One For The Road​

A pub stands at the far northern end of the Shetland Islands. Perched on a windswept cliff, it overlooks the slate grey North Sea. It is, by geographical certainty, the northernmost pub in Britain, and almost nobody knows it exists. Not only because it's hidden at the end of the world. Or even because the layered enchantments keep the scant local populace blissfully unaware.

No, this is a place that, usually, nobody wants to find.

A monastery had stood there once; guarding the ancient secrets of the jagged headland. But Vikings came and, as they are wont to do, pillaged the land and razed the building. It was apt, given that a few decades earlier the monastic order had butchered the pagan natives.

We will never know if those tangle-bearded soothsayers carved the ancient oaths upon the cliff face. Or if they that cast the sacrifices into the waves in supplication of their animistic deities, or merely for fun. Whether they were the first. Or if they too annihilated a culture upon that clifftop.

The Unspeakables constructed the pub in the late twenties. As the monks had before them, they sited it here to protect the eldritch secret of this ragged headland. Why a pub, is unclear. But like all the best establishments, it has an exclusive clientele: the dying, the desperate, the rich, and the famous.

In the taproom, one wall is devoted to the photographs of these former and current patrons. A picture of Albus Dumbledore, a whiskey sour in hand, enjoys pride of place. Pinned to one of the low hanging beams, it leaves the room, and everyone in it, to sit in his shadow.

The Unspeakables who built the pub called it 'One For The Road'. Presumably, because they had a sense of humour.

*​

"Stop me if you've heard this one before; a vampire, an alcoholic and the Minister for Magic walk into a bar. The barman, on cue, downs a pint of vodka, opens up a vein and says 'Good evening, Minister. The usual?'"

The Minister didn't laugh, so I smashed his head into the bar a couple of times. His skull left a strange imprint in the gin-soaked wood, as though it were made of sponge. How curious.

The rest of the patrons — there were only two — didn't seem to mind the sudden disturbance. I seized the Minister by the lapels of his coat and hauled him out into the storm. As I passed through the door, I rang the small bell beside it.

"Last orders," I yelled, without looking back. "Order a drink and pluck up the courage, or fuck off."

The rain pinned my shirt to my back and the wind whipped my hair, long and dank and greasy, about my face. The Minister was beginning to recover from his stupor and wriggle out of my hold. So I punched him in the stomach to bring him double and smashed my knee into the bridge of his nose.

"Motherfuck," I said, as pain lanced through me. He had a head like a boulder.

But the blow had knocked the fight out of him all the same. I dragged him out to the clifftop where the storm redoubled its efforts. Fifty feet beneath us, steel-grey waves lashed against the rocks. The drop wouldn't have been enough to kill me, let alone a vampire, but I could see the terror in his eyes nonetheless.

He knew the fate that awaited him.

"One chance," I yelled, my words swallowed by the squall before they reached my own ears. "Tell me where I can find it."

He yelled something back that I couldn't make out over the howling wind. I craned my head closer for him to repeat it and he tried to bite me.

So here's the thing about Vampires: they're strong, fast, immortal and practically indestructible. Sure, they might not like garlic all that much, and if you put a stake through their heart, it'll slow them down for a couple of hundred years. But to actually kill one; that's a challenge.

Here's the other thing about Vampires: they're as predictable as a pocket watch. Show them a jugular, and they're in there like a dick that's caught a whiff of pussy.

I stepped aside, seized him by the wrist and planted my hip into his. His feet slipped on the rain-slick grass, and he tumbled over the edge of the cliff. He dangled there, from my grasp, like a landed fish.

"Tell me where to find it," I roared again.

"The Elsewhere," he screamed. "Pull me up."

"You had your chance."

I watched as he fell, screaming, toward the inky waves below. But he never hit the water; instead, his scream died as he tumbled out of existence. Like the oldest, and best, magic tricks he was there one moment and gone the next. Tada!

By the time I returned to the pub, my two old patrons were meandering down the narrow path and off into the night. I shook my head in exasperation; cowards!

But they'd be back tomorrow night, they always were.

I locked the door behind me, stripped out of my wet clothes, turned down the oil lanterns and flipped chairs up onto tables. Then I made myself a drink: a sugar cube soaked in two measures of bitters, topped up with dark rum and apple juice. I sat sipping it in the dark.

Trouble was brewing. I could taste it on the air like the first day of winter. But then I had, after all, erased the Minister for Magic from existence. I wagered people would be a little unhappy about that. Those who hadn't known he was a vampire would see it as murder. And those who had known; well, they now had their own reasons to want my head on a platter.

Oh, and I'd just violated Paragraph 12 of the Guidelines for the Treatment of Non-Wizard Part-Humans in the worst conceivable manner. At least Calmet would've been proud.

"Lumos."

I considered the wall of photographs with the reverence of an archaeologist studying hieroglyphics. Some of the pictures moved, peering back at me, but more didn't; eternally frozen in the act of enjoying their last drink. The proverbial 'one for the road'.

Because this headland, this insignificant mote of earth, is the place where death gets cheated. Though everyone dices with death, some of us won't play unless we rig the game in our favour. This is the spot that bridges this world with the next; where we stack the deck.

I lifted my glass to the wall of pictures. "To the triumphant dead."

Albus Dumbledore raised his blackened hand and toasted me back.

I locked the pub's front door, changed into fresh clothes, threw on my billowing coat and was about to disapparate. I hesitated, then swung over the bar and grabbed the bottle of dark rum from the top shelf.

One for the road, right?

*​

After Voldemort was dead, the world let out a deep sigh and then settled, like dust, flat across the carnage. They moulded themselves to the broken world that the Dark Lord had left in his wake. Assuming the topography of all the old scars, divisions and prejudices.

And so we did it all again: picked a side, fought the battles, bled for our principles. Except this time we weren't fighting a tangible enemy with curses, but an obsolete and broken system with words and deeds.

The Ministry was rebuilt, from scratch, with the three of us at the helm. We instituted an ongoing process of gradual freedom for the House Elves. We returned the ancestral forests to the Centaurs. We created a mutual accord with the Goblins that allowed them wands. We redrafted the process of introducing muggleborns into the Wizarding World.

And we won. Again. We changed the world. Again. We retired. Again.

And now some motherfucker is attempting to undermine it all.

Again.

*​

I had a new war to fight, but I still had one stop to make before I went off to battle. The front door, framed by honeysuckle and daubed with a fresh coat of crimson paint, opened before I reached it.

More than any other in the world, this house felt like home, even though I'd never lived here. But when Teddy Lupin smiles, I always feel reassured by the fact that there's at least one tangible good I've done in the world. More than Voldemort, more than the social reforms, he was the physical embodiment of my legacy.

Harry Potter was here, that smile said. And he did one good thing in his entire miserable life.

"Harry," he says. "What a pleasant surprise. Please, come in."

Then we sat in his cosy little living room. I kept the bottle of rum in the inside pocket of my coat, for the sake of civility, and accepted the cup of tea he offered. And we sat in silence. He knew why I'd come, but was forcing me to take the white pawn.

"I'm not very good at this," I admitted.

"No, you're really not."

Silence again, during which Teddy's hair shifted colour a dozen times in a minute and his cat's claw fingernails tapped against the mug in his hand. This time, he broke first.

"Let me help you: there's something you have to do. There's a fight to be fought. You should say something about the sacrifice my parents made and that I'm all the good you've wrought in the world."

I winced. "That predictable, eh?"

He nodded. "Every time, Harry."

"But you understand, right?"

He sighed and put aside his untouched cup of tea. "No, not really. Wasn't it you that said that 'parents shouldn't leave their kids unless they've got to'?"

I swallowed. "I did. But I'm not your parent."

"You're the closest I've got. And fuck it, maybe I'm being selfish, but just for once, it would be nice if someone didn't abandon me to go fight the good fight. My mum, my dad, grandpa Ted, and now you."

I opened my mouth to say something, anything, reassuring. But the words didn't come. So I sat there instead and stared at my cooling tea.

It had been the same for me, of course. My mum, my dad, Sirius, Remus, and Dumbledore. Each had, in turn, given themselves to the fight and left an indelible mark upon my soul.

But, fuck it, they'd been right. Hadn't they?

Teddy took my silence for what it was and hurled his tea across the room. The mug smashed against the wall and painted the white with rivulets of tannin. I reached out to him, but he stalked by and disappeared into the quiet house.

I watched the tea run down the wall and, like a Rorschach test, form vague patterns and shapes I couldn't help but try to interpret. Just as Trelawny had found the Grim in my tea leaves, I saw nothing but the ugly reminders of who I'd become.

I wanted to go after him. To explain. But the words weren't there, and, besides, I had a bar to find and another friend to disappoint.

*​

There's a place in London that everyone has heard of, but few find. It's an entire world tucked away in the back rooms of greasy spoons, concealed in the secret names of streets, and hidden in the missing thirteenth floors of high rise concrete tenements.

It's a sprawling sub-city of wild, untamed magic and wild, untamable people. All interconnected like one of those Tube maps. Except all the rails only run one way, half the stations are dead-ends, and the madmen that stalk the tunnels also drive the trains.

There's the half-goblin that inscribes summoning circles on his clove cigarettes. The free house elf who can predict your death in exchange for a sock. The ageing hippy who embarked on one too many trips and now claims the eighties are the sloppy fabrication of the Illuminati.

'Legwarmers, mullets and Margaret Thatcher? Yeah, sure.'

Magicals and muggles alike can spend their entire lives and never realise that only a few microns of reality separate them from an entirely alien world. But some people, those closest to the fringes, they slip between the gaps in the pavement and tumble into the Elsewhere.

*​

Tonight I'm looking for one fragment of the Elsewhere in particular: a bar with no name that moves with the full moon. Asking around, nicely, I find that this month it's tucked in the pages of a leatherbound hardback in one of London's many charity shops. The bookcase itself hidden in a maze of rank, unwashed clothing. Each grotty shirt hung with the sort of haphazard imprecision that highlights just how pathetic and desperate your life has become.

Or maybe I'm projecting.

Screeching guitars, wailing vocals and hissing symbols blended into an indecipherable tumult of noise. A few half-hearted patrons staggered about the dance floor. Each too whacked out on speed and disco biscuits to remember that punk rock had stopped being relevant three decades ago.

The rest of the dingy nightclub was inhabited by the muggles too clued-in to sit in Wetherspoons. By the creatures too obscure for the clientele of the Leaky Cauldron, And by the wizards who were, somehow, left off the list for Hogwarts. All doing their best to ignore the caterwauling on stage.

Basically, Mos Eisley Cantina, if it had less class and worse music.

I made my way through the unwashed masses, drawing more attention than I'd have liked, and found a stool up by the bar. The proprietor made a show of checking in with every other punter before deigning to notice me. Then, without asking, splashed bitters and bourbon into a glass and tossed it on the bar.

I wiped away the spillage with the sleeve of my coat and lifted the glass in toast.

"Cheers, Rosie."

Her jet black sclera and oversized snakebite piercings both gleamed in the purple overheads. It lent the disquieting impression of two pairs of eyes staring back at me. I reached out to push a stray strand of her toxic pink hair back into place, and she slapped away my hand.

"I told you not to come back here."

"Did you? I probably wasn't listening. And anyway, you still served me."

"It's poison."

I considered the glass; it wasn't beyond possibility.

"Well then, I'll die happy."

I took a gulp and smacked my lips in a manner judged to irritate. It wasn't bad, either, but then all the best drinks, like my feelings, are mixed.

"What do you want?"

"You."

"Well, I hope you didn't come all the way down here to make a drunken pass at me. Because you've wasted your time."

"All time without you, Rosie, is wasted."

Her hands fell to her hips, and one of her eyebrows peaked; an expression that meant business.

"Alright, I'm looking for the Stone."

"What stone?"

"The Stone. Don't play fucking dumb with me, you're not pretty enough."

"Fuck you."

We glared razors at each other. If looks could kill, we'd have both been inside out, our entrails festooned across the bar like party streamers.

"I'm not playing games, Rosie," I said. "I know you know something. About the Stone, or about the vampires. If you don't tell me—"

"You'll what? There's nothing more you can threaten me with. You've already done the worst thing I can imagine."

"You have a poor imagination, then."

She bit her lip, and for a moment it looked as though she'd crack. Then she folded her arms and set her jaw, and her eyes went as black and hard as obsidian.

Well, fuck.

I turned to the guy sitting beside me at the bar and tapped him on the shoulder. He extracted himself from his conversation with a very comely brunette, to inquire after the wellbeing of my mental faculties and whether I'd like to maintain them so.

"I'm sorry," I said, and then smashed his face into the bar and, coincidentally, the drink he'd just been sipping from.

Dagger-like shards of broken glass skittered across the floor, and a fine mist of blood sprayed across the bar top. The brunette screamed, the music cut off and a second man appeared to my right and swung a bottle at my face. I caught the blow on my forearm and swallowed my cry of pain as it burst, showering me with tiny flecks of glass and beer.

I tied up with him, first grabbing his extended arm and then catching the other as he tried to plant a hook onto my jaw. Like an ardent, impatient lover I thrust my face forward to meet his, dropping my chin at the last moment and breaking his nose against my forehead. I supported his slackened body as he collapsed; no point in hurting him further.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Rosie leapt over the bar and stepped up into my face.

And honestly, I wasn't sure. It was a monstrous thing to do. Hopefully, the ends would prove to justify the means.

"Tell me what I want to know."

"Or you'll keep beating up my patrons?"

"Until either, you tell me, or nobody ever comes here again."

"That's extortion."

"No shit." She tried to stare me down, but couldn't bring herself to look me in the eyes. I reached out, snagged the sleeve of her leather jacket, and reeled her in so I could hiss directly into her ear. "Tell me where to go, and I'll fuck off. You can't want these vampire shits around any more than I do."

She pressed her forehead into my chest, and I caught the familiar scents of bourbon, cigarette smoke and her delicate perfume. "I hate you."

"No, you don't."

I tightened my embrace around her until I could feel her heartbeat thudding through my chest, out of time with my own. There were so many things that I should have apologised for; the fights, my hero complex, breaking her heart, and never leaving the toilet seat down. But instead, I settled on saying the lamest thing that came to mind.

"A wise man once told me that love was the most powerful of magic."

"Yeah, well, it's fucking terrible, too." She sniffed against my chest. "St. John's Church in Peckham."

She tried to pull away, and I held her fast. "A name?"

"He calls himself Rakshasa."

I rolled my eyes. "Fucking seriously?"

Rosie tried to pull away again, and this time, reluctantly, I let the leather of her sleeve slip from between my fingers. She spat on my coat, gave me the finger, then turned her back on me and strode away.

"Rosie," I called after her.

"Fuck off and die!"

I turned to find that I'd attracted somewhat of a crowd.

"She'll come around," I confided to a greasy-haired, greasy-flanneled kid with a mouthful of shark's teeth. "We're meant to be."

*​

I fucking hate Vampires.

Not because they're blood-sucking parasites. Or, well, not entirely because they're blood-sucking parasites. I think it's the obligatory attitude that sticks in my craw; the self-involved fucking pretension. The dressing in leather, donning thick eyeliner and painting their nails black. The constant, simultaneous, self-flagellation and perverse masturbatory fixation with their own inner demons.

"Oh woe is me, I am a tortured fucking monster."

Grow the fuck up. Or, y'know, don't. I suppose.

My point is that we live in a world of blood-banks, UV-filtering glass, and blood flavoured lollipops. And Vampires have eternal youth, groupies and very strong livers. And what do they do with this unprecedented level of freedom and power? Skulk about dusty crypts, writing bad poetry and eating people's pets.

What a bunch of absolute cunts.

*​

This particular bunch of cunts, and the crypt they were skulking in, were as rank and wretched as any I'd ever encountered. Blood had congealed on the floor and filled the small room with the stench of soured tampons. This, unfortunately, didn't quite manage to cover up the acrid smell of unwashed clothes and rampant copulation.

There were six of them, by my count, sleeping amongst the offal and refuse. Their ragged clothing exposed pale flesh crisscrossed by indigo veins, oversized fangs protruding over their lower lips.

I pushed the accumulated detritus from the top of one of the crypt's sarcophaguses onto the floor so that I could sit down. The noise of breaking glass roused the slumbering vampires.

"Wakey wakey, rise and shine," I said as they stirred. I took a swing from my bottle of rum and found, to my displeasure, that it was half empty.

Or half full; I am an optimist after all.

They kept their distance, perhaps because they knew me by reputation or because they respected my brazenness. Either way, they didn't immediately attack, so I started speaking.

"I've just finished having the most interesting conversation with the Minister for Magic," I began, and took another swig. "You see, someone has stolen something from me, and, as you might imagine, that upsets me. Now, I have it on good authority that it ended up in the hands of one of you chucklefucks."

The nearest one rose, revealing the poorly inked tattoos that covered his stomach and chest. He was, apparently, the 'Angle of Death'. Someone needed to teach these morons to spell.

"And what, you think we're just going to hand it over?" he asked, the words elongated and aspirated. Presumably, he thought this was intimidating. "Just because you came down here swinging your dick about like John Wayne?"

"Actually, that was exactly what I thought," I said, glad he'd caught on so quickly. "I can say please if it helps."

He smiled in a manner calculated to display his elongated canines. Around him, his cabal did the same and began to spread out. Evidently, they'd decided that one drunk wizard would be easy pickings.

"I hate to disappoint you," said the Angle of Death. "But you're going to find nothing here but your demise."

I yawned. I didn't even need to fake it. The rum was catching up with me. "Go ahead and try."

They didn't need a second invitation. The room filled with sibilant whispers and they closed to attack. The four directly before me rushed forward, while the remaining two climbed, spider-like, across the walls to attack from above.

I brandished my wand, and a jet of fire burst from the tip, catching three of the approaching vampires with a single spell. Angle, the last, leapt aside. I rose from the sarcophagus and turned, swatting one of the aerial threats away and sending her flying into a corner of the crypt. She collided with the stone wall in a horrendous cracking of bones and slumped to the ground.

The second launched himself at me, and I proved a second too slow. I rolled backwards with the hit, not allowing him to pin me, but earning two long grooves down either side of my face where his nails caught my flesh. I flicked my wand as he came again, there was a flash of white light, and the vampire was suspended in the air by his ankle.

Two of the smouldering vampires were struggling to their feet. I banished both of them into opposite walls, then chains sprang from thin air to engulf them.

I only realised that I'd lost track of Angle when he crashed into me from behind. I fell forwards, felt a hand seize my hair and then he smashed my face into the stone floor of the crypt, grinding it into a particularly feculent pile of debris.

He was fast and strong, but he evidently had no experience grappling. I crashed my elbow twice into the side of his head before he could latch in a choke and then twisted out from under him. He skittered to the other side of the crypt and crouched there, eyes flashing in the half darkness.

I stood, wiped shit from my face and glowered back, twirling my wand between my fingers.

"Where is the fucking Stone," I asked.

"We don't have it," he hissed. "It went with Rakshasa."

"Where?"

"The Ministry. To the Veil." I rolled my eyes. Of course, that's where he'd take it. "Now leave."

I laughed, a bitter sound, and shook my head. I had wanted to do this amicably. But now I'm pissed like I've been drinking spirits, neat, out of pint glasses.

"No such luck, I'm afraid," I said, levelling my wand.

"Then I'm going to take great pleasure in killing you."

"You mean you'll take great pleasure in trying. I mean, fuck it, you might even succeed, for all the good it'll do you." I took a step forward. "They don't call me the Master of Death for nothing, y'know."

"Keep making jokes," the vampire snarled, prowling toward me on all fours with the sinewy grace of a panther. "Perhaps you'll still be laughing when I shove you through the Gates of Death."

"Gates? Eh, honestly, they're more like a revolving door, at this point."

I had about ten more pithy comments, but he attacked before I got a chance to use them.

*​

A thousand years ago, on the day Harald Hardrada's armies lost the battle of Fulford, a raving lunatic came to Unst. He camped among the stones of the ruined monastery and consecrated his body for the task that was to come.

He descended the headland, using his magic as ropes. With a hammer, a chisel and an inhuman level of perseverance, he carved twenty-five stones from the cliff face.

His task took eight days and nights, during which he didn't sleep. When finished, he piled those stones into a wicker basket, strapped it to his back and started his long walk south. He didn't stop walking until he reached the Thames. There, in the shadow of the newly completed Westminster Abbey, he used the stones to create an archway, twelve blocks high on either side. As he added the keystone, bringing each side to thirteen blocks tall, he lost his footing and tumbled through the portal he'd just created. Into nothingness.

A couple of centuries later, someone decided that this seemed a perfectly logical place upon which to site the British Ministry of Magic. A place I'd long ago pledged I would never return. But now, by unsavoury circumstances, was obliged to.

At least I'd find there the two people who loved me more than anyone in the entire world. Those who'd stick with me through thick and thin. Those whose support I could count on, no matter what.

*​

"Harry, you're a twat," said Hermione. "You're a twat now, you've always been a twat, and the only thing that's ever going to change is that it's likely you'll become an even bigger twat."

I looked to Ron for support, but he just looked awkward and shrugged. "You are a bit of a twat, mate."

"Well, thanks a fucking lot. Glad to see I can count on my best mates to have my back."

I tried to lift my hand to scratch my nose and found, only adding to my growing frustration, that the chain fastening my manacles to the interrogation table wasn't long enough to let me reach.

"Harry, you killed the Minister for Magic!" Hermione's voice had taken on the same strangled pitch that she'd once reserved for when we hadn't bothered doing our homework.

"He was a vampire. We needed a new one."

"Says you, with no evidence!"

"When have we ever had evidence?"

"That's not the point."

I rattled the chains in another desperate bid to scratch my nose.

"Of course it's— eurghh," I said, my voice giving way to a strangled whine as I leant against the metal restraint that fastened my neck to the chair I was sitting in.

"Oh, for God's sake," said Hermione, and scratched it for me. "The point is, Harry, that you can't run around being a vigilante with no respect for due process."

"So I should have read Voldemort his Miranda rights?"

Ron looked, nonplussed, to Hermione, but she ignored him. "Of course not, Harry. The old system, I admit, was flawed. But we live in a new world now. One, I might add, that you helped make."

"Yeah, well, it's shit."

"You're only saying that because if the system works, it means that you can't run rampant across the country making up the rules as you go along."

"So, I like a bit of adventure," I objected. "So did Dumbledore."

Hermione's face folded into the same expression that she adopted when discussing my parents, or Sirius.

"Harry," she said, gently. "If there's one thing we all learned from our time at Hogwarts, it's that Dumbledore wasn't always right."

I took a moment to let that sink in.

"What a load of old crap," I declared. The restraints at my neck and ankles snapped open, and I tossed the manacles down on the table. I rose and tried to rub the circulation back into my hands. The pair of them gaped at me. "Dumbledore engineered a plan to destroy Voldemort so good that it worked even after he was dead. He was more right in that single moment than you've been in your entire life."

I reached across the table and plucked my wand out of Ron's shirt pocket. They didn't put up any resistance, perhaps shocked, or because they knew it'd be a futile gesture. Whatever the case, I gave them a wink as I left.

I had a vampire to stop and a Stone to reclaim.

*​

The pub at the end of the world attracts three types of patrons.

The first are the curious, the scholars and the dreamers. They come hoping that they can see the phenomena of the cliffs for themselves. That they can derive some small understanding. That perhaps they will find some solution there to the great questions of the cosmos. But each of them, even Dumbledore, leaves empty-handed. The only answers to be found there aren't those to the questions they're asking.

Second are the desperate, the decaying and the depressed. Those who come hoping to find some solace in the knowledge that they can escape. That they can, in this small way, take control over the situation, they've found themselves in. That they can, with one act of defiance, have a single moment of triumph. Some of them, the most desperate, even take it. Though most settle for a quiet drink, a sympathetic ear and the knowledge that they could.

The third type are the monsters, the morbidly obsessed and the parasites. Those who come not for the cliffs, but for the people who gravitate toward it. Sure, they often possess noble intentions: to provide the sympathetic ear that will turn people away from the edge. Some of them even mean it, but those don't last long.

No, the people who return, time and time again, are those that go because they find some nourishment in the misery of others. Those who thrive in the darkness and the despair. They come over and over, and they say all the right things, and they even save more than their fair share of tortured souls.

But really, they're there because through long years of life they've realised that they only feel alive in the lowest moments of other people.

And when they've gotten swollen and fat from the misery, they slope off into the darkness to wait for their next meal.

And the truly heinous? The worst of the worst?

They end up buying the place.

*​

The Department of Mysteries hadn't changed in at least twenty years. Buried deep beneath the Ministry, this bloated, rotting pustule has been bleeding poison into the system like a corpse at the bottom of a well. Somehow, time after time, the Unspeakables manage to avoid the purging fires that pass through and gut the Ministry, as indestructible as cockroaches.

The Chamber of Death hasn't changed either. The same dais, the same archway, the same gently shifting veil. Except this time it isn't Sirius lined up on a collision course with fate. In fact, it's the person that I simultaneously least expected, and ought to have guessed.

The entire universe is an enormous cosmic joke at my expense. And it doesn't even have the decency to be funny.

"Yeah, of course it's you," I said. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"Harry?" Teddy turned, wide-eyed to stare at me.

"Don't," I said, as his fingers twitched towards his wand. "Come away from the Veil and give me the Stone."

His eyes hardened and his fingers closed around the small black rock in the palm of his other hand. "And if I won't?"

"Then the pair of us are going to have to spend eternity explaining to your parents how badly we fucked up."

Teddy's eyes flashed hypnotically between colours; first red, then purple, then blue, before finally settling on a shade of green suspiciously like my own.

"We don't have to," he said. "Don't you see? We can bring them back. We can cheat death."

It was like a reflection from the past; Voldemort, Erised and the Philosopher's Stone.

I gave him my saddest, smallest smile. The one that I learned from years of watching Dumbledore do the same to me.

"It doesn't work like that, Teddy," I said, taking a step towards him. "There's only one way to cheat death, and it isn't with that Stone."

"But they're the same! Look!" He held the jet black Resurrection Stone up against the dark rock of the arch. "They came from the same place."

"Teddy," I tried again, but he was evidently in no mood to listen.

"You have to let me work this out!" His voice had gone high, and reedy, and desperate. "I need this."

Anger and desperation flowed off him in palpable waves. So much emotion, so much turmoil. It was in his every twitching movement, every anxious flicker of his metamorphmagus transformations, every syllable he spoke. I had been blind not to see it before.

Particularly because this would have been me. Had I not had the spectre of Voldemort looming over me, had I not had Dumbledore's guidance, had I not had a target for my own thirst for retribution.

I had failed him, too preoccupied with my own selfish desires. I could have seen it before now. Before it was too late.

You see, Dumbledore had been wrong about just one thing. As surely as Voldemort had missed one side of the coin, Albus had missed the other. Love, he'd always said, was the most powerful of magics. But he hadn't understood that it could be fucking terrible, too.

All those lost and broken things that had crawled out of the darkness. Tom Riddle, and Severus Snape, and Merope Gaunt, and Harry Potter, and now, finally, Teddy Lupin. The dead parents, the burning wardrobes, the broken homes, the love potions and the monster in my chest.

Nobody had ever taught us how to love, so we'd used our pain instead.

And then we'd passed it on, our bile overflowing to poison each subsequent generation in turn. Our broken shells becoming their chrysalises; shaping the children we ought to have protected into monsters made in our own image.

I could have, should have, broken the cycle earlier. Now there was only one way that it could end.

So Teddy and I duelled. And when the dust settled, and he lay broken in the debris, spluttering pistol shot coughs, I went to him. I gathered his broken body into my arms and held his head close to my chest.

"The stones," he whispered, straining to reach them. "They're the same."

"I know they are," I said. "It doesn't matter. Not now."

The Aurors would be coming soon. I suppressed the desperate urge to stand and fight them. One final hurrah before I faced the inevitable conclusions I'd found in this room.

Hermione had been right, of course. She'd been wrong about so many things, but she'd never been wrong when it came to me. I was a fossil; an embarrassment to the very system I created. Too set in my ways, and caught up in the thrill of the fight. I was the warrior in the time of peace, and one of these days I was bound to be wrong. One of these times I would set out on a crusade with the wrong target in my sights.

And I would sour everything we'd worked so hard to achieve.

"So, what happens now?"

The question interrupted my reverie. I looked to the Stone, to the archway and across the hundreds of miles to that jagged headland. Where the desperate and the broken take their last defiant roll of the loaded dice. I see the wall of triumphant dead and remember what Dumbledore had said, all those years ago.

'To the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure.'

I take a deep slug of the rum I'm still holding. It tastes like victory, it tastes like defeat, it tastes like thirty-five years of bitter struggle and every memory I've ever summoned to conjure a Patronus.

One for the road.

"Now?" And I smiled. "Now, we step out into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure."

 

Man I loved this shit. It captures this sense of epic to it. I honestly thought this was Joe's entry, before I realized Joe didn't submit anything this time around.

It just has this evocative world building to it- all of these cool tidbits we're fed, building up this idea of a grand story. I think the weakest part for me was the fight scenes, the ones with the vampires. I mean you tried to give it some weight, but it honestly just comes across as Harry curbstomping some fools. I was never really worried for him during the entire time, and the lack of narrative weight just didn't let me care about the action itself beyond being "a thing that needs to happen in service of plot".

You had the right idea skipping most of the action with Teddy. At the end of the day, it shouldn't even be a contest, because Harry is played off as this utter badass and no other character in the new generation would be able to live up to that without a lot of buildup.

Another criticism I have is that the vampires felt like a side element rather than an integral plot device here. If you replaced vampires with werewolves, I don't think anything would have changed in the story much. It just never seemed to play an important role - that is to say, the prompt was an excuse for the story, not the reason for the story. The main point honestly felt more focused on the Stone, the Veil, and all of the old magic stuff.

The vampires were just ornamental.

Another thing is that it all feels less like a self-contained short story and more the prequel to an epic saga? This feels too much like setup that when the ending finally does come, it leaves me a bit dissatisfied - that the epic I was promised wasn't quite epic enough?

These are minor criticisms really despite me harping on and on about them. I still rate this piece fairly highly, all things considered.

 

I'm gonna say that compared to everyone else, I really liked this story. I will also say I saw a fair bit of it when it was being crafted, so that might give me a better understanding of the underlying concepts.

The reason I liked this story is because it hit all the things I look for in a story. There is a sense of competence to Harry that shows that he's accomplished enough that he doesn't fear anything. Not being put into a room with Aurors, even if they are his friends, not going against a vampire, or a group of vampires.

I liked the various nods to canon that we saw as well, the pictures on the wall had a real impact on me in the sense that I could feel what Harry was feeling as he stared at them. I liked the empasis on moving and non-moving portraits, and the fact that Dumbledore had his fucked up hand.

The setting was well done and is what I look for in urban fantasy. Its magic without someone running up and screaming in your face, "THIS IS FUCKING MAGIC!". I like the bar hidden in a book. I like the bar at the end of the world, I liked the overall feel of the story of a weary traveler rebelling against a system that he created.

I really liked the story within a story you told about the viking that built the veil from the rocks of the cliffs at the end of the world. I liked how you tied the stone of the veil to the stone of the ring, and I didn't even mind when Teddy said his line. It added to his misery, the fact that he couldn't bring his parents back.

The reviews on this are conflicting. As far as story telling goes, there are some things that are conflicting, and I think some areas could have been fleshed out more. I'd have liked to have seen more with Teddy, but I understand why that scene went the way it did, I also appreciate the use of ambiguity in your narrative because it lets me fill in the pieces that I've picked up through out.

The joke he tells the minister at the start is pretty damn funny. In a way, its all in the delivery and the fact that its not expected. It works very well here.

This tells a complete story in my mind. There are things that are left to the imagination which is nice, I don't always like to be told everything and its rare that you can read something fanfic related that you can formulate it. This wasn't predictable at all. The world itself felt AU even though it had the trappings of canon. There was a sense of Epic to it, but it was tempered by the down to earth character that Harry was.

I liked the fact that instead of choosing to do the right thing and try and integrate himself into a system he helped create, he took the easy way out and stepped into the veil. He was tired of fighting and knew that he would never be able to fit in. I don't think the weariness of the character here detracts from anything, it adds to the flavor and shows an awareness of their own boundaries.

Its also a fucking badass way to go.

Overall, great story. I thank you for submitting this and crafting this story where before it didn't exist. There are very few that can match your talent in story telling, and very few that can create the concepts you do on the fly and make them work without them seeming too AU.

 

Great start to this one. Sets the scene nicely, but then I'm a sucker for things like pubs perched on windswept cliffs that are hidden away on the northernmost tips of countries.

Honestly this is a lovely example of saying a lot without using a lot of words. We have the entire history of the place without any extra words, and it's not useless history. Clearly there's magic to be had there, in that location, and a need for something to be there to guard against something else.

I'm interested.

The Minister didn't laugh, so I smashed his head into the bar a couple of times. His skull left a strange imprint in the gin-soaked wood, as though it were made of sponge. How curious.​

The fuck? If I read that right it's extremely violent, not to mention disturbing with the sponge-y imprint in the wood. Not that there's anything wrong with extremely violent, but it was a jarring scene in general. It reads like this Minister was just chilling at the pub then gets the shit beat out of him and threatened if he doesn't tell the bartender where to find something... and he's also a vampire?

Yup. Okay. I'm still loving this, but I do feel as if I was thrown a bit off the deep end into this story.

And now we're in Harry's POV? But I don't think he was the bartender, was he?

And yay, I enjoy Teddy being considered as part of Harry's legacy. Something about the implication that Harry nailed the Godfather shit is... nice. That said, I want to know how old Teddy is here. It's never pleasant to lose your parent-figures, but I have the impression that Teddy isn't a kid in this scene. Makes it a little harder to compare to him to Harry, since Harry kept losing everyone before he could finish school.

There's a place in London that everyone has heard of, but few find. It's an entire world tucked away in the back rooms of greasy spoons, concealed in the secret names of streets, and hidden in the missing thirteenth floors of high rise concrete tenements.

It's a sprawling sub-city of wild, untamed magic and wild, untamable people. All interconnected like one of those Tube maps. Except all the rails only run one way, half the stations are dead-ends, and the madmen that stalk the tunnels also drive the trains.​

Damn but you have a way with words. Even if you weren't, I have a weakness for things like this, that make the Wizarding World seem so much bigger than Diagon Alley. Kudos.

Tonight I'm looking for one fragment of the Elsewhere in particular: a bar with no name that moves with the full moon. Asking around, nicely, I find that this month it's tucked in the pages of a leatherbound hardback in one of London's many charity shops.​

I admit that... uh, this pushed the bounds of credulity a hair. I love the far that moves with the full moon, but it would make a little more sense if it was hidden behind the bookcase rather than within the pages of a book. Because now I'm distracted trying to figure out how that works - are you sucked into the book? How do you leave? Is it in your mind? Is it a portkey that doesn't move with the person who uses it? I just found this needlessly distracting, I suppose.

Whoo! Bar fight! But more than that, I like the dialogue with Rosie. Fun times.

Angle of Death... *snicker*

His task took eight days and nights, during which he didn't sleep. When finished, he piled those stones into a wicker basket, strapped it to his back and started his long walk south. He didn't stop walking until he reached the Thames. There, in the shadow of the newly completed Westminster Abbey, he used the stones to create an archway, twelve blocks high on either side. As he added the keystone, bringing each side to thirteen blocks tall, he lost his footing and tumbled through the portal he'd just created. Into nothingness. ​

Again, love how you manage to incorporate lore and history into short scenes. You just used a handful of paragraphs for that scene containing the above and it was perfect. Didn't get bogged down at all like so often happens when authors try to insert backstory.

"What a load of old crap," I declared. The restraints at my neck and ankles snapped open, and I tossed the manacles down on the table. I rose and tried to rub the circulation back into my hands. The pair of them gaped at me. "Dumbledore engineered a plan to destroy Voldemort so good that it worked even after he was dead. He was more right in that single moment than you've been in your entire life."​

Huh, well, now that's an interesting take on it. Haven't really seen that POV before. It's been implied, but not stated outright. At least in fanfic I've read. Kudos for something that feels a bit new.

Oh, and also, looks like Harry *was* the bartender. But how did anyone know Harry is the one that killed him? Unless I remember wrong there weren't witnesses, though I suppose the Minister didn't 'really' die and could have spread the rumor himself. ...or did I miss something?

I like the ending, that it ends up being Teddy that Harry has to fight and defeat. I like the very end, with that quote from Dumbledore fitting perfectly. But I ... maybe I missed it, but how the hell did Teddy get involved to begin with? It came out of nowhere, but then I am reading quickly to review before midnight.

Fun times! Just a few places where I had questions I wanted answers to - but whether I just missed those answers or whether they weren't there, I don't know.