At first it was an old dream. A high, cold laugh, a woman's scream, a blinding flash of green light - and Harry woke with a start, his scar paining him for the first time in twenty years. He ignored it. It didn't mean anything, he told himself.
The next night, Harry dreamt of a glinting blood-red stone and a man with two faces. Stress, he told himself. The next, a black leather-bound diary, a fifty-year-old boy and a pair of piercing yellow eyes: just dreams, he reassured himself. Last week he had dreamt he was being eaten by a fifty-foot-tall Chocolate Frog. These nightmares meant nothing. They were only dreams...
The next night Harry was back in the village of Little Hangleton's graveyard as Lord Voldemort was reborn. Pale, spidery hands reached out for Harry: he jerked awake, heart hammering, scar throbbing. Beside him in the bed they shared, Ginny slept on oblivious.
Over the next week more almost-forgotten faces followed: Sirius, falling through the archway in the Department of Mysteries; Dumbledore, blasted off the roof of the Astronomy Tower; Alastor Moody, Peter Pettigrew, Fred Weasley, Severus Snape, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Colin Creevey...
Harry was soon afraid to sleep. But then, abruptly, the nightmares stopped. Harry enjoyed several nights of peaceful, uninterrupted sleep; afterwards, he scolded himself for his panicking. Voldemort was dead, he reminded himself. The wizarding world had been at peace for twenty years. Despite the persistent prickling of his lightning scar, all was well.
It was two weeks later that he first dreamt of the tower: jagged, black, standing five hundred feet tall on a storm-battered island. Harry was sure he had never seen it before, but now every night he found himself standing beneath the tower's dark mass in the driving rain, hurrying inside, climbing the rough-hewn steps, climbing higher and higher and higher each night but never ever quite managing to reach the top...
It had taken him months to find it.
Sea-spray stung Harry's face as he stared, disbelieving, at the edifice that rose from the island rock before him like some twisted, monstrous flower. For a blessed moment he forgot the tormenting of his scar. The tower seemed at once both organic and deeply unnatural: ebbing here, flowing there, here showing a smooth reflective face, there offering a razor-sharp edge.
Harry cast his broomstick aside and started forward. This was an island in courtesy only - a flat slab of volcanic rock smaller than a Quidditch pitch two miles out to sea - and the tower stood alone at its exact centre. As Harry approached it loomed over him and he felt a familiar, unpleasant sensation: it was as if he were wearing Voldemort's Horcruxed locket around his neck again.
He shook his head, but the action failed to dispel either the tower's sapping haze or the ever-intensifying pain in his forehead. Harry gritted his teeth and pushed on. When he neared the tower, a section of its exterior melted away to reveal a darkened entrance. Harry lit his wand and peered inside. Narrow stairs twisted claustrophobically upwards and out of sight.
Harry climbed the steps in silence. The tower's power was stronger now: easing Harry's nerves, soothing the pain in his temple, beckoning him forwards and upwards. Harry found himself wondering what supernatural force had so doggedly drawn him here. This tower was surely Voldemort's work, but Voldemort was dead. Harry had seen him die. Harry had killed him. So what could possibly await him at the end of this stairway?
Harry soon found out. As the pain in his scar rose to a sudden, frenzied peak, a foul-smelling gust of wind swept down the stairway and snuffed his wandlight out. Harry was plunged into utter darkness. He took a long moment to steady himself against a rough stone wall. The sensory deprivation was almost total; it was broken only by the sound of heavy, frantic breathing. Harry was in the process of ordering himself to calm down when he realised - he had been holding his breath ever since his wandlight had been extinguished.
He wasn't alone in the stairway. And whoever or whatever it was that was making such a din behind him - panting, growling, stumbling around, clattering into walls - was close, and moving closer. "Lumos!" Harry whispered urgently. There was no response from the phoenix-feather wand that had always been such a faithful servant. Blind and helpless, Harry had no other choice but to stretch his arms out in front of himself and begin feeling his way forward inch by inch.
Harry soon lost all sense of time in the darkness. He could only keep putting one foot in front of the other. With each step came another scream of protestation from his scar and something new for him to stumble over -loose rocks, uneven stairs, other, stranger things. With each step, the noises behind grew closer and louder. With each step, the darkness ahead remained utterly impenetrable.
Then Harry's hand closed upon something soft and warm. As he yelled and leapt back, emerald-green lanterns all around burst into life. Harry span in a frantic circle, wand in hand. He had stumbled from the stairway onto the floor of a grand circular amphitheatre, he saw. There was no sign of his pursuer. The amphitheatre's walls were composed of the same flowing black stone as the tower; they reached up and up past rings of broken benches to a distant stalactite-strewn ceiling. Chained to a post in the centre of the amphitheatre floor was the boy into whom Harry had blundered in the darkness.
Somehow, Harry recognised him. Though his scar was paining him as it hadn't in twenty years, he stepped helplessly closer. The boy was secured to the wooden post at his wrists and ankles by heavy iron chains. Tattered grey rags preserved his modesty. Beneath a mop of black hair his eyes were closed in deep sleep; though he could not have been more than ten years old the handsome looks that would fool and ensnare so many were already well evident. Harry had seen this boy before - in a memory. Incredulous, he reached out a hand to be certain this was not some trick or apparition.
At Harry's touch the boy jerked upright. "Where am I?" he demanded, wrenching at his chains. "Who are you?"
Any answer Harry might have given was forestalled by the blinding stab of pain that shot through his skull when the boy's panicked and wild eyes met his. He cried out, swayed, fell. His vision went black. The last thing he saw before slipping into unconsciousness was a pair of monstrous scarlet eyes peering down at him.
