Chapter Text
The cemetery lay forgotten by the world. Old headstones, tilted and worn by time, stood half-swallowed by a cold, grey mist. Not a sound of life stirred the air. Everything in that place was lifeless. Ancient magic had seeped into the soil and been buried there, alongside the dead.
When Harry collapsed to his knees in the mud, it was with the lingering sensation of having been torn from the inside out. Reality still spun, refusing to settle. His vision swam. Nausea churned in his stomach. What had just happened? Beside him, Cedric lay just as disoriented, just as stunned. Was this the final task? A last cruel twist in the Tournament?
A sudden chill ran through Harry as the wind rose, snapping through his hair. He forced himself upright, tightening his grip around his wand. Ahead of him stood a grave, its stone marked with a single name: Gaunt. The engraving was less a name than a warning.
Then Peter Pettigrew appeared. Like something conjured from shadow, an apparition dragged up from the depths. Harry refused, for a heartbeat, to accept what he was seeing. But Cedric’s trembling beside him confirmed the truth: this was no illusion.
In a flash, they were disarmed. Harry’s wand slipped from his hand and sank into the mud. Cedric lunged forward on instinct, but froze mid-motion. An unseen force had seized him in place. The same weight pressed down on Harry, stealing control from his muscles before he could even resist.
Wormtail didn’t hesitate. His wand moved with practised ease. A flash of green light struck Cedric in the chest. For a moment Cedric stayed on his feet. Then his eyes went hollow, and he fell. The sound of his body hitting the ground was too loud in the silence.
Harry didn’t scream. His mind refused to accept what it had seen, reaching for anything else — an illusion, a test, a mistake — but none of them held.
Cedric wasn’t getting up.
Cedric was dead.
Pettigrew stepped back, breathing hard, waiting for something greater to come. And then the voice echoed across the graveyard. It reached into Harry’s bones and turned them to ice.
Voldemort.
The mist thickened. Wormtail crossed to Cedric’s body with shaking hands. Harry tried to move again, and failed. The hold on him had tightened, like the graveyard had decided he wouldn’t move. Cedric was lifted and carried towards the central grave. Something clenched in Harry’s chest.
Wormtail murmured words Harry couldn’t make out. A choked cry, a sharp motion, and Harry watched the servant’s own hand drop into the steaming brew. Where one had been, only a stump remained, dark with blood. The man had given his own flesh to it. Then Harry’s arm wrenched sideways, though nothing touched him. Pain erupted through his skin. His blood was drawn from him and carried into a cauldron at the centre of the grave.
What had been empty took form. What had been liquid stirred. Awake, aware. Bone came first, assembling itself with terrible certainty. Flesh followed, knitting itself into place. Skin stretched over it like a final veil. Then it breathed.
Voldemort rose.
He was no longer merely a man. He was something stripped of humanity: thin, reptilian, wrong in every line of him. Shaped by nightmare, not by flesh. His red eyes swept across the graveyard without urgency. When his gaze found Harry, his expression shifted.
Harry tried to recoil, but his body wouldn’t obey. Voldemort wasn’t looking at him as an enemy, but as something to be studied.
“Harry Potter…” he said.
The scar exploded. Pain ripped through his head until his vision fractured. He gasped, praying to wake up. But when his sight returned, nothing had changed. Cedric still lay behind him, and Voldemort was there.
With a flick of Voldemort’s hand, Harry was dragged forward, released only when his strength gave out. He collapsed into the mud, shaking. Voldemort stood over him, watching with cold fascination.
“The Boy Who Lived…” he said, savouring each word.
His hand touched Harry’s forehead and the world broke.
The pain was unlike anything he had ever known, too vast to become a scream. His scar burned like a wound torn open from within. Sound disappeared first. Then colour. Then thought splintered. And beneath it all, something else stirred: a presence.
Something inside Harry answered the touch. Not entirely his. Not entirely foreign. Misaligned — like two realities forced into the same space. Voldemort withdrew his hand slowly. A satisfied smile curved his mouth.
“This will be useful,” he murmured.
He held Harry’s gaze a moment longer, weighing what he’d found. Then his wand rose. Pressure returned, heavier than before. The ground fell away: no up, no down. The world let go of him.
And then… There was nothing.