The one with the power to vanquish the dark lord approaches…

Born to those who have thrice defied him...

Born as the seventh month dies…

And yet, here was the prophecy kid, crying in his crib, having just seen his mother fall. Lord Voldemort could feel the anticipation building inside him even as he prepared to kill again. After all, even though there was nothing about this boy which could harm him, he could not take any chances. He would do everything he could to ensure his immortality.

"Avada Kedavra," he intoned for the umpteenth time, focussing yet again on the desire to summon the target's spirit to him. No shield could protect against his weapon of choice; no lesser wizard had enough hold on the spiritual plane of existence to be able to visualize a spiritual shield after all. The three unforgivables targeted the spirit with no external effect on the body. Having no physical component, no protego could block them. All the other curses had a physical effect and thus required a transfer of physical energy in addition to spiritual, and even though shields only blocked the physical components, the spiritual part of magic simply fell through without the requisite energy. This was the sole reason the Lord went for the kill straightaway, however tempting the prospect of making his nemesis bleed to an agonising end may be.

There was one thing the dark lord forgot however.

Barely an year old he may have been, but the kid had a magical spirit. Having just seen the eyes of his mama lose life, a sign even he could understand, the only thing he desired was for the bad man to go away. When he saw the bad man say the same thing he had said to his mama, he wished to be safe. Had he been older, he would have visualised a protective shield around him. But his soul knew the threat, and it was completely in control.

Lord Voldemort's killing curse met an incorporeal resistance and rebounded back towards its caster. Even as his eyes widened sensing the erratic behaviour of his magic, his spirit was forcefully summoned out of his body towards the caster: the toddler himself.

Who knew the bane of the great Lord Voldemort would be a random bout of accidental magic from an year old kid?

In moments which encompassed an eternity for the Lord, he felt his spirit being ripped away from the body he was born in. As the connection between his spirit and his brain weakened, he tried to absorb all his memories back. There is a reason a spirit needs a brain however: even if a spirit has a unique emotional and analytical signature, it is incomplete without the memories of experiences to work upon: the memories which require a physical entity to live in. Without a brain, a spirit couldn't remember. Without a brain, the Lord would be no more.

Lord Voldemort had anticipated that.

Having anchored his spirit to the physical realm through his horcruxes, he had succeeded in ensuring that his spirit would remain where it belonged. But even his body wasn't immortal. He knew one day his brain would be lost, one day his memories would be no more. Would he still be the same without all his knowledge and the events that made him the most feared Dark Lord in the world? Voldemort had spent decades preparing for the same eventuality however.

It was possible to extract thoughts from a mind in a physical form. Thoughts were volatile though, and had to be stored into the right physical bodies. He had woven all parts of his life, the ones that mattered anyway, into his horcruxes. His triumphs from childhood and the knowledge gained at Hogwarts went to the diary and the diadem. The decades of knowledge he gained from his stay in obscurity went to the locket and the cup. The triumphs from the early days of his ascension went in the ring. The only thing left was to gain a body, locate his anchors and regain those memories. The only thought his spirit had to contain was this.

The stray spirit of the erstwhile Lord Voldemort was finally expelled from his old body. It had no physical presence and no memories besides those of his horcruxes and of how to create one.

If one could sense the spiritual plane half as well as Lord Voldemort could, one could feel the spirit of a dying creature lose its tenuous hold on its body. Before the soul could escape in the depths of the spiritual realm, one had to attract it and forge a connection with it. That done, it was an easy process to feed the soul your memories, bend it to your will and take its ownership. A larger spirit meant a greater capacity for thought, emotion and reason. More importantly, it meant a greater capacity for magic.

Voldemort had done it so many times he had lost count. His old body had been brimming with spiritual energy, and the only way out was to tie some of it down to other objects. This was how he had created his horcruxes.

This time, he had to connect his own soul to something were he to interact with the world enough to regain his being. He needed to possess a body. There was just a person nearby. Even if the boy had managed to vanquish the dark lord through his accidental magic, he could not resist what he couldn't see.

The spirit found the connection of the boy's soul with his brain. It had to destroy that connection were it to conquer that body. There was just the way to do it.

The incantation was only a way to trigger muscle memory. The spirit projected the thought of the connection snapping towards its target. It needn't say Avada Kedavra, the sentiment was the same. No physical energy was required and the spirit had stolen life force to spare.

With no brain however, the spirit couldn't remember what it was doing for more than a moment however. There was only so much room in the subconscious, and the knowledge of his horcruxes was indispensable. The spirit needed a brain.

The spirit imagined a connection forming between it and the boy's mind. It pushed all its essence into the thought.

Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, was now the Boy-with-Two-Souls, though the only being who was aware of it was the spirit. And now that the spirit had a brain, it was only a matter of time before it snapped the connection of the host soul from…

"Oh my!"

...his body.

In front of the spirit was a bespectacled old man his psyche was wary of. The man had long silver beard and hair, and was muttering something under his breath, his wand pointed towards the boy. Having no memory, the spirit could not identify his actions for what they were: magical binding.

When Sirius Black had gotten one look at the corpse of his brother in all but name, James Potter, downstairs, he had assumed the worse and alerted the ancient wizard Albus Dumbledore. It had been for the best, as he was the only one alive whom the hot-headed Sirius had enough respect for to obey, and it had still been hard for the grand Sorcerer to dissuade the grief-stricken youngster from making matters worse by rushing after Peter Pettigrew, the man who it was evident now had been a betrayer. Albus Dumbledore had, after convincing Sirius to return to his home and stay safe, finally gotten the courage to check the nursery upstairs. What he had discovered there was almost totally unexpected.

There were two corpses and an alive boy. Lily had, indeed, been hit by the killing curse. But the other corpse belonged to none other than Tom. Even more surprisingly, he had been vanquished by a killing curse as well. The only thing that made sense was that Lily might have managed to catch him by surprise. But when he turned his attention towards the boy, he was astounded even more.

"Oh my!"

Dumbledore could sense power. Immense power. Having checked upon young Harry just a day earlier, he was sure this power wasn't at all natural. In fact, this amount of power could not be contained safely in a human body, much less in that of an year old child. He had to quickly bind his magic to a normal level before his body collapsed.

Dumbledore would never know that he had, in his swift actions, saved the life of one young Harry Potter from being taken over by the spirit of the late Lord Voldemort.

But as he worked, he could only conclude that the dark lord had, indeed, marked the child as his equal, and had been vanquished by the power the dark lord knew not.

Having temporarily bound the child's core, Dumbledore was faced with another issue. The binding would wear out eventually as Harry would approach his magical maturity, and it was important that his body would be ready for the inevitable upsurge in magical capacity. Were he an ordinary child, Dumbledore wouldn't have dreamed of doing what he was about to do. However, Harry was no ordinary child. No longer.

Dumbledore put the boy into enchanted sleep and summoned his ritual knife. Inscribing runes over your body was generally counter-productive: The runes consumed a lot of spiritual energy (what an ordinary wizard would call magic) and left the target with extremely lessened mental and emotional faculties. But the boy now had energy to spare.

Dumbledore inscribed a single lightning bolt on the left side of his forehead. The 'Sowilo' rune would drain a lot of his excess spiritual energy and still leave him a wizard with as much raw power as Tom at his peak. More importantly, the scandinavian rune, which signified the sun, would use the drained spiritual energy to reinforce his health and body, increase his willpower, make his intent-based magic stronger, strengthen his psychic centres and attune him to the mind arts. Sowilo was, after all, the rune of guidance, goal-setting and success.

Harry was going to be a force to reckon with. It was going to be upon him to learn his purpose… that said, Dumbledore would have to coordinate with Sirius and Remus to ensure that Harry grew up with the right values. It would be nice if Harry were to grow up away from the limelight he was sure to get in Britain as the Boy-who-lived… but would either of Sirius or Remus be willing to uproot themselves from their home?

This was, indeed, a dilemma. Harry had to be kept in relative obscurity to prevent the fame from getting to his head, but he could not be denied of familial love. Albus could not fathom what would happen if a boy with so much power had the wrong nurturing. As he contemplated his options, a solution presented itself: Harry Potter was going to be raised by his only muggle relatives. Petunia Evans would surely love the lad as her own.