Imprisoned in the Past Pt III, The Mark of the Reaper

by Slytherin7Piece

The third and final instalment of the Imprisoned in the Past trilogy. The war is now starting to kick off as little Harry Potter begins his Hogwarts career. Meanwhile, Harry Peverell works to finish his task of defeating Voldemort while dealing with all of the unexpected problems changing the timeline has caused.

Foreword: This is the final part in the trilogy, the story thus far has been building to the point where Harry Potter from this timeline begins Hogwarts. Now things are going to change slightly. I have decided to incorporate little Harry's P.O.V into the story as we go along.

To this point, this timeline's Harry hasn't had much screen time. There are two reasons for this, the first being that I am in my thirties and find it difficult to write something from a child's perspective and make it seem realistic. I have nieces and nephews so I know exactly how young children act but sadly I'm too old to remember how they think.

The second reason is that up until this point in the story, Harry from this timeline is living a sheltered life. He's happy and healthy and doesn't have anything particularly interesting going on in his life.

I could have covered all the milestones in younger Harry's life and focused on older Harry watching himself grow up but that would have doubled the length of the story and we wouldn't be where we are now. I have read stories that do this and they are usually pretty good but I chose to focus more on older Harry's family life.

Most time travel fics I've read wrap things up too early, in my opinion. Harry goes back twenty or thirty years into the past, fixes things in the span of a few years and that's that. The only time we get to see the original characters from the book (Hermione, Ron, Neville, etc) is in a short epilogue at the end of the story. I cannot really throw stones in this regard as I did the exact same thing in the first version of this story, Coming of the Reaper but I want to do things differently in this story.

Which is why there was a necessity for part two of this story. Harry is now an established member of this timeline and has been for almost a decade. He has a wife, kids, a career, and is well-liked by most of the magical community. Truthfully I could have made part two much longer simply because of the amount of time it covered but as I said earlier, if I had done that we wouldn't be where we are now.

I will begin writing the first chapter of this story this week but I figured I would put the foreword up ahead of time.