Author's Note: Thanks so much for all the support and input, guys! I'm writing for you. Please enjoy!

FULL SUMMARY: Peace reigns nineteen years after the war, allowing wizards and witches to focus on learning and creating instead of fighting. In the tranquil post-war world, their ingenuity is displayed by the stunning amount of new magical advancements and inventions. The Ministry has been revolutionized, the magical population has boomed, and wizards and witches are being born with more magic than ever before. But every era of peace and prosperity must end one day, and that day is soon approaching.

Albus Severus Potter, the seemingly ordinary son of the extraordinary Harry Potter, is about to begin his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where academic competition is vicious and the social hierarchy is based on a mix of talent, genius, and charisma. Every day at Hogwarts is a challenge of wits, daring, and sheer determination. Albus cannot be more out of place, at least until he starts hearing a malicious voice in his head, giving him talent and skill that he had only dreamed of, allowing him to win tournaments and competitions with unbelievable ease.

But great power does not come without a great price. Albus is realizing that humanity's rule on Earth is coming to an end. An ancient legend tells of a mysterious entity bent on "reclaiming" magic and destroying all life on the planet. But how can Albus save wizardkind and humankind if he cannot accept—or understand—his own destiny? How much time does the wizarding world have left before an unprecedented disaster strikes and magic disappears forever?


BOOK ONE

~ALBUS POTTER and the COLOSSUS CODE~

Based on the characters and places of JK Rowling


TABLE of CONTENTS

Chapter 1 | The Unlucky Four

Chapter 2 | The Boy With No Scar

Chapter 3 | Chocolate Frog Cards

Chapter 4 | The Sorting Surprise

Chapter 5 | Preliminary Intelligence Tests

Chapter 6 | The Academic Pandemic

Chapter 7 | The Junior Wizarding Games

Chapter 8 | Team Seventeen

Chapter 9 | Fireball Albus Severus

Chapter 10 | Eugenics

Chapter 11 | The Colossus Code

Chapter 12 | The Ultimatum

Chapter 13 | Memento Mori

Chapter 14 | Seize the Day

Chapter 15 | The Last One Standing

Chapter 16 | Thanatos Rising

Chapter 17 | The Elite Descent

Chapter 18 | Capture the Flag

Chapter 19 | The Talent Search

Chapter 20 | Bull's Eye

Chapter 21 | Rank Number One

Chapter 22 | The Closing Ceremony

Chapter 23 | Chaos and Control

Chapter 24 | The End of the Tracks


-CHAPTER ONE-

THE UNLUCKY FOUR

Candlelight flickered over the yellowed parchment, illuminating its imperfections. A light breeze set the small flame dancing, sending the shadows on the parchment into a mad frenzy. A bottle of ink stood on the smooth oak table, its shadow stiller than the flame's. A quill with a peacock feather rested at an angle inside the ink bottle, looking elegant and simple in the semidarkness.

A man sat stooped over the table, his nimble fingers smoothing out crumpled and disintegrating letters. These letters were clearly ancient, and their alphabet was not English, but an odd combination of Ancient Runes and the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt. These crucial letters contained a record of the deadly experiment that had taken place many, many years ago, and the man knew that the same experiment would be repeated in less than a month. He had less than that same month to make his preparations.

He gently removed the peacock-feather quill from the ink bottle and smoothed out a new piece of parchment, this one clean and white instead of old and yellow, and pricked it with the tip of his quill, staining it. As he wrote, he thought. He thought about the four children, from wildly different backgrounds, that they had carefully chosen.

One from a normal Muggle family. He was destined to be the killer, the ruthless assassin.

One from the depths of the dirtiest part of society, the poor. He was destined to be the mastermind, the calculating genius.

One from the heart—quite literally—of the experiment. She was destined to be the healer, the cunning defender.

One from the elite, the middle child of the most famous family in the country. He was destined to be the powerhouse, the leader of them all.

These four were proof of the fact that genetic engineering—and magenetical engineering—had reached a new high. They were a new race, and the old race's only hope of survival.

The man finished writing his letter. He stared at it, unseeing, but shook himself back to life.

It was time now. There was no point in him having second thoughts.

The man sealed the letter. He added the letter, and a few other new documents, into a pile with the old. He extracted his wand from his clock and waved it, conjuring a shell of a book. He waved his wand a second time, and all the loose papers flew into and bound themselves to the spine of the book, becoming the pages. He closed the book with an air of finality, dread pounding in his chest in place of his heart. He held his wand like a pen and whispered, "Scribo." Out of nowhere, words appeared on the plain brown cover of the book, the book that was the only hope for these four damned children, in elegant golden lettering.

The Colossus Code.

Written in the letter inside the book, hidden among the many documents, was a cryptic, haunting message.

By the time you get this letter, it will be eleven years in the future. In the very book you have found this letter in, you will find a large amount of documents from the past, which contain clues. If you are one of us, you will be able to figure them out. You are special, dangerous, and powerful. We cannot tell you anything. We are being watched. You are being watched. But have hope—we will be looking for you. But so will they.

And they will find you first.


The boy had an eidetic memory—no, he had something stronger than an eidetic memory; it was superhuman. He could remember everything that had every occurred in his life, right from the moment he was born, when he had been wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blue blanket.

Despite this, he could not remember a time where he had been loved.

But he remembered his mother screaming when she touched his skin for the first time. He remembered his father scream, too. He'd been hours old, but he remembered. He remembered being delighted at the power coursing through his veins, delighted that their pain was giving him this power.

He remembered the doctors saying that there was something very, very wrong with him. He remembered all the needles they stuck in his skin, all the scans they gave him, hoping to make sense of why he destroyed everything he touched.

His skin was not normal skin. It was a weapon: a weapon that caused immense pain, and eventual death, to anything that came into contact with it.

The boy remembered being forced to cover every inch of his body. His parents put a mask on him, and gloves, too, as if that would change anything, make him any less of an abomination.

"He's a freak," his parents had said. They thought he couldn't understand, but they did not know how advanced his mind was. "We're going to send him away, so he won't hurt anyone."

"We can't send him to school. He won't be an investment banker, or a lawyer, or a doctor like we wanted. We're going to get rid of him and try again. We'll erase him from our minds. It will be just like he never existed," they said, thinking he could not understand their hateful, bitter looks.

He understood. Even some normal babies—and he certainly was much smarter than a normal baby—would understand when they were not wanted.

"He's not worth keeping. He's not worth all this trouble. He's a monster. We don't want him."

For some reason, her remembered all of this, all these terrible conversations, but he could not remember his parents' faces. Perhaps it was because he did not want to remember their faces. He did not want to remember the people who had called a baby a monster, even though he was. Is.

But he did remember that dark, cold night. He remembered being bundled up and passed from his mother's tight, rigid arms. He remembered a low, liquid voice.

"He will be in safe hands, Mr. and Mrs. Jones." But the boy knew that the man had known that the boy's parents hadn't cared whether he was in safe hands, as long as he was out of theirs.

The boy could not remember any more of the conversation, because he had fallen asleep. The darkness had been too thick.

The next few years passed in a blur, though he could remember every second of them. He could remember the date and day of the week of every day. He could remember the weather that day and what had happened to him on that day.

He learned to speak quickly. He had been less than one before words took the form of phrases, then childish sentences. He was at the mental development of a four year old at ten months old.

He could remember a woman teaching him. She encouraged him. She was pretty, with blond hair and blue eyes and a warm smile with dimples. The boy had decided right then that he liked blond hair and blue eyes. But the woman did not last; she disappeared on his first birthday.

After that, it was work and no play. He already knew shapes. He already knew colors. He already knew numbers. He knew subtraction and addition and multiplication and division. At two years old he knew these things. At three, he learned different things. They—a variety of men and women, though mostly men—told him how to defend himself. They told him how to grab onto someone just right to make them faint. They told him to always go for the eyes.

They told him to not be worried when a person fell to the ground and didn't move again.

When the boy was four, he knew how to kill. He could remember that one time where they had told him to grasp a cloaked figure in a hood. The person wearing the cloak had screamed, had begged for him to let go. He or she had said it hurt. But the boy hadn't let go. He had been taught to keep holding on until the person he was holding on to went limp, as this person soon did in a matter of a minute.

The praise came in heaps. He could remember the conversations centered around him, the eagerness.

"Look at his mental development. He's miles ahead of the average child. This in addition to his eidetic memory could mean that he has the highest IQ in the world."

"We trained him to kill from the start. Think of his potential as an assassin. Nobody would suspect a child. He would have a hundred percent success rate in his missions."

Sometimes, his future was shrouded in uncertainty.

"Will we teach him magic?"

"Will we send him to Hogwarts?"

"Are we taking a child's future away from him?"

There were always answers to these questions, however.

"We will teach him magic; it will be useful. The only thing he is good at is killing. He needs to be good at escaping as well."

"We can't send him to Hogwarts; he would kill half the school. Someone with his skin cannot be allowed in public."

"Taking a child's future? The child had no future in the first place, not with his...condition. We gave him everything."

The boy was grateful, so he did everything his superiors told him to. There was one man in particular—the very same who had taken him from his parents' home when he'd been a newborn. This one man told him to never pity, to never have mercy.

"Your parents threw you away like an unused tissue. They are a perfect example of people everywhere," the man had said. "You do not pity people. You do not have mercy for people."

"Why?" the boy had asked.

"Because they will throw you away otherwise. People are born to be killed. You do not have respect for their lives."

The boy did not understand.

"What's killing?"

And then there was a sad look in the man's eyes.

"What you've been doing all along."

The boy was silent.

"Oh. That's cool."


Society had a penchant for stepping over dead bodies and plugging their noses as they did it. They didn't give the bodies a second look. They went on to talk about what brand-name clothes they were going to buy, or what new gossip about some stupid celebrity who had never worked a day in his or her life graced the tabloids. The bodies took the role of the crumbs under the rug, swept there hastily, concealed from the ignorant eye.

But in this boy's world, the bodies were not under the rug. They were everywhere. They were draped all over the expensive furniture, all over the carpeted floor, all over the shiny coffee table. Their blood was smeared on the walls, the ceiling. Their stink was in the air.

The dirtiest, gloomiest part of the city was not illuminated. It was a waste of money to illuminate it, and the boy liked the dark. Darkness meant you couldn't see, and the boy felt special because he felt he could see in the dark when no one else could.

He could predict what mad-eyed man was about to take a knife out of his pocket. He knew what glint a rapist would have in his eyes. He could sense, if not see, the bruises behind the clothes of children, knew how many tears they had shed that day.

"Mum, I'm home," they boy said every day after he came back from primary school. In the books the boy read, the mother would respond with a hearty "It's about time!" and give him a plate of biscuits and a cup of tea and then ask him about his day.

The boy's mother did no such thing. She did not even respond. Her heart was dead. Only her body continued to work, like a wind-up doll that hadn't quite finished unwinding, even though the person who had been winding it had long since abandoned it. Usually she was upstairs. Making no noise, no sound, at least until his father came back, which was when she would start to cry and beg.

The boy felt no pity, only bitterness. They both had bruises, bruises so bad that he had to wear full sleeves and she sunglasses in public. But she had only stood aside all those times, sobbing, making a great show of pleading her husband not to hurt her son—their son. But it was just that, a show, because she had failed. She did not protect him.

She didn't even protect herself.

So bitter, so angry was the boy that he could not make himself cry when she overdosed—purposefully or accidentally, it wasn't hard to guess—and died in her sleep.

The boy hated her, but he felt more disappointed in himself than he did in her. He hadn't been worth it; he hadn't been a good enough son. She hadn't stayed for him, after all.

If possible, the boy's father was worse after that. In his drunken rages, he'd mutter things, things that made no sense to the boy.

"They're after you. You're one of them" and "You can do things."

The boy knew he could do things. He remembered everything he read, everything he learned. The boy, under ten years old, knew things better than some university students did. Sometimes he could influence people. A couple times he'd convinced his father to leave the house early, or to not be in the mood for a beating. He'd made animals do things he'd wanted them to do, too. He could even speak to snakes, though snakes didn't need any convincing to do his bidding.

But the most significant of these "things" was that he could read minds. The thoughts of people were a constant hum in his ears, like a fly that liked to sleep behind his ear. All he had to do was tune in, focus, and a person's innermost thoughts would be laid out for him to see, naked and vulnerable.

This was why the boy was so good at seeing in the dark. He could see into minds, and what in the world was darker, more obscure than the human mind?


The girl was an amnesiac. She did not remember anything before the fourteenth of February of her ninth year.

Her first memory was that it was very cold. Her second memory was that it was Valentine's Day. Couples were holding hands as they walked down the street, cuddling in the chilliness, sweet, loving looks on their faces as they regarded each other.

The girl was in the middle of the sidewalk, uncomprehending. She could not remember why she was in the middle of the sidewalk, except that she was out of breath, freezing, and hungry. She had been running, but from what, she no longer remembered. It was important, though, very important. She had been running from someone who had been chasing her, and that person would continue to chase her, whether or not she remembered.

The girl walked into a café, and it was obvious that she was the only child there. The owner of the café asked her if she was all right, if she wanted her mum.

The girl said, "Yes, I want my mum. But I forget who she is."

The owner of the café stared at her as though she were insane.

The girl could not blame him. She didn't remember anything, but she was pretty sure little girls weren't supposed to forget who their mothers were one random day in the middle of February.

At that moment, the doors to the café opened, letting in a gust of wind. The girl drew her arms about herself and shivered. A tall man stood there, and at once she was terrified for her life. The man strode toward her, his cold beady eyes fixed on her as if she were his target.

"I'm very sorry," he said to the café owner in a smooth voice. "I was looking for her everywhere."

The girl instinctively knew it was him that she had been running from. If only she'd had her memory, then she would have known why she had been running from him.

"Come," said the man, holding out a hand.

The girl did not take it. She stood there, still shaking, more out of fear than cold. "What do you want?"

"Come, dear. Come with me."

"I escaped," she said.

"You don't remember."

Those words sent a chill through her stronger than any winter breeze. He knew.

"I remember," she lied. "I remember very well. You're my...my...my..." She trailed off.

"You have never met me before," said the man. "If you remembered, you would have known that."

The girl didn't know if the man was tricking her, but she couldn't think about it, because at that moment the man had inconspicuously taken a stick out of his pocket, narrower in the front and wider in the back.

The girl seemed to know that it was a wand, though why she knew it was a wand or why she even knew what a wand was was a mystery to her.

Then the man whispered something, unnoticed in the cozy street-side café, and she didn't want to resist anymore. Her thoughts were clouded, and she thought of dandelions and flowers and bunnies, no longer afraid, no longer sentient. She took his hand and walked out, her eyes glazed over. When they reached an abandoned corner of the street, the man muttered something, there was a jet of red light, and the girl felt her feet give way underneath her.


The boy with the green eyes was used to camera flashes, the fancy dinner parties, the coos of adults saying he looked exactly like his father. He was used to dress robes, used to smiling so wide his face hurt, used to pretending he respected the people with the gaudy accessories who acted like they were the center of the universe.

But, in a way, he would never be used to being the son of a hero.

His mother had taught him to walk just right, to hold his fork just right, to wipe his face with a napkin just right. He had been briefed on what to reveal to strangers about his family. He had been warned never to touch food or drink without having it tested for poison first.

"Your father is a very special man," his mother had told him and his siblings when they had been very young. "He's a very good man, too. Special and good. But some people don't like him, because he's so good. People want to hurt him sometimes. They might try to hurt you, to hurt him. That's why you must always be very, very careful."

But the boy did not need to be warned, for he knew even better than his parents when someone wished him misfortune: he could see colored nimbuses around everyone in the ballroom. Auras. The emotions of people took a visible form for him. The politicians' superior purple auras. His parents' irritated yellow-orange auras. His siblings' bored gray auras. He could see malicious dark green auras as well, and there were plenty here in the heart of the Ministry, also known as the heart of the ambitious and the greedy.

Humans, the boy realized, were fickle creatures. They always changed auras, moods. They could never make up their minds. They hated someone one minute and loved them the next. They were happy one minute and sad the next. They were jealous one minute and proud the next. They were good one minute and cruel the next. The ever-changing auras gave him headaches, and as a result, so did people.

But auras were not the only thing the boy could see. He could tell, for instance, that the bowls of wine had magical sensors that made sure that no one under twenty-one years of age was drinking. He could also tell that the walls were lined with an invisible, enchanted sheet of magic which would put the entire ballroom under lockdown during an emergency. He could even see the little floating spheres that surveyed the occupants of the ballroom, making sure that no one had snuck a wand or other weapon inside.

Magic kept no secrets from the boy: he saw everything.

Perhaps that was why magic was so bitter. The boy could not do magic, no matter how much he strained, how much he raged, how much he cried. The boy collapsed, unexpectedly feeling ill, and was rushed to St. Mungo's on a monthly basis. The boy had to take medicines and potions, and hear the anxious whispers of his parents, wondering why he was so sick, what was wrong with him.

And he woke up in a nervous sweat every morning, panicked after his nightly terror. Sometimes he screamed, and his parents would come rushing into his room, asking what had happened, but he wouldn't be able to tell them because he didn't remember. His nightmares were clever; they tortured him, never letting him understand what they were about.

He yelled at the whispers in his nightmares. "Tell me what you're saying!" he'd screech into his pillow. "Just tell me!"

And the whispers turned into cackles and danced away from him, fleeing gleefully, taking joy in his despair.

But there was one word that they revealed to him, that the nightmares and the whispers told him over and over again.

Colossus. Colossus. Colossus.


Author's Note: I will be uploading the chapters on a biweekly schedule for now, which means the next update will be two weeks from now, on Friday, November 15. I appreciate all reviews and PMs I receive, and I read all of them carefully. Thanks for sticking me this long. I promise to try to make it worth your while!

-Crystalline