Chapter 101: The Trap
Disclaimer:
Harry Potter and all of its characters belong to J.K. Rowling.
I own only the original characters I create.
"Dialogue"
'Thoughts'
-Author notes-
Chapter 101: The Trap
One moment, Harry was standing in the living room of the cabin, his wand in his hand, his heart pounding with the anticipation of battle. The next, the world erupted into chaos.
The cabin, the safe house that had been their base of operations, their sanctuary, had simply ceased to exist. Dozens of demolition curses slammed into it from every direction, tearing through wood and stone and magic like tissue paper. The structure exploded in a shower of splinters and debris, the sound so loud that Harry felt it in his bones.
He reacted on instinct.
"Aegis Maxima!"
The shield charm erupted from his wand, and a shimmering dome of blue-white light expanded outward to encompass himself and everyone within a ten-foot radius.
Bellatrix, Peter, Rabastan, and a few others whose names he didn't have time to register.
The debris bounced off the shield, and for a single, breathless moment, Harry thought they might be alright.
Then he saw the bodies.
Three Knights...Avery, Gibbon, and a younger man whose name Harry couldn't remember had been outside the shield's protection. They lay on the ground, their bodies broken and bleeding, their eyes staring sightlessly at the sky.
And the attack had only just begun.
Harry looked up. The sky was filled with dark shapes. There were brooms, dozens of them, each one carrying a wizard or witch in the dark robes of the Ministry. Aurors and hit wizards, all of Dumbledore's finest soldiers.
On the ground, more were emerging from the treeline, their wands raised, their cold eyes searching for targets.
There were at least a hundred of them.
'This was all a trap,' Harry realized, his blood running cold. 'They knew. They knew about the safe house. They knew about the raid. They knew everything we were about to do.'
His mind raced, piecing together the implications. The aurors must have been waiting for them...waiting until all the Knights were assembled in one place, until they were at their most vulnerable. This wasn't a chance encounter. This was a carefully orchestrated ambush.
'Someone betrayed us.'
The thought hit him hard. There was only one way Dumbledore could have known about this meeting. Only one way he could have known the exact location of the safe house, the exact time of the raid.
There was a traitor among the Knights.
Harry's mind flashed to Daphne's father, Sebastian Greengrass, who had warned them about a traitor in their midst. The identity had been unknown then, a shadow lurking in the darkness. But now, as Harry scanned the battlefield, looking for familiar faces, he was reminded of the one that was conspicuously absent.
Lucius Malfoy.
'No,' Harry thought, the denial rising unbidden. 'It can't be. He's Draco's father. He's helped me before. He...'
But the evidence was damning. Lucius should have been here. He had been part of the planning, part of the preparation. And yet, at the most critical moment, he was nowhere to be found, giving only a flimsy excuse.
He's the traitor.
But there was no time to process this, no time to grieve. The battle was upon them.
"FIGHT!" Tom's voice cut through the chaos, magically amplified, commanding. "Fight, damn you! Fight!"
The Knights responded.
Spells flew through the air like rain, red and green and purple, curses and counter-curses, shields and hexes.
The night was lit by flashes of magical light, by explosions and fire and the screams of the dying.
Harry moved.
He had trained for this...trained for months in the Grimoire's inner library, trained with his ancestors' portraits, trained until his body knew the spells better than his mind.
He ran across the battlefield, appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye, firing curses and shields and counter-spells faster than most wizards could track.
"Verbero." A concussive blast sent three aurors flying.
"Gladius Incendia." A blade of fire sliced through a wizard's shield like paper.
"Speculum Aeternum." A curse rebounded off his mirror charm, striking down the caster.
Harry fought like a demon, like a force of nature. But even as he fought, he watched his friends die.
Rabastan Lestrange fell first.
The gentle giant of a man who had taught Harry how to bake cookies, who had laughed and joked and treated everyone like family...was struck by three curses simultaneously. He crumpled to the ground, his body smoking, his eyes wide with shock. He was dead before he hit the earth.
The Carrow twins fell together.
Alecto and Amycus, who had spent countless hours teaching Harry about runes and wards, who had argued with each other constantly but loved each other fiercely, who had been inseparable since birth...they died side by side, their hands clasped, their wands still firing even as the light left their eyes.
Fenrir Greyback fell roaring.
The werewolf, gruff and terrifying but secretly kind, charged into a group of aurors with nothing but his claws and teeth. He took down four of them before a killing curse struck him in the chest. He fell with a smile on his face, his yellow eyes blazing with defiance.
Augustus Rookwood. Evan Rosier. Selwyn. Travers. Mulciber.
One by one, the Knights fell.
Harry wanted to scream, wanted to rage, wanted to tear the world apart with his bare hands. But he couldn't stop. He couldn't grieve. He could only fight.
And then, when things couldn't get worse, Dumbledore arrived.
The sky seemed to darken even further as he appeared, descending from above like a god of judgment. His silver robes billowed around him, his long white beard flowing in a wind that touched no one else.
His eyes...those terrible, piercing blue eyes, swept over the battlefield, taking in the carnage with an expression of cold satisfaction.
"Tom," Dumbledore said, his voice carrying across the chaos like thunder. "How good of you to gather all your little friends in one place. It saves me so much trouble."
Tom Riddle turned to face him.
The leader of the Knights of Walpurgis looked older than Harry had ever seen him. His dark eyes were filled with a sorrow so deep it seemed bottomless, a weariness that spoke of decades of struggle, of loss, of hope that had been crushed again and again.
"Albus," Tom said, and his voice was calm. Almost peaceful. "I should have known you'd come yourself."
"I couldn't miss this." Dumbledore smiled, and it was the smile of a predator. "The final destruction of the Knights of Walpurgis. The end of a nuisance that has plagued me for far too long."
"You haven't won yet."
"Haven't I?. Let's see what else you have left then."
The duel began.
Dumbledore and Tom moved so fast that it was hard to follow them. Their wands became blurs; their spells would tear through the air with sounds like thunderclaps.
Curses that should have been impossible...killing curses that split into three, four, five separate beams; shields that absorbed spells and reflected them tenfold; transfiguration that turned the very ground beneath their feet into weapons.
But Tom was losing.
Harry could see it, even from a distance. The older man was slower, weaker. His time as a prisoner, his multiple deaths and resurrections...they had taken their toll. He was fighting with everything he had, but it wasn't enough.
And then it happened.
A curse, Harry didn't see what kind, struck Tom in the chest. He flew backward, his wand spinning from his hand, his body hitting the ground with a sickening thud. Blood poured from a wound in his side, dark and terrible.
"NOOO!"
Bellatrix's scream tore through the night, raw and anguished. She tried to run to him.
Tom lay on the ground, his chest heaving, his eyes fixed on the sky. For a moment, Harry thought he was dead. Then, slowly, painfully, Tom turned his head.
He looked at Bellatrix. At Harry. At the few Knights who were still standing.
"Take him," Tom rasped, his voice barely audible. "Take him away. He must live."
He then heard a man scream nearby.
An auror who had been aiming his wand at him suddenly clutched his ear, blood streaming between his fingers. Something small and brown was scurrying away from him...a rat, Harry realized dimly, a rat that had just bitten off a piece of the man's ear.
The rat transformed.
Peter stood before him, his wand raised, his face pale with terror but his eyes determined.
"Harry, you must escape!" Peter shouted. "NOW!"
Bellatrix was already there, her hand closing around Harry's arm like a vice. She was crying, tears streaming down her face, but her voice was steady.
"Hold on to me."
"No, I can't leave him-"
"He's already gone, Harry." Bellatrix's voice cracked. "He's already gone. We have to go. NOW."
She forced him onto her broom, kicking off the ground before he could resist. They shot into the air, breaking through the anti-apparition barrier that the aurors had erected, the magical resistance tearing at their skin like invisible claws.
Harry looked back.
Dumbledore stood over Tom's broken body, his wand raised. He said something...Harry couldn't hear the words, and then there was a flash of green light.
Tom Riddle's body went still, and Harry knew it was over.
"We can bring him back," Bellatrix kept repeating, her voice a broken whisper. "We can bring him back..."
Harry said nothing.
He knew the truth. He knew about the empty Horcruxes, the spent soul fragments, the immortality that had been lost. Tom Riddle was dead. Truly, permanently dead.
And so were Rabastan and the Carrows and Fenrir and Rookwood and Rosier and Selwyn and Travers and Mulciber and Avery and Gibbon and all the others who had fallen tonight.
The Knights of Walpurgis were dead.
Bellatrix's hand moved, and Harry felt the pull of a portkey...an emergency portkey, he realized, one that would take them back to the headquarters. Back to safety. Back to whatever was left.
The world twisted, and they were gone.
They appeared on the surface of the island, right outside the fisherman's cabin.
Harry's feet hit the ground hard, his legs nearly buckling beneath him.
Beside him, Bellatrix stumbled, catching herself on a rock. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes hollow with grief.
"We need to regroup," she said, her voice mechanical, as if she was reciting a script. "We need to find the survivors. We need to-"
She stopped.
Harry looked up.
And then he saw it.
The fisherman's cabin was gone.
Where the dilapidated structure had once stood, there was only a smoking crater, the earth scorched and blackened. The entrance to the underground facility, the hidden staircase that led to the main hall, the war room, the living quarters...was buried beneath tons of rubble.
And beyond the crater, the island itself was scarred. Great gouges had been torn from the earth, trees uprooted, rocks shattered. The air smelled of smoke and death and dark magic.
The headquarters, their sanctuary, their home...was destroyed.
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