Anitra's Dance

“This
al ial is locked!”

Albus
Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall, Severus Snape and the rest of the members of
the Order of the Phoenix stood in front of the offending mirror. Ron, Hermione
and Neville, wands out and charged, were searching the surroundings. But there
was no trace of their two friends. It was as if Harry and Anitra had vanished
into thin air.

Mad Eye
Moody, his magical eye circling madly,
stepped forward, carrying an instrument of the sort that people of the medieval
ages would have called an ‘atrocity’. He reached out the instrument to the
extent that is was between his magical eye and the centre of the glass exactly
and proceeded to gaze into it.

Behind
them, Nymphadora Tonks ruffled up her now green hair and stamped the damp
ground impatiently with her long booted legs. She had remained behind, mostly
to avoid stumbling in front of the group and thus delaying them, but also
because she kept having the feeling that someone was following them. Someone
very discreet and silent. She squinted her eyes, cou could see nothing, no
matter how hard she tried. The trees and grass before her were still, cold and
silent of their secrets. She then turned her attention to Mad Eye’s stunt. This
was something she didn’t want to miss.

*

“What do
you mean... she is your work.” Harry’s voice was merely a whisper. Voldemort
aka Tom Riddle aka the Dark Lord was thoroughly enjoying himself. This was the
hour when he would dazzle his prey with his brilliance, narrate the genius
details of his plan and brag about his strength and guile.

“I style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>created her, you silly boy. I knew I
could not penetrate Hogwarts to get to you. So the mountain had to come to
Mohammad. But how to lure you? Well, as they say, the silly literates, style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>cherchez la femme. You had to fall in
love with a puppet. MY puppet.”

Anitra
continued not to understand what was being said; she shook her pretty face in
disbelief.

“And a
soul?” Voldemort threw back his head and laughed. “Such an overrated concept. Personally
I disposed of mine ages ago. Too much trouble. However... far be it for me to
make you happy, my dear – but you do actually have TWO souls.”

“What?” she
asked weakly. Harry could hardly breathe. He still hadn’t moved on since the
‘she is my work’ part.

Voldemort
had moved away from them a bit; he had started to paced in front of them,
waving at the landscape.

“Can your
pathetic little minds understand why I chose this place?”

“This is
where you killed another of your relatives?” Harry asked in stark irony through
clenched teeth that, for normals boys, would clatter.

“That would
have been suitable,” their foe mused, as if the idea really appealed to him,
“but it is rather more mundane than that. This, my dearies, is one of the spots
in England where no one would stop to wonder about magical sounds and agonising
screams of pain. This is known as the home for the Scarecrow, Dr Syn’s alter ego.”

GB'>“Really!”
Anitra said with disgust, “that’s just a piece of fiction.”

“It doesn’t
matter,” Voldie said, looking at her reproachfully, “the legend lives. Here the
inhabitants are used to the idea of nightmarish shapes riding the marshes. They
will not alert the authorities until it is too late and I have started the
annihilation of the miserable muggles.”

Anitra
finally began to understand the extent of this person’s madness.

“Say
again?”

She never
got a verbal answer. Instead her body was flung into the air at the bidding of
the Cruciatus curse that made her writhe in pain.

Harry
roared with anger and launched forward. Voldemort’s terrible voice stopped him.

“style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>BE-HAVE!! Or she will most certainly suffer
an endlessly painful death. You appear to have forgotten, young Potter, that I
have the wand and the advantage.”

Harry
stopped immediately.

Anitra was
suspended in midair, but she never really acknowledged the strange fact.
Writhing in pain, she could sense only one thing: agony. In a way an odd
feeling of peace, she decided somewhere at the back of her head. There was no
room for worries anymore, no room for fear, no energy for happiness or any
other amotion. There was only pain.

And then suddenly
it subsided, and all the emotions in the world returned to her with a vengeance
and swiftly made her want back the pain. Was this how cutters felt?

“You will
like pain eventually. You will long for it and welcome it and love me for
subjecting you to it. I will make you used to it. As my slave, you will not
only obey orders, you will wish to do so of all your heart.”

“style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>I –
am – not – your – slave,” she said through gritted teeth, fighting to
breathe after the brutal shockwave of pain.

“No?” A
slow smile spread over the man’s snakelike features. “Oh, that’s right. Having
a memory problem, dearie? Let me jug it for you.”

And all of
a sudden two figures hovered in front of her. One was the child she had seen in
the Mirror of Erised and the other, she did not know or recognise. It was a
very old woman with silver grey hair, angular features and dark brown eyes.

This time
Harry saw what Anitra saw, and he gasped. Though neither of the figures was
Anitra, they both looked like very close relations.

“It was complicated,”
Voldemort went on, dreamily, “I neeeded a trustworthy spy that could lure Harry
Potter out of his safe cocoon. But the boy is perceptive; he would quickly see
through a spy, so the spy had to unaware of being a spy. More than that, the
boy needed to fall in love with the spy. How else would they get close enough
for me to spy on him? The answer was simple: I needed a female spy. Potter’s
tender age and raging hormones would help, but I had to be completely positive
that he would fall for her. And like any other Pygmalion, I needed proper
quality materials for such a feat. I needed a dead body as basic flesh.

So those
were the criteria. I searched high and low, but found no such creature. Who
would attract the Potter boy? She had to match his unique qualities: qualities
honed from his experiences and his talents.

Time was
getting close. I had to make my move before the boy left Hogwarts. Once a full
wizard and perhaps an Auror, fighting him would be much harder. Unable to find
the female in this time frame, I began to broaden my search to other time
frames. It had another advantage: It would be easier to foresee any effects of
random deaths. Yeeees,” he continued at the gasps this news earned him,
“naturally the person in question would have to die to become my willing
servant. Finally I did find someone who might be used with some modifications.
A muggle whose mind was strong enough to match Potter’s, scarred enough to
understand pain and intelligent enough to make him admire her. The problem,
however, was transportinr tor to this time. Her fate and accomplishments were
already set. Going further into the future made me realised that she had to
live her life; changing the future could change the past and vice versa. So
I would take her from her deathbed at a
ripe age – but that presented me with another problem: how to rejuvenate her.”

Something
had started prickling the delicate skin of Anitra’s nape as she was getting a
hint as to where this was going. Her glance went quickly to the two figures that
were beginning to look mightily familiar as the mad wizard’s speech was slowly
stimulating her memory.

“And it was
then that fate showed me how it favoured me, how I controlled Fate: Kate
Annah Hench had had a daughter.”

A sharp
intake and a hiss.

“Normally,
not even a daughter is enough for rejuvenating a person, but this case was
unique. Oh, bless the muggles and their silly attempts to restore their fragile
health and puny lives: The girl had received her mother’s kidney when she was
eight!

“.... and
she died when she was ten. I hastened to join her in the moment of death.”

A sob was
escaping Anitra’s clenched throat as the memories, one more brutal and
overwhelming than the other, rushed back at her with merciless speed. Harry
breathed heavily, so wanting to reach out and console her, but remained rooted
in the fear that his actions might provoke the Dark Lord.

And then
his attention was drawn to something else. A rustle and the faint sound of
voices. Then a flash of dark cloaks and approaching shapes became more clear.

The Order
of the Phoenix were coming to the rescue.

*

The magic
of the mirror had not been difficult to trace. Disapparating (once they were
clear of Hogwarts grounds) and Apparating in the right place had been equally
easily accomplished. Seeing and realising the scene before them, however, was
probably the hardest the members of the Order of the Phoenix had ever
experienced.

They saw a
young wizard without a wand, with his black hair in all directions, his green
eyes flashing, and anger, fear and tristesse painted in his smooth features,
completely helpless against a vicious snake, armed with a powerful wand. They
saw a girl, barely a woman, suspended in midair, clearly suffering from the
aftereffects of a Cruciatus curse, and tsaw saw two unknown figures hovering
surrealistically between their evil foe and his defenseless victims.

Things
could not have been any worse.

Correction.

They then
saw Voldemort give a signal as he was sighting them and all his Death Eaters
ruo hio his attention. Snape by Dumbledore’s side hissed and clutched his arm,
his knuckles white with the strain and his dark eyes clouded with pain.

This was
worse.

Being of
age, he was allowed to apparate. And even if he was not, he would still have
done so – following the enigmatic and secret group to this place where his
father might be.

From a
hiding place behind a lone tree, Draco watched how the Death Eaters encircled
Dumbledore and his followers. He leaned forward, just a little, to see if he
could recognise one of the black floating spectres under his hood.

style='mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'>Father. Are you there? How did you get out of
Azakaban? What are you doing?EN-GB'>

*

“style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>Dumbledore!” Harry yelled, both as
comfort and encouragement to Anitra and as a threat to Voldemort, “give it up,
Voldemort, you don’t stand a chance now. You know Dumbledore, don’t you? You
know how powerful he is.”

Trying very
hard to draw advantage of the only weakness of Voldemort he knew of, Harry
tried to disencourage their enemy by reminding him of his innate fear of the
Headmaster.

But
Voldemort smiled and a cold shiver travelled down Harry’s spine.

“I was
hoping he would join us – to witness my utter victory and fall to his knees to
worship me.”

“style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>In your fucking
dreams,” Anitra forced from her abused throat. Her voice was leaded with an
intense wrath that impressed even Harry.

“That
reminds me,” Voldemort said, narrowing his eyes and then turned his undivided
attention to her again. “Let us proceed our little tale, shall we?”

Ignoring
what went on behind him and evidently and openly enjoying the disclosure of Anitra’s
heritage and the pain it evoked, he continued his self-promotion.

“My
decision to be close to the moment of death was fortunate. You see, according
to history, Anitra Hench Kyrkeberg died by drowning in the Cottage Lake. She
could not swim, having been ruled by illness most of her life. But like all
muggles she had plenty of buoyancy to float. Naturally I had to alter that
criterion.”

Harry
didn’t like the sound of that. Nor did he like the fact that Anitra apparently
had stopped breathing. The two figures still remained mute pictures to
illustrate the bizarre and uncanny tale that was unfolded in front of them.

“Changing
history and time is dangerous, even for me, but in this case I was fulfilling
history. It occurred to me when I saw the child float and heard her heart still
beating: She would have survived had I not intervened. History couldn’t have
that. I couldn’t have that. Instead...”

He was
interrupted by a voice that sounded so alien to Harry that he, for a brief
moment, almost thought it came from another person.

“style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I... remember... I saw the light from the
surface, but something grabbed my foot. I looked down, boundless fear filling
my chest, and I saw this dark figure with its red snake eyes. YOU!!!”

Voldemort
bowed in mockery. “I am honoured to leave such a gratified first impression on
such a young child. I’m sure your mother had the same impression.”

“Yes,”
Anitra said, now shaking violently, “I remember you. You were standing there in
front of me. I thought you were the Angel of Death, coming to take me to my
daughter....”

“And I
was,” said the dark wizard, barely being able to keep back a huge childish grin.

Oblivious
to what he was saying and to the situation at hand, Anitra suddenly screamed in
anger and grief.

“style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>YOU – KILLED – MY – DAUGHTER – MY – MOTHER
– MY LITTLE GIRL....”

And the
teenage giho who was still hanging in the air broke free of the spell by an
impossible effort and unimaginable force and sprang forward in a mindless and
seemingly futile attack, fuelled by hatred and despondency.

Meanwhile,
a blonde boy leapt forward as he recognised someondernder one of the black
hoods. Around him a battle raged, spells were thrown almost randomly and curses
sang in the air.

*

Though
first somewhat surprised that a muggle had been able to break his magic,
Voldemort soon became the master of the situation yet again and grabbed the
desperate girl by the throat before she even had a chance to touch him. Harry
cried out, hardly knowing what he was saying himself.

“There,
there,” Voldemort laughed, “calm down, little kitten. You can’t fight Fate and
you certainly can’t fight Voldemort.” He held her out like she was a chicken,
completely disregarding the fact that her face was, rather swiftly, turning
purple.

“style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>LET
GO OF HER. LET GO OF HER!!!” howled Harry, looking around in a frenzy
to find a way to get them out of there.

Then
something happened behind them that made Tom Riddle turn around. A deafening roar
was coming from the line of Death Eaters, who were now faced with a violent
attack of a herd of Minotaurs that made the ground shake and a very angry
Hagrid. Behind him several giants, led by Madame Olympe, were making their
destructive way.

And that’s
when Anitra instinctively struck. Before Harry’s incredulous eyes she grabbed
Voldemort’s right hand, so tightly around her neck, and swung her legs up to
wrap round his arm. The sum of her anger and fears snapped that thin skeleton
arm in two with a sickening sound. A scream of pain escaped the evil wizard’s
mouth; he fell to his knees and as a reflex grabbed his right arm with his left
hand. Anitra had fallen, choking and coughing, a few feet away, and she, too,
noticed that Voldemort had lost his wand. Harry moved more quickly than
lightening.

“style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>ACCIO WAND,” and the Dark Lord’s wand
came flying into his hand, willingly obeying he who had been the former owner
of its brother.

Furious
with pain and insult, Voldemort was reaching for Anitra as he drew a knife from
the folds of his cloak. Too late did he notice that Harry had his own agenda.

Harry had
known that he could never kill to save his own life. Saving Anitra’s, however, was
another matter. He saw the glinting knife high above Anitra’s chest, he felt
hin ben being filled with the very essence of fear, and he reacted to save his
love and the meaning of his life.

“style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>AVADA
KEDAVRA!!”

The bolt from
Voldemort’s powerful wand caught Tom Riddle right in the chest, travelled up
his neck and enveloped his head. He didn’t even have time to scream. Instead,
he fell to the ground as abru as as a puppet with its strings suddenly cut;
the knife fell from his lifeless fingers and his torso fell on top of it.

For a moment
– just for a second, both Anitra and Harry thought they had seen the pale
curtain of a ghost trying to escape the dying body; but also this spectre had
to give up and was dissolved with a sigh, evaporating into the wind.

Anitra lay
flat on the ground, supporting herself on her elbows. Harry had sunk to his
knees, feeling numb and drained.

Voldemort
was dead.

*

style='mso-spacerun:yes'>

TBC

Well, that
was my version of a possible death for Voldie. What did you think? R&R,
please – also constructive critisism – it’s very valuable.

But hang
on, cuz’ there’s more. We need Dumbledore to explain a lot of things (doesn’t
he always?), and what will happen with Anitra?