Harry couldn't move. Couldn't think. Slowly, ever so slowly, he raised his hand...pointed it at Malfoy...

But suddenly the floor beneath him began to shake. Ron and Hermione jumped backwards as a hole opened up in the floor, growing larger and larger, and Lucius Malfoy had no time to move before he was engulfed by the shrine, falling to the floor below with a sickening crack.

Ron and Hermione watched helplessly as Harry knelt by Ginny's dead body. There were no tears that fell from his face; nothing whatsoever suggested that Harry was perturbed, at least nothing visible to the naked eye. Only the way his mouth hung slightly open (as if he couldn't think to close it) and the slight shaking of his shoulders gave away anything about the firestorm that now raged inside Harry's skull.

Tears filled Hermione's eyes as she stared at two of her best friends, one now dead. Ron, too, looked inconsolable—he was mouthing Ginny's name over and over, unable to move, making Hermione pull him backwards as the floor crumbled further, widening the gap between Ron and Hermione and the Boy-Who-Lived.

"Can you – jump, Harry?" asked the witch. "Harry?"

No movement. No sign. Just indifference as the floor nearer and nearer to him crumbled away, until finally the bit of shrine supporting him fell away as well and an alabaster glow seemed to hold Harry and Ginny in midair. Harry was now hovering directly next to the entrance to the final room of Voldemort's dungeon, while Ron and Hermione, forced backwards, found the darkened wing inaccessible, blocked by the rapidly-forming abyss that separated them from the Boy-Who-Lived.

Hermione, the most intelligent of the group, found herself suddenly struck by a brutal realization. A glance at Ron showed he followed shortly afterwards. Before they had entered the shrine, the Order had given them a Portkey that would allow them to exit the shrine in case of emergency. Hermione had the Portkey in her pocket.

"Harry!" she shouted, and this time her best friend of seven years turned and stared her directly in the face, a look that held such power in its depths she wondered if Harry had inherited some basilisk power from the one he killed in second year.

"Harry...oh, it's terriblie! The only way out of this shrine is the Portkey, but we can't take you with us! Do you think you can – float – over here? Can you - "

"Go," said Harry suddenly, softly, and Hermione was sure she misheard.

"W—What, Harry?" asked Hermione again.

"Go," repeated Harry. "Save yourselves. Go!" Pieces of ceiling were beginning to fall throughout the shrine, peppering images of the Founders with cracked concrete.

"Harry?" asked Hermione, shaken.

"We've defeated Voldemort!" said Harry, his resolve seeming to increase. "The people need to know. You must be the messengers!"

"But..."

"I can't leave Ginny. Please understand."

Hermione was speechless. She stared at her best friend of seven years—he was asking them to leave him for dead. No—she wasn't the smartest witch in her year if she couldn't find some way to get them out of this. She began to think.

"Harry..." Ron turned to him. "You've been the best friend that I could ever ask for. Let's go, Hermione," he said, pulling the crumpled aluminum can that served as their Portkey out of her pocket. Hermione turned to him in horror.

"Ron, what are you..."

"Harry wants us to go! If we can't all go together, that leaves us only one choice!"

Hermione continued to stare at Ron, mortified. Harry watched from his position across the crumbled shrine as his two best friends fought with themselves, and smiled as he thought of all their fights over the years.

Now Hermione turned to face him, tears flowing freely down her face. "Harry..." she said. "I promise to tell the world about this victory. Please! You must try..." she began, before the Portkey activated and his two best friends disappeared in a flash.

"Ginny..." Harry and Ginny descended to the spit of land by the last doorway, and Harry once again knelt at the foot of his dead girlfriend's body. "There will be a new era of peace," he said, struggling to keep the tears from flowing. "I wish we could have seen it. Ginny, I love you. I always have and I always will."

With those final words, Harry struggled to his feet, trying to maintain his focus on the task ahead of him, but he found himself strangely apathetic. Ginny was dead. Nothing else mattered.

"Lumos," he whispered, raising his hand in front of him. With that, he turned forwards and continued on the path ahead of him. Harry was unaware if he walked for mere minutes or days, just that the path finally ended at another door exactly like the first. The door was unlocked—Voldemort had apparently not expected anyone to come this far.

Harry opened the door and looked inside, holding his hand in front of him to cut through the darkness. Before him, sitting on a table, was a lone book—Rowena Ravenclaw's artifact. The seventh Horcrux.

But how to destroy it? Harry placed his hand in front of him and focused his energy on performing a great burst of magic.

Reducto. The spell slammed into the book, and the pages turned as if in a sudden gust of wind, but no visible damage was done whatsoever.

Diffindo. Again, the aged pages flapped in the wind, but otherwise the book seemed to shrug off the curse.

Sectumsempra. Nothing.

Harry felt his hopes slowly sinking. He was going to die in this shrine, and he couldn't even destroy a book while he was there! Feeling his anger rise, Harry stepped forward and grasped the book in one of his hands, ready to throw it to the floor in a fit of anger.

And then he stopped and stared in shock.

The book's pages were turning by themselves—Ravenclaw must have left a bit of herself in the book as well. Puzzled, Harry replaced the book on the table and stared at the page it had opened to. The page seemed to have been written in Latin, but before Harry's very eyes the book's words melted away and reformed into English.

Attero veneficium—The Magic Destruction Spell.

This spell is very dangerous and is not in wide use due to its extremely volatile nature. The caster must focus all of his or her magic into one spell in order to destroy a person or object, hence the name Magic Destruction Spell. Most of the time this spell is fatal, because all but the most powerful of wizards cannot survive without their magic. The incantation is "Attero veneficium," followed by a forward flick and twirl of the wand.

And Harry almost dropped the book in realization. He knew what the final Horcrux was.

The eighth Horcrux was him.

It all made sense suddenly—the connection with Voldemort, which always seemed to go deeper than the scar. Voldemort's confidence that no one would discover the last Horcrux. The failed Killing Curse that Voldemort had attempted on Harry must have had far greater effects than anyone but Voldemort himself had known—in attempting to kill Harry, the soul had split a final time, and that piece was now embedded in Harry by the eternal connection between him and Voldemort. His scar.

And then Harry knew what he had to do. He took a deep breath, focusing every single ounce of his magic on the spell. Without giving himself time to second guess himself, he performed the wand movement demonstrated on the page with his hand, saying aloud the words "Attero veneficium!"

An immense ring of light emerged from Harry, surrounding him for an instant before its several pinpoints surged together into the seventh Horcrux. There was a sudden scream, although no one else was in the room, and the book's pages suddenly began to turn by themselves before fading into nothingness, crumbling away into dust.

And then suddenly Harry fell to his knees, although he was unaware that anything had happened. He felt incredibly tired...perhaps it was time to rest a little...

"Ginny, I did it. Ron, Hermione—the world will be okay now." Harry crumpled to the ground, his last bits of energy leaving him.

A ghostly image then appeared before Harry—that of Ginny Weasley. "Harry..." she said softly, her voice ethereal.

Harry blinked his eyes several times—this must be a hallucination brought on by his overexertion. "Ginny?" he gasped anyway. "Is that you?"

"You did it, Harry," she said, her chocolate-brown eyes piercing his gaze, removing all doubts about the reality of the scene that he was seeing now. "Yeah, I did, didn't I, Gin?"

"Let's go, Harry. Let's go to your parents...and Sirius, and Remus, and Bill...and Dumbledore..."

Harry smiled very weakly. "Yes, let's do that," he said. His exhaustion was slowly fading away, and a happiness beyond any he had ever felt was now taking its place. He felt himself rising into the air, the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders. Above him, Ginny watched peacefully, her hair enfolding her radiantly and giving her the appearance of an angel. He wanted nothing more than to go up there with her, to be with her forever, and to see his parents, Sirius, Remus, Dumbledore...

And as Harry Potter floated into the sky to join the woman that he loved in heaven, he paused for a moment to gaze at the earth and hope that the world would enjoy the lasting peace that his sacrifice had brought.