Thread 6309409

Archive: https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/qstarchive.html?tags=Disappearing%20Hogwarts

Character Sheets: https://pastebin.com/VNSkfRge

Twitter: https://twitter.com/head_qm

--

In the last thread:

> The Unseelie lay waste to the Earth, an unstoppable horde devouring everything in its path

> You and your friends fight a demented Harry Potter, who has nothing else to lose

> With severe losses, you win, the Boy-who-lived falling to his own Killing Curse

> In the following morning, you and Arty get married, then march towards the center of Atlantis

> Against hordes of dementors, the final battle against Salazar Slytherin and the Darkness inside him rages on

And now…

Salazar Slytherin, his form of darkness, magic, shadow and hate. You and your allies, fighting against him at the end of the world. The type of thing that only happens in story books, the type of thing there should be prophecies about.

And there were prophecies about it, but they were prophecies you had rejected. Maybe that is why, at the cusp of success, Luck turns against you.

Salazar lets out a scream of rage and a torrent of raw magical power in the direction of you and your troops, and you stand in between them and it. You slam both your hands together, Excalibur and Elder Wand together, and bring it forwards, forcing through both tools of Fate your wish to protect your friends. And when met by half superpowered protego, half mythical blade, the wave of death parts, your sheer willpower clearing a cone behind you from the torrent of energy.

Against powers impossible, you hold, unwavering.

And then, the Great Drill that tries to pierce a path into a place no one should ever go, hits something it shouldn’t, and the ground shakes.

You lose your footing a moment before Salazar is no longer able to maintain the blast.

There is a scream as only a fraction of the power gets past you. No, many screams. You turn to see-

“Ah, commander,” says Talon, the left half of his torso gone. “I… It was… an honor.”

He collapses on the floor, blood splattering everywhere. He isn’t the only one. Several of your soldiers get caught, and you survey the field searching for Arty, finding her safe with Apollo and Linda, but behind her you see Brighton. You see as the blast did not reach him, but was enough to distract him and his soldiers who were keeping the dementors at bay.

And the animal-like shadows tear through Summer Nott, as he tries desperately to save her. He and Winter scream, too, in horror. Both of the silver lynxes wink out of the battlefield.

“Finally, some progress,” Salazar says, grinning. “I told you, little Elliot. I’m going to destroy you. You can’t fight me. You should have stayed at home, waited for destruction with your parents. At least you’d be able to hug them before dying. Instead, you die here, watching your friends bleed to death first.”

“But that’s fine, isn’t it, little Elliot?” He mocks, voice dripping with cruelty. “Because at least you got to see Atlantis with your own eyes. Losing them was a small cost to pay for your curiosity, after all.”

“Shut up.”

“You don’t get to give me orders, little Elliot.”

“Linda. Rebuild formations, get the dementors off our backs,” you hiss, and she goes. “Salazar. I beat you until now. I kept your dementors at bay. My soldiers and I cut you so much you’re being held together by spite and chewing gum.” You look straight at him, eyes unwavering. Your anger solidifies into something unyielding, clear as glass, cold as ice. “You throwing a hissy fit won’t change anything.”

[Cont.]

>>6309412

“Bombarda Maxima!” You shout, and your army follows suit, the spells slamming against him hard.

“I don’t think it is appropriate to goad him, commander,” says Falere by your side, clutching her bleeding shoulder.

“An enraged enemy is a stupid enemy, Snyde. Now, tell me you have some bullshit seventh year spell to help us?”

“Sorry, used my whole arsenal already. But I managed to get this from my sister.” She opens her hand, showing a pair of galleons. “They’re fake, protean charmed. This one changes, this other one changes, only one way. I used it to tell her what other armies were doing during the battles.”

You look at her with disbelief.

“Potter never explicitly forbade it,” she explains, looking embarrassed. “It takes a long time to enchant but-”

“Yeah, no, I get it, you’re a genius.” You snatch the coins from her hand and toss one in Apollo’s direction. “Pollo! Catch! It’s proteaned!”

The boy accios it from the air, looks at you surprised, then nods.

“Arty! Linda! I need a path to him!”

“We got you!” They shout, before rushing forward.

“Go help Brighton and your sister with the dementors,” you tell Falere. “They’re needing help. Come back if you have any other ideas.”

The girl nods and turns.

“And Falere!” You say and she stops, looking back. “Brighton just lost someone. Tell Helga to make sure he’s not-”

“Commiting suicide by means of battle rage like you were trying to do a couple of minutes ago? Sure.”

She goes, and you charge.

--

“You fuckers! You-” Brighton brings the Sword of Gryffindor down on a dementor, his eyes flickering between dark and normal as Godric tries to reel him in and fails. He punctuates each work with a blow, his wand forgotten. “Mother! Fucking! Fuck! Summer! Summer!”

“Vulnera Sanentur, Vulnera Sanentur, Vulnera Sanentur,” Winter whispers wide eyed over Summer, the spell useles. That does not stop her from begging the spell over the hole where her sister’s left lung used to be.

A silver badger slams against the dementors lunging at Brighton’s back.

“Longbottom! Snap out of it!” Helga shouts. “You have an army to command!”

“Fuck the army! I’m going to kill every last fucking one of these things!”

“You’re going to kill yourself and Winter! Is that what you want? Because if so, just fall on your own sword so we don’t have to worry about not hitting you when trying to hit them! Now duck, you wannabe Gryffindor!”

The insult does hit him in a way his bloodlust is not expecting, allowing a shred of sanity to slip in, if only for a moment. He sees himself deep into dementor territory, and the realization of his own stupidity snaps him off completely.

“Merlin-fucking-dammit, what the fuck am I doing?” He says, more to himself than anyone else. Then he shouts, “Helga, pull me! Ascendio!”

[Cont.]

>>6309414

He rises in the air and a Carpe Retractum gets him back to his troops. His eyes are once again fully black, but only because Godric is lending him his power, Longbottom fully in control.

“Sorry. And don’t tell Hallaster I apologized.”

“It’s fine. I’ll order the troops, go get your friend up.”

Brighton walks over to Winter and pulls her up by the scruff of her robes.

“Winter. Stop.”

“I can save her! I can still-”

He knees her in the stomach.

“I need you,” he whispers in her ear, holding her gasping form. “Snap the fuck out or we don’t get revenge. You’re smart enough to know that.”

“I- I can-”

“She’s dead, Winter. No, you can’t. Bottle it up, then grab the bottle and hit these fuckers over the head with it. But they’ll stay alive if you keep crying. We’re not Hufflepuffs. We can be soft when no one is looking.”

It takes the girl a herculean effort to pull her eyes away from her sister.

“I need you on the left flank. Protect anyone who can still cast a patronus.”

She nods and goes without a word.

Brighton takes a last look at her friend’s corpse, but there is no time to turn her into a beautiful sapphire. He runs to where the defenses are weakest, howling orders through tears.

--

Apollo waits for your signal.

His transfigurations still wreck havoc on the dementors, but he waits for your signal.

And when you Depulso the fake galleon directly into Salazar’s chest, Apollo makes it become blades and acid and fire and an infraction upon every transfiguration rule McGonagall ever scratched upon a blackboard.

Salazar screeches for a long while before managing to sunder it from reality.

--

[Cont.]

>>6309415

Your forces have been diminished by this last blow, but the battle moves forward. The dementors still push against you, ever the threat. A threat that becomes harder and harder to stop as your forces dwindle.

Will you focus all your forces on stopping their advance, allowing Salazar a moment to breathe? Will you throw everything against Salazar, at disastrous cost if you fail? Or will you try to split your powers in half, focusing on both at lesser success? Every moment this battle rages on, your chance of losing someone close to you increases. But, at this desperate time, there may be another option.

Once in a Forbidden Forest, Harry Potter had walked through dementor infested woods without a Patronus, for he held the Resurrection Stone. Could it truly keep the dementors at bay? Could it keep these animal-like dementors at bay? And is it worth the risk of that supposed curse that made any who used it kill themselves?

> Everyone focuses on blocking the Dementors, we can’t afford them overwhelming us (Elliot: +80 vs DC 160, Army DC: +105 vs DC 185)
> This battle needs to end, and it needs to end now. Focus on Salazar. (Elliot: +80 vs DC 160, Army DC: +105 vs DC 200)
> Keep on each of them separately, giving neither no quarter (Elliot: +80 vs DC 180, Army DC: +105 vs DC 200)
> Use the Resurrection Stone (DC: ???)
> Other (Write in)

Hey everyone! Sorry for the enormous delay since last thread, but we're here to finish this. I cannot overstate how much it sucked to not have the time or be anywhere close to the right headspace to QM this quest after getting so close to its conclusion.

But we're back now! Hopefully to a satisfying end where you don't *all* get tpk'd and everyone dies a horrible death! Probably going to be posting at some random times (like now when everyone is probably asleep) as I'll be thankfully going off on a well deserved vacation soon and update from weird places, but I expect to be able to maintain an update every two days, as I was doing before.

AH FUCK IT'S HERE

Rolled 57, 7 = 64 (2d100)

>>6309417
>> This battle needs to end, and it needs to end now. Focus on Salazar. (Elliot: +80 vs DC 160, Army DC: +105 vs DC 200)

if im understanding this correctly, this is a 2D100, correct? im going to assume it is with each result going in order, we cant afford to let this fucker win.
We going all in now!

>>6309423
Welcome back, HeadQM! boy i missed you and this amazing drama and suspence you created here, you magnificent bastard!

>>6309432
>130
>112
FUCK!

>>6309432

That will be 6 rolls total (in 6 posts, preferably by 6 different people, but changeable if people take too long to roll), and the first three will be for the first dc, the last three will be for the second one. But let's wait until we have a quorum on the vote and I can call for the roll before rolling!

In unrelated news, I am behind on basically every single quest I was following, and haven't even looked at the QTG in the last however long it has been since last quest. Gods, these last few weeks fucked me up something major

>>6309437
>these last few weeks fucked me up something major
hope everything goes back to normal soon and for you to feel better

>>6309432
+1
Are we screwed?

>>6309417
> Use the Resurrection Stone (DC: ???)
Worth a shot. Will it maybe kill us? yes. Will doing anything else maybe kill us? Also yes.

>>6309423
Woo! Just glad to have you back, QM.

>>6309432
Anon plz, look at the DCs, we need to roll a 95 to beat this

>>6309417
> Use the Resurrection Stone (DC: ???)

Rolled 100, 77 = 177 (2d100)

>>6309417
>> This battle needs to end, and it needs to end now. Focus on Salazar. (Elliot: +80 vs DC 160, Army DC: +105 vs DC 200)

>>6310267
holy shit, a perfect 100

>>6309739
i don't trust the stone, everyone who's used it has killed themselves and he got saved by himself from a short time in the future, not the stone

>>6310267
>>6310268
>>6310271
YES! THATS WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT!
the stone is the obvious bad ending, screw that.
with these rolls we got everything we need!
blessed rolls!

>>6310274
77's still 18 too low for the Army DC, we need someone to get us past that gap

>>6310278
oh damn, you right, i miscounted...still, we take down Salazar with the first roll, thats half of the way there

Rolled 1, 39 = 40 (2d100)

>>6309417
> This battle needs to end, and it needs to end now. Focus on Salazar. (Elliot: +80 vs DC 160, Army DC: +105 vs DC 200)
We're so back!

>>6310285
We're back alright - back in the darkness

>>6310285
good thing we still have 3 more chances to win the 2nd roll

>>6310267
>>6310285
What are the odds of this happening, btw? This is, like, cosmic levels of happening.

>>6310293
didn't expect we'd get both the worst possible roll and best possible roll against Salazar

>>6310285
jesus fucking christ...

>>6310267
>>6310285
Guys...
>But let's wait until we have a quorum on the vote and I can call for the roll before rolling!

>>6309437

>>6310296
so far 4 votes are for ending the battle, safe to say that one is currently the winner vote

Well, now you fucks have put in the position of deciding whether I ignore the 100 or not. I'm going to say that, as we miraculously had both a 100 and a 1, we'll stick with the plan I said here >>6309437 and start counting the rolls from now.

>> This battle needs to end, and it needs to end now. Focus on Salazar. (Elliot: +80 vs DC 160, Army DC: +105 vs DC 200)
4 votes (I'd link them here but 4chan's dogshit spam detection system thinks a post that quotes more than half a post is spam)

> Use the Resurrection Stone (DC: ???)
2 votes

Now you can roll. We seem to have more than 6 people, so 6 people roll 1d100 each, I'll add the right bonus later. The first three will be for Elliot, the following three will be for the army.

I'd recommend you roll well.

Rolled 29 (1d100)

>>6310373
oh man, so are the previous rolls not counting? i hope they do, if not...then thats fucked up...anyway, rollan

Rolled 69 (1d100)

>>6310373
You know it'd be easy to say that the world was bound to be fucked someday eventually, but that's just cope as we all die here

Saw these in a european food place 4 days ago, posting them for "good luck"
1/6

>>6310392
HE'S SIDEWAYS AAAAAAAAAHHHH
2/6...
>Error: Maximum file size allowed is 8 MB
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

>>6310393
3/6

Rolled 96 (1d100)

>>6310373

Rolled 37 (1d100)

>>6310373
Please not another nat 1

>>6310498
It's not the best but I'll take it.

>>6310479
>>6310484
LETS FUCKING GOOOOO!!!
TOTAL SALAZAR DEATH!
now we just need another great roll for the army, we are halfway there!

>>6310374
>>6310385
>>6310479

109 149 176

Nice! We have one roll for the second trio with >>6310498 , but things are too slow for my taste, so we need two more rolls. Feel free to roll again if you've already rolled, so we can get things moving again.

Rolled 55 (1d100)

>>6310561

Rolled 30 (1d100)

>>6310561

thingsa aren't looking too good for the army

>>6310585
With stupid inflated roll DCs to guarantee we lose, is it any wonder?

>>6310587
we still have the main threat of Salazar under control

>>6310592
What I'm wondering is why isn't the Beast Merlin turning on him yet? This fight still feels like it's going so piss-poor for us

>>6310595
Speaking of that, I don't think we can take a break from spell spamming to yell stuff at the Beast or Salazar to get their attention on each other, or at least get these stupid dementor animal adds to FUCK OFF

Rolled 27 (1d100)

>>6310561
rollin just in case it gets a chance of being accepted...also begging for a hail mary...

>>6310599
welp...F to our army, they are absolutely fucked...oh God, at least let Arty be ok...

>>6310587
Anon, I don't know how to tell you the DCs of each option were right in the description of the choice, and they have been steadily increasing according to the previous choices you've made by systematically choosing to not focus on the dementors. In fact I don't believe you've chosen to cull the dementors once, despite the rising threat.

There were easier alternatives and different choices to be made. It brought you closer to Salazar's defeat fast, as you had some spectacular rolls before, but there was a definitive cost.

>>6310595
They need each other for the Cradle, at which point neither you nor them have any doubt they'll turn on each other.

>>6310498
>>6310564
>>6310582

Very well. Writing.

>>6310602
>steadily increasing according to the previous choices you've made by systematically choosing to not focus on the dementors. In fact I don't believe you've chosen to cull the dementors once, despite the rising threat.
FINE LET'S JUST PICK THE STUPID DEMENTORS OPTION NEXT, GODDAMNIT OUR ROLLS ALL SUCK

Rolled 48 (1d100)

>>6310373

>>6310665
Oops, I just saw that others had rolled without linking that post. Never mind.

You hand hovers over the pocket where you’ve stored the Resurrection Stone, and for a moment your eyes lock against Linda’s. It takes an instant for you to know what she’s thinking.

Don’t you dare, her eyes say.

So you don’t. Instead, you fight on. With Excalibur flying where one of your hands should be and the Elder Wand in the other, you attack Salazar. You, Arty, Apollo and Linda fight with the experience only Potter’s classes could have gotten you, four army generals and a Founder wielding metal, might and magic against a being that is only horror a thousand times over.

And you’re winning.

Your wife and Linda blast Salazar with point-blank patronuses, casting and recasting the spell as the shadows which were once Merlin take them out. Linda powered by Ravenclaw, Arty by her sheer willpower. Apollo transfigures matter into death, cutting like a scalpel while keeping it well away from his sister and the others. And you with your tools of Fate, a wand to defeat Death and the Sword of the Once and Future King who hungers to set its true owner to rest.

If the world survives, this is the moment where history and story will blend to a point where it is impossible to tell which is which, for this is the moment in which Salazar’s rage turns to fear.

“Expecto Patronum!” Arty shouts, and her Wolpertinger materializes in the air, all of her hope and happiness taking physical shape before crashing against Salazar in a burst of light. “Expecto Patronum! Expecto Patronum!”

Each blast of silver imparts the darkness with reality, and you and the others break that part of reality with every spell and curse you know. Salazar Slytherin, imbued with the power of Darkness Beyond Time, is forced to take a step backwards towards his great spinning drill, still digging towards the Cradle of Magic.

A second step back, slipping, then a third, then-

“Elliot!” Linda shouts, pointing. “The dementors!”

You turn and see in horror the moment your army breaks. A crack in their protections and the dementors overwhelm them, pouring through, flooding the battlefield, no longer able to be contained. Riley and Falere, back to back still struggling, are torn apart by the beasts, but their screams are muffled by the dozens of other students dying.

“Fall back!” Brighton shouts. “Fall Back!”

You turn to run, to try to help them, but a column of black fire blocks your way as Salazar sees his chance at victory and does everything in his power to ensure it will happen.

[Cont.]

>>6311141

Yet Brighton is still one of the brightest generals of his generation. You admit that, more than once, you only beat him because you had Helga by your side. Somehow, somehow, through shadow and fear Ravenclaw’s brightest student directs patronuses and barriers, waving his wand to form walls with the silver weapons of the fallen to block the creatures of shadow from advancing, desperately trying to save every soldier he can.

As you try and fail to retreat back to help them, Brighton leads them forwards towards you, because he knows the same thing as you do.

There is no more stopping the dementors.

There are too many of them, your army spread too thin. Now, either you destroy Salazar once and for all and hope that killing him will destroy the dementors he controls… or you die. And you need to do it before the dementors finish consuming your soldiers.

No other path but forwards.

No safety in your warriors, whose numbers dwindle rapidly.

And, as Brighton arrives with what remains of your army with Winter by his side, you see the single soldier remaining in the back. The soldier who had stayed behind to attract whatever dementors possible towards her, towards that isolated, easy prey, so others could escape.

Helga Hufflepuff holds her silver badger until the very last student is safe before allowing the final scrap of her magic to be consumed. She looks kindly at you before her patronus winks out, smiling defiantly as if saying “This isn’t your fault. I’m proud of you.”

Then Artemis Pertinger’s old body is clawed and bitten until it is no more, though Helga does not give Salazar the pleasure of hearing her scream.

--

The dementors advance. Salazar, torn to struggling pieces which still fight. Your army, dying, knowing their fate is sealed.

Behind you, the drill keeps spinning, ever closer to its final destination.

Of your closest friends, Arty, Apollo, Linda, Brighton and poor normal Winter remain.

Only one more strike against the heart of darkness is needed, but every time your final blow fails to connect, two of those friends will die.

All your choices have led to this.

Roll.

> +50 from your Battle Rolls and your months of training
> +40 from your the Elder Wand and Excalibur
> +40 from your army and allies, fighting to the very end
> Roll 1d100+130. Bo3, DC 200

Rolled 79 + 130 (1d100 + 130)

>>6311143
>Helga is dead
ooh...i knew this would happen, it was expected but it still hurts...
we are honoring everyone who fell in this battle, but she is getting a special one for sure, rest in peace, Helga Hufflepuff. Your sacrifice will not be in vain.

THIS IS FOR HELGA!

ROLLING!

>>6311144
>Beat it by 9
>3 of a kind and a pair of 4's for a full house
even if nobody else beats the DC, we got him...FOR HELGA!!!

Rolled 88 + 130 (1d100 + 130)

>>6311143
AAAAAAAA

>>6311191
Did we get him? Is it over?

Rolled 93 + 130 (1d100 + 130)

>>6311143

>>6311144
>>6311191
>>6311213

>>6311144
>>6311191
>>6311213
>all 3 rolls beat the DC

>>6311230
>>6311215
But Falere is dead. Apollo will never score now. Do you guys think we fucked up too hard laser-focusing Salazar?

>>6311232
we did what had to be done

>>6311232
Maybe. We can't go back, though. Down that road leads madness... Just as Harry Potter.

We prioritized saving the world over saving our friends in the end, and ai think that was ultimately wisest, because if we'd focused on fending off dementors but Salazar had succeeded, everyone would die anyway. All the rest was luck of the dice.

>>6311241
it's theoretically possible to bring them back with the cradle's power

>>6311242
Maybe, but let's not get our hopes up... I'll miss Helga/Hope most of all, but billions have died and there may be mroe pressing uses of the Cradle, or good reason not to use it.

>>6311243
true, there's still the problem of the apocalypse going on outside

>>6311243
>billions have died
And Elliot's group don't know yet, do they?

>>6311248
it's not exactly hard to come to that conclusion from how all the Unseelie escaped and how we bearely made it through just a few of them

>>6311248
The Minister for Magic brought us every single artefact she has, and we know the Unseelie have been unleashed.

I shall post the next update in exactly one hour (And if I don't, know that it is because my hotel's internet is being shitty)

i get extremely hyped and nervous every time i see that nummber go up in the thread watcher...
its happening soon!

Your army fights against Salazar. Even as the dementors fall upon them, they fight to give you just another moment, just another try at ending this. But as Salazar loses his humanity, his attacks grow ever more erratic, more difficult to predict, shards of darkness shooting out in every direction.

Behind you, you don’t dare look, because you know you’ll see your soldiers dying for you, protecting you from the horrors behind.

And you can’t disappoint them.

You slash with the Elder Wand, green Slytherin fire striking down, being rebuked by a barrier redirecting your attack towards Linda. You spin, using the momentum to turn away from her and all the way around, coming back with even greater fury. Maybe it is seeing your school colleagues, your army, die for you at the hands of such horrors in numbers and manner that would break even the toughest of hearts, or maybe it is the sheer power flowing through your body, but each blow, each strike, reminds you what you’re fighting for, who you’re fighting for.

Your parents. Linda’s mom and sister. Taylor’s parents.

All of Hogwart’s students.

And every single other person too.

You know that there is chaos and death outside. At some level, you know there must be an uncountable number of dead at the hands of the Unseelie, deaths you hadn’t allowed yourself to linger on because if you did you would never have let your army to sleep for eight full hours and have a few hours of celebration while who knows how many died before going to face Salazar.

If you had done that, you’d have certainly marched towards him with an exhausted army and lost, so you hadn’t allowed yourself to really consider what every wasted moment battle really meant.

Every moment passed increased the chance of there being no Helen and Kendrik to greet you home. No Mom and Dad to tell you’d gotten married, no mother and father to be mad at you that they hadn’t been there to see you and chastise you for doing it, even as they smiled and told you they were happy for you.

And that wasn’t something you could ever, ever allow.

You call Excalibur to your hand, holding both it and the Elder Wand together. Brandishing your sword like a wand and your wand like a sword, you call upon magic you’d been repeatedly told not to use, magic that one would only use in desperate situations, where one had very little to lose.

“MUFULGUR!”

And you bring down the Sword in the Stone and the power of the heavens down upon Salazar. His shield disintegrates into a shower of sparkles, and the blade hits true.

And the Darkness which is Slytherin explodes.

[Cont.]

>>6312366

You and your army are launched backwards, sharp fragments of shadow slashing through you as you’re sent tumbling and crashing directly into the dementors. But they don’t attack you, for they are too busy screaming.

Like a chorus of pain, the animalistic dementors howl as Salazar writhes in the middle of the battlefield, struggling, his shape now suddenly back to being more wounded man than shadow. His eyes flicker between human and void as he holds his head in his hands.

“NO! NO! YOU STILL NEED ME! I STILL NEED YOU! We’re almost there!”

You reach for your wand, but it has flown from your hand in the blast. Around you, your army clutches their wounds from the blow, shards of black still piercing their skin.

You hold Excalibur, which has not left you, and force yourself up, limping, bones certainly broken.

“We can still do this! We can still win!”

You limp, trying to reach him, trying to deliver the final blow.

“All we need, all we need… is a little push!”

And, in this moment where there is no army shooting at him, no self important hero trying to strike him, he lifts his hand and brings it down, burning all that is left of his power to pull down the only thing he can pull, the only thing he still has control over:

The Drill.

The ground below you shines with blinding light and crumbles beneath your feet as you lunge at him, trying to hold him back, trying to stop him but a moment too late. You fall as you two struggle, falling, falling, Excalibur falling through the air behind you. And then, just a moment before disaster, there is a sudden magical deceleration, turning a fatal fall into simply bone-shattering as your kneecap connects with the floor first and cracks into three. And while there is blinding pain, there is also… beauty.

The Chamber within which the Cradle of Magic is held is not beautiful, simply because it cannot compare to the Cradle itself. Within this previously domed room, at its center atop a simple pedestal, there is a single point of neverending light. Nothing more, nothing less than light, more pure than purity, more beautiful than beauty. As the patronus silver lights stands to normal light, the golden light of the Cradle stands to patronus silver, only a thousand times grander.

[Cont.]

>>6312367

Yet also, a thousand times more uncaring. Like the beauty of a hurricane or a tsunami, like the beauty of the meteor that crossed the skies before killing the dinosaurs. It is beautiful, and it is Sublime, and it is Everything. It is Power, distilled as a physical thing.

And you and everyone else is running for it. Your leg broken, you hold on to whatever part of Salazar you can, willing Excalibur to attack. Around you, the dementors strike even as the golden light burns them, desperate to reach it, your allies screaming and fighting, the voices of your closest friends shouting things your brain doesn’t have the time to understand as you struggle-

“Elliot!”

“Stupe-”

“Expecto-”

And even as you fight with nothing more than blood and sweat and despair, somewhere in your brain some part is still looking, still searching, still watching the Cradle, hoping, waiting for someone to reach it, end it, finish this battle. And you see against the golden light a shape reach out, as if struggling against howling winds, and close their hand around that god-like shine.

And the voice that reaches you, through the barrier of pain and adrenaline in your mind, is Brighton shouting:

“Pertinger, no!”

I'll post the final part of this update in another hour. Cheers!

>>6312371
fuck you QM
I'm not convinced it's Arty, but I don't care because I love them both equally

>>6312371
YOOOOOUUUUUUUU BASTARD!!
YOU REALLY GONNA LEAVE US WITH THE CLIFFHANGER FOR ANOTHER HOUR?!
truly, even eviler than Salazar...

>>6312369
One of the twins grabbed the cradle? That could be good... Right?

>>6312384
this is HeadQM we talking about, you KNOW somehow its not gonna be good

The burning light of the Cradle, for a moment as intense as the sun, grows brighter still. Salazar manages to slip from your grip as you look at the light, horrified. He does not get far, because the light surges again into an explosion that throws him back, but leaves you and the other students unharmed.

The searing glow dims, and within its center, shimmering, as if containing the sun under his skin, is Apollo Pertinger.

“Pollo! No!” Arty screams, running towards her brother, but you hold her back. Apollo is floating a few inches off the floor, looking at himself, at his golden form, with curiosity. Suddenly, the skin on his arm cracks, and from the crack the golden light from before, no, even stronger, pours. Arty watches, tears pouring down her face. “No… Pollo.”

Slowly, gently, he floats back down to the floor, approaching.

“It’s fine, Arty. It’s fine.” He reaches out towards her, as if to wipe away her tears. Yet they evaporate before his fingers can touch her skin. Another crack appears on the side of his face, and where the light touches, the impenetrable stone of Atlantis melts. “It’s what I wanted. You’re safe.”

“No! No! This isn’t right! I was the one who was supposed to do this, not you! You’re not- You’re not meant to die! The prophecy was about me!”

“Did no one ever tell you?” He asks, kindly. And, for the first time since you’ve known him, Apollo smiles. Not a smirk, not a grin, but a full-blown smile. It goes all the way to his eyes, because he finally knows the only thing that matters to him. “Magical twins can feed off each other in the womb. Take things they shouldn't. Like magic. Like time. Like fate.”

“No! That’s not fair!”

“Life isn’t fair,” he says, with eyes that transcend time, with eyes that can see the past and the future. “But we get through it all the same. And I got to have fun on the way! I stole your magic and your time, and Elliot gave you those back. I’m afraid I’m keeping this one.”

Then he turns to you. Somewhere, Salazar advances towards you, shadow and fury, but Apollo waves him away.

“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for saving her. Thank you for helping me. But there is still one final step. One no one but you can do.”

You nod. “A final task?”

“And then you can rest. But I think you will quite enjoy this one.”

He reaches towards you, then stops. A great tear appears on his back, light shining through as his body succumbs to the sheer raw power of the Cradle, but he does not look in pain. He turns to look at a spot above, and it takes you a moment to realize it was the exact spot where Riley and her sister had died, as if he could still see her, as if she was still there.

“I’m sorry. I told you you wouldn’t have a future with me. I hope you can forgive me.”

He places a hand on your shoulder, his soul tears into nothingness, and you become God.

--

[Cont.]

>>6312387

Magic.

Magic is a strange thing.

The wizard understands it through instinct and study, but at its most basic level he does not truly comprehends it.

But you do.

You also know that your time with this understanding is limited, that it will fade away ever so quickly. Well, then, there is much to do, so you should get to it.

The first thing… What’s the first thing? Ah, yes, you should probably return to your body. You cease to be Part of Magic Itself and open your eyes. Reality comes flooding in. Everything and everyone, every atom, every soul, like small pinpricks of light. Like you’re walking on the surface of the sun.

Except for one thing.

“What did you do!?” Salazar shouts in rage. You can see him, the droplet of shadow among the light, struggling, trying to walk in your direction, trying to kill you even now. But he can’t, because while half of him is trying to murder you, the other half is trying to run away. “Avada Kedavra!”

You raise your hand and pluck the emerald spell from mid-air, watching it with curiosity. Then you flick it away.

For no other reason than you being used to it, you still utter the incantation.

“Petrificus Totalus,” you suggest to reality, and so it is done. Salazar freezes. He is bound in place by thick ropes as you add, “Incearcerous.”

Something that shouldn’t ought to exist is screaming in horror of you.

“I’m sorry, Merlin,” you say, and your voice echoes through time. “I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry things had to be this way. But you can’t keep on existing.”

G O A W A Y !

“I will not. This has gone on for too long. I understand you now. I understand this thing that you are. And it is time for it to end.”

N o !

W i t h o u t M e

T h e y W i l l E n d

E v e r y t h i n g !

“It is true that without Merlin they’d have perished, long, long ago. But you’re not Merlin, not really. Merlin died a thousand years ago, his soul torn through shreds. You’re just… a passing shadow which an impossible darkness casts upon this world. A passing shadow who has taken all the cleverness and cunning of a great and flawed man. And that Darkness I can’t erase, not now, now with what little power I have, because it is part of being human. That Darkness is sadness, sorrow, grief, pain, and, fundamentally, death. It is things that Humankind still hasn't yet felt, because they are too young to do so, but which they will meet one day. It is every horror, every terror and every fear. And I can’t destroy that without sundering the universe and ending humanity itself.”

“No. I can’t destroy it. But I can diminish your hold of them. And for now, that will be enough.”

[Cont.]

>>6312388

N o ! P l e a s e !

It cowers before you as you draw forth the Elder Wand, put your feet in the right places. Because this spell, above all others, requires it.

With pity, you look at the sad thing squirming before you. It shouldn’t ought to exist. But you understand it now. At the end of the day, it is shadow. It Magic’s manifestation of every shadow cast upon humanity.

Your fingers move to the starting positions.

But the thing with shadow…

You flicker your wand once, twice, thrice, at the exact positions.

The only way to destroy it…

“EXPECTO-”

Is to fill it with Light.

“PATRONUM!”

> Roll… however many d100 you want

>>6312385
Ah anon, I may do many things, but to take away a player's earned happy ending is not one of them, I think. It may not be perfect, but this one, this one is definitely well earned.

This is the quest's final roll. It has been a pleasure.

Rolled 84, 72, 4, 54, 66, 75, 32, 84, 58, 65 = 594 (10d100)

>>6312387
Called it

and also fuck you QM

fuck you a thousand times over

Rolled 39, 45, 31, 89, 27, 59, 18, 26, 54, 48 = 436 (10d100)

>>6312389
It's been an honour

Rolled 50, 32, 68, 4, 64, 58, 34, 17, 28, 10, 14, 63, 79, 67, 99, 94, 11, 93, 98, 51, 1, 75, 79, 7, 99 = 1295 (25d100)

>>6312389
>> Roll… however many d100 you want
i would roll 1000 if it didnt fear it would crash by doing so, so im rolling 100 instead!

>>6312394
>99 twice
>94
>93
jesus fuck

>>6312394
huh, it automatically went down to 25, that appears to be the limit

>>6312391
it has been a pleasure, you MAGNIFICENT bastard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWDCIbrKnwg

Rolled 34, 20, 73, 23, 11, 51, 79, 32, 61, 52, 75, 87, 47, 75, 22, 49, 41, 37, 57, 61, 9, 20, 66, 3, 28 = 1113 (25d100)

>>6312389
sure

Rolled 20 (1d100)

>>6312389
Just a little more.

Rolled 80, 42, 61, 31, 19, 23, 22, 1, 36, 11 = 326 (10d100)

>>6312389
This has unironically been an amazing moment. Bravo, QM.

Rolled 93, 56, 9, 49, 69, 75, 85, 11, 53, 52, 11, 17, 81, 32, 5, 42, 24, 73, 55, 30, 6, 44, 72, 96, 70 = 1210 (25d100)

>>6312389
dice+100d100

Rolled 36, 62, 61, 84, 32, 19, 24, 58, 32, 35, 26, 43, 42, 21, 28, 5, 89, 81, 91, 23, 79, 97, 76, 52, 81 = 1277 (25d100)

>>6312389
Again, sucks that Falere is dead so Apollo will never score now.

OH WAIT NVM FUCK AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

>>6312413
Thank you, anon. And to think I thought this quest would take one thread, two tops. I even managed to create a nice little arc with Arty's words, which I'm very happy about. This quest went very differently than what I expected it to go, and there were many of your choices that I did not expect that drastically change how things went. Namely, whenever you all picked for Elliot to not be able to cast the patronus... Well, it shifted his path in a very noticeable way, all leading up to this, as this part of the update will probably make it clear. Last update for the day, but there are 4 more large updates (5k words in total because I got slightly carried away) I'll put out on the following days. Then, I think, I'll open up to see if there are any scenes you guys want to see and answer any plot related questions you still have before finishing up with an epilogue.

--

You remember everything that makes life worth living, everything you hold dear. Your parents, your friends, your wife. Every stranger you’ve never met, every experience you’ve never had, every feeling you never felt. Every moment of happiness and sorrow which created the human condition, because that, too, is part of being someone alive, now, when humankind is just at the beginning of its story.

And within that wish, within that spell, you put all of your all your hopes and dreams that humanity will never end, and that you will see those that you lost once again, not in some impossible afterlife, but here, in flesh and bone. All your certainty that Death will never take those you love. That some day, some day far, far away, that Darkness will cease to be.

And there is no brighter thought in the whole wide world.

The tip of your wand explodes with silver light, and from it comes a multitude of forms. Not animals, no, but everyone you swore to protect from that darkness. Billions of humanoid forms, blasting from your power and being forced directly down Salazar’s throat.

Atlantis and all its reflections shine like a silver sun. Across all the world, people look up in awe, for the dementors that come for them are screaming.

They watch as the creatures of darkness crack, and from within them comes silver suns. And those suns become solid, and an army of glowing beings charge upon the Unseelie. The impossible horrors fly away, but there is nothing upon the earth that can outrun the patronus glow. The patronus which is Humanity grabs them, and through the wounds in the world, the horrors are dragged kicking and screaming into that place beyond Time which, today and never again, is filled with neverending light.

The last of your Patronus, a tall and muscular girl with scars sprinkled all over, looks at you, smiles, then slams her fist on Salazar’s nose, which breaks with a satisfying crack. He crumbles to the floor, no sign of the Beast’s corruption to be seen.

how perfect that we got the highest possible roll on our last (real) roll

Slowly, you exhale, the patronus light slowly fading.

“Elliot?” A voice asks, but it isn`t Arty’s. Arty is too busy, crying over the empty and charred robes of her brother.

“Hey, Linda.” You say. “That took… quite a lot.”

“Is… is he dead?”

“The Beast is. The Unseelie are. Salazar, well,” you flicker your hand and his wand explodes into splinters. “We’ll deal with him in a bit.”

“Are- are you-”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re glowing,” she says, as a simple statement of fact.

“Still have some power inside me,” you say. “It’s draining fast, but… I think I still have enough power for just one more miracle. Come, give me some help.”

She follows and you bring her along as you float past the battlefield, people clutching their injuries. As you pass, the wounds close, the bleeding stops, the tears are quelled. Finally, you reach the Mirror. You wave and it follows you upwards into the skies with Linda, until you can see the city below you and the sea around you. You look up. Linda looks up with you, and you touch her shoulder.

In Atlantis, with the atmosphere above the city removed to not interfere with the sky’s observation, there is no blue above. Except for the presence of the sun, the day sky looks like the night sky, and as you touch her, her skies light up to become like yours, every star, every single one of them, visible to the naked eye. More lights than even your brain can count. An entire universe of choice.

“Pick a star,” you say. “Make it a pretty one.”

With tears in her eyes, without words to describe it, she points at one. It doesn’t have a name, as with the scale of the universe it would be almost impossible for her to pick any humans have mapped.

“Good one.” You wave, and the Mirror becomes a circle. “Nothing but debris orbiting it. No reason not to use it.”

“Wha-” she starts saying as you pull your hand away from her and her vision comes back to normal. “What?”

“You see, the Atlanteans got it wrong, Linda. They thought that the Cradle of Magic would make them a god. But that’s not true. Don’t get me wrong, it is incredible but… It is only Magic and Power. If I didn’t know how to use it, if I had never held a wand before having it, I would have only caused destruction.” Slowly, you begin to warp the Mirror, bending it. “But even with all this power, I can’t do whatever I want. I wouldn’t be able to transfigure things with it if McGonagall hadn’t taught us, for example. And so I wouldn’t be able to do what Avalon did, for example. With the little time and knowledge I have left, I wouldn’t even be able to create something as simple as the Elder Wand.”

[Cont.]

>>6312721

“Because that takes knowledge and effort, and that only comes from hard, hard work. And that’s something no magic in the world can do for us. It is like science without engineering, or like engineering without someone to actually build the designs. To do the impossible, one must first combine their knowledge in just the right way, create just the right tools. But today, of all days, we are lucky.” Within the Mirror, the star Linda had picked appears, blurred and out of focus. “Because Merlin couldn’t predict everything. Because he was right. Because in his stumbling through time, he managed to set things just right, just right for the impossible to happen.”

You understand now. You see how Merlin could not see the far away future, much like Helga could not see past Last Light. All he could do was create the conditions to allow a future in which humanity does not end, allow us to blindly drive through time’s narrow gap where we aren’t destroyed. You see how narrow the path was, how terrible the journey.

But while he was alone in his life, he was not alone in his goals.

He had his father with him. He had the Founders. And he had the Peverell family, which had been great before him and existed far before what wizardkind believed them to have, since Atlantis, and whose lineage had ended not too long ago, when Harry Potter had died.

And the purpose of the Peverell family had never been to stop death, not by themselves. The Peverells, ever since Atlantis, had been crafters. Their purpose had always been to create the right tool.

The image of the star in the Mirror sharpens to perfection. You can see the solar coronas, the smallest of spots on its surface. You can see it in all its glory, all its wonder. You float in front of it, so it fills your field of view, almost as if you were there, as if the Mirror was a portal to a faraway place..

“Today, Linda, and just today… All the tools are here. All we need is the knowledge and power to use them wisely.”

You don the Cloak of Invisibility, created by Ignotus Peverell to hide the wearer from death, and your image disappears from the Mirror. For all its power, the Mirror will never be able to affect something it can’t reflect, and the Cloak hides its wearer perfectly.

From your pouch, you pull the Resurrection Stone, created by Cadmus Peverell to allow him to meet the ones he had lost. Once, twice, thrice you turn it in your hand, and in front of you appears the image of a boy. He is your age, dark skinned, with large rectangular glasses. It is now only him the Mirror shows, only he and his star.

And from beneath the Cloak, you pull the Elder Wand, created by Antioch Peverell to protect him from any who would wish to bring death upon him. You point it at the Mirror, at the exact place where you’d be, if you were visible. At the center of the dark-skinned boy’s image. At the center of the star.

[Cont,]

>>6312723

If you did not possess the power of the Cradle, even with all the tools at your disposal, the Mirror would have been impossible to tune to the right degree of precision that it would take to do this.

The Cloak, the Stone, the Wand, the Mirror. But one thing was still missing. The tool forged by Helen and Kendrik Hallaster, and turned into its proper shape by Harry Potter, the Heir of the Peverell, whose family’s motto was “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”

Without Harry Potter, the handiwork of all others would not have been enough to finalize the final piece, the final tool, the right person. Someone who would look at the right target and use the right spell, not with Hate, but with utter and complete rejection for its existence.

Because with eyes that can see further than Merlin’s, your vision is still not enough to reach the end of humanity’s path.

Because you had told Taylor, in your dreams, that you’d visit the stars with him.

And you’d never lie to a friend.

And you refuse to accept you’ll never see him again.

With all the rage and magic in the world, you cast the only spell capable of holding itself together through the great space between the stars, no matter how far it has to go. A spell whose very core and essence is the utter rejection of something’s existence, a refusal to accept and allow something to remain in the same plane as you. It is the sheer and complete desire to end something, in all of its forms.

With the voice of God, you bellow:

“AVADA KEDAVRA!”

There is a great flash of emerald green as the Killing Curse hits the Mirror and is reflected back, increased a millionfold by its perfect surface as it not only shows, but ensures the spell acts as the amplified Image reflected upon it, not affecting you because you’re not shown within the Mirror’s borders, crossing the space between earth and the star in an instant of raw, unbridled power.

You shout as you fight the spell, forcing it to bend to your will, fighting magic, fighting death, and that which, until this very moment, have been the unbendable rules of the universe. The universe shrieks back as star becomes stardust, as the very essence of the Killing Curse is warped by your wish, beaten, twisted, unwilling to wield until it breaks, and it all explodes in a flash of verdant that mere human eyes should never be able to see, but which the eyes of those in Atlantis see nonetheless.

There is silence around you as the last of your godly glow vanishes.

In the Mirror, the star is no longer there.

Slowly floating towards the floor alongside you, is Taylor Cycad, gently coming to his senses.

>>6312725
wait, let me see if i understood this right...we avada kedavra the avada kedavra so we could sacrifice a star to revive taylor, is that what just happened?

>>6312753
You just performed an extremely complicated and dangerous magical ritual which involved all three deathly hallows, the mirror of Erised tuned and aligned throughout millions of light years and the killing curse against the very concept of death itself to sacrifice a star and bring your friend back.

So, in general terms, yes. You had a prophecy to fulfill, after all.

>>6312765
>You had a prophecy to fulfill, after all.
OH SHIT! THAT DIDNT EVEN CROSSED MY MIND! THAT WAS PART OF OUR PROPHECY!

>>6312765
Whew, good thing we checked for aliens first. Can you imagine if we Jean Greyed a species for this?

You find Salazar still tied up, getting shouted at by Brighton, who punctuates every word with a kick to his stomach.

“Fuck! You! Fuck! You! You- evil- asshole! For Lily! And Summer! And- and…”

“That’s enough, Brighton.” You say, gently placing your hand on his shoulder. “He’s beaten.”

“Bring her back,” Brighton says, and there are tears in his eyes. “Summer. I saw it, you brought Taylor back. Bring her back!”

“We will,” you nod, and he looks at you with shock, as if he hadn’t expected, as if he hadn’t dared hope you’d say yes. There is peace in your voice, like never before. “It will take a while. Without the power of the Cradle, we’ll have to align the Mirror by hand. We’ll have to deal with things like the motion of the planet and the atmosphere warping light, and a bunch of other things engineers will need to solve to be able to do it consistently. It may take years. Decades, probably. But we’ll get them back, Brighton, I promise. But now I need to talk to him, and I’d rather not waste one of our precious few remaining wiggenweld to do so.”

Brighton takes a step back, still in stunned silence. You crouch by Slytherin’s form.

“So it ends, Salazar. Once again, you lost.”

“Bah!” Scoffs the man in the body of King Arthur, now injured but without the rot that permeated it before. He lies in the debris of battle, rocks, blood and lost blades around him. “What will you do? Kill me? You’re not man enough to do it. So I’ll live, and with the powers of Ancient Magic I will escape whatever prison you toss me in. I’ll live, and I promise you, little Elliot, I’ll find a way of destroying you.”

“Will you?” You ask. “Very well.”

You wave your hand and the bindings fall. You toss him the Elder Wand, which he catches with astonishment.

“Go ahead. Have your revenge.”

Salazar Slytherin does not know why you have done what you just did, but he does not waste the chance you’ve given him. The words “Avada Kedavra!” are out of his mouth before you have time to stand up.

The Killing Curse fails to manifest.

[Cont.]

>>6313201

“Crucio! Sectusempra! Diffindo!” He shouts, but to no avail.

“You will find, Salazar, that when the Beast took residency within you, it lodged itself within the part of this body that held on to Magic,” you wave and the Elder Wand flies back to your hand. “And that part was an unfortunate casualty of my destruction of Merlin’s legacy.”

“What?” Slytherin hisses, and there is horror in his voice. “No. No!”

“Yes,” you say, turning from him and walking away. For him, and only him, you drop your kindness and allow your words to cut. “I’m afraid to say, Salazar, that you’re no longer a threat. But I believe you’ll find the muggles have greatly improved their quality of living since your time. You’re a clever man, I’m sure you’ll manage to integrate into their society quite quickly.”

There is a howl of pain and anger, and he charges at you. You are, of course, ready for it. Yet a moment before you turn to put him in his place, there is a sickening sound of metal piercing flesh.

You turn to see the view you expected, Salazar charging at you with one of the many fallen blades on the floor in his hand. What you didn’t expect is Excalibur, out of its own will and volition, fully embedded in his chest.

“No… You… I can’t… die,” he sputters, blood dripping from his mouth. He falls to the floor, the blade still stuck within him.

“I would have let you live, Salazar. I really would have. But it seems the Sword of the Once and Future King isn’t as merciful.”

“I’ll… come back. Someone else, another… body.”

“No, I’m afraid you won’t. Because Excalibur was made to be given to a muggle to fight magic. It was made to destroy magic. That’s what it does. It would destroy a Horcrux, if it found one. And it will destroy you, now. And, since you are not quite a human spirit anymore, I know of no way of bringing you back.” You look at him with pity. “Goodbye, Salazar.”

Salazar Slytherin screams as the thing which is not quite a soul is ripped from Arthur’s body and into Excalibur’s blade.

“And this is the end of Arthur’s tale,” you say, pulling the sword from his chest. The blade is dark and blackened, and holds for only a moment before turning into dust, its purpose done, its master avenged. “Be at peace, my friend. I’ll find somewhere beautiful for you to rest.”

ooh, excalibu is GONE gone? dang, there goes our kingdom, it was worth it tho...i would have loved to give salazar one final punt in the dick tho

>>6313203
we never became the actual king anyway, had to be pulled from a specific stone for that

>>6313203
>>6313319

We have lots of time to find or found another kingdom we have an actual claim to. The world is still an utter mess, which opens up opportunities. We're conquering death, which means we have all the time we need and people will probably be pretty hyped up about us. bringing people back from the dead is a pretty big deal to people, as fans of the Abrahamic religions will probably be aware.

>>6313484
who needs to be a king when they've already become a god?

The Unseelie are gone, the dementors are dead, Salazar is finished. Atlantis is silent, except for the groaning and crying of your soldiers. You take a while to help those you can, and to console your girlfriend.

“Pollo… Pollo…”

She cries where her brother had disappeared, holding the charred remains of his robes. You just sit beside her and hug her.

“I’m sorry.”

“You were meant to become god, weren’t you? You brought Taylor back, didn’t you!? Then bring him back too!”

“I can’t, Arty. If there is a way to bring him back, even the power of the Cradle wasn’t enough to show me a way. His soul burned to cinders. If there is a way, then I don’t know it. Maybe in a few thousand years when the Cradle regains its full power we can study it, discover a way. Or maybe not.”

You look at the charred clothes and your humanity returns a bit, the knowledge from your time as divinity was fading away from memory, like a long lost dream. You allow yourself tears, for Apollo was your friend, too.

Yet you know that there was no other ending he’d have preferred, given the circumstances. In the end, his will was done. He’d known it hadn’t been his actions as a child that had hurt her magic, and he had ensured she’d never come to harm again.

Apollo, you knew, had died a man who could use the Mirror of Erised as a normal mirror. He had no more wants to be fulfilled, no more desires. In the end, he had been happy.

But you don’t need the Eye of God to see that your wife doesn’t want to hear any of that right now. Maybe one day, but not when the pain is still so close, still so raw. So you hug her instead, you hold her tight until she falls asleep in your arms.

“Well done, Elliot,” says a voice in your head. “I couldn’t have picked a better host.”

“Literally,” you agree. “Merlin wouldn’t have allowed it to happen any other way. The same way as I couldn’t have asked for a better ghost in my head. Happy to have you back, Helga.”

“Is that surprise I hear in your voice? Did you forget I’m a magical-weird-spirit thing?”

“It may have slipped my mind for a moment or two during the heat of the battle.”

She giggles. “Sorry for taking so long to come back. Couldn’t help you with the final bit of the fight, or with your brief stint at godhood, but I’m happy to see the world is still here.” You two sit in silence for a while. “Did you understand Merlin’s plan, at the end? Because sometimes it very much seems like we fought our way through hell and got through the other side through grit and spite, and others it feels like it was all predetermined.”

[Cont.]

>>6313541

“If it had been all predetermined,” you say, shaking your head. “Things would have gone a lot smoother. Merlin’s vision couldn’t reach this far, couldn’t even reach Last Light. But, like you couldn’t see past Last Light but could feel the only path where we survived was through it, he could feel whether the existence of a path forwards was more or less likely.”

“All he could do,” you continue, gently combing Arty’s hair with your fingers. “Was put things in place to ensure that light didn’t completely wink out. That was all he could do, to keep the flame alive. There was no grand plan, or at least if there was, it never happened. Till his very last moment, Merlin believed he would still be alive today.”

“So, grit and spite?”

“Grit and spite.”

“Good to know the indomitable human spirit still has some value, even in the face of fate itself.” You can hear the hesitation in her voice as she continues. “And speaking of human spirit… I heard what you said to Salazar before he died.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. What were the words you used? ‘Not quite a human spirit anymore’?”

“Helga… I do know what you are. Well, did. The knowledge sort of went away with the power, just the general gist of it remained. And, well…”

“I’m not Helga Hufflepuff, am I?”

“You are not not Helga Hufflepuff… And magical-weird-spirit thing, as you so eloquently put it, might also not be correct either. Helga’s soul, along with the other Founders, was exposed to the full depth of the Darkness Beyond the Veil. Atlantis had defenses strong enough to stop the Unseelie, so it kept the souls of the people inside it, too. The Founders’ souls weren’t so lucky. Their souls were shattered and spread out. It wasn’t quite as complete of a destruction as Apollo’s, but not something you can recover from.”

“But as Time found its way there, the energies in that place started to coalesce. The fabric of Darkness itself wrapped around the biggest remains of a soul it had, which was a good chunk of Merlin. The Ancient Magic of the Cup of Sorrows and the magic within the Founders’ bodies, along with the remaining splinters of Merlin, gathered around the next four biggest splintered pieces of soul, until it had formed… Something. Something new. Something that one would be hard pressed to call Helga, Salazar, Godric and Rowena. It’s like… breaking a glass vase, then grinding the glass until it’s dust, mixing that dust with clay, then molding it in roughly the same shape as the original. Is it the same vase? I’d say no. We’re not even talking about the Ship of Theseus here, it’s… It is even deeper than that.”

[Cont.]

>>6313543

“You have a good chunk of her memories, and even her personality, but your soul and mine,” you continue. “Are not the same. They’re made of different stuff. Could you and the original Helga be considered the same person? The answer to that is probably something philosophers will discuss for a very long time, I think.”

“You know, you could have lied and said yes.”

“I make a point of not lying to my friends. Sorry.”

You can feel her shaking her head inside yours.

“Psh,” she scoffs. Then, as if the word itself was a curse, “Hufflepuffs. Well, at least I can feel less guilty about leaving and opening a restaurant now that this is all over.”

“A restaurant?”

“I’d open a bakery, but then I’d eat it, so a restaurant is safer if I don’t want whatever new body we eventually find for me to turn into a sphere. But I think I might go on a trip first.”

“Where to?”

“Lost places that may or may not have well preserved empty bodies lying around for me, Rowena and Godric. I figure you children won’t want to stay with us in your heads now that everything is over.”

“Fair. But I’ll have you know that before that trip, I’ll need a honeymoon and some very, very long vacations. Events which, I’ll let you know, you’re not invited to.”

“Of course. I’d never dream of coming between Mr. and Mrs. Hallaster’s honeymoon, so I’ll find the coziest place of this forest inside your head to bunker down, build a treehouse, a hammock, maybe find out if there are any fishes in this river. Should I ask Rowena to reach out to see if the Ministry’s department of Magical Creatures has survived and can loan a few dragons for your honeymoon?”

You wince. “Arty told you?”

“Oh yes. She wouldn’t stop giggling, blushing and beaming.”

You two watch your army put itself back together for a while.

“Your wife’s lucky to have you.”

“I’m lucky to have her. I can’t wait for us to get out of here and… Just exist together, without all this over our heads.”

“I don’t doubt it. You deserve it. We all deserve some peace.”

>>6313544
so...the founders DIED died...but managed to somehow survive instead...but they arent themselves anymore...but they still retain part of themselves??? oh man, thats a doozy.
so...they are still "with us" and are basically just waiting to..."reincarnate", is that right?
i wouldnt really object to Helga staying with us for a bit longer, if only to help her get a body (maybe she becomes one of our many daughters if Arty is ok with it?) of course, after our honeymoon thats is

>>6313578
Indeed. Helga and the other Founders are an amalgamate of their old souls, the energies released by Merlin during his ritual and time imbued into them from the time turners, probably with some stray Atlantis magic in there as well. What she is only time will be able to tell, but she is certainly not something "planned" by magic, if you could call it that. Something in some ways more frail and in others more resilient than a normal soul.

Whether the original Founders can be retrieved in some manner is another question entirely.

>>6313585
>Whether the original Founders can be retrieved in some manner is another question entirely.
i mean, we just stopped the end of the world and revived a dead person, at this point i say we can do it given enough time

>>6313587
messing with souls is dangerous

>>6313942
literally nothing is more dangerous than what we just did, i dont want to appear way too coky, but its safe to say we are above danger at this point, all we have to do is be careful enough and take our time

>>6313949
Not necessarily. Apollo may have permanently erased himself. There are still risks.

Doesn’t take long for you to see Brighton looking at the skies with a telescope and a list, giving every star a name. Summer Nott is at the very top, followed by each of your soldiers who have perished.

So you give your sleeping wife a kiss on the forehead and walk in search of someone you haven’t talked to in a long time. You find him with his arms wrapped around Linda, watching the Mirror in an enormous form, showing the blurry image of his favorite star.

But now that you’re here, you don’t know what to say.

“So,” says Taylor Cycad, alive and well. “I was told you’re destroying my hobby.”

“It was one star,” you say with a grin. “You still have two hundred billion trillion of them, you’ll get over it.”

“Well, you haven’t given me any other options, have you? But I figure you’re going to need to do away with at least one more. Linda was telling me you’re meant to tear the very stars from the heavens, plural.”

“I mean, after all the parties Elend paid for the Raiders I feel it would be impolite not to bring him back, so there’s the second one,” you say, as if it was obvious. “Oh, and all of humanity, too.”

“Big goals. So, that’s it? Everybody lives happily ever after?”

“Not quite. There’s still a lot of work ahead. I mean, I can’t do much if something just straight up blows up the Earth before we can stop it, and with the Statute of Secrecy being obliterated by a horde of Unseelie, we’re going to have a lot of people thinking about how to use magic creatively.”

“Which means a lot of people being idiots who can potentially destroy the world,” Linda says. “That’s not great. Any ideas to not let that happen?”

“A few. Well, not to stop the world from being destroyed but… I figure that isn’t as much of a problem if not everybody is in the same world.”

Taylor grins wide.

“But I’ll need someone to help me with the kinks of any plans I come up with,” you say. “Would you happen to know someone interested in figuring out magical interstellar travel?”

“I might know someone. Is finishing Hogwarts required for that position? And do you think Hogwarts has tragedy support, like some muggle colleges do where if a colleague dies you automatically pass the semester? And does it apply if you are the person who died?”

“I think Hogwarts might have some other issues at the moment, like being the only thing resembling a governing body at the moment.”

“In Britain?”

“More like in the world. Four billion people died.”

[Cont.]

>>6313996

“Four billion?” Taylor gasps, looking horrified. “That’s…”

“Yeah. Most myths of ancient cities were actually Atlantis in disguise, so anywhere that was close to them was gone. Islands in the middle of the ocean got away unscathed. Researchers in Antarctica are fine. Everyone else is going to have a rough time rebuilding. But we’ll get there. I’m sure of it. And, in time, we can get everyone back.”

“Did… Did mom and Baubau-”

“They’re fine, Linda. All our parents are. Scared. Shaken. Probably traumatized. But it turns out Camelot’s last defenses held for just long enough.”

The three of you stand in silence, watching Taylor’s favorite star, basking in this moment, in this impossible moment you thought would never happen. There are no tears. Instead, there is just this… peace.

“I… I don’t know how to say thank you for this,” he says. “I don’t know how to thank someone for bringing me back to life.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I really, really do. Last thing I remember we were fighting Lily, and then… Here. And even though there wasn’t anything between those moments, I can’t thank you enough for making sure that time without time ended. I find that I quite enjoy living.”

“And we enjoy you living too. Hasn’t been the same since you left.” You put your arm around his shoulders and give him a shake, as if to guarantee him he’s here, alive. “But I did get married without you here.”

“You what?”

“Yeah. Had to use Linda as bestman, instead of both of you.”

“Why, I’m quite offended by that.”

“Sorry, but you weren’t responding to my letters on account of being dead.”

“I forgive you.”

“Linda, does that mean you’ll go back to being Raven since you stopped being her because he died?”

“That’s not how trauma works, Elliot,” she answers, grinning. “But maybe in the bedroom.”

“There’s the Linda I remember. Finally retiring that second suitcase?”

“Depends on how Taylor likes to play.”

“Uh, what are you two talking about?”

“Nothing, honey.”

And so, like in many nights before, the three of you stand below the starry sky. Through hell and more, until you reached the other side. You know there is a long trek ahead, that there will be pain once you discover the list of dead outside, and you realize that the dangers are not over since there is still the “he is the end of the world” part of the prophecy, but this moment, this victory, this bliss… You’ve earned it.

[Cont.]

>>6313997

“I didn’t want to say anything before,” Linda says, reaching into her pouch and pulling out a bottle with an amber liquid. “But I did bring something for us to celebrate winning.”

“Oh wow! And this one looks like it is actually good!”

“My mom gave me the best one she had once I told her it was for us to drink after saving the world. Should we wait for Arty to open it?”

“She’s sleeping, and I don’t think she’ll be in the mood even when she wakes.”

She uncorks it, takes a swig and makes a face.

“Nope, still haven’t acquired this taste.”

You laugh, and with your friends, you drink. After all you went through, and all you suffered, at least for this precious moment lost in the depths of Atlantis where you can forget the hurt outside… All is well.

The End

And that’s it, folks. That’s it for our story, I hope you have enjoyed it, and enjoyed playing. I know I enjoyed being your QM. That’s, what, two years of my life? Merlin, that’s too long.

I still have an epilogue that I’ll post later that serves as the wrap up that gives meaning to the whole “He is the End of the World” part of the prophecy, but I think this is a good place to "officially" end it. If you have any questions about the quest or unresolved mysteries and plot points, feel free to ask them, and I wouldn’t be opposed to writing some other scenes, if you have any suggestions of some moments you’d like to see.

Did you enjoy the quest? Did you enjoy the ending? What were your favorite moments and where do you think I messed up? I’d love the feedback, for I am not immune to having my ego stroked if it is good, and trying to improve if it is bad.

>>6313999
>Did you enjoy the quest?
Hell yeah.

>Did you enjoy the ending?
Yes. A bit animesque in a sort of Neo Crystal Tokyo, Tenga Toppa Gurren Lagann way, but that isn't bad. Just unexpected.

>What were your favorite moments and where do you think I messed up?
I can't think of any obvious screwups. My favorite moments were probably the battles at school and the portion in Arthur's grave/resurrection chamber. The initial Lily reveal and, of course, the wedding and ending are up there, though.

The escalation towards the end was a bit extreme, potentially, but for the ending of such an epic quest, it feels earned. Good job, HeadQM. Thank you.

>>6313999
>trips
nice

>Did you enjoy the quest?
VERY, so much that you inspired me to start QM-img, funnily enough, the very first time i discovered /qst/ was the very first day that you started the quest.
if thats not some sort of sign or destiny, i dont know what that is.
I´ve had yet to find any other quest that comes remotely close to this one, sufice to say, you did some good shit right here.

>Did you enjoy the ending?
Honestly? i was expecting a bit more, like, i know you are making an epilogue later, but i was expecting to at least get out of atlantis and start working on fixing the world, even if it was just a hint of what would happen next, not to just end like that, feels just a bit rushed, but that might be just me, i´ll have to sleep on it for a bit.

>What were your favorite moments?
as a coomer, i was expecting the sex scenes to be my favorites or at the very least the ones that i would remember the most, but actually, my favorite scene was when Elliot and Arty where having that verbal fight, it was SO very well done.

>where do you think I messed up?
hard to say honestly, there were so little mistakes in the entire story that i really cannot think of any storytelling mistakes, maybe like >>6314002 says, The escalation towards the end was a bit extreme but i do agree that it was well earned, maybe we had too many rolls with too little advancement in those last battles? i know we had some shitty rolls, but even when we did had good ones it felt like we barely made it through, might just be missremembering though, we did had some shitty rolls that dragged us down.

If you can, do you think you would be able to post the entire thing in a document? this feels like perfect material to revisit in the future, it would be great to read it like a book.

and finally, now that the quest is over, i HAVE to deliver that fanart piece i was working on, gotta deliver before the thread dies.

ALSO also: now that the quest is done (and if anyone is interested) i could try and poach some players/lurkers here for The Caretaker quest, its nowhere near as good as this quest and will never be, but if anyone is looking for more of this universe, thats exactly what the caretaker is, a sidequest of this story, similar plot, similar world, different characters and different stakes!
yeah i know, this is sad, but im just doing it because i loved this story so much that i wanted to expand on it even if its not as good, im sorry...

>>6313999
what would have changed if Taylor hadn't died all the way back then? also still slightly annoyed at you tricking us with the calendar lol

>>6314008
oh yeah! that calendar thing was bullshit!
i completely forgot about it

i feel like the first people we should try to bring back after Taylor are the Potter family, despite him going insane and trying to murder us

>>6314010
i say his family, but not him

>>6314007
> i was expecting to at least get out of atlantis and start working on fixing the world, even if it was just a hint of what would happen next
Fair, but for the next several years humanity and wizardkind will probably just have to sit down and do the hard work of rebuilding civilization. Even anything with the mirror will take at least a decade for people to start to work on, and that is a conservative guess. There would be little time for wild adventures and fun escapades, and that isn't all that fun to write about. So while Elliot and the others have a steep hill to climb, it will be mostly a hard climb, not an interesting one for most of it.

> maybe we had too many rolls with too little advancement in those last battles?
Fair, I did think that by the end it was dragging on for too long, but then I had already committed to it, and there was little to do but just go forwards.

> If you can, do you think you would be able to post the entire thing in a document?
I can try, but that'll be literally scraping the archives for it since I don't really have it neatly organized anywhere.

> and finally, now that the quest is over, i HAVE to deliver that fanart piece i was working on, gotta deliver before the thread dies.
No pressure, but I would love to see it. Also, shame IlvermornyQM was nowhere to be found, I checked his quest but he last posted a couple of weeks before I started and hasn't given signs of life since.

>>6314008
> what would have changed if Taylor hadn't died all the way back then?
Oof, difficult to say. I heavily suspected someone would die in that fight since it was heavily stacked against you, but if you had succeeded without it... I don't know. Honestly, from the start I had the quest mostly planned up to Last Light and after that just general vibes of plotpoints (Merlin, avalon, Atlantis, etc) and where I wanted it to go. Clearly, Potter would have been far less worried about you, and Salazar would have to come up with a far less plausible reason to come to Hogwarts. Also, Elliot would probably have far less strong feelings about death, so that could very much have altered the path of the ending.

In fact, y'all deciding Elliot wasn't able to summon a patronus was most likely the single biggest decision you didn't know you were making. Dementors are magic's way of manifesting all horrors, and anyone who is too afraid of those things isn't able to summon one. Arty got hers once she was no longer afraid of death, Linda got hers once she came to terms with Taylor's. Elliot never did, not until the very end, and in a very different manner than either of them (and with a lot more power too).

> also still slightly annoyed at you tricking us with the calendar lol
You have no idea how proud I was of that one. I was SO hoping no one would see it coming, and was honestly giggidy writing that update because I knew that, even though it was a perfectly reasonable and plausible mistake to make, it was utter bullshit and I loved it.

>>6314016
>I can try, but that'll be literally scraping the archives for it since I don't really have it neatly organized anywhere.
wait, did you really just update the quest and not saved everything in a doc file or something?
i´ve been saving every update i´ve done in my quest and i just reached the 400 pages, who knows how many pages worth of updates you have so far...

>>6314016
>shame IlvermornyQM was nowhere to be found
yeah, looks like him or people around him have been having several medical problems, sadly not much that can be done about that.

>>6314020
I have a notes doc and a current update doc, that's it. As soon as I post it, I delete it from my doc, suptg can take care of storing it for the long term for me

>>6314023
Damn, that's a shame. Hope they get better soon.

so, now that this quest is done and only the epilogue is left, whats next for you?
you taking a break? already planning the next one?

>>6313999
Not going to lie, I'd love to see someone write a followup alternate ending quest in which Elliot uses the power of god to thrust his consciousness back in time via true time travel (rather than jumping to another timeline as potter was going to do) to prevent the absolute worst slaughter that Humanity has ever experienced.
Would be VERY fun to see how much we could twist things. Throw so many wrenches in Salazar's plans, stop Taylor from dying, possibly stop Lily from getting soulkilled, assemble the founders sooner rather than later, completely cheat in all of the army battles so we win them all instead of losing a few times, since we know what tactics the fuckers are going to use

>>6314011
being resurrected and seeing Lily being alive again might unfuck his mind
>>6314094
it was Potter who brought back Atlantis, not Salazar, so that could be prevented by just not making the mistake of having him go insane by telling him the truth

>>6314016
what was the plan for if we hadn't failed the fight at the start where failing got us obliviated by "Lily"?

>>6314032
Probably taking a break for a while, then I have one (hopefully much shorter) idea for a quest, on a completely different original world and tone.

>>6314094
So, funny thing, had you allowed (either through him defeating you or by you just not going there) Potter would have completed the True Time Turner, and realized it would need colossal amounts of energy to run. The largest amount of energy available, of course, was the Cradle, which would have turned the last battle into a three-way fight. Had he won that, he'd have used the Cradle to go as far back as he possibly could... Which would have amounted to 5 minutes or so, because that's how much energy it takes to actually change time instead of making a stable loop. That would have set him upon Salazar, but drained a good chunk of the cradle's power in the past, which would have made Elliot not able to do all the things he did in this ending. (Why, yes, I was inspired by Wakfu, in case you're wondering)

>>6314144
Not sure. I was pretty certain she'd win because her bonus was very high (and I think she wasn't even using Salazar's power when she beat you), but it would depend on what you did. Had you gone to Potter to tell him about it, she'd feign ignorance and try (and most likely succeed) to throw him against you, then stalked you for Last Light info, possibly even using the help of the minister, or most likely her father's map.

I think the biggest decision split with Lily was whether or not Salazar killed her. Had you been more agreeable to her advances, Salazar would have kept her, so there'd be the chance to save her. THAT would have most likely completely change a lot of things, as if you had managed to exorcise Salazar from her head using the Ancient Magic Reservoir she'd have become a very powerful ally with a lot of friends, though she'd reveal herself be a very, very broken person. This could have potentially led you down a path of more of a mental restoration instead of a bodily one (as it was with Arty), which could lead to A) a development like Isadora's in Hogwarts Legacy and B) possibly getting you closer to Brighton earlier, as you could potentially heal his grandparents.

Also, I'm still mad that I had big plans for Hugo, then had to scrap them when he rolled himself into irrelevancy by falling every single roll against you. He was meant to be an actual threat to foil you again and again by being the most cunning asshole around, but he just... Could not catch a fucking break.

>>6314290
hugo failing EVERY roll was fucking hilarious

>>6314139
he killed his entire family by his own decision and turned his family into slave zombies, his mind is permanently fucked, there is no coming back from that

>>6314290
congratulations on getting to the end, that's a benchmark most qm never reach. even after dear anons decided to get our army shredded against my warnings, i'm happy to have contributed to the quest. particularly getting brighton on the team

for my questions... did ron and hermione make it? and since ilvermornyqm isn't here to ask, did merula?

>>6314344
>since ilvermornyqm isn't here to ask
he actually just came back, he posted a short "blog" update in his thread, he should be back to posting relativetly soon.
also, Merula hasnt showed up in his quest at all, thats on mine

>>6314347
i'm pretty sure he was a self-proclaimed merulafag but it's been a long time and i might be misremembering

>>6314348
hmm he probably is too, i certainly do not remember the last time he mentioned her, but then again he hasnt been around for a while, so you are probably right

>>6314344
Thanks anon. Honestly, getting Brighton on the team wasn't something I was expecting, but he was a fun addition. I honestly expected Hugo to be the one to host Gryffindor, as he was brave (even if a massive dickhead), but once again he was ignored by the plot. When you picked Brighton over him was the moment I gave up on him, as Brighton was just a far more interesting character than him.

As for survival, Hermione did (just barelly), though Ron died protecting her and Lockhart in some faraway place. Merula also did as she was leading some people in Hogwarts in the fight and most people there survived thanks to Minerva and the other's efforts, to your early warnings and to the energy boost Hogwarts got from the repository.

>>6314381
was the australian woman you cut away to ever intended to show up anywhere other than there?

>>6314385
That depended entirely on whether you went along with Crouch or not. You just called the ministry on him, so he fucking died and so she just went on to do her own thing, selling secrets he revealed to her and getting rich. Had you not done that, it would probably have been revealed that Winky, who still visited Crouch Senior's tomb religiously, found the message she left in there and eventually found her way to Crouch (which could have spawned a tangent about elf magic that I had very little planned for). As it stood, Nienna was just the coward who eventually found a modicum of grit in her final moments and died to save others, which is not a bad way to go, all things considered.

>>6314322
Eh, when we may live for thousands of years and develop all new magical and mundane treatments, there may be a way to fix his broken brain.

>>6314462
just keep him in a secure place until he calms down, seeing Lily alive could help

now i remember something i wanted to ask before.
How much stuff/inspiration did you take from the videogames?
i know you took some of the ancient magic and the shadow goblins we fought under the lake from Legacy and Merula and Taylor looking straight up like Rowan from Mystery, is there anything else you took that nobody else caught?

>>6314290
What would happen if Salazar had won?

>>6314645
So, funny thing about Taylor, I didn’t actually intend for him to be Rowan. I just sort of thought “indian dude who likes stars”, which my brain immediately decided he was a nerd and, therefore, needed glasses. Maybe there was some subconscius thing there, but I certainly didn’t set out to make it a reference (unlike Raven, who was obviously a reference to that one fic).

For references no one caught, at least one I didn’t see anyone comment, is that in the Battle for The Mirror, each task would give you a gold star, and you needed all 10 to open the final door. That part was a reference to the first 3 HP PC games, in which in a class you had to collect all stars to finish it with max points (which were useless, but that’s beside the point.)

Now one thing that you didn’t specifically ask but that I’ll talk about anyway is the actual inspiration for the quest. Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 ahead. Go listen to “Down By The River”, it is important for this.

In BG3, you have a Illithid Worm in your brain that should, under normal conditions, transform you into a mindflayer. However, you just don’t. At the same time, you have these dreams where this person, this mind guardian, gives you cryptic warnings about this threat they are fighting for you. Sound familiar? Yeah. But here’s the thing, in the final game, the mind guardian is actually a full blown mindflayer that is blocking the transformation through plot devices, but that wasn’t always the case (according to rumors). In an earlier version of the script, the mind guardian was the Illithid Worm itself, who had fallen in love/endeared itself to you/something like that. And one of the possible endings was that it offered you to let the world end/let yourself be transformed, but in exchance it would give you an eternal perfect life of pleasure inside your mind. Your mindscape, of course, is this beautiful glade with a small river running through it.

Listen to the song again. Which character is singing? If you pay attention, well… “Lace your heart with, let your spirit’s soul take flight, dance into the night, down, down, down by the river.” It’s the fucking worm. The fucking worm is singing to you, seducing you to stay, and I thought that was so fucking cool.

And I thought it was a shame that plot was dropped, so I decided to make my own, in a different setting to make it not so obvious.

[Cont.]

>>6314684

At the very beginning, had you chosen “Faith” as a romance (and a fair number of other things had happened differently), this could have been one of the ends. Faith would have said, “Hey, I think we lost. I think the world is done, beyond saving. But if you give me your power, if you give me your life, I could burn it to allow us to spend eternity here, together, down by the river.” Whether that would have been said out of real worry or malice I hadn’t decided at that point.

A very different quest that would have been, that is for sure. But, of course, Arty threw a wrench in many of my plans. But it is fair to say that without BG3 this quest wouldn’t have existed.

>>6314664

I had a few planned endings. I think it was clear that, at the end, named characters were a proxy for your “health”. Next to go would have been Brighton and WInter, which wouldn’t have changed the ending. Next were Linda and Apollo. With Apollo dead, Arty would be the one to sacrifice herself. No final plot twist with Apollo using Arty’s words, no long happily ever after. The prophecy would have been straightforward.

Had Arty died, then Elliot would used the brief time as a burning God to pull Atlantis back into the hole it came from, dragging the unseelie with it, but not the dementors. This would have left half of humanity dead, and the other half weak and exposed. It would have been a very bittersweet ending, with humanity being very much fucked, and with long, long decades of darkness ahead, and probably lead to them eventually exploding themselves now that there was no one to make sure they wouldn’t.

Honestly, I did not expect it would come to that, but if you failed again, well… That’s it, game over. The darkness wins, gets the power and consumes the earth, using the power of the Cradle to expand ever outwards consuming the universe.

Not the most pleasant thing in the world, but if it came to that it would probably be a sign I had failed as QM.

>>6314687
>probably be a sign I had failed as QM.
nah, i can most definitely say that even if it came to that, you wouldnt have failed a QM, that would be us failing as players for not seeing the (what would have been) obvious choices, dont ever doubt yourself HeadQM, you are amazing

>>6314687
>it would probably be a sign I had failed as QM.
it would have been entirely our fault for bad decisionmaking

>>6314684
>>6314685

Huh, interesting inspo. You're right: that would have been a VERY different quest.

>>6314687

Grim. I'm glad we didn't end up fucking things that badly.

>>6313999

Damn. I am sorry to have been incapacitated/ill and couldn't be here for this in real time. Amazing quest. Good enough to inspire others to try their hand at this.

>>6314685

I kind of thought of that possibility a one point. Not that specific, but close enough with spending eternity with her in the mind forest.

I'm going to read through more of your answers later, maybe come up with a few more.

But amazing job. One of my fav quests ever. I got a bit teary at times throughout it and smiled a ton.

I am going to try for maybe one last lewdfic before this thread dies. Should be like a month, so should be time for some inspiration to come to me, I hope.

What a tremendous piece of work. I avoided this thread for the longest time because I was too scared about the ending lol, but that was wonderful. I only hope I could ever write something even half as good. You should be proud, HeadQM. You should be very proud.

>>6315148
FAILSAFE was good, didn't expect to see you here

What an ending
Thank you, QM, for running!

>>6313999
You've outdone yourself, HeadQM. I'm happy I was here to participate in this thread.
Thank you for writing this quest!

>>6315707
This quest attracts a lot of QMs, I've noticed, which is probably further evidence of quality.

I just thought of something. How much worse would it have been if Salazar had been able to create a perfect body for himself in Avalon vs stealing Arthur's? I mean we would be down a powerful Arty but would still have Helga in our head to help I suppose even if she was blind.

I really have no clue how we would have turned Potter to our side, but how easier would the last fight been with him? I assume much as he was literally the only adult in the room and this adult was likely the strongest guy alive.

>>6314290

>Wakfu

That was an excellent bit of inspiration. S1 was kino.

>>6314348
>>6314350

I like Merula, but I was not MerulaFag. DESU, I think Penny and her sister are cuter as teens, but I am into blondes as my own thing shows. A Merula is fine too, though.


Just to say, I love angst but am super satisfied we got a happy ending where there is hope, even if it cost us an arm and some friends to get there. Also, saying it inspired you makes me want to reinstall BG3 and give it a more honest shot when I have more time and feel 100%.

>>6315148
>>6315733
>>6315753
>>6315766
Thanks for the kind words, everyone. Happy you enjoyed it. I'm travelling now, so will probably only post the epilogue late next week, so look out for that.

>>6315959
> How much worse would it have been if Salazar had been able to create a perfect body for himself in Avalon vs stealing Arthur's?
Not too much worse in the sense that the DCs wouldn't have changed much, but you'd have a normal Arty instead of the battle fiend she is, And no bodily Helga either, so you'd probably roll with a smaller modifier. Can't give you exact numbers, though, as I don't plan that far ahead. Most importantly, given that Arty wouldn't be healed and still in her shortened lifespan, she'd be far less likely to be convinced to actually fight for her future, since "she was going to die soon anyway", which could lead to greater angst and possibly require some rolls to stop her from sacrificing herself for the Cradle.

> I really have no clue how we would have turned Potter to our side,
I don't see how you could have convinced him to help at that moment. Potter was too far gone (and, infact, I did several callbacks to things Voldemort does in book 7, including the description of how he falls to the floor when he dies) and had gone fully Dark.

If you mean convincing him earlier, I think it would only have been possible to get him to this point as an ally if Lily was still alive. Once she died, and once you all told him what had happened to her, he was gone.

>Also, saying it inspired you makes me want to reinstall BG3 and give it a more honest shot when I have more time and feel 100%.
It is a genuinely a great game (though my only criticism is that every single recruitable npc is Too Important for no story reason, but I'll give it a pass) with a fantastic soundtrack. And I love Karlach with a passion.

--

In unrelated news, I went to somewhere plot-relevant today and spent far too much money in HP crap! If I had more time here, I was honestly considering doing a short trip to Abberton to visit the church Elliot's parents hid out in, for no reason other than it amusing me, but it would take too long.

Also, Abberton specifically being the place for Camelot was absolutely not planned as a thing. I just looked at "possible places for camelot", saw Colchester was one of them, then started looking through cities and villages south of it, until I saw that one of them was ruled by someone called Peverel. Pure coincidence that it existed or happened to be in the right place.

>>6316534
>Pure coincidence that it existed or happened to be in the right place.
>Pure coincidence
>>>>>>>>he doesn't know
>>>>>>>>HE DOESN'T KNOW

>>6316540
Now I honestly don't know if I missed something or if you're just fucking with me

>>6316534

I don't believe in coincidences. Especially not with Hallaster meaning 'guardian of the forest' or 'by the river'. A few other things in the quest. You are secretly a super mastermind and I am on to you.

I also hope the twins and their Coven mostly made it out okay. Hope Brandon from CTQ didn't lose another foot defending Hogwarts.

I hope you had a nice trip. I have been personally been messed up on codeine cough syrup after seeing I still had some lung shit and was given more of it + a different antibiotic, but it is good now. Call it a staycation, heh, since I had PTO and junk.

Also, anyone good with PS needs to take that left arm off picrel to be lore accurate.

>>6316694

Nice but I was pretty sure it was the left that got sliced off. here. Quick fix.

Also QM? is it going to be explained why Lockhart was able to make prophetic paintings when every other Seer was unable to post Last Light?

>>6316694
>>6316699
would there be any chance to get that fixed? or are we getting a prosthetic arm?

>>6316699

So Lockhart, (and Luna for that matter, who also makes some weird and certain claims about the future she had no way of knowing), were not Seers in the traditional sense. Helga sees the strange place the Darkness lives in during the first few acts as a Forest, with each person or Thing being represented by a tree. If we were to extend that analogy, Lockhart and Luna would be trees with much, much longer roots. It isn't that they can see the future, it's that their roots touch other roots, and though that connection touch people's subconscious, getting fuzzy information from that. Potter thought Lockhart was some kind of Seer, but when he went to see him, he already had the inklings of his plan in his head, which Lockhart just put it into visual and certain terms. He saw it and thought "clearly this is what I should do, my future is written". In the same way, Luna says that she is sure there are other dragons like the one you captured, simply because her "roots" reach far enough, subconscious minds enough that she can see enough evidence to tell her there is another one out there (possibly even reaching the dragon itself). It isn't something any of them do consciously, of course, and the result is that they just seem insane, or at least mildly weird.

It was one of the possible ways you could get some pieces of information, most of all from the adults like Malfoy, Potter or Granger, had you decided to explore it

>>6316891
Probably magical prosthetic for the short term, regrown for the long term.

>>6316960
Important thing about Lockhart, also, is that because his roots touched other roots directly he could entirely bypass Occlumency, which is why Potter never even considered it was a possibility.

>>6316960

That is a cool explanation. Reminds me of the conception of people accessing the noosphere to just know things they have no right to know because they are tapping all of human consciousness.

Two of my characters seem to do something similar, to an extent. One just has feelings, for magic specifically, after her soul was damaged even if probably not a seer like her sister, the other just has gut feelings that turn out correct a troubling amount of the time even if it makes her look like a paranoid delusional lunatic; sort of appropriate she can 'see' things since her vision fucks up, and she will see thing that aren't there and hear voices not her own. See things differently, though she can't control it.

My favorite bit was probably us getting a 99 on our dance roll and having Arty shed a few happy tears.

The army battles were all pretty kino but beating Hugo with less than half the soldiers he had after using the paintings to cheat was great.

>>6317079
> The army battles were all pretty kino but beating Hugo with less than half the soldiers he had after using the paintings to cheat was great.

Do you know how clever I thought I was for coming up with that shit? How certain I was that someone would call out that for the first time in the entire quest I was calling attention to the paintings, and then no on did, only for Weasley to roll like dog shit at the most critical time? In another world, Hugo and Malfoy would have collaborated to take you down, with Malfoy giving him anything he needed to fuck you over in the Battles, and Hugo giving Malfoy dirt on you. The entirety of act 2 and 3 were meant to be a Hugo/Malfoy combo, potentially with him eating dirt/having a cathartic end (probably not death) in Avalon right before Salazar escaped.

But no, he couldn't roll above 40 to the point where I couldn't reasonably justify him being a credible threat, so in the Snydes come to give some spice to the mix instead.

God, he made me mad.

>>6317549
you know the one thing that i will always remember about him? a dn its not him eating shit every time we fought...its the fact that we share a name, so everytime i read about him i felt like a useless piece of shit just for sharing the same name

>>6317550

You are the good Hugo to his shit one my man.

>>6317079

I kind of though for a bit Hugo might team up with him since Hugo really seemed to hate us, even if for petty reasons, but was very prideful and a creep; had narc'd on us to his mom. Then, yeah I was like that is silly. Who would team up with this joker when he kept getting blown out, even if he was just a minion.

It would have been fun, though.

So what would using the resurrection stone have actually done and meant?

>>6317951
Ooo, that's a good question.

>>6317951
Ah, nice question!

Basically, the Stone could gleam the record of people who had died from the universe, but it could not truly bring a ghost of them back. Instead, it showed you the version of them in your memories. But that brief connection came at a cost, where it took a bit of your soul to that place of death, too (which is why it brought with it suicidal thoughts, Potter wasn't entirely wrong on that one).

In your case, using the stone would call forth a memory of Taylor, but it would serve more as a way of reflecting upon your own thoughts that actually getting information. If you had used it the first time you got it, it would probably have reopened the wound in your arms, and Faith would have to intervene in her "world", but the brief connection would have given you insight about the nature of the beast (possibly about it being Merlin, but I hadn't decided). If you had attempted to use it during the battle, it would have kept the Dementors at bay by producing quasi-patronuses (the dead have no reason to fear death, after all), but against these improved animal-like dementors they would have fallen after a while (would have bought you a few turns without needing to worry about them). But in this final battle, Linda was very aware you were thinking about using it, so if you had voted for using it she would have tried to take that shit from your hands and use it first. Had she managed to do it, it is quite likely she'd have given herself to the dementors, to join Taylor and the ranks of ghosts helping you. If you had used it instead, you'd have suffered some serious consequences, which would probably have shuffled the order of possible endings up above, as you wouldn't have been available to give the finishing blow with Excalibur.

Speaking of Deathly Hallows, the Cloak would have Hidden you from Dementors, which would be another clue to them being connected to the Darkness and it's true nature.

speaking of questions.
i know you said you would take a break but i wanted to know, are we getting the epilogue later in this thread and continue into another one (if necessary) or are you just going to let this one die and do the epilogue at some other date?

>>6319180
Oh no, the epilogue is nothing big enough to warrant a thread by itself, just a final update set... a while after the ending. It is mostly done and I'll probably post it later today or tomorrow. Just haven't posted it yet because I was travelling for work, and now am procrastinating on unpacking my bags and trying to unjetlag myself.

>>6319523
No rush. We're on page 3.

Epilogue

Your marriage to Arty did not last forever, but simply because forever is an awfully long time. It lasted six hundred and twenty seven years, give or take, and ended for some stupid disagreement. Then you had a couple of decades of off and on again, before deciding it had been a dumb decision and getting back together.

Your second marriage with her is still going strong, and you two had learned your lesson. After all this time, you were still better together.

“I still don’t like it. Are you sure there isn’t any other way?”

“It’ll be fine, dad,” you say. “We’ve evacuated everyone and taken everything important off it, and we’ll put it back together once we’re through, just the way it was before. We can even let you go through some of the most interesting things we found.”

“You only took off the top ten kilometers! What if there was something below that?”

“The earliest fossil we found was at seven, and that was from microbes. You’ll be fine.”

“Oh come, honey,” your mom says. “I’m sure Stonehenge and Camelot will still be there for you to study afterwards. You did also take out the animals, right?”

"No, actually. We specifically chose to leave behind the cutest puppies and kitties we could find." Your mom glares at you, which is still effective. "Yes, we took out all the animals."

Not every part of your vision in the Mirror had come true. Yes, you and Arty did have more children than was remotely reasonable, even with the still-thought-to-be-limitless stretch to human lifespan. Yes, Taylor, Linda and Helga were there, though she’d now returned to a form that was a mix of both her original body and Faith, with a hint of Arty thrown in there for old time’s sake. And though it hadn’t happened yet because it was still a couple decades in the future, it seemed quite likely you and Arty would celebrate your thousandth birthday together. Because what is a year of difference when you’re alive for so long?

The only people missing are Lily and Apollo. Even now, after all the incredible power you’d discovered, after bending magic and reality in ways not even Merlin could predict, you had found no way to revive them. Lily perhaps in another thousand years, if you were lucky and all your endeavors to unravel the mysteries of that dark forest paid off.

Apollo, however, you have no hope.

Doesn’t mean Arty has stopped trying, though.

[Cont.]

>>6320019

“Thanks for hosting this,” you say, drinking something that tastes like a bright summer morning. “It has quite a view.”

“And I expect said view to be remade once you’re done with it,” says Taylor, with only a tinge of real annoyance. “It’s the most contested piece of land in the entire Moon! Do you know how much Elend offered me for it?”

“I think he mentioned something around three and a half star systems?”

“Pushing into four. Rich bastard. He’s lucky I like him.”

“Some things never change. Ah, Faith! Rowena!”

Your old friend and a large humanoid raven approach. You really never quite got into the body-changing trend that had started with the leaps made in human transfiguration, but Ravenclaw completely changed her look every decade or so, returning to this form every so often.

Helga Hufflepuff, however, hadn’t existed for over nine hundred years. In her place, there was… no one important to the rest of humanity. She had her bakery and her children. The people from her community, a small one living in one of Saturn’s moons, loved her cakes. She had everything she could ever need.

“Hi, Elliot,” says the raven Ravenclaw.

“Heya. How’s my favorite walking apocalypse doing?” Faith asks.

“Good. Nervous. Excited to be finally done with it.”

“This is the end, then? After this, no more prophecies? Ever?”

You shake your head. “With this many people spread in this many worlds? Not even foresight can predict what happens next. This is it. The final one. After this we’re truly on our own.”

“I think we’ll manage. We did a good enough job.”

It hadn’t been perfect. You’d lost whole worlds to people making experiments, hell, even you and Arty had died once, which had been quite scary for the instant it lasted. But with the Mirror letting you bring back those that died and with humanity spread all across this arm of the galaxy, you’d learned from it. You learned what to do and what not to do. After almost a thousand years, you were starting to actually understand how magic worked, and how to not kill yourselves in the process.

[Cont.]

>>6320021

“Is there anyone else from the old guard not coming?” Rowena asks, with you not sure how she makes some of those sounds without lips.

“Amalia says thinking about it gives her headaches, so she and Elend won’t be here. Falere is over there talking to Hermione, but Talon and Riley are not coming. They’re part of the No Threads initiative, set off a couple days ago.”

“What’s that?” Faith asks.

“Further reassurance we won’t destroy ourselves,” Taylor says, pointing at the starry sky. “Pick a random star and go to it, without anyone knowing which one you picked. Then colonize it and never look back. This way if we ever manage to create something Truly Scary that can chase us, even we won’t know where everyone is, so we won’t be able to tell it.”

“Uh, are we planning on building something Truly Scary?”

“No, but then again, no one ever does. The Seasons are spearheading it and finishing up some kinks they had with the first launch, so they won’t be able to make it either. But I think that’s Linda arriving!”

There is a series of loud booms as an express trans-star portkey explodes several people into existence, including Linda, Brighton and his harem. Honestly, how he had managed to seduce so many ladies for so long was beyond you. But, then again, most people had multiple partners throughout their lives, so maybe you were the weird one.

“Lady Necromancer! Long time no see!”

“You thought I’d miss it?”

“Figured maybe She Who Controls the Mirror was too busy to come and see us mere mortals.”

“Immortals,” she corrects you. “But only if you aren’t too much of a git. Otherwise next time you explode yourself I might just decide the universe can’t spare the missing star.”

“Terrifying,” you say, grinning.

“Besides, we started this together, might as well end it together.”

“That we will.”

“And Arty?”

“Taking care of the baby, she’ll be here in a bit.”

“You two had another? Merlin! I thought that by now you’d have grown tired…” Her voice drifts away into nothing as she sees the black and red haired couple in the furthest corner of the white expanses of Taylor’s mansion. “Oh. They came.”

“Yeah. Figured it would also be proper if he was here.”

“Only the two of them. After all this time, did… did his children never forgive him?”

“He killed them, Linda. Not everyone forgives that. Ginny did, but I don’t think Harry ever forgave himself.”

“For not stopping Salazar?”

“For not managing to finish that Time Turner.”

“Ah.”

[Cont.]

>>6320022

The world isn’t perfect, by no means. There are still mysteries to be solved, riddles to be cracked. Linda has plans to start bringing older people back, from before your time, and that will take levels of precision with the Mirror that have never been seen before. You had to pump up the production of restricted-use wands, as letting everyone be able to do anything led to far too many continents getting destroyed. This had meant societal problems to solve (try not making a two caste system when some people can shoot death from their hands and others can’t), and managing production lines which couldn’t always produce all they needed. Though people were working on building more of them, there were always more people needing safe magical artifacts, there were always more lives that could be improved with magic.

The one time some genius had tried making the assembly lines self-replicate had led to the end of the Galleus-5 planet, and you were not making that mistake again.

But you’re trying. By Merlin, you’re trying. Compared to the time you were born in, today is paradise, and every day people live is a day where that Darkness Behind the Veil gets smaller. One day, you believe, it won’t exist at all.

Before that can happen, however, you have an oath to fulfill.

“Hey everyone! It’s great to see you again!”

“Arty!” Faith says, pleased. The two had created quite the bond throughout the centuries. “I hear we have a new redhead in the family!”

“You know, you’d figure that after so many tries at least one of them would have been born with my hair,” you say, annoyed, but not really. “Must be something with magic and redheads, the Weasleys are also insufferably red. Should add to my pile of things to investigate.”

“They all have your nose, though,” Arty says. “And your eyes.”

“That they do.” Your day grows brighter as Arty puts herself under your arm, fitting perfectly there, as she has for the past nine centuries. She is wearing an ancient, though still perfectly preserved, yellow dress with gold and black details. Still a favorite, after all this time. “We’re still missing Godric, I think.”

“Ah, he isn’t coming,” Ravenclaw says. “Something about how seeing England be destroyed doesn’t fit well with him. He and Arthur are probably going to drink themselves into a stupor and only wake up after it is all done.”

“Bah! It won't be destroyed! And I said we’ll put it all back!”

“They still don't like it.”

You spend a while talking to your friends, remembering the good old terrible times and telling stories everyone’s heard a million times, possibly literally. You look at the myriad of your children who are present, almost all adults now, and breathe a satisfied sigh. Then, finally, it is time.

[Cont.]

>>6320024

You all gather at the edge of Taylor’s property by the Great Machine, the white sands stretching in every direction. Rising from the horizon, looking nothing like before, is Earth. It isn’t blue and green, no. Instead it is a splosh of muddy brown, as the top layer of its crust had been carefully removed and preserved.

Almost a thousand years ago, Arty had sworn an oath. Once she learned what the Mirror could enable, and once she learned that her brother could not be saved, she swore, and you swore with her because you knew it would be true.

Not. One. More.

You swore that the last person to ever truly die would be Apollo Pertinger.

That everyone who ever died would be brought back.

And that you two wouldn’t rest until it happened.

She’s been keeping her promise, and you’re keeping yours, racking up more magical breakthroughs together than any other team around, and without killing yourselves even once (your singular deaths had been caused by another, completely unrelated, experiment happening in the same continent).

There is one soul, however, you can’t bring back through the usual means. A soul that is running out of time. A soul that will need great care, and great help, and a very secure cell, and, by Merlin, a lot of therapy.

You see, when someone creates a Horcrux, they take away their soul’s connection to the universe and put in the Horcrux. This means that someone with a Horcrux can only be brought back through their Horcruxes, and not the same way you first brought Taylor back, oh so long ago.

If all of a person’s Horcruxes were to be destroyed, then the connection to the universe would be restored, which was what the Unseelie had done to every Horcrux on the face of the Earth during their brief stay.

But there was another possibility.

If a Horcrux were to exist for too long, say, a thousand years, it would instead lose its energy and fade away. In this case, the connection to the soul would just be lost. Not in the Horcrux, not in the stars, gone beyond saving.

And there was exactly one dark wizard who had gone beyond that which even the most deranged sorcerer had done. A dark wizard that had made hundreds of Horcruxes and thrown several of them into volcanos, causing them to be lost somewhere inside the Earth’s mantle.

Even today’s magic could not locate them in such a vast area.

[Cont.]

>>6320027

Of course, though locating the Horcrux was not possible within the time you have available, a runaway magical process could be used to destroy the entire Earth and everything within it without any form of discrimination, which would include said Horcruxes.

If such a proposal had been voted on a thousand years ago, even if it had been technically possible, it would have been shot down. As it was today, in a time where most people saw death as a horror from the past that hadn’t happened for almost a millennia? Where parents didn’t tell children about death until they were old enough because the truth was too terrible? It had been approved with barely a hitch.

So now you stand by your machine, holding its activation lever. You have to admit, your hands are sweating.

“You’re sure Stonehenge is safe, right?” Your dad asks again.

“Yep. We’ll have everything back in one piece in a couple of years.”

“I still don’t understand why it has to be you.”

“Because it was prophesied.”

“But you could just not do it.”

“Then it wouldn’t have been prophesied, and then I wouldn’t have known to do it, and then I wouldn’t do it. But it was, then I do, then I will.”

He just gives a “Bah!” of general exasperation at this whole “magic” thing.

“You good?” Arty asks, holding your hand tight.

“Not going to lie, not all that cheery with the prospect.”

“Apollo, Lily, Merlin and the Founders,” she says, with a certainty built upon centuries. “No one else dies. Not even him.”

“I know. There’re a lot of older people who are against it, who say he doesn’t deserve it.” You point with your head. “Brighton is one of them. Hasn’t talked to me since I told him.”

“They’ll come around. It may take a thousand years more, but… I find that when there is little strife, kindness becomes contagious. Your kindness saved me. Saved the world. Maybe it can save this one last soul, miserable as it may be.”

“Have I told you I love you, Arty?”

“Once or twice. I love you too. Now, let us see some fireworks!”

And you pull the lever. The Machine comes to life and fires, hitting Earth with a blast of impossible energy and tearing it asunder. Because you were prophesied to end the world and, to save just one more person, to keep your promise, and to make that Darkness shrink just little more for no reason other than every life being worth the effort… you do.

>>6320029
didn't expect it'd end with us blowing up earth to resurrect voldemort

If you liked the quest, please vote on the archive! I'll hang around the thread until it dies, but that is the last proper update to it. After this, I'll probably take a break for a while, but I should still lurk about in other threads.

I'm seeing if I can make a doc with all the updates in a neat format like someone asked, and I'll post it here if I do get around to it (turns out I wrote an awful lot, apparently!). Who knows, maybe some day I'll get the patience to clean it up and post it properly somewhere (probably not), but for me half of the fun is reading your comments! Thanks for participating!

https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/qstarchive.html?tags=Disappearing%20Hogwarts

>>6320032
Well, it was prophesied! I had some ideas of interpretations of what "HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD" could mean (other than being the source of the darkness and letting it loose). Some were figurative, but I quite dislike figurative interpretations to prophecies, so I wanted to be literal. And it gave me an excuse to show the far far future, and where each character ended up, so I quite liked it.

It is, very much, a happy ending, simply because I believe that if we don't blow ourselves up we will end up being quite something to behold. In a world where we not only have science, but also Magic, I could think of no excuse for humanity to linger on in this old rock we call home. We spread out and, in something very much inspired by Leto's Golden Path, never look back (though Elliot achieved it with significantly less bloodshed, probably because I believe less in humanity's propension for stagnation than Herbert showed in Dune).

>>6320032
this, that really came out of left field, an interesting decission.

>>6320033
this was an absolute pleasure and honor to have my very first quest i found the very same day i decided to investigate what /qtst/ was to have a nice and proper ending.
this has got to be one of the best things i´ve read in my life so far.
you did amazing, HeadQM and i cannot wait to see what you do in the future!
all i have left to do now is to finish that fanart.

in the meanwhile, and with HeadQM´s permission, i would like to promote the sidequest to this story, The Caretaker´s Quest.
If anyone is interested we could use a few more players, its nowhere near as good as this, but it has similar characters, similar story, but an entirely different story.

Once again, thank you for this HeadQM and my your future stories be as good if not even better than this one!

>>6320029
Huh. Interesting ending! We really did conquer death, huh? Elliott Hallaster: King of Kings!

>>6320033
Thanks for running it. It was a blast!

Oh HeadQM, I was wondering, what was the whole backstory with Arthur and Camelot? Obviously the beats of the legend are still true, but I'm interested in the whole thing with Atlantis being involved, the church being the last bit of it, and all the stuff with Avalon being Merlin's respawn chamber and all that.

Okay, I've just binge read the whole thing in like 4 days, which caused horrible damage to my sleep schedule. Good quest. Time for a review.

Best parts are slice of life, no contest. In the "adventure" parts, when reading the whole thing, most choices come off as "pick your flavor of misery porn". The ending of thread 1 tells you that honestly, so no surprises. QM does looove broken things. Maybe from update to update the drama flows better, but when binge read it's too much for my tastes.
Anyways, that's criticism over, everything else is great. Especially the characters, the real highlights of the whole thing.

Elliot telling Salazar he'd let him live is pure bs though. Maybe after a long break at the end of 2 years that read fine, but after I've witnessed Cocksucker compete for the edgiest villian cup with everything he's got, "we'll take away your magic and let you go" is *not* the response lmao. The responce is immediate brutal murder. At least QM had the presence of mind to kill him in the same update.

I'm just gonna reiterate, the slice of life is so good it made me briefly truly happy on the inside, incredible job hurting me QM.

The ending is an odd one. I thought we're gonna take an easy way out and do some fate rewriting, like after act 1 but for the better. I would have loved that kind of ending, even if it's not high art. But no, full blown apocalypse. At least I know where did "fuck ton of children" thing started with Arty.
>"Elliot, it's time to repopulate earth"
>"Yes honey"

The epilogue is pretty interesting. Humans became atlanteans but less dickish(presumably).
I wonder if an acess to a reliable resurrection method made humans more reckless. "Watch me transfigure antimatter for shits and giggles, my friends are gonna rez me anyway".

I wonder how did people who died on earth in 2025 to a zerg apocalypse reacted to being rezzed 200 years later into an interstellar magical kingdom.

Was there a formalized queue for who gets the rez after who?

Appolo's not-quite gf got the shortest straw in the universe then. Rejected, died while in distress, resurrected later just to be told that the rejection wasn't quite real, and also Appolo is the only person we can't rez. Brutal. At least she got a 1000 years to get over it.

QM's repeated statement that he only expected the quest to be 1-2 threads is filling me with primal fear. I've recently started a quest you see, and I only expect it to last 1 or 2 threads.

>>6321276
oh, you have valid reason for tht fear, i started the Caretaker quest as a simple sidequest that was expected to last 1 or 2 threads since it was also my very first time writing a quest of any kind...im slow but im still going, so yeah, better start making time for it,you gonna need it

>>6321276
you're forgetting Salazar was a magic supremacist muggle-hater, so forcing him to live as a normal human would be a fitting punishment

>>6321067
There wasn’t much of a specific backstory, other than Merlin getting to the end of his Sight and becoming extraordinarily busy. At that point, for no reason that he knew and in what was certainly an extremely infuriating process, his prophetic powers indicated that if humanity was to survive, he would have to set up the kickstart of a lot of processes and historical movements, and then sleep for a thousand years and only reawaken once those processes had reached their end.

Of course, the reason he had to do that was because he’d blow himself up and be unable to do anything else ever, but up to his final moments he honestly thought he’d live to see our millenia.

One of the things he did, for example, was setting up a budding prophecy in Arthur’s refuge, a peaceful place Arthur would flee to when the weight of the crown got too heavy. He didn’t know why he had to do that, only that the fate where humanity survived grew brighter if he did. Merlin knew only that Arthur was of Great Importance to the future, and suspected that Arthur making Britain great would lead more people to rest above Avalon, which he could potentially use to create more Ancient Magic bodies quickly, perhaps even getting more people to help in his project.

Then he came back from one of his trips and found Arthur dead at the hands of his son.

He took him to Avalon, which was the place he used to rebuild himself, in hopes that eventually the place could bring him back to life if enough Elixir of Life was pumped into him. But he believed he’d screwed up, severely, that he had almost severed the thread of fate that allowed Humanity to survive. That was when he decided that Magic, the thing that always ended the world, needed to go.

Which eventually led to him creating the Interdict, which killed him and fulfilled his vision.

>>6321276
Hey anon! Happy to have you here and thanks for the review!

> In the "adventure" parts, when reading the whole thing, most choices come off as "pick your flavor of misery porn"
That’s fair. End of act 1 was too much, and when I was planning it I for some reason thought all the bad things that happen to Elliot would be more spaced out, and so more believable and less brutal, but then the time came and it was all at the same time, and I couldn’t take any part out without losing an important part of the narrative. Not the Lily reveal, not Taylor’s death (though I could have saved the arm), nor the Beast’s breaking of Elliot (it needed to be shown as a threat, though I could have made it less), and not the time-fuckery (though I did try to use it to lessen Elliot’s suffering).

If I could go back and redo it, I’d probably have done things differently, but that ain’t an option when you’re doing it live. I do think it got better at act 3 and 5, though. Don’t get me wrong, they went through awful shit, but nothing like what Elliot went through in Act 1.

> Elliot telling Salazar he'd let him live is pure bs though
Elliot’s whole thing was the rejection of killing, as defined at the end of act one (and then reinforced when he AK’s a fucking star). It would be a betrayal of his character for him to kill, even Salazar. But he DID, as >>6321285 pointed out, think it was the worst non-morally-abhorrent fate he could give Salazar: to reduce him to one of the muggles he despised.
Excalibur, of course, thought differently.

> I thought we're gonna take an easy way out and do some fate rewriting, like after act 1 but for the better. I would have loved that kind of ending, even if it's not high art.
Nah, I don’t like rewriting the past and wasn’t really sure that was what was going to happen even in Act 1. The dead are dead, the only thing we can do is either accept it, or take magic by the throat and force it to give them back. (also timefuckery has a bunch of issues I don't like or want to deal with)

> At least I know where did "fuck ton of children" thing started with Arty.
Singlehandedly responsible for saving redheads from extinction, she was.

> Was there a formalized queue for who gets the rez after who?
I think everyone who died in Atlantis came first, simply out of respect for their fight and sacrifice. Then probably at first bringing back useful and good people who could help in rebuilding shit. Dumbledore, for one, was probably one of the early ones. There was some prioritization, but I figure that by now it is “Did you die today? Get revived tomorrow.” and then just going back through the list going ever further backwards in time.

[Cont.]

>>6321359

> Appolo's not-quite gf got the shortest straw in the universe then.
Yeah. Apollo had decided already that if he had any shot at the Cradle he’d go for it, because he wasn’t giving Arty any chances to sacrifice herself, and he didn’t want Riley to cry for him. Of course, that isn’t how people work, but he’s not exactly the wisest when it comes to understanding people. But he went into that battle fully expecting to die.

> QM's repeated statement that he only expected the quest to be 1-2 threads is filling me with primal fear.
I expected us to reach Last Light by mid thread 1. When I was done with Act 1, one and a half threads late, I expected I was a third done with it.
Estimating shit isn’t my strong suit, but my update rate also dropped drastically as time went on.

--

I am currently gathering all threads into a neat doc, and turns out I got to google docs' 1.5 million character limit somewhere around thread 6, so I decided to split it into a doc per act instead.

Some stats:
Act 1: 97.624 words, 146 updates, about 670 words per update
Act 2: 118.132 words, 113 updates, ~1k words/update
Act 3: 88.697 words, 66 updates, ~1.35k words/update
Act 4: 78.576 words, 49 updates, ~1.6k words/update

Which, fuck me, that's a lot of writing. Lower number of updates as time goes on, higher word count because I can't write a short update to save my life and that shit is only getting worse. I suspect it may be fatal. Still need to get Act 5 processed, but I suspect the trend will continue.

>>6321361
>the word count per update goes up the longer you run
True story. Happened to a friend of a friend of mine. Me.

>>6321348
Oh yeah, quick question.
What the FUCK happened to atlantis, specifically? Did Merlin obliterate it, or did they obliterate themselves?

And another question. What even is the whole deal with the unseelie?

>>6321535
oh yeah, one of the few things that left me kinda confused were the unseelie, previous to this i had never heard of them before but after a quick google search turns out those are in a lot of things, and the lack of a physical description really made the entire time with them pretty hard to picture it in my head

>>6321535
>>6321540

The vibe I got was that Atlantis accidentally obliterated itself, or Merlin's dad Gilgamesh did so.

The Unseelie, I think, were installed as pat of the protective measures on the Cradle. They were trapped in there so accessing the Cradle meant going through them.

I pictured them like Hellboy 2's tooth fairies, scaled up and mixed with a xenomorph and a spider monkey

Did I understand correctly, QM?

>>6321544
>spoiler
i imagined them like Wildmutt from Ben 10 but with something similar to shark skin but also droopy and somewhat slimy

>>6321535
> What the FUCK happened to atlantis, specifically?

The Lost Moment (a concept I stole from Robert Jackson Bennett's Founder's trilogy) between day and night where magic's restrictions are weaker is a very powerful tool which the Atlanteans were just starting to come to terms with, but it basically allowed them to do more things with magic than normal (think of it as if between 6:00:00 and 6:00:01 everything in your computer had admin permissions). Didn't come up in the quest, but it also only happens in the Whosi lines (which is why they exist in the first place, and why Atlantis follows them).

Why does it happen? Who knows. Maybe the universe is a simulation and someone made an off-by-one error. Maybe at sundown the barriers between the plane of magic and the real world grows thinner. Depends on what you want your flavor of magic to be. But the point is the Atlanteans didn't like that they had to jump through this instant-sized hoop to create greater wonders, and tried to make that moment bigger, and started fucking about with time-magic.

Then one of two things happened: Either a miscalculation or unexpected interaction between time-magic and this moment that shouldn't exist led to some runaway process that consumed the city, or the Universe's antivirus didn't like being fucked with and reacted violently, deleting the annoying section that was fucking around with it.

But it wasn't Gilgamesh, it was just someone else working in their own project. Just some idiot with a Bright Idea that didn't take enough precautions because "It will be fine, you're just exaggerating".

[Cont.]

>>6321628

> What even is the whole deal with the unseelie?
The unseelie are from Irish mythology, and in it they are "evil fairies". Of course, in this quest they are nothing like that. In here they are more of a concept made manifest than an actual creature. My interpretation is that there needs to be Something that holds definitions of certain concepts to, for example, know what a "bird" is so that it can conjure it when someone casts "Avis". Call it God, if you wish, as long as it isn't actively interfering with the world, or Collective Unconscious if you prefer, or something else.

Someone fucking about with Gates That Shouldn't Be Opened in the limits of magic somehow peered into this space of pure ideas, and pulled a piece of it out. It was just a test, they didn't know what they were pulling. If you imagine all ideas possible, it isn't difficult to see that most ideas, when extrapolated to their maximum, would end up in death. That's what the Unseelie are, a random section of Ideaspace made manifest, a cut up of parts of different disparate concepts forced into life.

They are, of course, not pleased about existing.

I took the idea of the Unseelie being indescribable creatures from the Significant Digits HP Fanfic, because


White skin. Teeth. Blood. Chittering.
Large eyes. Wet. Oily. Gnawed.
Sparse flesh. Lumpy joint.
Mouth. Smile.
Smile.


Is a terrifying fucking description and I loved it.

>>6321544
> Hellboy 2's tooth fairies

That is a nice image, and does fit the bill. I imagine them as a big spider-like creature. A white mass in the center with one large eye which itself opens into a mouth with far, far too many teeth. Four (or six, or eight) long rigid legs come out from it, and from the knee-bend to the tip, it slowly goes from a bony protrusion to a blade sharp enough to damage Atlantis's stone. Something that almost fits the bill (though undershoots the horror) is DND's Death's Kiss (3e, not 5e), but it needs rigid legs instead of tentacles and a horrifying mouth eye.

But, again, they are concepts come alive, but any interpretation is valid as long as it is terrifying.

When solving the problem of the unspeakable horrors trouncing through his city, The Wise One who ruled it realized he had an opportunity. What better way than using unspeakable horrors to protect the one thing that could possibly threaten his position? Why, from then on, anyone who wished to use the Cradle would have to first release the Unseelie, those horrible awful things that had killed so many. No, it was too dangerous to do and only someone horrible would even suggest such a thing, which made his position safe from any wannabe gods.

Also, I finished gathering all posts from Act 5 + Epilogue and the stats are

71.148 words, 43 updates, 1.6k words/update

Which brings the total word count to about 454k words, which is utterly insane. It is about the size of Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix combined, which is crazy to me. That just sounds wrong, but I can't find any issues with the count, and NaNoWriMo challenges people to write 50k words in a month and I had 2+ years, so it isn't unheard of but... Fuck me I didn't realize I was writing that much.

No wonder the anon who read it in 4 days fucked his sleep schedule.

Between the first post and the Epilogue was 787 days, which amounts to 500-600 words a day. Suddenly I'm not that surprised when people like Brandon Sanderson write 3 tomes a year (No, I am surprised, fucker has done it consistently for decades, he's a machine).

I'll post the docs later once I'm done revising them and seeing if I didn't miss anything. Not sure anyone will ever read them, and I'd recommend just downloading the threads themselves if you want to archive them, but it makes for a cleaner read.

>>6321635
Truly, this site and medium is ideal for encouraging productivity.

>>6321635
>Not sure anyone will ever read them
ooh, i will, you can bet on that!

>>6321635

>That word count

I am at 230,000ish for my game plus w/e for the fics, character sheet. I wrote the old total for the fics for this, the cross-over for DHQ, CTQ, mine at one point but I cannot recall it aside from being "what am I doing with my life" level. Started on one final short lewd for DHQ. Nothing too much but a going away gift. Soon after the end but way b4 the epilogue which was great. I will read the docs, save them. I do like our banter and images though so they get a place too.

>>6321361
I have the thing I am doing in a single big ass word doc, with multiple back-ups of it and the fics on like 3 different external drives + 2 internal ones. I am not losing this shit.


Sorry illness and other crap meant I couldn't/didn't let me feel up to playing this last bit but reading it all like a big meal vs a bunch of snack sized bites was pretty satisfying.

Amazing ride.