Chapter Text
June 24, 1995
Cold clung to the stones like fog. The grass was still. The air didn’t stir. Overhead, the sky hung hollow—starless, dark, waiting.
Beneath the yew tree, a cauldron simmered. Steam curled into the air, thin as breath, pale as bone. No wind moved it.
Something took shape in the mist.
A body. New, and not. Too thin. Too pale. Eyes open too wide.
He rose slowly from the potion—wet and gleaming like something pulled from deep water. Not born, exactly. Reassembled.
Voldemort stood.
And the night held still.
Nearby, Harry Potter gasped, breath catching in his throat. Blood ran down his arm, the cut already beginning to seal. But it wasn’t over. The magic still moved—thick, alive, reluctant. His blood had soaked into the ritual, and something in it fought back.
Voldemort raised his wand, and light sparked— the wrong color. Not green. Not death. Gold.
Then—something gave.
The world didn’t shake. There was no noise but the faint sound of splitting—like old wood under pressure. Something inside him came loose.
No one noticed.
Not Harry. Not Wormtail.
Not even Voldemort, who only paused, a flicker of pain crossing his face before fury returned.
But it happened.
Two fragments, cut loose without warning.
Pieces that still remembered what it was to be human.
To fear, doubt, regret. To want.
Too soft to survive the man he became.
Blood, laced with the ghost of a mother’s love, caught them like hands in the dark.
They didn’t die.
They slipped out of the world, quiet as breath.
A small, strange sort of kindness.
Something like mercy.