JKR owns Harry Potter and characters (obviously). Please start from Philosopher's Stone or most of the back story will be confusing. Same notes as all the others. This is the last installment of the series and will contain some post-war chapters toward the end in place of the epilogue (1, 5, 10, 15, and 20 years later). Thanks as always for reading.

Once this is complete, I'm considering continuing this in a collection of shorter one-shots post-war as well as additional content from the existing stories. If there's anything you'd like to see more of in those respects, please leave a comment or message me.


Chapter 1 - Edgeir Borgin

Eyes rolled furiously behind closed eyelids to a bright surge of green light and a vortex of warm flames. Lizzie skid into a dark basement and was completely covered in soot. She stood up slowly but felt shorter as she dusted off the soot from the fireplace. She was smaller, skinnier, like she hadn't hit peak adolescence yet and spent a month or more with very little to eat.

She'd been here before and remembered it, vaguely. Lizzie looked about the room with piercing curiosity, straining her eyes to focus on the dim light. She moved toward shelves that lined the walls and her eyes fixed on familiar dusty jars. She was seeing them through less ignorant eyes with sudden dawning recognition of what they were this time.

The jar labeled with a faded strip of tattered parchment as human ash - muggle human ash, she knew to be Renee Riddle. Lizzie watched as flames danced across the surface of the glass encasement and the girl's face flashed with fear. She fell back like a severed marionette and then her skinned body burned to crisp until Lizzie no longer had the stomach to watch.

Next to the jar was a stack of small bones, likely from hands, labeled muggle bones through a thick web of cobwebs. The longer Lizzie looked at them, the more they started to look like bodies lining a church floor. In the shadows of the tiny bone bodies, one was dug up like the girl only Lizzie ever saw in Petunia's garden, the shelf now covered in dirt. Nora Zabel.

The second jar contained a human heart in a yellowing fluid, it seemed to beat still just ever so slightly. It was covered in what looked to be mold. Scared little eyes shone through the glass back at Lizzie, just the eyes. Emily Teller.

On the shelf below, severed feet that had long since decayed were in a glass box. Petite hands reached out around the back of them to pull them close to a body that no longer existed. Amelia Smith.

The feet's next-door neighbor was a flagon of reddish-brown fluid that had thickened with time, labeled Meladictus Blood. Thick vines moved through it like snakes and a scroll sat next to it. She picked it up but couldn't break the seal to open it. Adrianna... Nagini.

Lizzie heard a man trudge down the basement stairs and concealed herself behind the shelf. It was Borgin, the shop owner, collecting something for his show room. He muttered to himself, and Lizzie made an inadvertent noise in her attempt to listen. His eyes shot toward the shelves, and he gave the contents a dark look. After looking up and down for signs of movement, he clenched his jaw noticeably tight and swallowed a tremor that ran through his skin.

Lizzie moved into the room when his footsteps retreated up the stairs and she noticed a jar that surely wasn't there before. It was opaque, and she couldn't see into it through the outside. She lifted the label, turned it in her hand, and froze at the writing. The first line read 'ophidian remains,' and the second 'Azalea Potter.'

Lizzie opened the jar and peered in through the top hole. A hissing sound filled her ears immediately and her eyes opened wide as saucers. The jar shattered when it slipped from her grip, and she looked across the room at a younger Tom Riddle looking back through the dusty mirror on the wall. It wasn't until she saw her scared reflection when she realized she was thirteen again and froze in place. The dead looking hand on the mantel of the fireplace she'd entered from opened and black smoke billowed into the air, suffocating them. Lizzie looked down at the shattered glass as small black snakes moved through the shards. Her insides churned. Riddle laughed, not the high-pitched cackle she'd heard from Voldemort, but the presumptuous, condescending laugh from a younger Tom Riddle. The handsome one, the intriguing one, her twin from another generation. The boy who left the top of his year to work at this shop. The young man who set out to pay a debt he didn't know how to satisfy. In the process of doing so he mutilated his soul, created six horcruxes from six girls, the last bits of their bodies on the shelves for safe keeping because he knew even Borgin would not touch them.

Lizzie shuddered violently. He was behind her now, standing over her shoulder. Just thinking about defying the bond sent her reeling in pain. He held her neck with his hand, so she'd look straight up at him. It was then she knew that all was lost, the war was won, she was trapped here with him forever.

The bell above the door rang out and a young woman entered the shop above judging by the voices that could be heard overhead. Riddle's hand wrapped around Lizzie's head to cover her mouth while they listed.

"Can I help you?" Borgin asked in the tone he used with witches and wizards who didn't look the lot of which would enter his shop.

"Yes, actually," the woman said. She sounded young and sweet mannered, but curt and familiar. Lizzie could anticipate her words before she heard them.

"Do you have any historic artifacts, ones that once belonged to Hogwarts, say founders, or perhaps professors in the early half of the century?" She asked.

"Came some years too late..." he said a little darkly. "Used to have a few," he added. Riddle smirked.

"Anything interesting? I'm writing a book on some Hogwarts legends and legacies within house archives," she said evenly. She was lying, Lizzie knew she was lying but didn't know why or how exactly.

"Jewlry, founder artifact, long gone now," he said. "I don't think anything here currently has any affiliation with the school."

"Shame... you didn't ever sell anything related to Ravenclaw, the founder or notable professors, have you? Sorry, partial to my house is all," she asked.

There was a pause. "No... no not that I recall," he said like he'd rattled his brain some. "What's your name darling? You look a little young to be writing a book," he asked curiously.

"Mandy... Mandy Brocklehurst. I graduated Hogwarts the year before last, been hesitant to join the ministry with all the uncertainty... political climate being what it is...been traveling in the hopes of getting a book published..." she explained.

"Best of luck then," he said a little dismissively. If she could have seen his face, he would have looked unconvinced. The man had his eyes narrowed on her intently. She was average height, very thin, with black, wavy hair tied in a messy ponytail with a noticeable burn on the side of her forehead and face, and glasses bespeckling a pair of vibrant green eyes. He didn't notice her pick up a rolled up scroll next to a snake and woman artifact and tuck it into a messenger bag.

The bell rang again on the door and Lizzie moved to slip up the stairs in the hope to follow her, but Riddle held her back in a firm, uncompromising grip. In her ear she heard him whisper "I won." For a devastating moment she was back in her old bedroom at Privet Drive, and then she was waking up to light from a high overhead window. The air around her was as dingy as the room itself, and she pulled at the remnants of a ponytail that sat in a knot behind her head.