208 Chapter 208: His Deepest Fear

If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr

I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.

I would like to thank my beta, Akisu, for his help in this chapter.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

1 May 1994, Hogwarts, Scotland

It had almost been an hour since Harry entered the maze, and he was admittedly getting bored. Oh, he'd had to go through a few challenges, but they weren't really that difficult. The Rune Puzzles were somewhat obvious to solve. They were even easier than the ones printed every day in the Daily Prophet that Harry liked to solve during his breakfast.

Then again, those challenges were aimed at students, not fully qualified adult mages.

It showed with the quality of the trial before him. With a flick of his wand, Harry broke through the ward to get to the other side. Most of the challenges he had to deal with were fulfilled either by some kind of runic activation or a ward that reacted to a simple action. In a way, this allowed students to have multiple ways of getting past it; they could either solve the challenge or try to break the ward.

The maze itself was rather simple in its design. Oh, sure, it was very large and could be complex, but each layer of the maze moved with some kind of trigger and rotated in the opposite direction of the previous one. Each layer was guarded by a challenge of some sort, meaning that every competitor would have to go through certain types of challenges to get to the centre. If Harry had to guess, each rotation was triggered by someone getting through a challenge, meaning that competitors' actions would affect each other in some way, be it positive or negative.

The first challenge was a runic puzzle that Harry solved in seconds, and then some kind of room filled with mental illusions that he defeated with a glance. Then came a riddle room that was warded to open only when the answer was spoken out loud. Harry just broke the ward. It was a common enough ward that had a very well-known counter.

Harry's Arcane Hearing really wasn't fair to the other competitors.

Still, it wasn't like he was planning on winning the damn thing. It was obviously a trap. Honestly, he would have pretended to be stumped or pretend to make a blunder and accidentally get disqualified, if his friends weren't already in the maze.

Thankfully, Tracy and Blaise were already eliminated at the second layer of the maze. Harry had memorized his friends' songs using his Arcane Hearing and could listen to their location. It was pretty imprecise, but he did his best to remain at the same layer as them, while progressively getting closer. Tracy and Blaise disappeared from the maze and reappeared somewhere outside somewhere around the second layer. Their songs did not have any sign of distress, only a bit of reluctant frustration, so he assumed that they were out of the task.

Only Daphne remained in the maze, and she was going through the tasks very quickly. Harry slowly made his way towards her general location. This whole thing was a trap and Harry didn't want to leave the maze without knowing that she was safe. Afterwards, he would either send up red sparks and forfeit or pretend to make a mistake and get eliminated.

Anyway, Daphne was doing very well from the looks of it. She was advancing very quickly towards the centre. If Harry had to guess, their lessons in curse-breaking were very handy. Daphne probably just disabled any ward in front of her, which was something they had practised extensively. Still, Harry had told Daphne that the whole thing was a trap. They had all agreed to lose quickly since there was very little to gain by winning the task. Tracy had the spot she craved in the Court of Slytherin, and they definitely did not need the gold or recognition.

Daphne ignoring their agreement worried him. He had to find her and quickly.

Suddenly, the stones shifted around once more, and Harry stabilized himself quickly. The maze walls shifted with a very loud groan, echoing through the narrow passages. Harry watched, as the solid stone walls seemed to liquefy for a moment, rippling with arcane energy, before settling into a new configuration. A passage that hadn't been there before now lay open in front of him, becoming the only way out of the room.

The whole transition was very smooth and seamless. Harry wanted nothing more than to study the runes that were probably etched in the walls but refrained himself. He still had to find Daphne.

Cautiously, Harry stepped forward, his wand raised and ready to cast at the first sign of danger. As he moved into the newly revealed passage, a thick, swirling fog began to seep from the ground, curling around his ankles like a living thing. The fog was dense, almost tangible, and as he walked the furthest.

Even without his Arcane Hearing, Harry would have been able to tell that the fog was charmed. It acted similarly to a cheering charm, only it amplified fear, not happiness. Then it came, a song unlike one that Harry had ever heard before.

It began subtly, a barely audible whisper of fear, creeping into the consciousness almost unnoticed. And then, when it took root, it grew very quickly, the harmonies changing and shifting unpredictably, reacting to what it discovered. Beneath it all was a deep resonant tone, a foundation of some sort, something that is present in every single living thing….

It was so familiar, right at the tip of his tongue, "Fear…"

It took longer than he liked to realize what this song belonged to, "That's a boggart."

The entire melody was just so complex, so much more different than that of any magical creature he ever encountered. But it didn't feel natural. This was different. This was something more, "What are you?"

The creature seemingly materialized out of nowhere, into the image of an older Harry, "You're a clever one, aren't you?"

"I like to think so and you didn't answer my question."

"Now, what would be the fun in that? It's not common that I find someone like you, with a fear that would allow me to communicate. I deserve to have a little fun, don't I? I wonder if you've realized what your fear is…"

Harry shrugged, "I realized it the moment I saw you. It's in the eyes, you see."

"You're right. They're very familiar, aren't they?"

His heart leapt into his throat. This was a bit more personal than he liked to see. Because he had seen those eyes before every day in his previous life. It was the eyes of someone who was alive but did not live. A man who would die without truly experiencing life.

If there was something he dreaded more than anything in this life, it would be that he would die alone, with that look on his face. Seeing it so plainly just made him uncomfortable.

The boggart continued, "Most people are afraid of monsters, of other people, of their friends or family abandoning them. The wise ones are afraid of themselves, of what they could become… I have to play a role for every single one of them. But you… You're afraid of those eyes. You're leaving me a lot of free will to work with."

"But you won't tell me what you are…"

"I won't," the creature denied.

"Then we have nothing to discuss. You see, I am rather busy. Goodbye, boggart."

With a wave of his wand, Harry banished the boggart and dispelled the mist. He walked through the passageway and walked the paths that took him the closest to Daphne. He was getting close. He could hear Daphne's song getting louder with every step he took.

He ducked suddenly as he felt a spell coming from his left and sent a stunner towards the castor. Harry cast a repelling shield in front of him to redirect two spells coming his way. With a flick of his wand, he conjured birds that flew towards the attackers and turned to chains, binding them and sticking to the walls.

Deciding to see who was ambushing him, Harry snorted when he saw McLaggen and two other Gryffindors in his year, "Seriously? Why did you even attack me?"

The older boy looked resigned, "Come on, man. After all you did during the whole tournament, are you really surprised that people wouldn't try to eliminate you?"

"I guess not. Nice try, though," Harry complimented before stunning him and his collaborators.

The moment they all fell unconscious, the ground swallowed them all, and Harry felt their songs disappear and reappear seconds later outside the maze. Huh, so being unconscious was grounds to be eliminated? That was good to know.

Before he could analyze the effect, Harry felt Daphne's song race up into pure panic, then to blinding pain. Harry started running without thinking about it. All thoughts of hiding what he could do turned into smoke as he focused on saving his best friend.

He was done playing…

With a wave of his wand, the protections on the walls were bypassed and the stones moved away, creating an artificial path directly near Daphne's location. He warped space to minimize the distance. It took a dozen hops for Harry to start hearing the screaming.

Daphne's screams grew louder and more desperate with each wall he went through, her melodies turned into a haunting symphony of pain that cut straight to his soul.

When he finally found her, he froze when he saw his friend contorted in agony on the cold cobblestone floor of the maze. Daphne's elegant blonde hair, typically styled with meticulous care, was now strewn wildly around her head, a halo of disarray. Her skin, normally the picture of porcelain grace, was marred by beads of sweat and etched with lines of pain.

He tried to shake her, but she didn't seem to respond. The sight of her in such a vulnerable state was jarring to Harry, a stark contrast to the strong young woman that she really was.

She was still trembling, and Harry instinctively went to try to do something. Anything. He knelt beside her, dozens of basic healing charms on the tip of his tongue only to stiffen when someone spoke up, "Ah, you're finally here."

Harry pointed his wand at the source of the voice to see Ron Weasley of all people smirking at him, "What did you do to her?"

"It was just a cursed locket I had around. Only I can remove it from her. With it, I can make her feel extreme pain with just a thought."

Harry prepared himself to break the locket entirely only to be interrupted by Weasley once more, "I wouldn't do that if I was you. If the Locket is removed without my permission, she will die. If not by the backlash, then the Imperius Curse I put on her would do the rest. She's such a willful young woman, I have to say…"

Harry noticed Daphne's glassy eyes, a telltale sign of being under the Imperius Curse, "You're not Weasley, are you? I know him. He wouldn't have been able to pull something like this off."

"Right again. He said you were bright. After our affairs are concluded, they'll find Mr. Weasley petrified somewhere else in the maze. By then, I will be long gone."

Harry snorted, "There had to be better ways to go about attacking Daphne."

"Oh, you misunderstand. Ms. Greengrass is the unfortunate victim here. This was all about you. You see, for all your intelligence, you lack wisdom. You have patterns like any other. You have pressure points: your friends, specifically Ms. Greengrass here. It wasn't hard to see what you've done the previous year just because she was petrified. I'm sorry to see someone with your potential gone, but you were just making too much noise, becoming too troublesome to deal with."

"You're with Dumbledore," Harry simply stated, repressing his rage as much as he could.

The sinister smile Harry received looked wrong on Ron Weasley's face, "Yes, I am. How did you find out?"

"I wasn't actually sure, but you needed to bypass the observers somehow and since it's something that Dumbledore just created, he was the most logical choice. Honestly, I was just guessing and used the name of the most powerful person I antagonized recently. Thank you for the confirmation though. So, this was all an elaborate trap to kill me?"

"You must think you're so smart… You're right, Dumbledore deduced that you had a way to keep an eye on your friends. I followed after Greengrass and put her under the Imperius as quickly as I could to stop her from forfeiting like you were likely to ask her to. She went further into the maze, something that Dumbledore assumed would get your attention. And well, it did. It's a shame that she had to suffer though. She didn't deserve it."

Harry sneered at him, "So, what's stopping me from stopping you, right now?"

"The fact that the necklace would kill her should be enough to prevent you from doing so. You see, to truly kill me without your friend biting the dust, you'd have to somehow dispel the Imperius Curse I put on her, then somehow remove the necklace without her being hurt, and finally land a spell on me. Call me dubious, but I can't see you being able to do that in less than a second."

"Hmm, very interesting plan. Not yours, I presume. After all, you don't sound like a planner. Ah, I get it now."

"Get what," the impostor asked. 

"Have you always been in Dumbledore's thumb, or are your loyalties that fickle? Which one is it, Wormtail?"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

AN: I'll be honest when I started to write this chapter, I wanted to put more in it, but it ended up getting longer and I didn't have time to finish it. I ended up just stopping there and dividing it into two to make sure I did the second part properly. Personally, I think it turned out well in the end. As usual, please let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions regarding it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr

I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.

Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.