"Are you done crying yet?"

Remus opened his eyes. In front of him, though hard to see through his watery eyes, was Nyarl. "What do you want?!"

"At this moment? For you to stop your wailing. It's disgraceful, and frankly unnecessary."

"Unnecessary? You bastard, I just found out that my best friend's son, my nephew practically, is possessed by a fragment of the most horrible wizard in the world!" Remus shouted, hoisting himself to his feet. "At least show some sympathy!"

Nyarl replied, "Don't blame me. In fact, you should be thanking me. If it wasn't for my intervention, you wouldn't know, nobody would know, and that fragment would have had years to influence Harry, Vernon, Petunia, and Dudley's minds in horrible ways. That and those other enchantments wouldn't have been found. The hospital neglected to tell you, but they were cast by Albus Dumbledore. You can owl them and check, if you don't believe me.

"Frankly, I don't," Remus growled.

"That hardly matters. What does matter is that you're now currently free of his mind control, and so are Harry and his relatives," the god said. "And I don't appreciate your attitude. I have given you two tasks, and both have lead to improvements in your life. I have given you two rewards, and both have massively improved your health. You would be a sick, pathetic man right now; Sirius Black would be rotting, forgotten, in Azkaban's high-security wing; nobody would be searching for the traitorous rat; the Dursleys would have lived full of malicious spite for the next decade and a half; the Grangers wouldn't know that their daughter is a witch; the DMLE wouldn't have discovered the rampant obliviations happening in their department; and Harry wouldn't even have a chance of getting free. A lot of good things have come your way because of me, and I won't stand for you shouting at me in moody angst. Grow up."

Moony had hardly expected so thorough of a chewing-out that it shocked him a bit. He swallowed the retort building in his throat and took a second to think about what Nyarl had said. "You're right. Thank you."

"Good. Now, if you are done moping around, I have another task for you."

Remus eyed the young-looking god. "What is it? And what exactly are all these tasks accomplishing, anyway?"

Nyarl grinned. For an instant, not nearly long enough to understand but more than enough time to see, Remus caught a glimpse of the real Nyarl, the creature hidden behind the guise of the older Harry Potter. It was indescribable. "Chaos, Remus, chaos. Everything I've had you do so far has started a chain of events that will increase the number of players in the game and increase the number of actions each can take. Neither good nor evil, it is freedom. Now, presently, there is a prophecy in play; normally, I would despise prophecies, but in this case, the prophecy actually foretells a future that easily removes an inhibitor of chaos. In short, I want Harry to finish killing Voldemort, preferably without dying himself. There are a couple ways this can come about, but the one I'm interested in also is the one where you don't die right next to your future wife."

"I like that plan too," Remus agreed.

"Obviously," Nyarl drawled in a way that reminded Remus of Snape. "This is why I want you to learn and use the one curse that could save Harry Potter from an unnecessary death."

"That's brilliant!"

"There's just one problem," Nyarl replied. "Remember how I said I would never ask you to kill someone? Well, learning that curse and using it would very likely get you killed. I can't have that. The curse is the 'Dementor's Curse,' which would allow you to remove a soul from a body and consume it for power — in other words, you could pluck Voldemort out of Harry's head and eat it for lunch. Using it without the right preparations, however, would turn you permanently into a dementor yourself."

Remus looked green. "Is that really necessary?"

"No. Of course not. But the only other option that results in the removal of the soul shard from Harry's head is resurrecting Voldemort and having him and him alone murder Harry with the killing curse," Nyarl replied. "Well, you could always summon the Grim Reaper to help you, but that would be a catastrophically bad idea, worse than bringing back Voldemort."

"Right... fine, dementor's curse it is." A wave of nausea shook Remus's stomach. "Where do I start?"

"In Hogwarts, there is a hidden room on the seventh-floor corridor that you and your friends never found. It fills itself with what the user needs, hence its name: the Room of Requirement. It has its limits on what it can physically do, but it can provide you with all the information you need. Start there." Then, without warning, Nyarl vanished into thin air.

"Wait!" Remus shouted to nobody. He scowled. "I'm not a student. How am I supposed to get into Hogwarts?" The soft rustle of parchment caught Moony's ears. He turned and found a blank, folded mass of parchment that he recognized instantly. "Oh. That works."

Sneaking into Hogwarts was nothing new to Moony of the Marauders. Sneaking in without James, Sirius, and Peter was, as was sneaking in without James's invisibility cloak and without being a student. In fact, it would be especially awkward now if he was caught by anyone, teacher or otherwise since he definitely looked nothing like a student now.

Disillusioned, silenced, transformed, and running on all fours, Remus made his way through the castle with lightning speed and phantasmal stealth. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, pushing every one of his already heightened senses to never-before-reached extremes. Every tiny noise in the old stone castle sounded like a thunderous boom to Moony's ears, and the faint scents of students smelled like an approaching horde of approaching enemies.

Moony, of course, was having a blast. Despite being arguably the calmest of his old quartet, Moony was the adrenaline junky of the group, the one who got his jollies on a good, heart-pounding adventure. This? This was exactly what got him hot and bothered.

He made his way up to the seventh-floor corridor. Starting at one end, he made his way down the hall, searching for any sign of the room he so desperately needed. It supposedly had the information he needed to save Harry within it, and he wasn't going to give up on finding it, no matter how hard it was.

Reaching the far end of the hallway, he'd finished checking the right wall. He turned around and started checking the right, formerly left, wall. Again, seeing nothing he turned around once he made his way to the end of the hallway. He transformed back to human and drew his wand. This time, instead of looking for something visually, he started looking for something magically.

The sound of stone grinding against stone made Remus jump. Panicking, he ducked around a corner and peeked out. He saw nobody. Instead, he found a door where there hadn't been one before. 'Brilliant,' he thought to himself.

When he walked inside, he found a table piled high with books, a potions bench stacked with tool and ingredients, a large, and a raised platform of stone. Behind him, the door slammed shut and vanished, leaving only a thin crack in the mirrors that encircled the room to show where it had once been. Remus walked over to the table with books on it and found two books that were opened. The one on the left was opened to a page listing the "Speed Reading" charm. The other listed the instructions for the "Remember This!" charm.

"This room is bloody brilliant," Remus proclaimed. The mirrors on the wall seemed to reflect a little brighter, as if proud of itself. Grabbing the book on the memory charm, Remus began to read.

His enthusiasm for the wonders of the room faded very rapidly. He'd come in seeking power to save a life, and the room was determined to see that exactly that happened, and as quickly as possible.

At first, it was pleasant, with the room taking care of his needs. A bed would appear when he needed it, food would arrive when he was hungry, and though he could hear the students outside, it barred them from entry if they tried. But as time went on, it started becoming petulant and demanding. If Remus tried to read the books out of the order it prescribed them, or tried to read other sections than the ones it said, it slammed the books shut on his fingers. If he spent time goofing off — because really, who could focus indefinitely? — it threw the next book at him.

Of course, the did give him breaks from the reading, but it seemed insistent that he spent that time on more practical things. If the room wasn't unsubtly implying that he should be working on his target practice or raw magical output, it demanded that he exercise by creating weights, gym equipment, a running track, or a pool.

The room also messed with his sense of time. The glowing light was constant, and aside from the noise outside (which seemed unusually sporadic and random), he wasn't quite sure how long he'd been in there. It had to have been a few days, at least. A week?

And then he exhausted the room's supply of light and gray magic that it wanted him to learn. He'd enhanced his body with all the magic it had shown him, and taken most of the potions save for those with really rare ingredients. But now, It wanted him to learn and use black magic.

"Are you sure this is really necessary, room?" a concerned Remus asked.

The room said yes by throwing the book at his head again. Remus deftly caught it in one hand but took the hint anyway. "Fine."

Of the spells he learned from that point on, the first spells were the ones that were legally dark — that is, they were labeled dark by the ministry, and thus were illegal to practice normally, but weren't terribly dangerous or evil. Those, Remus had no problem with. It was the other spells, however...

A goat materialized next to the stone dais, chained to a post. Everything else in the room had vanished, save for one book, a bowl made of black stone, and an obsidian dagger.

"Seriously, Hogwarts! This is getting a bit messed up."

Another book dropped onto Remus's head. He grumbled and opened it to the bookmarked page, and read the underlined section. "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is, first and foremost, an institution of learning. The founders all unanimously believed that there was no subject worth omitting from the curriculum. Though the curriculum has certainly expanded in some areas as new discoveries were made, politics has seen the curriculum shrunk in other areas, most notably in the areas of dark magic. In the early days of Hogwarts, students were taught how to safely and responsibly use their gifts to the fullest extent, even if it involved magics of the foulest kind.

"It was the dream of Godric Gryffindor that one day, one of the students of Hogwarts would discover a way to purge the evil from magic, so that sacrifices need not be made in order to achieve one's goals. This dream has yet to be realized."

The book vanished from Remus's hands the moment he finished the passage. "Fine, I'll do it," he said. Hogwarts seemed pleased.

He ended up having to eat the goat's heart raw while sitting in the middle of a circle of blood. It wasn't as bad as he was expecting. In fact, the wolf in him asked for more, since the heart tasted so good. He ended up eating the whole goat.

The room had started getting outright creepy after that. Meals came less and less frequently in the form of mounds of food (he was still eating obscene amounts because of his second payment from Nyarl), and more and more frequently in animals for him to hunt. And when he did get cooked food, the drink with it was nearly a quart of fresh blood. There was no other supply of fluids in the room, save for the potions he made, and the room wasn't letting him out.

One of the werewolves he'd met a while back said that pig's blood looked, smelled, and tasted almost exactly like human blood. Remus prayed it was pig's blood he was drinking. He knew now that the room could only provide him things that were in the school or on the school's extensive grounds, and he knew that the grounds often served as farmland for Hogsmeade village. He just couldn't ever remember seeing any pigs.

He really prayed that it was pig's blood.

Finally, mercifully, the room decided that he was done. The last books it gave him were ones he'd already seen, opened to the pages that detailed potions or rituals that he couldn't do yet (needing certain celestial alignments), didn't have the tools for (how in the world was he supposed to find Atlantean Glass?), or didn't have the ingredients required (dementor bones?!). Remus made a list of what he needed to get and still needed to do. Then, finally, the room let him out.

Remus emerged from the room a different man — more of a monster, really. The room's insistence that he eat raw meat and his isolation meant that he'd taken to spending practically all his time in his other form. The constant exercise and high-protein diet had made him put on a lot more muscle, and the body-augmenting magics had only exacerbated that. The blood magics had caused his eyes to turn crimson in both forms, while the runic magic had littered his torso with symbolic scars.

The room of requirement had taken the battle-hardened soldier of the war against the Death Eaters and had mixed it with the remains of the beast that lay strewn across Remus's mind. It had taken that, thrown it to the forefront of his mind, and then plainly reminded him that he was on a mission to save his honorary nephew (his pack) from the clutches of the Dark Lord's soul.

When he arrived back at his home, he found a stack of letters waiting for him. He went to pick them up, but a hand grabbing his own stopped him. He glanced over his shoulder. "Nyarl."

"Remus. Don't bother with those yet. You're on a time limit, you know. Take them with you."

"Nyarl, I just got home. I want to rest," Remus replied tersely. "The room held me hostage for... how long has it been?"

"A month."

"A month?!" Remus shouted. He could have sworn it was only two weeks. "Sirius should be out by now!"

Nyarl shook his head. "Another prisoner started a fight, one of the human guards got hurt and Sirius got a black eye. Some of the nastier inmates blamed the fight on Sirius, and their friends backed them up. The guard seemed all-too-happy to keep Sirius for the rest of his sentence since everybody 'knew' he was a dirty, rotten Black. He'll be out for sure next month."

Remus growled. "Damn..."

"As for you, I believe you have some ingredients and tools to collect," the chaos god remarked.

"Yeah, about those..."

"If you recall, one of the rituals you performed was one that granted you extremely enhanced senses, especially those that are purely magical in nature. If you try, I expect that you might find yourself quite capable of using both mind reading and practical divination. That is why I had the room teach you that, after all," Nyarl said.

"Wait, that was you who made the room teach me all that stuff?!"

"Of course. You are my employee. I hardly want you being incompetent on me."

"And the blood and animals it fed me?!"

"That was all you, Moony. The wolf spirit isn't gone from your body at all; it was merely made into a part of you. Subservient to your will it may be, but it is neither silent nor passive within you," Nyarl explained. "You were hungry, and Hogwarts cares for her students, especially one that came back of his own free will and at risk to himself."

"Note to self: never tell a Ravenclaw that the school wants them to stay. They'll never leave again," Moony remarked. "Alright, so you want me to divine the locations of these ingredients, right?"

"That I do," Nyarl said. "A bit of advice: you may have to travel to North America for an Atlantean Glass."

"I see. Thank you."

"No," Nyarl replied, grinning, "thank you."

Remus dug out his old divination textbooks and his crystal ball, mildly surprising himself with the fact that he hadn't thrown them away. He began the exercises listed in the book, and to his monumental surprise, found that they worked. Images started appearing almost instantly in the ball.

With a few supplementary spells, Remus gave himself the ability to hear whatever he was seeing. Though he found the future to be murky and unclear, the present appeared before him as clearly as the world seen with his own naked eyes.

Now, he should have been looking for the things on his list. However, he couldn't help himself; he had to see Sirius. The vision appeared in the crystal ball, and with a flick of his wand, Remus transferred it to his mind's eye. To him, it now appeared as if he were floating invisibly, silently, and intangible in Sirius's room. He could feel the distant chill of the Dementors circling the higher floors, and he could see Sirius pacing the small cell as Padfoot.

Grabbing his wand, Remus said the incantation for the astral projection spell, forcing it through the vision. Forming around where his mind's eye was currently hovering, the slightly translucent image of his body took shape. As it was intangible and would make no sound until Remus spoke, Padfoot didn't notice it at first. But when he did...

Padfoot jumped several feet in the air, landing against the wall as Sirius. "Oh, bloody fucking hell! Lord Anubis!" He bowed deeply.

Remus's mind blanked for a second. Then he remembered what he currently looked like. Glowing eyes, canid head, translucent, appearing without warning in a heavily warded cell... Yes, that completely looked like the Egyptian god of the dead, Anubis. Considering that the gods of most of the world's major mythologies did actually exist and regularly talked with wizards the world over, concluding that one was currently sharing your prison cell wasn't unreasonable. But in this case, it was wrong.

Remus burst out laughing. "As flattering as your respect is, when we get to the afterlife, I'm so telling Prongs that you mistook me for a god." He laughed some more. "Score one, Remus Lupin. Let it forever be known in Marauder history that I am the godly one."

"Remus! Seriously?!"

"No, you're Sirius. I'm the godly one, remember?" Remus quipped.

Sirius groaned. "Yes. Fine. You're the godly one, Remus. How in the bloody world did you get here, and why do you look like a bodybuilding Egyptian god?"

Remus chuckled, echoed by his projection. "That is a long, complicated story that just keeps getting weirder." He preceded to tell an abbreviated version of it.

When Sirius was up to speed, the dog-man summarized it quite elegantly: "So... you're on a divine quest to save my godson and screw with the world by causing ripple-effect chaos?"

Remus compared that statement to his own mental version of events. "Yeah. Bloody hell, it's a god-tier Marauder prank, and we're not even the masterminds." He pretended to sob dramatically.

"So, which god is it? You never said. Is it Eris, Set, or Apep? Who?"

"He's never said explicitly, but I'm almost absolutely certain it's Nyarlathotep," Remus replied. "The thought of working for an outer god is a bit disconcerting, but so far, he'd been nothing but helpful."

"Yeah, but he's an outer god and a chaos god..." Sirius sighed. "Remus, if that's true, you're already in it for the long haul and there's nothing anyone can do to save you. You can't save you now if this goes sour. You said he's offering you a choice each time, but I bet he's saying it in just the right way that you pick the choice he wants you to every time."

The Anubis-lookalike averted his gaze. "Yeah... I know. I've always suspected, really. But what choice do I have? Play his game, or... well, I don't know what will happen to me, to us. He claims that if I hadn't played his game from the beginning, you'd be up in the high-security wing, forgotten. It would be years before you get out. I think he wants you in his game as much as he wants me."

"At least he wants us alive and in play, so to speak. That's something, right?" Sirius put on his signature grin, though it was a little more hollow than usual.

"That it is."

"Also, when I get out, Dumbledore's second on my list, just below Peter. I don't care about anything else he did, but what that man has done to Harry is inexcusable. I solemnly swear that I am going to tear that man a new one," Sirius vowed. "Even if I have to make a-" Suddenly, Sirius clapped his hands over his mouth and shook his head. "No, I am NOT going to finish that sentence," he stated after pulling his hands away.

The projection of Remus snorted. "I won't ask. Anyway, stay out of trouble. I'll see you in a few weeks. Right now, I've got some things to find. Later, Padfoot. The godly one is out~"

Cutting the flow of magic, Remus returned his awareness to his ramshackle shed of a house. He really needed a good job right now; his house was at the limit of what magic could keep together, and he really needed a new place. No... wait... "I have a job!" Remus cheered. "I can ask for anything, even money, as payment!"

Then another thought occurred to him. "How am I going to afford these ingredients now?"

As if answering his question, a paper airplane appeared out of nowhere and hit him in the head. Remus, now terribly sick of things being thrown at his head, crushed the plane when he caught it. Then, unfolding the crumpled paper, he read the message on it. "You don't even know where they are or how much it will cost. It could be free, for all you know. And are you not a wizard?"

Apparently, Nyarl had a sense of humor. Not one that Remus found funny, but a sense of humor nevertheless. Rolling his eyes, Remus returned his attention to his Crystal Ball. He had a list of things to locate.

Ironically, an Atlantean Glass, a supposedly mythical divination tool, turned out to be the easiest thing to locate and acquire by far. All he needed was one international portkey and fifty US Dollars. It turned out that, to muggles, the glass appeared as only a large ball of quartz with a metal band around its equator. To Remus, it looked like exactly that, except the image he saw through it didn't match what was on the other side of it, even factoring in the distortion. It looked like a novelty toy, to be honest, yet it was what Remus's divination told him that he needed.

As he walked out of the store, he felt compelled to look at the city's skyline through it. Holding it up to his face, he found that he had only one thing to say: "Atlanta. Atlantis. Dear Merlin, we're stupid." He promptly put the quartz orb into his magical pocket and vowed never to speak of what he saw through it. It just wasn't worth it. As he left, he could have sworn that the sun was shining from the other direction.

Now back in the city of London, which was distinctly less insane than Atlantis, Remus set about trying to acquire the last of his ingredients. Several of them happened to be together in one location. The problem was that the location and the ingredients within were all owned by a hag, and a particularly crazy one at that. Remus thought hags ate children but assumed that he would be safe because of his age.

That was not the case. He still had the wounds from her fork in his side, right above where his liver was.

The wolf in him was, of course, quite pissed that something would dare assume that it was higher than him on the food chain. He'd bit the hag in return. From there, everything went a bit fuzzy. At least he was leaving with the ingredients he needed. And she'd made him lunch, too. Without babies. Because that would be weird.

Yes, that was what had happened. Remus nodded to himself, assuring himself that he did not just rip a hag's heart out of her chest with his bare claws and eat it in front of her dying eyes. When that didn't work, he pulled out his ever-present chocolate and ate a few squares to get the taste of blood out of his mouth.

For the last thing he needed, the dementor bones, he apparated to the North Sea. There, he withdrew his broom from his pocket and took to the skies. With his divined directions assisting him, he flew until the chill of the wind (blocked by a warming charm) transformed into the unholy chill of the dementors.

In his chest, one of the permanent spells he'd done on himself activated, and like a sudden firestorm, heat blossomed in his chest. The soulfire was a warm, hopeful flame, one that drove away the chill with remarkable ease. It was, in essence, an internalized patronus for only himself.

But it also served as a beacon for the dementors. Their shrill cries pierced the air, letting Remus know that he would have company very soon. He touched down on the island and withdrew a shrunken trunk. Unshrunken and then engorged, it stood on its side now twice the height of a man. Remus opened the lid, revealing another, similarly massive trunk. That trunk contained another, which contained another, and so on — like a set of nesting dolls. Each trunk was expanded, which meant that each trunk, when the whole setup was closed, was further away from normal reality than the trunk above it.

Perched at the very edge of the island, facing inland, Remus looked at where the dementors were coming from. Readying his wand and straddling his broom, he prepared for the split second opening he needed.

Like a flood of darkness, dementors swarmed out at him. Remus twisted his wand and flicked it upwards. He did not say the spell most often said before an approaching swarm of dementors; he said a spell never before spoken in their presence: "Accio closest dementor!"

The hapless monstrosity found itself unexpectedly tugged towards Remus, which was fine with it, and then shoved into a box, which was not fine with it. It screamed its protest, which went unheard as the nesting trunks shut themselves.

Tapping the outermost trunk with his wand, he shrunk and lightened the whole ensemble, stuck it into his pocket, and then flew the fuck away from Azkaban. He wasn't crazy after all; who'd actually want to stay there? His brain helpfully informed him that kidnapping a dementor was also something people would consider crazy. He ignored that observation.

When he returned to his home, he went instead to the nearby woods and into a cave he'd carved into the ground earlier. There, he conjured his patronus and set the shrunken trunk down. Moony released the dementor, where with the aid of his soulfire and his wolf patronus, was able to wrestle the dementor down to the ground and restrain it. Then, with his ethereal wolf helpfully sitting on the dementor's face, Remus pulled out a knife and started cutting.

By the time he'd gotten the necessary bones, the dementor was looking mighty sad. It was floppy, for lack of a better term, and pitifully folded itself into a corner of the cave when Remus let it go. Amortal beings like dementors couldn't die, no matter how much you broke them apart, and Remus didn't know if it would ever grow its bones back. He hardly cared if it remained boneless for eternity.

Finally, he was ready. Grabbing the Atlantean Glass, his ingredients, and a time-turner that the room of requirement had provided him with, Remus rewound the clock. It took the spacetime-bending properties of the Atlantean Glass to amplify the time-turner's range enough to get back before the winter solstice, but he made it. When he arrived, the time-turner shattered into a million pieces.

Using the ingredients, he brewed a pair of potions that would prepare him for what was about to come. Then, using chalk dust, he drew a large ritual pentagram embedded in a circle. At the northernmost point, he placed the dementor bones, while placing lit candles at the other four points. Then he levitated the Atlantean Glass above the pentagram's center and sat in the center.

At precisely thirty seconds before solar midnight, the point exactly halfway between dusk and dawn, Remus began chanting. His magic surged outwards, and when it struck the candles, their light increased. The glass orb gathered the light and focused it back down on Remus, but it also focused the darkness erupting from the dementor bones.

In his body, Remus's soulfire blazed brighter, while the two potions he'd drunk triggered a cascading activation of all the magics he's performed on his body in preparation for this. The magic lifted him up and spun him onto his back, while the clothes on his body dissolved into nothingness. On his skin, the runes he'd carved into his own flesh started glowing, only to suddenly turn absolutely black.

Solar midnight struck. Remus fell into a trance, only aware of his own body and soul, and the exquisite magic flowing through both. It was euphoric.

So lost in his trance, Remus didn't notice the figure appear nearby, nor did he notice the figure move towards him. "You're lucky, Wolf. You dove in head first, and danced exactly to my tune without ever really questioning me. It is fortunate that the magic you're performing happens to benefit you as well as me. Congratulations, my pawn, you're only one move away from being a queen."

Nyarlathotep raised his hand and twisted space, time, and the magic that filled the air. The Atlantean glass warped, and then transformed into an eyeball made of living stone. It sank towards Remus's floating body, and Remus's body transformed into his hybrid form as it approached. The eye touched his chest, just between his pectoral muscles, and embedded itself within his flesh. Remus's anatomy adjusted itself accordingly, while his soul spread its magic into the eye, claiming it as part of himself. The chaos god then let his influence fade, allowing the ritual to take place as it should have, and then vanished.

Frost started spreading out from the circle, while the plants nearby started wilting. On Remus, frost formed a thin coating on his fur. By contrast, his bare skin turned pinkish and started steaming with incredible heat, protecting him from the extreme cold surrounding him. Under the frost layer, his brown fur turned completely white.

The spell ended, dropping Remus unceremoniously to the ground which broke him from the trance. He quickly looked down at himself. "Bloody hell..." Then he looked at the remains of the ritual. "Bloody buggering hell. I really went through with that?! I... Where am I? Let's see... I remember being in Atlanta, I looked through the glass... Everything's fuzzy after that."

He spotted his wand and a spare set of clothes off to the side. Unfolding the clothes, he realized that the dark gray robes weren't a set that he recognized. A note fell out of the folded clothes. "The glass alone distorts your perception of reality. The eye restores it. I'm impressed with how efficiently you completed your task, even with your perception altered." Below the text, there was a surprisingly detailed, animated sketch of Remus. In his human form, the sketch pulled down the collar of his robe to expose his bare chest. It transformed and then repeated the action, this time exposing the eye.

Remus looked down and then twisted his head a bit to see what his snout had been blocking. The eye in his chest looked back up at him. "...That's creepy." As if acknowledging it was the trigger, there was a tiny jolt of pain in his chest. A sudden flood of information reached his brain; Remus found that he could see and feel with the eye as if it had always been a part of his body. "That's really creepy."

Below the illustration of himself, more text appeared on the note. "The eye of truth allows one to see things that are hidden from view or are normally imperceptible to mortals. It will not be confused by illusion, and will enhance your mind's eye. It can see souls. You are now ready to extract the soul fragment from Harry Potter."

"Finally..."

Remus coated his head with a glamour, replacing frosted white hair with light brown, and glowing crimson eyes with a forest green. The frost hadn't left him since the ritual; even if he showered in scalding water, the frost returned within minutes. And though his skin was still warm to the touch, the air around him even the slightest distance away was frigid, enough that he could see his own breath, even indoors. The upside was that neither heat nor cold bothered him anymore, but his appearance as a frozen, albino man was a touch disturbing for him to look at — thus the glamour.

He glided towards Harry's home at number four, Privet drive, the robes Nyarl had left him billowing as he walked. Given the frosty air that surrounded him, had he put the hood up he would have been mistaken for a dementor. He didn't have his hood up, so any passers by would only attribute the child to the late December weather or the fact that the dark of the night had just barely started to retreat.

Remus sat on the pavement in front of number four and disillusioned himself. It was still just a tad too early for the general populace to be heading out to work, but there were a few lights shining from windows along the street already. None, however, came from the house he was interested in.

A loud crack split the silent morning air. Remus happened to be looking right at the spot where Albus Dumbledore materialized, wand already drawn and aloft. He marched towards the house, towards Remus, and flicked his wand at the still seated lycomorph.

The disillusionment charm broke instantly, but so did the glamours he'd applied not even ten minutes ago. Remus scrambled to his feet as his former headmaster closed the distance between them. Wand pointed at Remus's throat, Dumbledore said, "You have no business here, dark wizard."

By this point, Remus had his own wand in his hand, though he hadn't yet raised it towards the old man. That Dumbledore didn't recognize him didn't surprise him that much (since he hardly recognized himself in the mirror these days), but that Dumbledore would immediately accuse him of being a dark wizard confused him... until he remembered that he technically was a dark wizard now.

"The only dark magic I have ever performed is the magic Hogwarts freely offered me," Remus said in his defense. Was it true? Technically. But was it misleading? Definitely. A thought occurred to him; realizing that he could use Dumbledore's lack of recognition to his momentary advantage at getting some answers, Remus chose his next words carefully. "And, as a matter of fact, I do have business with the family inside. My good friend's son ran afoul with a particularly nasty wizard's curse. I'm just helping them out a bit, is all." Now, he raised his wand. "The question is, what are you doing here, headmaster? The only children in that house are far too young to be your students."

Dumbledore's wand lowered slightly. "As it happens, the son of a friend and former student of mine also lives in that house, though he is living in there with his aunt and uncle. I put up a set of security wards around their house since the boy's relatives are muggles, and you set them off not even a minute ago. I came to assure that he was safe."

"I find it hard to believe that you have Harry Potter's safety on your mind, Headmaster," Remus replied, "what, with the mind alteration and observation charms you placed on him and the Dursleys? I swore I purged them all from the house, at Mrs. Dursley's request. I even went so far as to take them all to St. Mungo's to get them fully examined. That you are here now implies that you have since replaced those charms, Dumbledore."

Dumbledore's free hand moved up to adjust his glasses. Remus made the mistake of following the hand and looking Dumbledore in the eye. The legilimency probe slid into Remus's mind like a hot knife through butter and started flipping through Remus's memories.

His mind's eye as open as it was, however, Remus literally saw the attack coming and could see it digging in his mind. Remus's world went red. With his magic, he snatched the psychic probe and pulled. Dumbledore's mind, not expecting to be pulled, found itself yanked deeper into Remus's mind, and into his mindscape.

Dumbledore was cold, so very, very cold. The arctic winds howled around him, twisting through the frozen forest. He could hear the howl of a wolf, terrifyingly near yet out of sight and unlocatable. The headmaster trudged forwards through the snow and ice.

He didn't understand; this was supposed to be the dark wizard's mind, but no mindscape was like this. It was too solid, too real. No soul could support it.

The cold hurt, but try as he might, he couldn't escape it. There was an immense pressure pulling him down, sucking him in like nothing he'd ever experienced before. He looked around for anything that could be of use to him, a sign that he wasn't actually out in the snow. Then he looked up. Instead of what he'd assumed was the moon, based on the light of the forest, was actually a giant, floating eye that was pointed directly at him.

"Dumbledore..." The voice on the wind growled. "You've shown your true colors. I see the blackness in your heart..."

A snarl. That was all the warning Dumbledore had before a massive, white beast attacked him from behind, pinning him to the ground. Dumbledore struggled, but to no avail. The pain of the beast's claws was excruciating, but what was worse was its voice. It was a guttural thing that dug into his brain. "Between Sirius's arrest and preparing to extract the fragment of Voldemort from Harry, I've been a bit too busy to deal with you, Headmaster. But you threatened my pack, you attacked my mind. I'm not going to wait to let Sirius maim you; I'm going to do it myself."

The beast's claws pierced the man's abdomen, ripping it wide open. Then, with great ease, the beast burrowed into the open wound, shoving its massive frame into Dumbledore's relatively small body.

Remus found himself floating in the cloudy mists of Dumbledore's mind, having counterattacked Dumbledore's psychic probing by attacking him in the wolf spirit's forest. He found it remarkably easy with the eye of truth guiding his way. The wolfman followed his vision deeper and deeper into the headmaster's past.

Memories upon memories flickered past him, some pleasant, others not. He didn't have anything in particular that he was looking for, so he just grabbed the first memory he found, a brightly glowing one that showed a young girl. It was a happy one from the headmaster's youth, one from an idyllic time before the headmaster had regrets.

The lycomorph bit into the memory with his fangs, as if the memory were nothing more than one of the goat carcasses he'd eaten. It was delicious, and before he knew it, Remus had devoured the whole memory. But as he'd eaten, the entire mindscape shook with agony. Figuring that Dumbledore might be listening, Remus said, "Break the connection, headmaster, or I'll leave you without any happy memories." To emphasize that he wanted it to stop, Remus let go of the headmaster's mental projection, allowing him to withdraw it if he willed it. Sure enough, Remus found himself flung out of the headmaster's head while Dumbledore was flung out of his own.

Back in the real world, Remus adjusted his gaze to focus on the headmaster's beard, which was filling with red from the man's nose bleed, and then the man's wand, which was still aimed at him. "I can't let you go, now that you've been in my head," Dumbledore said. "Oblivi-"

"Flipendo," Remus interrupted. Augmented by both his own actions and the manipulations of Nyarl, the amount of magic he could and did put into the knockback jinx intensified the spell to such an extent that it sounded like a cannon blast and sent Dumbledore hurtling all the way across the street and against the wall of the houses there.

Remus quickly dashed over to the man before he could right himself, and stuck his wand against Dumbledore's head. "Listen, you have about ten seconds to leave before the muggle's come investigating. This isn't over between us. And the next time you set foot anywhere near this street, I will kill you. Do you understand?" So angry was Remus, that frost was quickly spreading across Dumbledore's face from where the lycomorph's wand made contact.

"Yes. I have many things to say to you too," Dumbledore said. With a crack, he disapparated from out of Remus's grip.

Hearing the approach of muggles, Remus disillusioned himself and crossed back over the street, thankful that he'd only cast a knockback jinx and not something more destructive, like a fire spell. There was no evidence, meaning that the muggles would likely assume it was nothing but an unusually loud firecracker and think little more on the matter.

He walked up to Vernon, who was poking his head out his front door. The muggle man shivered as he approached. "Vernon," he whispered. "It's me, Remus. I'm invisible. Let me in, please."

Vernon's eyes went wide, taken by surprise by the invisible man. "Yes, but bloody hell, it's only 7:00 in the morning. Why are you here so early? And what was that boom?"

Remus slipped inside and dropped the disillusionment. "I'm here because I finally have a way to remove the parasite from Harry, and that boom was me scaring off a cruel wizard that followed me."

"A cruel wizard? Who?" Vernon asked.

"The man who abandoned Harry here, and the man who placed mind-altering curses on your family, Albus Dumbledore." Remus flicked his wand around and began dismantling everything he could find, only pausing to tell Vernon what he was doing.

It didn't take long for Petunia to come down, having heard the noise. Vernon helped fill her in as Remus worked. "Isn't there anything we can do to keep him out?"

The ex-werewolf bit his lip. "...Temporarily, yes. Absolutely. In the long term, though... I'll see if I can pull some strings to get something set up, but we really don't have many options."

"Well, why not? Surely you wizard folk protect your own homes." Vernon looked at Remus hopefully.

"We do, but that is part of the problem. Wizard homes can be protected, but muggle homes can only be warded if they are in a wizarding community, where the only nonmagical people that might see it already know about magic. If I set up a defensive ward, and your angry neighbor stomped over and triggered it, there would be a lot of questions, ones that would see me thrown in jail." Remus turned thoughtful, realizing how little of a punishment that would be for him at the moment, considering he was practically immune to the dementors.

He shook his head. "Anyway, there are a few things I can do. However, they are all either temporary, prohibitively expensive in material costs alone, highly disruptive to your lives, or would require me to become basically your live-in bodyguard."

"Let's start with the temporary things," Petunia said. "We can do a little bit more later, once we have breathing room."

Remus agreed. For them, he set up an anti-apparition ward, an anti-portkey ward (only blocking inbound travel), an anti-scrying ward (keyed to let only him through), a hostility-based proximity alarm, and a confundus ward triggered by the proximity alarm. The alarms were also set to make a loud noise inside the house so that they could activate the portkeys Remus gave them. "None of this will last forever," Remus said. "I'll have to come back and renew it. But you won't mind me popping in once or twice a month for a few minutes at a time, will you?"

"Of course not," Vernon said. "You're going out of your way to protect us."

Warding done, Remus finally got to the very reason he'd come: purging Harry of the fragment of Voldemort's soul. Worry filled Remus's heart; supposedly, he'd done all he could to protect himself from being transformed into a dementor, but he wasn't entirely certain it would work.

He decided to do it in the backyard; the Dursleys were instructed to pull Harry in the moment the soul fragment was out of Harry's body ("When the lights end," Remus said) and then shut the door. If Remus didn't change, they could let him back in. Otherwise, they were to wait inside and block the doors until the cold and misery went away.

Then, with Harry at his wand tip, Remus incanted in an inhuman language. The toddler before him screamed, but not as loudly as the shard of soul attached to Remus's wand. Lifting the glowing crescent up to his mouth, Remus inhaled it.

He swallowed.

The Dursleys snatched Harry away and shut the door.

Remus waited. Other than an extremely pleasant taste in his mouth, nothing had happened. He was about to give the "all clear," when suddenly, frost exploded out of him, even as raw power surged through his magical core. He felt electrified, more alive than he'd ever felt before (and that was saying something). Even if only a tiny fragment, the raw power contained within Voldemort's soul was staggering and utterly intoxicating.

Remus blacked out.

Twenty-five miles away, deep underground, in a hall filled with identical orbs, one orb in particular shook. Then, with a sound like the crack of a gun, it shattered into a million pieces.