Disclaimer: I do not have any rights of ownership for the characters used except the OC's. All the credit goes to the authors. Only the plot belongs to me. All characters are aged up (above 18) and are consenting adults. This is a work of fiction and does not resemble reality in any way whatsoever.
Chapter 16
~ Harry Potter ~
The biting wind of the December night whipped through the narrow, winding lanes of Godric's Hollow, carrying with it a flurry of crystalline snowflakes that stung the exposed skin of Harry's face like tiny, frozen needles.
Harry Potter, Lord of the Ancient and Most Noble Houses of Potter and Black, remained a silent, spectral predator trailing behind the hunched silhouette of Bathilda Bagshot. His dragon-hide boots crunched softly against the freshly laid snow, a sound so muted that it was easily swallowed by the howling wind. His grip on the holly and phoenix feather wand was ironclad, his knuckles stark white beneath the dark leather of his combat gloves. Every muscle in his body coiled tight, thrumming with the potent magic he had claimed as his birthright.
He was unsettled.
He was entirely on edge.
It was pure instinct that clawed at the back of his throat. He was constantly checking his periphery, his emerald eyes darting from the shadows of the snow-laden hedgerows to the darkened windows of the cottages they passed. He was searching for any sudden surge in ambient magic, any ripple in the atmospheric wards, or even the absolute slightest movement in his direction.
He knew there was a trap awaiting him. An ambush of some sort. The realization had come true the moment the old woman had beckoned to him from the graveyard gates.
Bellatrix's desperate, tear-soaked warnings echoed relentlessly in his ears. "He cursed something or someone there. He set a trap. He left the snake. Nagini."
Yet, he followed her anyway.
There was a dark, arrogant confidence blooming within his chest, a fiery certainty that had been forged due to his recent victories. He was no longer the scared, ignorant boy who had blindly followed Albus Dumbledore's cryptic, half-baked instructions. He was a man who had ripped a piece of the Dark Lord's soul out of a living host with his bare, magical hands. He had women waiting for him at Grimmauld Place—Narcissa with her cool, calculating brilliance; Fleur and Apolline with their fierce, intoxicating devotion; and Bellatrix, the Dark Lord's former right hand, who now worshipped the very ground Harry walked upon. He had a fortress. He had a family. He had power.
If Voldemort wanted to play a game of shadows in the ruins of Harry's past, then Harry would gladly oblige him.
With a soft whisper, Harry created a makeshift portkey and sent the cloak back into his room, his magical signature would transport the cloak safely into the confines of his room. If Voldemort showed up, he could not risk a Deathly Hallow falling into the madman's hand.
Bathilda shuffled slowly, her progress agonizingly tedious. She moved with the stiff gait of a marionette whose strings were tangled, her moth-eaten shawls pulled tightly around her hunched shoulders. She led him away from the quaint, picturesque village square, away from the gate and the couples that might have occupied the local pub, and down a darker, far more desolate lane toward the very end of the street.
Harry's narrowed eyes analysed the environment with clinical precision. The houses here were different from the charming, well-kept cottages near the church. They were older, their thatched roofs sagging under the weight of the snow, their front gardens choked with dead, frozen weeds. But it was the magical atmosphere—or rather, the distinct lack thereof—that put Harry's teeth on edge.
The house Bathilda was leading him toward was barely lit. A single, sickly yellow glow emanated from a window on the ground floor, casting a weak, pathetic swath through the darkness. Harry cast a silent, wandless diagnostic charm, letting his magic wash over the property like a radar ping.
Nothing.
There were no wards surrounding the area. No Anti-Apparition jinxes, no Muggle-Repelling charms, no Caterwauling alarms, not even a basic intent-based ward. The property was magically stripped bare. It seemed entirely abandoned.
Harry sneered, recognizing the tactic instantly. It was a forced adaptation, a grim reality of the current state of Wizarding Britain. Under Voldemort's tyrannical reign, the Ministry of Magic had fallen, and the Death Eaters had assumed absolute control. The Snatchers and the dark patrols frequented villages in the country to terrorise and capture sympathizers and muggleborns in hope of being rewarded for a job well done, to support the cause of the Death Eaters.
To put up a ward was to paint a glowing target on your own back. It was an invitation for a raid led by actual Death Eaters.
And so, the magical folk—those who had not already fled the country or been dragged screaming into the depths of the Ministry's torture cells—had been forced to adapt. They lived like Muggles. They stripped their homes of magical protection, huddling in the dark, praying that the lack of magical signature would allow them to slip under the radar of the new regime.
It was a pathetic, cowardly existence, and it made Harry's blood boil with righteous fury.
Bathilda reached the front door of the crumbling cottage. The wood was peeling, the paint chipped and faded to a sickly grey. She did not use a wand to open the door. She reached out with a trembling, spotted hand and turned the tarnished brass knob. The door creaked open with a loud, complaining groan that sounded entirely too loud in the silent night.
She stepped over the threshold, disappearing into the pitch-black hallway.
Harry paused on the front step. If this was to be a confrontation, he would face it looking his enemy in the eye. He gripped his wand tighter, visualizing the spells of the Black family grimoire he had recently mastered, and stepped inside.
The immediate assault on his senses was profound. The air inside the house was stagnant, thick with the cloying, musty smell of ancient dust, rotting paper, and something else—something sickly that Harry couldn't quite identify, like meat that had been left out in the sun just a day too long.
The hallway was a claustrophobic tunnel of peeling, faded wallpaper that might have once boasted a cheerful floral pattern, but now resembled a stretch of diseased skin. A sole candle lay lit in the far corners of the living room.
Bathilda did not speak. She did not welcome him, nor did she ask him to remove his snow-covered boots. She simply turned her back to him and began to unfasten the heavy, moth-eaten cloak that was draped around her frail shoulders. Her movements were jerky, uncoordinated, as if her limbs were too heavy for her joints to bear.
She let the cloak fall to the floor in a careless heap and, without a single backward glance, shuffled away from the front door, disappearing through an archway that Harry presumed led into the kitchen.
Harry stood perfectly still in the hallway, his breathing shallow and silent. His ears strained, catching the sounds that began to filter through the archway. He heard the scrape of a chair against the floor. The metallic clanking of pots being shifted. The clink of porcelain cups being set down upon a counter. And then, the distinct, bubbling sound of a kettle being boiled, followed by the rich, earthy aroma of coffee wafting through the stale air.
Coffee.
Harry's lip curled in a dark, cynical smirk. He was standing in the unwarded, rotting house of a woman who was supposed to possess the greatest historical secrets of Albus Dumbledore, in the middle of a village where his parents had been slaughtered, and she was brewing him a cup of coffee.
Had Harry remained the ignorant boy he had been up until a few months ago, he would have let his guard down, lulled in by a spirit of normalcy in these dark times. But Bellatrix's warning... coupled with his own, recently acquired paranoia allowed him to assess the situation as it seemed.
"I'm not falling for it, Tom," Harry whispered to the empty hallway, his voice a low, dangerous rasp.
He didn't follow her into the kitchen. Instead, his eyes darted to a door on his left, standing slightly ajar. A dim, ambient light spilled out from within. Harry pushed the door open with the tip of his dragon-hide boot, refusing to touch the wood with his bare hands, and stepped into the room.
It was a study. Or, more accurately, it was the chaotic, hoard-like remnants of what had once been a brilliant woman's workspace.
The room was suffocatingly cluttered. Books were stacked in precarious, leaning towers that threatened to topple with the slightest vibration. Rolls of parchment, some fresh and blank, others yellowed and brittle with age, littered every available surface. The air here was even thicker, smelling heavily of binding glue, old leather, and dried ink.
Harry raised his wand, murmuring a soft, controlled "Lumos."
A dim, silvery light bloomed from the tip of his holly wand, illuminating the gloom and casting long, exaggerated shadows across the chaotic mess. He kept the light low, not wanting to draw attention from outside, but bright enough to conduct a thorough, meticulous inspection of his surroundings.
He moved with a silent grace amidst the clutter. He approached a massive, intricately carved mahogany desk that dominated the centre of the room. It was buried under a landslide of loose papers, empty inkwells, and broken quills.
His eyes immediately caught sight of a thick book resting near the edge of the desk. The cover was a garish, eye-watering shade of magenta, and the title was embossed in glittering, gold lettering that seemed to scream for attention.
The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore by Rita Skeeter.
Harry's jaw clenched, a surge of hot, bitter anger flashing through him. He had seen excerpts of this absolute garbage. He knew what the insect of a journalist was claiming about the man who had been the Supreme Mugwump, the Chief Warlock, and the only wizard Voldemort had ever feared.
Beside the book lay a piece of parchment. It was a note, written in the unmistakable, acid-green ink that Skeeter favoured. Harry leaned over, his eyes scanning the spiky, arrogant script.
Dear Batty,
Thanks for your help. Here's a copy of the book, hope you like it. You said everything, even if you don't remember it.
Rita.
Harry felt a cold, sickening realization wash over him. He knew Rita Skeeter was an unregistered Animagus, a beetle that crawled into the cracks of people's lives to spy on their most private moments. But she hadn't just spied on Bathilda. She had drugged the poor, senile old woman. Veritaserum, likely laced into food, or perhaps a Confundus charm to lower her mental defences before employing Legilimency to rip the memories directly from her fragile mind and then Obliviating her.
It was a gross violation. It was a desecration of an old woman's mind, all for the sake of selling cheap, sensationalized gossip to an already terrified public.
Harry picked up the note, his magic flaring involuntarily. He pocketed it, vowing to take care of Skeeter and put an end to her nonsense when this is all done.
He turned his attention away from the desk, his illuminated wand sweeping across the walls of the study. They were covered in framed photographs and newspaper clippings, a chaotic collage of a long, storied life. There were articles about Bathilda's publication of A History of Magic. There were moving photographs of other famous, historical figures—Ministers of Magic, renowned potioneers, celebrated curse-breakers.
And then, his gaze locked onto a small, silver-framed portrait sitting atop a bookshelf.
It was a younger Bathilda Bagshot, her hair still holding a trace of colour, her eyes sharp and clear. And standing beside her, looking impossibly young, with auburn hair and a beard that had not yet turned white, was Albus Dumbledore.
They were smiling. They looked like friends.
Harry stared at the portrait of his former headmaster. The anger that had sparked at the sight of Skeeter's book flared into a roaring inferno of complicated, agonizing resentment.
"You played me, Dumbledore," Harry whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of grief and repressed anger. "You set me up on a board, gave me a handful of cryptic clues, and expected me to march to my death for the 'Greater Good.' You didn't tell me about your past. You didn't tell me about him."
As if summoned by his very thoughts, Harry's wand-light caught the edge of another portrait, partially obscured by a stack of crumbling ledgers.
Harry stepped closer, his heart hammering a sudden, frantic rhythm against his ribs. He used his free hand to shove the ledgers aside, sending them crashing to the floor in a cloud of dust.
It was a portrait of a young man. He was devastatingly handsome, with a wild, mop of golden-blonde hair, sharp, aristocratic cheekbones, and a pair of eyes that blazed with a manic, charismatic brilliance. It was a face that could command armies, a face that could seduce a saint into committing a sin.
Gellert Grindelwald.
Harry stared into the painted eyes of the darkest wizard to plague the earth before Voldemort. This was the man who had plunged the wizarding world into a global war. This was the man who had believed in the subjugation of Muggles, who had built the prison of Nurmengard, and who had famously been defeated by Albus Dumbledore in the legendary duel of 1945.
But this wasn't a portrait of an enemy. The way it was framed, the way it was kept in this study... it was a portrait of someone known intimately.
And then, Harry saw it.
Carved into the wooden frame of the portrait, right beneath Grindelwald's smiling, arrogant face, was a symbol.
A straight vertical line.
Enclosed by a circle.
Enclosed by a triangle.
The Deathly Hallows.
The very same symbol he had seen glowing in the air of the Grimmauld Place library, conjured by Winky's magic. The very same symbol Narcissa had identified as the mark of the Peverell family. The very same symbol he had just seen carved into the ancient, crumbling gravestone of Ignotus Peverell in the churchyard not ten minutes ago.
Harry reached out, his gloved fingers tracing the deeply grooved lines of the carving.
The Elder Wand. The Resurrection Stone. The Cloak of Invisibility.
The puzzle pieces, jagged and bloodstained, began to violently snap together in his mind.
Dumbledore and Grindelwald.
Two brilliant, powerful, ambitious young men. They hadn't just been planning a political revolution for the 'Greater Good.' They had been united by a shared, consuming obsession. They had been hunting the Hallows.
Dumbledore had possessed the Cloak—his father's cloak—and had given it to Harry. Dumbledore had defeated Grindelwald, and in doing so, according to the legend of the first brother, he would have won the allegiance of the Elder Wand.
And Voldemort.
The Dark Lord's rage, the visions Harry had suffered, the endless, frantic search... Voldemort wasn't looking for a way to defeat Harry's wand core connection. He wasn't looking for political power. He was hunting the ultimate weapon. He was looking for the Wand of Death. He was looking for the Elder Wand.
"He thinks it makes him unbeatable," Harry murmured, his mind racing with terrifying implications. "He thinks the Hallows will make him truly master Death."
The floorboards behind him let out a long, agonizing creak.
Harry spun around instantly, his wand dropping from the portrait to point dead centre at the doorway.
Bathilda Bagshot stood in the archway of the study.
She held a tarnished silver tray in her trembling hands. Upon the tray sat two delicate, chipped porcelain cups filled with steaming, black coffee.
She didn't jump when Harry whipped his wand around. She didn't gasp. She didn't show a single ounce of fear or surprise. She simply stood there, perfectly rigid, staring at him.
The silence in the room stretched. The ticking of a grandfather clock in the hallway seemed to echo with the deafening rhythm of a sledgehammer.
Harry did not lower his wand. He looked at her. Really looked at her.
There was something profoundly, fundamentally wrong with the woman standing before him that made the hair on the back of Harry's neck stand at attention. Her skin looked too loose, sagging around her jawline and neck as if it were a garment two sizes too big. Her eyes, clouded, did not blink. Not once. She just stared at him with a blank, hollow emptiness that was far more terrifying than any expression of overt malice.
It was a creepy, suffocating stillness that ticked Harry off.
"You knew him," Harry stated, his voice a low, hard tone that brokered no nonsense. He gestured toward the portrait of Grindelwald with his free hand. "Grindelwald. And Dumbledore. You knew what they were planning."
Bathilda did not answer. She stood perfectly still, the steam from the coffee cups curling up into the dusty air, obscuring her face for brief, fleeting moments.
Harry took a slow, deliberate step toward her. He refused to be intimidated by a senile old woman, trap or no trap. "What do you know about this symbol?" he demanded, his voice echoing in the cluttered study. "Why is everyone so obsessed with it?"
Still, nothing. She did not twitch. She did not breathe. She simply stood there, a grotesque, silent sentinel in the gloom.
"Answer me!" Harry commanded, a flare of his magic rattling the teacups on her tray.
And then, she opened her mouth.
She did not speak English. She did not speak any language known to man.
A sound erupted from her throat that made the blood freeze in Harry's veins. It was a low hiss, a wet, rattling noise that sounded like two pieces of dry sandpaper being rubbed together inside a hollow cavern. To any other wizard, the sound would have been a horrifying, incomprehensible noise of absolute terror.
But to Harry Potter, it didn't sound like noise. It sounded like a voice. It sounded perfectly coherent.
"You are Potter?"
The question slithered through the air, coiling around Harry's mind.
Harry froze. His emerald eyes widened in absolute, unadulterated shock. He stared at the frail, elderly woman, his mind struggling to process the impossible reality of what had just occurred.
She was speaking Parseltongue.
How the hell was Bathilda Bagshot speaking the language of snakes? It was an incredibly rare, inherited genetic trait, passed down exclusively through the bloodline of Salazar Slytherin.
Voldemort possessed it.
Harry possessed it, courtesy of the soul fragment that had once resided in his scar.
But Bathilda? She was a magical historian, a renowned author. She had no connection to the Slytherin line.
Unless…
Unless it wasn't Bathilda Bagshot speaking.
Harry's heart hammered a frantic, staccato rhythm against his ribs. The sweet, sickly smell of rotting meat suddenly overwhelmed the aroma of the coffee. The loose, sagging skin. The unblinking eyes. The jerky, uncoordinated movements.
He left the snake. Nagini.
Harry slowly, deliberately, gave a single nod. He did not lower his wand. He aimed it directly at the space between her clouded, milky eyes.
"Yes," Harry replied, allowing the cold, serpentine syllables of Parseltongue to slip from his tongue. "I am Potter. What do you know of the mark?"
He hissed the question back at her, challenging the creature wearing the old woman's face, daring it to drop the charade.
But the old lady did not say anything. The creature inside did not respond to his interrogation. The hissing ceased, leaving the oppressive, ticking silence to crash back over the room.
Instead of answering, Bathilda slowly raised her right arm. The movement was jerky, the joints popping audibly in the quiet room. She ignored the silver tray, allowing it to tilt precariously, the hot coffee spilling over the edge and splashing onto the dusty floorboards. She pointed a finger past Harry, toward a closed door on the far side of the study, leading deeper into the house.
Harry looked at the finger. He looked at the door. He looked back at the unblinking, hollow eyes of the imposter.
He knew exactly what was about to happen. The adrenaline flooded his system, banishing the exhaustion and the cold. He was Lord Black. He was Lord Potter. He had ripped the soul from Bellatrix Lestrange, and he would not be bested by a glorified reptile playing dress-up.
Keeping his wand trained squarely on her chest, Harry began to back away slowly, moving toward the door she had indicated. He didn't take his eyes off her for a single fraction of a second. He reached behind him, his gloved hand finding the cold brass of the doorknob. He turned it, the mechanism letting out a loud, protesting click, and pushed the door open.
He took a step backward into the dark room.
Multiple things happened at once, overwhelming Harry's senses with pure chaos.
As Harry crossed the threshold, the absolute, undeniable stench of death assaulted his nose. It was not the faint, lingering smell of old rot that permeated the hallway. This was a fresh kill, aggressive, and suffocating. It was a smell so foul, so violently offensive, that Harry's stomach heaved, bile rising hot and acidic in his throat.
Gagging, Harry whipped his wand upward, casting a blinding, brilliant Lumos Maxima that flooded the small, windowless bedroom with harsh, silvery-white light.
The beam of his wand illuminated the horror resting upon the decaying four-poster bed.
It was the real Bathilda Bagshot.
Or, at least, what remained of her. Her body lay sprawled across the blood-soaked mattress, her frail form broken and twisted into an unnatural, agonizing posture. She had been dead for weeks. Her flesh was a sickening, mottled scene of bruises, bite marks and infested with maggots. But it wasn't just the decay that made the sight horrifying.
She had been eaten.
Massive, jagged chunks of flesh had been ripped from her torso and limbs, exposing the gleaming white bone beneath. Her ribcage was cracked open, hollowed out like a slaughtered animal. The bite marks were unmistakable—huge, crushing punctures that only a predator of monstrous proportions could inflict.
"Fuck," Harry spat, his horror morphing instantly into a blinding, violent rage.
A sound erupted behind him.
It was a sound that would haunt his nightmares for whatever remained of his life. It was the wet, sickening sound of flesh tearing. The sharp crack of bones snapping and breaking under immense, unnatural pressure.
Harry spun around, his wand coming up in a deadly arc.
In the doorway of the study, the false Bathilda Bagshot was coming apart.
The disguise was failing. The old woman's jaw unhinged, dropping down to her chest with a grotesque, wet snap. The skin of her face tore open along the cheeks, peeling back to reveal a massive, diamond-shaped head covered in thick, heavily scaled, olive-green hide.
The creature was bursting out of the neck. The old woman's body contorted violently, her limbs flailing and snapping as the massive, muscular girth of the serpent forced its way up through her ruined chest cavity. The moth-eaten shawls and the floral dress ripped to shreds as a giant snake, thick as a tree trunk and easily twenty feet long, revealed itself in all its horrifying, primal glory.
Nagini.
The Dark Lord's familiar.
Nagini reared up, her massive body towering over the collapsing, empty husk of Bathilda Bagshot. Her jaws opened wide, exposing fangs the size of daggers, dripping with venom and the remnants of her gruesome meal. Her unblinking, slitted eyes locked onto Harry, burning with a cold, murderous intelligence that was far too human.
She hissed, a sound that vibrated the very floorboards, and lunged.
Harry didn't freeze. The combat instincts, honed by the brutal training regimen he had subjected himself to, took over completely. He didn't cast a stunning spell. He didn't cast a disarming charm.
"Confringo Maxima!" Harry roared.
A blast of concussive, explosive force erupted from the tip of his holly wand. It slammed into Nagini's massive, scaled chest mid-lunge. The explosion was deafening in the enclosed space of the study. Books, parchment, and the ruined skin-suit of Bathilda were blown into a chunks of debris across the room.
Nagini shrieked—a terrifying, almost human sound of pain—as she was thrown backward, her massive body crashing through the mahogany desk and smashing into the far wall, bringing the portrait of Grindelwald down in a shower of splintered wood.
Harry didn't wait to see if she was dead. If Voldemort had her here, she would be notoriously resilient to conventional magic. He raised his wand again, visualizing the violet, soul-burning flames of the Ignis Violaceus. He was going to turn the beast into ash. He was going to end this right here, right now.
But before Harry could unleash the curse, the atmosphere in the room shifted.
It was a sudden, violent drop in temperature that made the breath freeze in his lungs. The ambient magic in the village, the protective enchantments of Godric's Hollow, screamed and shattered under the arrival of something profoundly, catastrophically dark.
CRACK.
The sound of Apparition was not the usual, sharp pop. It sounded like the sky itself tearing in half.
The explosion of displaced air hit Harry like a physical blow, forcing him to take a step back, his boots sliding on the blood-slicked floorboards of the bedroom doorway.
The dust began to settle. The frantic, pained hissing of Nagini fell silent as she slithered subserviently into the dark corners of the room, her massive coils wrapping around the wreckage of the desk.
Standing in the centre of the demolished study, his tall, skeletal frame draped in billowing, pitch-black robes that seemed to absorb the very light from Harry's wand, was the being behind all his suffering.
Lord Voldemort.
He stood with a chilling, absolute stillness. His skin was whiter than a skull, glowing with a sickly, pearlescent colour. He had no hair, no lips, and two vertical, serpentine slits for a nose. But it was his eyes that commanded the room—scarlet, burning with a hellish, unholy fire, the pupils narrow, snake-like slits focused entirely, obsessively, upon Harry.
He held a wand in his long, spider-like fingers—the yew wand that shared the core of the very weapon Harry currently had pointed at his heart.
For a long, suspended moment, neither man moved. The silence was absolute, broken only by the distant, howling wind outside the crumbling cottage. It was a standoff between the monster who had terrorized a generation and the young Lord who had been prophesized to annihilate him.
Voldemort's lipless mouth curved into a slow, mocking, triumphant smile.
"Harry Potter," Voldemort whispered. His voice was cold and clear, lacking any warmth or humanity. It slithered through the air, caressing Harry's name with a toxic, possessive glee. "We meet again. In the place where it all began. How delightfully poetic. You have walked willingly into your own grave."
Harry stared into the scarlet eyes of his mortal enemy. He felt the pull of the cursed connection between them, the phantom ache of the Horcrux that used to reside in his scar trying to resonate with the master soul.
But there was no pain. There was no overwhelming intrusion.
His mind was his own, fortified by the removal of the soul piece and the immense power of his combined Lordships.
Harry didn't cower.
He didn't flinch.
The fear that used to paralyze him in the presence of the Dark Lord was entirely, remarkably absent. In its place was a cold, arrogant, utterly lethal calm.
He thought of his parents in the graveyard. He thought of the women waiting for him, trusting him to return victorious.
A slow, dark, and incredibly dangerous smirk spread across Harry's face. He stood tall, his posture projecting absolute, unapologetic dominance. He lowered his wand slightly, a gesture of supreme, mocking confidence, and locked his vibrant, emerald-green eyes with Voldemort's burning red.
"Let's see if you can put up a better fight than your pet," Harry taunted, his smirk widening into a feral grin. "Because tonight, Tom, you're the one who isn't walking out of here alive."
Author's Note
Like it? Love it? Let me know your thoughts down below.