24th June 1995, the graveyard at Little Hangleton, 10:08 PM
Harry fought.
Behind the leaning granite cross, with the Re'em wand burning bright in his right hand, he had become something he had not known he could be. Each time a Death Eater rounded the stone he met them — shield, parry, counter — and the wand took his intent and made it vast. He had learned, in the space of these last frantic minutes, to ride it: to feel the amplification gathering and to bleed it out in controlled measure, more for a heavy curse, less for a quick one, the wand answering his mastery the way a fine instrument answers a practised hand.
His Expelliarmus had become a weapon of terrible simplicity. The plainest disarming charm in the world, the first spell any duellist learned — and through the Re'em wand it shattered shields outright and flung its targets across the graveyard, some merely paralysed, some out cold before they struck the gravestones. Five of them lay scattered now, unmoving, in the churned earth around the cross.
But there were more than a dozen still standing, and Harry was beginning to understand the cost.
He felt it in his chest — his magical core spinning faster and faster, the internal threads of him working at a pace that was not sustainable, the wand drinking from his reserves at a rate that frightened him. 'This is why,' he thought, blocking a slashing hex and answering it with a flung Death Eater. 'This is why Dad never let me lean on it.' The Re'em wand did not give power for free. It borrowed against him, and the interest was steep.
He felt the well running dry.
With a wrench, he switched — the Re'em wand vanishing back to wherever the summoning kept it, the holly wand familiar and small in his hand. His next Stupefy was a pale thing beside what had come before. The Death Eaters, sensing the change, pressed in. Harry gave ground, and gave it again, his breath sawing raw in his throat, until his back came up against the last tombstone at the top of the rise and there was nowhere left to give.
Lord Voldemort, who had watched all of it from the centre of the circle with Pettigrew cringing at his side, raised one pale hand.
"Enough," he said. "I have seen enough."
A lazy flick of his wand tore the tombstone away from Harry's back and sent it tumbling, and Harry was out in the open, exposed, on his knees in the firelit dirt with a circle of masked figures closing around him.
He was nearly spent. He knew it. The exhaustion had crept past his bones and into the place where hope lived, and frustration and a cold creeping despair were pressing at the edges of him — how long, how long has it been, where are they, why hasn't anyone come — but the green eyes that lifted to meet the Dark Lord's red ones had not gone out. Not yet. A faint, stubborn ember of resilience burned in them still.
"We shall duel, you and I," Voldemort said. "A proper duel. As wizards do." He inclined his head with mocking courtesy. "Come, Harry. The niceties must be observed. We bow."
Harry did not bow.
Voldemort's red eyes flickered. "Imperio."
The curse rolled over Harry's mind like warm water, and a voice that was not his own murmured bow, just bow, it would be so easy, so pleasant, just bend your neck — and Harry, to his horror, felt himself begin to fold forward.
No.
He found the blue moon. He found the calm moonlight. He found the place Ethan had built and the Imperius had not quite reached, and he set his will against the warm voice and threw it off, snapping upright with his jaw clenched and his eyes blazing.
A ripple of astonishment passed through the masked circle. Two of them took an involuntary step back. The boy had broken the Imperius.
Voldemort's mouth thinned, but something gleamed in his eyes that might almost have been pleasure.
Harry stood. His legs shook. He had no plan and no strength and no escape, and he understood with a strange clarity that he was very probably going to die in this graveyard — but he understood, too, that he was going to die upright, that he was going to die trying to defend himself, even if no defence was possible, even if all he had left was the refusal to kneel.
He raised the holly wand.
"Avada—" Voldemort began, almost gently.
"Expelliarmus!" Harry cried.
The two spells met in the air between them.
What happened then was nothing Harry had words for.
A jet of green light and a jet of red met and did not pass — they joined, locked, fused into a single thread of light that connected the tip of Harry's wand to the tip of Voldemort's, and the thread turned to gold, and a sound rose from it, high and pure and unearthly, like the song of a great phoenix. Both their wands shuddered. Harry felt his own hand seize around the holly, unable to let go, and saw Voldemort's long fingers locked the same way around the yew.
A dome of golden light wove itself up and over the two of them, cutting them off from the circle, and the Death Eaters fell back from it in confusion.
Then, from the bead of light where the gold thread met Voldemort's wand, shapes began to bloom.
The first was a great ghostly hand. Then a man — old, surprised, blinking. Then a woman. Then more, pale and silver and smoke-edged, the spirit-echoes of every life that yew wand had ended, spilling backward out of it in reverse order of their dying.
And then two figures Harry knew from a photograph and knew instantly, in the marrow of him.
A man with untidy black hair and glasses.
A woman with long dark-red hair and green eyes that were Harry's own.
"Mother," Harry breathed. "Father."
"Hold on, Harry," his father's echo said, circling close to the golden dome, putting itself between Harry and the writhing thread. "Hold the connection. Don't break it."
"When it breaks, you must run," his mother's echo said, her silver eyes never leaving his face, fierce and tender at once. "You hear me, sweetheart? The moment it breaks, you run."
Harry, on his knees inside the golden cage of light, his arm shaking with the strain of the locked wands, let out a small broken laugh.
"Run," he repeated. "To where?"
His mother's echo did not have time to answer. The echoes were massing now, dozens of them, circling the dome, turning their pale faces outward toward Voldemort and his servants — and Voldemort's face, on the far side of the golden thread, had gone from cruel triumph to dawning, furious comprehension.
"Priori Incantatem," he snarled. "No — NO—"
The echoes pressed against him, against the masked figures beyond, a wall of the silver dead, buying Harry seconds with their nearness.
"Don't lose hope, Harry," his father's echo said. "Help is closer than you think."
And Harry — kneeling, spent, his wand-arm screaming, surrounded by the ghosts of the murdered and the living monsters who had murdered them — threw back his head and laughed. Hearty. Helpless. Genuine.
Across the golden thread, Voldemort's snake-slit eyes narrowed.
"What," he hissed, "do you find so amusing, boy?"
Because in the last few seconds — beneath the phoenix-song, beneath the strain, beneath the cold and the fire — Harry had felt a warmth arrive at the very edge of his awareness. A vast, familiar, fur-and-horn presence. A bond that ran through the wand and his own blood and called to him like a heartbeat.
"They're here," Harry said.
The golden thread snapped.
And Ethan Esther apparated into the centre of the graveyard with the great horned bulk of Osian beside him and Jasper rising from his shoulder, the little camera-device on the Snidget's leg sweeping the whole scene, capturing every face, every mask, every kneeling servant of the risen Dark Lord.
For one heartbeat, nobody moved.
Then Ethan moved, and the graveyard became his.
He did not speak. He did not threaten. He flicked his wand almost idly, and "Impervius Cortina," he said, and the air rippled — and a wave of force shot through with cold starlight tore outward from him and flung half a dozen Death Eaters off their feet and into the gravestones. He turned, and cast again, and again, and his spells were threaded everywhere with that same pale silver light, beautiful and wrong, and they came from impossible angles because Ethan was no longer standing anywhere — he blinked across the graveyard in flickers, here, gone, there, casting in the half-second before each Apparition completed, so that the masked figures were firing at a man who was already three feet to the left and behind them.
He sent a curse at Voldemort, almost as an afterthought.
Voldemort deflected it with a snap of his yew wand — but his red eyes had gone wide with a fascination that was very nearly hunger, drinking in the style of the man before him, the blink-and-strike, the starlight-threaded magic, the cold expressionless face above the coldest smile any of them had ever seen.
Around the edges of the graveyard, a curtain rose.
It came down in shimmering veils of starlit dark, layer upon layer, walling the whole place in — and when one Death Eater bolted for the gap between two gravestones and tried to Disapparate, the curtain reached for him, a fold of it peeling off like a living thing and wrapping him and dropping him senseless to the earth, exactly the way a Lethifold takes a sleeper. After that, no one ran.
Harry, slumped on Osian's broad warm back with Jasper settling protectively against his chest, watched his father work, and felt relief crash through him so total it nearly took the last of his consciousness with it.
He had seen this once before. Years ago, a boy of ten, hidden and wide-eyed, watching Ethan take apart a settlement of poachers who had thought themselves safe. The same cold artistry. The same starlight. The same terrible, beautiful certainty.
'That's my dad,' Harry thought, and let his eyes half-close, safe at last.
Ethan stopped only when more than half of Voldemort's servants lay still in the churned earth — some unconscious, some bleeding out their last in the dark, beyond any saving. Voldemort glanced at the dying with something like distaste and, almost gently, killed them himself with a sweep of green light.
"Mercy," the Dark Lord murmured. "And the removal of the weak. You have done me a service, Seer."
He stepped forward, the firelight gleaming on his bone-white skull, and his eyes were bright with a collector's appetite.
"That curtain. That starlight. Your... blinking." He tilted his head. "Such profound command. I have not seen its like in fifty years." Almost playfully, he raised the yew wand and sent a Killing Curse streaking into the curtain-dome to test it —
— and the curtain simply opened, a neat round hole irising apart to let the green light pass harmlessly out into the night, then closing again, seamless.
"Very," Voldemort breathed, "very interesting."
He laughed, high and cold and delighted, and turned the full weight of his attention on Ethan.
"You and I should not be enemies. A man of your gifts, wasted as a nursemaid." His red eyes slid to Harry, draped exhausted over the Re'em's back. "Immortality, Seer. I can offer it. Power beyond your dreaming. And the price is nothing at all — merely the boy. Hand me the boy. Surely old Dumbledore has not bound you so tightly that you would die for his chains. The Potter brat is a leash, nothing more. Cut it."
Harry, on Osian's back, lifted his head and let out the smallest chuckle. He tilted it to one side, looking at Voldemort through half-lidded eyes.
Ethan turned.
And he swept the Dark Lord a low, comical, magician's bow — one hand flourishing — and rose with that coldest of smiles still on his face.
"No," he said simply.
The single word fell into the silence of the graveyard.
"Harry is my son." Ethan's voice was quiet and level and it carried to every corner of the curtained dark. "What I feel for him, you could never understand. You have never felt it — not once, not from the first hour of your life. Your mother died rather than stay for you, and you have spent fifty years making the whole world pay for a warmth you were never given." He tilted his head, and the cold smile did not waver. "I almost pity you. Almost."
Voldemort's snake-flat face darkened with every word, the red eyes burning.
"Then die with him," he spat. "Avada Kedavra!"
The green light leapt across the graveyard at Ethan's chest.
"Dad—" Harry's eyes flew wide, the cry torn from him — because Ethan had not moved, was not moving, stood square in the path of the curse —
The green light struck a Galleon.
Ethan had flicked it up between two fingers and engorged it in the same motion, a great gold disc of metal that took the Killing Curse full on — and the curse splashed against it and died, leaving nothing but an ugly black scorch seared across the coin's face.
Ethan looked at the ruined Galleon with the faint annoyance of a man who had liked that coin.
He clicked his tongue. "Tsk."
Then he raised his eyes to Voldemort and his kneeling, broken circle, and the descending weight of that gaze made even the Death Eaters who could still move press themselves flat to the earth.
He gestured once.
The curtain-dome came apart — layer by layer, the starlit veils folding down and dissolving into nothing — and as the last of it vanished, so did Ethan, and Harry slumped on the Re'em's back, and Jasper with his little camera, and the great horned bulk of Osian. Gone. Not a swirl of portkey-light, not a crack of Apparition. Simply gone, the way a star goes out.
The graveyard was left to its fire, its dead and its risen master.
Lord Voldemort stood unmoving for a long moment in the smoke, the burned Galleon still glinting in the grass where it had fallen, and his mind turned the image over and over — the blinking, the starlight, the curtain that ate a Killing Curse whole, the great horned beast, the boy who had broken his Imperius and laughed in his face.
His red eyes flashed with murderous intent.
'I underestimated him,' the Dark Lord thought, and the thought was very cold. 'The Seer. As I underestimated the boy.'
It would not happen twice.
He turned to the empty dark where Mordred had been, and where Mordred would soon return, and he began, in the silence of the graveyard, to compose the order he would give.
Find the Seer. Learn his name. Learn everything!