"Levicorpus?" Snape stared at Tom, stupefied. "You turned it into... this?"
"Yeah." Tom shrugged. "Didn't you see it last year?"
I never imagined it could stop Fiendfyre too!
Snape felt his entire understanding of magic tilting on its axis. A prank spell he had scribbled into a textbook margin as a teenager had grown into something capable of this?
"Cough... cough!"
Fawkes reappeared beside the group, carrying a coughing, blood-flecked Aberforth. Dumbledore took one look at his brother and at the castle standing whole behind him, and the tension went out of his shoulders.
"Well." Grindelwald let out a quiet, satisfied laugh. "It seems you've found yourself another remarkable student. One who can stop my Fiendfyre, no less. A great teacher truly does produce great pupils."
Tom's expression darkened the moment the words landed. Inside the learning space, all three of the others burst out laughing.
On the surface it sounded like praise for Dumbledore. In practice, Grindelwald was complimenting himself, and had probably slipped a mention of the rest of them in for good measure.
"Absolutely shameless," Ariana muttered, shaking her head. "Andros, when Grindelwald comes back, you need to knock some sense into him."
"Consider it done." Andros grinned broadly.
Outside in the real world, Dumbledore was not laughing.
He had been thoroughly, completely pushed past the edge by everything Grindelwald had said and done. With his brother safe and the castle unbroken, there was nothing left to hold him back. The Elder Wand gave the faintest tremor in his hand, and a blade of golden light cleaved downward and severed the silver chain as though it were thread.
Grindelwald's expression hardened. The wand in his hand vanished, replaced by the one he kept specifically for facing the Elder Wand. Even the wind seemed to register Dumbledore's fury now, cutting across exposed skin like the edge of a knife. A surge of gold-tinged crimson energy rose and broke like a wave, innumerable unnamed curses folded within it, and Grindelwald was driven back step by step, unable to find firm ground.
Tom's expression grew serious too.
Dumbledore meant it this time. The Elder Wand hummed with building resonance, amplifying every thread of magical power that passed through it, as though the wand itself were leaning into the fight.
By any measure, Dumbledore was probably the least battle-worn of all the Elder Wand's masters. A wand born into the heart of conflict had, in his hands, seen relatively little of it. After he defeated Grindelwald and claimed the wand, he had spent the following decades rarely raising it against another person. The handful of confrontations with Voldemort had been brief, deliberately restrained, never pushed to a conclusion.
But now the Elder Wand was straining to match its master's intent, and what it unleashed far exceeded anything it had shown before. With rage pouring through the channel and the wand responding in kind, Tom found himself thinking: if Voldemort were standing where Grindelwald stood right now, his first instinct would not be to fight. It would be to run.
Voldemort had always been, at his core, someone who did not believe in himself. All his confidence was borrowed, constructed from schemes and shadows. He had only ever felt safe being monstrous once he had arranged for Dumbledore to die without facing him directly.
"Andros," Tom said, splitting off a thread of his consciousness and turning to the learning space. "Your read?"
"I am unbeatable." Andros's confidence had not wavered. "Dumbledore in combination with the Elder Wand has surpassed what Grindelwald and I anticipated, I will admit that. But only by so much."
Ravenclaw gave a slow, considered nod. "Your Headmaster is the finest synthesis of modern magic alive. Black arts, white arts, his command of both is exceptional. But talent does not negotiate. Unless you were to become the King of the Age, I cannot think of anyone with the standing to defeat Andros."
While the three of them spoke, the battlefield told its own story. Grindelwald's arrogance had been stamped flat under Dumbledore's assault, forced into a reactive crouch against magic that came in relentless, heart-stopping waves.
So Dumbledore had not stood still either, all these years. He had not simply waited.
Grindelwald felt the pressure mounting, and found, to his own surprise, that he was also more exhilarated than ever. The wand in his hand was screaming under the strain, a sound of something pushed beyond its limits, and he paid it no attention at all. His casting rhythm accelerated, the booming collisions of spell and counterspell never pausing for breath. Everything around them was either being destroyed outright or seized and turned into a weapon by one set of hands or the other.
Steel shields dissolved in flame. The stone walls of the outer castle were transfigured into spreading puddles of formless grey. The ground itself was sinking, cracking, heaving upward in broken ridges.
"Dumbledore! This is who you really are!"
Their silhouettes cut through the dust and debris, and each time their eyes met across the chaos, they could see the same thing looking back: the cold, unblinking readiness to end this.
"I will not let your power threaten this world any further."
Dumbledore caught the newly summoned Fiendfyre in a cage of water, holding it suspended. Behind Grindelwald, the ground buckled and rose, forming itself into a stone giant. The giant raised its fist and brought it down with crushing force, runes blazing along its knuckles, sealing off the surrounding space so that Grindelwald could not simply Apparate away from the impact. Tom watched the tactic with genuine admiration. He had never seen anyone fight quite like this.
Grindelwald did not look back. His wand pointed straight up, and a beam of pitch-black light touched the stone giant's arm. The darkness spread instantly, branching outward like cracks in ice, and the giant shattered into a cascade of loose earth and rubble.
"Power is not something to be restrained. It is something to be used!"
"The world requires people who exceed the ordinary to lead it forward. With timid hands at the helm, the wizarding world will stagnate and rot until there is nothing left worth saving!"
A warning flared in Dumbledore's mind. He Apparated with the fastest reaction he could manage, reappearing ten metres behind his previous position. The instant his feet touched down, a jagged pillar of heated red stone erupted from exactly where he had been standing. It exploded outward a moment later, and molten rock poured from the wound in the earth like blood.
"Your fighting style has changed."
Dumbledore studied Grindelwald carefully, watching him in the stillness that followed the last exchange.
"I told you," Grindelwald said simply. "Nothing stays the same."
Then, abruptly, the intensity drained from his face, replaced by something closer to boredom.
"That's enough for today. I'll be back."
He looked at Dumbledore one last time. Then he turned, stepped sideways through space, and was gone.
Behind him, with a single sharp crack, his wand split apart. Piece by piece it crumbled, splinter by splinter, until nothing remained but fragments scattered across the scorched earth, never to be whole again.