If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr
I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
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21 June 1995, Nurmengard
Harry's previous scythe appeared back in his hand, but in the place of his blade was a swirling edge of fractal light, as if reality itself had been bent, layered, and folded into a weapon. He raised his weapon against Grindelwald and spoke up, his voice echoing over what remained of the battlefield, "You're not the only one who can break the rules of the game, Grindelwald."
The Dark Lord stared at Harry, looking even more surprised than before, and the young mage could understand why. He had beaten Grindelwald. There was no going around this. Harry had won their previous fight. His plan had worked. He had trapped Grindelwald in a realm of his own creation, where time itself was frozen completely. It was an attack from the Dark that literally saved him. Harry saw that now.
His plan backfired in a way that Harry didn't really expect. The fact that Harry created a realm out of nothing meant that this dimension wouldn't have the inherent protections that the material realm had, the same protection that was stopping the Light and Dark from invading. He had assumed that by creating the realm while inside Midgard, its properties would protect him, but he forgot the fact that he was essentially using his soul as the realm's basis, meaning that, given the multiversal properties of souls, it made the realm accessible to the Light and Dark, and since the Champion of the Dark had been trapped there, it was no wonder that the entity decided to attack when it could.
It wasn't fair, but battle seldom was. The fact remained that Grindelwald was being supported by a very powerful external entity, while Harry had to rely on his wits to make any progress. It must have grated his pride seriously to actually end up being bailed out by his patron, after losing to a teenager.
Nevertheless, as he watched Grindelwald conjure creatures of Darkness, each one almost as big as a small building, ready to kill him, something just clicked. Grindelwald was essentially channelling the nigh-infinite power of the Dark. It was only right that he did the same.
He had been leery of trying to mess with dimensions too much, and with good reason. Everything showed that the void between worlds was a very dangerous place. Nidhogg's presence alone made him extremely wary, and there was always the fear of making too much noise, of putting their realm into the eyes of something powerful, which was a bad idea, to say the least.
But right now, he didn't care, not anymore. He was out of options. He couldn't see Marinakis or Vlad anywhere, and literally trapping Grindelwald in an inescapable prison hadn't worked. And so, he reached out to eternity, and it answered.
The process was agonising, to say the least. To hold even a fraction of a fraction of it in his body had overwhelmed his magic circuits very quickly, exactly as Grindelwald and Dumbledore were limited due to their human bodies. Of course, they had grown with this power inside them, which slowly made their bodies adapt to channelling it.
If Harry had been some sort of magical creature, he would have maybe been able to withhold the energy for a handful of seconds, but that wasn't the case. It was why Grindelwald was so much more powerful now; he didn't even have a physical body anymore, just a projection of dark energy that manifested his soul, allowing him to bypass his previous physical limitations.
Nevertheless, Harry had something that neither Grindelwald nor Dumbledore had, and that was mastery over the Deathly Hallows. He had used his family crest to combine them into a scythe, capable of harming souls, phasing through any shields, and amplifying magic, but it hadn't been enough against Grindelwald; nothing was.
But it was almost perfectly designed to channel an enormous amount of magic. And so, eternity was absorbed by the Elder Wand, unable to shatter thanks to the resurrection stone, and grounded by the Cloak of Invisibility, which wrapped the unstable energy in layers of unreality. The scythe didn't crack or burn. No, it sang, much like Harry was.
It was perfect, and with a slice, he unmade the shadows that had attacked him. The weapon made him feel whole, in a way that he had never felt before, and the battlefield stood silent, as Harry had done the impossible once more.
The Dark Lord's eyes were wide in shock, having reverted into a semi-human form. He murmured to himself, but Harry could still hear it very clearly, "What are you?"
"I told you. I'm Harry Potter, the last Peverell, the Master of the Deathly Hallows, and the Lord of Space and Time. These weren't all empty titles, you know."
If Harry couldn't defeat Grindelwald by trapping him inside a realm, then he'd bring the realms to him. With a flick of his scythe, a gigantic rift opened from the sky, and a small meteorite appeared, falling towards Grindelwald at a very high speed.
Grindelwald's response was immediate. His eyes widened for a single heartbeat before his hands shot up, releasing a massive beam of Darkness that howled against the falling mass. It wasn't just a spell; it was a torrent of void, a scream of entropy given form, and it slammed into the meteorite with enough force to tear apart the very air. The two forces clashed mid-sky, held in a suspended battle of wills, the meteorite halting slightly as the beam flared brighter.
But it wasn't a rock.
It wasn't even a meteorite.
It was a mass of condensed, formless chaos, energy from the space between worlds, the Void itself wrapped and woven by Harry's will into something shaped. Something aimed. It was not bound by physical law. And as such, it began to unravel the Darkness that resisted it.
Grindelwald's deduction of the situation was impressively quick. Instead of panicking, he channelled as much energy as he could into a shield, a monstrous dome of Darkness, jagged and pulsing. It formed around him, a fortress forged from his very essence, trying to hold back the inevitable.
The meteorite struck the shield, and the world broke.
There was no sound, only distortion. A ripple of unreality surged outward, bending light, curving the sky, and tearing gravity into ribbons. The air folded, the ground buckled, and for a moment, space itself was wounded. For a fraction of a second, the infinity of the Dark met the eternity of the void, and the material world didn't know how to handle it.
Nevertheless, it was an opportunity. Harry warped space in front of him, leaping in the air, thanks to a magic circle beneath his feet. He accelerated, scaling through the giant rocks whose behaviour was random given the uncertainty of the rules of physics due to the impact of the two forces.
He threw himself forward, but Grindelwald saw him coming and conjured spears of shadows, trying to deter him. Harry, though, turned into his raven form and dodged them, while keeping his momentum, before turning back into his human form, with his scythe raised, fractal edge gleaming like the edge of reality itself. He didn't aim for Grindelwald's body; he aimed for his tether, his connection with the Dark, much like what Lily had done before. After all, with a body made essentially from energy from the Dark, if Harry severed the connection, then Grindelwald would die.
Harry had barely touched it before Grindelwald realised what was happening, and condensed a pulse of destruction given form, essentially the same amount of energy that he was sending to attack his opponent.
The last Potter raised a hasty barrier, creating layers of bent space and temporal traps, but they were overwhelmed immediately. Every piece of magic was consumed, immediately, undone by the sheer potency of the Dark. The young mage found himself having barely been able to survive the attack by singing a small realm into existence, which took the brunt of the attack.
Nevertheless, the impact sent Harry flying away, and he found himself on the ground, barely having succeeded in surviving the impact by conjuring a magic circle to stop his descent. He expected Grindelwald to follow up on his attack, only to hear a great impact as the Dark Lord was hit with the meteorite.
Huh, at least his attack distracted Grindelwald. It was the logical step to take. Harry's attack could have actually harmed him, and instead, Grindelwald had let himself be hit with an attack he could regenerate from, instead of suffering any permanent harm. Too bad for him, the ball of chaos had done exactly what Harry had wanted.
When the condensed chaos struck, the impact created some weird chaotic singularity for lack of a better word. It wasn't just space bending or time stuttering. It was the very concept of them faltering. Up no longer meant anything. The sky twisted into a spiral of mirrored reflections. Colours bled out of the world, turning into sounds, while gravity surged sideways before collapsing inward again.
It had created a miniature slice of chaos in a structured realm, a place in which, for just a period of time, the laws of physics, the laws of space and time became far more flexible. With a flick of his scythe, the breach closed itself, and Harry watched as Grindelwald reformed himself once more. He sent a beam of Darkness at Harry, who countered by opening a breach in front of him. A solar flare met the beam of pure destruction and held it in place.
Grindelwald's beam faltered, distorted mid-flight as if the magic itself was hesitating. The structured entropy that had once torn through shields and realms began to warp, its edges flickering, bleeding light, unravelling into incoherence. His magic destabilised, spasming, erratic, bleeding fragments of unbound concept, and then, like a collapsing star, it flared once more… and disintegrated into a chaotic solar flare that licked across his semi-corporeal form, tearing through his shadow-flesh with ease.
In a second, though, he was back, his eyes glowing in fury, "What did you do?!"
Harry coughed, pushing himself upright with his scythe, grinning despite the blood on his lips. "You've always underestimated small things, Grindelwald. You regenerated from the attack, yes, but chaos had a tendency to stick around."
He stood fully, the scythe glowing in his grip, "You're channelling structured destruction, entropy given form, but this," he gestured to the crater where reality still twitched and shimmered, "this isn't structure. We're fighting in a domain of chaos now. And chaos doesn't have rules."
Grindelwald didn't respond, not with words, anyway.
The shadows behind Harry twisted, darker than even the void-choked sky above. No sound, no warning. Just a spike of power. A blade of pure annihilation surged forward, forged from distilled oblivion, aiming for Harry's exposed back. It moved with certainty, the kind of attack that didn't miss, didn't fail.
Except it did.
The blade stopped.
Mid-motion.
Frozen inches from Harry's spine, its edges vibrating against the tension of locked time. Grindelwald was behind it, eyes wide, body strained forward like a predator in mid-pounce, frozen not by choice, but by force. And then, like a corrupted reel unwinding, he began to move backwards. Slowly, agonizingly, second by second, the entire sequence unravelled, Grindelwald stepping back, the blade returning to his hand, the shadows retreating like a receding tide.
Harry turned his head slightly, watching with mild interest as the Dark Lord was rewound like a spell undone, his hand glowing slightly, the only sign of his magic, holding the Champion of the Dark, for as much as possible in the small trap. After all, for just this moment, the laws of space and time were his to command.
And so, Grindelwald lunged again, same attack, same fury.
And again, he rewound.
Again.
And again.
Each time, the moment snapped backwards, a time loop. Or it would have been better to call it a time trap. Here, in this broken pocket of warped space, time didn't flow; it spiralled. And Harry commanded it with an iron fist.
It was draining, to say the least, but if he could just stop it for a little longer, he would win. This was a race against time, and for now, time was his bitch. Of course, Harry expected Grindelwald to quickly realise what was going on. After all, he would sense that time wasn't flowing naturally at some point.
But time in a magical battle was a powerful thing. Preparation and setting up complex attacks could change the outcome easily. And the young mage had bought himself enough time to set up his final attack. This was it, all or nothing. He would kill Grindelwald.
Slowly, he sang a realm into creation and created a breach within it. By his command, his realm slowly started to absorb as much of the void as he could, filled with enough energy to create a miniature realm. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't even stable, but it would do.
Meanwhile, his grasp on his time loop was slowly fading, as the Dark Lord obviously kept fighting against it. Harry did his best to reinforce the trap, but eventually, the Dark Lord broke through it with a pulse of pure darkness.
Harry warped space in front of him, redirected the attack, and the Dark Lord growled, having fallen to his knees slightly, "You cannot win. The best you could do is delay me. Eventually, you'll run out of tricks, and I'll tear your soul apart. Eventually, my ritual will activate, and believe me, anyone you ever loved, anyone you even felt a smidge of care towards, will suffer. Believe me, I don't lack creativity."
The young mage gave him a smirk, "Oh, I think I have one more trick up my sleeve."
He ran towards Grindelwald, his scythe raised, the fractal edge bending reality in its wake, trailing a cascade of collapsing light and reversed echoes. The Dark Lord snarled, raising a shield of shadows layered with wards and entropic pulses, barriers that had once withstood gods.
But they shattered before contact.
Harry didn't strike the shield. He struck before the shield existed.
Cause unravelled. Effect took its place first. The blow had already landed before Grindelwald's magic had a chance to react. Time and space screamed in protest, but the laws had already lost their grip. And so, the scythe sliced clean through the Dark Lord's chest.
Grindelwald gasped, reeling, stumbling backwards. The connection flared behind his eyes, raw, panicked. Harry didn't stop. He twisted the blade, and with a single wordless command, the scythe absorbed the small realm he had carved earlier into existence, folding it into the weapon. The Elder Wand drank it greedily, stabilised by the Resurrection Stone, wrapped in unreality by the Cloak.
He raised it again.
The link was there, flickering, struggling. A tether to the Dark, raw, ancient, infinite, and for a moment, Harry held it in his hand.
He was going to cut it.
He was going to end it.
But chaos… dissipated.
Without warning, the air crystallised into stillness. The sky smoothed, and the horizon snapped back into linearity. Magic condensed, clarified, calcified. Order reasserted itself with such force that it drowned chaos with silence. A tidal wave of Light followed a purity that smothered paradox and burned the frayed ends of time itself.
Grindelwald's eyes widened in recognition and savage relief. Harry was barely able to dodge the attack of pure Light, an attack that created pure stillness, essentially disintegrating everything completely.
Then he saw him.
White robes, unmarred. Hair gleaming like silver fire, but it was his eyes, brilliant, blinding white, that silenced everything else.
Dumbledore had arrived.
Harry suppressed the urge to groan. As if everything hadn't been complicated so far.
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AN: This chapter is a bit on the chaotic side. Harry technically won twice against Grindelwald, which is also backed by the Dark, which is kinda badass, but I guess it also makes it feel a bit cheap. Of course, Grindelwald is still limited by the fact that he's not human anymore. He's essentially a crystallisation of the Dark in the material realm, which limits his flexibility but increases in raw power, not a good trade-off for someone who already overpowered everyone else. Still, he had to do it to keep the ritual running, but there is also something else, which I'm trying really hard not to spoil, which is affecting him. Honestly, this could have gone either way, and I decided at the last minute to have Harry win. I'm not sure it was the right choice, but it's the one I went with. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any recommendations.
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If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr
I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.