The Gloaming of the Gods

It is funny, Albus thinks, the way clouds move always in smaller and smaller circles of illusion as he grows older. They wisp merrily over the sun dappled field he crosses now, moving slowly but deliberately toward a meeting he knows to be fated.

The village lying in flame behind him does not touch the feral wilderness of this field. Nature is, as always, moving at its own unsympathetic pace, and the birds above are lisping coolly into the breeze that carries the acrid smoke away to the west.

Albus sees the wizard kneeling by a creek, feels his awareness of his own approaching, and focuses on the wand lying untouched in the blades of grass. Grindelwald, however, makes no move for it, and Albus stops several feet away, motioning the slender column of wood to him with a flick of his hand. The pause is heavy, weighted with all that has been done in the name of war, and all that will be done again, cycle renewing like the movement of those clouds overhead. The water of the stream gurgles softly, like the last bitair air sucked into the lungs of the dying before it rattles away to idleness.

“I knew this moment would come,” the dark wizard says finally, in heavy Bavarian tones. “Do you know what it is, to see in your heart what will come, but to know there is nothing but to move forward, on and on until you reach it?”

“Yes,” Albus says quietly, “I do.”

Grindelwald looks at Albus from his position on the bank, in a kneel that is stiffening slowly as his muscles give in to a slow rigor mortis from a dark spell landed at the siege of the village. Soon, the control of his lower body will not be his, and hence the control of any dignity left to him. They both know this.

“Surely, then, you can see that I had no choice. My path was set before me. I had nothing but to step onto it.”

“Ah…there I cannot agree with you. There is always a choice.”

The graying features sneer, “Come now, princeling, you cannot be so naïve as that. We are all merely puppets to Fate, pulled along in grotesque obedience by the strings snapping and pulling at our backs. You can only dance on command. Even you - you dance like a monkey to Fate.”

“It is always easiest to lay our responsibility at the altar of Fate, but that does not make it true. Fate is always a pair of roads before us, and the choice is ours alone to make.”

Grindelwald laughs, shortly, before giving in to a racking cough. When the spasms subside he is shaking, and his voice is weak; a smoky echo of what he must have sounded like as a child.

“All I ever wanted, you know…was for someone to call me home.”

The paralysis has crept up to his lower body, and a dark stain spreads slowly across the crease of his robes.

“Then I shall cut your strings for you, now.”

Grindelwald looks up into Albus’s face, and he is open, diseased, newborn and terrified. “A grand end.”

“You will return to the mother that birthed you just as you came into the world. There are worse things than that.”

And as Albus raises his wand, in the pause before the great vacuum is opened, he whispers softly, “They are calling you Home.”


~~**~~

Albus has left the field behind him; left it to the ministries of several countries to pick over. Left it to the relic hunters and the orators, left the devastated village to the compassionate hands of the healers. He has apparated to a rolling countryside he knows well, and now he walks down a red road slowly.

He enters a pub and moves quietly, unnoticed, through the throng of loud workers just returning from their fields and the cycle of growth and decay, and takes a quiet seat on the end of the bar. He is offered a whiskey and a pint. He accepts the whiskey.

Albus has always liked the tongue of the laborers; the easy cadence of the Irish dreamer-plowman, the bawdy jokes and the lilt of the laughter. He lets it wash over him now, allows it to filter out some of the blackness, some of the guilt of snuffing out life.

Someone drums out a half rhythm on the scarred bar top. A voice rings out and the bar slowly falls into silence. Albus lowers his head to his hands tiredly, and the man sings out regardless.

On Raglan Road…

In India the first jasmine blossoms will be burgeoning.

In Greece the lambs are being sheared.

In Scotland the children of the next war are flirting and dreaming and spending their restless force on chance.

On a plain in Germany a dark, evil, fallible and lost wizard is burning, and his ashes mingle with the storm of inhumanity that sears that plain.

People are burning everywhere.

In this pub in Ireland, Albus Dumbledore lays his head upon the bar and sheds a tear for all that will be, and all that he cannot change.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet…

The boots of the farmers tap quietly, the clink of glasses is muffled.

I had wooed not as I should, a creature made of clay --
When the angel wooes the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.

~