“-. November 11, 1996 .-“

  Harry James Potter went on the fifth yearly walk of his life, and for once nothing scared him.

  Not the dark, not the woods, not the time portal in the Rollright Stones Circle, not even the man and the dwarf standing in front of it.

  For the first time, he didn’t avoid the megaliths and instead walked straight towards the center.

  Ahead of him, Ed and Dougan both turned from where they’d been guarding the thing, and each stepped back one step. They watched him closely as he approached them. Despite Harry’s all new ability to process conclusions out of all inputs in real time, he couldn’t exactly tell what their mood was. It wasn’t because they were hiding it though. They just… didn’t know what all to expect tonight either? They definitely expected something though.

  They had the manner of men who wanted to encourage him, but refrained. Might be antsy too, not about anything that might happen but what already had. They’d been antsy for a long time, Doug less than Ed. But both of them were happy to see Harry here.

  Harry accepted the space they made for him in the middle of their little trine, and studied the portal, through all senses and not-senses and psychometric view. He focused on what he could and couldn’t match, to what he’d seen during the Goblet time twist.

  He understood more than before, but still not everything. That was fine though.

  He was smart enough now, to gradually comprehend the rest through deconvolution. “This portal leads to… the end of time? No, further. Why? How?”

  “It leads there currently,” Doug replied. “But you’ve already guessed the answer to your other question.”

  “This is how the gods, the real gods left,” Harry deduced. “They…” Harry trailed off, then slowly turned to look Ed in the eye. “You left. To the far future? Farthest future? Isn’t that just the end of the universe? Help me out here.”

  “Let’s assume the Big Bang is an accurate assumption about how things began,” Ed said, though Harry now knew that wasn’t his name. He was starting to suspect it wasn’t even his current fake identity. “It’s not, but the assumption will work well enough for this mental exercise. Assume the Big Bang is how things happened. Why would it happen? According to the current physics paradigm.”

  “It couldn’t have,” Harry said promptly. “Infinite energy from infinite compression is a cute dream to have, but nobody seems capable of saying how that infinite particle of everything would actually exist in the first place.”

  “Just so,” Ed said. “What do you think that answer is?”

  “Obviously, it can’t have anything to do with material physics,” Harry reasoned. “At least, not just the physics of this level of reality. But magic – at least magic as it is today – could potentially be used. If I suddenly took control of all magic, I could, in theory, crush the planet into a tiny speck of nigh-infinite density, if nothing gets in my way. I’m not going to, obviously.”

  “Your ethics are the last thing we’re worried about,” Ed assured him with a trust that almost made Harry lose his train of thought. “Go on.”

  “… Magic’s still an artificial construct, though, at the end of the day, so that can’t be the answer either. Unless the whole Big Bang cycle is the result of an overarching will?”

  “Let’s assume that it’s not.”

  Let’s ‘assume’? “So… the answer has to lie with whatever allows Magic to exist in the first place then. The astral plane. Or ethereal plane, or both, or either, however they work… made the big bang happen? What am I missing?”

  “Entropy.”

  Harry blinked and looked down at Dougan, even as his mind ran ahead processing the answer. “… Nullification of force,” Harry reasoned. “Degeneration of physics… When everything is the same everywhere, the same particle soup… There would be functionally no energy or force acting upon matter, or even on itself, they’d all be mutually cancelled out. A universe made entirely of a diffuse, uniform sludge may as well not have any physics at all.”

  “And so?” Ed said leadingly.

  “And so it would functionally lack causality, would be completely subject to anything else that exerts influence on it. Even the weakest influence will be practically infinite in scope.”

  “The material universe is causal,” Doug said idly. “The astral, ethereal and so on, increasingly so the higher you go, the higher planes are associative. Assume there’s no overarching will there either. What happens?”

  “… The final soup would be made of an infinity of identical particles at equal distance and zero motion, where thermodynamics may as well not exist…” Harry brought a hand to cover his mouth, disbelief warring with the conclusions he was drawing. “An infinity of identical associations – it would be like quantum entanglement but in reverse, which on an adjacent associative planes would qualify as the same particle. The final – the primordial soup would look like a single particle in the higher planes… And because there’s no causality or physics to say otherwise, that image would project back onto the primordial soup…”

  Harry trailed off in disbelief. In that case, the ‘strong force’ would suddenly exist again, except with none of the other forces to counteract it. The force that kept particles grouped into atoms, called the ‘strong force’ because it was the strongest force. It would suddenly exist again, only multiplied at the infinite power, for everything all at once. And the weak force or electromagnetic force wouldn’t be there to counter it, because the scale of matter complexity at which they manifest didn’t exist.

  The end result would be a sudden implosion without an external will, a wholly self-determined event! The end of the material universe, or a large enough part of it for the difference to not matter. The one moment when circular logic becomes valid because it’s the only moment when causality doesn’t exist. Through an infinitely looping association to the infinite power, the end of the universe would become the start of the next one.

  The Big Bang would make-believe itself.

  … So what if there was an external will?

  Feeling like he might float away from sheer disbelief, Harry looked intensely at the portal. Kneading spirit strands through its fractals, Harry directed it to show if he was right, and it obliged him. The image on the other side of the portal began to change from that vast expanse of rainbow-colored gas – the phlogiston, was that the final soup? The primordial soup? – and flickered rapidly. Harry caught just a image of several opposing hosts, of colossal human-shaped beings and... other things, before Dougan flicked the surface with his fingers.

  “Careful,” the dwarf cautioned. “Some things look back.”

  Harry jerked his head, feeling as if something had been pulling at his brain through his eyes. The view in front of him was now just – the present. The portal showed what was beyond it right now, like it was just a pane of glass standing in the air.

  A disbelieving laugh burst out of him. It had been hard enough to wrap his head around the idea that it was possible to predetermine your own existence, that the grandfather paradox wasn’t a paradox at all. Now Harry was finding out that there was a cosmic equivalent of that, except it didn’t have anything to do with time at all.

  In a moment when the pull of matter is null, the push of consciousness would be infinite, associative mechanics would trump everything. The most extreme expression of the similarity principle is outright sameness. The big bang will naturally occur immediately after entropy. But if you manage to enter such universe right in the brief moment before that event…

  Harry covered his mouth as he marvelled at what he’d just realized. “No physics but all the mind-over-matter – if anyone managed to travel to that point, the heat death of the universe, Entropy itself… they would be the only mind to exert force upon matter, all the force. To a primordial soup with no causality, then a concept, ideas… any information would exert practically infinite power, you could make anything happen just by wanting it, and wouldn’t even need magic for it! Such a person would be like a god – become God. So much that he could even hijack the big bang – you hijacked the big bang! You travelled to the end of the universe and hijacked the next one!”

  When coming from outside into a universe where consciousness predominates over matter, with no other will left to direct it, what do you get? Unlimited creative power with an infinite number of tries to get what you want just right. Forever, if you want it. What would such a cosmos be like? If Colin Creevy’s game rants were any indication, a cosmos like that would be fantastic.

  “We weren’t the only ones with this idea, more’s the pity,” Ed said mildly, as if he hadn’t just revealed himself as a deity in the flesh. “But we did win, eventually.”

  “Bloody hell.” Harry pressed his palms against his eyes. “Bloody hell.”

  “And good heavens too,” Ed replied.

  “And the astral and the abyss and all the planes of the infinite wheel,” Dougan added while puffing smoke rings out of the pipe he was smoking all of a sudden. “Or the world tree, depending on your view.”

  “A very narrow view that is,” Ed said as if he expected Harry to understand, which he took to mean that if any ‘great tree’ existed, it was likely bigger than any one universe. “The whole thing ended up rather complicated, but worked out better than it could’ve in the end.”

  “Not for everyone,” Doug darkly muttered. “Not yet.” He glanced up at Harry’s searching look. “Don’t you worry about it none, the problems of the next cosmos are our mess to deal with. You’re here for your own.”

  “Is it though?” Harry wondered. “Mine? Ours?”

  Dougan eyed him sideways. “Unless you want the Abyss back?”

  Harry’s eyes widened in alarm. “That’s real? Infinite layers of chaos, each of them a hell filled with demons?”

  “The ‘infinite’ Layer of the Abyss are only what the metacosmos intersects with of the insides of a very big and bad life form,” Ed said grimly. “We’d planned to destroy it – it was the other, secret reason why we jumped forward the way we did. We made alliances with various other races and entities of like mind as us too, across time and space. The potential energy of an entire cosmos imploding and exploding again would’ve been enough to kill anything. Unfortunately, while we did manage to lure the Worldworm to the end of time after us – that’s why you don’t have Hell here anymore – that’s as far as we got.”

  “What happened?”

  “Traitors,” Doug mildly answered. “What else?”

  “From our own ranks,” Ed admitted unhappily. “And when the others saw our cohesion breaking down, they took it as an excuse to try and take out the competition.”

  “The dragons won that war,” Dougan said melancholically. “The kalpa would still be theirs if they didn’t have their own traitors.”

  “And then the mind flayers and aboleths and all the others that refused to be part of our coalition showed up, and it all turned into a mess.”

  “It’s always chaos when a cosmos is born,” Doug chewed on his pipe.

  End sighed. “Anyway, that was the plan when us ‘despicable Ori apologists’ decided to skip ahead a kalpa, instead of living down to the expectations of certain parties and make civil war here.”

  “Which you’d have won,” Doug threw as an aside. “The others couldn’t even prosecute a war against a bunch of bug people.”

  Did he mean the Wraith? “You keep doing that,” Harry noted, glad to have something to latch onto that wasn’t so far beyond him as to feel silly just being part of this discussion. “Talk about things in the second or third person, about Ed and those others. As if you weren’t involved.”

  “I wasn’t, I am entirely a product of the next eon. My father and my kin, though, are a different matter.”

  “And you’ll never forgive us for how things turned out for him, we know.” Ed’s tone was dark but not bitter, as if he agreed with Doug’s sentiments about whatever-

  “I’m nursing a grudge against that upstart Ao and will string Beldinas by his own entrails one day,” the dwarf corrected. “You and Gygax are fine.”

  Ed seemed honestly surprised. Were these two using Harry as a moderator to bring up topics previously left unsaid? Not that he minded, exactly. He was a bit too mind-blown to mind most things right now.

  Most things, not all of them. There was one that stuck in his craw, namely how much of everything mentioned in this talk was taken right out of Colin Creevy’s board games.

  Harry stepped back to be able to look at the both of them better. He opened his mouth, then reconsidered and closed it. Thinking for a moment, he turned his mind to Magic and rode its divination systems in search of Ed Greenwood.

  Magic pointed to right in front of him.

  But it also carried him all the way to Canada, where an identical Ed Greenwood was jotting down notes for his next Elminster book. Right that moment.

  Feeling daring, Harry unleashed upon both Eds with all the psychometry and revealing spells he knew. Which was all of them, memorising the entire Hogwarts library and mastering all the spells ever were just two of many things he’d filled the last few months with. Especially after Charlie taught him how he hacked magic, and Harry proceeded to figure out how to do that entirely mentally.

  The Ed in front of him beat back the attempt with a scowl. The Ed over in Canada showed no resistance, and in fact didn’t even notice having his history, spirit and body scanned all the way to the deepest level. “You’re posing as Ed Greenwood… and he’s aware? He knows you as Elminster – hold on, that thing about the Forgotten Realms setting being based on Elminster’s ‘real’ visits to Earth is true? Wait, isn’t Elminster just some mage?”

  “The Shadow knows,” Ed intoned with the put-upon air of a radio actor. At Harry’s blank look, he huffed. “Guess it was before your time. The answer is yes to all of that, I have a bunch of disguises and Elminster is one of them, I’ve been using it to pretend I only visit this planet through the ‘dimensional weak spot’ in his living room. This arrangement will be ending soon, though, as amusing as it’s been to pull one over on Mystra –“

  “And Ao too,” Dougan threw in.

  “- Mister Greenwood isn’t long for my favor. I’m near the limit of my patience with what the Blumes and that bitch are doing to Gary. Since Ed hasn’t denounced them, I expect him to completely sell out by the end of this decade, the next at most.”

  How the hell does a talk with the Gods of the next cosmos end up mentioning the name Gary?

  Wait. Gary. Gary Gygax. Gygax, he was a god in the next cosmos too? No, Harry already had enough on his plate without asking about that too.

  I’m talking to gods, the reality of the present seemed to smack Harry Potter all of a sudden. Some of the biggest and baddest of the gods, maybe, if those games are as accurate as all that… “Why are you here?” Harry demanded, even though he’d never got a straight answer before. “Why have you come back? What do you want with me?”

  “I’m here because I never left,” Ed answered. “You can travel wherever, whenever and however long you want, if you can use time travel every time you commute. It lets me come and go without actually being absent in between. This portal’s not just a doorway you know. Can you tell?”

  Harry studied the portal, though he already knew the answer. “It’s an anchor? Or a hook…”

  Ed motioned encouragingly.

  “The knot to a time loop that reasserts itself every time someone comes back through, or even looks through. It’s like the observer effect. Other than directly observing it, the only thing that can lock an event in the timeline is if you travel to that event. Become that event. As long as this portal exists, the future you created can’t be undone by further time travel.”

  Harry had thought about the nature of time a lot, in these months since he realized where his future was going. When. That it wasn’t going to be proceeding into the future, for a while. Harry Potter might see the next year, but not for a long time if he was right about what would happen tonight, of all nights.

  He looked up at the sky. It was clear enough, as these things went, and it showed that more time had passed than he’d thought. The night wasn’t waiting on him, it never did.

  He looked at the… gods, he supposed. Whatever that was worth in this place and time when causality and physics were at their most powerful. “I appreciate that you’re finally open with me, but this is all trivia to me in the end.” Harry waited, and when neither made a show of being offended, he continued with well-hidden relief. “Now, I need to think.”

  “You know how to call me,” Dougan told him.

  “You don’t need to call me,” Ed promised. “I’ll be there first.”

  Those words filled Harry with dread, but also an all too explicable, soul-deep relief.

  “Go, have the rest of your walk. You’re a proper diviner now, even the gods don’t know what you’ll do.”

  “Only what I’ve already done, right?” Harry glanced at the portal, and it obligingly showed him scenes of himself going to various historical figures and offering them new lives and new purpose, near the final days of their lives. “Seems I’ve done quite a lot.”

  “We try not to peek,” Dougan denied while both he and Ed very pointedly did not look in the portal-turned-scry pool’s direction. “You make it hard though, sometimes.”

  “You mean I will make it.”

  “I mean what I mean.”

  Not what I think you mean, huh?

  Harry turned away with a wave, walked to the outside of the Rollright Stone circle, and teleported away.

  He could have gone on a circuitous path, to linger, to stall how he knew tonight would end.

  Instead, Harry Potter appeared in the private laboratory of the headmaster of the Durmstrang Institute of Magic and Mysticism, and petrified Igor Karkaroff mid-way through the ritual of draining the soul of Viktor Krum.

  It’s always Halloween.

  The Durmstrang Headmaster was draining Krum’s spirit, technically, not his soul. Based on the ritual array, the ritual would gradually transfer the spirit of Viktor Krum to Voldemort, through the body and spirit of Igor Karkaroff, whom the dark lord was currently possessing like he’d done to Quirrel before.

  Krum’s spirit was being diluted through Karkaroff’s, which diffused its essence enough for Voldemort – who’d attuned himself to Karkaroff for the past five months – to assimilate the admixture of both at once.

  Harry looked at Viktor, who was writhing in agony even unconscious. Any more of this and his spirit wouldn’t be enough to keep his soul anchored in this life. Of course, this was part of the plan as well. Clearly, Voldemort planned to transfer into Viktor Krum’s body after the soul departed, which would leave no opposing will to contend with, unlike what the Dark Lord had to settle for with Karkaroff and Quirrel, and Bertha Jorkins in between.

  The body itself would not reject him either, at least not to an extend he couldn’t power through – it would still be enough of Krum’s own spirit coming back.

  It wasn’t resurrection, but still the next best thing. Especially for a wizard capable of transfiguring himself.

  Despite the horrible nature of the crime unfolding in front of him, Harry still felt like he wanted to dance in happiness. Finally, a mess he actually had a business knowing about! A problem he actually knew how to deal with! You’d think an IQ of over three hundred could solve any problem, but clearly intelligence wasn’t enough for some things.

  It was enough for this though.

  “What – who – Harry Potter!” Voldemort spoke from the back of Karkaroff’s head. “How can this be? No, it’s the date isn’t it? Always this blasted eve!” Despite being immobilized by a sudden intruder in the safest place in Durmstrang, the Dark Lord got over his surprise faster than Harry would’ve, at least before his surgery. “If I knew as a youth that taking a walk on this night would lead to such magical breakthroughs, I would have indulged them myself. I yet might. Why are you here, boy? To snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Did it leave you unfulfilled, to have evaded my plots yet again?”

  Harry transfigured the sole of his shoe into a blade to break the ritual array with his foot, teleported Viktor away to the Pottery with a note for Charlie to know what to do, and faced his nemesis. Psychometry went through Karkaroff’s life with alacrity. It took a little more time to tell him apart from Voldemort, but soon he was reading the Dark Lord’s own history too. And, more importantly, his nature. The nature of his current state.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Horrified by what I have become, child? Yet you keep stopping me from becoming more than this shadow and vapour, ironic isn’t it? I’m burrowed so deep into your heart and mind that you would divert your mighty ritual for my sake, just so others won’t welcome me into their hearts and minds instead-”

  “Avada Kedavra.”

  The poison green light struck the shocked Voldemort’s spirit, destroying all but the faintest dregs of the shade. Thus weakened, it came loose from Karkaroff without killing him like he would have Quirrel, if Harry hadn’t done it first. Stupefy took the death eater out of commission, and a portkey deposited him with Viktor Krum, and an additional explanation note. The authorities here were not fit for purpose.

  “Phantasma Claudo.”

  The spirit binding spell prevented the spectre from escaping.

  Voldemort began speaking again, but Harry only paid minor attention as he studied the shade. To his dismay, everyone else’s information about how horcruxes worked wasn’t wrong.

  If it had been just the spirit, the horcrux anchors would only have kept the spirit on this side, meaning the soul only lingered as a side benefit of being literally inside it. In that case, enough applications of Avada Kedavra would’ve eventually destroyed enough of this shade that the soul would come loose of the spirit entirely, and move on into death that way.

  Unfortunately, this really was not the case. It really was splitting of the soul, not just the spirit.

  “Laqueus exspiravit.” Ectoplasm burst out of Harry’s hand, turning into a glowing net of chains that plastered the spectre of Tom Marvolo Riddle to the floor right in the middle of the ritual circle.

  He didn’t really need to voice incantations anymore, but it was a fitting habit to stay in, when you didn’t want others to know how superior you were.

  “You – you cannot presume to absorb me! I will devour you! Give me what I’ve been aiming for all this time, boy, I dare you!”

  “The thought did cross my mind,” Harry admitted as he began to use transfiguration to modify the ritual array. No mere chalk, this, it was silver and copper mixed with bronze and platinum and gold, all very precisely transmuted with their three-fold mix of blood, and then fused into the floor itself. It was a masterful display of formalcraft. “I have better ways to increase my spiritual potency, but the physical empowerment rituals you went through would be nice to steal, especially since I wouldn’t need to make any of the sacrifices myself. I could even do it safely.”

  “You are deluded, boy!” The shade squirmed, trying to get out of the ectoplasmic net. It failed. “Such feats are ancient legends, not even I was able to reproduce them!”

  But the goblet could, and now so can I. “You don’t remember this, but you were a formidable nemesis in all the other lives we lived, before time was rewound. Unfortunately for both of us, stakes are too high this time around. In trying to keep up with them, I’ve finally surpassed you. Goodbye.”

  “What on earth are you-?“

  “Avada Kedavra.”

  The killing curse struck the Dark Lord’s shade a second time. And because Harry had just modified the ritual circle, and further drew on all of Magic’s weaves to emphasise the similarity principle to the maximum possible, all the other horcruxes were struck by the same killing curse as well.

  Thus ended Tom Marvolo Riddle’s sad story, this time for good.

  All that was left was for Harry Potter’s story to also end for good, from a certain point of view.

  Magic is utilitarian, standardized and replicable, the perfect thing for war against alien invaders, Harry through as he exited the laboratory and ascended the stairs to Durmstrang’s tallest tower. But it sustains itself by tapping into the spiritual strength of the mystically strong.

  The minimum power level had gone up since antedeluvian antiquity, but the personal heights had dropped very much down, and there was a cap where there hadn’t been one before. This was why mighty artefacts like Astras and other God Weapons could no longer be made, and why the average man couldn’t build up to legendary feats anymore.

  The minimum power Magic syphoned off an individual spirit was bigger than most started out with, so muggles – people were left with nothing to work with after magic took its due, never knowing the loss.

  Or, if they did feel the loss, they never understood why they lived with such feeling of lack.

  Dark rituals where you stole the strengths of other races worked because magic was specifically configured to take from wizards and nourish everything else. So when you took in that ‘everything else,’ it wasn’t tapped and drained like the rest. That was why dark lords were so powerful. Why Voldemort was so powerful.

  Before Magic, even uncle Vernon could potentially have harnessed his inborn spark to become a mighty hero or wizard, with the right guidance and self-cultivation resources. Physical enhancement was the natural norm, not unheard of. Now it was only wizards that were tougher to harm.

  And now Wand Magic…

  It was the result of the ancestors imposing their design over all others, thanks to the sheer number of people involved in that work of spiritual architecture and ritual spanning decades. But it was a system designed to make wizards at the expense of athletes, warriors, heroes, savants, and everything else under the sun.

  A horrible sacrifice in perpetuity, but it worked. The new way to apply mysticism turned the tide against the incredibly advanced technology of the aliens, and its utility allowed for even the greatest obstacle to be circumvented on the way to assassinating the latest snakes.

  But now, Magic had grown great, expansive enough that it finally extended well out into the earth’s magnetic field, which meant it was exposed to all the energy that the planet’s electromagnetic field would normally redirect and repel for the sake of life. If someone were to take magic and invest it into an ethereal mechanism of power accumulation, the dependence on the spirits of man could disappear. It could sustain itself off the Sun’s emissions and cosmic rays. It just needed an overriding authority to force the change, and the time of heroes and gods would come again.

  It wouldn’t be an easy transition. The change would involve all Magic, which meant Magic itself would be disrupted or outright unavailable for however long it took to affect the change. Magical workings would fail, spells, wards, weaves, any enchantments not generated by an object with its own self-contained spiritual power and spell matrix.

  Then, too, there was Harry’s personal distaste for mind-affecting magic.

  Briefly, Harry Potter considered the ins and outs of going at it slow…

  He decided against it.

  The Statute of Secrecy was destroying humanity. He couldn’t afford half-measures anymore.

  Atop the tallest summit of Durmstrang Institute of Magic and Mysticism, Harry James Potter ascended to a higher plane of existence.

  Magic welcomed him like a mantle tailored specifically for him, a throne vacant for thousands of years waiting for his arrival and none other, a planet-spanning divine construct that operated on laws and rules applied backwards in time. Through a time loop. Retroactively. Today.

  The spirit of James Potter appeared to Harry’s right, quiet and ready. The spirit of Lily Potter didn’t, because it had been given entirely to her blood sacrifice. It was a feat to rival the old miracles from before Magic’s time, but Harry knew enough and was smart enough to unravel that too. He undid the sacrificial protection magic, and then reached back through Magic’s pan-temporal nature to pluck Lily Potter’s soul from just the moment of her death.

  Thus did Lily Potter take form next to her son as well, and she didn’t understand anything.

  James stepped past Harry with a fond pat on his head, and moved close to his wife to tell her all about it.

  It should’ve only taken a moment, and maybe it did, but this was fine too. They could have their time.

  Harry had more than enough to do without distraction. He hadn’t needed to think too much at all, about what he wanted to do first with the ability to act across time.

  He wasn’t given much choice either, not hat the time had come.

  The moment he settled at the heart of Magic and checked that it was doing what he thought it did – it was – he suddenly found himself at the exact point in space, time and dimensions when the Others kicked him out of the Astral Diner, with his foot right inside the door.

  “I knew your hubris would prevail in the end,” The Other-in-Chief said in admonishment, as if Harry should have just accepted that he got blasted back into his home dimension, after his worst past life experience was forcefully dug up. “Oh, I see. You’re not quite as low on the ladder as I thought. In that case, I do apologise but we still cannot permit-“

  “Tell me something,” Harry interrupted him. “When a man's heart overshadows a god's, what will the gods punish? What will they forgive?”

  “Nice try.” The man made to knock him on the forehead, only to be held back by a forcefield Harry had conjured to protect himself, while he transmitted to Magic the ritual he’d just put together, spanning space and time outwards and backwards to every moment of his timeline’s history.

  All the power that magic ever drained from someone or something was suddenly at Harry’s fingertips, along with real-time awareness of everything connected to it at every point in time. Including the technology and structures the Ancients Left behind.

  Even the stargate network.

  “What are you doing?” The man pushed forward, his might staining against Harry’s defense powered by the totality of magic ever accumulated. “Those are not toys!”

  “Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of death, and the stroke that hits the vein, the haemorrhage none can staunch, the grief, the curse no man can bear.” The combined force of the Others rammed against Harry’s power, then, and even the entirety of Magic only barely kept them away. “But there is a cure in the house, and not outside it, no. Not from others but from us, our bloody strife. I sing to you, true gods on time’s far side. Now hear, you blissful powers departed – answer the call, send help. Bless we children, give us triumph now.”

  A hand came down to grab the Other by the wrist, and violently threw him away.

  The Other stumbled to a halt against one of the diner booths, and stared at the man that now stood between Harry and him. “Manu.”

  “Abraxas.”

  Abraxas straightened and laughed mockingly. “Look at that. The Everjust goes and breaks his own pact, proving me right at last!”

  “Wrong.” The whole diner seemed to shake at his one word. “As you always are.”

  Abraxas glared, trying to project outrage instead of disbelief. “You infringe on our worldline after you made both our sides swear not to infringe on each other, and dare call me a liar?”

  “I called you wrong, but you just made a liar out of yourself.”

  “Spare me your word games!” Why was he so angry?

  “As opposed to yours? They must be really good word games I suppose, if everyone here still follows you even now that you’ve failed.”

  “SILENCE!”

  The cosmos shook with his command.

  Manu was completely unfazed.

  Instead, he dismissed Abraxas with a look of contempt and addressed the Others. “This is what you betrayed us for? A ‘sacred’ timeline held together with spit and pillaging? Have you no shame? Where even is your pride?”

  “You dare speak of pride, you?” Abraxas spat before any of the others could more than look uncomfortable. “You abandoned the world, our world, all the worlds!”

  “I entrusted it to our inheritors!” Manu’s voice boomed. “One reality, one branch of the tree, just one! But you, even with all the rest of space and time to yourself, even after failing all your boasts despite having everything stacked in your favor, you have the gall to stick your tendrils through my wall and pillage what little inheritance they have?!”

  “Do not speak of things you don’t know anything ab-!“

  “How many times did you rewind this timeline? How many times did the Ori kill you all? How many times did they enslave you all? How many times did things even worse than them burst across the universe like plagues? How many times?!”

  No answer, save the distant wailing of astral winds battering at the windows.

  “And now, here at the end, when you finally have no other choice but to swallow your pride and stop interfering with your humans in the hopes that they’ll finally find a way out – because they haven’t bred and indoctrinated themselves out of being warriors – you go and snatch defeat from the jaws of their victory!”

  “If you truly believe that, you are a fool.” Abraxas sneered, standing straight and proud, or pretending to. “The Ori are dead.”

  “But that’s not true, is it? Adria’s still there.”

  “She is being handled.”

  “By someone else, like Anubis is being handled by someone else even though you could damn well have descended him, even unmade him completely. Just like you all could gang up on Adria now and put her to an end for good. But then, this way there’s no more Moros, Ganos and Oma around to point out all the ways that you’re wrong about everything.”

  Anger skittered over the Other’s face, barely contained. “If that is the best you can muster, then you truly are every bit the fool I believed you to be!”

  “And here it is, blaming the one you betrayed for your betrayal, as always you scream in pain even though you’re the one on attack. I suppose it’s less embarrassing than admitting that all of you combined literally don’t have the power to spare anymore, seeing as it was all wasted on this infinity of failed timeline curves! Why not let them unravel, if it would free back your power? Let me guess, you’re keeping them as unknowing prisons for all the threats you couldn’t destroy. Or won’t be able to, in the future.”

  For the first time, there was no rejoinder.

  “And now the dregs of your strength are all tied up in sustaining this so-called sacred timeline of yours, as if there’s anything worth keeping!”

  “ENOUGH!”

  The walls cracked with the force of Abraxas’ dictum.

  Manu was completely untouched, and so was Harry who stood protected in his shadow.

  “How many times did you hijack Samantha Carter’s thought processes? Does she even have a self of her own?” Manu continued to twist the knife. “How many times will you use Daniel Jackson to clean up your messes just to wipe his mind again? What of the rest of the universe where our legacy ever reached? The Destiny ships? All those planets that got stargates seeded on them without us ever stepping foot in their galaxies, and then those that didn’t! Even here back home, do you even care about what’s happening in the uncharted territories? And our artificial worlds! Do any VARNs even survive? Do you know? Or do you pretend they don’t exist because they’re outside this sector of space you keep winding back and back all over again, unwilling to venture out to take responsibility because you’re cowards.”

  “BEGONE!”

  The combined power of all the Ascended Ancients collided with a single man. It felt like it might unravel Harry completely, even shielded as he was from the worst of it by Manu’s unmoving bulk – if these were dregs, what was their full might-?

  A giant spear smashed through the Astral Diner’s wall and through bartender’s chest.

  The stream of power collapsed. The phantom space wavered violently, the walls almost shattering completely before Abraxas unravelled from around the spear that had just gored him. In a shuddering streak of misty white, he reformed further inside the diner, cradling his chest with a trembling hand. “What…”

  “Because of you, the Goa’uld turn into Illithid.” Manu began to grow. “Because of you, the Wraith become Neogi.” Manu began to loom, great and terrible as arms and armor made of celestial metals formed from light and cinders on his form, a colossal giant with a silver hand and a beard of fire. “Because you abandoned us in our hour of need – because you so wanted to come back here and steal our children’s future – the dragons stole the dawn from us. And when they too broke down due to their own traitors, your misbegotten legacy burst forth like a plague and tormented the next cosmos for an age, just like it's doing here!”

  With a vicious pull, Manu wrenched his spear out of the floor and swung around for a mighty smash against the wall.

  The Astral Diner shattered, walls breaking to pieces to be swallowed by screaming maelstrom winds, the Wall between the twin realities itself began to crumble-

  “What are you doing?!” Abraxas screamed in shock. “You’ve gone mad! If you don’t stop, both realities will-”

  “-be better off without you, as we all would have been!” Looming like the literal giant he was, Manu smashed his spear at Abraxas a second time.

  The man dodged like a streak of smoke, but the spear changed direction mid-swing and rend him asunder. The image of the unseemly bartender burst like a ripe fruit, and from it skid aside the bloody, gored-through shape of a man that looked youthful.

  But as he began to grow and almost match Manu’s size, Harry saw that his appearance was just another lie. He could see through lies, now, and what he saw was an old, wizened man gone to seed, that had never fought his own battles.

  “You are mad!” Abraxas snarled, drawing on all his strength, and the strength of the Others too. “This is why we-“

  “-lie, you lie, lie, always lie and cut and run when everything you want is finally on the line due to your own cowardice and weakness! Today I put an end to your rebellion!”

  “For the glory of Tyr!”

  Through the portal at the end of time through the crack between worlds, the 365 alternate realities on the other side of the wall, and all their many time loops, were invaded all at once by a thousand angelic hosts.

  “That’s us done,” James Potter said before yanking Harry back into their world, back to their time and Magic’s fold.

  Damn, I got distracted!

  But could anyone blame him? Harry could see the breach now, the crack in the wall between the two sides of the lego house. It was blended through by the time portal, through which Manu – Tyr – was launching a literal universal invasion.

  … Now or never.

  Harry Potter had done a lot of mundane things in the months since his brain surgery, from mastering all kinds of magic to creating an enchanted device capable of cataloguing and even reconstituting someone’s entire bank of memories, no matter how vast and tangled and genetically-coded they might be.

  But he’d thought about things enough to figure out his role in today too, even though he hadn’t anticipated any of what had just taken place.

  Harry Potter reached through Time until he became aware of everything Magic ever touched at every point in time since it first gained existence. Then he paused, and slowly let go even as he lingered between moments. He’d almost forgotten, but he wasn’t alone.

  He turned to look at his parents, soul and spirit together. They looked back at him, loving and soulful, but said nothing. Harry didn’t need them too. It was enough that he could read their full, true histories at a glance. Their whole lives, and everything they’d been before.

  Harry reached into the chest pocket of his robe, pulled out one of certain three silver hairs, and burned it.

  “My word!” Dugmaren Brightmantle balked at the sheer chaos he materialized in. “This is not what I expected for my first summoning! What am I saying, of course it isn’t, this is you we’re talking about here-”

  “Mister Dougan,” Harry called, not taking his eyes off his parents for fear they might disappear before he was ready. “Do you think you can get past that?”

  Dougan looked at the reality-breaking inter-planar time-war that had just broken out. “It better be something really important.”

  “I’m thinking a rescue mission,” Harry said, not sure if he should be feeling hope or something else. “Two people, three if you can manage it.”

  Dougan met Harry’s eyes and accepted his telepathic communication without reservation. “Oh… I see. Wait for me.” Like a streak of shining dust silver, Dougan blitzed through momentary gaps in the – Harry didn’t even know how to describe it.

  He didn’t know how much time it took on the other side, but after barely a few seconds on theirs, Dougan returned like a comet, and when the smoke became living being again, the singed and frazzled dwarf wasn’t alone. With him were three people. A man and two women, of whom only Oma Desala didn’t freeze in shock at the sight of them. Even then, she didn’t speak. She understood the significance of the moment before all but Dougan and Harry did.

  Moros stared at the ghost of James Potter and saw his distant future. Next to him, Ganos La stared at Lily Potter and saw hers.

  The Wheel of Samsara is a right blighter and a half, Harry thought sourly. But it’s finally working out for me, I suppose.

  Or would, after he finished here. And whatever else he did in the lower world to tie up the loose ends, wherever it took him. And whenever too.

  The God of Magic reached through time until he became aware of everything Magic ever touched at every point in time since it first gained existence. He saw the Birth of Magic and almost broke down in hysteria.

  He zeroed in on everything the Ancients left behind, both on Earth and off it through their connection, however fleeting, to the Stargate Network. Which had been locked up in a ritual since Magic came into existence the first time, through full exploitation of the similarity principle to tap all the stargates in the network, through the one on Earth. A ritual created and deployed in the future. By Harry.

  Now.

  Here.

  Through the Stargate on Earth, Harry Potter connected to the whole of the Stargate Network. The Stargate Network that had, at one point or another, been connected to everything else the Ancients left behind, even if just through a fleeting subspace scan or connection. Riding that connection, Harry Potter mentally grabbed everything the Ancients ever left behind in the physical world other than the Stargate Network, and shoved them through the Wall into the other side.

  All at once, everything the Ancients left behind other than the stargates now existed only in the Other dimension.

  All at once, in Harry’s home dimension, everything the Ancients left behind other than the stargates had stopped existing from the moment Magic came to be, far in the past.

  All at once, the two realities broke completely loose of each other as all the similarities between them were destroyed. All but one. All but the stargates themselves, which were just enough to maintain the origin point between them, all the way back in history when the split first took place.

  Magic braced against the chaos that flooded the new yawning gap between realities, and held.

  No more connecting wall.

  No more time reversion for the Others, now that they’d used up all the resources on their side and didn’t have this half to pillage to that end.

  No Alteran technology to reverse-engineer in Harry’s home dimension, save whatever the Goa’uld developed up to the rebellion.

  Opening eyes he didn’t remember having closed, eyes that technically he didn’t even need at this level of being, Harry saw that Moros and Ganos had been watching him the whole time, waiting for him to see them. To witness when they finally let go, and allowed themselves to be pulled into the local wheel of rebirth. To become the Merlin and Morgan of his home history, and eventually other people after those lives were spent. Others, then others again, until they finally met again as children during Hogwarts class of 1960.

  Harry Potter looked at his parents, James Potter and Lily Potter, and knew that he could resurrect them. Transmute fresh new bodies for both of them, that’s all it would take. It would be so easy… He couldn’t Descend now, he couldn’t leave his new role if he wanted Magic to protect reality from the Chaotic breach, at least until he freed up enough resources to conjure up a new way to power it, that solar tap and cosmic ray collector he’d envisioned could be combined fairly efficiently, now that he could model it properly.

  But they could resume their lives.

  “What point would there be?” James asked, knowing what Harry was thinking because he hadn’t shielded his thoughts from them.

  “Maybe we’d rather stay here?” Lily said. “There’s so many things…”

  … On second thought, Harry was thinking too much like a mortal.

  Harry Potter turned away from his parents, and still didn’t occlude his thoughts.

  “… We’ll see you with fresh eyes then, son,” were James Potter’s last words as he, too – as he again surrendered to the wheel of rebirth.

  “We’ll all live together this time, as a real family,” said Lily Potter before she joined her husband in the wheel.

  Looking back through time, Harry Potter raised his hand and pointed his finger across time and space at himself, as Herla Cyning in that very moment when his sister Danu was about to rape him under possession of a Goa’uld.

  “Avada Kedavra.”

  Herla died.

  Harry closed his eyes and remembered that moment, the sheer relief that death brought Herla before he joined the wheel as well.

  Harry watched from his place at Magic’s Heart as the Goa’uld inside Danu raged at her lost opportunity to torment him. The snake flooded Danu with poison and left her to die in favor of entering Herla’s own flesh. It was just fast enough to restart biological functions, even if the spirit and soul were both gone.

  Harry would’ve given his sister mercy too, but casting spells backwards in time was more power-intensive than he expected, when Magic needed all it had to keep Chaos away, and the aftershocks of the pan-planar time war until the world lines diverged enough to no longer be in range. Ideas began to flood his mind about new and auxiliary methods of gathering power, but he couldn’t put them into practice right then.

  That was a problem because he needed to warn Myrddin about the fake Herla, who’d decided to track him down and steal his body before Herla’s finished decaying. Seems that even Goa’uld had limits as to the state of their host bodies.

  Thinking quickly, Harry tried not to feel too embarrassed as he reached back through time to just a few minutes ago, when Moros had just rejoined the wheel of reincarnation. It was much less taxing to work magic across time when the moment was so much closer to the present.

  The Ancient was surprised, but allowed himself to be marked with a geas. After further communication, the Ancient agreed to at least consider the additional request Harry realized only just then, that he should be making.

  Harry looked back in time again, to the moment when the Goa’uld in Herla’s body tracked Myrddin in the forest, where the wizard had gone mad with grief. With a glance beyond flesh, Harry confirmed that Moros truly had reincarnated back in the past. Interestingly, Myrddin was his first incarnation, but according to Magic not his earliest life in this dimension. That confirmed that he’d fulfil Harry’s other request, then.

  Good.

  Harry waited until the wizard laid eyes on the Goa’uld-possessed, long dead Herla, and triggered the geas.

  The possessed corpse did not escape Merlin’s wrath.

  That’s all of it then.

  With a sigh, Harry sat back in his throne – because any god should have one – and busied himself with programming certain magical subroutines ahead of time, just in case the dimensional war still managed to spill all the way to their side somehow.

  Otherwise, he watched as Merlin delivered Herla’s body to the Isle of the Blessed and set about his, Harry’s final request.

  Thanks to his powers as an Ancient, and Harry helping him download the essentials of Magic’s functions during dreams, Merlin was able to reach the Antarctic outpost without issue. There, during a moment when Harry briefly excluded the stargate from the pan-temporal ritual, Merlin used it to travel to Atlantis.

  What he did after that was beyond Harry’s sight, but Harry had already looked back in time to the most critical moment to know his request had been carried out. He was only surprised when he saw a certain gateship materialise out of thin air in the outpost, disgorging a much older Merlin just a moment after he dialled out.

  Harry was confused up until he realized the reason – Herla hadn’t been avenged yet. It had completely skipped Harry’s mind in the rush and excitement, but it was just about that time, wasn’t it?

  It was like watching an award-worthy epic, as Merlin set on his grandest quest ever and worked with the ancestor spirits to curse the little folk forevermore. Even as the God of Magic with all knowledge at his figurative fingertips, Harry still learned some things watching that happen.

  The ritual ended up claiming Merlin’s life, but it seemed the wizard had fully expected that too. And when he died, yet another ritual he’d set up back in the past, at Harry’s exacting specifications, summoned James Potter’s soul to reincarnate all the way back during the time of the ancients, and that of Lily Potter too.

  Harry laughed as he felt a similar tug on his own soul, from farther back in time than even he could see because it was before the day Magic was born.

  He ignored the pull while he finished setting up all the contingencies and what else he could think of, to make sure Magic kept running normally until he was ready to fix it so it didn’t spiritually vampirize every being alive. And fix the world too, after he finished his hop and skip through history.

  This, it seemed, was how he got reborn in time for the Tau’ri Rebellion, just a moment before , as the last-ditch attempt by Abraxas’ Ascended to reclaim the True Timeline.

  The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

  As he left his very spirit behind to run Magic on autopilot, Harry hoped Merlin had remembered to collect those poor, unfairly stranded future folks, because he’d completely forgotten about them.

  ..-""-..

  End of Book I

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