Our Star

Our Star

On the second level of an abandoned building, next to a badly decayed table and chair, is a book. Ordinarily nothing worth a second glance, the book is more of a thick cardboard notepad. The cover is torn, and through the tear there is visible a scrawled, weighted script. A ballpoint pen, half melted to the simple, dusty wooden floor lies nearby.

If someone were to open that book, the first thing they would notice is that many pages are missing. This person might also notice the flaky black residue that has covered the lime-green cover in irregular, splattered splotches. By this time, the examiner would doubtless have caught sight of the actual script the book contained, and the physical properties of the tome would be disregarded, and the person would be consumed by the urge to read it from cover to cover. It might be a manner of enchantment, or perhaps a morbid curiosity, because the first remaining entry isn't particularly encouraging... it reads:

The Ministry of Magic is gone. They tore apart the walls and floors, and those that were kill quickly they sifted through the rubble to find. I saw it on the television, for by this time the barriers between the Wizarding world and the Muggle one had been hastily cast aside in an effort to gain more allies in the fight against Voldemort. These barriers, I think, were too quickly put down. As one straddling both worlds, I read the Wizard's Herald and Time magazine... watched in stupefied, grinning awe as Cornelius Fudge shook Tony Blair's hand in front of the U.N. building in New York, with President Bush and Kofi Annan looking on. But there was an air of levity surrounding these events that was entirely inappropriate.

It had taken a hole the size of a 747, torn into the side of Hogwarts, and over six hundred dead children and teachers to tear down these century old boundaries, yet the Muggles had absolutely no concept of the battle they were about to enter. They smiled and saw the simple cottages and old technology used by the Wizards, and despite the various magical marvels that were preformed for them, they still could not fully believe they had been deceived for over six hundred years. It was generally thought that this was all some kind of trick, perpetrated by a collection of people who did nothing but dance naked under a full moon. It was so hard to absorb the whole of the Wizarding world, the Muggle mind simply couldn't accept it all at once.

CNN had been covering a diplomatic visit to the Ministry when it had happened. One minute a sharply dressed Chinese woman was describing the hierarchy of the Ministry, followed by small man in a large pointed hat that was trying to be busy with his hands... the next there was a roar, a scream, and one horrid moment when the camera was turning at the exact speed and axis as a spray of arterial blood. And then the camera was abandoned as its operator ran away, gibbering senselessly.

That ends the first page. A human reader might be offended on a primitive level by the even, neat manuscript that describes such horrible, chaotic events. Turning the page, however, the reader's confusion and disgust would only increase. The second page is separated from the first by several dozen half pages, clumsily torn from the book. This page is covered in sharp, jagged symbols... some might recognize them as runes, others might wonder at the squiggles of a madman... and some might recognize it as the language of the lost continent of Mu.

This page might be examined, and some certain guttural words might be read aloud, and if the person did not drop the book and run away screaming at the effects those words had, then they might, puzzled, turn the page and read:

I have changed now. I have... learned certain things. The Ministry is gone. The taboo surrounding certain old magicks is gone... and I have changed myself to better survive this increasing dangerous and empty world. I can see the etheric trails of magick now... I can read the world from one swirl of their currents...

My parents... Europe... is dead. Voldemort put something in the air... a thick, black miasma... to choke the life out of every living thing it touched. Grindlewald did this in the late 1800's, in London, I am told... his first atrocity... I don't care. The Wizards are trying to band together, but it is now hopeless for them. Their tracers and those of Voldemort's marauders grow ever closer... soon they will be wiped out. And truly for when...

Here the normally neat scrawl deviates, and becomes a tangled mess. The next page is covered in similar scrawl, but the page after that resumes the neat script.

I changed my hands. I turned them into a mess of a million tentacles. I have seen Voldemort's followers... and have by some natural gift discerned their artificiality. I am still young... I believe so, anyway, but I have never heard of such beings during my studies at Hogwarts. They are... technically, not alive. They are much like giants... similar in size to Hagrid, the groundskeeper, if not slightly larger. Their skin seems stretched, and yet somehow armored. Engraved upon their pale flesh are runes of Mu. I've been reading... there are so many forbidden texts.

Voldemort has animated dead flesh, and created a neural...

Here there is a picture of a human brain, and next to it is a picture filled with something that might be mistaken for random squiggles. Next and on this drawing are several mathematical equations, written in algebraic code, runes sprinkled in.

...network very unlike anything else on this planet. It exists in a state of sustained energy, each mind differing only by a pattern that repeats over and over... a vestige of personality. I cannot imagine how such a thing was created. Wizard-created homoculoum like house elves have brains not dissimilar from ours... merely created in such a way as to release endorphins and other pleasurable chemicals only when the elf is doing something like housework. There are mutations to this of course... Dobby, a house elf I encountered at Hogwarts, was one of them.

These constructs of Voldemort's are powered by pain and suffering. Negative magick, or that cast with hostile intent, is absorbed and continues to power their neural network. It is only after a slaughter like the one at the Ministry of Magic do they have enough energy to achieve higher cognitive ability.

Voldemort is different... Voldemort's mind is powerful enough to be a tracer unto itself within the etheric trails of magick that waft through this world unnoticed by all but me. It exists in order to verify it's own existence, a perfect, closed process that should not be possible in reality. I have never laid eyes on Voldemort, nor do I have any wish too.

In all of this, Voldemort too has managed to find some central location, some basic control that influences everything in this world. He has changed something about reality itself... and now the dead walk. Indeed, almost exactly as it has been imagined so many times in fiction. The great black miasma that choked most of Europe killed all it touched, but those corpses did not stay silent. They have risen again as the Marauders of Voldemort. Unfeeling, uncaring, they only exist to destroy those that live.

They know I am here, but they do not yet understand what I am. I hear them stumbling around on the bottom levels... but I have destroyed the stairway, and they can no longer reach me.

My hands... now a mess of tiny tubules, have been used to alter the pathways in my brain. Yes... I stuck these into my ears and nose, and stirred my sticky fingers through my own mind. I have blocked out most emotion, and the majority of my memory. I have done this in order to be unfeeling and uncaring, because I now exist in a world that will consume me if I show any kind of weakness, and because what I feel compelled to do requires no sort of conscience.

I have been waiting for days and days, for Our Star. Harry Potter, the living legend, disappeared after the attack on Hogwarts. There had been rumors that he had gone to live with the giants along with his friends. The giants have access to a world I cannot see, and so Harry Potter is beyond my ability to reach. Before I was completely isolated from the outside world, Voldemort was sliding across the rest of the world like a thick, black sludge. I believe this behavior is indicative of Harry Potter's continued existence. I think Voldemort's ultimate goal is the Plateau of Leng, where there exists a point where realities diverge.

I am waiting for all hope to be extinguished, and with that, I shall end this vile world myself. I have examined Voldemort's new body very carefully, and found source, where he drew energy from to create his body, the bodies of his followers, and how he shifted reality to create his Marauders. I have worked into my own mind a series of processes similar to those used in Voldemort's "perfect" neural net, and taken out the perfect loop utilized in his. My mind will act as an open window, through which this energy will travel. By it's nature, this energy is bound to certain types of matter, and certain elements, so as this energy is released, the matter associate with it will vanish and convert to energy, and flow through this window as well.

I am uncertain if this will only destroy a small portion of this planet, it's entirety, or perhaps the entire universe. That is why I must be certain before I do this. When Harry Potter is dead, when all possible hope is extinguished, then reality shall die with him.

There are more pages of this, diagrams of Voldemort's followers, half scribbled code representing Voldemort's mind, and more ranting about the history of the homoculoum. There are dots of black that spot each page, and curious, thin stripes of blood, as though a small squid rested a wounded arms there... some might read through the entire book, captivated by the ravings of someone who had no clear memory of his past, nor emotion...

...others, however, would skip directly to the last entry:

I went outside today. I wanted to breath the now clean air, and feel the wind against my skin. My mind has begun to repair itself, to tear apart my devices. I will have to rework it now... but it was worth it, I think, to be sentimental one last time. High above the earth, I saw with perfect clarity the corruption and death that had stretched deep into the earth. Charred corpses stumbled a scorched and salted earth... the miasma, which I thought had dissipated, had in fact simply moved on, crossing the ocean to choke the Americas. The oceans themselves were much warmer then they should have been, and billions of dead creatures floated on the surface.

Mushroom clouds spotted the surface of the Earth. Not an action against Voldemort, I am certain, but strikes of opportunity against longstanding rivals. Voldemort went virtually unchecked. Only at the very edge of that miasmatic cloud, where Voldemort's followers surfaced, was there genuine battle. I was pleased to see many of those giant, maggot-skinned creatures fall; muscle, bone, and brain rendered into anonymous piles of gore by countless bullets, explosives, and in some extreme cases, hand to hand combat. Truly, the Muggles that the Wizarding world had spent so much time looking down upon were far greater in terms of skill and ingenuity.

A shame I will have to kill them all.

While I was high above the earth, Harry Potter confronted Voldemort. Dumbledore, in that moment, died. He gave us all, Muggle and Wizard alike, a final View of that grand confrontation.

Voldemort has moved on from his marauders and followers, and created... or perhaps summoned, something completely alien to this world. These creatures seem to exist in many times and places at once. It's hard to describe. I puzzled at them, tried to get my mind around their math, and had a very violent series of aneurisms. Despite the modifications I have made to myself, to raise myself just below omniscience, these creatures are still beyond me.

There was a hill, and Harry Potter was at the top of it. High above him was Voldemort, a hulking, gray figure garbed in a long black material. Between them whirled a vortex of those strange creatures... or perhaps only one of them. Harry did not stand alone, either. The corpses of dozens of giants lay strewn at the base of the hill, and his longtime companions lay at his feet, unmoving. He shouted something guttural... something I could not hear clearly, but sounded very similar to the type of magick I had been delving into. A beam of light shot from the tip of his wand, and slammed Voldemort in the chest.

Harry Potter, Our Star, is dead. The great Dumbledore is dead. Voldemort was vaporized in that beam of light, and has gone to a place beyond my sight... I believe he is dead as well. The miasma has dissipated, the followers have been torn down by the Muggles, and the dead have finally been laid to rest... but the world is still dead walking.

Those things that Voldemort summoned, the ones who are not bound by any measure of physical law, still persist. They are... or perhaps it is, tearing down the pillars of our world. It began three hours ago.

Here there is a vortex shaped squiggle, which is probably indicative of the passage of time, then:

It has changed something... the core of the Earth is spreading outwards while the ocean drains into a single massive hole. Australia is covered in a sheet of ice seventy meters thick. The American have been slammed together, with the total kinetic energy of the moon falling to Earth, while the moon itself has shattered into a trillion pieces, which now rain down to earth. Humanity is dying. Their deaths are a painful throb behind my eyes. Not because of any sentimental attachment, but because the sum total of their deaths have created a new sort of weight in the etheric trails of magick, which now flicker and thin.

I do not know how much longer I will have control of my surroundings. The energy I have prepared to destroy everything is now embodied in these new forces. I must do it, now.

Here the tome ends. Anyone reading it might glance at the book in disdain, no doubt an abortive, short-sighted fiction generated by some degenerate substance abuser. But that will never happen. Right out the broken-paned window is Diagon Alley, and there is not a soul walking its brick-laid street. The wood is weathered centuries, and some buildings have collapsed. Look a little higher, and is Britain, a charred-out ghoul of its former splendor. Look up at the sky, there is only a ceaseless, unending white. There is not a sun in the sky, nor any other star.

But far away, in one of the places that had been hidden even from Wizards, a dark thing gibbers.

The End