Part 61

Harry felt his feet slam into the ground; his injured leg gave way, and he fell forward; his hand let go of the Triwizard Cup at last. He raised his head. They had obviously left the Hogwarts grounds. Harry was not sure exactly how far they had travelled but since the mountains usually surrounding the castle was gone as well he figured it was very far.

"I hate how you people travel", Dorian grumbled as he got up and looked around. "Now where the heck are we?" Harry looked around. They were in an overgrown graveyard. He could see the black outline of a small church beyond a large yew tree to their right. A hill rose above them to their left. Harry could just make out the outline of a fine old house on the hillside.

"Where are we?" Dorian asked again.

"I don't know", Harry groaned and Dorian carefully helped him up.

"Did anyone tell you the cup was a Doorkey?" Dorian asked.

"No… I had no idea it was a portkey."

Dorian wrapped Harry's arm around his shoulders and looked around. He sniffed. He could make out a weak scent. He was sure he recognized it but he couldn't place it.

"Is this part of the task?" Harry asked him.

"Not sure… keep your wand at a ready as Remy says."

"Yeah," said Harry and gripped his wand tightly. He kept looking around him. He had, yet again, the strange feeling that they were being watched.

"Someone's coming," he said suddenly.

Squinting tensely through the darkness, they watched the figure drawing nearer, walking steadily toward them between the graves. Harry couldn't make out a face, but from the way it was walking and holding its arms, he could tell that it was carrying something. Whoever it was, he or she was short, and wearing a hooded cloak pulled up over their head to obscure their face. And - several paces nearer, the gap between them closing all the time - Harry saw that the thing in the persons arms looked like a baby. . . or was it merely a bundle of robes? Harry lowered his wand slightly and glanced sideways at Dorian. He blinked in confusion when he saw Dorian tense and being to snarl. The figure stopped beside a towering marble headstone, only six feet from them. For a second. Harry, Doiran and the short figure simply looked at one another. And then, without warning, Harry's scar exploded with pain. It was agony such as he had never felt in all his life; his wand slipped from his fingers as he put his hands over his face; his knees buckled; he was on the ground and he could see nothing at all; his head was about to split open. From far away, above his head, he heard a high, cold voice say:

"Kill the spare."

"Run Harry!" he heard Dorian say and then he heard a snarl and Dorian bolted forward in wolf-form. Harry scrambled up and turned around. He noticed Dorian jumping and snapping at the short figure who was now armed with a wand. Curses came flying from it and Dorian jumped aside of each and tried to bite the person or tear their throat out. Harry hurriedly turned again and started limp-running into the darkness. He had not gotten far though when he suddenly heard a painful yelp. He twirled around and saw Dorian lying on the ground, slowly turning back into human form. His right arm appeared to be broken and the right side of his chest and stomach was badly burnt. He was obviously in huge pain. He looked at Harry and saw the fear on the boy's face. Their eyes met and Dorian's amber eyes were filled with pain. Harry took a step forward to help but Dorian shook his head and with a roar he transformed again and bit into the stomach of the figure approaching. They screamed in pain and Harry heard that it was a woman screaming. She threw a curse at Dorian's head and he jumped off her. Harry noticed he could not use his front leg.

"Dorian run!" he shouted but Dorian did not listen. He saw the woman raise her wand again. "Dorian!"

"Avada Kedavra!" the woman shouted.

"DORIAN!" Harry screamed and a green light exploded into the night. The pain in his scar reached such a pitch that he retched, and then it diminished; terrified of what he was about to see, he lifted his gaze. Dorian lay motionless on the ground in human form. He held his still left arm stretched out towards Harry. He was dead. For a second that contained an eternity, Harry stared into Dorian's face, at his open amber eyes, blank and expressionless as the windows of a deserted house, at his half-open mouth, which looked slightly surprised. And then, before Harry's mind had accepted what he was seeing, before he could feel anything but numb disbelief, he felt himself being pulled to his feet. The short woman in the cloak dragged Harry toward the marble headstone. Harry saw the name upon it flickering in the wandlight before he was forced around and slammed against it.

TOM RIDDLE

The cloaked woman conjured tight cords around Harry, tying him from neck to ankles to the headstone. Harry could hear shallow, fast breathing from the depths of the hood; he struggled, and the woman hit him.

"Quiet", the woman hissed. She then checked that all the knots were tight enough. Once sure that Harry was bound so tightly to the headstone that he couldn't move an inch, she drew a length of some black material from the inside of her cloak and stuffed it roughly into Harry's mouth; then, without a word, she turned from Harry and hurried away. Harry couldn't make a sound, nor could he see where she had gone; he couldn't turn his head to see beyond the headstone; he could see only what was right in front of him. Dorian's body laid some twenty feet away. Some way beyond him, glinting in the starlight, lay the Triwizard Cup. Harry's wand was on the ground nearby it. The bundle of robes that Harry had thought was a baby was close by, at the foot of the grave. It seemed to be stirring fretfully. Harry watched it, and his scar seared with pain again and he suddenly knew that he didn't want to see what was in those robes. . . he didn't want that bundle opened.

He could hear noises at his feet. He looked down and saw a gigantic snake slithering through the grass, circling the headstone where he was tied. The woman's fast, wheezy breathing was growing louder again. It sounded as though she was forcing something heavy across the ground. Then she came back within Harry's range of vision, and Harry saw her pushing a stone cauldron to the foot of the grave. It was full of what seemed to be water - Harry could hear it slopping around - and it was larger than any cauldron Harry had ever used; a great stone belly large enough for a full-grown man to sit in. The thing inside the bundle of robes on the ground was stirring more persistently, as though it was trying to free itself. Now the woman was busying herself at the bottom of the cauldron with a wand. Suddenly there were crackling flames beneath it. The large snake slithered away into the darkness. The liquid in the cauldron seemed to heat very fast. The surface began not only to bubble, but to send out fiery sparks, as though it were on fire. Steam was thickening, blurring the outline of the woman tending the fire. The movements beneath the robes became more agitated. And Harry heard the high, cold voice again.

"Hurry!" it screeched.

The whole surface of the water was alight with sparks now. It might have been encrusted with diamonds.

"It is ready Master", the woman said.

"Now... " said the cold voice.

The woman pulled open the robes on the ground, revealing what was inside them, and Harry strangled yell. It was as though the woman had flipped over a stone and revealed something ugly, slimy, and blind, but way way worse. The thing had the shape of a crouched human child, except that Harry had never seen anything less like a child. It was hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. Its arms and legs were thin and feeble, and its face flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes. Just for a second Harry found himself thinking that even Hagrid's cursed Skrewts were way prettier but just as nasty as the thing the woman carried. He shook the thought away though. This was not the time to channel his inner Sirius… He looked at the woman again. The thing she carried seemed almost helpless; it raised its thin arms, put them around the woman's neck, and she lifted it. She carried the creature to the rim of the cauldron. For one moment, Harry saw the evil, flat face illuminated in the sparks dancing on the surface of the potion. And then the woman lowered the creature into the cauldron; there was a hiss, and it vanished below the surface; Harry heard its frail body hit the bottom with a soft thud. He really wished for it to drown. He closed his eyes and really wished for it, then he heard the woman talking.

"Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son!", she said.

Harry's eyes flew open when the grave at his feet cracked. Horrified, Harry watched as a fine trickle of dust rose into the air at the woman's command and fell softly into the cauldron. The diamond surface of the water broke and hissed; it sent sparks in all directions and turned a vivid, poisonous-looking blue. Next she pulled a long, thin, shining silver dagger from inside her cloak. She spoke with a calm voice. A voice Harry realized was of someone who hd accepted their fate.

"Flesh - of the servant", she said. "Willingly given, you will revive your master.

She raised her left hand and she gripped the dagger very tightly and swung it upward. Harry realized what the woman was about to do a second before it happened - he closed his eyes as tightly as he could, but he could not block the scream that pierced the night, that went through Harry as though he had been stabbed with the dagger too. He heard something fall to the ground, heard the woman's anguished panting, then a sickening splash, as something was dropped into the cauldron. Harry couldn't stand to look. But the potion had turned a burning red; the light of it shone through Harry's closed eyelids. The woman was gasping and moaning with agony. Not until Harry felt her anguished breath on his face did he realize that she was right in front of him.

"B-blood of the enemy", she panted. "Forcibly taken… you will… resurrect your foe."

Harry could do nothing to prevent it, he was tied too tightly. Squinting down, struggling hopelessly at the ropes binding him, he saw the shining silver dagger shaking in the woman's remaining hand. He felt its point penetrate the crook of his right arm and blood seeping down the sleeve of his torn robes. The woman, still panting with pain, rumbled in her pocket for a glass vial and held it to Harry's cut, so that a dribble of blood fell into it. Then she staggered back to the cauldron with Harry's blood. She poured it inside. The liquid within turned, instantly, a blinding white. The woman, her job done, dropped to her knees beside the cauldron, then slumped sideways and lay on the ground, cradling the bleeding stump of her arm, gasping and sobbing. The cauldron was simmering, sending its diamond sparks in all directions, so blindingly bright that it turned all else to velvety blackness. Nothing happened. Had Harry's wish come true? Had the thing drowned?

And then, suddenly, the sparks emanating from the cauldron were extinguished. A surge of white steam billowed thickly from the cauldron instead, obliterating everything in front of Harry, so that he couldn't see the woman or Dorian or anything but vapor hanging in the air. Then, through the mist in front of him, he saw, with an icy surge of terror, the dark outline of a man, tall and skeletally thin, rising slowly from inside the cauldron.

"Robe me," said the high, cold voice from behind the steam, and the woman, sobbing and moaning, still cradling hr mutilated arm, scrambled to pick up the black robes from the ground, got to her feet, reached up, and pulled them one-handed over her master's head.

The thin man stepped out of the cauldron, staring at Harry and Harry stared back into the face that had haunted his nightmares for so many years. Whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes and a nose that was flat as a snakes with slits for nostrils… Lord Voldemort had risen again.

TBC NO! Dorian my baby! *cries*