"I've got your clothes," a voice said from next to me.
Looking up, Harry wasn't looking at me but held out a shirt and pants for me. I only then realized I was naked. I gasped and snatched the clothes out of his hand and quickly slipped them on. Standing up, I looked around.
"Where are we?" I breathed.
"I have no clue," he admitted.
We were in a great domed glass roof glittered high above us in sunlight. Perhaps it was a palace. All was hushed and still, except for those odd thumping and whimpering noises coming from somewhere close by in the mist.
I turned slowly on the spot, and our surroundings seemed to invent themselves before our very eyes. A wide-open space, bright and clean, a hall larger by far than the Great Hall, with that clear, domed glass ceiling. It was quite empty. Harry and I were the only people there, except for —
I started. I had spotted the thing that was making the noises. It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath.
"You cannot help."
I squealed and spun around, Harry holding me close to him. Albus Dumbledore was walking toward us, sprightly and upright, wearing sweeping robes of midnight blue.
"Harry, Maisey." He spread his arms wide, and his hands were both whole and white and undamaged. "You wonderful kids. Correction— brave woman, brave man. Let us walk."
Stunned, Harry pushed me forward as we followed Dumbledore, who strode away from where the flayed child lay whimpering, leading us to three seats that I had not previously noticed, set some distance away under that high, sparkling ceiling. And yet...
"But you're dead," said Harry.
"Oh yes," said Dumbledore matter-of-factly.
"Then . . . are we dead too?"
"Ah," said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. "That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, I think not."
We looked at each other, the old man still beaming.
"Not?" I repeated.
"Not," said Dumbledore.
"But..." Harry raised his hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. I gasped and then touched my own shoulder, it was smooth. "But we should have died — I didn't— we didn't defend ourselves! We meant to let him kill us!"
"And that," said Dumbledore, "will, I think, have made all the difference."
Happiness seemed to radiate from Dumbledore like light, like fire: I had never seen the man so utterly, so palpably content.
"What? Explain," I said.
"But you already know," said Dumbledore. He twiddled his thumbs together.
"We let him kill us," said Harry. "Didn't we?"
"You did," said Dumbledore, nodding. "Go on!"
"So the part of his soul that was in us..."
Dumbledore nodded still more enthusiastically, urging Harry onward, a broad smile of encouragement on his face.
"...has it gone?"
"Oh yes!" said Dumbledore. "Yes, he destroyed it. Your souls are whole, and completely your own."
"But then..."
Harry glanced at me and then over his shoulder to where the small, maimed creature trembled under the chair.
"What is that, Professor?"
"Something that is beyond either of our help," said Dumbledore.
"But if Voldemort used the Killing Curse," Harry started, "and nobody died for us this time — how can we be alive?"
"I think you know," said Dumbledore. "Think back. Remember what he did, in his ignorance, in his greed and his cruelty."
"Sir, he took our blood!" I gasped after a moment of thinking.
"Precisely!" said Dumbledore. "He took your blood and rebuilt his living body with it! Your blood in his veins, Lily's and your, Maisey, protections are inside the three of you! He tethered you both to life while he lives!"
"I live... while he lives? But I thought... I thought it was the other way round! I thought we both had to die? Or is it the same thing?"
"But wait," I said before Dumbledore could answer, "why am I still alive? I thought Harry was the Chosen—"
"He took your blood as well, Maisey," Harry butted in. "So you as well... A-And the other prophecy— maybe we're both..."
"Harry— Maisey— together, you were the seventh Horcrux; the Horcrux he never meant to make. He had rendered his soul so unstable that it broke apart when he committed those acts of unspeakable evil, the murder of your parents, the attempted killing of a child— two of that. But what escaped from that room was even less than he knew. He left more than his body behind. He left part of himself latched to you, the would-be victims who had survived.
"And his knowledge remained woefully incomplete! That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.
"He took your blood believing it would strengthen him. He took into his body a tiny part of the enchantment your mother laid upon you both when she died for you. His body keeps her sacrifice alive, and while that enchantment survives, so do you, so does Maisey, and so does Voldemort's one last hope for himself."
"And you knew this?" breathed Harry. "You knew — all along?"
"I guessed. But my guesses have usually been good," said Dumbledore happily.
"The Deathly Hallows," Harry said and the smile wiped off from Dumbledore's face.
"Ah, yes," he said. He even looked a little worried.
"Well?"
"Can you forgive me?" he said. "Can you both forgive me for not trusting in you? For not telling you? I only feared that you would fail as I had failed. I only dreaded that you would make my mistakes. I crave your pardon, Harry— Maisey. I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man and smart woman."
"What are you talking about?" I asked, startled by Dumbledore's tone, by the sudden tears in his eyes.
"The Hallows, the Hallows," murmured Dumbledore. "A desperate man's dream!"
"But they're real!" Harry burst.
"Real, and dangerous, and a lure for fools," said Dumbledore. "And I was such a fool. But you know, don't you? I have no secrets from you anymore. You know."
"What do I know?"
Dumbledore turned his whole body to face Harry and me, and tears still sparkled in the brilliantly blue eyes.
"Master of death, Harry, master of Death! Maisey, was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort?"
"Of course you were," Harry and I said quickly.
"Of course," I breathed, "how can you ask that? You never killed if you could avoid it!"
"True, true," said Dumbledore, and he was like a child seeking reassurance. "Yet I too sought a way to conquer death."
"Not the way he did," said Harry.
"Hallows, not Horcruxes," I breathed.
"Hallows," murmured Dumbledore, "not Horcruxes. Precisely."
There was a pause. The creature behind them whimpered, but Harry nor I looked around.
"So it's true?" asked Harry. "All of it? The Peverell brothers —"
"— were the three brothers of the tale," said Dumbledore, nodding. "Oh yes, I think so. Whether they met Death on a lonely road... I think it more likely that the Peverell brothers were simply gifted, dangerous wizards who succeeded in creating those powerful objects. The story of them being Death's own Hallows seems to me the sort of legend that might have sprung up around such creations.
"The Cloak, as you know now, traveled down through the ages, father to son, mother to daughter, right down to Ignotus's last living descendant, who was born, as Ignotus was, in the village of Godric's Hollow."
Dumbledore smiled at us.
"Us?"
"Yes. You have guessed, I know, why the Cloak was in my possession on the night your parents died. James had showed it to me just a few days previously. It explained much of his undetected wrongdoing at school! I could hardly believe what I was seeing. I asked to borrow it, to examine it. I had long since given up my dream of uniting the Hallows, but I could not resist, could not help taking a closer look... It was a Cloak the likes of which I had never seen, immensely old, perfect in every respect... and then your father died, and I had two Hallows, at last, all to myself!"
His tone was unbearably bitter.
"The Cloak wouldn't have helped them survive, though," Harry said quickly. "Voldemort knew where our mum and dad were. The Cloak couldn't have made them curse-proof."
"True," sighed Dumbledore. "True."
Harry and I waited, but Dumbledore did not speak, so I prompted him.
"So you'd given up looking for the Hallows when you saw the Cloak?"
"Oh yes," said Dumbledore faintly. It seemed that he forced himself to meet our eyes. "You know what happened. You know. You cannot despise me more than I despise myself."
"But we don't despise you, Professor."
"I was such a fool," Dumbledore said, breaking the still silence. "After all those years I had learned nothing. I was unworthy to unite the Deathly Hallows, I had proved it time and again, and here was final proof."
"Why?" said Harry. "It was natural! You wanted to see them again. What's wrong with that?"
"Maybe a man in a million could unite the Hallows, Harry. I was fit only to possess the meanest of them, the least extraordinary. I was fit to own the Elder Wand, and not to boast of it, and not to kill with it. I was permitted to tame and to use it, because I took it, not for gain, but to save others from it.
"But the Cloak, I took out of vain curiosity, and so it could never have worked for me as it works for you both, its true owner. The stone I would have used in an attempt to drag back those who are at peace, rather than to enable my self-sacrifice, as you did. You two are the only worthy possessor of the Hallows."
Dumbledore patted our hands, and Harry and I looked up at the old man and smiled; I could not help myself.
"Why did you have to make it so difficult?" I breathed.
Dumbledore's smile was tremulous.
"I am afraid I counted on either Miss Granger or Maisey to slow you up, Harry. I was afraid that your hot head might dominate your good heart. I was scared that, if presented outright with the facts about those tempting objects, you might seize the Hallows as I did, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. If you laid hands on them, I wanted you to possess them safely. But you both are the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying. You both did it."
Harry and I looked at each other for a moment. Through our journey seeking the Hallows and the Horcruxes, we were never focused on living forever or cheating death, we wanted to stop Voldemort. Before we died, we accepted our destiny and came to terms with it, hence why we were able to see our loved ones via the Resurrection Stone.
"We've got to go back, haven't we?"
"That is up to you."
"We've got a choice?"
"Oh yes, Maisey." Dumbledore smiled at us. "We are in King's Cross, you say? I think that if you decided not to go back, you would be able to... let's say... board a train."
"And where would it take us?"
"On," said Dumbledore simply.
Silence again.
"Voldemort's got the Elder Wand," Harry finally said.
"True. Voldemort has the Elder Wand.
"But you want us to go back?"
"I think," said Dumbledore, "that if you choose to return, there is a chance that he may be finished for good. I cannot promise it. But I know this, that you have less to fear from returning here than he does."
Harry and I looked at each other and stood up. I knew he had to save our friends, and I knew he also knew that as well.
"Tell me one last thing," said Harry. "Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?"
Dumbledore beamed at us, and his voice sounded loud and strong in my ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.
"Of course it is happening inside your head, you both are connected, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"