Dark

Chapter 34

Eleanor
The towering hedges cast black shadows across our path, and, whether because they were so tall and thick, or because they had been enchanted, the sound of the surrounding crowd was silenced the moment we entered the maze.
I pulled out my wand and uttered, “Lumos!”
Harry had done the same, and both our wands lit up the path before us.
I took off down the path, Harry following closely at my heels. It wasn’t until we reached the first fork that we stopped.
“Which way are you thinking?” I asked Harry.
He looked both left and right, considering them equally before answering, “Left.”
We moved ahead for a short while, a strange feeling creeping over me as we pushed furthered into the maze. We hadn’t run into any obstacles yet, and surely we should have. I slowed my pace and turned to face Harry. He seemed just as concerned as I did.
“We should have –“ I started to say, but he quickly cut me off.
“Reached something by now?” He said. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking.”
The anxious feeling that had been filling me was even stronger now, as we stood still. My eyes shifted up and down the path, but there was nothing there. This felt wrong. It all felt so wrong.
“Do you feel like we’re being watched?” Harry asked quietly.
“Yes.” I answered.
Without any further hesitation we continued down the path, only stopping again when we reached another fork.
“Which way?” I asked.
Harry didn’t answer this time, he simply held out his hand in front of him, letting his wand balance in his palm before whispering, “Point Me.”
The wand began to spin slowly until it came to a stop, pointing off to our right.
“What is that?” I asked, the strange feeling in the pit of my stomach lessening for just a moment as intrigue took over.
“A useful spell Hermione found. Four-Point Spell, points you North.” Harry answered.
“Of course Hermione would think of that.” I answered, a small smirk appearing on my face. While I had spent time researching magical beasts and all kinds of defensive and offensive spells, Hermione had found another useful thing to look up. Navigational magic. If there was anyone I truly respected for their brainpower, it was certainly Hermione Granger.
Harry and I followed the direction the wand had pointed us in. The path before us was again empty. We took another right turn at the end of this path and yet again the way was clear. We rushed ahead, making it half way down the path when someone suddenly came bolting into our way from the left.
Raising my wand high I was faced with a flustered looking Cedric Diggory.
“Hagrid’s Blast-Ended Skrewts!” he hissed. “They’re enormous – I only just got away!”
Without another word he bolted out of sight again. Harry ran on, passing me this time while I followed closely behind. He took the next right-hand turn but came to sudden halt just feet down the path. I crashed into him and nearly sent him falling forward, but he managed to steady himself while he kept his gaze trained straight ahead.
I looked down the path and was surprised to find that a dementor was gliding toward us. I had been sure that a dementor would be too dangerous to bring into the maze. I hadn’t prepared for this. A patronus, it was one of the spells that I couldn’t do, no matter how much I tried.
Before I could think of another attack or defense, before I could even turn around and try to find a way around the dementor, Harry had raised his wand.
“Expecto Patronum!” He shouted.
A silver vapor erupted from his wand and formed into a large stag, standing defensively before us. With a small wave of his wand the stag galloped forward and the dementor fell back, tripping over the hem of its robes. But that didn’t make since. It didn’t seem right.
“Hang on,” Harry said, taking a step forward. “You’re a boggart! Riddikulus!”
With a loud crack, the shape-shifter exploded in a wisp of smoke. The silver stag faded away and I couldn’t help but stare after Harry.
“You okay?” He asked, turning to find me watching him, my mouth hanging open to some degree out of shock.
“You…you actually can produce a patronus? A real one?” I said, nearly unable to believe what I had just witnessed.
“Yeah.” Harry said, looking at me with his eyebrows furrowed.
I didn’t ask any further questions, just moved on through the maze with Harry.
Left…right…left again…twice we found dead ends. Hermione’s Four-Point Spell came in handy multiple times, setting us back on the right track when we had strayed too far.
As we took another right turn, we were faced with a golden mist floating ahead of us.
“Reducto!” Harry said, attempting to blast the mist away.
Nothing happened, it still hung there taunting us. Harry and I looked at each other, and it was evident that we were both making sure that the other was ready to step forward into the mist, not knowing what it was.
Before we could take a step forward though, a scream shattered the silence that had surrounded us since we entered the maze.
“Fleur?” Harry yelled.
Without hesitation, Harry and I both stepped forward into the mist. In a split second the world had been turned upside down. Quite literally. It was as the though the sky and the ground had switched places. My feet were the only thing keep me from falling down into the star strewn sky as my hair fell down in long dark waves below me. Turning to Harry I could see his glasses slipping off his face before he pushed them back into place.
What do we do now? If we move our feet will we fall into the nothingness of the sky now situated below us? Will we even be able to move our feet at all?
There was another loud scream from up ahead and I snapped my gaze to Harry. It was clear that we needed to move forward, and quickly. Something was happening up there, and it didn’t sound good. Harry and I nodded to each other, a silent agreement that we had to move. Then we each pulled a foot away from the ground.
Immediately, the world righted itself. We both came crashing forward onto our knees. I had never been so oddly thankful to see solid ground below me.
Harry and I quickly picked ourselves up from the ground and moved onward. We reached the end of the path and took another right-hand turn. There was no sign of Fleur anywhere. Either she had managed to get herself out of trouble, or she was out of the competition. I wasn’t sure which idea was more appealing at the moment.
Again we met nothing for a long time, but we kept running into dead ends. It took ages to find a new route through the ever confusing hedges. Taking another new turn we came face to face with our third obstacle. Cedric had been right, the Skrewts were enormous. It had to have been nearly ten feet long and it now resembled a scorpion more than anything else. Its long sting was curled over its back and its armor like shell glinted in the light of my and Harry’s wands. I couldn’t help but feel thankful that the skrewts were tiny when Pansy pulled me into a box full of them. A singed robe was nothing compared to the damage that this one could do.
“Stupefy!” Harry shouted as he raised he wand toward the skrewt.
The spell hit its armor and rebounded back into our direction. I grabbed Harry roughly by the shoulder and pulled him down as I ducked out of the spells way. I quickly darted forward, still keeping myself low. I raised my wand toward the skrewt’s underside and shouted, “Impedimenta!”
With a mere few feet between Harry and the skrewt, it came to a sudden halt, frozen in place.
“Skrewt’s shells are like armor, Harry. You have the hit their underside, it’s their weakness.” I said, stepping back toward Harry and making my way around the now immobilized creature.
Knowing that an Impediment curse was not permanent, we rushed further along, quickly taking a left hand path when we reached it.

Harry
We had been heading down the same path for a few minutes, wondering when another turn would show itself. That ever lingering feeling of uneasiness that Eleanor and I seemed to be sharing was continuing to grow. I still couldn’t shake the idea that we were being watched.
“What are you doing?”
The yell had come from so close at hand that it must have been in a path running parallel to mine and Eleanor’s.
“What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”
That was Cedrid, it had to be.
“Crucio!”
The air suddenly seemed filled by screams and my feet immediately carried me onward, faster than I could have imagined. There was no turn nearby though, how were we going to get to the next path?
“Harry, stand back!” Eleanor called out.
I moved away, and just in time as she raised her wand and yelled out again.
“Bombarda!”
An explosion erupted in the hedges nearby and as the cloud of dirt quickly dissipated, I could see the gaping hole that Eleanor had created. We rushed through and just ahead of us we could see them. Krum was holding his wand out, standing over Cedric who was struggling and screaming.
“Stupefy!” I shouted.
The spell hit Krum and sent him flying backwards, where he came crashing to the ground in a motionless heap.
“Are you all right?” Eleanor asked, rushing forward and extending a hand to Cedric.
“Yeah,” he panted. “Yeah…I don’t believe it…he crept up behind me…I heard him, I turned around, and he had his wand on me…”
“I can’t believe this…I thought he was all right,” I said, looking down at Krum.
“So did I,” Cedric said quietly.
Then he raised his wand toward Krum.
“What are you doing?” Eleanor shouted, stepping between Cedric and Krum, shielding the unconscious Bulgarian from harm. “Viktor wouldn’t do this. Not the Viktor I know. I’ve been training with him all year, and I am telling you…this isn’t him.”
I could see the worry in Eleanor’s eyes. Was it worry for Krum? Worry for Cedric because of what Krum had done? Worry over why Krum may have done it?
“He had to have been cursed.” Eleanor said, pleading with Cedric. “He wouldn’t do this, I swear. There is no other explanation.”
Cedric looked down at Eleanor, considering her words carefully. In the end he lowered his wand again, his expression seeming to finally relax.
“You’re right.” He conceded.
Eleanor let out an audible sigh of relief, turning to look at Krum briefly, before stepping back toward us.
Cedric raised his wand toward the sky and red sparks erupted upward.
“Now they’ll come and get him.” He said solemnly. “Well…I s’pose we’d better go…”
“Yes, we should.” Eleanor said, grabbing my arm and pulling me along the path with her.
We continued on, trying to find the cup quickly. It seemed like Fleur and Krum were both out of the running now. If we could just make it to the center of the maze first, Eleanor and I could actually win this. So we ran, only stopping to use the Four-Point Spell every now and again to ensure we were heading in the right direction.
It felt as though we had been running for nearly a half hour before we pulled up short again. What stood before us now was something I had only ever seen in the Monster Book of Monsters. It was a sphinx.
It had the body of an over-large lion: great clawed paws and a long yellowish tail ending in a brown tuft. Its head, however, was that of a woman. She turned her long, almond shaped eyes upon us. She was pacing side to side in the path, blocking our way. She watched us, taking in our appearance before speaking.
“You are very near your goal. The quickest way is past me.”
“So…so will you move, please?” I asked, knowing what the answer was going to be.
“No,” she said, continuing to pace. “Not unless you can answer my riddle. Answer on your first guess – I let you pass. Answer wrongly – I attack. Remain silent – I will let you walk away from me unscathed.”
My stomach seemed to slip several notches. This wasn’t something that I was good at. Hermione had been the one to solve the potions riddle in our first year when we set out to save the Philosopher’s Stone. If she hadn’t been there, I know I wouldn’t have made it past that. I certainly wasn’t sure that I could make it past this either.
“Give us the riddle,” Eleanor said, almost excitedly.
The sphinx sat down upon her hind legs, in the very middle of the path, and recited:
“First think of the person who lives in disguise,
Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies,
Next, tell me what’s always the last thing to mend,
The middle of middle and end of the end?
And finally give me the sound often heard
During the search for a hard-to-find word.
Now string them together, and answer me this,
Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss?”
I gaped at the sphinx, trying to take in all of the information.
“Again please.” Eleanor said.
By the time the riddle had been repeated three times over, Eleanor fell silent beside me, concentrating.
“A dementor?” I asked Eleanor, turning away from the sphinx. “You wouldn’t want to kiss dementor, right?”
“No, Harry. You have to use the entire riddle.” Eleanor said. “Who is someone who lives disguises and only tells lies? Someone who deals in secrets? What does that sound like to you?”
“I don’t know…a spy maybe?” I asked.
“Yes. And the next part…well that one’s easy to overthink, but what if it’s literally just the last part of the word mend, the middle of the word middle, and the ending of the word end?”
“The letter ‘d’?”
“Exactly. And what do people say when they’re thinking hard about something?”
“Er…” I thought it over. “I don’t – wait, ‘er’. It’s ‘er’.”
Eleanor nodded, smirking up at me.
“Now string them together.” She said.
“Spider, the answer is spider.” I called out, finally turning back to the sphinx.
The sphinx smiled up at us and stepped to the side of the path, letting us through.
Eleanor and I set off at a run again. We had lost enough time with the riddle, but we had been in here so long already that we had to be getting close. As we came to another fork I used Hermione’s spell to point us in the right direction. We ran up the path it indicated and then took another right-hand turn.
That was when we first caught sight of it. The Triwizard Cup was gleaming on a plinth a mere hundred yards away. It was so close I could practically feel myself being able to close my hand around the handle of it. Then a dark figure hurtled out onto the path ahead of us.
Cedric was going to get there first. He was sprinting off toward the cup and I took off after him. I could hear Eleanor running, sprinting along just behind me.
There was a sound off to the left, a loud rustling, and then I saw it. Movement. The hedges were being shoved aside by something large, headed straight for Cedric. I stopped in my tracks, holding a hand out to stop Eleanor as well.
“Cedric,” I yelled, “on your left!”
My warning had given him just enough time to look up and fling himself out of the way as a massive spider ripped through the hedges and into the path. I saw Cedric’s wand fly out of his hand as he fell to the ground. The spider turned and began to bear down upon him.
“Stupefy!” I yelled.
The spell hit the spider’s gigantic, hairy black body. But it was useless, the spider simply jerked, scuttled around, and began to run for Eleanor and I instead.
“Stupefy!”
“Impedimenta!”
It was no use, the spider was either too large or so magical, the spells were doing no more than aggravating it.
I shoved Eleanor to the side of the path as the spider drew level with us and within a split second I was being lifted into the air by the spider’s front legs.
I could hear someone shouting Stupefy, but it wasn’t Eleanor. Had Cedric really stopped and turned back to help us?
“Strangoccide!”
I fell twelve feet as the spider suddenly let go of me. A pain seared through my leg when I hit the ground and I clutched at it as I looked up to find that Eleanor had her wand aimed at the spider, and it was seemed to be struggling oddly to get away from her.
“What is that?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know.” Eleanor answered, a dark look coming over her as she looked down to me. “We need to get moving.”
Eleanor finally lowered her wand and the spider quickly made its way down the path in the direction we had come from.
Cedric held out his hand to me and I took it, allowing him to help me up onto my aching leg. Eleanor helped support my other and together, the three of us made our way down the path to the cup.
“Go on. Take it then.” I said as we reached the Triwizard Cup.
I waited for Cedric to reach out for it, but he merely stood there and looked between me and Eleanor.
“No…you take it. You two should win. That’s twice you’ve saved my neck in here.”
“That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” Eleanor said. “The one who reaches the cup first gets the points. That’s you. You would have reached the cup before us if you hadn’t come back to help with the spider.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to help you with that spider if you hadn’t kept it from getting me first.” Cedric kept looking between us, the gleam of the cup reflected in his eyes. “Go on, take it.”
“No, just take it Cedric.” Eleanor said defiantly.
“I’m not taking it.” He said, shaking his head and stepping away from the plinth.
“What if we all take it together?” I asked. “Hogwarts wins either way. But we’re tied right now. If we take the cup together, all of three of us win.”
I looked to Cedric first. A small smile was starting to stretch across his face as he looked longingly toward the cup. When I looked to Eleanor though, I didn’t know how to interpret what I saw. Her lips were pressed tightly together and her eyes, they seemed sad. It was like something was wrong, but she didn’t say anything. She just turned away from me.
“All right,” Cedric finally spoke up. “We’ll take it together then. On the count of three?”
“On the count of three.” I agreed.
We stood there, the three of us lined up before the Triwizard cup, ready for the tournament to finally end.
“One – two –“
But that was when everything went wrong. I felt a hand push up against my back suddenly, and before I knew it I was stumbling forward toward the cup. As my hand latched onto the handle of the cup, Cedric’s did as well, and a sudden pulling sensation seemed to fold me into nothingness as the air in my lungs compressed.

Eleanor
I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want the fame, I didn’t want the glory. None of it mattered to me, this was the end of the tournament, and I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. That was why I did it. That was why I had reached forward and shoved both Harry and Cedric to the cup on the count of two.
They could have it. I didn’t want it.
“That was foolish you know?”
I turned around sharply, looking for the source of the voice. He wasn’t supposed to be in here. What was he doing in here?
“You really shouldn’t have done that.”
As I looked down the path, a dark figure stepped out of the shadows. I raised my wand to see that it was exactly who I had thought I heard. But he wasn’t supposed to be inside the maze.
“I don’t care about winning. But Cedric deserves this, and Harry can have it alongside him if he wants.” I said, taking a step back.
“Well you shouldn’t have worried about that,” Moody said, “because neither of them will be gaining any glory tonight.”
“What do you mean? Where did the cup take them?” I asked, a sudden dread filling the pit of my stomach.
Moody raised his wand instantly, and a flash of red light swept toward me. I ducked down and sent an impediment jinx his way. It was no use though, he had already moved.
Again and again I sent curses, jinxes, hexes, everything and anything I could think of in Moody’s direction, the darkest spells in my repertoire flying free. Yet again and again he was ready for me. The hedges around us were dotted with smoldering patches, and gaping holes.
As Moody set his wand in my direction again, I attempted to disarm him, but it came to nothing. My spell was blasted away by his own and I was sent flying off of my feet. I landed hard against the ground and my wand rolled away from me into the darkness.
“Crucio!”
I had only just started to get back to my hands and knees when the curse hit me. I fell to the ground again, screaming in agony as the pain swept over my body, engulfing all of my senses, and feeling as though it were ripping my very atoms apart in a violent rage.
When the curse lifted I was sprawled out on the ground, dirt under my nails from where I had clawed at it in desperation. My breaths were heavy and painful, as my lungs seemed to be set on fire with each inhalation. My muscles felt weak and I found myself unable to move for a moment.
But that moment was what made all the difference. In that moment, when I couldn’t bring myself to move, Moody had stepped up beside me. Everything that happened next happened so quickly.
I could feel Moody’s hand tangled in my hair as I was pulled up harshly from the ground. He yanked back on my hair again, bringing my head further back. Before my muddled brain could tell what the cold sharp object against my throat was, it was already too late. A terrible pain stretched across my throat as it was ripped open, my own blood spilling rapidly from the wound, and cascading down me to pool at my feet. The hand in my hair was suddenly gone and I crumpled to the ground.
I gasped violently, trying to pull air into my lungs, but it wouldn’t come. I could feel the blood not only pouring out of my neck but filling my lungs, suffocating me. The lightheadedness came quickly, and though I tried to hold my own neck together with my weary hands, the muscles just simply stopped working. The entire world faded into darkness as I lay there dying.