AN: Been a long time, but better later than never.


When Harry had left Privet Drive he hadn't really had a plan on where to go, and seeing as he had no need for food or drink he only thing he really sought for was clothes to replace the oversized blood stained rags he was still wearing.

Walking around in blood splattered clothing was assuredly no way to not draw attention to oneself after all.

With a quick magic check for the time of day, telling him it was early to mid-afternoon Harry made up his mind.

"I need to go to a shop." Harry decided as he walked, heedless of the looks of passer-by's as they saw a preteen in bloodied rags walk down the street. "I'll need new shoes too, these things are falling apart." He noted looking at the ratty trainers he was wearing had holes in various places, in the front revealing his faded socks which also had holes in them, and through the sole as well giving little to no protection to Harry's feet.

After all, anything Harry as currently wearing were previously owned and used by Dudley, so they had seen better days before Harry had been given them.

Harry hated to do so, but he had to, begrudgingly, thank his aunt for telling him about Diagon Alley in her confession about magic and his parents so he did in fact have a direction in which to travel but with nothing but the money he'd stolen and the rags on his back, Harry had no way to get to said magical shopping district except to walk and with such crappy shoes it was going to be a mighty uncomfortable journey.

As Harry walked, he reviewed the other bits and pieces of his aunt's tale, specifically about Hogwarts and Dumbledore, who Harry remembered from his aunt's recount as the person ultimately responsible for placing Harry with the Dursley's in the first place.

"In a blanket on the front step, wonder if that's where I died from freezing?" Harry thought out loud, drawing several odd looks from the few strangers he passed by that were in earshot.

Eventually he stumbled upon a small shopping district and went crazy, for as much as two hundred seventy five pounds would allow a boy of his age to.

Hours spent going from shop to shop Harry was now was without any money but sported a new t-shirt, pants, shoes, socks and a new pair of underwear, he was so glad to be rid of the cast offs of his fat cousin. The last thing he purchased, which had used up all the money had acquired from the Dursley family, was a hat to cover the scar on his forehead, if he wanted to remain unnoticed, it made sense to hide telling features of oneself from onlookers.

'Now I need to get to Diagon Alley… where did dearest Petunia say the entrance was again…oh right, a 'dingy old pub' at Charing Cross Road.'

Now Harry had never been educated, either by the Dursley's or the school he'd gone to, to not talk to strangers because it wasn't safe, so Harry felt no ill course by picking out a random person on the street and asking them for directions.

'Eeny… meeny…miny…moe.' Harry thought looking around him at the strangers surrounding him, deciding at last when his little chant finished.

"Excuse me miss?" Harry spoke up, walking briskly to a reasonably well dressed young woman walking ways opposite on the other side of the street.

Said woman, a dainty blonde haired lady in her late thirties in a modest red skirt and white top stopped at being addressed, watching as a small child rapidly approached her.

"Is there something I can help you with, young man?" she asked, curious.

Using anything and everything he could, he managed to get the lady to give him directions to where he needed to go without getting the police involved for being out by himself during school hours unsupervised.

"Thank you very much ma'am, you've been very helpful." With these final words Harry took off leaving a bewildered woman starring at Harry's back as h left.

'What a strange boy…'

In the late afternoon hours later at the brink of evening Harry saw a sign that he'd been looking for all afternoon as he walked down the street towards Charing Cross Road in London.

'The Leaky Cauldron…what a way to hide an entrance to a magical society…' Harry mused as he walked casually to his destination, no need to draw any attention to himself needlessly after all.

Entering the pub was like stepping back in time, everything he looked at looked decades old, from the bar to the tables and chairs.

'Are those goblets?' Harry nearly gaped as he watched a patron take hold of a large steaming glass and downed the contents in one swig.

"Are you all right there, lad?" the barman asked bringing Harry back to here and now. "Not lost or anything are ye?" he asked with a chuckle. Harry kept his face blank as he walked further into the pub, stopping in front of the barman.

"I'm looking to get into Diagon Alley." Harry spoke quietly, taking his Hogwarts letter out of his pants pocket and showed the barman, the letter being the only thing that had actually been his that he's taken from Privet Drive.

"Ah, a First Year are ya?" the bar man asked with a grin. "Not to worry laddie, follow me and I'll you sorted."

The barman made it a few steps from his post behind the bar before he noticed Harry was, actually, by himself with no adult in his company.

"You here by yourself laddie?" he asked. Mentally cursing the man for his question, Harry muttered quietly to the man that he was an orphan. "Ah, that explains it, no worries laddie." The barman said patting Harry on the shoulder as he ushered Harry through the pub to a blank wall.

Harry looked at the barman a little confused, he thought he was going to Diagon Alley, and was about to ask what his deal was when Harry saw the barman pull out a long thin stick of wood and tap an odd sequence of bricks.

Harry watched, and felt, magic activate as the bricks began to shift, splitting from the middle till an archway was created, revealing an Alley with stores every which way, and a towering tall white building standing alone at the end of the path Harry was looking down.

"There ya go laddie, Diagon Alley, best be quick with your business though, the shops and bank will be closing soon." The barman told Harry before turning around and returning to his post at the bar.

Harry immediately set course for the bank, no point going to any shops if you didn't have money to buy anything after all.

Coming to the front of the white building, Harry spied a burnished bronze doors at the top of white stairs, with creatures of short stature guarding the door, both wearing uniforms of scarlet and gold standing on either side of the front door.

Walking up the stairs and coming closer to the creatures harry got a closer look at their actual appearance.

"Wow… talk about ugly." The blunt statement from Harry made the two creatures glare at Harry heavily.

"You best show us goblins respect, wizard! You'll not live to insult us again!" the now identified goblin threatened.

Harry couldn't help himself and snicker at the goblin's threat to kill Harry for his disrespect.

"I'll respect you, when you've earned it, goblin." Harry replied before moving to enter the bank. The scarlet and gold garbed goblins crossed their spears they were each holding in front of the door Harry was about to walk through, halting his progress.

"You will show respect, or you will not enter Gringotts." One of the pair demanded.

"Fine...I'm sorry I called you ugly. Happy now?" drawled Harry. The goblin's just continued to sneer at Harry, but pulled apart their spears, clearing Harry's passage into the bank.

Without another word Harry walked passed the goblins and into the bank's entrance hall.

It was a sparse hall with few, if any decorations with only a set of silver doors with words engraved onto them. These doors too, had a pair of goblin's guarding them, these two with swords instead of spears.

'Ooh…scary.' Harry thought mockingly before passing through the silver engraved doors.

Or he would have, if he didn't halt mid step as he felt his body pass what he felt was a line of magic at the threshold of the doors.

His stopping at the door drew the attention of the goblins either side of Harry, both drawing their swords in sync.

"Come with us, Wizard." They demanded, a door appearing on the side wall of the entrance hall.

Shrugging his shoulders Harry did as they asked and followed one as the goblin led him through the door to a long passage, doors all along the way, with the other of the pair trailing behind Harry. Harry did take notice that the door he'd just walked through with the goblins close by itself and vanish as if there wasn't one there at all.

'Isn't that interesting…' Harry mused quietly as he walked for a few minutes till the goblins stopped at a door and ushered him inside.

The room was dimly lit, with circular rings carved into the floor with only four torches in each corner as a source of light. Aside from the door Harry had come through, which closed behind him, there was only one other door, with no windows or any other defining features.

Harry could also feel an ambient pulse of magic within the room coming from the floor's circular pattern, though he couldn't identify what the feel of the magic was meant to do.

'Wonder if they want me to stand in the centre of the circles?' Harry thought sarcastically before moving to stand in the middle of the room on top of the rooms' innermost circle.

In a room adjacent to the one Harry as occupying, a team of goblins, curse breakers to be precise were analysing the data that was being taken in from the examination matrix Harry was standing on.

When Harry hit the entrance hall threshold, he's triggered an alarm that informed the goblins by the silver door that the person seeking entrance to the bank was cursed and needed to be examined to identify the nature of the curse on said person, and their purpose for coming to Gringotts while being cursed.

Let it not be said that the goblins of Gringotts didn't take the security to the extreme.

They had a reputation to uphold.

As the information was being recorded for the curse breakers to read through, the many goblins eyes widened as they read the only two bits that their analysis matrix were able to identify.

One was soul magic in form of a horcrux.

The other was a soul ritual that protected the one intended from their soul being removed from the body.

"Horcrux! Destroy it!" one of the curse breakers yelled out, a sentiment that the other curse breakers wholeheartedly supported, as they bolted from the room to fetch a dragon to burn the horcrux to cinders, and Harry along with it.

Harry meanwhile was closely observing the ripples on the floor with his fingers, his magic gliding over the intricate patterns as his magic brushed over them to better understand what it was that these circles were used for.

For the next 7 minutes Harry was lost to all but the feeling of his magic as he touched the magic on the concentric floor pattern, until the floor began to rumble.

'Wonder what's goin on…' he wondered. 'The floor is solid stone, so my magic says, so whatever it is that's making the ground shake is really big…and it seems to be getting closer.'

Normally the goblins of gringotts wouldn't dare think to bring a dragon up from the lower levels of the high security vaults, as dragons were ridiculously hard to control, even after they had been properly conditioned via torturous methods; but the curse breakers were in a hyped state of mind after seeing Horcrux on the analysis of the examination matrix and that type of magic made goblins lose their mind in a pursuit to have that type of magic destroyed.

So the Curse breakers had retrieved an Ukrainian Iron Belly, and were using clanker's (an item to make loud noise that the dragon was trained to expect to feel great pain after hearing if it didn't move) to direct it to the room that Harry was still in.

With a start, Harry saw the door opposite the one he had come through, open, and a loud clanging noise hit his ears, right before he saw the maw of a dragon opening its maw, feeling the room's temperature increase massively within seconds.

"Oh son of a-"

The room was engulfed in fire.


AN: another chapter done, what will happen next?

a big thank you to all that have reviewed and those that read the story in general, even without all that many reviews knowing that the story is being read makes me happy.

New methods/ ways that Harry can die that HAVEN'T already been done are more than welcome to be submitted, i will use any and all methods you can think of.

Read and Review