Chapter 577: Godric Gryffindor
The Lands Between was a sea of shifting, eternal mist.
Through the haze, the blurry outlines of a dilapidated street began to take shape. Trash piled up in the narrow alleyways, and beside a door with peeling paint, a faded plaque—Oakwood Home for Children—hung crookedly, shivering in the wind and shedding flakes of dust.
In the midst of this falling dust, a black cat was suddenly snatched up from the ground by a pair of invisible, powerful hands.
"Centuries have passed, and you lot still manifest in the exact same place..."
The voice was booming and hearty, vibrating with a physical force that seemed to push back the mist.
Sean reacted instantly. He vanished in a blur of shadow, reappearing a dozen yards away atop a swirling orb of vapor. The mist in front of him began to coalesce. It didn't move fast, but it moved with purpose—as if unseen fingers were weaving the grey threads into a towering, massive silhouette.
First came a great feline head, then a powerful torso, and finally a coat of ink-black fur. Sean, in his giant Bastet form, loomed over the landscape, his form nearly fifteen feet in diameter.
"Oho!"
The man let out a sharp chuckle. He raised a long, silver sword that pulsed with a rhythmic, blood-red light.
The Great Cat fixed him with cold, slitted pupils. A second later, Sean vanished again, reappearing another twenty yards away.
A ruby-hilted blade was known as the sharpest object in the Lands Between; every wandering soul knew to fear its edge. However, Sean had underestimated the speed of the man wielding it. Within a heartbeat, the man had closed the distance, his blade blocking Sean's path once more.
"Who are you...?" the Great Cat asked, his voice a low, vibrating growl of caution.
He scrutinized the man, trying to place him among the more notorious spirits of the realm. Very few Dark Wizards could survive for long behind the Veil, but they did exist. No place was entirely harmonious, not even death.
Normally, the residents of the Lands Between avoided newly arrived Dark Wizards. Such souls were usually consumed by their own Inverse Souls eventually; there was no point in tangling with them.
But Sean was confused. He felt a strange, close proximity to this "Dark Wizard," yet he had no memory of such a connection. And he certainly didn't know any "lunatics with ruby-encrusted claymores."
As the man's face emerged from the swirling vapor, the first thing Sean noticed was the scarring. Three deep, jagged claw marks started at his left temple, slashed across the bridge of his nose, and ended at his right jawline. It practically split his face into two separate maps. The scars were old—faded to a ghostly white—but they were savage enough to make any observer take a step back.
Above the scars sat a pair of brilliant, piercing amber eyes.
The man looked to be frozen in his early forties. His hair was a wild, dark-gold mane flecked with grey, and his beard was rough and unkempt, as if he had shaved with a dagger in a hurry. He wasn't wearing the ornate, flowing robes of a wizarding portrait; instead, he wore a battered, deep-red coat with frayed cuffs and a heavy patch on the left shoulder.
Sean didn't know why, but he looked at that patch and knew it had been sewn on by hand long after the coat was made.
The "Madman with the Ruby Sword" tilted his head, studying the Cat with a look of undisguised curiosity, as if he were browsing a book in a village market.
"You're awake," the man noted. His voice was deep, carrying a raspy, melodic edge. "Most people arrive here in a dream-trance. You aren't dreaming."
"The Void Rune grants a wizard the power to traverse this realm," the Great Cat replied.
"Oh? Is that what you think?" The man grinned, his shoulders shaking with a silent laugh.
Sean stared at the blade. "You seem quite fond of that sword."
"I used this blade—forged by a particularly grumpy goblin, ugly thing it is—to cut down seventeen wizards in a single charge. Capable fellows, they were, too. For a month after that, I couldn't lift my right arm. Had to use my wand with my left. An old friend of mine spent the whole time cursing me while he brewed a vat of poultice. His temper smelled worse than the medicine..."
The Cat didn't understand the point of the story. He watched this "vicious" murderer who bragged about killing seventeen men and contemplated leaving the realm early.
"You are here because I have something to teach you," the man said, taking a bold step forward. "What Rowena failed to teach, I shall provide."
"What?" Sean blinked, caught off guard.
"She carved wandless casting into your very soul just so I could find you, didn't she?" The man let out a wide, toothy grin. "She's still the same. Never says a word, just waits for you to guess her meaning. She thinks that's 'Wisdom.' We all knew what she was up to, of course, but we loved her, so we let her have her little games."
Sean felt a jolt of shock. Was this man a suitor of Rowena Ravenclaw?
"Come then. Test my steel."
The man raised the sword. Its edge looked so impossibly sharp that Sean's mind flashed to the legends of the realm. In the folklore of the dead, there was a story of a "Madman with a Red Blade"—the most dangerous entity in the mist. No wizard could face his blade and remain whole. To date, no soul had ever claimed victory against him.
And, unfortunately, he was a man who lived for the duel. Most spirits avoided him like the plague if they wanted to see the next day's fog.
"Oh, and by the way," the man added with a booming laugh, "I won't be satisfied unless you give me everything you've got."
The Great Cat's fur bristled until he looked twice his size.
The ground began to vibrate. Deep within the mist, reality was beginning to warp. As a "Guest of Honor" in the Lands Between, Sean possessed unique privileges. He could cast spells that were normally dampened by the Veil, and he could impose a degree of Transfiguration upon his own spirit.
"Vine-Stone Guardian!"
Massive, vine-entwined stone hands erupted from the white earth, tearing through the fog. The sound was like a mountain collapsing. The man with the sword laughed joyfully as the hands clamped shut around him, pinning him in a crush of ancient rock.
The "stone tomb" closed tight. Sean allowed his form to shrink back into a standard black cat, his breathing slightly heavy.
Was it... that easy? he wondered.
He thought about the man's words. He was Rowena's "friend." He was here to teach. And his method of teaching was... trying to cleave a cat in half.
The situation was absurd, and Sean hadn't even begun to process it when the earth shook again.
The Stone Guardian was cleaved in two. Not just chipped—the entire hand was split vertically from top to bottom. The massive boulders crashed into the white void with a series of thunderous booms.
Sean had never seen magic like this. He had never seen a wizard this powerful.
"Not enough..."
Through the dust and stone shards, the man walked out as if he were taking a stroll in a garden. His amber eyes were glowing with an even more terrifying intensity.
"We predicted this. We knew that once the crises were solved, the wizards who followed us would grow soft... but not this soft. As her student—her only student—I cannot allow you to remain this weak."
Before Sean could blink, the man dipped his shoulder and bent his knees. In a blur of motion, he was inches from Sean's face.
Sean had never felt anything sharp so close to his throat. His emerald eyes narrowed with a desperate focus. In a fraction of a second, a yard-wide stone shield manifested between them.
The ruby blade struck the stone and, for the first time, hesitated.
Sean slammed his paws into the mist. The shattered stone hands began to reform, but this time, something deeper—something more tectonic—began to pull itself out of the void.
The man laughed, the scars on his face stretching into a gruesome mask of delight. He watched the mist being pushed aside by the sheer pressure of Sean's magic. He saw the Cat's pupils lose their luster for a moment as the boy nearly collapsed from exhaustion.
Then, the entire Lands Between began to roar.
Two stone palms, each nearly a hundred feet wide, tore through the mist and slammed together with a speed that defied logic. The concussive blast of the impact cleared the fog for miles.
The man was caught between the stones. His fate was unknown.
Sean didn't wait to find out. He turned and bolted.
"I've seen many men run from a duel. Occasionally, I even let them live..."
A hand appeared out of nowhere, snatching the running cat by the scruff of the neck.
The "Madman" looked a bit worse for wear—his robes were torn in several places and he was covered in grey dust—but he looked largely unbothered by being crushed between two mountains.
Sean realized he couldn't win. The Void Rune on his chest began to glow, the mists rising to pull him back to the world of the living.
But then, the man swung his sword. He literally cut the returning mist apart.
Sean's eyes widened. He had a new understanding of just how powerful that blade was.
"If you won't duel properly, I shall become quite cross. And if you try to go play with that witch Ariana again, I'm afraid I'll have to forbid it..."
The man looked truly unhinged now. But at the mention of Ariana, Sean's eyes turned cold.
The man was too dangerous. How does he know about Ariana? What else does he know? What is his goal?
"Vine-Stone Guardian!" Sean's soul let out a silent, internal roar.
"Yes! That's the spirit!"
The man laughed like a child. But a second later, his smile froze.
The shaking ground went still. Sean's face had turned a sickly, translucent white. He was wheezing like a broken bellows.
"You..." The man paused, his brow furrowing. Then his lips curved back into a roar of laughter. "Are you out of mana, boy?"
Sean began frantically searching the orbs of mist for Dumbledore's dream-seed. He was combat-ineffective; he needed backup.
"You've exhausted your soul's 'reserves'? Where does a soul get its reserves from?" The man was still laughing, but his tone wasn't mocking. It was instructional.
Sean froze. The question hit him like a bolt of lightning.
Is a wizard's soul truly limited by 'mana'?
Magic lived in the soul. Sean knew this. But the human body acted as a bottleneck for the manifestation of that magic. If the body was removed from the equation... if the soul was "naked" in this realm... what was the limit?
He hadn't considered it. Until now.
"Show me your Will! In this place, if you believe you can summon a tidal wave, you become the storm!" the man roared.
Those were the last words he spoke before he was forced to flee.
He barely managed to roll out of the way as a colossal shadow descended upon him. His eyes filled with an undeniable, raw shock.
It didn't look like a mountain, because mountains don't crouch.
The massive entity was composed of blue-grey granite, its surface a network of ancient cracks. Moss and lichen spread across its shoulders in dark green patches. Stunted pine trees grew from the crevices of its collarbone, their roots splitting the stone.
The head leaned forward. A shelf of rock over the brow shielded two points of glowing, dark-red light—veins of enchanted iron ore.
The stone titan crouched in the mist. The man with the sword couldn't even see its shoulders. He had never realized the ceiling of the Lands Between could be touched—not until this titan's head disappeared into the clouds above.
"Such blind confidence..." the man whispered.
He swung his sword, parrying a stone arm that moved with the weight of a landslide. He charged directly toward the black cat.
The cat sat perched atop an orb of mist, its slitted pupils visible even through the thickest shroud.
The man felt the mist around him begin to vibrate. The infinite, eternal fog of the Lands Between began to churn and boil.
The Void Rune on Sean's chest flared with a blinding light before a deep, jagged crack appeared across its surface. Sean didn't notice; he only felt a surge of something ancient and primal rushing into his spirit through the fracture.
The battle finally ground to a halt as Sean stared in horror at the cracked Rune.
The warrior looked at the cat and broke into a wide, respectful grin. "The etiquette of the duel... I've forgotten it for far too long."
He sheathed his blade. The concussive waves from the battle finally settled.
"I am Godric Gryffindor. Deceased... one thousand, one hundred and seventy-seven years."
The mountain moved. The stone titan lowered its head from the clouds, allowing the black cat to stand upon its massive shoulder.
"Sean Green. Living... fourteen years."
Sean's silhouette was almost lost in the receding mist.
Godric Gryffindor went rigid. He stared at the cat, his jaw nearly hitting his chest.
"Fourteen?" he whispered. "You're fourteen?!"
He looked at the titan, then at the cat, then back at the titan.
"I'm done," Godric muttered, throwing his hands up. "I'm not fighting a child."
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