Deep in the forests of Albania, a chase was in progress.
A long, thin shadow moved through the undergrowth at speed, threading between the dense trees, using every trunk and root system it could find to break line of sight. Above, moving through the night sky in unhurried intervals, Grindelwald tracked it from above. He did not know this terrain well, but altitude gave him the overview, and the tracking enchantment gave him the thread. He was not going to lose it.
He was also being careful not to force the issue too early. His actual target was not Voldemort. It was Nagini. If he pressed too hard, Voldemort might sacrifice her to buy himself time to escape, and that was not an outcome Grindelwald was willing to accept.
In the moonlight, and by the occasional flare of the illumination spells he cast downward, the picture became clear: a great python moving through the forest floor, and clinging to her tail, a rat.
The rat was Voldemort.
Nagini was a serpent of extraordinary magical potency. In his current state, Voldemort lacked the strength to possess her. He could only inhabit creatures with minimal magical resistance, and a rat was about as low as it got. For a being who had once ruled through terror, spending his existence clinging to a snake's tail in the body of vermin was not a dignity he processed gracefully. The degradation had been working on him steadily, layering itself over a mind that was already dark, compressing it further.
He had no time to dwell on it. He was busy directing Nagini's escape route with everything he had.
Where had this flying wizard come from, and what business did he have hunting him in Albania?
One of Dumbledore's people?
No. Impossible. Whoever was up there had a quality that nothing connected to Dumbledore ever carried. Dumbledore's people spoke about love and feeling and the value of human connection. This person moved like something that had dispensed with all of that a long time ago.
Then the explosion came.
Not aimed at Voldemort or Nagini directly. Aimed at the hillside ahead of them, where Grindelwald's sharp eyes had picked out a cluster of cave openings in the rock. If Nagini reached those, the trees and passages would make tracking substantially harder.
The ground erupted. Rock fragments were blasted deliberately sideways, sealing the cave entrances under rubble before they could be used.
Voldemort seethed. He began calculating a new route, and in the half-second his attention drifted from Nagini, the command he was sending her came a beat late. The great snake slowed fractionally, uncertain, staring at the blocked terrain ahead.
That was enough.
Grindelwald moved. The undergrowth responded immediately, vines erupting from the soil and twisting together into cables, wrapping around Nagini before she could react. Voldemort snapped his focus back and screamed the command to break free, but the vines had already anchored, and Grindelwald's wand had already moved. A dark beam struck Nagini precisely.
The python shrieked, a sound that carried through the whole forest, and her body convulsed with sudden desperate force. The rat on her tail was thrown clear.
Grindelwald landed quietly on the forest floor. He looked at Nagini, still straining against the vines, and exhaled.
"Easy now, old friend. That was the most efficient solution available. When you recover, you may even appreciate it."
He had noticed something in himself since his release from Nurmengard. His temper had lengthened. He found himself thinking of the people who had shared his earlier decades with a sentiment that had not been there before. That era was emptying out. Nagini was one of the more unusual remnants of it. The strength of her will had always impressed him, the way she held her mind together past the point where others broke. It reminded him, in its way, of the Grindelwald family's curse and what it took to survive it.
He raised a hand. The rat that had been thrown clear froze mid-flight, and a stone on the ground transformed and shot upward, becoming a cage that closed around it. The rat produced a sound of genuine anguish.
A mass of black vapour tore free from the rat's body. The creature shrivelled.
Grindelwald attempted to contain the vapour. Every method he tried, every magical structure he cast around it, the dark mist simply passed through, slipping between the layers of magic as though they occupied separate planes of reality.
"Who are you?" The voice that came from the vapour was cold and sibilant, and underneath the flat tone, something was burning.
Grindelwald smiled and let go of the attempt. He stood with his hands behind his back, watching the mist. "It appears you're in a condition even more wretched than I'd estimated. The world has been talking about nothing else for months, and you don't even know who I am."
"What level of ambition is it, exactly, that calls itself a Dark Lord and cannot cross its own country's border?"
"Who are you." Voldemort simply repeated it, cold and patient. The vapour churned.
"Gellert Grindelwald."
A pause.
"You?" The voice sharpened. "You're supposed to be in Nurmengard. You should have died in there years ago."
Voldemort had been born in 1926. His years at Hogwarts had coincided with the peak of Grindelwald's power across Europe. In the beginning, he had taken Grindelwald seriously, had even used him as a model for what global domination might look like. Then Grindelwald had lost to Dumbledore, and after that Voldemort had stopped thinking about him entirely.
Defeat was its own kind of death as far as Voldemort was concerned.
He had not imagined any scenario in which they would meet, and certainly not one in which he was drifting through a forest in Albania as a vapour while the man he had dismissed decades ago stood on solid ground looking at him.