24th June 1995, the graveyard at Little Hangleton, 9:49 PM
Harry could not stop shivering.
His scar burned — a deep searing line of fire across his forehead, worse than it had ever been, worse than the Divination vision, worse than the corridor with Quirrell three years ago — but it was, just barely, manageable. He held to that. He held to the manageable the way a drowning man holds to a single plank.
'Breath, breath...' The imagine of the blue moon resurfaced in his mind once more, its hazy, gentle moonlight soothing one's mind, its color rendering one's mind clear of negative thoughts.
He steered his breathing down. He steered the racing of his mind into something that could be used. 'Right... The worst has happened. We are not in the maze. We are somewhere else entirely, and that thing in Pettigrew's arms wanted us here. So think. Think of how to get Cedric out. Think.'
In front of him, Cedric Diggory stood with his wand raised and his shoulders set, placing his own body between Harry and the round-faced, sweating figure of Peter Pettigrew. The bundle in Pettigrew's arms stirred against its dark wrappings.
Then a voice came from the bundle.
It was a thin, high, cold voice — the same voice from the Divination vision, the voice that had said Crucio and made Pettigrew scream — and it spoke two words with the casual finality of a man ordering a meal.
"Kill the spare."
Pettigrew raised his wand.
"Avada—"
Harry moved before he had decided to.
He hit Cedric's side with his shoulder, hard, throwing the older boy sideways and using the momentum to roll himself away in the opposite direction. The green light tore through the space where Cedric had been standing and struck the marble slab behind them.
The slab exploded into fragments.
Cedric, sprawled on the cold earth, stared at the place the curse had hit — the stone that had been there a half-second ago and was now nothing but scattered shards across the grass — with his eyes very wide and his breath coming in ragged gasps.
"Cedric!" Harry shouted from behind a tilted headstone. "Cover! Get to cover!"
Cedric reacted. He scrambled behind a tall granite marker, his body shaking, his breath sawing in and out.
Pettigrew laughed — a high, delighted, unhinged sound — and began firing the Killing Curse at their cover, one after another, the green bolts smashing chunks from the gravestones, sending splinters of marble whining through the dark. Harry pressed himself flat. Cedric did the same. There was nothing to do but stay down.
Then the cold voice cut through Pettigrew's laughter.
"Wormtail. Enough. End this little game. Our friends on the other side have been kept waiting long enough."
Pettigrew obeyed at once, with the cringing reverence of a man whose entire existence had narrowed to a single master's approval. From the shadows between the gravestones, figures rose — dark-cloaked wizards and witches, the ones Mordred had recruited, advancing slowly with their wands lit and their eyes bright with malice.
Harry's mind, against every screaming instinct, kept working.
'If they take us both, Cedric dies. That voice said kill the spare — it wants Cedric dead and it wants me alive, for now. So I have time. Cedric does not.'
The logic assembled itself with terrible clarity. There was one Cup. One portkey. And Cedric was nearer to it — it had landed perhaps fifteen feet from where Cedric crouched, glowing faintly gold in the grass.
Harry laughed — loud, deliberate, drawing every eye in the graveyard to his headstone.
"Cedric! The Cup! It's a portkey — TAKE IT!"
Cedric's head snapped toward the Cup. Understanding flooded his face. Then his face changed again, set hard. "Not without you—"
"GO!"
The Dark wizard surged. Harry came up from behind his headstone firing — Stupefy, Reducto, Stupefy — fast and wild, not to hit but to scatter, to buy the seconds. Two of them dived. One went down. The volley bought exactly as long as Harry had hoped.
Cedric reached the Cup. He turned back, hand out, meaning to wait — meaning to take Harry with him.
Harry fired one last spell. Not at the Death Eaters.
At Cedric.
The charm caught Cedric's outstretched hand and slammed it down onto the Cup.
"HARRY—!"
Cedric vanished, the portkey wrenching him away in a swirl of gold light, his shout still hanging in the cold air after he was gone.
'Good. He's out. He'll bring them.'
Then there was no more time for thought.
Harry kept firing as the Death Eaters closed, shielding, dodging, working every angle Ethan had ever drilled into him — but there were too many, and he was fourteen, and he was already spent. A red bolt clipped his shield. Expelliarmus tore his holly wand from his hand and sent it spinning into the dark grass.
"Crucio."
The pain came from Pettigrew's wand and it was nothing Harry had a word for.
Every nerve in his body became a line of white fire. He went down. He writhed on the cold earth, his muscles convulsing, the world narrowing to the single endless fact of agony — and somewhere above the pain, Pettigrew's voice, mocking, sweet:
"So brave. So noble. Sending your little friend home. And what good did it do you, Harry Potter?"
The Dark wizards and witches around all laughed.
The curse lifted. Harry lay gasping, his whole body wrung out, unable to move. Hands seized him — hauled him upright — dragged him across the graveyard to a tall marble tombstone at the top of the rise. He had a half-second to read the name carved into it.
TOM RIDDLE.
Pettigrew flicked his wand. The carved stone angel above the grave came alive and seized Harry — its marble arms wrapping him to the headstone, binding him at the wrists, the arms, the throat, the legs, the ankles, until he could not move so much as an inch. The stone was cold against his back. His scar screamed.
He hung there, bound, and forced his breathing down, and watched.
Pettigrew set the bundle down on the ground beside a great iron cauldron Harry had not noticed before — a cauldron already full of something that simmered with a pale, sickly light. The bundle, freed of its wrappings, was revealed: a thing the size of a small child, hairless and scaled, dark red-black, weak and twitching, with a flat snake-like face and red eyes. The sight of it turned Harry's stomach.
Pettigrew worked the ritual with shaking hands.
He drew a silver knife. He cut into Harry's arm — Harry hissed, jaw clenched — and let the blood run into a glass vial, which he tipped into the cauldron. "Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken." He took bone-dust from the grave at his feet — Tom Riddle Senior, dead in this churchyard — and let it fall into the brew. "Bone of the father, unknowingly given."
Then, weeping, his face grey, Pettigrew laid his own right hand flat across the cauldron's rim, raised the knife, and brought it down.
"Flesh of the servant, willingly sacrificed."
He screamed. The severed hand dropped into the cauldron. The brew flared white, then blinding, and a column of steam rose from it that filled the whole top of the graveyard.
Harry watched it all with his eyes wide and his body shaking and a horror in him so total it had passed beyond fear into something cold and still.
The steam cleared.
A man rose from the cauldron.
Tall. Thin. Robed in black. His skin was the white of old bone, his face flat and snake-like with slits for nostrils, his eyes a burning red. He flexed his long pale fingers and breathed the night air for the first time in thirteen years.
Lord Voldemort had returned.
And Harry, bound to the headstone, broken with pain, looked upon the Dark Lord in the flesh — and his mind buckled.
The memory came whole and without warning. A green light. A woman's scream. Not Harry, please, not Harry, take me instead — and then the green light again, flooding everything, the last thing his mother ever was. It rose up in him and drowned him. He could not separate the figure rising from the cauldron from the figure in the memory. They were the same. They had always been the same. The shivering would not stop.
Around the circle, all the dark wizards and witches had gone silent. Several of them — the ones Mordred had recruited with promises and gold — stared at the risen Dark Lord with naked shock on their faces. They had not, it was plain, believed this would actually happen. They had signed on for a raid, for chaos, for a strongman's coin. They had not signed on for this.
Only Pettigrew was smiling, cradling the bleeding stump of his arm, weeping and grinning at once.
Voldemort breathed.
"Robe me," he said quietly.
Pettigrew, sobbing, draped a black robe over the Dark Lord's shoulders. Voldemort looked down at the weeping man and, almost gently, touched his wand to the bleeding stump. Silver light closed over it — a new hand, gleaming and cruel, grew where the old had been. Pettigrew gasped, kissed the hem of the robe, babbled his thanks.
Voldemort ignored him. His red eyes moved across the assembled circle.
"My friends," he said, in the high cold voice that carried to every corner of the silent graveyard. "Thirteen years. And tonight, you have given me back my body. Some of you by your loyalty. Some of you—" the eyes moved, slow and assessing, "—by the coin of another man."
He raised his new hand. He pointed, almost lazily, at three of the dark-cloaked figures in turn.
"Half-blood. Half-blood. And you — your mother was a Muggle, I think."
"M-my Lord, please—"
"Avada Kedavra."
Three flashes of green. Three bodies fell.
The remaining ones dropped to their knees as one, pressing their faces to the cold grass, gabbling pleas for mercy. Voldemort regarded them with the faint satisfaction of a man surveying a tool that had proved adequate — and Harry, through the haze of pain, understood with a sick lurch that the Dark Lord was reading them, all of them at once, each kneeling mind laid open to him.
He did not touch Harry's mind. Not yet.
A faint smile crossed the snake-like face.
Then Voldemort turned, and walked across the graveyard toward the tombstone where Harry hung bound, and the smile widened — slow, cold, and terrible.
"Harry Potter," he said softly. "How you have grown."
He stopped a foot away. The red eyes searched Harry's green ones — and Harry felt the cold pressure of something reaching into his mind, sliding behind his eyes, looking.
It found his Occlumency.
The defences Ethan had spent four years building rose against the intrusion — the layered shells, the false rooms, the still water — and Voldemort's red eyes flickered with something almost like surprise. Interest.
"Occlumency," he murmured. "At your age. Someone has taught you well, boy."
Then, casually, he shattered it.
The defences came apart like glass under a hammer, and the pain doubled — mind and body now both aflame — and Harry's vision swam and his thoughts scattered like leaves in a gale. But he did not scream. His jaw locked. His bloodshot eyes stayed open and fixed on the Dark Lord's face.
Voldemort tilted his head, reading whatever surfaced in the broken wreck of Harry's defences.
And then he laughed — a high, cold, delighted laugh that raised the hair on Harry's neck.
"You remember," he said with his-pitch down to a whisper kind of voice.
Harry knew exactly what he meant. The green light. The scream. His mother's body falling. His eyes burned, bloodshot and unblinking, staring up at the thing that had taken her.
"Good," said Voldemort, and the satisfaction in his voice was the worst thing Harry had ever heard. "Good. That is my mortal enemy."
24th June 1995, the Champion's starting ground, 9:51 PM
Cedric Diggory hit the grass at the maze's entrance still shouting Harry's name.
He came up on his hands and knees, the Triwizard Cup tumbling away across the trampled turf, his heart slamming, his whole body shaking with the after-shock of the portkey and of everything before it. He looked wildly around — for Harry, who was not there — for anyone—
And found, pacing the starting ground a few yards off with their wands already drawn, the Headmasters and Headmistresses of the five schools. Dumbledore. McGonagall. Maxime. A grim-faced Durmstrang deputy. Headmistress Fontaine of Ilvermorny.
"Professor!" Cedric scrambled up, half-falling, and threw himself toward Dumbledore. "Professor Dumbledore — Harry — he's still there — they've got him — you have to—"
Dumbledore caught him by the shoulders, steadying him, his blue eyes was sharp and grave.
"Cedric. Look at me. Where is Harry?"
"I don't — a graveyard — it was a graveyard, the Cup was a portkey, it took us to a graveyard and there were — Pettigrew, and a — a thing, and there were dozens of them, dark wizards, witches, and, and Harry made me take the Cup, he forced me back, he's still there—" The words came out broken, faster and faster, tears streaking the dirt on his face. "I don't know where, Professor, I don't know where it was—"
Dumbledore held him.
And it was then, over the Headmaster's shoulder, that Cedric saw the maze.
Its centre was on fire.
A great orange bloom of flame had erupted at the heart of the hedges, and it was spreading outward along the corridors, climbing the twenty-foot walls, throwing wild shadows across the abandoned pavilion. The spectators' stands — where hundreds of people had been sitting twenty minutes ago — were empty, chaotic, half-collapsed. And across the grounds, between the maze and the castle, flashes of light were tearing through the dark — red and green and white — the unmistakable cross-fire of a battle, accompanied by distant shouts and the crack of breaking stone.
Everyone was gone. The crowd, the families, the friends. Gone.
Cedric stared at it, his arms still shaking in Dumbledore's grip, his voice gone very small.
"Professor," he whispered. "What's — what's happening?"