James jerked his head to look down at her. Her eyes opened, but they were changed. They were pure white, glimmering and flashing like diamonds before a winter sun. She did not look at him, but her hand continued to grip his, to squeeze avidly, as if trying to communicate through touch alone.
A warm wind rose up around her, spinning into a soft cyclone, drying her wet hair and clothes, lifting her up to her feet, and then raising her into the air.
James let go of her hand as she arose, straightening, her features firming into a taut expression of severe calm. She raised her hands, held them out at her sides, palms open, fingers spread. She was summoning and controlling the hot wind, using it to repel the viciousness of the storm. Light accompanied her, pale as moonbeams, coalescing in waves around her form and building like a halo.
With a subtle sweep of her hand, she extended the force to James. He leaned, swayed as the air rushed around him, cocooned him in a tempest
of warmth, and lifted him away from the sinking ice.
Petra's power was surging still, increasing, building like a whine in the air, a thrum underfoot, a pulse that seemed to penetrate into the very ocean depths below.
And yet James felt no siphoning of strength from his own inner core. The cord no longer connected them. He had let go of Petra, given it all to her, poured into her the entirety of all that he had stored for her.
And now she was using every last ounce of it.
He arose alongside her, bathed in her power. He found that he was afraid to speak to her, worried that he might somehow break whatever strange enchantment had brought her back. It was Petra, and yet, in some indefinable way, even beyond the unearthly glitter of her eyes, she was changed.
Together they scanned the dark, storm-swept ocean all around.
The spell of ice was shattering into choked shards now. Floating ice fields rode the waves once again. Lightning stabbed down in staccato strobes. In the middle distance, the Gwyndemere floundered before the gale.
And approaching it, walking atop the water alongside her human host, herself transformed into a giantess of ice and water, swollen with purpose and drunken with triumph, the Lady of the Lake stalked, reaching forward, ready to crush the ship and all aboard it like a broken toy.
Petra saw her, narrowed her flashing diamond eyes, and surged forward through the air, supported on her cyclone of warmth, taking James alongside her.
The ocean sped away beneath them. The peaks of the waves reached for them, but never touched them, or even so much as cooled them with mist at their passage.
Odin-Vann was like a child next to Judith's bloated form, stumbling uncertainly atop the waves, his robes and hair battered by wind and rain. Ignoring him, Judith stalked forward, made of the ocean and drawing it up into herself, feeding from its power to grow to behemoth proportions, intending not only to kill, but to terrify first.
Petra did not slow to confront Judith. Instead, she raised her fists and blasted through the hulking figure at shoulder level, plunging into her back and bursting from her engorged sternum, emerging fully dry on the other side even as the water demoness half-collapsed, cascading over Odin-
Vann, who fell into the waves, spluttering.
Judith roared and rebuilt her form, sucking dense green ocean back into herself and bulging even larger and more terrible.
"How are you here?" she bellowed in rage and surprise.
She reached with tentacles like freight trains, groping for Petra and James where they floated in their personal typhoon of light and warmth.
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James Potter and the Crimson Thread
FanficJames Potter and the Crimson Thread by G. Norman Lippert. Two years after the debacle of the Morrigan Web, James Potter returns to Hogwarts for his final year. With the Vow of Secrecy crumbling in every corner, the Magical world prepares for its im...