Angela Cross and the End All Spell

Angela Cross and the End-All Spell

--a Harry Potter Universe fanfiction--

Chapter Seventeen

**Another Dimension**

Somewhere in darkness...

"Assertion: she is here."

"Acknowledgement: yes, the scent of old power is fresh once more, we feel it. Query: now that she is within our grasp, what is the recommended course of action?"

"Response: send in an avatar to commune with her. As the fog surrounding her destiny befuddles us, we must see what she knows and determine how extensive her knowledge truly is."

"Acknowledgement: agreed."

"Acknowledgement: agreed."

"Acknowledgement: agreed."

Angela opened her eyes to a sight she only seen twice before but had personally dreaded visiting in the flesh.

All about her was an endless aqua-marine sky, deep and dark as though the sun had set long before and all that was left was the remaining death of the rest of the day's light. Clouds slowly crossed the horizon on an eternal voyage, while farther beyond, larger and more monstrous than she recalled, were amoebas that rivaled the size of continents, the haze of the growing night's sky visibly obscuring their amazing forms; there was no sign of movement from them, but their very presence was quite unnerving. There were no stars in the sky, just the massive creatures and the clouds and, strewn about her, bits of rock that floated about like asteroids. The rocks, no part with more surface area than perhaps one of her Hogwarts classrooms, had relatively flat tops, as though they had once been the ground to some place; the bottoms crumbled away and trailed off below into the endless black shadow. No ground could be seen, just a black haze that obscured any surface there may have been; Angela wondered if there was even any surface at all below her: perhaps if she fell she would fall forever and never hit a bottom.

The young Gryffindor clutched her robes about herself and got to her feet, trying her best not to move too much; the rock she had been deposited on was no bigger than her old bedroom, and taking a tumble off the edge was not something she wanted to risk. It was cold, though there absolutely no movement in the air, no wind of any kind. There was an odd swooshing sound, like the noise of a very distant tide, but it came and went and often left long, dead-silent moments in its wake.

There was nothing else. Nothing out there. No means of getting off her rock or getting back home. Angela sat back down and wrapped herself even more in her cloak, feeling very alone and very scared. She wondered if the others would have seen her vanish, or just assume that Fluffy had swallowed her in one big gulp and not know where to look. Perhaps Dumbledore or McGonagall would eventually figure out what happened to her and find a way to bring her back, but that could take a very long time and she had no idea what could happen to her in the meantime. Plus she was getting hungry.

And then there was the thought of the beginning of the second term, when she had her first Book of Black lesson with McGonagall and that version of herself appeared before them, black-lightning coursing throughout her, her hands on her head... Angela felt even more scared, wondering if this was going to be the time that happened. Was she going to die here?

She quickly felt very sad and wished she had had nicer thoughts about her mother while she had been back home.

"A spectacular view, isn't it?"

Angela's eyes opened wide and she whipped around, wanting to know who had spoken. Who she saw standing on the rock behind her was certainly the last person in the universe she expected to meet here, but there he was, hands in the pockets of his black suit, admiring the scenery as though he had been there the whole time.

Rod Serling was in the Dark Dimension with her.

Angela didn't know what to say, and instead resigned herself to looking at him with an utterly perplexed look on her face. The host of The Twilight Zone, his entire body black and white and shades of gray, as though he had stepped right out of the television series itself with no pigmentation to himself whatsoever, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket; the packaging had no brand on it at all, just a black and white box with CIGARETTES written in block letters as though it were truly a generic brand. He popped one out of the pack and lit it; the cigarette, despite having no more color to it then the man smoking it, still gave off a small orange glow. After taking a drag from it, he then looked to her.

"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into... the Twilight Zone."

"This... this is the Twilight Zone??" asked Angela, making sure she wasn't getting things mixed up.

"Well, not really," Serling said to her following another drag from the cigarette; his voice sounded tinny, as though it were coming from an old television set. "But it's as good an analogy to this place as any." Considering how on-the-mark his mannerisms and speech were with the television show and just how unusual her life had been over the last year, Angela wondered if perhaps she really was in the Twilight Zone.

"You're not really Rod Serling, are you?"

"I'm here to help facilitate your introduction into the world we're in right now," he said plainly, chain smoking as he went; Angela normally disliked the smell of cigarettes, but whatever came from his mouth or nostrils in puffs carried no scent or substance at all. "I'm your guide on the road, past the signpost up ahead, our next stop... Well, you know the rest of that, don't you?"

It was true, Angela had loved watching the Twilight Zone on television whenever she got the chance, though it had been a little while since she'd had the opportunity to watch an episode of anything on a TV lately. Actually taking part in an episode, though, was a strange and very uncomfortable experience, especially considering the way the main stars of these shows could very well have anything happen to them, from pretty good to tremendously bad.

"So where am I right now?" She had a good idea, but wanted to hear it straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

"The Dark Dimension, as it's been known to some." He took a long drag from his flavorless, scentless cigarette. "You have been brought beyond the barriers of imagination and left of the doorstep of beings too old and too powerful to care about things like names or identity. Beings who play games of power and deal in battles beyond your ability to even comprehend. And I don't mean that as an insult, even thinking about the things they do would probably make your head explode."

Again, the thought of her hands clutched around her head while on the floor of the classroom came to mind. Shuddering, Angela shook the thought from her mind quickly with her eyes clenched tight.

"And... and why did they bring me here?" she asked, trying to think of something else.

Serling took in a deep breath, stamped out what was left of his cigarette on the rocky ground at his feet, and put his hands in pockets. He then began his monologue with the usual swagger she had seen so often on his television show. "Portrait of a young girl, one Angela Cross. A young lady, good of heart and of nature, who through circumstances beyond her control has by chance come across something that many men of power have sought by choice. What that chance has brought her has now come to a climax in this performance, leaving her stranded on a stage where she was destined to come from the beginning, standing in the middle for all the audience to see, and may now very well find her curtain call as the show ends, here... in the Twilight Zone."

Though that didn't tell her anything she didn't already know, Angela didn't like the way Rod Serling had mentioned she would find her end here. She got up and turned about, brandishing her wand from her robes and wondering just what chance she had of defending herself in this alien land with a bunch of first-year spells. She wondered if Mister Serling could be transfigured into a teacup, or perhaps be bored to sleep if she repeated one of Binns' lectures.

"I already know all that," Angela said, eyeing Serling carefully. "They want..." Angela wondered for a moment would happen if she brought it up here. "They want what was in the Book of Black, right?"

"Exactly," he said with a smile on his face as he pulled out another cigarette and lit it; the wand seemed not to worry him in the slightest. "The spells Price Delgado wrote down captured some of the essence of power the rulers of this realm have and focused that power into magic he could use when he returned to his home time and space." Pausing for a moment, he took a drag from his fresh cigarette and continued. "Understand the reality of your situation, young lady: there are spells that could twist the souls of saints into tyrants or lay bare the minds of every great thinker, spells that could rend one end of your universe to the other and all space in between... All that power is trapped in that adorable little head of yours, and all because you went flipping through the pages of a strange book."

It was growing more and more apparent that Serling wasn't forgetting what he was talking about; unsurprisingly, the Forget Me True spell seemed to have no effect here.

"Now, as Mister Delgado never got to use any of the spells in that book, my employers would very much appreciate having that power returned to them."

"You want me to give you back the spells? How? I don't even know how to get at them."

"No effort to it, a simple willingness to let us extract the magic from you and the job will be done, like that." He snapped his fingers for effect, simultaneously ashing his cigarette over the edge into the darkness before taking another puff from it. "Of course, you won't be able to use magic of any sort any more, but it's the best - and really the only - choice that can be offered here."

Being forced to return to Oklahoma and live the same existence she had been enduring with her mother for the rest of her life? Angela definitely didn't like the sound of that: with magic she had found a new wonder and hope in her otherwise unhappy world, something she never wanted to go back from. But more than that was the sense that giving them the spells, even if she could keep her witching abilities, was simply a bad idea.

"Why did they give the Book of Black to Delgado in the first place?" she asked, still holding her wand at the ready.

Serling frowned at this; considering she had never before seen the television character speak in anything but a neutral manner, it was quite creepy.

"Why does it matter?" he said, irritated. "You're being given the choice to either return down the path you came here on and step back into your original world, or suffer... other consequences. It should be pretty cut-and-dry from there."

"I don't think so," said Angela, feeling pretty irritated herself. Her heart was beating fiercely and she was honestly more scared than she ever had been before in her life, but she knew in her heart she was being played at, and despite liking The Twilight Zone she didn't trust this Rod Serling imposter any more than she could probably throw him. "If Price Delgado had opened the book before I did, he would have probably blown the whole world to pieces; none of the spells in the Book of Black were good, every one of them was meant to do evil things. Why should I give you the spells and then have someone else get the same magic some day?"

"You'll just have to take that chance, won't you?" Serling said flatly, his brow still knitted in a frown. "You will surrender the spells, or my employers will just have to yank everything out of your head until they find what they want."

This wasn't just a matter of being a witch or not now, it was a matter of living or dying. Angela felt awful, these were not choices a twelve-year-old girl was supposed to deal with; she was supposed to be concerned with homework and ponies and snacks and friends, things of that nature... Now she was being told to hand over probably one of the most powerful weapons in the universe to an evil Rod Serling or be killed after having her head scooped clean with a melon-baller, whereas they'd probably get all the spells anyway.

She didn't know what to do. She was scared and didn't want to die, but how could she let these beings have something that could end life as she knew it across the universe? They fought battles on a scope she couldn't even begin to fathom, rubbing out her reality could have been no more important to them then cutting down a tree to get a nicer view of the property. Thoughts went to Hogwarts, McGonagall, Dumbledore, Hagrid, Jason and James, Kathy, her mother...

She couldn't risk it, there was just too much at stake. Without allowing herself to dwell on it anymore, she quickly resigned herself to the future she had seen six months previous, and, wand at the ready, said:

"Forget it."

If Mister Serling had looked collected before, he certainly showed no signs of it now. The man glared at her, took one long, angry drag from his cigarette before throwing it off the edge in a fit, and then stared at her gravely.

"Then prepare to voyage to the shadowy tip of reality. You will travel a through route to the land of the different, of the bizarre, the unexplainable. You will go farther than you like on this road, where the limits are only of the mind itself: your mind, to be precise. Young lady, you are entering the wondrous dimension of imagination. Next stop... the Twilight Zone."

And all of a sudden the floating rock they were on plummeted downward as though whatever invisible cables that had been holding it up were suddenly snipped. Angela yelled and dropped to her feet, grabbing whatever surfaces she could get a finger-grip on, while Rod Serling just pulled out another cigarette and lit it. Clouds sped past them and the darkness began to engulf her as the little aqua sky that had been visible before was sucked up by the shadow. Wind, still as night before, now rushed past her violently, chipping off small parts of the rock's edges, and deeper and deeper they went, into the very core of the Dark Dimension.

The cold around her was considerable, far worse than what minor chill she had to endure at the higher elevations when the sky was still visible. Angela shivered, happy the ride had finally stopped but terrified of what laid in store for her now that she refused the gray-toned man's offer.

The plummet downward seemed to last for hours; it was all Angela could do to keep her grip for so much time, and she had been in darkness for so long now that she had no idea what to expect. Then the wind died down and the feeling of being yanked away by momentum slowly ceased, and after a moment she realized she was no longer moving. The air was completely still once more, and now absolutely freezing. It had been so warm that June evening at Hogwarts that Angela was only wearing leg socks and her school skirt, but at least her cloak was long enough to help alleviate the prick of the air from making it unendurable.

There was a light tap on the rock ahead of her, and Angela, blind from the darkness, quickly got up, only to fall backwards onto her bottom from the vertigo the blackness brought her. As fast as she could she raised her wand, shut her eyes, and cast one of the first spells she had learned at Hogwarts.

"Lumos!"

Even with her eyes closed she felt almost blinded from the brightness, but after a moment she allowed herself to open her eyes slightly. A gleam of white light was radiating from her wand in all directions. The rock was still there, as it had been before, though the light did nothing to show any of her surroundings beyond it, and standing only a few feet from her, the gaze on his face no more pleasant than when the trip began, was Rod Serling, who proceeded to pull out a cigarette. Angela quickly scuttled back as he casually lit it, only to find she had no room left with which to move.

"Well, now that we're here, let's get started, shall we?"

It was like watching a window freeze over at super-speed, as within the blackness long, spidery strands of crystal and frost formed, the light from her wand gleaming off of them. The web of cold was forming around her rock in a ball, about two miles in radius, and when it was done she found herself in a colossal black sphere of clear crystal webs. In the darkness behind them, something scuttled across those webs, and when Angela looked about she finally saw the authors of the Book of Black, staring back her.

They moved like spiders and looked like some kind of weird tripods, three impossibly long legs of frost navigating along the webs, but instead of bodies they each had one gigantic eye, bloodshot and an impossibly sharp shade of blue. It was hard to make out just how large they were in the dark, but if Angela had to guess she would have thought maybe two-thousand feet from the end of one leg to the other.

There were five of them, moving about the web of thin crystal from all angles as though for them gravity was meaningless, and their speed was disturbing considering their immense size. All the eyes were focused on her from outside the web.

A voice boomed through the still air.

"Assertion: she has refused to cooperate." It sounded like grating fingernails against a chalkboard.

"Acknowledgement: yes, we must now proceed on the riskier path."

"Query: is her destiny any more visible to you now that she is at the heart of our realm?"

"... Response: no. She is blacker than ever here at the center of all things."

"Assertion: but if she dies then the power is lost to us forever. The shadow-strands are too tightly entwined with her soul."

"Suggestion: perhaps the avatar may be of some use here. His is a hollow frame, if the soul is his then perhaps his willingness to return the power to us will bear more fruit."

"Response: agreed."

"Response: agreed."

"Response: agreed."

"Response: agreed. Command: remove the soul from the vessel and claim it as your own, minion."

Rod Serling promptly took one last puff from his cigarette and stamped it flat under his foot, then walked up to Angela with his arms outstretched. As he did so, his skin began to turn dark-gray and wither, his fingers elongating and his hair and facial features vanishing save for his mouth, which grew and grew as he approached her. He stopped walking and simply began to float at her, his mouth widening on his featureless head as though he intended to suck the very soul from her body.

The sight of this horrible creature, still wearing the black-and-white suit, was making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, and Angela felt the twisting in her stomach like her body was violently rejecting the very presence of what Rod Serling had transformed into; any unease and unhappiness she was feeling at her current situation were becoming magnified stronger and stronger in her mind. A Lumos spell would be no defense, and Angela couldn't think of anything on the fly that might fight back such an awful creature. Nothing except to drop her wand, open her palm before herself and hope for the best.

"Vas Flam!"

As the wooden wand clattered at her feet, the sleeve on her robes immediately disintegrated, followed by the searing warmth of magical flame. Had it covered just five more feet, the creature might have been close enough to grab her in its long, deathlike hands, but as it was the former Rod Serling was struck by the invisible shimmer of air around her palm at point-blank range, the most concentrated and potent location of the blast. It didn't even have the opportunity to be surprised as its entire body burst instantaneously into ash, and then into nothing at all.

Yellow and red flame channeled furiously about ten feet from her palm where the mirage-like flickering of air ended, melting the surface of the rock-face as it continued on, unimpeded, vanishing into the black distance. After about fifteen seconds, during which the flame-pillar stopped firing from her hand, there was the sound of an ear-shattering crash, as though a glass window half-a-mile across had been hit by a rock, accompanied with a short-yet-bright flash of explosive light in the distance. And with that, ten percent of the surrounding frost web collapsed in on itself and melted away into the air.

The din of calamity eventually ended, yet there was no movement, neither by Angela nor the strange creatures clinging to what was left of the web, whose eyes were stuck on what destruction she had just done. Shaking, Angela got up, looking at her hand and then at the gaping hole in the web. Much of the rock she was on was now a molten slag, and any trace of the twisted Rod Serling was now completely gone.

Too quickly though, the air around her changed from pleasantly warm to cool and then back to a freezing chill, and in the distance the web of frost quickly reformed itself, the patterns and shapes of it new but just as much a reality as before. The five eyes turned back at her, and while there was no expression to read from them, she got the feeling that she had just made the gods very, very angry.

"Assertion: she has destroyed our servant!"

"Assertion: she has defiled our realm!"

"Assertion: she can utilize the power!"

"Assertion: we cannot risk any other course of action, we must extract the power from her immediately or kill her to protect ourselves."

"Response: agreed."

"Response: agreed."

"Response: agreed."

"Response: agreed."

And then the black lightning struck her.

The webbing of frost and crystal had hummed as flickers of black electricity fired inward, slamming the girl to the ground and sending waves of incredible pain through her. It was like the worst migraine she had ever suffered, synapses firing left and right as electric fingers tried to shuffle through her thoughts, yet despite all the pain she did not pass out as she expected she would, being forced to endure as the five dark beings probed her mind for a means of returning their power to themselves. Her head was throbbing terribly when all of a sudden the world around her began to shimmer and fade away, and she wondered if for a moment she was going to pass out after all.

"Assertion: her destiny! The fog is lifting!"

"Response: we see it as well. Only shades though, we cannot glimpse all the details."

"Command: start from as far towards the end as you can see and bring her forward, we must push through as much as we can and see where the power will take her and ourselves as well."

"Response: agreed."

"Response: agreed."

The rock scattered away like dust in a strong wind, as did the rest of the Dark Dimension, and Angela, still searing from lightning coursing through her, began to find herself in a long hallway made of stone. Shafts of sunlight shined through the windows, and just a small ways ahead of her were two huge wooden doors. She was back in Hogwarts, just twenty feet away from the entrance to the Great Hall.

She couldn't move though, she couldn't do anything to get help. The lightning was smacking all around her, scarring the stones and slicing tapestries to ribbons, yet the hallway seemed completely devoid of people. Perhaps the sound of the electrical discharge would alert someone to her presence-

"... know what I have to do."

Angela couldn't move to turn and see who said that, but the voice sounded very much like her own - except deeper, older. It was approaching her quickly from the stairs behind her and then down the hall, a whole group of footsteps from the sound of things, and then whoever had spoken came up to her and kneeled down to her, looking her in the face.

It was her, grown up. Exactly the same as the ghostly-form-Angela from those months before, except whole and as a complete person. The older Angela looked at her sympathetically and grabbed her hand.

"Don't worry, it'll be alright," she said to her in as comforting a manner as she could muster.

"Angee, are you sure about this? I can come with you, you don't have to go alone." It was Kathy, also older in voice, though Angela couldn't make out her features properly; her friend was staying a little farther away, trying to avoid being struck by lightning discharge, but it was apparent she was on the verge of tears.

"This has been going on for a long time, we've all seen it," older-Angela said in response. "She'll pull through this."

"But we don't know if you will!" It was Jason this time, older as well. He was considerably larger than before, about six-feet-tall and much more developed than his scrawny younger self.; he seemed absolutely panicked. "You never found out what happened after-"

"We don't have time for this!" older-Angela yelled at him angrily. "She'll go any second now." Reaching into her cloak pocket, older-Angela took out a small hourglass tied to a string-necklace and placed one hand on each end. She then looked upwards, perhaps to her friends and anyone else who was behind the young girl out of sight, and gave them all a nervous smile; despite trying to stay confident, it was obvious she was breathing heavily. After a second, she looked back at her younger form and placed the loop of the hourglass necklace around her, a bolt of black lightning barely missing her head as she did so.

"Alright, off we go," older-Angela said with a sigh.

Despite all the pain she was feeling, Angela managed to get out "Wait-" before her older self resumed her grip on the sides of the little hourglass, and then proceeded to snap it in half.

"Angela!!" was all she heard from her older friends before the school immediately washed away and she found herself back on the rock in the Dark Dimension. The pain in her head, while not going away completely, diminished a considerable amount as the dark beings conversed amongst themselves.

"Query: what happened?"

"Response: the smell of power was all but gone from the older self, though the control was visible in her mind; we could not extract the power from that one. Query: what was that she broke prior to the timeline dissipating?"

"Response: a time-turner, magical device used to influence limited expanses of time. Breaking it would result in random spatial/temporal consequences. Query: if the elder one no longer carries the power intact, did our extraction attempts succeed?"

"Response: unknown. Assertion: if not, then we must discover the consequences of bringing her here at all costs. Continue probing."

The pain returned again, and Angela could through the shocks and jabbing feel something running from her nose down her face. She was beginning to bleed.

The Dark Dimension faded once more, and as the world around her took shape she found herself lying at the feet of a tall young man who looked considerably like James. Like Jason before he was also much larger, though he looked like he was in terrible condition; his clothes were tattered and ripped apart, and his trademark sunglasses were hanging sideways on his head as though they had just been broken. He was drenched in water, and to her surprise he was holding what looked a castle tower above his head with his own two hands.

"-Avada Kedav-!"

"No! Don't use it yet, we can still-"

"We don't have time! If she casts the End-All spell, we're-"

"Have you found it yet??"

"I'm looking as fast as I can! Breaking this stupid curse isn't easy, you know!"

"Oh crap, not now," James said as he looked down and suddenly noticed Angela at his feet; he was apparently straining to hold the part of the building up.

"You!" It was Angela's older voice, though it had the strange resounding of fingernails on a chalkboard behind it.

"James! Shut her up quickly!" It was Jason, somewhere off in the distance. Trying to fight back the pain as much as possible, Angela looked at her surroundings; she had appeared in what seemed to be a battle zone. There were witches everywhere, all wearing black and white uniforms Angela didn't recognize, and their attention seemed to be split between the younger Angela and her older counterpart somewhere out of sight.

"Don't search any further!" Angela yelled at her younger self. "You'll only find destruction! Don't-"

She couldn't continue any further though as James proceeded to hurl the entire castle tower over the younger Angela like a javelin. With a rush of air and a crash in the distance, older-Angela ceased yelling.

The unmistakable face of Kathy was before the young girl almost immediately, looking at her with a sorrowful expression in her eyes. "Hi, honey," she said sympathetically.

James took his ruined glasses off and threw them to the ground. "Did she ever tell you how long she stayed in this time?" he asked her, looking off into the distance as he crouched over Angela next to Kathy.

"No," responded the older Ravenclaw girl, "we just have to hope she disappears quickly. Angee," she said, addressing the young girl, "in your sixth year, you have to go see McGonagall, you have to forg-"

Before she could say anything further, one of the black bolts of energy lashed out and hit Kathy square in the chest, knocking her backwards into James and causing them both to fall backwards.

Unable to see the result of what happened to her friends, the world began to fade from Angela's view again, though off in the distance could be heard the resounding crash of an explosion, as well as a voice that sounded as angry as Angela ever thought she could be.

"Don't let the probe go any furth-"

The battlefield disappeared and was replaced by a gray flagstone floor, the thunder of the distance giving way to total silence save the scuffling of feet.

"What the...??"

A short, round woman with paisleys and flower-printed robes looked down at her, jumping back in total surprise at the sudden appearance of a child student that had black lightning blasting from her. In her hands was a large book with a lock on it, which despite the surprise she managed to keep a grip on.

"Whut that?" asked a deep, dim-witted voice to Angela's right. With the pain shooting through her head in intervals now, Angela couldn't concentrate on much of the other comments that began to sound around her; all she could tell was that there were at least four people with her, and three were gigantic.

"Wait," said the squat woman, "I saw something about this in McGonagall's Book of Black notes. This is some sort of... by-product of the magic, I think. I can't remember, though." She then looked to Angela, though kept her distance to avoid the lightning sparks. "Can you tell me who you are, little princess, hmm?" The tone of her voice, as well as the batting of her eyes, was a sickening attempt to appear sweet and utterly inappropriate to what was happening at the moment, and despite being in agony Angela couldn't help but feel very angry and irritated at this little woman. She felt a small level of satisfaction when one of the lightning arcs came close to the lady and sliced a good portion of her cape in half, which resulted in a terrified yelp from the woman who ducked behind a nearby table. Angela caught a glimpse of some large, squat, green feet the size of Hagrid's running about trying to avoid being hit themselves.

A shout then came, muffled as though it were behind a door; it was Angela's older voice, normal this time save the desperation behind it. "Angela? Is that you??" the voice called out. "Professor Umbridge, let me in! Is there a younger version of myself in there with you?"

The door slammed open and a teenage version of herself came running in, looking down at Angela in surprise and then at the squat woman behind the desk, somehow with even more surprise.

"I remember now... You did this!" she shouted at the woman angrily just as the flagstones vanished once more.

"Oh no," said Jason.

Angela now was on the floor of the Gryffindor common room, where at the moment the walls were decorated with silver frost, mistletoe and garland. It was dark outside the window, a bright full moon shining its light through to illuminate the otherwise dark room.

What she saw before her eyes was a completely shocking sight: a teenage Jason had his wand out and was levitating an extremely large armoire over the prone form of an older George Weasley who was wearing sort of dressy wizard's robe. Both boys looked battered about, but George was more so, though it didn't stop him from noticing the sudden appearance of first-year Angela in the room.

"What-?"

Jason, a stunned look on his face, looked back and forth between Angela and George, seemingly unable to come up with anything to say. His face looked terribly pained and upset and it appeared as if he had been crying; nevertheless the armoire remained over the Weasley boy, as though he were preparing to drop it on him.

The entrance to the Gryffindor common room opened up and a bright shaft of light poured in from outside, a short spurt of laughter coming from the entering students, followed by shock as they saw both sights before them.

"Jason? George??" It was Angela's voice, completely shaken by what was all happening at once before her. "What's-?"

The stones of the Gryffindor common room vanished and once again she was lying on the rocks of the Dark Dimension, her wand still upon the ground giving off its white glow. The pain quickly subsided and Angela gasped, her head throbbing almost as bad as before but at least not so overtly.

"Assertion: this is proving useless!"

"Acknowledgement: agreed. The second incarnation was more powerful than the others, but far too dangerous to reach out to, and the third and fourth attempts were hardly present. Though a scent of any sort was suspiciously absent from the third."

"Query: what of the second's warning to her younger incarnation?"

"Response: perhaps an attempt to warn us away from probing deeper? A threat against us?"

As the voices boomed about her, theorizing and discussing the various failed attempts to probe her timeline and regain access to the power of the Book of Black, Angela struggled to return to her feet. Her body was wracked in pain, though, and her muscles felt much to weak to help her do more than a very shaky crawl towards her wand. She wondered what would happen if she stuck it in her mouth and tried to cast a spell, if perhaps the zap so close to her head would knock her out or even end what she was going through. But she couldn't think of any spells that were particularly destructive or even mildly stunning, and as the Vas Flam spell didn't do any damage to her hand she doubted she could take herself out with a quick blast of fire; it was cold enough with what she was wearing at the moment anyway, and she didn't want to chance spending her last moments alive being naked in some alien realm.

"I'm so sorry about all this," said a now-familiar voice. Angela, beaten and weathered, looked up just past her wand and saw one more familiar sight: it was her older-ghostly self, exactly as she had been six-months prior except that no parts of her were being blown off at the moment. The older-self was crouched over the wand, looking sadly at Angela but with a little bit of a smile to her face.

"H-help me," Angela muttered out, wanting anyone to just bring a halt to what was happening to her. She was wishing now that she had just done what Rod Serling told her before and given them the lousy spells, as this felt far from worth it at the moment.

"I can't," the older one said sorrowfully, "I can't do anything for you anymore except tell you that you'll make it through this. You'll make it through everything. But you have to be strong. Don't let them beat you."

"Assertion: an intruder!!"

The older Angela looked up at the scene around her as the five eyes glanced at her, their bodies scuttling back and forth along the webbing angrily at the sight that someone had penetrated their realm.

"Assertion: it is the first one! She has bound herself to the original!"

Looking desperate, the ghostly Angela looked back at her younger counterpart and gave her a stern gaze.

"This is all new to me, Angela, I don't know what's going to happen to me after you're done here. But you're going to win this. You have to be as strong as you can be, don't let them take anything from you, do you understand?" Angela just looked at her older self for a moment, took a moment to assert herself, and simply nodded.

"Command: we must act simultaneously. Draw out the power, search out the timeline! Do not let the elder interfere!"

And the pain came back again, this time feeling as though it were churning out of her as well as into her. Angela cried out in pain as she felt the world flutter away around her.

She was on a stony floor, this time in what looked like an Egyptian tomb. The walls and floor were made out of yellow sandstone while large, carved statues of animal-headed gods were everywhere. There was little she could even see this time though, as she could feel something tugging at her mind like an angler with a lure.

She had to remember what the ghostly Angela said. Don't let them take it, don't let them take anything from you. She couldn't let them have the power of the Book of Black, no matter what. And her older-self, she was her from the future: she had gone through all of this herself and was still alive. If she could do it, then Angela would definitely pull through, all she had to do was fight.

Five tall, robed figures in turbans stood before her, swinging what looked like wands at her as she came into view.

"What in the-??" It was a phrase Angela was getting used to in her travels through time. Before the forms could do any more, though, two were struck back by black lightning discharges and went tumbling the floor.

"Run!" an Angela somewhere out of view shouted, her voice closer to what Angela's voice normally sounded like. There was the shuffling of running feet and a sudden rumbling as what sounded like a cave-in could be heard, the room about her shaking crazily and the remaining three men covering their heads as bits of ceiling began to collapse around her.

The sandstone dissipated and was replaced once again with Hogwarts. Except it was a sight at Hogwarts Angela wanted to avoid seeing again: it was the store rooms beneath the castle where she and Kathy had been chased by rats and bumped into the zombie quartermaster Grazzle Stumpfoot.

Above her, on a stack of boxes, were Kathy and Angela, almost identical to their present-time counterparts. At the appearance of Angela, the other girls had mixed reactions: Kathy was totally surprised, while the other Angela looked almost relieved.

And all around her were rats, like before, with little pink bulbs sticking out of their heads, as though their brains were protruding from their skulls. They all spun and looked at Angela with confusion, but that was about all they could muster in the way of reaction before the sparks started jumping about. There were so many rats swarming about in the dark hall that it was impossible for them to avoid being blasted about by the energy. She heard her other self yell "C'mon!" and then there was a clatter of boxes.

She didn't pay much attention beyond that though, as the yanking against her mind grew harder and harder; Angela resisted, tears streaming down her face as she fought the pulling and the pain coursing through her body. The pain was getting sharper and all she could do was grip her head and clench her teeth and hope this would all pass soon.

"It will," came the voice of the ghostly Angela once more; her voice sounded like it was falling apart, reverberating as it came. Angela didn't bother to open her eyes this time, as she was too busy trying to fight off the pain she was going through.

"It hurts," she said, her teeth held together so tight she thought she might break them.

The squeaking of rats vanished, and the floor felt different again. Unclenching her eyes for just a moment, she saw herself from six months before with Professor McGonagall, both looking at her in stunned silence with completely confused looks on their faces. McGonagall's hat was in the other Angela's hands, as it had been after the instructor tried to read her mind and almost got sucked into the Dark Dimension herself. All the young girl could do is look at these two people from her past and plead with them.

"Please," she squeaked out, "make it stop! I can't take it anymore!"

"It's going to be okay, everything's going to be just fine," the ghostly-Angela said, her voice becoming more distorted as she spoke; Angela spared a look at her and saw her transparent form was being blown about, as though it was losing its cohesion. "They almost have what they want," the older-Angela told her, "but you don't want them to take it from you." There was a pause, as she steeled herself. "You need to give it to them, freely. Stop fighting and give in."

Angela didn't know if she'd heard that right, through all the torture and distraction; she'd fought all this time and now she was just supposed to give up? Was this all some kind of trick? She looked at her previous counterpart from January. "I don't understand!" she shouted back at the ghostly-Angela. "How can I give it to them??"

The older-version crouched down and spoke quietly to her; despite all the firing of electricity, she still managed to be heard, speaking into her good right ear.

"They can't see you this time, Angee, they sent you too far back, before you came to them; they're poking and prodding and yanking you, but they can't see what they're getting from you now. They've been wanting the spells we had crammed into our head all that time ago, and if they take them by force then everything's going to be a disaster. But there's one spell you can share with them, one that will stop all your pain and keep them from ever bothering you again. It's..." She took in another deep breath, drew herself up, and continued once again.

The ghost, whose body was flittering away faster and faster, looked at her intently; she had just conveyed something of the utmost seriousness to Angela, something that she had no doubt could never be taken lightly. From the name of the spell, the young girl seemed to understand the significance of what she was to do.

"I don't know how!" she exclaimed through the pain, "I don't know the words!"

The ghostly-Angela gave a smug, satisfied look: she'd done all this before and knew all too well what was going to happen. Despite being in total agony, Angela couldn't help but feel a little the same at the sight.

She then told her the words.

Angela, through the teary eyes and throbbing of her head, felt something inside her click, as though a key had been turned. Something else, much like the fire-pillar spell, had been awakened in her thoughts, something more terrible and potent than anything she was bound to learn in any of her future lessons with Professor McGonagall. She looked at her previous self, who stood there in shock along with the instructor, and felt pained for her, knowing she would one day have to go through just what she endured. The ghostly-Angela did the same, probably feeling even more pain for her, for whatever trials she would have to go through in her future; judging from just the snippets she had seen, it was bound to be quite a wild ride.

And then she left the past behind and was finally on the rock floating at the center of the Dark Dimension.

"Query: what happened? We lost our sight of her for a moment!"

"Response: she was sent back too far, back to when the other attempted to probe our realm."

Angela looked up, the energy finally gone from her body and the pulling against her mind ended. They were too busy worrying about what had happened to dissect her past or future at the moment. Kneeling by her, looking more and more ragged, was the ghostly-Angela, now more thoroughly torn apart than ever; as before, it didn't seem to bother her, though Angela had no idea just what this apparent disintegration of her elder-self meant.

"Good job," the ghost said, almost gone from view. Angela said nothing, she was too exhausted to do more than look glassy-eyed at herself as she was blown farther and farther apart by invisible winds. "I've got to go now, just remember what I told you: it's going to be alright, just be strong."

She then threw Angela a smile, just before one last blast of invisible air knocked the elder-Angela to the side with a heavy blow and an audible "Oof!". As she hit the ground her wisps blasted apart and just like that she was gone, leaving the little girl all by herself once more in a realm of pure, reckless darkness.

"Assertion: something has happened. Query: can you sense it?"

"Acknowledgement: we sense power, yes. Old power, unfettered and unblocked."

"Query: is it coming from the girl?"

"Rebuttal: that cannot be, we were unable to tap any of the ability within her mind."

"Rebuttal: but it is coming from the girl. Something has been freed within her!"

There was a certain desperation in their tone that gave Angela just a little extra strength, enough renewed energy to pull herself to her feet and grab her wand as she got up. They were coming to the sudden realization that the girl that stood before them knew something different now, something far nastier than a pillar of fire could ever hope to be.

"ASSERTION: SILENCE HER!!"

These creatures once gave the most dangerous spells in reality to a madman bent on world conquest. These spells had instead fallen into the hands of a little girl who didn't know any better, and in turn gave her fantastic gifts and a life that she would have otherwise been denied. They violently tortured her to try and take back the power of those gifts so that they could give them to someone else down the line to do their dirty work for them, work that would have undoubtedly ruined the lives of every man, woman and child throughout the world, and would have killed her and drained her mind dry to get to it had she not somehow persevered. Considering what she just went through, it didn't take long for Angela to weigh the moral consequences of what she was about to do.

Before they could stop her, Angela shared the End-All spell with them.