Forever Knight [Harmione]

Epilogue: Forever

Twenty-five years going on twenty-six…

Harry looked up at the dark English sky, west of Amesbury in Wiltshire.

Earth, timber and stone.

He touched his hand to the wards and it held.  All around him, it was silent. 

If you listen hard enough you can hear her screams.

He smiled. 

Hermione loved his sporadic flares of drama.

“Alright there, Harry?”

Harry turned and regarded his best friend of almost forty years, Ron Weasley.  He stared at Ron a moment, pondering his reply.  Was he all right? 

There were some aspects of his life that he wouldn’t exchange for the world, and yet there was that other side that brought him such deep pain that he sometimes understood why Hermione didn’t think immortality was such a blessing.

For now, Harry nodded.

Ron’s shoulder’s sagged with relief.  “Then let’s go.  This place still gives me the creeps.”

From a forty-seven year old man who rounded up the fiercest dragons for a living, that was saying something awful.  

Harry smirked.  “It’s the safest place on earth.  Safer than Hogwarts.”

“Hogwarts doesn’t have an angry, thousand-year-old vampire imprisoned in a coffin buried underneath fifty feet of earth and twenty feet of concrete.”

“The wards are unbreakable.  So long as me or my bloodline survives, those wards aren’t going down, and that’s if I don’t physically pass on guardianship of this seal.”

Ron sighed as they walked farther from Stonehenge.  “I still don’t get why they didn’t just kill her.”

“They can’t.  Not until Yasmin’s at least a thousand years old and officially among the Most Ancient. And then when that time comes, Yasmin has to be the one to kill Dendera so that she could ‘properly’ take Dendera’s place.” 

“And there can only be three?”

“In Europe, in an official capacity.  There might be a few millennium-old vamps hidden here and there, but they haven’t been groomed to the position. No one’s come forward to contest Nekhbet and Kalfani’s place, anyway.  Until then, it’s status quo.”

Ron sighed. “That’s frightening.”

“Vampire laws, and they seem to work.  If they weren’t in place, there’ll be vampire anarchy, and trust me… you don’t want to know how vampire anarchists get their kicks.”

“In the meantime, you and your future biological children are stuck guarding Dendera.  Why did you get this job again?”

Harry chuckled. “Because vampires generally aren’t afraid of vampires, but vampires seem to be afraid of Dhampirs. So here I am… perfect for the job.”

Ron nodded.  “I’m glad we had this talk.”

“We had this same talk twenty-five years ago, I think.”

Ron was silent.  “Merlin, has it been that long?”

Harry didn’t even reply.  It was slightly painful to talk about the years gone by.  When he looked at Ron and saw silver peppering the ginger-red hair, noticed the subtle limp in Ron’s aching leg from the dragon-herding accident he suffered fifteen years ago, Harry felt momentary grief. 

There was no silver in his dark hair; not a limp marred his gait; no lines showed evidence of aging.  He was strong and agile. He was a freelance agent of the Brotherhood of Osiris.  He was an instructor for the Dark Creatures Defense class in the Auror Academy.  He was the N.E.W.T.s-level D.A.D.A. professor in Hogwarts.  He was going on fifty.