How The Mighty Have Fallen

No one should know what it feels like to be able to put a face to the 
name of death, to be able to so readily picture the once thin and 
gangly frame and emrald green eyes that seemed constantly both 
curious and sorrowful and know it as the end to all ends.  It would 
have been a desolate feeling, both helpless and appalling, 
shredding to the very soul.  

	Thus it must have been.  But no one has known death as Harry Potter for 
thousands of years.  Not since Albus Dumbledore breathed his last, and in 
his wake a school crumbled, not since the most familiar and intelligent 
allumni aged and withered as all life must eventually do, not since that fateful 
day when two brother wands were raised against each other in one last 
and brutal mistake.

	Only the dead know who their king is.  And the dead tell no secrets.

	It was a spell that put him there.  A powerful and vauge spell, a spell 
he thought he needed to defeat the greatest evil he had ever known.  It 
was a spell he would have been better off leaving alone and allowing that 
evil to continue its reign.  In the long run he would learn that Voldemort's 
evil was only the tip of the iceberg, just the visible bit of mankind's evil 
roots.  And those roots ran deep.
	
	The spell turned out to be poisened with darkness, magic more 
evil than any ever seen.  It was, as he predicted, Voldemort's undoing.  
It was also his.

	And now where does this king sit?  In heaven or hell? 

	He sits on a throne, beyond the blackest water of fabeled River Styx.  
It is the same throne he first saw when he was only nineteen.  Now he is 
older than time itself.  

	He is very old, and yet has not aged, for he is not alive.  No, 
life is for the living, and with it comes the inevitible end of such.  
Surely death cannot die?  All the same, no longer is he nineteen in appearance, 
with the stubble of a beard and the tired but vivid emerald eyes he was known for.   

	He is mangled.  Mangled by years and years of greif, unjustice, and 
horror.  He has heard every sad and terrible tale that can be told by human 
lips.  He is more stone than human now.  He is a living-yet-not-alive 
retainer for the pain of mankind.  

	As to heaven or hell, there is neither.  There is only one ending for 
all.  It is neither the rewarded heaven nor the dreaded hell, though it 
is closer to the latter.  It is more of the greek version of the land of 
the dead, as the River Stix would suggest.  Yet its true roots are in no 
legend ever spun from mortal lips.  It is a place where the gates and 
the heart are one in the same, where you must be dead to enter and nonexistant 
to leave.

	And death is just as final as is told.

	After all, he is the master of all that exists.  He can never be 
outwitted.  He can never be denied.  Everything answers to him in the end.  
And then he will hear their tales of woe, and never shed a tear, because 
he's heard it all before.  And worse. 

	And for eternity he will sit upon his throne.  He is forever shackled 
there with chains of that fateful spell, and his mantle grows no lighter 
with each passing decade.  He has no possibility of redemption.  

	He paid a price for his ignorance.

	His reign will never end.