The moon had finally come out—though it did nothing to soften the night.
If anything, it made things worse. Its pale, anaemic light spilled across the grounds of Little Hangleton cemetery and draped over the silence like a funeral shroud. Tombstones loomed in the dimness, one after another, like mute sentinels keeping secrets no living person would ever hear.
A graveyard in the dead of night was already the stuff of horror. And Voldemort's resurrected face—corpselike and grotesque, a thing that had no business looking the way it did—only deepened the dread.
In this eerie atmosphere, he looked more monstrous than ever.
The Dark Lord tilted his head back slowly. A look crossed his face—rapturous, unhinged at the edges as though he had drifted into some private memory of struggle and hunger.
"You all know my goal: to conquer death." His voice was low and rasping, rolling through the graveyard like smoke. "Events have proven that at least one or two of my experiments bore fruit. I did not die—though the curse should have been fatal."
The corners of his lipless mouth curved in a smile—self-satisfied and ghastly all at once, as though he were mocking fate itself for daring to oppose him.
Sherlock watched him with a faint, contemptuous smile of his own.
"And yet I was as helpless as the most wretched creature alive. I had no body, and every spell I might have cast required a wand." For just a moment, a flicker of pain passed through those scarlet eyes—something raw and wounded. Every person standing in that graveyard felt it: the depth of his defeat, the scale of his humiliation.
"I remember those sleepless days and nights. Second by second, I forced myself to survive. In the end, I found refuge deep in a distant forest—Holmes, can you guess where?"
He turned his gaze toward Sherlock, as though genuinely curious what the detective would say.
"Albania," said Sherlock. "Where else?"
His tone was dry, dismissive—the voice of a man already bored by an answer he'd known before the question was asked.
He said it with good reason. It wasn't just Albania—the entire Balkan Peninsula at the time was a volcano on the edge of eruption.
Bulgaria, barely surfacing from thirty-five years under Zhivkov, was shaking under multi-party politics; protests and strikes bled into one another without pause.
Yugoslavia, its internal ethnic fractures too deep to paper over since Tito's death, was beginning to come apart at the seams, the shadow of war was already lengthening across its territory.
Albania itself, once the most hermetically sealed nation in Europe under Enver Hoxha, had cracked open under the weight of reform—mass emigrations, student demonstrations, a social order that had all but dissolved.
In the chaos of its political transition, an unembodied dark lord could move far more freely than anywhere else on earth.
Hearing his destination named so easily, Voldemort paused. Then that scary smile returned.
"Yes, Holmes. You are correct again. I had my reasons for choosing it."
Sherlock said nothing. He simply looked at him.
"At the time, I was not desperate. I was certain that my loyal Death Eaters would find a way to locate me eventually. I had always assumed that someone—one person, at least—would come. Someone who would use the magic I could no longer perform myself and restore me to a body."
He paused.
"What I could not have imagined was that I would be left to wait in vain."
Behind him, the gathered Death Eaters flinched as one. They kept their heads low, none daring to meet those burning crimson eyes. The bitterness in his voice was not subtle—it was a blade, and everyone present felt its edge. The graveyard seemed to press. The air turned thick and stifling.
"I still had a remnant of power—enough to possess another living creature. Even so, I dared not go near populated places. The Aurors were still hunting me. Alastor Moody. Rufus Scrimgeour. Kingsley Shacklebolt..."
He narrowed his eyes at the mention of those names, a cold gleam was passing through the red.
"I took to possessing animals. Snakes were my preference—naturally. But it was scarcely better than being a pure phantom. Their bodies were ill-suited for casting magic, and each possession shortened their lives. They died quickly, one after another, forcing me to keep moving, keep searching.
"And still —
Ten years.
Ten years, and not a single person came to find me."
The Death Eaters shook again. No one looked up. Voldemort drew a slow breath and collected himself.
"Then, four years ago, hope reappeared. You may find this difficult to believe—but a young wizard, gullible and easily led, wandered into the forest where I was hiding. He happened to stumble across me. He was a teacher at Dumbledore's school. Such people are the most susceptible to manipulation. He opened himself to me—body and mind—and carried me back to this country.
How deliciously ironic. It was not you, my faithful servants, who saved me. It was one of Dumbledore's own. I attached myself to him, watched through his eyes, and directed his every move.
I believe our two special guests this evening are quite familiar with what followed."
Sherlock and Harry exchanged a glance.
They knew, of course. Quirinus Quirrell.
He had been a perfectly competent professor of Muggle Studies before his encounter with Voldemort—and a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor afterwards. He had possessed genuine ability, this man who had turned it all toward ruin, who had nearly killed Harry.
Had it not been for Sherlock, Snape would have spent an entire academic year silently absorbing blame for crimes that were never his.
"And still you failed," said Sherlock. His voice was perfectly calm.
"Yes. My plan failed. I obtained only unicorn blood—the Philosopher's Stone remained beyond my reach, and immortality slipped through my fingers once again." He let his gaze rest on the two of them. "I was defeated... once more by Harry Potter. And, of course, by you—Sherlock Holmes."
Harry's body stiffened. His eyes locked onto Voldemort; his hand, hidden inside his robes, closed tight around his wand. One twitch—one sign of movement—and he would have Expelliarmus off his tongue before the thought had finished forming.
The professors concealed in the shadows were no less tense, every muscle ready.
Sherlock alone appeared entirely unbothered.
Voldemort held that ferocious stare on him for a long moment. And then, inexplicably, he did nothing.
The graveyard fell silent. Moonlight pressed flat against the headstones. Even the yew leaves had gone still. The Death Eaters stood motionless, their masked eyes moving from their master to the two captives and back again.
"So you retreated to the Albanian forest again?" said Sherlock. "You were rather furious when you left last time, I recall." He seemed genuinely curious, in the way a man at a lecture might lean forward to hear the next point.
He had every right to recall it. In their first year, Sherlock had known little about Voldemort—and yet he had turned his words into a scalpel anyway, cutting with precision at whatever lay beneath. It had apparently left an impression.
Voldemort's gaze shifted—something more complicated moving through it now.
"After Quirrell died when I abandoned his body, I was weak again—as before—and I had no choice but to return to that distant hiding place. It was perhaps the darkest period of my entire existence. Darker than any other. Hope had been close enough to touch, and I had watched it dissolve.
"I stopped expecting any wizard to come to my aid. As for the Death Eaters —" he paused with cold deliberateness "— I ceased to harbor any illusion that a single one of them gave a moment's thought to my condition."
Several figures behind him shifted uneasily.
"Shall I tell you why they didn't come?" said Sherlock.
Voldemort looked at him with what appeared to be genuine interest. "You know?"
"Power produces counterfeit devotion." Sherlock glanced at the hunched figures lurking behind the Dark Lord.
"Isn't it obvious? You never truly earned their allegiance—not once. You have no talent for it. Whatever personal magnetism might have helped you, you never bothered to cultivate it. The so-called Death Eaters feel nothing for you but fear. The only reason they followed you was your power. Naturally, when your power vanished, so did they.
I suspect you will never truly understand this: dominion built on force and terror will always be toppled by something stronger."
"No—I understand it perfectly," said Voldemort, shaking his head slowly. "I simply believed my power would never fail. I did not anticipate the setback."
Sherlock gave a cold laugh. "There is quite a lot you didn't anticipate."
"Perhaps. But I am stronger now than I was before. More complete."
"If you consider this —" Sherlock gestured toward Voldemort's noseless face "— to be complete, then I suppose I'll have to agree with you."
"Such a shallow fixation on appearances, Holmes..."
"You're the last person who should say that, Tom Riddle."
"Holmes... do not be impatient. Very soon—very soon—I shall dismantle that confidence of yours..."
Voldemort smiled again—that particular smile, the unhinged one.
"I returned to those dark depths of the forest. About a year ago, just as I had nearly abandoned all hope, hope arrived anyway. A friend found me—this gentleman here, Mr. Smith. Or perhaps I should now call him Blacklight."
His gaze drifted toward Blacklight. It carried something unreadable—appreciation, perhaps, or the quiet pride of a man pleased by his own fortune.
A flicker of discomfort crossed Blacklight's face.
"He had evaded the Ministry's attempts to prosecute him. He believed those hypocrites had no right to judge him—and I agreed entirely. He needed an ally. Someone who could lead him past the old constraints and build a new order. And so he thought of me.
He was thorough and determined. He searched through the countries long rumoured to be my hiding places. He came, at last, to Albania. He found a place deep in the forest that even the creatures avoided. He noticed the small animals dying without apparent cause. He followed those signs, traced them to their source, and found me."
As Voldemort spoke, the image took shape in every listener's mind: Blacklight standing in that strange and dangerous forest, wand gripped white-knuckled, picking his way through the fog and the twisted trees, kneeling over the small broken bodies of dead animals, piecing together the trail—step by careful step—until he reached whatever lay at the end of it.
"I will say this: this friend of mine proved rather more loyal than any of those who once swore their lives to me. He is brave, sharp, and ambitious—and he never gave up, no matter what stood in his way.
After he found me, he rendered me considerable help. With a charm or two of my own invention—and a small contribution from my dear Nagini —"
He looked at the great snake winding its slow circles nearby. Something almost human entered his expression for a moment. Then his gaze returned to the people around him, and whatever it was vanished entirely.
"— unicorn blood, combined with a potion brewed from Nagini's venom. Together, they gave me something almost like a body. Enough strength to travel. And with my dear friend's help, I made my way back to this country at last."
He turned, his voice dropping to something almost conversational.
"I am not ungrateful. Those who help me are never forgotten. And so, my friend—why don't you do as our young visitor suggested earlier, and remove your glove? Allow me to do something for you."
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