Harry Potter: Pursuit of Power

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

Chapter 1. Metamorphosis

11:30 PM

18th June 1996

The Ministry of Magic – Atrium

Sure it was over, sure Voldemort had decided to flee, Harry made to run out from behind his statue guard, but Dumbledore bellowed:

"Stay where you are, Harry!"

For the first time, Dumbledore sounded frightened. Harry could not see why: the hall was quite empty but for themselves, the sobbing Bellatrix still trapped under the witch statue, and the baby phoenix Fawkes croaking feebly on the floor

And then Harry's scar burst open and he knew he was dead: it was pain beyond imagining, pain past endurance.

He was gone from the hall, he was locked in the coils of a creature with red eyes, so tightly bound that Harry did not know where his body ended and the creature's began: they were fused together, bound by pain, and there was no escape

And when the creature spoke, it used Harry's mouth, so that in his agony he felt his jaw move

"Kill me now, Dumbledore…"

Blinded and dying, every part of him screaming for release, Harry felt the creature use him again…

"If death is nothing, Dumbledore, kill the boy…"

Let the pain stop, thought Harry… let him kill us… end it, Dumbledore… death is nothing compared to this…

And I'll see Sirius again…

And as Harry's heart filled with emotion, the creature's coils loosened….

- excerpt from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

… and the creature desperate to regain its slipping control reached out blindly to the magic that forged a connection between itself and its victim almost fifteen years ago hoping to gain another foothold in the boys mind, not knowing that the lightning bolt scar which stood as a symbol of its greatest failure to date contained more than just magic. So mangled was the creature's soul that it could no longer recognize a piece of itself underneath the agony caused by trying to possess Harry Potter. But the pain became unbearable before it could gain control of the connection that existed between itself and the boy and it was repelled from the boy's body. The creature did not know then that its act of desperation had set in motion a small chain of events that would end with giving Harry Potter the tools to engineer its downfall.

01:00 AM

19th June 1996

Hogwarts – Headmaster's Office

Harry closed his eyes. If he had not gone to save Sirius, Sirius would not have died… More to

stave off the moment when he would have to think of Sirius again, Harry asked, without caring

much about the answer, "The end of the prophecy... it was something about neither... can live..."

"… while the other survives," said Dumbledore.

"So," said Harry, dredging up the words from what felt like a deep well of despair inside him,

"so does that mean that… that one of us has got to kill the other one… in the end?"

"Yes," said Dumbledore.

For a long time, neither of them spoke. Somewhere far beyond the office walls, Harry could hear

the sound of voices, students heading down to the Great Hall for an early breakfast, perhaps. It

seemed impossible that there could be people in the world who still desired food, who laughed,

who neither knew nor cared that Sirius Black was gone forever. Sirius seemed a million miles

away already; even now a part of Harry still believed that if he had only pulled back that veil, he

would have found Sirius looking back at him, greeting him, perhaps, with his laugh like a bark…

"I feel I owe you another explanation, Harry," said Dumbledore hesitantly. "You may, perhaps,

have wondered why I never chose you as a prefect? I must confess… that I rather thought… you

had enough responsibility to be going on with."

Harry looked up at him and saw a tear trickling down Dumbledore's face into his long silver beard.

- excerpt from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

As Harry climbed down the staircase which led to Dumbledore's office, the cocktail of emotion and adrenaline that had kept him going for the past few hours died down and gave way to a bone deep wariness. His scar which had mercifully remained painless since he repelled Voldemort's possession had started throbbing again, albeit in a different way than before. The pain he had previously experienced from his scar had been localized around the scar though varying in magnitude from tiny pin pricks to being stabbed in the head with a hot poker. But now he felt as if something vast and incomprehensible is spreading out from his scar to smother him. For a brief instant he considered going back to Dumbledore's office but dismissed the thought as soon as it occurred to him. He wasn't in the mood to meet with the headmaster so soon after their talk. He wanted to rest in a place where he wouldn't be disturbed.

Before he knew it his feet had carried him to the room of requirement. He paced in front of the wall three times while thinking of a place where he would be able to rest and not be found by anybody. The room provided him with a comfortable bedroom with a décor similar to the Gryffindor dormitories. Harry closed the door behind him and collapsed on the bed and within a few minutes gave in to the smothering darkness which had been steadily encroaching upon his mind since the failed possession and which he mistakenly assumed was exhaustion, not knowing that his actions since leaving Dumbledore's office were not entirely his own or that he had just started the hardest and most important struggle of his life.

01:20 AM

19th June 1996

Hogwarts – Room of Requirement.

Almost fifteen years ago when the creature known as Lord Voldemort was struck by a rebound killing curse, a tiny piece of his mangled soul split apart from the rest and without an adequate vessel for its storage would have perished. But by a stroke of fortune it managed to find remnants of its master's magic in the lightning bolt scar on Harry Potter's forehead and managed to find a home in the scar. But the soul fragment was not willingly separated from its owner and the scar was not a properly enchanted vessel and hence despite possessing all the memories of Lord Voldemort from his birth to the moment it was created, it had no cognizance and none of the other characters shared by its brethren except for a tenuous connection to the original. So it had remained dormant while unconsciously sustaining its existence by continuously leeching a little magic from its host and imbuing a few of its powers to said host. It had been kept weak and at bay by the protection its host's mother had woven into not just his blood but his very soul by the act of ultimate sacrifice. But since Lord Voldemort's resurrection it had started gaining strength and when he tried to use the piece of soul as a foothold to possess its host, it gained even more strength and more importantly the brief but intimate contact with another part of itself has gifted it with true cognizance. The part of Lord Voldemort which existed in Harry Potter had, for the first time in its existence, achieved a sense of self beyond the most basic instinct of survival. This made the soul fragment even more similar to a true horcrux and as is the nature of such existence it had started to influence its host with the ultimate goal of subjugating and possessing him.

The accidental horcrux immediately spread the insidious tentacles of its influence on its host's mind. When the boy felt something wrong and thought to seek help from his headmaster it used his emotional trauma and physical exhaustion and subtly planted thoughts in his mind to make the option seem unappealing and made him isolate himself from any external influence in the room of requirement and once he was alone it attacked with all its strength to achieve its goal.

But before the horcrux could take over the host's body it had to overcome the protection weaved upon him by his mother, a Sentinel whose sole purpose was to protect Harry Potter's mind, body and soul from all harm. The nature of this sentinel was in many ways the polar opposite of a horcrux, as a horcrux was created by splitting one's soul in an attempt to escape death while the sentinel was a construct created by the sacrifice of Lily Potter's life, magic and her very soul for a single purpose. It had a limited form of cognizance in that it could detect and understand any threat to its host and respond accordingly by utilizing and molding its' host's magic into a form that would defeat the threat as it had before when quirinius quirrell had been rendered incapable of touching Harry Potter without being grievously harmed or much more recently when it had utilized Harry's overwhelming emotions to expel Lord Voldemort from his body.

And like before the Sentinel responded to the horcrux's attacks, however this battle unlike the previous ones was against a piece of soul which while comprising of only a fraction of a Lord Voldemort's power had all the skill and experience of the brilliant wizard and also an instinctual understanding of both Harry Potter and the Sentinel due to almost 15 years of proximity and the timing of the attack could not be worse as Harry's magic which was the fuel for the Sentinel's work was exhausted from his previous battle.

The Sentinel had, with the limited intelligence bestowed upon it had recognized this disadvantage and had deduced that it could not repel this attack by itself even while utilizing Harry's magic as the horcrux too with its increased cognizance had started leeching a higher amount of Harry's magic to do its bidding. So as a desperate act it wrenched Harry's consciousness from the depths of his mind and fused with it to extent it had never done before.

Heavily burdened by grief and exhaustion, Harry had until this point, only been peripherally aware of the Struggle between the two entities his body had been playing host to. But when the Sentinel fused with him he had instantly gained the knowledge which until then had only been available to the sentinel and became aware of the nature of his tenants and understood the consequences should the soul fragment succeed in its attempts. And so with every attempt the horcrux made to further spread its influence on its host's mind and magic, Harry guided by the Sentinel learned and evolved. He learned how to infiltrate the horcrux's mind and how to take control and utilize its own magic against it from its attempts against him and when it sought to protect its own slightly inferior supply of power, he learnt how to defend and purge his own magic from foreign influence and proceeded to do just that and while the horcrux was still reeling from being cut off from his magic, he gathered all the magic available to him and attacked it with the intent to shatter its newly gained cognizance. In this he had succeeded in that his attack shattered the horcrux's hastily assembled defenses and then using the horcrux's earlier tactic he sent several tendrils of his own power to infiltrate the horcrux's magic and started siphoning its own power to add to his own and when he once again gathered a sufficient amount of power, he sent an even stronger attack and this time he succeeded in piercing through the soul fragment's remaining defenses, and entered its mind and at once he was drowned in a deluge of foreign memories.

More than Five decades worth of memories belonging to the darkest wizard in recent memory assaulted Harry's mind with force of a freight train and seared themselves onto his brain. Yet, Harry whose will power and sense of self are stronger than they had ever been weathered the assault and had only become stronger for it. He gathered his magic one more time and with the Sentinels guidance molded it for a final assault, this time to completely expel the broken and mangled piece of Voldemort's soul from his body. And when he struck, the "horcrux" if it could even be called that anymore did not even put up a token defense as it exited his body and died an ignominious death. The only sign of its passing was a tiny puff of black smoke which exited the lightning bolt scar which adorned Harry's forehead and dispersed with a tiny scream.

03:17 PM

19th June 1996

Hogwarts – Room of Requirement

It would not be a huge overstatement to say that the Harry Potter who woke up in the Room of Requirement was a markedly different person than the one who went to sleep almost fourteen hours ago. He woke up feeling well rested and also ridiculously hungry. But before he could procure any food, he needed to freshen up. As soon as the thought popped up into his mind a door appeared on the wall in front of him. A glance at his wrist watch showed that it was almost half past three. An absence of windows prevented him from finding out if it was afternoon or the dead of the night and once again like an omniscient god bent on fulfilling his every wish the room created a window on another wall letting in bright sunlight and giving him a beautiful view of the Hogwarts grounds. He got off the bed chuckling slightly and walked to the new door and opened it only to be greeted by an exact replica of the bathrooms on the Gryffindor tower.

He exited the bathroom half an hour later buck naked feeling (and probably smelling) much better than when he entered it. He needed to go to the Gryffindor tower to get and fresh change of clothes as his current ones were very dirty and he didn't want to traipse all the way to the kitchens in them. They were so dirty that even the normally gentle and eager to please elves would probably kick him out on principle. But, he didn't want to go the Gryffindor tower and face all his house mates either. So he thought it was time test a new spell.

He twirled his wand carefully in a complex motion and pointed it at his dirtiest sock and intoned

"Mundis Vestimentum"

He grinned as his sock twitched and shook itself as all the dirt on vanished from its surface. He quickly repeated the spell on all his articles of clothing and felt a surge of satisfaction as the spell worked perfectly every time. Maybe it was slightly pathetic that he was so pleased with a simple cleaning spell when Voldemort was well on his way to creating a horcrux at his age, but he couldn't help it. He had always felt the same whenever he had mastered a new spell regardless of its use and that part of him hadn't changed despite him possessing over 50 years of Voldemort's memories. He supposed that was a good thing. It was also slightly amusing that among the huge amount of spells and other assorted magicks he learnt from Voldemort, the first spell he needed was a simple cleaning spell. As he reviewed Voldemort's (and now also harry's) memories he was astonished at the sheer breadth of his knowledge. He had heard many times that the depth of Voldemort's knowledge of the dark arts was unparalleled. That much he now knew to be true. But the dark arts formed only a fraction(though a large fraction) of Voldemort's knowledge. Voldemort's mastery of more mundane magicks like transfiguration and charms was perhaps surpassed only Dumbledore in Great Britain. He also now knew exactly what set people like Voldemort and Dumbledore apart from other witches and wizards. He had heard the many wizards being praised as gifted or brilliant but both Voldemort and Dumbledore existed in a league of their own. Their powers were on a completely different plateau.

Voldemort had always possessed an intimate connection to his magic, intimate enough to allow him a remarkable amount of control long before he started at Hogwarts. And when he attended Hogwarts, he managed to learn and master new spells at an astounding rate. Harry always thought Hermione was a genius but even she paled in comparison to Voldemort. Voldemort had achieved a level of skill in his magic that he no longer required incantations and only required minimal wand movements for all except the most complex of spells.

Experiencing all of Voldemort's memories had left Harry with a cocktail of conflicting emotions. Admiration for his skill, tenacity and cunning, hatred for his actions against Harry and so many other innocent people and disgust that despite all the skill and knowledge he would let his hunger for immortality cripple his potential to such a large extent.

Horcruxes Harry thought, were a vile magic not just because of the actions necessary to create one but the act of splitting one's soul would cripple a person in ways that could not be adequately explained by words. Harry had a unique perspective on the nature of a horcrux. To date he had fought and destroyed two of those abominations, one of which was so uniquely entwined with his own magic that he doubted such a situation had ever occurred to anyone before. He had experienced the memories of a man whose mental state had degenerated with every horcrux he made. It was a testament to Voldemort's will power that he retained enough sanity and clarity of thought to make complex plans even after mangling his soul so badly.

But his flaws were also glaringly visible in that he was too easily controlled by his hatred. Despite all of Snape's proselytizing about Voldemort taking advantage of fools who wear emotions on their sleeves Harry thought that Voldemort was also one such fool though he had not always been so. When he was young Tom riddle had been much more in control of his emotions. While Voldemort as he currently was also exercised a remarkable amount of control normally, his control slipped much more frequently and for more petty reasons. Harry ascribed this change to Voldemort's horcruxes. Tearing a part of one's soul off creates an emptiness that could only be filled with powerful dark magic. Voldemort knew enough spells to utterly obliterate Harry in dozens of different ways, but every time Harry faced him Voldemort's first instinct was to use the killing curse. Harry had previously wondered why that was, after all while his mother's protection prevented Voldemort from killing him while using spells like the 'Avada Kedavra' it didn't prevent him from say conjuring a rope and hanging Harry from it or conjuring enough water to drown him. He now knew that the Killing curse could if only temporarily fill the void in Voldemort's soul and dull the constant ache that Voldemort felt ever since making his first horcrux and which only grew with every new horcrux he made.

Even among the spells classified as dark magic, only a few created this curious effect, the cruciatus curse being another example, but none managed to dull the ache for as long as the killing curse. Voldemort had researched this phenomena mostly through trial and error and he found out that the more powerful the victim of the killing curse the longer the void was filled and the pain kept at bay. And so like a drug addict seeking his fill to get high on, Voldemort couldn't resist the temptation and hence reverted to throwing around killing curses whenever Harry was near.

Voldemort's memories also provided Harry with the knowledge to perform an adequate assessment of his own skills and potential. Harry could now honestly say that his skills and knowledge before gaining Voldemort's memories while better than most of his peers were still abysmal. They were not even comparable to a 16 year old Tom Riddle let alone 70 year old one. But Harry also recognized that he had a lot of potential, perhaps to one day even rival Voldemort himself.

Harry had been able to master the patronus charm and repel more than a hundred dementors when he was thirteen and had been able to best Voldemort in a contest of will power of magical power when he was fourteen. Of course Harry knew now that Voldemort having just been resurrected was not at the height of his powers but Harry too was exhausted from the third task of the triwizard tournament and had not yet grown into his full powers.

But Harry also recognized that his approach to his education was remarkably cavalier, especially for someone whose life was threatened enough times that he ought to have learned more than school yard spells. Voldemort had in his seven years at Hogwarts devoured any knowledge he could find at an astonishing pace while Harry himself had learned the barest minimum he could get away with. The only times he really applied himself were when he learned the patronus charm and during the tri-wizard tournament and both times it had been only to prevent himself from being embarrassed in front of a crowd than any real desire to improve himself. Even after Voldemort's resurrection Harry had spent an entire year moping around while bitching about Dumbledore and Umbridge and once again doing nothing to increase his skills. The only slightly useful thing he had done the whole year was teaching the DA the few spells he had mastered in the previous years. Though the fact that only five of them responded when called for help was pathetic and spoke of his nearly nonexistent charisma. Harry had now recognized that he had been far more desperate to live up to people's expectations of him than to really live. He was pretty sure now that if his mind didn't get dumped with Voldemort's memories he never would have found the desire to live up to his true potential.

Harry surmised that the glaring differences in both Tom's and his own attitude toward their education lay in their childhood. While at first glance, to an outside both of them would appear to have a similar childhood, both orphans with unhappy living conditions it couldn't be farther from the truth.

Tom was born in an orphanage in a country still reeling from the great depression and the First World War. The abundance of orphans created by the war and a scarcity of resources caused by the economic crisis had created a very Darwinian atmosphere in the orphanage. Tom had at an early age learned to be more sly and cunning to get better portions of food or better toys to play with. He learned to outsmart his fellow orphans and charm their minders. Most of his earlier accidental magic was caused in his attempts to escape from older and bigger bullies. He learned at a young age that whenever such strange events occurred the bullies would leave him alone for a while. So he learned to control these strange powers at first to protect himself and then to threaten other younger kids to do his bidding. What the other older kids did with their fists and legs he learned to do more efficiently with his powers and eventually made every other kid in the orphanage fear him. Young Tom had perhaps rightly so considered himself special. He had big dreams and bigger ambitions and so had also channeled his considerable mental faculties towards academic pursuits and consistently stood at the top of his class. But then he like so many other muggle-born and muggle-raised children had been blindsided by an invitation to Hogwarts. Learning of the existence of an entire world of people like him, of wizards and witches enraged and excited him in equal amounts. Enraged because he was told he was not as special as he thought himself to be and excited to learn more about his powers. On his arrival at Hogwarts he found himself placed in the Slytherin house where he had been treated with scorn and derision for his common muggle name. But Tom was always a fighter, he poured all his effort into proving himself to be superior to all those who mocked him. And at this he succeeded as within a few years he grew from his position as an outcast in his house to someone who was both admired and feared.

Harry on the other hand lived in an oppressive environment where he was discouraged from doing anything other than his assigned chores and keeping his head down. The Dursleys never encouraged him to do well at school. Any noteworthy academic achievement had been met with only indifference and scorn. And on the rare few occasions that he performed accidental magic he had been punished heavily. So Harry was used to coasting along at school and by the time he had come to Hogwarts the habit had become so ingrained that he was actually amazed that he remained an above average student.

Harry shook himself of from his rather lengthy musings a he finished dressing himself in his now clean clothes.

He pointed his wand at his hair and cast a hair grooming spell that Voldemort had funnily enough learned from Abraxas Malfoy when they were both in school. It took three iterations to get his hair into a decent looking mop, though Harry had no illusions getting it to stay that for long.

"Postati Kameleon" Harry muttered and tapped his wand on the top of his head and felt a cold tingle spread across his body as he successfully cast a disillusionment charm for the first time. As he exited the Room of Requirement, he checked himself and felt that his disillusionment charm though nowhere near the level of Voldemort's was as good as the one cast on him by Mad-Eye Moody. Voldemort himself was capable of turning himself almost completely invisible with a disillusionment charm. The mark of a good disillusionment charm was not only how well the charm mimics the background of the user but also how fast it adapts when a user is moving.

Voldemort was capable of a charm powerful enough to keep him completely invisible while running at his top speed. Harry may have a long way to go till he reached that level but he still felt that his first attempt was remarkably successful. Though it should be expected as Harry's knowledge of the spell was not just academic as he had memories of countless hours Voldemort spent mastering that spell. So he knew exactly how to mold his magic to get the best results. And as Harry attained better control over his magic his spells would inevitably improve.

As Harry moved along the corridors taking care to step out of the way of the occasional student he pondered on how to increase the control he had over his magic. The most commonly used method was practice. The more Harry practiced magic the better his control, but there were ways to speed up the process. Ritual magic is remarkably useful for such endeavors. It amazed Harry that very little was known about the nature of ritual magic to the general wizarding population. The prevailing opinion was that ritual magic was both dark and dangerous, which was true to an extent. Ritual magic was classified as dark because it was dangerous. Rituals are generally used to achieve results which are highly complex or powerful to achieve via normal spells. But when a spell is messed up the result usually varies with how powerful the spell was and how badly it was messed up. But for rituals of which even the simplest are more powerful than most spells even the slightest errors in the ritual circle can have disastrous and often fatal consequences for the user. So using ritual magic requires a large amount of study of the properties of the runes and the properties of the materials used to draw the runes and that was for using pre existing rituals. Designing rituals on the other hand required an even more extensive study and a knack for dangerous experimentation. So even highly accomplished wizards preferred using a series of overlapping spells achieve effects that could not be achieved by a single spell rather than dabbling in ritual magic. But ritual magic had some inherent advantages that could never be replicated by spells regardless of how many were used. It is well known among the academia that some of the oldest and longest lasting enchantments were cast using specially designed rituals.

And then there were rituals of the kind that Harry was pondering which were designed to help a wizard achieve his true potential. These rituals forcibly mold the user's magic in certain patterns (usually corresponding to individual wand movements) or a variety of elemental manipulations using the lowest amount of magic necessary while simultaneously letting the user feel the entire process intimately so that the user after performing the ritual a few times will then be able mold his magic in all the patterns with a high degree of finesse while reducing or even eliminating wand movements corresponding to the patterns. Voldemort had used these to help him achieve a seamless mastery of the molding patterns corresponding to all the commonly used wand movements and also to give himself a high degree of control over fire spells which eventually led to him being able master fiendfyre to an astonishing level. Harry needed both these rituals as mastering individual molding patterns would lead to an overall increase in his skill and he also needed to master fiendfyre to destroy Voldemort's remaining horcruxes when he obtained them.

Harry dissolved his disillusionment charm as he stopped in front of the portrait guarding the kitchens. He tickled the pear and the painting swung open and he entered the kitchen all the while planning his future.