The sitting room was pitch-black. A layer of dust lay over the floor, like no one had lived here for quite some time. There was even a For Sale sign hanging by the door.
Wizards squeezed into the house, poking curiously at Muggle objects. Someone used magic to tidy the place up. The gloomy room gained a hint of human warmth—yet these were not good people.
They had once served Voldemort: Death Eaters who had committed countless atrocities. Most of them had originally been imprisoned in Azkaban, yet now they had resurfaced in the wizarding world, gathering once more beneath a new generation's Dark Lord.
Harry appeared at the top of the staircase.
His stomach cramped with fear. He gripped the banister with all his strength just to stand upright.
To him, he looked like a reed trembling in the wind. But to the Death Eaters, he looked like a sluggish, languid emperor.
Harry still had no idea what kind of authority his face represented.
The sitting room went quiet. Even the sound of snow settling outside became sharp in the silence.
The dark wizards arranged themselves in a fan before him, like a dense black forest.
Among them, Harry saw a familiar face—Draco Malfoy. That annoying boy stood behind a man who, as expected, was his father: Lucius Malfoy. The two of them looked as though they'd been cast from the same mold.
At Harry's gaze, Draco showed a strange mix of excitement and delight. Lucius smiled and said, "The master is watching you, Draco. Don't show fear. Go on—step forward bravely."
Harry watched Draco's clammy, pale face draw closer. The fear clogging Harry's throat burst open, and a severity he hadn't expected from himself tore out of him—
"Stay there!"
His voice was still in the middle of breaking, and it came out like a rasping duck's squawk—hoarse, harsh.
Draco's face turned even whiter. He was terrified, tears in his eyes. This sniveling coward looked like a completely different person from the arrogant little peacock he acted like at Hogwarts.
The wizards in the room all froze as if struck by a Body-Bind.
"L-let them go."
Harry had expected to be hit by a storm of vicious curses. He'd already steeled himself to die bravely—he would even count it as repayment for the Dursleys raising him all these years.
But no spell came.
Facing the young Harry, the villains all bent themselves low in obedience, like wheat flattened by the wind—so eager they seemed ready to kiss his toes. Someone lifted the spell on the Dursleys.
The first scream came from Uncle Vernon, then Dudley. Aunt Petunia still looked half-dazed.
Harry waved at them. "Come here. Quickly." He tried to stand like a man, to shield his Muggle family beneath the ring of black-robed wizards.
But what answered him was Uncle Vernon's merciless, shrieking rage.
"You little mongrel! You damned wizards! We ran all the way to Africa and you still won't leave our family alone! Do whatever you want—do it to me! Don't hurt Petunia and my darling!"
Dudley let out a piercing scream, trembling as he hid in Vernon's arms.
Harry stared at the scene in disbelief. His uncle held his wife and child, glaring at Harry as if the hatred between them ran deeper than oceans.
A few quick-thinking dark wizards hurriedly cast the Imperius Curse again, taking control of Vernon and Dudley.
Harry asked blankly, "What did you do?"
"Obeying your order, we captured the Dursleys and brought them back," said a young man Harry had never seen before. Others called him Crouch—young Crouch. "At your command, even if they were at the ends of the earth, we would throw ourselves into it without hesitation."
"I told you to bring them back? Why were they hiding from me?"
The dark wizards exchanged looks. Crouch was the first to react. He shouted smugly, "The master wishes to hear the Muggles' crimes! Let them speak for themselves!"
Uncle Vernon was shoved in front of Harry. A witch poured a potion down his throat. After he drank it, the fat, middle-aged man stared at Harry dully. With that dead-eyed look, his swollen face resembled the head of a slaughtered pig.
Harry felt chilled to the bone.
Crouch's eyes darted, and he took it upon himself to ask on behalf of his master. "Filthy Muggle—why did you go to Casablanca? Did you not know the master commanded you to remain here?"
"Because he's a bad seed…" Vernon's voice was flat and empty. "He went to that school. When he came back, he was a complete villain. He tortured my precious Dudley with spells. He even hurt me. I had to protect Petunia and Dudley. While that little monster was away at school, we moved."
Harry shook his head hard. "No—impossible! You… what did you say I did? What did I say?"
"You said, 'I was a slave for eleven years. Every evil thing you did to me, every punch you landed on my head—I remember it all, perfectly.' Then you turned Dudley into a pig. My Dudley used to be a clever little angel, but afterward he became a complete idiot. You said, 'For my mother's blood, I won't take your lives—but remember this: from today on, you will not live for yourselves. Especially you, Aunt Petunia. Your blood and your bones are important to me. Protect them.' …"
Vernon's numb, forced accusation struck into Harry's heart like an iron spike. When that heaviness cracked, countless earlier doubts suddenly found their answers.
So it wasn't that this family had found kindness—he had forced them with violence.
Harry didn't know how he had bypassed the Trace and cast magic freely outside school, but the result was clearly a revenge play.
Crushed beneath enormous guilt and pain, Harry didn't know what to say for a long moment.
"Master," Lucius Malfoy asked carefully, "shall we begin?"
"What?"
"Of course… ah, forgive me. I misspoke. You will decide."
Harry looked at him—Draco's all-powerful father, a member of the Hogwarts Board of Governors, a former Death Eater, and still a Death Eater now. He asked, "Begin what?"
The wizards lowered their voices, letting awe and terror seep slowly out from the depths of their lungs. In unison, they said:
"Resurrection."
It was like lightning tore through Harry's mind.
Then his body moved without his will.
From his sleeve, he drew a wand of elder wood—strange, because Harry had never seen it before—and he lightly pointed it at the Dursleys.
Within a silent spell, Vernon and Dudley floated up like two pigs, bumping the ceiling and lightly bouncing off it. Petunia remained on the floor.
The dark wizards were thrilled. From an old burlap sack they hauled out a massive stone cauldron and lit a fire beneath it. As great quantities of white and black soul-stones were thrown into the flames, the liquid inside began to boil at once.
Harry saw carvings on the cauldron's surface: a mural depicting warriors stepping into the cauldron one after another and being reborn. In the blank spaces between, strange magical runes flickered. Almost without thinking, Harry read them aloud:
"Dagda blesses the brave.
Cast in the dead one's remains,
and summon the soul back home!"
The Death Eaters held their breath.
A woman drew two crude coffins from the sack. The soil clinging to them had been cleaned away, yet the stale rot of age still lingered.
When Harry saw those coffins, his mind was swallowed by fog. Then cold rainwater fell wetly across his cheeks. He lifted a hand to wipe away tears.
He flicked his wand. The lids opened.
Inside, there was only dull, withered bone.
Harry closed his eyes. He couldn't bear to look again, because he already knew whose remains those were.
Aunt Petunia suddenly screamed—the spell on her had faded.
"Who are you?! N-no—Harry, Jesus Christ, you've come for us! You still want to hurt us! First it was Lily, and now it's you!"
"Shut up!" Crouch's wand flashed with a vicious red light.
But before he could act, the Elder Wand in Harry's hand struck first—a red beam that slammed into Crouch.
Cruciatus Curse!
Crouch screamed in agony.
Harry lowered his wand. Crouch clapped a hand over his own mouth at once.
Harry opened his eyes again as if he'd just woken from sleep. Something about his expression was strangely wrong, and everyone felt it at the same time—
Their familiar young Dark Lord had returned.
And yet Harry still moved like a dreamer. His actions and his words spilled out without thought, without control.
"Petunia, my dear aunt. Don't worry, and don't be afraid. I only need a little of your blood. For your sister to return to the world, don't be stingy. Offer up your blood."
He waved the wand. The female skeleton in the coffin rose, floating into the air, then slowly sank into the boiling cauldron. The red-hot magical flames jumped unnaturally, their color gradually turning a deep, eerie blue.
Petunia looked like she was about to vomit. She was terrified.
Harry gripped the Elder Wand like a knife and cut down across Petunia's fingers. The thin woman had lived in Casablanca for two months, her skin slightly darkened by the sun. Blood streamed from the tips of her ten fingers and flew into the cauldron. Petunia's cheeks changed—healthy red draining away, turning little by little into a corpse-grey pallor.
Only when the magical fire turned a ghastly green did Harry finally stop drawing blood.
From among the Death Eaters stepped a man with his head lowered. He went to the barely-conscious Petunia and forced a vial of potion down her throat.
Harry recognized him.
Severus Snape—Hogwarts' Potions professor, the vicious teacher who had always used his position to sneer at and humiliate Harry.
Time had passed. Now Snape didn't even have the courage to lift his head and look at Harry.
The young Dark Lord didn't spare Snape a glance, letting him treat Petunia's blood loss. His gaze remained fixed on the cauldron as he began chanting a long, awkward incantation.
Harry's voice rose higher and higher. The house trembled. His face overflowed with raw emotion.
In the next instant, a geyser erupted from the cauldron, almost striking the ceiling. It looked endless—yet not a single drop fell onto the floor. Within the fountain, a human outline slowly began to glow.
Harry stared, spellbound.
In the water, a gentle woman's face gradually emerged.
"Not enough!" he suddenly screamed.
When he pointed his wand at the Death Eaters, they cried out in terror.
"Offer your flesh!"
The magical mark branded into their skin began to burn. Gritting through pain, the Death Eaters stepped forward, raised their wands, and sliced fresh meat from their own bodies into the cauldron.
Snape did not hesitate for even a heartbeat. He severed his left arm as if it were not his own bone and flesh. When his blood fell into the cauldron, the effect was the greatest—most immediate, most striking.
The fountain ran red with blood, and a vaster, fiercer life-force surged out.
Within the water, the bones were wrapped in more and more flesh, slowly gathering into a newly living human body.
"Return… return!"
Amid tears of joy, she was born.
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