Loki crashed into the bed in the Room of Requirements as he breathed out a soft sigh of relief. He stared blankly at the ornate ceiling above him while recollecting the strange set of events that had happened to him inside the Fake Abyss he'd just been transported into.
'....will 'He' take the offer?' Loki thought as a sinister smile found its way to his mind.
The plan seemed rather rudimentary and extremely silly to Loki when he first thought it up as he decrypted the secret of the 'Lord Hidden In The Shadows'.
'...I doubt he even has another solution…'
'But I guess I do know how I can distract 'Her' for Rowena…'
'I don't need to risk myself or my puppet anymore, not unless something unforeseen happens.'
'Should I tell Helena about the plan?'
'Hmm…no…a little chaos is always necessary.'
If Loki's idea worked, he'd have True God willingly become his host and allow him to direct a fight with Mother Tree Of Desire to distract 'Her'.
'Can I harm 'Her' if I advance to Sequence 3 before we fought?' Loki wondered as he thought about her current strength.
'As long as she doesn't gain access to the Tenebrous World while she's still in the Abyss we should be able to fight her since she hasn't fully descended into the Abyss, she's likely only a projection and doesn't even hold the symbolism of the Great Old One of her pathway."
'....to have hurt Daph…'
Loki shook his head.
'No use getting emotional about these things. I'll only find myself deeper in trouble doing that.'
That was when Loki snapped his fingers as he watched the runes hovering around him using spirit vision.
"...Voldemort?" Loki mumbled out a question as he observed the soul that was floating in front of his eyes. The soul that he'd stolen from Harry Potter's scar.
"What was this doing inside his scar though? A Horcrux? Why would Voldemort make his direct enemy a Horcrux…"
"And why didn't he use it to kill Harry easily or just take his place once he was sufficiently powerful enough?"
Loki frowned as he thought about what might've happened for Voldemort to turn Harry himself into a Horcrux.
"How did it even remain undiscovered for so long?"
"I remember seeing a subtle mental queue for people to ignore it even if they noticed something wrong with it…but it definitely wasn't strong enough to effect a demigod…"
"Most teachers that can see souls should've been able to spot this rather easily…yet they did not?"
"Salazar did it?"
Loki frowned as he reached that conclusion.
"No…he probably didn't have the right time frame to do it. Firstly the Horcrux could not have formed in the last few years since Harry and Voldemort never spent that much time alone together. Secondly, the soul was inside Harry's scar, which means that it likely formed on the night he got it…"
"Perhaps it formed out of panic? Voldemort realised that the killing curse he cast on the Potters backfired on 'Him' and so 'He' formed a Horcrux out of Harry to protect himself out of fear of dying?"
"No that can't be right…"
"He already had Horcruxes before that, why would he fear death in that moment?"
"Hmmm…." Loki nodded while stroking his chin. "Why is the God of Bugs and Errors not cheating when the book is right here and open in front of him?"
"What do ya think?" Loki said lazily while flicking the piece of soul hovering in front of him.
The soul shuddered when it felt the corruption from the grey fog seeping into it.
Yet, it didn't retaliate as Loki had expected it to.
"It's…too weak?" Loki noticed as the soul started to die right in front of him.
Loki retracted the grey fog he'd allowed to poison the soul and pulled out his wand to do something else-
With a flick of his wand, Loki cast a simple spell that tickled the spirit body threads that emerged out of the weak soul.
'Should I parasitise it fully?'
'....no it probably has no value in combat since it's so weak…'
'I could however benefit from 'learning' Voldemort's secrets…'
'Surely a piece of his soul knows much of what he's got planned doesn't he?'
Loki's smile turned sinister as an eerie idea slowly built up into a plan inside his mind.
…
In another part of the castle, Dumbledore rushed towards the Gryffindor common room in a terrible mess of panic.
The fat lady's portrait swung open even before Dumbledore said the password as he used his abilities to keep his entrance a secret.
Once beside Harry's bed, Dumbledore stared deeply at the scar that he'd observed a million times before in the past decade.
And even though physically, the scar didn't look much different at all, Dumbledore felt a shiver travel down his spine as he realised that its most important content was missing.
Dumbledore's eyes widened as the pupils shook.
Although Dumbledore did not have the means to directly interact with souls, he could still verify their presence rather easily and interact with them even more easily through their Body of Heart and Minds and manipulating their threads of fate by simply overwriting their actions using the Quill of Alzuhod.
Even a soul as weak as the one Voldemort had left behind had a Body of Heart and Mind that could be used to manipulate it. Although deeply depressed and fractured, the body of heart functioned well enough for Dumbledore to always have fragmented access to Voldemort's mind.
So whenever Voldemort had 'strong' thoughts, he could skim them off of Harry to make sure he was always a step ahead.
And so this 'piece of soul' had become the cornerstone in his greatest plan thus far! To complete his apotheosis ritual to become a Sequence 0: Visionary!
And so when Dumbledore found the 'soul' missing he couldn't believe it. It was as if someone had kicked him in the shin!
There was someone else at Hogwarts who knew about the soul in Harry's scar and stole it?
He knew it couldn't be the professors since he had implanted a deep sense of ignorance in their minds regarding the soul, whether they saw it first hand or heard about it from someone else.
So it could only have been a student or an intruder since Harry hadn't left the school grounds in the last few hours.
Dumbledore's frown deepened.
It wasn't possible to separate the soul from Harry's scar.
Dumbledore knew because he'd tried a million times before from trying to use Professor Kettleburn's help to using a million different mystical items. Dumbledore had done it all yet none had ever worked.
It had always been the one single variable in his plan that he could not conquer and was also the reason he placed Harry under such heavy scrutiny all the time.
Because he was worried.
Worried that Voldemort would gain a way to brainwash or worse even capture Harry through his soul left inside his mind.
A soul that was deeply intertwined with Harry's own.
But it seemed like Voldemort hadn't known that a piece of his soul had become trapped inside Harry the day he'd tried killing the boy of fate.
Because Dumbledore reasoned that the Voldemort trapped within the scar was the true Voldemort all along and the one that lived to proverbially 'tell the tale' was the actual Horcrux.
Everything would've been so much easier if he could've just separated the soul from Harry and then learnt all of Tom's secrets that way. Especially those after Tom left school and returned only after he became a Demigod of the Abyss pathway.
'This…just like that spider in the forbidden forest.'
'Although much more sophisticated…the soul in the scar has been ripped away…nothing has been done to correct or fix the places that it touched Harry's own…'
Although Dumbledore couldn't see Harry's soul completely, he could make an educated guess based on how Harry's Body of Heart and Mind had been disturbed, by how his island of consciousness in the sea of subconscious had been damaged.
The work was 'amateurish' to put it lightly when compared to the work someone like Kettleburn, his right hand man to work with souls, did.
Dumbledore's frown deepened as he pondered and eventually returned with a startling thought.
'The gospel…'
'The spell to steal…'
'Is there someone else at Hogwarts that knows those spells?'
'Gehrman Sparrow?'
Dumbledore's brows furrowed in thought as he patiently spelled out each word in his mind, 'Has he mastered these spells enough to steal a soul?'
Dumbledore's frown turned deeper as a slight tinge of anger poisoned his gaze.
Dumbledore had been pretty annoyed when Gehrman Sparrow had done something similar to steal his 'supervision' from Harry during the fight last year against Voldemort that he had used coincidences to bring Gehrman Sparrow to.
But he had accepted it as a warning from the boy to not try and involve him in such matters.
And so Dumbledore hadn't retaliated. After all, someone having the backing of a True God that almost everyone else feared had their words weighed in gold.
But this?
Dumbledore found it angering.
If a mere child wanted to challenge a dragon, then he would know the Dragon's wrath.
As such, after some thinking while hovering around Harry, Dumbledore's eyes gleamed with some ideas before he quickly walked back to the Headmaster's office before sending a letter out using his phoenix.
…
Hermione looked up at the ceiling of her four poster bed.
'I didn't even realise that we were whisked away to Mr. Error's castle.'
'But for 'Him' to personally help me out like this…'
'I should be quick.'
'Perhaps this is a hint from 'Him' for me to pick up my pace.'
'What happened with Mr. Star's plan about infiltrating the gathering he is a part of?'
'Has he already succeeded?'
'Hmm…' Hermione frowned.
'No. I need to be first. I need to do the most. And I need to be the best.'
With her gaze firm, Hermione nodded to herself before quickly falling asleep using cogitation to relax her mind.
…
Loki sneezed involuntarily, 'Who's talking bad about me behind my back? I'm innocent! I swear.'
Pushing that thought to the back of his mind, Loki's eyes focused on the little soul as he dived back into learning whatever he could from the fragmented piece of fragment soul in his hands.
'His mind islands are pretty weak…'
'Good thing I brought him into the Sefirah Castle and kept him covered in the Grey Fog while we were outside…'
'Although, I doubt Dumbledore's little traps would've been able to activate and send any sort of signals from Salazar's hidden domain.'
'But…this dark magic.'
Loki frowned since something about it all seemed off to him.
'What Gods fulfill the wishes of the Unforgivable Curses?'
Loki could clearly see the deep intent with which Voldemort cast the curse as he tried to 'hurt' Harry and clearly recognised the runes that were embedded in the spell.
'But that's the problem.'
'None of these runes are supposed to do any of what's actually happening.'
'While sure, the power rune is a partial symbol that corresponds to the Twilight Giant Pathway, and the symbol of the eye is another partial symbol that corresponds to the eye of weakness from the same pathway, and the final major rune the partial death rune corresponds to the Death Pathway, together they don't mean what they should.'
'The sentence when put together as Voldemort cast his spell 'means', 'May you empower the weakness corresponding to death with the power I pour into you.''
Loki quickly messed around with other similar memories of Voldemort using his overpowered Avada Kedavra, which wasn't difficult since it seemed like that was the only spell he used.
And the results were the same.
Everytime Voldemort used Avada Kedavra, it was the same nonsense, 'May you empower the weakness corresponding to death with the power I pour into you.'
'I mean, as long as Salazar or whatever True God wanted, he could truly just use this phrase to activate the killing curse as a sort of twisted sense of humor…'
'But…'
'Something still doesn't add up.'
'If that was the case and the Killing Curse was so popular why didn't it affect or distort Salazar's or the Twilight Giant True God's morals or world view? Why didn't he become a mass murdering pure blood maniac?'
'He seemed to have been 'kind' enough to me when he met me. While that might have been because of 'our shared lord', he clearly doesn't have a penchant for killing muggle borns.'
'But the Black Family…'
'...could 'He' be offloading his madness?'
Loki's interest in the matter deepened.
'It seems like I have stumbled on some sort of gold mine.'
'...this might be interesting...?'