The battle waged around them, spells flashing power back and forth, shield spells thrown and deflecting death. Who would have thought the Forbidden Forest would be the battleground for this final magical war.
Harry had thrown a power shield around himself and Hermonie who lie unconscious next to him.
"'U' 'N'", Harry said. "I know it means something". He glanced quickly at Hermonie's prone figure. "Hermonie, this spell won't last much longer and all I have are these dumb letters that Professor Trelawney had written before she was killed."
"I don't know. 'U' 'N' or 'UN'", he reflected. Pausing Harry considered that they could be grouped.
"Maybe, 'Un', like the prefix", he thought, "Un like opposite. Ummm, Un...happy, un...loved, unbearable."
"Wait!", Harry stopped, "What had Voldemort said this to him 'It will be your undoing boy'".
"Oh god, Hermonie, He Said looking down, "Voldemort said it to me. 'UNDOING'. He's not just going to undo me he's going to undo it all."
Harry blinked. It was not accident that the battle is here in the forest. That ancient statue Harry and Hagrid had found earlier in the year is not just a statue of an hourglass -- it is an artifact.
"An 'Undo'er'", Harry muttered.
Binns had told them some of the artifacts legends. They had been recorded since the first magicians.
An undo'er was reported to have the power to take the artifact user back in time, much like a time turner. But in doing so it also undid the things that happened. The user would age backwards as well but would still retain all that they knew. The past could then be replayed. History could be re-written afresh. Much like a child who asks for a 'do over' because he failed at part of a game. You could go back in time to get things right.
A loud explosion jolted Harry back to the present. The shield had collapsed and he was now vulnerable. Well, shield or no, he needed to get to that statue before Voldemort. He quickly moved Hermonie behind a large tree hoping that she would be safe.
As took his first step, Harry looked up and noticed that another figure was advancing into the clearing toward the moss covered hourglass statue. Harry poured on the speed and sprinted toward the old statue. As he was just about to reach it, he tripped over a root and went crashing into the statue head first and knocked himself out.
The Dark Figure... Voldemort stepped up the statue pedestal touching the stone hourglass and hunched over. He pulled an old rusty key that hung around his neck and put it into a keyhole that appeared in pedestal. The world stopped.
Harry opened his eyes. He was lying on the ground, his head against something hard. He put his hand up to touch his head and felt wetness. Then, Harry heard a low gravely voice "Potter... why am I not surprised to find you here", he said. Harry rolled over and looked up. Standing over him was Tom Riddle -- Lord Voldemort.
Voldemort smiled -- crooked teeth holding back the laugh that would be forth coming.
"You thought you be the death of me, but you see I can not die", snickered the dark figure. "By the prophecy, one of us must die at the hands of the other, so Harry it will be you and it will be today"
Harry looked around himself; a sphere surrounded Voldemort, himself and the hourglass artifact. It looked like a giant soap bubble the battle frozen about them. Spells were in the process of being cast, some just about to reach their targets.
Harry looked where he and Hermonie had been just a few moments before but instead of the tree shielding her body, there was a large gash in the earth and tatters of bark and shreds of the robe that Hermonie had been wearing. Harry could just stare in disbelief.
"You want to undo all this, don't you Harry?" smiled Voldemort. "Of course you do. I tell you what Harry, I'll undo it, erase it, it will never have happened. Oh yes, my boy, that I'll do."
"We're going to erase much", Voldemort said thoughtfully. "I'm going to wipe clean all this mess and go back to and make things right – as they should be."
Voldemort turned the key and the whole image around them flashed and blurred.
The contents of the bubble were going backward through time. All the events outside the on that last day were being erased. The point at which Trelawney had been struck down, Harry could see it. That had been miles away, yet he could see it quite clearly as if here were right there before him. He could see himself waking that morning, that which was to be his last morning at Hogwarts being wiped away.
But he also saw other things too. He saw all the events that happened in that day, everywhere he looked. He could see Aunt Petunia making Breakfast for Uncle Vernon. Harry could see around the entire world and know for that brief instant what was happening everywhere. He could even see for the briefest moment an image of Voldemort standing within the forbidden forest chanting some spell. Then that too was undone.
"Do you know boy that all I need to do is to push you beyond the shell of this spell and I'm rid of you! Push you out there and you die, Potter. You'd be torn apart in the reverse current of time and be erased. Your feeble essence will smear itself over time. You'd be dead and I'd be rid of you".
Another day had sped past being erased, removed from time. Harry stood and stared at the scenes before him, time was reversing faster and faster, events removed before their eyes.
"And I", Said Voldemort, "will continue back where I can retake my form of the day, but I'll know all that I know now, I'll be as powerful as I am now, but I won't make the same mistake about you. You won't be born."
"Such a sad day. Don't you think"? Voldemort sneered.
Weeks were streaming bye now faster than before, each week cut from time, undone. Harry braced himself against the pedestal he was weak, his head spun. Harry could barely stand and his left hand grabbed onto something -- a string like loop -- for support.
Voldemort moved slowly over to Harry and put his hand around the back of Harry's neck. "I don't see any reason to wait any longer", he said as he grabbed Harry and starting pushing him to the edge of the spell bubble.
Harry was still weak from the blow he had receive on his head. He knew that as soon he left the bubble, layer-by-layer of him would be left in different times and would be erased. He would die. Holding on as well as he could Harry tried to resist the force pushing him toward his own death. His knees buckled and fell over, toward the edge of the undo'er's spell edge.
Harry clutched the string loop. Whatever he was holding onto prevented him from getting those last few inches to his death. Voldemort, kicked at him and Harry felt whatever was holding him give way. It buckled and then broke. Falling shoulder first, Harry instinctively put out his had to stop himself and fell against and through the surface of the bubble. Screaming Pain shot through his hand as it was erased out of existence. Harry continued to slip forward thinking "No he can't have won"
And so Harry Potter died.
Voldemort eyes crinkled with delight as he stood alone in the undoing sphere. He had won! The prophecy had been fulfilled. One had died at the hands of the other. Voldemort would survive.
What Voldemort had failed to notice was that Harry had been clutching onto a loop of twine that held the key which operated the undoing artifact. Voldemort had worn the key around his neck. When Harry had fallen holding the key string, it had bent the shaft of the key and finally broken it. The shaft of the key had been pulled out of the spell sphere with Harry. The mechaninsm controlling the artifact permanently jammed.
Time continued to be undone outside the sphere, but there was no way to halt the undo'ing spell. The broken remains of the key were firmly jammed in the pedistal never to be removed. Thus Voldemort and the sphere continued to travel back into the past forever. The sphere traveled past when the prophecy was uttered, past when Harry was born, past even when his parents were born.
Voldemort moved beyond his own birth. His essence was held within the undoer sphere. He then existed outside time forever -- never born, never dead.
As one undoes the effects of his or her life, there comes a time when its effect becomes smaller and smaller until the point where that fact that you never existed has no consequence on the flow of time. That time comes certainly before you were born.
So it was with Voldemort. Time restarted, you could say, at the point unaffected by the dark lord. It flowed from that point as if there were no break. The universe, the world moved forcefully forward again.
New lives were woven together in that new time that had not been before. Its shape had changed yet remained remarkably familiar to what had gone on in the last running of time.
There came a day in the new magical world, when a boy was born to a loving mother and father named Harry. He grew as boys do. He was neither famous nor marked in anyway different from any others. Surrounded by friends, uncles and loved ones, he grew and was blessed with strengths and weaknesses but possessed nothing too terribly different from his peers.
In years to come he would go to the magical school of Hogwarts, meet special friends whose friendship would last a lifetime. He learned in the ways of his parents and would become a man, a wizard. He would do right and try to minimize his wrongs. Eventually he would die, as we all must, as just an ordinary wizard.
In all of us there is a hero. That hero waits until the right external events arise. Without those events, that hero is unknown, even to ourselves. Such was the case with the boy known as Harry Potter and with his closest friends in this new world: Draco, Ron, and Hermonie.