Chapter 581: He is Her Deity
Inside the dream-trance, the sky was a heavy, unsettling shade of milky white.
The night had passed, yet the dawn seemed hesitant to arrive.
Albus Dumbledore moved with a sense of desperate reverence. He knew that far
across this misty expanse, a boy was fighting a war on his behalf. He scanned
the landscape before him. The chasing mists of remorse had finally ebbed,
revealing a small, perfect circle of emerald-green grass.
Surrounding this sanctuary were countless Gothic arches, tilted at impossible
angles. They had no visible foundations, appearing to sprout directly from the
white void and stretching toward an unreachable ceiling. Against the infinite
grey-white nothingness, this patch of green felt like the most precious thing in
existence.
In the center of the lawn stood a girl.
Dumbledore's breath stopped. His heart felt as though it were being crushed by a
frozen hand, refusing to beat. His legs turned to lead, and for a moment, his
only instinct was to turn and run—not out of malice, but out of a crushing sense
of unworthiness.
She looked exactly as she did in his memories: frail, pale, and small. She wore
a clean blue cotton dress, and her long blonde hair fell in silent waves down
her back, undisturbed by any wind. She was leaning over, her fingers gently
adjusting the stalk of a single, tall daisy. That flower seemed to be the only
thing in her world—her only prayer, her only hope.
Sensing a presence, she slowly looked up. Her gaze pierced through the thinning
mist and landed directly on him.
In that instant, Albus instinctively tried to hide. He stepped back into the
shadows of an archway, his lined, tear-stained face turning away from her. He
was terrified. He was terrified that his sin-stained soul would pollute her
peace. More than that, he was terrified of seeing even a flicker of blame—or
worse, fear—in her pure blue eyes.
Dark wisps of vapor began to curl around his ankles, threatening to anchor him
there forever, as if the realm itself were trying to protect her from his
intrusion.
But Ariana didn't look afraid. There was no resentment on her face. She looked
as though she had been standing there for a hundred years, simply waiting for
him to find his way home.
She let go of the daisy. A brilliant, tender light ignited in her eyes. Her
mouth opened slightly, and she spoke. The words were timid and soft, yet they
shattered the silence of the void like a thunderclap.
"...A... A... Albus... brother Albus..."
That single, restrained call held a century's worth of loneliness and longing.
Albus's entire body shuddered. Behind him, the mists of the realm seemed to
crack and dissolve into ash. He could no longer move or speak. Tears blurred his
vision, tracking silently down his cheeks from beneath his half-moon spectacles.
The nightmare of judgment he had expected never came. In its place was a call as
pure as the day she was born. He looked at her as if she were the sun—too bright
to stare at directly, yet impossible to ignore.
Ariana saw his reaction. She saw the tears and the hesitation that kept him at a
distance. She didn't understand the complex politics or the "Greater Good," but
she understood sorrow and fear—the two things that had been her constant
companions behind the Veil.
She awkwardly opened her arms, offering a gesture of a hug. She didn't dare move
toward him, so she simply stood there, reaching out across the grass.
It was a pose he knew by heart. On a summer night in Godric's Hollow, she had
made that same gesture, trying to soothe Albus after a fight with Aberforth,
only to be ushered away by their mother. Since then, a hundred years of fog had
separated them.
Ariana's own eyes welled with moisture. She wasn't crying for herself—she had
forgotten how to do that long ago. She was crying for him.
"Brother Albus... don't be sad..."
Her voice was fragmented, but she spoke with a frantic urgency, desperate to
make him understand. She let go of her dress and pulled her hair aside, baring
her thin neck to him.
"It... it doesn't hurt. Not at all. It was just like falling asleep."
She placed a hand over her heart and looked directly into his eyes—those eyes
that were currently drowning in self-loathing. She took a breath, her expression
turning serious and certain.
"And... it was me. I went there myself... I wanted to help... I was just... too
clumsy..."
At those words, Albus Dumbledore—the Greatest Wizard of the Century, the
Defeater of Grindelwald, the only man Voldemort ever feared—collapsed. He fell
to his knees at the edge of the grass, his spirit broken by the weight of her
unconditional forgiveness.
He removed his glasses and buried his face in his trembling hands. A century of
suppressed sobs finally broke free, a heavy, rhythmic sound that echoed through
the eternal mist.
The dark vapors behind him shattered completely, falling away like white petals.
Ariana looked panicked. She ran across the grass, her bare feet silent, and
knelt before her brother. She reached out, stubbornly and patiently prying his
fingers away from his face one by one. It was the only thing that mattered to
her.
She succeeded because Albus no longer had the strength to resist.
Ariana took his aged, tear-soaked face in her small hands, forcing him to look
at her. Then, as if performing a sacred rite, she leaned forward and gently
pressed her forehead against his.
In that heartbeat, the entire dreamscape went still.
The vicious mists vanished. The air was suddenly filled with the scent of wild
herbs and warm sunlight. Within that fragrance, a new kind of mist began to
rise—one that had never existed in this realm before. It didn't cling to the
earth or the sky; it drifted softly around the two figures, glowing with a
gentle light.
"Ah... they have been born..." Godric Gryffindor murmured from the distance,
wiping his own face with a rough hand. "The Mists of Mercy and Forgiveness."
Beside him, Rowena Ravenclaw didn't answer. Her gaze was fixed on a far-off
region of the realm where the battle was reaching a fever pitch.
The darkness there was growing thicker. The Lands Between was boiling, perhaps
in rage at the laws being broken. A tidal wave of pitch-black vapor, three times
the size of any previous surge, was erupting from the void.
The third Vine-Stone Guardian had finally collapsed, its granite limbs scattered
across the white earth. Against this wall of ink-black despair, a single pair of
emerald eyes shone with a brilliant, defiant light.
The mist was like a dragon, guarding the treasure hidden behind the Veil. it
roared, it lashed out, it sought to swallow the world.
The Black Cat was alone.
His sword had been given away. His guardians had fallen. The Void Rune on his
chest was a map of deep, glowing fractures. His will was frayed to the point of
snapping, and his body felt as though it had been forged from lead.
His ears drooped with exhaustion.
But he raised a trembling paw once more, attempting to weave the magic for a
fourth Guardian. He did not retreat. He did not blink.
He did not stop, because in this realm...
He was her Deity.
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