Day One: The Sky That Bleamed
POV: Senior Auror Jean-Pierre Lavoie (Canadian DMLE)
We were stationed on the Resolute coastline, thirty miles from Devon Island, when the world broke. I've been an Auror for twenty years; I've seen Dark Wizard hideouts, I've seen rogue dragons. But I've never seen the sky turn the color of a bruised lung.
"Sir, the sensors!" my junior, Miller, screamed.
The magical barometers didn't just spike; they exploded. Glass shards flew across the observation deck as the island across the water was swallowed by a dome of shifting, abyssal shadows. And then, there was the light—a piercing, surgical scarlet that sliced through the dark.
"It's him," Miller whispered. "The Zogratis kid."
We felt the first shockwave through the water. It wasn't an explosion; it was a rhythmic thrum, like the heartbeat of a god.
The panic was immediate. We had five hundred Muggles in the nearby research stations. We spent the first twelve hours in a blind scramble, casting Memory Charms and Confounding entire fleets of ships.
But how do you hide a horizon that is literally on fire?
Day Two: The Absolute Cold
POV: Healer Sarah Jenkins (ICW Response Team)
By the second day, the "Shadow-Dome" had expanded. The ICW sent a Task Force of fifty Aurors to breach the island.
They didn't even make it to the shore.
I was at the base camp when they came back—or what was left of them. Their brooms were frosted with a black ice that wouldn't melt. These were hardened combatants, men who had faced Voldemort's supporters, and they were shivering like infants.
"It's not cold," one of them told me, his eyes wide and vacant."It's... the absence of hope. It's Ekrizdis."
Suddenly, the ground beneath the base camp buckled. A massive fissure opened, but before we could fall, the earth seemed to stitch itself back together.
We saw a pulse of blue light ripple through the bedrock from the direction of the island.
Darius was holding the ground beneath our feet.
He was thirty miles away, fighting a primordial nightmare, and he was still looking out for us.
The awe was starting to replace the panic, but only slightly.
Day Three: The Singing Air
POV: Auror Kingsley Shacklebolt (ICW Observer)
I had been sent by Dumbledore to assist. By Day Three, the island was no longer visible. It had been replaced by a swirling vortex of elemental fury.
The air began to sing—a high, vibrating hum that made our wands spark uncontrollably.
"We have to get closer!" I shouted over the gale.
We took a shielded Ministry cutter toward the island. We got within five miles before the spatial distortions became too much.
We saw them then—brief flickers through the storm.
Ekrizdis was a towering mountain of darkness, throwing lances of pure entropy that should have unmade the world.
And there was Darius.
A small, solitary figure standing on a cliffside. He wasn't even using his wand for most of it. He was moving his hands like a weaver, pulling the very threads of magic out of the air.
It was the most beautiful and terrifying thing I have ever seen.
No one spoke.
We just watched.
A Twenty-year-old boy was keeping the apocalypse in a cage.
Day Four: The Day the Souls Cried
POV: Miller (Canadian DMLE)
The screams started at noon.
Thousands of them.
They weren't coming from the island; they were coming from the air itself.
The ghosts of Azkaban.
The sky was filled with tattered, grey shapes, a swarm of despair so thick it blocked out the sun.
Panic turned into a riot. My own team started weeping, dropping their wands, overcome by the psychic weight of Ekrizdis's malice. I felt my own soul being pulled toward the island.
Then, a flare of silver light—not a Patronus, but something deeper, something ancient—blasted out from the center of the island.
It hit the swarm like a sunrise.
We watched, mouths agape, as the ghosts turned into pillars of white light and simply... vanished.
They looked peaceful.
"He's curing the dead," Shacklebolt whispered beside me.
We stood there for hours, drenched in that silver light, feeling a warmth that shouldn't exist in the Arctic.
Day Five: The Boiling Sea
POV: Captain Elias Thorne (Magical Coast Guard)
On the fifth day, the water started to boil. Our ship's hull was steaming. The tectonic pressure was so high that the sea was being heated from the crust up.
"The island is sinking!" the lookout yelled.
We watched through long-range Omnioculars.
The landmass of Devon Island was physically tilting.
We saw Darius Zogratis at the center of it all.
He looked like a ghost—pale, his clothes torn to rags, his scarlet eyes the only color left in his face.
He was holding his hands toward the sky, and we could see the physical weight of the atmosphere pressing down on him.
He was acting as a pillar for the world.
The shock was absolute.
We realized then that he wasn't just fighting a wizard.
He was holding back a hole in reality.
Every Auror on my ship knelt.
We weren't praying to the gods; we were praying for the boy.
Day Six: The Silence
POV: Jean-Pierre Lavoie
The sixth day was the worst because it was silent.
No more explosions.No more screams.
Just a crushing, heavy pressure that made it hard to breathe.
The magical residue in the air was so thick you could taste it—like ozone and old parchment.
We watched Darius through the monitors.
He wasn't moving anymore.
He was just... there.
A frozen sentinel.
Ekrizdis was a swirling maw of shadow, trying to find a single crack in the boy's will.
We stayed awake all night.
No one could sleep.
We just watched that small red spark of his eyes through the Omnioculars, the only thing keeping the darkness from rushing across the ocean to our homes.
We felt a collective, crushing guilt.
We were the "protectors," and we were standing on a boat watching a young man die for us.
Day Seven: The Collapse
POV: Sarah Jenkins
The sun was low on the horizon.
The seventh day was ending.
We saw Darius look toward our ships.
For a split second, I swear he looked through the Omnioculars, through the miles of ocean, and directly at us.
He looked tired.
He looked like he wanted to go home to his library.
And then, he smiled.
The sensors went dead.
The horizon simply... folded.
It was like a giant hand had reached down and crumpled the world.
The island, the shadows, the light—it all rushed toward a single point in the center of Darius's chest.
A blue flash brighter than a thousand suns blinded us.
The shockwave hit our ship and nearly capsized us, but it didn't feel like a blast.
It felt like a clean wind.
When we could finally see again, Devon Island was gone.
The sea was rushing into a massive, steaming trench.
There was no shadow.
There was no Ekrizdis.
There was no Darius.
The Aftermath (December 1997)
We stayed for weeks, searching the waters.
We found nothing but floating chunks of ice and a single, charred piece of a Yew wand.
The panic was gone, replaced by a global, echoing grief.
When the Daily Prophet arrived with the headline THE SUN SETS, I saw Aurors—men who had killed in the war—sobbing openly on the docks.
We had witnessed the peak of human potential, and we had watched it burn itself out to keep us safe.