SOS 28.

A bit late on this one, but I was stuck with the middle section as I decided on what approach to go regarding the previous developments in 23 and 24.

Comments are welcome.

Also, this is hte hundredth HP based chapter here, so yay?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Here it goes,” Harry muttered as he looked at the moonless sky, muttering a prayer to Cernunnos as he felt the Horned Spirit’s gaze upon him, the forest around him teeming with countless grasping shadows. Thankfully, due to the lack of moonlight, he wouldn’t have to contend with the regular critters that could obstruct his path. Case in point being the Unicorns he the Celtic deity seemed so fond of.

Of course, those were not the only animals that stayed inside their dens without moonlight to guide them. Centaurs were another thing he was rather happy to avoid, he had had his fill of cryptic prophesying codgers. With a silent lumos, soft white light illuminated a small area around him, granting him visibility up to ten feet. Judging it to be enough, Harry took a deep breath and walked into the forest.

It had taken him some time to prepare for this excursion. He had long since mastered the wandless art of masking himself visually and audibly. But tonight demanded more—he had to hide from every conceivable sense, at least from creatures of prey.

Scent, sight, taste, presence, disturbances.

It had taken him a week to find a spell suitable enough for it. Well, he had found it on the third day, but the rest of the time had gone into practicing it. Thankfully, his past experience with both the Mist and magic came in handy. But his demigod nature made it hard to work with intricate, delicate spells like this, as Ollivander had stated—but as of this afternoon, he had successfully walked into the owlery without making a single owl or bird look his way. Hades, even Mrs. Norris, that abomination of a cat had not chased after him, even though he had shot a stinging hex at the animal.

The best thing about the charm? Any sounds made by objects in contact with him were also muffled?

A stick snaps under his foot? No worries.

Footprints? Taken care of.

It was one of the basic espionage and hiding charms, and Harry was going to thank the author of the book profusely—after getting done with whatever creature he was supposed to kill tonight, that is.

Softly moving forwards, Harry gained confidence with every step he took, and soon, he was swiftly moving through the bushes and trees, judging the terrain with an ease born of a life spent in the wilds. He had read the Hogwarts section of the library intensively, thanking Zeus that he wasn’t born with a dyslexia prone constitution like the others. Several creatures had been listed as the denizens of the Forbidden Forest, many just speculations.

None had ever really foraged around in its depths, the ancient forest teeming with life for at least three thousand years. Hell, there were rumors of a dragon den or two along the northern edges of the forest, and sightings of a class XXXX beast were commonplace, even if refuted by officials.

While he had not truly faced a magical creature in such a manner, Harry was quite confident even in his magical abilities. He had defeated a remnant in Surrey, and Hagrid was definitely not feeding a dragon or a manticore in this jungle.

Something red shone at the edge of his vision, and Harry shifted his wand towards it, before wrinkling his nose at the half eaten carcass. “Poor monkey,” he muttered, staring at what little fire he could spot, along with that chewed up, separated tail. A moment later, Harry resumed his journey into the interior of the forest, the trees growing denser with each passing minute, along with the sounds of critters and creatures alike.

A snake passed by his foot, the giant constrictor pausing for a moment to lick the air as its head swiveled towards him, and Harry watched the serpent stare at his position for a moment, before it turned around and crawled into the underbrush. “Of course, thermal detection,” he sighed, recasting the spell just to be safe as he waited for the snake to move away completely.

Once he was sure that it was gone, he ducked underneath the branch ahead of him, and instantly slipped on the wet mud. Thankfully, his hand reflexively caught the branch, saving him from soiling his robes. Taking a deep breath as his heart calmed down, he looked around himself at the dark forest, his lumos showing him the little trail of water ahead of him, which had turned the surrounding dirt to mush. 

‘The creek where I found those Unicorns and Cernunnos must be nearby,’ he thought with a grimace, once more looking up at the moonless sky. Without the lunar magic actively suffusing the air, Unicorns were much less likely to come out, thankfully sparing him from the Horned Spirit's tender mercies. Slowly shuffling his feet around the wilted, rotten leaves and sparkling, sludgy dirt, Harry moved forwards again, keeping one arm out to catch any support in case he slipped again.

The forest was much quieter than the last time, not as distracting as it had been that night, he thought silently, eyes flicking over every inch of revealed ground before him. Yet, something pricked at his senses, like the sensation of someone, or rather, something watching him. And he knew for a fact, that it was not some random spider on a leaf watching him—-but still, whatever it was, it was of no concern right now. He needed to find whatever Hagrid was keeping as his pet, and kill it.

A part of him knew that he was doing wrong. Killing Hagrid’s pet, whatever creature it may be was going to cause the gentle, heartfelt man quite a lot of pain. He even felt a little guilt about it, that he was going behind his—arguably his friend’s—back to do so. Still, it was better than the alternative where Cernunnos decided to show his displeasure directly to the half-giant. He didn’t know the full dynamics between the Celtic deities and the wizards but with how his last few interactions with either side of the spectrum had gone with the unfortunate soul that existed in between the two worlds, he was quite happy to avoid it altogether.

A shriek pierced through his thoughts, shattering the relative quiet of the forest around him like a sledgehammer, and Harry jumped in his place for a moment as goosebumps erupted on his arm. The sound continued on for seconds, slowing down from a high pitched, agonised scream to a weak, dying warble, and his eyes narrowed as he slowly turned in the direction the sound had come from.

The precognitive instincts of the demigod—stemming from their limited ability to access the higher planes of existence their parents operated on—screamed at him all of a sudden. Though far more muted in his restricted state, in the relative silence of his mind, it was as if a trumpet had gone off in his ears.

The light from his wand disappeared as he raised a shield on pure reflex, and Harry flinched as a jet of liquid splashed against his barrier, before dropping to the ground. Grimacing as he watched the leaves and sticks wilt underneath the venom, Harry looked up as something fell on the forest floor before him Taking a step forwards as he created a ball of light above his free hand while keeping his shield intact, his eyes widened as he beheld a sizzling corpse of a large ape. Its grey fur was burning away, revealing the fresh, sizzling flesh beneath as whatever venom it had been splashed with continued to eat away at the already dead creature—the same venom that lay barely a couple inches away from his feet.

Something shifted above the dead animal, and Harry willed the ball of light to float higher, revealing more of the dark, suddenly silent canopy around him. Crimson scales greeted him first, shifting into a sharp, glinting brown as the massive serpent slowly unveiled its coils. For a moment, he was as mesmerized by its beauty as he was by the shock of its size, easily twice as thick as the snake that he had crushed when killing his first chimera.

And then two baleful, poisonous yellow eyes opened in the dark, slit pupils glaring at him as the serpent lowered itself to his height, long body unwinding with a rustle of scales shifting on the wood. Involuntarily gulping as the serpent’s head fully came into his view, Harry stood still as the serpent flared its hood slowly, twice as big as his face and still silent, still not giving away any hostility beyond that first jet of venom.

“You have killed…a higher serpent,” the snake opened its mouth, a purple tongue flicking out into the hair, revealing the large, too large fangs behind as its hiss echoed around them, yet Harry understood it perfectly. Those black slits seemed to study him as more of the snake’s body was revealed, its head staying still even as more of its body appeared in the air, suspending itself midair, “But not a hatchling…another abomination.”

“A chimera,” he answered back, relaxing slightly as he realised that this was a divine snake, instead of a magical one. Yet he did not lower his shield. Even as he continued, “Back in my other homeland.”

“Hmmmmm,” the large serpent hissed, before its head turned towards his raised wand, and his tongue flicked out rapidly, “The Sky is strong in you…a strange thing for one of water and salt to smell like the sky. For what purpose do you enter this forest, abomination?”

The urge to blast the snake to the ends of the earth rose within him, but he suppressed it with all the patience Chiron had instilled in him. If there was a divine creature in the Forbidden Forest, it was definitely a pet of Cernunnos, and he didn’t need the Horned Spirit lusting after his blood again. “The God of the Wilds has given me a task, I must see it to completion,” he answered after taking a calming breath, eyes lingering on the fangs he could see as the snake yawned again, the subtle scraping of its scales on the wood seeming to echo around him.

“I see,” it hissed again, tasting the air again as its hood seemed to flare even bigger, and his pulse quicked as a response, a dozen spells flitting through his mind in a moment as he felt his magic tremor in anticipation. However, contrary to his thoughts, the serpent slowly started to return to the darkened canopy above, the brown and red scales disappearing into the darkness as its silky yellow eyes and those pupils stayed on him, “He wants you to hunt the many-legged one. Go east from here, it shall take you to the many-legged one’s nest.”

“Many-legged one?” he muttered in confusion, only for the snake to ignore him entirely as it turned its great head around, and started to crawl back into the branches above, vanishing slowly into the unnatural darkness above. As the last of its red scales disappeared, Harry just stared after it for a few moments, wondering what in the name of Hades had just happened with him, before his eyes lowered to the still smoking carcass.

“Weird,” he said to himself, before raising his palm and staring at the wand, “Point me East.”

An extremely useful piece of magic, so simple and so easy to learn that many overlooked it unless it came in their curriculum. And yet, for someone like Harry, whose whole life revolved around tracking down monsters and artefacts, it was a massive tool. 

‘And now rogue demigods too,’ he thought bitterly for a moment, remembering crossing blades with the Son of Ares, as well as that dark rift into which he had disappeared. Guilt followed through however, as he remembered his own failure to catch the bastard, as well as the destruction he had wrought on Lancaster—yes Ares had manipulated him to do it, but still…it had been hard to see the news of the death and destruction on the mortal news channels later on.

Pushing those thoughts to the back of his mind, Harry turned in the direction his wand was directing him at, and started to move through the forest once again. With the revelation of such a large predator in his vicinity, the sounds of all kinds of creatures had faded into silence, and he ambled through the underbrush carefully, holding onto branches and trees as the mud got increasingly slippery once again.

Something skittered past his leg a minute later, and he paused instantly, creating another light source by his feet, breaking nothing but grass and leaves. Yet Harry knew that he had not imagined it, especially with how silent his surroundings had become.

“Fuck,” he cursed, knowing that whatever it was, he would have to deal with it after he dealt with Hagrid’s pet. Something white glittered at the edge of his vision, and Harry slowly pushed the light towards it, and his eyes focused upon a large tarantula, white bellied and handing on an intricate web, flies and insects littering its nest. And yet, as the ball of light moved an inch more towards the arachnid. Harry;’s eyes widened.

Beyond the first one, numerous webs lined the trees, growing denser with each passing branch, and housing dozens of spiders. For fuck’s sake some were bigger than his forearm! “What in the Amazon rainforest is this place?”

He had met large spiders before, whether they be mortal or of the monster variety. Travelling through the wilds in the search of one thing or the other had always made him see such sights. Hell, he had fought a large centipede and a thunderbird at the same time once…but so many large spiders so close to one another? It was a sight he doubted anyone had seen before, especially since spiders were known to cannibalise.

“No way one but forwards I guess,” he muttered to himself, creating a couple more balls of light, illuminating more of the forest around him as he turned eastwards once again. Considering the words of the serpent, and the state of affairs around him, Harry was willing to bet that the many-legged-one pet of Hagrid’s was nothing but a spider, maybe a large one.

He could take on a spider. He’d killed worse before.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The River of the Dead stretched in both directions, a ribbon of black glass broken only by the pale, reaching hands of those who would never touch its banks. The stench of rot and rusted steel drifted over the water, carried by a wind that never touched the living world.

“Lord Ares, what brings to the gates of the Underworld?”

“Take me to your Master’s dwelling, Boatkeeper.”

“Of course,” the featureless face lowered in deference, and Ares stepped onto the ancient, rotten ship. The screams of the damned greeted him, many of them hopeful, and many of them scared. 

As someone who personified war, Ares was as close to the domain of death as you could get without actually having it in your essence to be one. One of the the rarely known, and even rarely used power was to grant every soul on the battlefield an honorable afterlife. No judgement of their lives, no weighing of scales.

Straight up Elysium if he so desired, for dying in combat and service.

The last time he had done so was during the War of Troy, and it had been a cause of uproar when he had decided to let Hector enjoy the eternity of Elysium until it became necessary for him to be reborn. Thetis and everyone who had supported the Greek side, especially Athena had been wroth with him for centuries, and pleaded incessantly with Zeus for ordering him to rescind the decision.

‘Hah!’ He snorted mentally, remembering his half-sister’s smoldering eyes and those crossed eyebrows. He respected Athena as a warrior, and certainly recognised her wisdom and intellect, but the way she disregarded everything until it was Zeus’ thunderbolt crackling with doom, yeah, it got tiring. 

Giving the shivering, blood soaked soul next to him a glance, Ares let a little of his power emerge, his eyes taking a hellish orange hue as he peered into the mortals life. Bullet wounds pocked his chest, one leg reduced to shredded flesh by an explosion. Mines, turrets, an ambush—Ares had seen it all before.

He glanced over the rest of the soldiers, their deaths written plainly on them. In the mortal world, reasons for fighting had shifted—resources, territory, fear—but in the end, the field was the same, and so was the blood.

Though not all that impressive considering what happened in Vietnam, he thought with a smirk, walking forwards towards the brow, Charon’s dark robes spreading out from where he was using his oar to navigate them into the Underworld.

The rest of the trip passed in silence, the Boatkeeper silent and unmoving from his place,while Ares stood completely uninterested in anything beyond looking at the last moments of every soul around him. Time had no meaning to him, not in this world between worlds, where gates to every Underworld existed, teeming with souls and reapers alike.

The oar’s rhythm faltered then, a wave of energy disrupting the reality around them. Ares felt it too—heat, sudden and biting, licking across the edges of the dimension. 

“Is that Yamamoto?” he mused, eyes looking at the clouds of fog that obscured vision for as far as this dimension existed, and yet this chaotic, primordial landscape could not hide the flash of celestial hellfire, nor the heat that dwarfed a star as he heard a roar of anger, and a phrase he had not heard in thousands of years.

“Burn all creation to ash, Ryūjin Jakka!”

“Yes, Lord Ares,” Charon’s flat, uninterested voice echoed around them as the powerful shinigami’s aura pressed against the fabric of the realm, and even Ares raised an impressed eyebrow at the blazing heat and weight behind the old Shinigami’s might, “There has been some disturbance in the Heavenly Gardens, and it has spilled into this realm.”

“Hn,” he grunted, peeling back the layers of dimensional barriers to view the fight personally, always awed by the martial prowess, as well as the power possessed by the Head Shinigami. His fingers twitched, and he felt his sword—forged from his own blood and bones, along with the purest of the metals this Universe had to offer—hum in anticipation.

Maybe if he just demanded a duel, it would not be so bad right? Hestia and Athena both were on good terms with that light bulb, they wou-

“We are here, Lord Ares.”

Giving the raging, world-burning power in the distance another glance, Ares schooled his features and tightened his mind as he turned to their left, an unassuming outcropping of grey rock greeting his eyes. Reaching out across the gap separating dimension, Ares grasped onto the anchor on the other side, and simply raised his foot off the boat. 

The world shifted around him, the greys and violets of the world-between-worlds disappearing into the blacks and browns of Hades, named after the God who ruled it. Shuddering as the smell of bones and brimstone filled his nose, along with the pervading, dark energies of the dimension brushing against his being, Ares shook his head and turned towards the palace that loomed in the distance.

Hades had not allowed him to directly appear at his palace.

The Dark One wanted him to walk to his gates, across the length of the Underworld…Typical.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Motherfucker,” Harry trailed off as he pushed yet another web-covered branch out of his face, only to reveal the absolutely massive nesting ground before him. Opaque silvery white strands and clumps of web covered every inch of the ground for dozens of meters, holes and tunnels littering every little inch of the place. A shiver went up his spine as he saw the size of some of them, larger at their smallest diameter than he was tall.

Swatting away the tarantula climbing up his arm absently, Harry watched the nest for any signs of movement, eyes tracking the dozens of large, pearly eggs that littered the ground. He was no fool. Years of hunting Myrmekes and Basilisks had taught him enough to recognise a nesting a hunting ground when he saw one, especially one with multiple residents. 

He had disturbed enough webs and spiders on his way here that it was a fool’s hope to wish he had gone unnoticed by now…yet as he had thought a few minutes ago, there was no way on but forward at this point.

His eyes stilled at a spot in the distance as his breath froze in his lungs. His instincts, dampened as they were, still whispered to him as the forest exhaled.

It wasn’t the breeze—it was something deeper, a shift in the air that pressed against his skin like a living thing. His light orbs swayed faintly, their pale glow barely pushing back the dark, and the silk under his boots trembled in a way that spoke of something vast moving through it. The vibrations rolled from every direction, humming through the ground and the trees until it felt as though the entire nest had become a single, breathing body.

A shadow moved ahead.

The first leg emerged. Black, barbed, thicker than his arm, followed by another, and another, until eight stood revealed, each joint clicking faintly in the stillness. The body followed, as big as an elephant and mottled in shades of ash and pitch, hair glistening faintly with damp. The head lowered into view last, eight glistening eyes fixed on him with a cold, unblinking precision that rooted him in place.

Harry had fought monsters before. Thrice he had almost died to creatures much more deadly than this spider could ever hope to be. But this was different. He was not a demigod here, but a wizard, and still a novice by all accounts. While before stood a spider that spanned more than eighteen feet at its widest, with mandibles the size of his arms.

“You are far from your den, little human,” the creature rasped, voice decidedly male and each word shaped from a deep, grinding hiss, reminding him eerily of the chimera he had killed.

“I’m here for something that lives in this forest,” Harry replied, his wand never lowering, even as his eyes flicked at the shadows that moved around them, the rapid chittering and the vibrations in the silk below him telling him exactly what he was dealing with here.

“Many things live here." His target continued, clacking its mandibles together and taking a step forward, legs the size of a giraffe’s neck moving so silently and with such deliverance that it was almost unfair.

“Something large, something with many legs” he smiled placidly, the tension rising by the second as he thought about the quickest way to end this. Because it was without question that he was going to kill this spider, and then the hundreds of others would attack him.

The great spider’s mandibles twitched, grinding like wet stone as he stopped moving, a dozen feet separating them, “And you think I am that something?”

“I think you’re making a convincing case.”

From the shadows to his right came another shape, moving with slow, deliberate grace. It was smaller than the first, but only by comparison—long legs glided across the silk with predatory elegance, the mottled grey of its carapace broken by deep, rust-colored bands. It stopped beside him, mandibles clicking once as another set of large, eight eyes locked onto him..

“Mosag,” the male said without turning.

“Husband,” she answered, her voice quieter but colder,yet nonetheless alien as the female raised a single foot in his direction, its end looking sharp enough to skewer a rhino. “This one smells of magic and blood. Not the kind of prey we usually allow so deep.”

“He comes as a hunter,” Aragog said. “Sent by someone he claims..”

Mosag’s cluster of eyes seemed to shine with malevolence, a sinister, low hiss spilling forth from her mouth as Harry visibly saw her mandibles tremble, “Then he shall not leave.”

Harry’s gaze flicked between them. “One of you is my target. Maybe both.”

A ripple of hissing rolled through the webbed clearing, the shadows themselves seeming to breathe. And finally, eyes blinked into view—dozens, then hundreds—the tunnels and high branches filled with movement that was no longer hidden out of sight. The swarm surrounded him without sound, their sizes ranging from palm-sized scuttlers to bear-sized monsters, all fixed on him.

“You have walked into the heart of a kingdom,” Aragog intoned, massive head shifting as the spiders surrounded him on all sides, “My children have been hungry for wizard flesh for a long time, child.”

“I don’t care what you call it,” Harry said evenly as he extinguished the light behind him, throwing the creatures in sharp relief “I was sent to end it.”

The venom dripping from Aragog’s fangs hissed where it touched the silk, and for some reason, Harry was reminded of a tumbleweed.

“Then you will feed it first.”

The swarm closed in like piranha on flesh instantly.

The air thickened with the musk of the nest, damp and suffocating and filled with rot. Harry’s shield flared to life, pale light shimmering as the first wave struck—three wolf-sized spiders slamming into it with bone-jarring force. A flex of his power tore ground beneath them into jagged stone, impaling one and throwing the others back.

Mosag rushed him with a shriek of hunger, her front legs stabbing where he had stood a heartbeat earlier. Harry rolled, severing sticky strands before they could wrap around him, and lashed out with wordless gout of flame. It scorched across her flank, burning away hair and cracking chitin, her shriek echoing through the web. Below her, the web sparked with the heat, but to his frustration, it did not ignite.

She lunged again along with half a dozen of her brethren, and trusting his shield to uphold as he poured more power into it,  he met the matriarch’s strike with a piercing charm straight into one of her foremost eyes. The globe burst, ichor spraying as she staggered and Harry pressed the attack, another spell shearing through her head in a bright arc. The bright pink of Lacero carved through her carapace and insides, splattering his front with her stinging blood. Unfazed, Harry crouched in the same motion as he turned on his heel, expanding a circle of bright orange flames around him while Mosag sagged to the ground, jittering and curling inwards in death.

Aragog roared, the sound rattling the silk like a drum, and the swarm erupted in a frenzy—at the death of its queen or the fury of its king, Harry did not know. And neither did he care, he observed with narrowed eyes as the spiders nearest to him recoiled, shrieking and dying to the fire he had conjured. Aragon on the other hand, simply jumped over the flames and ran towards him,  his massive form surging forward. Fangs like scythes struck at his shield, the giant spider roaring in fury as its legs too joined the assault, barbed tips attacking his barrier with the strength of a rampaging Colchis. The barrier flared with each strike, cracks splintering out over its surface as it glowed a soft cyan, and gave way under the sheer weight of the assault. 

But he had been prepared for it. As Aragog roared in triumph and stabbed down with his legs, Harry slipped inside the spider’s reach with an experience born of countless battles, before driving a shattering hex into one mandible, snapping it clean.

“You will not leave!” Aragog thundered, yet his voice shook as the large arachnid stumbled back, and the mandible landed on the blood soaked silk below them with a hiss of venom meeting the silken strands.

Harry’s answer was a wordless snarl as he backpedalled once, avoiding a lunge from one of the smaller spiders, his wand pointed at the ground. Magic answered his call eagerly, his wand seeming to almost purr as the thunderbird feather inside its core ignited with energy, and a bolt of pure lightning slammed into the damp silk. His power travelled in a  visible wave of rolling blue energy, stunning every spider into a spasming, uncontrolled frenzy—and killing quite a few of the small ones on the spot.

Aragog too, was not spared, though his great bulk meant that he was only slowed instead of stunned. Thankfully, that was all he needed. Magic poured into his wand as Harry ran, jumping over Mosag’s legs before sliding along the wet silk right up to the arachnid’s face. He watched Aragog struggle against the paralysis, eyes tracking him with urgency as its mandibles clicked rapidly. However, right as his legs began to move, Harry carved his wand upwards in a vicious arc, letting that magic spill out in an overpowered cutter once again. The beam split Aragog’s head from crown to fang, revealing the destroyed, dark insides of its head. The air seemed to hold its breath as his colossal frame sagged, then crashed onto the web with a thundering shiver that rippled out through the entire nest like a death knell.

For a single heartbeat, the swarm froze, and even Harry breathed in the scent of electricity and rot deeply, his kill confirmed..

Then they came like creatures possessed.

Harry fought like a man treading water in a sea of teeth. Every movement was a strike or a dodge, every step leaving ichor on the silk. For every spider he blasted apart, three more poured in from the tunnels. Webbing struck from all sides, some catching and burning against his skin before he could cut them loose. His light orbs wavered under the press of bodies, the shadows twitching and alive.

Something heavy crashed into his back, forcing him forward into another pair of fangs. He twisted, cutting one attacker in half, then slammed a concussive charm point-blank into the other’s face, while his other hand ignited with fire that turned another into a shrieking, scrambling ball of flames. Yet for each spider he had destroyed, thrice the number were ready to bite at him. To tear his flesh from limb and devour his body.

Harry was a strong wizard for his age—even very strong, some might say—and exceptionally talented when it came to combat. Yet he was only twelve, still a student and unknowing of the hundreds of spells and curses that could take down an army. He could fight these creatures one on one forever, but all at once? He was starting to slip, both metaphorically and literally, in the pool of blood and guts that was starting to form around him. A pointed leg tore through his shield, nicking him in his calf, while a small spider managed to sink its fangs into his shoulder before he swatted it away. Bit by bit, spider by spider, he was being bogged down by the sheer number of bodies around him. Visibility was flagging down each moment, as more and more spiders swarmed the nest, coming in from the whole forest as his light balls extinguished one by one. For a moment, he thought about praying to Taranis, to pray for removing the restriction on his powers.

But before he could do that, the forest changed.

The silk vibrated with a deeper note, a bass hum that rolled through every strand as a familiar sound echoed around them. The musk of the nest thinned under a sharper, colder scent and the swarm hesitated, their hissed fury breaking into confused clicks, the soft, slow rustling of scales on wood piercing through the quiet that had descended upon them.

From the canopy above, crimson scales slid into the light, massive coils glinting in the dim glow. The divine serpent uncoiled, golden eyes locking on the spiders with a predator’s absolute authority, daring them to move lest they draw the beast’s ire.

The reaction was instant. The nearest spiders bolted, their retreat spreading like a wave. The swarm scattered into tunnels and branches, the chittering fading into the dark until only the dead and the silence remained.

The serpent lowered its head to Harry’s height, hood flaring in quiet dominance as it perused the numerous kills spread across the length of his stay here, eyes lingering the massive forms of the nest’s creators.

“You have done as the Horned One asked,” it hissed, turning towards him,  “Leave now, before their courage returns.”

Harry met its gaze for a long moment, chest heaving, before giving a sharp nod. Without a word, he stepped over the tangled corpses of Aragog and Mosag, his boots squelching in the thick ichor, and began the slow, deliberate walk back through the forest.

Behind him, the serpent’s coils slid back into the canopy and vanished like it had never been there, and the nest lay still—its rulers dead, its children cowed, and its silence heavier than before.