Death is Painless

"Avada Kedavra!"

Harry Potter should be dead. He'd been struck with that dreaded, green curse by his mortal enemy that haunted his very dreams, yet, he was standing at King's Cross Station.

The wizard looked around and tried to get a sense of everything. The train to Hogwarts sat still, without a sound. The air felt stale, yet Harry couldn't taste it or anything else. As he thought about it, he smelt nothing either. His senses were dull and everything seemed ethereal and peaceful. He looked around for guidance but found none. He was all alone.

The afterlife seemed pretty shitty so far.

Then, in the corner of his eye, Harry spotted a fetus-sized, black wraith, curled up in a ball. He didn't need to see red eyes to know it was Voldemort. It had to be. The nightmares from when Cedric died reminded him of that ugly baby body often enough. The graveyard. It was only the beginning. Then came Sirius, Dumbledore, Moody, Dobby, Fred, Remus, Tonks, Colin Creevy, Snape, not even Hedwig was left alone!

Death shouldn't be filled with nightmares! It should be over! Why wasn't he allowed to rest in peace?!

But what about his friends? All the students that were still at Hogwarts?

Voldemort.

Harry started hyperventilating as he took small steps backward, away from the disembodied wraith, before he heard a voice behind him.

"I apologize for the delay, I came over as quick as I could."

Harry turned and glared at the intruder as he snapped his wrist forward, expecting a wand to appear in his hands.

He was disappointed to realize that he didn't have his wand.

The man in front of him chuckled aloud, "I'm sure you have plenty of questions, frankly I do as well, with this piece of a soul you have in your mind."

Harry's jaw dropped down. In his mind?

Then he took in the man's appearance and put his hand down. Not like he could do anything without a wand.

The man had bat wings and a tail.

No magical creatures he knew had those features... except... Succubi were supposed to have those, but four pairs of wings? And as far as he knew, succubi were extinct.

Fuck? A succu- no, an incubus was in his mind? Harry was willing to return to life and present himself to Voldemort's mercy at this point. He clenched himself tightly and inwardly cursed at his luck until he realized how familiar the rest of his appearance was.

Sure, he was taller than Harry and had an aristocratic look to his face, but his eyes were the same killing curse green as his. The man's hair was jet black and tied in a ponytail behind him. His skin was pale like Harry's as well.

That was where the similarities ended. He was far more than simply pale, it looked almost sickly as if he was dying. Yet, even how close to death he appeared, the man looked as if he was full of life. His appearance was difficult to put to words, as his very presence was so otherworldly.

Nope. No way was this some relative, plus, how could his mom be related to an incubus? He might have jumped the gun with the eye color comparison, but he blamed the fact that everyone and their mother constantly reminded him how he had his mother's eyes.

Yes, he looked like his father and had his mother's eyes. The classmates of his parents were all broken records. Bloody British parrots, the lot of them.

'Where is mum anyway?' he thought to himself. 'If I'm dead she should be here!'

"Interesting. A soul shard that lived with you your entire life. Hmm. And you look tense as if you died in battle. Personally, I never expected an outcome half as good as this," he muttered to himself. "You'll make a fine devil, boy."

"What!" Harry jumped. "Devil?"

He nodded in return. "Yes, a pleasure to meet you, I'm Lord Cadaer Beleth, devil and Head of the House Beleth of the 72 Pillars. I created the Deathly Hallows with my wife as an attempt to turn a human into a devil. Well, Beelzebub eventually succeeded but the Deathly Hallows were made years before the Evil Pieces. Also, you start off as a High-Class devil with the power of my house, so I believe he is now the most overrated genius in Hell and we succeeded where he failed."

The 'devil,' flashed a wide smile that startled the hell out of the recently deceased wizard.

"T-to turn? Like a vampire? Wh-what?"

"I'll ignore the horrible impression you're making because you expected this death to be your last," Lord Beleth grinned. It was a grin of an amused, apex predator looking down, sympathetically, at a lowly frog who spent his life at the bottom of a well. The devil naturally commanded his undivided attention, yet Harry felt no malice.

Harry stood straight and stopped talking. Best to just go with the flow.

The devil laughed to himself a bit more. Harry got the impression he was enjoying this a bit too much.

"You see, there was a war that lasted over a millennium between Angels of Heaven, Devils of Hell, and the Fallen Angels who wanted Earth for themselves."

Harry's jaw dropped again, Professor Binns did NOT teach this.

"It ended over 500 years ago, don't worry," the devil winked before he took in a deep breath and relaxed his figure.

"The war was horrible. What used to be millions of us... Now all Three Factions could be considered to be three different endangered species. Towards the end of it, when most of my family were dead, I decided to take a... vacation."

Harry nodded. He's been exposed to so many world-changing surprises in his life, he should be desensitized to them by now.

Actually, he should have expected magical societies hidden from other magical societies. How much further did the rabbit hole go? On the other hand, Harry didn't want to think about the implications of how old the devil was either. Voldemort gave up everything for immortality, what about this devil?

"And so I tried to relax when I met a woman. You must understand, relationships are different for us. Currently, I live with 10 concubines and it's far from uncommon. But Iolanthe... Wizards and Witches live for 200 years at the most because of the fey blood in their veins, but they are still, primarily human. You may have a couple of percentage points of their blood at best, but devils never age once we enter our prime. Our relationship was never meant to last and we both knew it..." he trailed off and looked upwards into the grey sky. How did Harry miss the fact that the sky was grey? It wasn't like clouds but whisps that constantly drifted across the expanse in front of a darker grey firmament.

Well, that answered that question. Sucks to be you, Tom, should've been born a devil.

Actually... that would have been even more frightening. Thank God he's human.

A sharp pain lanced through his head, reminiscent of the throbbing pains his scar used to give him. He couldn't focus on why it just happened because of the other bombs Cadaer dropped on his mind.

Fey blood?! For a community that hated half breeds and was so focused on blood purity, it was all so hypocritical! Harry believed the devil in front of him. Maybe he was too trusting, but everything made sense and Cadaer had a far greater presence than Dumbledore and Voldemort could ever dream of. Harry figured Merlin himself would bow down to this man.

Also, having your friends and family die as you stayed youthful sounded horrible and Harry pitied the devil. Yet, at the same time, he felt envy. He didn't even know what love was. Was what Snape did love? An hour ago, he would have thought of him as a hero, but, looking back, he was a selfish and petty bastard.

"Take me, please, leave my baby alone!"

The memory that had been dragged from the depths of his mind by dementors sounded in his ears.

That was jealous possessiveness, not love. What about Dumbledore? He sent him back to the Dursleys every year and never helped Sirius get a trial! Chief Warlock of the damned Wizengamot! And Remus, too! He left him alone without a single visit and died before he could make it up to him!

Harry clenched his fists as cold rage ran through his bones. It was a foreign feeling. He never felt so angry at the injustice of his life. Sure, he lashed out sometimes, but this was something else. Something primal.

If the devil noticed Harry's reaction, he ignored it and continued his story.

Cadaer Beleth sighed. "Back then, we had no way of turning humans into devils. She passed on, but before I met her she had a son of her own. At any other time, I would have hypnotized her to forget her spawn and killed it. It was only human after all."

Harry shivered. He was beginning to realize how far from human Cadaer was. His species lives forever unless someone kills them. Devils.

It was more than a little unnerving.

"But I was lost and more depressed than I had ever been in my life, so I let him live. Eventually, I grew to love him as my own son. Yet, I still knew they were only human. Eventually, both of them would pass on before me. So, during the greatest century of my life, my wife and I created three items from my power in an attempt to turn them into devils. The wand. The stone. And the cloak," his voice fell quiet in a dramatic decrescendo.

Cadaer waved his hands over to a bench, motioning Harry to join him as he sat down, retracting his tail and wings. The boy was more than thankful, he'd been shocked with too many revelations so far and had almost collapsed where he stood by now.

"As a pure-blooded Beleth, I have power over death." Cadaer ignored Harry's stiffening reaction at the thought of blood politics. "At the time, the Deathly Hallows were a project to help prolonge Iolanthe's life, but in the end, we couldn't gather enough power before she died."

The devil let out a painful breathe. "Because of my power over death and her genius, we were able to make the Hallows absorb energy from death in an attempt to turn one of her blood into a devil. We succeeded but found that they required massive amounts of power to succeed. We had no way of gaining that much energy before either my wife or step-son died. I presented it to my wife's grandchildren; Antioch, Cadmus, and Ignotus. The items were keyed to her blood after all, and I wrote the project off as a failure."

Cadaer clicked his tongue and pat Harry on the shoulder. "Then I get the first magical alert in centuries of my families hermit lifestyle and found that one of her blood died with them fully charged! Even better than we hoped, you were revived with the power of a pureblood Beleth. It's something that had never been done before!"

The devil grinned to Harry before he continued. They went back and forth and somehow, the devil got Harry to open up about his life story. He never really talked to his friends or allies about everything, but talking to a stranger was cathartic. He never went into the true depths of the abuse at home or how much the alienation over the years hurt, but Cadaer had been alive far too long not to miss the subtle cues.

In return, Lord Beleth talked about how he and his peerage live isolated from most devils and how the low birth rates affected their kind. He also covered how the Three Factions work as a whole, how witches and wizards differed from the Magicians that were spread throughout the world, the Evil Piece system, Rating Games, Sacred Gears, and how he could turn his friends into devils as well. He didn't have to leave them all behind!