Bryan repeated the phrase slowly, struggling with it.
'Existed there for a long while?'
What did that even mean. He had existed for a long while, somehow, in some timeless eternal place?
Timeless eternal place—did that phrase mean the same realm of death he had just seen, moments ago? The one depicted among the nine ancient carvings in Avalon's high temple, the place he had privately come to think of as the "jellyfish world," due to lack of any better name?
"Ariana."
The sudden shift in conversation stunned Dumbledore equally. Tear-tracks still marked his own wrinkled face, and he stared fixedly at Ariana, his own breath was quickening with rising confusion.
"You know Bryan?"
The waning moon climbed steadily higher, its pale, wavelike light was rippling gently through the surrounding trees, casting everything below in shifting, silvery patterns.
"Albus—"
The lovely young woman spoke only that single word to Bryan, then turned her own gentle gaze back to Dumbledore. Her eyes, meeting his, were soft with unmistakable tenderness.
"I don't blame you, Albus. Nor Aberforth. Don't summon me again, please. You belong to the world of the living—and I have already gone far from it."
The smile that bloomed slowly at the corner of her mouth was brighter than any summer noon sun could manage.
Then her insubstantial spirit-form began fading rapidly away, carried off gently on some mysterious, formless ripple.
"Ariana!"
"Wait!"
Dumbledore and Bryan both cried out at the same moment, their two voices were overlapping in the night air, but their combined calls could not hold back the girl who had briefly returned to the world of the living.
Under the reluctant gaze of both men, Ariana vanished completely, leaving nothing behind but the faint impression of where she'd stood.
The wandering night wind, the swaying branches, the distant bird-song still calling from the shadowed corners of the woods—all of it seemed to vanish too along with her. The whole world fell into total silence, leaving only the two men's forlorn breathing between the trees.
Dumbledore looked at Bryan. Bryan looked steadily at the empty space where Ariana had just disappeared. Neither of them moved for a long while.
"Just now… was that truly Ariana?"
It was not Bryan who asked this first, but Dumbledore, his own scattered senses were gradually returning to him after the shock.
Now it was Bryan's own turn to be struck dumb by the question.
He didn't answer Dumbledore right away—there was no way he could and instead walked a few slow steps away, sinking heavily onto a jutting rock nearby, both palms pressed hard against his own forehead as he worked through everything.
'All of this…'
He had seen it before, somewhere. Back when he was still Archestratos, drifting through that same great door into the world of the dead—the very first time he had ever touched what the centaurs called the Tablet of Destiny.
And just now—
Ariana's spirit had passed out of the world of the dead, through that gigantic door steeped in the power of ancient rules, and vanished behind it once more—while some part of her lingering mark had been stripped away and left behind, permanently, in that world she'd departed.
'What was this. The death and rebirth of a life, playing out before his own eyes?'
Then why had Ariana appeared again, after her mark had already merged into the world of death?
Bryan's own gaze snapped abruptly toward the Resurrection Stone clenched in Dumbledore's trembling hand!
'That was it.'
She had been summoned back by the Resurrection Stone's power.
But a fresh, more pressing question leapt immediately into Bryan's mind at that realisation.
Ariana's death had come nearly a full century ago, yet it was only some five minutes ago that Dumbledore, having finally found the Resurrection Stone tonight, had reawakened her soul's lingering mark. That vast discrepancy in span of time between the two events…
'The timeless eternal place—does that phrase mean, quite literally, a place entirely without time itself?'
Bryan's own eyes, restored now to their violet hue, brightened suddenly with understanding.
In that world of the dead, time itself stood frozen—that was precisely why the vision he had witnessed had taken the particular form it did!
As for Ariana's claim that she had seen him before, in that place—that was genuinely impossible to say for absolute certain, given everything else he didn't yet understand.
Bryan could only reasonably assume, working from what little evidence he had, that he himself had indeed appeared, in some form, within that world at some point.
It was, after all, quite possibly the single most mysterious place in the entire known universe, a domain belonging to the dead alone. Its governing rules could not be guessed at or reasoned through using the familiar rules that governed the world of the living.
"I believe—"
Bryan finally spoke aloud, answering the pleading, searching look sitting in Dumbledore's own eyes.
"—that was truly Ariana."
The lightness carried in that single, simple sentence seemed to lift, all at once, some enormous crushing weight from Dumbledore's bowed shoulders.
"Was it, truly…"
Dumbledore murmured the words softly. Behind his familiar half-moon spectacles, his own blue eyes grew damp again.
"It was Ariana."
Dumbledore sniffed hard, working to steady himself. "How forgiving of her, after everything. She said—she said she doesn't blame me at all, for any of it."
Tonight, in this small clearing, Dumbledore had shed every last trace of his usual grandfatherly bearing, and looked instead like a child who'd made some mistake, now rejoicing at being forgiven by his parents.
Bryan fell back into his own pondering silence, working through a different thread of the mystery.
Why had I been able to see all of that, just now, when Dumbledore's own vision had seemingly been private?
Without a doubt, it was because of the Tablet of Destiny—the very same one that had, once again, already vanished from his conscious senses, as suddenly as it had appeared.
Perhaps because it, much like Ariana belonged to that other world, and something in tonight's events had provoked it into briefly revealing some small fragment of its authority—or its own particular power?
Only—had what he'd just personally witnessed been a moment drawn from the actual past, or had his own soul been briefly swept by the tablet's power into the world of the dead itself?
Bryan pressed his own lips together, working through the two competing possibilities carefully.
He found himself leaning, on balance, toward the former explanation.
In Lady Hufflepuff's preserved memory, she too had once attempted to properly descend into that world of the dead herself—and had, by her own account, failed in the attempt.
That much was made clear from her conversation with Lady Ravenclaw, as well as from the many other scattered pieces of information Bryan had carefully gathered before tonight through his research.
That particular world had, evidently, long since drifted far away from the ordinary magical world he currently inhabited.
Only by passing through the great stone door with all three necessary coordinates finally gathered together, could one reasonably hope to journey there in actual person, rather than merely glimpse it through fragments and visions.
And in that other world, too, it seemed there were those who wished, in turn, to return to this magical world they'd left behind.
Though Dumbledore's store of magical knowledge ran far deeper than Bryan's in most respects as in his youth, he had spent great effort studying the Deathly Hallows in detail—he treated Bryan, in this moment, as the one who had already gone before him into this specific mystery.
"Will I—will I be able to see Ariana again? Someday?"
He looked at Bryan now with open hope, and asked the question again, more plainly.
"If you wish to see Ariana again—"
Bryan raised his head, gazing thoughtfully up at the waning moon hanging steady in the night sky above them, picturing it, in his own mind, as the distant "jellyfish world" he'd glimpsed.
"—the Resurrection Stone is still in your hand, Headmaster. I believe it can still work, if you chose to use it again."
Dumbledore's own expression twisted sharply with visible inner conflict at that.
He did, indeed, longed beyond any words to see Ariana again—to properly tell her, at last, just how much regret he had carried with him, every single year since that terrible afternoon.
That was the terrible thing about the Resurrection Stone, one of the three Hallows.
It tempted you. While you drowned helplessly in your grief, unable to properly pull yourself free of it, the stone quietly fed on your own remaining life in the process.
And yet, looked at from another angle, perhaps this was simply the necessary price that had to be paid for such a thing—a kind of equivalent exchange, the way alchemy had always demanded balance for any true transformation.
To wake the dead, those whose causal thread with this world had already been severed, and call them back across that gulf—you had to pay for the privilege with your own remaining life, in the end.
There was no other way it could reasonably work.
"No—"
Dumbledore's face contorted sharply, as though he were actively enduring some fresh agony in refusing the offer.
"Ariana said that she doesn't want to be disturbed again. I—I cannot—"
He gritted his teeth hard, walked the short distance up to Bryan, and, his hands trembling badly throughout, dropped the Resurrection Stone ring directly into Bryan's palm.
"You keep it instead, Bryan. I genuinely cannot. I'm not fit to carry this particular temptation. If it remains with me any longer, I won't be able to stop myself from eventually going against Ariana's wishes."
The icy touch of the ring against his skin further sharpened Bryan's own returning clarity. He rose slowly from the stone he'd been sitting on.
"If not for that accident, I believe you would have made a brother who loved his sister dearly, Headmaster Dumbledore—"
"Is that so. Is that truly what you think of me, Bryan?"
Dumbledore smiled weakly at those words, fell silent for a brief, considering moment, and then new hope rose again in his own deep blue eyes.
"Do you think I'll be able to see Ariana again someday—oh, not through the Resurrection Stone, I mean properly. After I myself die, eventually. Is there—is there some kind of world where—"
Bryan wasn't especially surprised that Dumbledore would ask this question, following everything else tonight.
Ariana's words only moments ago had been brief but for a man as wise and experienced as Dumbledore, they had evidently been more than enough material to guess at a very great deal beneath their surface.
Bryan shook his head slowly with genuine regret.
"I would very much like to give you a clear, comforting answer on this, Headmaster Dumbledore. But I'm afraid I cannot. What we're discussing now, at its heart, is death itself—and no one, however powerful or well-informed, can fully see into its complete secrets."
"Then would you at least explain what just—"
"My answer remains the same as before, Headmaster Dumbledore—"
Bryan sighed with real, unfeigned weariness.
"I genuinely cannot offer any adequate explanation for death itself. Oh—this particular item should be returned to its rightful owner—"
Contemplative and working through his own private thoughts, Bryan drew the Elder Wand from his own pocket and held it out toward Dumbledore.
"Oh, thank you for that, Bryan. I owe you another apology, I think—I'm afraid I rather lost myself for a good while there tonight."
Dumbledore murmured, taking the old wand back into his possession, his fingers ran over its familiar length a few times as though reassuring himself of its presence.
His own thoughts drifted for a moment afterward. Then, quite suddenly, Dumbledore lifted his head and looked at Bryan.
"You want to collect all of the Deathly Hallows. Don't you, Bryan?"
Tonight's strange and wondrous events had brought a measure of trust between the two of them. Bryan considered for a brief moment, then nodded.
"That's right, Headmaster Dumbledore. I need all of the Deathly Hallows."
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