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HP474- Taken
🕑 Added 2025-07-25 23:04:39 +0000 UTCHarry raised his hands slowly, not bothering to turn. "Tommy," he called.
The wand at his back pressed harder. "Even now, you dare to mock me," Voldemort hissed, voice rough, like stone scraping metal.
"Mock?" Harry said, almost lazily. "Isn't that your name? Given by your lovely Muggle father. Tom Marvolo Riddle. Bit dramatic, rearranging it like a crossword puzzle."
"You saw my memories, haven't you," Voldemort muttered behind him.
Harry chuckled. "You left part of your soul in my head. Would've been a waste not to have a look."
He heard Voldemort click his tongue. Harry ignored that. Instead, he reached, mentally, searching the borrowed memories. Most he'd seen before. Childhood in the orphanage. Hogwarts. The diary. Bits and pieces, like watching someone else's nightmares on loop. Still, he went deeper this time. Not for sentiment. Just for the right answer.
"Vanishing Cabinet," Harry said a moment later, tilting his head. "So that is how you sliped into Hogwarts."
Voldemort's hand curled tighter around his wand. "You are coming with me."
Harry didn't argue. He moved slowly, toward the cabinet. No sudden turns, no clever twitches. His brows furrowed, eyes flicking across the room.
His spine ached from how firmly the wand was pressed to it. He didn't need a guess to know it wasn't a bluff. The second he tried something, Voldemort would fire without hesitation.
Still, he didn't stop thinking.
Every step, every breath, he split his attention in pieces. Calculating ranges, spell delay times, which items in the clutter might block a curse. It was like juggling razors, whatever he thought, was useless.
He kept walking.
Two more steps to the Vanishing Cabinet. Another half-metre and he would be gone from Hogwarts, straight into whatever hellhole Voldemort had prepped. Not ideal.
"Where are we headed?" Harry asked casually. "Your charming graveyard again? Or something newer? Bit of style this time, maybe."
Voldemort didn't answer, but Harry caught a faint huff, irritated, not amused.
"Still touchy about Riddle, then," Harry added, more to keep the man talking than anything else.
"Be silent," Voldemort hissed.
Just as they stepped into the Vanishing Cabinet, Harry split his attention a hundred streams. Each thread of thought tested a different path, casting, dodging, redirecting, overloading the cabinet itself. Most wouldn't work, but he didn't need most. He only needed one.
The moment the cabinet shuddered around them and the magic shifted, he moved.
When they stepped out of the Vanishing Cabinet, Voldemort was swallowed in complete black. He couldn't see his own hands, couldn't tell if Harry was still in front of him. His wand shifted slightly in the air.
"Lumos," he snapped.
Nothing.
"Lumos!" Again, louder this time. Still nothing.
Harry stepped aside before Voldemort even noticed he moved. Unlike Voldemort, he knew why the light wouldn't come. The air was filled with fine, invisible dust, Vial of Everlasting Night. A substance that killed all light in a ten-foot bubble, no matter how bright the source. He took it from Slytherin's vault a few years ago, and this was the first time he had a proper use for it.
Another spell fired from the dark, "Lumos Solem!" and again, no response. The light just didn't exist.
Harry tossed the Invisibility Cloak onto a nearby chair, finding it by brushing his fingers against the edge. He moved in the opposite direction. Voldemort might have been blind in this darkness, but the man wasn't stupid. The Cloak had its limits, especially with someone like him. And Dumbledore. Both could sense it, trace its presence. Took Harry a while to figure out why.
Similarly, he could feel that same magical presence around Dumbledore before. At first, he had no idea why, but he went back through the memories, sorting them one by one in the System's recall bank, scanning every time Dumbledore was near him. Most instances didn't show anything unusual.
Except a few moments. First, when Dumbledore led that raid into Knockturn Alley, trying to trap Albus Riddle, he carried a wand Harry had never seen before. Pale wood, nothing like his usual one. Then again, when Harry returned from the graveyard and declared Voldemort was back, Dumbledore had that same wand in his hand. The third time was at the Ministry. That night. The one where Harry was seconds from ending Voldemort, and Dumbledore crashed through their blockade with Fawkes and shattered every ward in the place.
Harry ran the memory thread through the System's recall, checking and cross-checking. Each of those moments carried the same strange energy.
Then it all clicked.
The cloak, the stone on the Gaunt Ring, and that unfamiliar wand Dumbledore only pulled out on very particular days. Harry didn't need a lecture to connect the dots. Hallows.
"Avada Kedavra!" Voldemort's voice sliced through the darkness. Harry didn't see the spell, he couldn't, but the sudden static hum in the air was enough to guess the Killing Curse had been fired.
Probably at the cloak.
He doubted even the Killing Curse could cut through the Everlasting Night. Still, it was a safe bet the spell had gone straight at the cloak, since it was the only thing Harry had left behind in reach.
He crouched, making himself as small as possible, shifting silently behind, what he only assumed was an overturned desks. Voldemort was in here somewhere, but the room was large, and the darkness made it impossible to know how far off he drifted.
Another curse might follow if Voldemort called out again. If he did, Harry would reply, with something sharp enough to make the idiot regret speaking.
Nothing came for a moment. No more shouting. Just silence.
Then Voldemort's voice again, somewhere off to the left, low and frustrated, "You think you can hide?"
Harry didn't answer. The man was grasping at shadows, literally. Let him waste his spells.
He slid sideways across the floor, wand at the ready. His fingers brushed something sticky, melted wax or old potion residue. Disgusting, but not worth pausing for.
Voldemort started laughing madly. "You're still immature. Pestis Incendium."
Harry didn't see fire, but the sudden wave of heat said enough. He dropped to the ground and rolled sideways behind something thich he felt earlier, shielding himself as best he could. A sharp crack echoed as something wooden caught and split. The cursed flames hadn't reached him yet, but they were close.
He muttered under his breath. "Fiendfyre? Bloody hell." Was Voldemort an idiot?
Whatever location they landed in after the Vanishing Cabinet, it was familiar to Voldemort, and that was a problem. Familiar meant mapped. Meant exits. If he started a cursed fire here, it meant he had a way out.
Harry didn't.
The Fiendfyre roared now. Harry heard it tear through shelves behind him—snapping, cracking, dragging heat like a beast on chains. The temperature spiked hard enough to make his lungs ache.
He didn't need to fight it. He needed to outpace it.
He silently cast Accio, catching the cloak mid-air and sliding it straight back into his inventory. The flames were louder now, eating through something somewhere behind him. He flicked his wand and muttered the Unicorn-tongue variant of Glacius, not the textbook version, but the one he pieced together with the Basi's help.
Fiendfyre was cursed. A regular ice charm wouldn't cut it, not against that kind of flame. But the frost variant Harry used in the Unicorn tongue, that held the roaring heat back. The air around him dropped in temperature at once. Not a comfortable chill either, this was deep cold, biting, raw, the sort that made your fingers numb even through gloves.
The cursed fire snarled when it met the frost. Not a clash exactly, more like two things pushing against each other and refusing to budge. The flame didn't spread further for now, though the heat behind it still pulsed like an angry heartbeat.
Harry didn't stick around to admire it. He moved sideways again, crouched low, using the brief pause to scan for anything that might pass for a door, a grate, a tunnel, anything. The Vanishing Cabinet had dumped them into some kind of ruined storehouse from the feel of it.
