I have never held a tool that understood me the way the Elder Wand did. It sat cool and heavy in my palm, not merely wood and core but a carved ledger of triumph and blood, of winners and the wounds they left behind. Where my human hands had once tightened on pens and scalpels and the sleek aluminum of a lecture podium, now those same hands wrapped themselves around the wand that had toppled kings and toppled death. Power buzzed along my bones like an answering signal.
Power, however, is meaningless without direction.
The headmaster's office smelled faintly of lemon drops and old parchment. Portraits watched, some politely, some with the weary curiosity of those who had seen too many plans made and unmade. I eased into Dumbledore's high-backed chair and closed my eyes, letting the twin currents of memory and reason swim together until they were indistinguishable. Albus's memories provided the map; my other life provided the algorithm.
The year a small, stubborn boy would step into the world and tilt it. The year my predecessor—my host—had planned to hide the Philosopher's Stone in the school, a lure for the darkness that hunted it. In the original timeline, the Stone would be used as bait; in this one, the Stone was already in my possession, a fact that simplified one calculation and complicated another. I could hide it elsewhere, use it as a snare, or burn the option entirely. Each choice split into a thousand branching probabilities.
The most urgent thing: Voldemort was not a myth to me. He was a problem set I had already solved in thought experiments and then discarded because the actual variables were messy—emotion, loyalty, betrayal. Now those messy variables became data. I possessed not only Albus's instincts but also my cold, empirical certainty. I knew the locations of all of Voldemort's Horcruxes. I had the coordinates. I had the methods required to unmake them. And I had the knowledge that most people I might recruit would not survive the truth.
I laid out the plan in my mind like a chessboard.
Step one: secure the Stone—and whether I archived it in the school's deepest vaults or converted it into an inert decoy would depend on the bait I intended to use. If I kept it here, it would draw Voldemort straight into Hogwarts' defenses. If I sent it away, I could create a purer trap: a false Stone carrying a trace of my presence, beasts and enchantments trailing the scent. Dumbledore had always believed in tests—subtle, moral, instructive. I had never been interested in morality as an exercise. I was interested in outcomes. But morality and outcome were not mutually exclusive; they could be engineered to converge.
Step two: protect the students—or at least the ones I could not afford to lose. Harry Potter would be invaluable in more ways than one. Exposure to peril would harden him, but not if it killed him. The old Albus had reasoned that a test was necessary; I retooled that test into a controlled exam with failsafes. I would not be petty; I would be surgical. Professors would be kept in the dark beyond necessity, and the protections I set would be layered and interlocking: charms within charms, wards keyed to intent as well as name, and a set of contingency spells designed to be triggered only by me.
Step three: retrieve and destroy the Horcruxes. This was the part of the plan that felt closest to mathematical proof. I listed them in the order that minimized collateral damage and maximized probability of success.
I would not describe the list aloud; I would not write it on parchment that could be stolen. Instead I laid it into the seams of my mind like a sequence of prime numbers: ring, locket, cup, diadem, snake, diary—each with its own signature and its own countermeasure. Some were secured in vaults, some were buried inside people's trust, one slept in a place I could not—yet—touch without uprooting the school. The diadem—in the room where Ravenclaw's memory of genius nested—presented a moral conundrum: to retrieve it would be to rip a piece of Hogwarts itself open. But the alternative—leaving an instrument of Voldemort's division within our walls—was untenable.
I sketched solutions.
For vaults and physical objects: infiltration, precise charm work, and an illusion of absence. For living repositories—objects hidden in loyalties and hearts—I would need guile. Sometimes a Horcrux would require destruction by mundane means; sometimes by substances only my combined knowledge could synthesize. Basilisk venom, fiendfyre, and the subtle, corrosive flame of a phoenix were tools I could choose from, each with consequences I had computed and accepted.
Step four: build my team, but not in the way Dumbledore often had. In the past, he had asked hearts to obey conscience and friends to trust fate. I would recruit on the basis of utility and reliability, then convert loyalty into dedication through principle and purpose. McGonagall would need to be fortified—kept close and given false leads. Snape would be handled like a chemical element: reactive, necessary, volatile. The Order of the Phoenix—if I revived it—would be a network optimized for compartmentalization. Fawkes, old and reborn, would carry messages, feathers carrying spells that no owl could. Magic would be the rope, but people would be the hands that pulled.
As I planned, a small, undeniable truth kept surfacing: knowledge alone did not absolve responsibility. My intellect could forecast probabilities and orchestrate operations, but it could not shield me from the moral calculus of sending another human into danger. I had once been a mind that valued results above everything. Now I wore a mantle of faces—Dumbledore's, with his regrets, and mine, with its sterile equations. There was no erasure of either. Fusion meant compromise.
I tapped a trick with the Elder Wand, feeling the currents hum. A map leapt into being across the desk—an outline of the British Isles overlaid with shimmering sigils and labels only I could make sense of. Small lights blinked where a Horcrux lay; threads of silver traced safe routes, red threads suggested throwaway diversions. Each path was a calculation in human reliability, magical strength, and the geometry of secrecy.
There was a decision to make about Harry, and I made it the same way I made every choice now: clinically, but not cruelly. He would be tested. He would be prepared. He would not be used as bait in the reckless manner of the past. He would be educated, given a scaffolding of knowledge and an inoculation of truth in increments he could bear. The boy deserved better than martyrdom; he deserved strategies tailored to his survival and to the greater good.
The portraits watched me plan. One of them—a woman with a hat I half-remembered from Albus's lifetime—tilted her head and said with gentle curiosity, "Headmaster, do you sleep?"
"Later," I replied. My voice carried the softness of Dumbledore and the hard clarity of someone who had no patience with wasted time.
Outside, autumn wind scratched at the windows. Hogwarts was waking to its new term, unaware of the invisible nets I was weaving. I closed the map and returned the Elder Wand to its place, feeling the echo of its will settle into mine like a companion who respected competence.
There would be no grand speeches tonight. There would be lists, laboratories of spellwork, and the quiet handoff of secrets to those I chose to trust. There would be risks. There would be betrayals. There would be things I could not prevent.
But there was also a plan—a sequence of moves that, if executed with precision, could excise the darkness without detonating the world.
I folded the future into a tight, manageable shape. Then I rose and began to write instructions that could not be misread, sealing them with charms and signatures only the Elder Wand could verify. The first of many moves slid from ink to parchment.
Tomorrow, I would speak with Nicholas Flamel—not as a student of alchemy but as a strategist reclaiming a variable. Tomorrow, I would rearrange the protections in the Stone's supposed hiding place. Tomorrow, I would find my first ally.
Tonight, though, I slept for the first time in both my lives, if sleep it could be called: a brief shuttering of thought to let the new mind consolidate. When I woke, I would be both the prodigy who solved problems by twelve lines of reasoning and the old wizard who bent his knee to compassion.
The Elder Wand thrummed softly in the darkness, as if in agreement.