He roused in the half-darkness, confused, scared, until he identified the tall and blocky shapes around him as four-poster beds, heard the little sighs and creaks that meant it was a normal night in Gryffindor Tower. A dream, he realized, the understanding slowing his heart, calming his breathing. It was just a dream.
But how much of it?
At the bottom of his bed, a girl's silhouette stirred, bushy hair surrounding her head like a wild halo. "You'll be all right now," murmured the well-known voice. "I have to go."
"No, wait." He caught at the edge of her robe as she started to stand. "What was going on out there? With you and Malfoy, and then those things, and you said Harry and Ginny were gone—"
"You told me you wished it had never happened." Feminine fingers, smooth and cool, gently disentangled his from their handful of black fabric. "So now it hasn't. No one ever met with Malfoy in the Room of Requirement, and nothing strange ever happened outside it. Harry's right there—" She pointed to the next bed over, where he could now see his friend curled into his usual nighttime ball under the bedclothes. "—and you'll see Ginny in the morning. Forget it, Ron, forget about all of it. It never happened. It was just a dream."
"What about you?" Reluctantly, Ron let go of his hold. "Will I see you in the morning?"
His friend gave a strange, choky little laugh. "Don't worry," she said. "Everyone who should be there, will be. Now go back to sleep, Ron, please. I promise, it will be all right now."
"If you say so." Ron slid down under the covers and shut his eyes obediently. "Night, Hermione."
"Good night, Ron. Sleep well." There was a pause, and then a very faint sound, which could have been three whispered words or the sound of a kiss being blown from an outstretched fingertip.
Or, just possibly, the sound of nothing at all.
Ron slipped into sleep, and never registered that although his visitor was gone, the door of his dormitory had failed to open and close.
Safely in Outer Time, the Threshold closed behind her, Neenie took the three steps which brought her to her own domain, then sank down at the base of one of the trees, dropping her face into her hands. "I'm not crying," she whispered. "I'm not. That was the best thing I could have done for him, for that world's Ron, merging him into a ridge that way. He would never have understood what we do here, and this way he has a world he knows, and Redwing gets to stay with us. I'm not crying, I'm…"
Her throat and her eyes conspired to make a liar of her, and she drew her knees up to her chest, shaking.
We should have been faster. We should have done more. If we'd only been there a few seconds sooner, we could have saved Lynx as well as Redwing, stopped the RC's from taking that world's Harry and Hermione for rehabilitation, fixed it as a tell of its own rather than letting it be merged. We might even have caught the man who was directing the RC's, the one who's caused us all these problems in the first place…
She knew her recriminations were pointless. Her Uncle Pat had been exhausted by his unusual efforts towards Chronicling a world completely separate from their own, which bore tangential relations to not one but two ridges. Without his sudden awakening to the understanding that the little tell he'd stumbled across, the world where her beloved and his sister had been placed, was about to go up like a firework, they would have had no warning at all. In which case, they would have been back where they had started, combing through hundreds of thousands of worlds to try to find two particular, very special people. At least they had saved one of their own, instead of losing them both.
Unfortunately, as she also knew, knowing and accepting were two entirely different things.
Something cool touched her hand. Startled, she looked up.
The forest around her was changing. Even as she watched, the small dots of red and yellow and brown which had begun to appear among the trees grew rapidly larger, the leaves drying and losing their green before her eyes. A breeze whipped through the upper canopy, carrying a drift of autumn color with it and leaving behind bare branches. The sky above her was leaden gray, and bits of it seemed to be descending towards her. One of those bits was what had made an impression on her skin.
"Snow?" Neenie got slowly to her feet, blinking in puzzlement at the clouds. "Why would it—"
A woman's figure moved in the trees. Neenie had a hand on her dagger with its blue pommel stone before she thought.
"Peace," Miss Suzie said, stepping out where Neenie could see her more clearly. "Your family will be here in a moment, along with your newest arrival. I wanted to come a little ahead of them, to remind you that no matter how well you do, you will always have failures."
"I know that." Neenie released the dagger impatiently. "Do you have to rub it in?"
"Such was not my intention." Miss Suzie gestured towards the sky. "You crafted this domain. Though you have given your Packmates, your siblings and parents, control over it to some extent, you did the majority of the work and therefore it will always respond most readily to you. And while your heart sorrows, the domain will grieve with you. Until you recoup your loss, until you regain the person you feel responsible for not saving this time, it will be winter here."
"Always winter?" Neenie wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. "And never Christmas?"
Miss Suzie's smile was as wintry as the breeze now cutting through Neenie's thin robes. "The words are yours, not mine, but yes. Now, go and take comfort, and make your plans well. Your father's pains on behalf of my partner have absolved you from any further responsibility to us. From this day on, you are a free Legendbreaker, though we will always be available should you need help with a difficult problem, or wish to share your joy at some great success."
"Thank you." On an impulse, Neenie curtsied, as she would have to a queen. Miss Suzie accepted it with a stately inclination of her head, then turned and was gone, vanishing into the now swirling snow.
"Neenie?" called a voice a moment later, young, male, and with the power to make Neenie's breath catch short, make her heart thump wildly against the insides of her ribs. "You out here?"
"Over here." Neenie pressed the inside corners of her eyes, willing her tears away. This was a moment for happiness, not regrets. "Are you all right?"
"With Mrs.—I mean, your Aunt Carrie to fix me up? How could I be anything else?"
"You managed before," said Fox as the two young men appeared around a particularly large tree, Redwing half a step ahead with his longer legs. "Of course, you never took the 'who can bang himself up the most' prize. That would be my brother."
Redwing flicked the cloak he was carrying over his arm in Fox's direction, showering Fox with snow, then shook it out once more before coming to drape it around Neenie and look anxiously down into her face as he fastened the clasp at her throat. "What about you?" he asked quietly. "How are you doing?"
"You're here." Neenie put a hand over his, smiling into worried blue eyes, breathing in the scent of clean male with just a hint of spice and musky feathers. "That makes everything better for right now. I've missed you, you know."
"I'm glad to hear it." Redwing slid his arms around her, under the cloak, and she stepped into the embrace and settled her cheek against his collarbone. His hands moved along her back and sides, gently caressing, and she sighed with pleasure.
"You have until next spring to stop that," she murmured.
"You haven't been eating," Redwing said over her words, his finger tracing down her spine. "Why haven't you been making her eat?" he demanded of Fox. "You know how she gets when she's worried about something she thinks she can solve with her books! She forgets to eat, half the time she won't sleep…"
"Yes, and you're the only one who can distract her," Fox retorted. "And until today, we didn't have you. I can do a lot of things for her, but not that, and if you start saying I should have anyway, I swear I'm going to mix up all your socks so you never have a matched pair again."
Redwing chuckled, the sound transmitting through Neenie's bones before it reached her outer ears. "Why should I care? I won't be able to tell, with my eyes back to the way they were in our world, before all this happened. Besides, nobody sees your socks when you're wearing robes anyway."
"But you won't always be wearing robes," Neenie cautioned, lifting her head to look up at Redwing. "We work in all kinds of places, there are spins and tells where people wear jeans and trousers more than they do robes, we might even have to wear business attire sometimes…"
"Then I'll let you pick out my clothes for me, and hex him if he gets anywhere near." Redwing kissed her on the forehead. "And we're just being silly in any case, so it won't matter. Shall we go back to the cottage? It's getting chilly out here, and Mr.—your dad was saying something about plans…"
"Losing Lynx may not be as much of a disaster as we thought at first," John said when everyone was seated around the kitchen table. "It's not good, certainly, but because we did get Redwing—" He nodded to the young man of that nickname, who tossed him a salute in return. "—they have a limited number of worlds where they can rehabilitate her."
"Why—oh, stupid me!" Meghan shook her head in chagrin. "It's the same reason we were all put in pairs and threes in the first place, isn't it? The resonance?"
"It is precisely the resonance." John smiled at her. "And because my mission succeeded, and we are now free to use all of our power, we may be able to force their hand even further if we move quickly. Are you up for it?"
"Who are you asking?" Carrie said before an eager-eyed Meghan could reply. "Because I'm going to have to say no if Redwing wants to go. Sorry," she added in Redwing's direction, "but I just finished a complicated bit of healing on you and your eyes need time to readjust to working in infrared instead of normal light."
"I wasn't going to ask anyway." Redwing grimaced. "It would be worse than the nightmare where you realize you haven't studied for a practical exam. As long as you're not going after…" He sketched a jagged shape down the center of his forehead.
"No, I think we should save the most complicated for last." John tapped his fingers together. "As much as I would like to go after that world now, for personal reasons. Still, if we leave that one as their only option for placing Lynx, we get an extra strong dose of resonance between her and our young hero, which might make our job easier. And it so happens that we have the perfect people to handle the other pair we're discussing." He pointed first to Fox, then to Meghan. "Assuming you'd like them back, of course."
"Let me see." Fox leaned back in his chair. "Do I want to rescue, literally from a fate worse than death, a beautiful girl who's already in love with me and will take to Legendbreaking like she was born for it? I do believe that would be a yes."
Meghan simply let her beaming smile speak for her.
"Excellent." John looked down the table at Pat. "And if you're recovered enough to try a little Chronicling, I thought we might be able to pull off an FSM maneuver."
"A forced split and merge?" Neenie looked dubious. "I don't know, Dad. That takes a lot of power."
"It does, but it's also quick, and it leaves no traces. If I understand it correctly, that is."
"If we take advantage of a natural breakpoint…or even if we have to manufacture one, in an indeterminate stretch…" Neenie trailed off, muttering to herself, then looked up. "I think we can do it," she said. "It's risky, but as long as we get in and out cleanly, we'll rebuild our power fast, because we'll have everyone except for Lynx, Wolf, and…" She flinched from saying the last name. "Everyone except those three. And as long as we pick our moment to start congruency with their world carefully, we could even go so far as to wait until the main action ends if we have to."
"Which I think we'd better." Pat's reluctance on the point was clear, understandably so since his Pack-sister and his godson were two of the people under discussion, but his face was determined. "Especially with Wolf involved. I mean, just look at the titles of the ridge books. The Chronicler didn't want you to lose sight of who it was about, now did she?" He shook his head. "Which means they'll be watching, and even a hint of interference will bring the RC's down like the wrath of your god of choice. But once the final battle is over, and we get into those nineteen years of indeterminate time…"
"A few people walk out of the castle and disappear early one morning, without anyone seeing them go, and we nudge the world into the next one over, where those people are still sleeping in their beds." Fox snickered. "Or, in one case, where she never existed. But she won't mind that, as long as she exists with us. It could work."
"It will work," John said, letting no trace of his inner uncertainty appear on his face or in his voice. "But it will have to wait until we finish the mission which is our current priority. Now, apart from Fox and Meghan, who should go into the field for that one?"
Neville Longbottom fingered the DA Galleon in the pocket of his robes and wondered, not for the first time, where Luna Lovegood might be leading him. The train ride back to London for the Christmas holidays in this, his sixth year at Hogwarts and Luna's fifth, had been uneventful until she had asked him, through the medium of the very coin he was now rubbing with his thumb, to wait for two minutes after she got up to go to the lavatory, then come into the corridor and join her.
"What is so secret that you couldn't say it in front of Harry?" he asked now. "Or Ron, or Hermione, or Ginny?"
"It's not something I have to say." Luna opened the door of an empty compartment and beckoned him in. "It's something you have to see." She led him to the window, which the darkening evening had turned into a ghostly mirror, superimposing their translucent images on the trees and meadows past which the Hogwarts Express was rushing. "Come and look."
Stepping up beside Luna, Neville looked as she had requested. For a moment, he saw only their two forms, his own familiar one, stocky and round-faced as always, and Luna's slender, wide-eyed prettiness. Then, as though a mist were clearing away, a third shape appeared, between and behind them.
"What—" Neville whirled, but no one had entered the compartment with them.
"She isn't here," said Luna, her tone reproving. "She's only there. Look at her and tell me what you see."
Setting aside his feeling of being disconnected from reality (an exercise to which he had become accustomed during the year and a half he had known Luna) and returning his eyes to the reflections, Neville squinted at the ghostly girl, who was becoming better defined with every moment. "She's pretty. Sort of delicate, like she might break, except I don't think she would. She looks tough too. Her skin is a brown sugar kind of color, and her hair is all braided, like Angelina used to wear, only shorter." He leaned forward a bit, inspecting the reflection's face. "She has silver eyes. Sad eyes, like she misses somebody she loves. I…" He frowned. "I think I know her, only I can't think of her name. And…"
His heart gave a convulsive shudder, cutting off his words. The girl in the mirroring window had just laid her hand on reflection-Neville's shoulder—and Neville could feel the pressure of those small, strong fingers through his robes at this very moment.
"It's you she misses," Luna said conversationally. "It's you she wants. Do you want her? Will you go with her? You don't have to worry about your gran, or anyone else here," she went on without giving Neville time to answer, which was just as well, as he had absolutely no idea what he was going to say. "They'll never know we're gone."
"We?" Neville was extremely proud that his voice hadn't squeaked. "Does she want you too?"
"Not the same way. Just as a friend. I have someone else who's been missing me." Luna leaned back, looking dangerously off-balance from where Neville could see her in real life. In the reflection world, he could clearly see the young man against whom she was resting, whose features and coloring reminded him of Hermione Granger but whose teasing smile made him think more of Harry or Ron. "I've made my mind up already, so it all depends on you. The only thing you have to do is say yes, you'll go with her, or no, you want to stay here. But whatever you decide, you need to do it quickly. There isn't much time."
Neville had read about being torn by a decision, but had never understood it so clearly as at this moment. It was as if he was not one person but two: one of him wanted nothing so much as to bolt out of this compartment and back to the safety of his friends, his life, the world he understood, while the other knew himself ready to conquer worlds and slay dragons if only the girl whose hand was on his shoulder would stand by his side. But it was a choice he had to make, he couldn't have it both ways, it had to be one or the other, safety or adventure, the known or the unknown—
"Yes," he heard someone whisper, just as someone else shouted, "No!"
The world tore down the middle with a sickening jerk like the train running off its rails, and half of him staggered back and collapsed onto one of the seats in the compartment as the other half reached up and clasped a hand, tiny and warm and real and alive—
With a gasp, Neville opened his eyes. Luna was leaning over him, looking concerned. "The train went around a curve, and you fell," she said. "Are you all right? Did you hit your head?"
"The girl." Neville sat up, breathing hard. "There was a girl—and another boy—"
"There's no one here but us." Luna gestured around the empty compartment. "I was hoping to show you one of the new spells Daddy's planning to print in this month's edition of The Quibbler, that you can use on a window to see your true love, but it didn't work right when I tried it. I'm sorry to have called you away for something so silly."
"Don't mention it." Neville got up to peer out the compartment window. "I was sure there was a girl…"
Looking back the way the train had come, he failed to see Luna's small and secret smile, or her silently blown kiss in the vague upward direction of Outer Time.
"I'm a little sorry for him," Captain murmured into his Pearl's ear. "He never gets to have a you."
"He'll have somebody nice, though." Pearl ran her fingers through his hair. "And I suppose Luna could go looking in that direction. If she really, really wanted to."
"I hope she doesn't," Fox put in, cradling Starwing against him and resting his cheek on top of her head. "He's not worth it at that point."
"You would know." Captain grinned and dodged the halfhearted smack his friend aimed at him, then looked down—though not as far as he had been used to look—at his beloved. "You grew," he said, trying not to let his eyes stray to the area in which the largest gains had been made. "I like it."
"I thought you would." Pearl wiggled a little, and snickered at the flush which rose in Captain's cheeks. "Is it hard to be good?"
"Yes." Captain gently removed her arms from their place around his neck and took one step back from her, though he still held her hand. "It's harder than ever to be good." He glanced in the direction of a large, black, winged horse which was watching them all with an expression of weary equine patience. "Though it does help to have your mum right there."
"We won't have to be good much longer," Starwing said without opening her eyes. "Once we're trained in being what we are now, and we go on our final gathering mission, we can all make our promises at once, and get started on our lives."
"All right, I'll bite." Captain started in the direction of the horse, Pearl skipping beside him, Fox and Starwing on his other flank. "What are we now? And what exactly happened between the last time I saw you, and now?"
"The answer to the second question is a very long story." Fox slid his arm around Starwing's waist for ease of walking. "But it will help to flesh out the answer to the first question, which is: Legendbreakers…"
On another arm of the great sprawling universe of story, a man waited. He had seen his own beginnings only a little while before, and soon he would see to the final ending of his enemies. He could appreciate such an artistic duality, in the moments when cold rage did not turn his eyes to gray ice and harden his pointed face into a sculpture of marble.
It was they who changed me, they who ruined me. If they had never come into my world, I would never have conceived of such a disgusting emotion. Love for her, indeed! As if such a thing were possible!
For that, and for everything else, they will pay. And soon.
He had spent long hours trying, and failing, to breach the security on their domain, until he realized he had no need to attack them in their stronghold. Instead he could force them to come to him, to enter a world where he would control the rules. With their own needs and desires he would trap them, and with their own foolish beliefs he would destroy them.
I have what you want. More, I have who you want. So come to me, little Legendbreakers, Pack and Pride in your vaunted strength. Come, and learn the secrets of how you began.
Before I seal you to the Inner Time of your ridge, to end you once and for all.
