is that all?" Harry asked, recovering his wits before Hermione. Leave it to Professor Riddle to think that an Elder Wand is an appropriate spare. "And what about the downside?" he asked, already thinking one step ahead. "Neither of us are you. If we ever lose a single battle-"
"I modified that aspect," Riddle interrupted. "As long as you remain dedicated to self-improvement, they will not betray you. When you are defeated in battle, the wands will stay loyal so long as you are asking yourselves why you lost, and what you might do to win the next time. They will only become discontent if you become content with yourselves. That was the best I could do once I learned how the original was made, but I think it's a fair price for ordinary people to pay for that power. On a technical note, I added a single strand of each of your pony manes to the cores, in order to achieve that outcome of binding them to you."
"And what happens if we ever lose the philosophy of self-improvement?" Harry asked. "Not that I ever would, but..."
"Then it will betray you if you are beaten by a stronger wizard," Riddle confirmed Harry's guess. "So long as that wizard does not already have an Elder Wand, that is." He grinned slightly. "In other words, if you rise to the top, or close to the top, and find it difficult to improve much further, you will have nothing to fear. Even if I was strongest, and you were second after me, and I defeated you in battle, I would not become the new master of your Elder wand because I already have one. And as a final note, they prefer battle to mundane use, although if you are using them to push the boundaries of your magic, to cast spells you otherwise couldn't with your current strength, they do not mind."
"Is that why they're made from Whomping Willow wood?" asked Hermione. "Because they like battle and strength?"
"More or less," Riddle Tome nodded. "I assume the goblin metal speaks for itself? Or did you never reach that subject in your readings?"
"I did," said Hermione.
"I didn't," said Harry.
"Goblin metal has properties that wizards can't reproduce," said Hermione, sounding like she was quoting a book. "It absorbs only that which strengthens it, and goblins use that property to make indestructible armor, which is how they stand a chance against wizards. Goblins almost never let others use it, so it's extremely valuable. It can't be stolen either; without the willing and true blessing of the goblins, it loses its magical properties, or so they say. The last recorded instance of goblins giving their metal to wizards outside of things like extremely expensive jewelry was the sword of Gryffindor."
"Meaning," Professor Riddle lectured when she was done, "that their blessing to Antioch Peverell went unrecorded by history-" he played with his knobbed wand in his grasp of levitation magic "-so we can assume they are slightly more generous than most wizards suspect."
"How generous?" Harry asked, his mind immediately looking to gain an advantage that ordinary people don't know how to get, now that he has the key insight on how to get it.
Riddle shrugged. "I expect you can earn their blessing by performing a great boon for the goblin nation in secret, but since that sort of thing is difficult to do, it explains why more Elder Wands have not been made, even if other wizards have guessed how to make them. I fashioned each of yours to resemble your original wands so they don't stand out. I won't bore you with the details except to say mithril makes an excellent enchanting base. Despite how they look, they do have the knobs of mithril balls that work as a series of magical amplifiers, with a series of undetectable space-extending charms hiding the fact. Olivander would be able to tell the difference from your normal wands, but most others would not be able to notice unless they used them, so you needn't hide them. Be careful only in the strength of magic you demonstrate, and be careful about situations of disarmament and wand-seizing during chaotic battles."
Harry and Hermione said "got it" and "okay" to the warning of the wise old wizard.
"So I'm guessing," Harry said, "this means you figured out the Deathly Hallows?"
He nodded. "Well enough to recreate them, yes. Twilight Sparkle helped. Though I should mention those wands are a bit more special than I've let on so far. They are my magnum opus, at least when it comes to device creation. Treat them well."
Harry looked at his wand with a bit more reverence, held it a bit more carefully than before. "What about the stone?"
"Which one?" Riddle asked. "Resurrection or permanence?"
"Permanence."
Riddle smiled. Two red stones flew from his robes to float before him. One he gave to Harry Potter, the other he gave to Hermione Granger. "There is a false bottom to your new wands," he said. "Touch the base three times, then the tip twice. That will reveal the hidden pocket of space-extension."
They followed the instructions and a hole appeared in the bottom of the wands, as if they were hollow.
"How did these end up working?" Harry asked as he dropped the stone 'into' the wand. He didn't have to worry about the permanence effect unless the stone was in contact with his wand... wait...
"In a significantly more complicated fashion than the Elder Wand," Riddle answered. "Do not worry about their activation in those storage compartments. There is a separate compartment for that, which I will explain later. Once you are more skilled, you will be able to have the stone touch your wand from inside the bottom compartment without any apparent change on the outside. It will not happen accidentally. But to answer your question, Stones of Permanence are closer to the Mirror than the Deathly Hallows. It was Twilight Sparkle's second biggest project for the last few decades. You'd be better served by asking her for the details."
"Decades?" Harry asked, even though it shouldn't have been so surprising. His own prediction had been at least 50 years. "How long were you..."
"Thirty-five years."
"What?" said Hermione.
"Oh," said Harry.
Honestly, that was better than expected. If Tom Riddle had been in his sixties, and Harry had told him to expect it to take as long as his current age to unlearn his bad habits, then taking 35 years to learn the Patronus Charm almost cut his predicted completion time in half.
"I've wanted to ask ever since you left," said the thestral, "but was your escape intentional or accidental?"
"Accidental," Hermione answered. "I had no idea we could leave until it happened."
"I was not asking you, Ms. Granger." He turned to face Harry. "I promise not to hurt you for your answer. And I should mention that I can act as a magical lie detector, though my own abilities aren't as solid as Luna's, so please don't try."
...
"It was intentional," Harry admitted.
"It was?" asked Hermione. "How..." she began, then trailed off. "Harry, did you know a phoenix would come and take me?"
"More like I manipulated you into being given the choice... but yeah. Sorry for Dumbledoring you like that. It was the only way I could see to get us out while we were still young enough to be Hogwarts students."
Hermione didn't reply in words, though she was going through a complicated series of facial expressions.
Riddle sighed. "I suspected as much," he said. "My self of thirty-five years ago would have plotted against you if he knew that for certain. He did plot against you, planning out your exact punishment if it turned out to be true."
Harry gulped.
"But even he saw the benefits of the happenstance," Riddle said, his eyes going a bit distant. "No sense keeping you in the mirror when you didn't have to be there. My old self balked at the unfairness, but he could admit that it was timely, and now I can admit that it was my own fault we were all there in the first place. It's a good thing you swore Celestia to secrecy. I don't know what I would have done if I definitively knew you'd planned your own escape, but it wouldn't have been good, and it probably would have set me back a few years. Maybe even permanently."
"Hold on," said Hermione. "Please slow down. Why did it take so long for you to get out? I thought Harry said you found the Mirror last night... well, I mean, thirty-five years ago. What went wrong?"
"You mean what went right," he corrected. "After I stunned and transfigured you into a metal band to recreate the conditions of our entrapment," he openly admitted, "Mr. Potter's quite reasonable and likely anger-fueled response was to make it so I could not leave until I learned how to cast his Patronus Charm. He'd already learned my Killing Curse, so I could not complain that he was asking of me what I had not already asked of him."
Hermione sat down on the floor. She was a bit awkward in getting there, probably because she was in human form and out of practice. "That's..." she said, then didn't say more for a while.
"Bad?" suggested Harry Potter.
"Good?" suggested Riddle Tome.
"Both," said Hermione. "Why did you teach Harry the Killing Curse?"
"Because I wanted him to learn it," said Riddle. "It ended up being a trade. I would learn his favourite spell if he learned mine. Well, my old favourite."
She turned to Harry. "And why did you learn it?"
"To get him to learn the Patronus," Harry explained. Then, immediately coming to his own defense, "I didn't even have to use hatred, and I only ever used it against bees and ants."
"Some of which had been transfigured from live ponies," offered Riddle.
"Will you stop it with that joke already?" asked Harry. He'd already been reassured in Parseltongue that it wasn't true. "Don't worry, Hermione, it's a fact that he didn't actually do that."
Hermione looked a bit disturbed, and not entirely reassured.
"Sorry," apologized Riddle. "It's been so long that the joke helps me remember the finer details off the top of my head. I only just remembered I even made it in the first place. It is a bit too mean-spirited, isn't it?"
"Way too mean," said Hermione. "Harry, I'm still having trouble with the fact that you know the killing curse."
"It's only for things like trolls and dragons," he assured her. "Well, our dragons, anyway, not Equestria's. I can cast it while using my Patronus now, so I never have to worry about accidentally killing a sapient being if I miss my non-sapient target."
Hermione had paused at the word 'troll', then actually seemed to consider his point of view. "I... guess I can understand that. If I had to choose between casting a killing curse and dying to a troll again... I'd learn the killing curse if I could. But how could you learn it without hatred? And how can you use it while your Patronus is up?"
"By using Occlumency," he replied. "A lack of hatred actually helps-"
"I think," interrupted Tom Riddle, "that this discussion can be saved for later. Only an hour remains. We must prepare our story. And once we have, there shall be one last thing to do. Are you ready to hear it?"
Before they left for Hogwarts, Riddle pulled Harry aside for a brief detour.
"Silver Life," he formally addressed, the words strange to Harry's ears because he wasn't in his pony form. "Do you have access to infinite life? Is that the domain of magic you have discovered for yourself and shared with the world?"
"Um..." said Harry. "Is that why I can make my Patronus as big as I want?"
"That is my guess," answered Professor Riddle. "Did you tire at all from purging the world's Dementors?"
"My magic was aching afterwards," Harry said. "But I felt like I could have kept on going forever, if not for that."
Riddle nodded. "Then I think it is safe to assume that you can revive as many people as you like, so long as you do not allow your magic to be sacrificed as well."
"Where are you going with this?"
It's not like they could go around reviving everybody that humanity has ever lost. And if he couldn't let his magic be sacrificed, he would only be able to do it for muggles, never wizards.
On that front, preventing death is easier than curing it, and prevention shouldn't be too difficult with so many Philosopher's stones. The Patronus can only revive the recently-deceased – people who are braindead, but who aren't yet warm and dead, i.e. whose brains have not yet suffered any major damage, from decay or anything else. That means his Patronus probably wouldn't work to revive people that are completely frozen, only people whose bodies had been much colder than usual when they died, cold enough to slow down the process of decay. A brain that's frozen solid would qualify as having way too much damage. Dying cold gives you hours. Dying warm gives you minutes. Dying hard-frozen gives you no time at all. But even a day would be too long for anyone, if he had to guess.
Unless Professor Riddle had found a way to...
"There is someone I'd like you to revive," he said, "before it is too late."
Apparently not. If he was saying that, he couldn't extend the window for revival indefinitely.
"Even if the assumption about infinite life turns out to be false, a single test should not drain you too much. Oh, and you shall have to take your pony form for it. Please do that now. And leave your new wand on the floor for a moment. I need to make a final modification."
Harry Potter became Silver Life.
"Just to be sure," said Professor Riddle, his wand making strange traceries of anti-light in the air, centered around Silver's new spare wand, "that mane is truly ethereal, correct? It is not the result of an active Patronus? You are not casting the spell at the moment?"
"Yep," said Silver. "I'm fully ascended." For some reason, the patterns in the air looked a bit hypnotic, like his mind was being drawn to them somehow. "Why?"
Professor Riddle finished tracing the anti-light in the air around Silver's new wand. The hypnotic pull was stronger than ever. In that distracted state, Silver had no ability to react as Tom Riddle leveled his wand at point-blank range and said, "Avada Kedavra."