The remaining wards surged to life, lashing out like a wounded beast. Dark magic burst outward and coiled together before me, swirling into a dense mass of black mist. The magic condensed rapidly, shaping itself into a humanoid form.
Before I could react, the figure lunged straight at me.
I rolled across the ground to avoid the rushing mist and immediately cast three killing curses in rapid succession, emerald bolts tearing across the air toward the creature. Every attempt was futile. The black figure twisted unnaturally, slipping between the curses as though it had no true body before lunging straight at me.
Before I could react, the mist slammed into me and forced its way into my body.
Agony erupted through my mind.
I clenched my teeth as a violent pull seized my soul itself, dragging me away from reality. The forest vanished and the sensation of movement consumed me, like being ripped through the fabric of existence itself.
When my vision finally cleared, I found myself standing in a vast grey expanse filled with countless ghostly figures drifting aimlessly across the barren landscape.
I barely had time to comprehend what I was seeing.
The mist surged toward me again.
Already exhausted and dangerously low on magic, I abandoned any thought of spellcasting. Instead I lunged toward the nearest wandering spirit, one of the dimmer souls drifting nearby. My hands closed around its neck, though the body felt more like cold smoke than flesh. The soul did not resist. Its hollow eyes stared through me as I opened my mouth and inhaled.
The soul dissolved instantly.
Cold power flooded into me as its essence was devoured and absorbed into my own.
I could feel the other presence approaching.
My other self.
Knowing I had only moments before it reached me, I rushed deeper into the grey wasteland, seizing whatever wandering remnants I could find and devouring them without hesitation. Each soul I consumed strengthened my own essence slightly, reinforcing my presence within this strange dimension.
But the other fragment was closing in.
Enough.
I turned to face it and launched myself forward.
We collided violently in midair, our forms crashing together like two storms made of shadow and soul. The impact sent the other fragment reeling as if it had not expected such a direct attack.
I did not waste the opportunity.
Breaking away from the collision, I seized two nearby souls and devoured them instantly, their fading essence pouring into me like dying embers being drawn into a furnace.
The other fragment recovered quickly.
To my irritation, it began doing the same.
It tore through the drifting spirits with brutal efficiency, devouring them one after another as the surrounding souls scattered in silent terror.
"Damn it," I muttered under my breath.
This could not continue.
If we both continued consuming souls, the outcome would become unpredictable.
I lunged forward again and crashed into the other fragment, gripping the shadowy form with both hands as I forced my will against it and began devouring it directly. The horcrux fought back immediately, its essence pushing against mine as it attempted to consume me in return.
Our souls clashed violently.
Neither of us willing to yield.
The struggle became a brutal tug of war as we hurled each other across the grey dimension, crashing through drifting spirits and devouring whatever remnants we could seize along the way in desperate attempts to gain the upper hand.
One by one the weaker souls vanished.
The hollow black remnants were the first to disappear, their empty shells offering little resistance as we stripped them apart for power.
Soon the vast plain grew emptier.
Our movements slowed as the battle dragged on.
The other fragment was weakening.
I could feel it.
Its resistance grew more unstable with each passing moment, its form flickering erratically as if struggling to maintain cohesion.
My own strength was fading as well, but far more slowly.
The difference in stability between us had finally begun to show.
With a final surge of will, I forced my essence deeper into the fragment and began tearing it apart.
The horcrux realized what was happening.
Its form twisted violently as a scream erupted from its very existence.
The sound was unlike anything human.
It began as a sharp, piercing wail before rising into something far more horrifying, a layered scream filled with overlapping voices as if countless souls were crying out in agony at once. The sound tore through the grey dimension like a blade, echoing endlessly as the fragment struggled desperately to escape.
"NO—!"
The scream fractured into a thousand distorted echoes, stretching into a long, unbearable howl of pure torment as its essence collapsed inward.
I devoured it completely.
The scream cut off instantly.
Silence returned to the grey wasteland as the last remnants of the horcrux dissolved into my soul.
Once I finished devouring the horcrux, a flood of memories surged into my mind. They were not foreign, yet they did not entirely feel like my own either. I inherited the thoughts and experiences of myself at the moment the horcrux had been created.
Among those memories was something particularly interesting: the early prototype of the flight magic that would later become one of Lord Voldemort's most infamous abilities. The method was still incomplete in those memories, more of an experimental framework than a finished spell, but the principles behind it were all there.
Once the influx of memories settled and my mind stabilized, I finally allowed myself to observe the strange dimension around me. The endless grey expanse filled with drifting remnants of souls still felt surreal.
Even now I found it difficult to believe that something like this existed within the Resurrection Stone. The Harry Potter story I remembered from my previous life had always seemed rather simplistic. The magic had been interesting, but the world itself had often felt strangely shallow.
My opinion of Lord Voldemort had been similar.
When he was first introduced, I had found him fascinating. A dark wizard feared across the magical world. Yet as the films progressed, that image had slowly collapsed. The version presented there had never seemed particularly terrifying.
Now that I possessed his memories, that impression felt laughable.
The films had softened everything.
They had hidden the worst parts.
In just over a year after graduating from Hogwarts, he had personally killed more than fifteen people. Most of them had been muggles, individuals he had considered beneath notice, eliminated simply because they were useful for experimentation or inconvenient witnesses.
The casual brutality contained within those memories made it clear that the version portrayed in those stories had been heavily sanitized.
As I drifted through those thoughts, a sudden pressure spread across the grey dimension.
The space itself was beginning to reject me.
The endless plain trembled faintly as the remaining soul fragments began dissolving into the air, as though the realm itself was destabilizing now that the horcrux anchoring it had been destroyed.
Realizing I had very little time left, I moved quickly.
The wandering souls nearby had already begun to fade, but I seized as many as I could reach and devoured them in rapid succession, pulling their fading essence into my own before the dimension could erase them entirely.
The pressure intensified.
The grey world warped around me.
And in the next instant, the entire dimension violently expelled me back into reality.
I was violently expelled from the realm within the Resurrection Stone and slammed back onto the ground as reality snapped into place around me. For a moment my vision blurred and my lungs burned as I dragged in a sharp breath.
I pushed myself up immediately.
My first instinct was to check my surroundings.
I scanned the clearing carefully, extending my senses through the concealment wards I had placed earlier. The ward structures were still intact, faint threads of magic quietly humming in the air around the shaft. No one had entered the area. No disturbances.
Good.
Only then did I look down.
The ring lay a few feet away on the ground.
I walked over and picked up Marvolo Gaunt's Ring. The metal band felt the same as before, but the black stone embedded within it was different. Several thin cracks now ran across the surface, spreading through the Resurrection Stone like fractures in dark glass.
I turned the ring slowly in my fingers as I examined the magical structure inside it.
And then I understood.
My eyes widened.
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it, low and sharp, echoing faintly through the silent forest. I shook my head while staring at the cracked stone resting in my palm.
"And they say Voldemort was the most terrifying dark wizard."
The claim suddenly felt ridiculous.
The craftsmanship within this artifact was extraordinary. Even damaged, the layers of soul magic woven into the stone were absurdly complex, far beyond what most wizards could even begin to understand.
Whoever created this ring had not merely been talented.
They had been a madman.
A brilliant one.
I looked at the fractured surface of the stone again, turning it slightly so the faint light caught the cracks.
"Whoever made this… was a genius."
Completely insane.
But a genius nonetheless.
- To Be Continued -
Word count: Around 1.6k
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