The Boy Who Lived
James Potter shielded his eyes with one hand as he watched his best friend disappear down the road on his motorcycle. The rumbling engine could still be heard as the long-haired young man vanished into the Somerset village of Godric's Hollow, turning at the cemetery and roaring along the lane past the village common.
As the sun set, lights and lanterns began to come to life as children, Muggle and wizard alike, began to set out Trick or Treating. It was Halloween, a night of magic and fun for both wizard folk and their non-magical neighbours, the Muggles of Britain. For the Muggles, it was just another holiday with unseasonably fair weather and a pervasive feeling of joy in the small village. However, it was instead a night of distraction for the wizards and witches of the smaller, magical community of Godric's Hollow. For one evening, there was an attempt to set aside worry and fear to enjoy the simple pleasures of costumed children trick-or-treating with their families. It was a night one could almost forget that the magical folk of Britain were at war.
Willing himself to set aside worry, James laughed, both at his outrageous friend's choice of transportation but even more at the thought that by next year, he and his wife would be taking their own son from door to door in search of candy, apples, and little magical treats. As he closed the door behind him, the smile faded slightly as he thought about the Troubles that gripped his world. Brooding could wait until morning. Tonight was for his family. They would worry tomorrow.
"James?" Lily's voice came from upstairs, just loud enough to be heard as she prepared the baby for bed. "Do you see MooMoo down there?"
His grin broke into a bigger, warmer smile despite his pensive thoughts of a moment before. After a quick look around, he spotted the stuffed wolf peeking out from under the small sofa in the sitting room. Harry, his son, had not been able to manage "Mooney" but instead had delighted in playing with his "MooMoo." Their dear friend Remus, who had given Harry the toy, grimaced whenever he was reminded of the nickname. MooMoo was an indispensable part of the toddler's bedtime routine.
"He's here, Love," James called up to his wife. "Let me close up things, and I'll be right up."
"Okay," she replied, "but don't take too long. Someone up here isn't going to last very long."
Lily's words were disputed immediately by a gurgling, cooing call from the boy. Harry was a child of strong feelings that he did not hesitate to communicate despite his somewhat limited vocabulary.
James dowsed the kitchen lights and made sure the wireless was turned off. He set his wand, the instrument with which he secured the house, on the table by the sofa as he retrieved MooMoo. After turning to climb the stairs, James paused, patting his pockets and looking about distractedly. He was forgetting something, some variation in the routine. The routine was dull, but he had placed the safety of his small family at the mercy of their careful, methodical regimen of procedures for protection and evasion from their foe.
He was about to risk calling up to Lily again when his eye caught the small pumpkin-shaped bowl of candy by the front door. That was what he'd forgotten: trick-or-treat loot for the neighbourhood wizarding children (the local Muggles could not notice the Potter's magically protected cottage, their eyes simply sliding past it as they walked along the lane). He smiled again, imagining young Harry in a brown-furred onesie, with antlers affixed to his head and a shiny black nose, shuffling around the village collecting candy.
He was still smiling when he released the bolt on the front door, deactivating a portion of the protective wards securing the house. With one hand on the bolt, he was juggling the candy bowl and MooMoo with the other, making sure not to dislodge the note which explained the sleeping baby and inviting guests to help themselves to pepper imps and chocolate frogs.
However, before he could open the door, it flew open, striking James in the chest, scattering the magical sweets into the air, and driving him back. Time slowed for James. He could hear the crack of a spell and see the purple light splashing around the edges of the door as he was sent staggering back towards the stairs. His wand, crucially, was still on the table by the wireless, too far for him to summon into hand with wandless magic. As the door opened fully, his worst fears were realised.
Standing outside, wands drawn and levelled a few feet from the door, just far enough to have avoided the remaining wards guarding the home, stood two figures in long black robes. Their faces were hidden behind ornate silver masks marked with serpentine runes and patterns, their mouths protected with an iron grill set within the silver surface, but the wizards' quick eyes were wide and triumphant behind the masks. They were Death Eaters, the shadowy foot-soldiers of the dark force that had cast Britain into fear and despair.
If their appearance were not terrifying enough alone, the figure who approached between them threatened to turn James weak with fear. Lord Voldemort wore no mask. His pale face split with a wide grin as he delicately mounted the threshold and crossed inside. He shivered, though not with cold. It was a thrill of victory, a frisson of joy at the fear he saw on James Potter's face, that moved Lord Voldemort. He paused, considering the dark-haired young man who lay before him, a child's toy incongruously clutched in his hand.
"Hello, Mr James Potter," he rasped sibilantly, his voice surprisingly high and reedy. "Thank you for having me in. I take it your family is… at home?"
James set his jaw and bit down on the need to respond, to cast some defiance in the evil figure's face. More, he avoided even glancing towards the upstairs, hoping that Lily could hear what was happening, that she and Harry might find some means of escape in whatever time he could purchase for them with the price of his own life. He knew he would never leave this house again, but time would have to be his final gift to his wife and son.
Voldemort tilted his head to the side, regarding James critically, almost regretfully. With a flick of his wand but not a word, Voldemort sent the wand from the table flying to James, who snatched it from the air with the practised ease of a quidditch seeker grabbing the golden snitch. The dark wizard watched intently as a flash of realisation passed over James Potter's face.
James raised his wand, beginning the shielding spellprotego, but the enchantment was still passing his lips when Voldemort violently slashed his own arm down, flinging a spell at the young father.
"Avada Kedavra!" The green light of the killing curse coursing from Voldemort's wand splashed like water across James, bypassing the incomplete shield without the slightest deviation. One hand holding his useless wand and the other a small stuffed wolf, James Potter slumped back onto the bottommost stairs, the light gone from his eyes and the life from his body.
"And now, I shall see to your wife and son, Mr Potter. I'm sure that you will not object." Voldemort glided across the entryway, delicately stretching over James's body to ascend the stairs, his wand calmly held level before him.
Outside, the two Death Eaters watched with unconcealed glee as Voldemort climbed the stairs while doing their best to be on the lookout for agents of the Ministry of Magic or one of Albus Dumbledore's infuriating supporters. The smaller of the two slipped her mask back on her head under her cloak, revealing a mass of ebony curls and a finely sculpted, cold beauty disturbed only by the feverish admiration burning in her dark eyes.
"Bellatrix, be wary. Our Dark Lord instructed us to maintain the watch!" The taller of the pair, Lucius Malfoy, kept his distinctive, shoulder-length white-gold hair bound up under his hood and his patrician visage concealed behind his silver mask. His eyes roved around the quiet village and the small numbers of families moving about their holiday business further down the lane. His wand was ready, and he would not hesitate to kill any man, woman, or child who disturbed them, wizard or not.
Bellatrix Lestrange laughed at his caution, her throaty voice turning strident in her mad joy. "What have we to fear, Malfoy? Potter is dead, and his brat is soon to follow. Tonight, my Dark Lord becomes eternal, invincible. His hour is come, and we are at his side!"
Even as she spoke, a woman's scream was briefly heard and suddenly cut short. A simultaneous flash of green light was visible from the upstairs window, with a muffled sound within. The two could feel something fantastic and fey, like a great inrush of wind that somehow did not move the physical air, a tension of power gathering above them. Malfoy glanced back to the village, ensuring no alarm had been raised, while Bellatrix closed her eyes with bated breath, spreading her arms wide,willingthe murder of the child to complete the prophecy that she and her Dark Lord followed.
This time, when the light flashed green, the windows on the front of the house shattered. Those on the ground floor were blown in as if the house was imploding in a tornado, but the nursery windows blew outwards, along with a good portion of the surrounding wall. Broken bricks and glass shards rained down on two Death Eaters. Lestrange's unmasked face was streaked with blood from falling glass, her unblinking eyes wide with disbelief but unwilling to flinch away from the catastrophe above them.
From the room above, there was only darkness now, a still, deep blackness of unnatural night. From the shattered wall, an oily dark vapour curled out, serpentine, hanging in the air. A feeling of death, of inexplicable loss, pierced the two Death Eaters through their hearts.
"No," Bellatrix choked out the hateful sound, "it can't be! My Lord?"
At that moment, the unctuous cloud spun itself to dissipation in an insensible wind that did not move the leaves on the nearby trees. As the last of the black cloud thinned to invisibility and the stars once more shined through the night, they heard an unmistakable sound.
A baby cried. First hesitantly, then openly wailing, piercing the night.
"Impossible!" Bellatrix screeched and made as if to dash into the house, wand raised.
Malfoy grabbed her by the arm, his voice commanding and decisive where before he had been servile and deferential.
"Bellatrix, something's gone wrong. Our Dread Master is gone. You can feel it!"
She wheeled on him, her eyes rimmed with mad tears and her voice cracking with raw emotion. "You're wrong, you lie! Let me go!"
Malfoy grimaced behind his mask and did the only thing he could do. He gestured with his wand and sent an incantation soaring into the night. "Morsmordre!"
Then, his hand still locked on Bellatrix's arm, he apparated away, the two Death Eaters spinning and turning in on themselves to the point of nothing, vanishing with a cracking sound.
Above the modest house, now partly in ruins, was a colossal, spectral skull composed of emerald stars, with a serpent protruding from its mouth like a tongue. The Dark Mark rose higher and higher, blazing in a haze of greenish smoke, bright against the black sky like a comet portending doom. All across Godric's Hollow, from the Hangman's House to the stream that ran along the commons, wizards and witches stared in horror at the sight. They clutched their children close and fled to their homes. Some grabbed broomsticks and took to the sky, scattering across southern England.
Within minutes, a Ministry of Magic Department of Magical Law Enforcement team arrived with a staccato string of apparitions like a string of firecrackers. These aurors, the magical police of the nation, spread out around the Potter cottage, forming a perimeter blocking access to the street. They began going door to door, interrogating magical folk and obliviating the memories of unfortunate Muggles who happened to see their arrival.
Their leader, Alastor Moody, was the first to enter the house and discover James Potter's body. He limped up the stairs, constantly waving his wand as he wove spells of detection and warding. There, he found the body of Lily Potter, fallen between the crib and a scorched pile of black robes, marked in silver and green silk thread with the serpent symbol of Lord Voldemort himself. Of the dread foe himself, there was no sign.
In the crib, crying and clutching at his blanket, lay Harry Potter, miraculously unharmed, except for a thin scar, rather like a lightning bolt, that marked his forehead. Despite the clearly detectable echoes of foul magic—the Unforgivable Killing Curse—still lingering in the air and legible to Moody's incantations.
"Well, that's a thing," muttered Moody. He made an invocation with his wand and forcefully said, "Expecto patronum!"
A wisp of white vapour emerged from the tip of his wand and circled over his head.
"Albus Dumbledore," Moody told his patronus, giving a few more instructions before sending it speeding to the great wizard and leader of the resistance to the so-called Lord Voldemort.
He carefully secured the baby under his arm, concealed somewhat beneath his cloak, and limped down the stairs, his newly acquired prosthetic leg clanging on each step. Once outside, he moved away from the house towards the centre of town a small distance, where a team of his three best aurors surrounded him, warding away messages, ministry officials who had begun arriving to "supervise," and even an assistant to Minister of Magic Millicent Bagnold, one Cornelius Fudge. Fudge insisted on being told "everything that had happened before tonight," as if he had just noticed the war raging in his country. Fudge sputtered and fumed impotently until a colossal hand descended on his shoulder, moving him side as if he were a child.
"Pardon, yer honour," came the low, rumbling voice of Rubeus Hagrid. "Got ter talk to old Moody, I reckon."
The huge man, easily half again as tall as the tallest auror and thrice as wide, was waved over to Moody, and the two were quickly cut off again by the three aurors on guard duty. The man wore a long coat, had long wild hair and an equally long and wild beard, and clutched a pink umbrella in one serving-platter-sized fist. Whatever was said between the veteran auror and the hulking figure was quick and emphatic. Fudge saw Hagrid take a bundle from Moody, tucking it under one enormous arm and then replying loudly to a question from the grizzled auror.
"No, I reckon I know where to borrow suitable transportation, so long as you don't ask too many questions." The gigantic man tapped a huge finger aside his squashed nose and winked broadly.
Moody shook his head, sighed, and waved the man away, accompanied by the three aurors. With their departure, Fudge could finally reach Moody to demand answers to his questions.
Across the border in Scotland, at the enchanted castle of Hogwarts just beyond the edge of Hogsmeade village, a tall, slender man with a long white beard and piercing blue eyes that belied his somewhat genteel and distracted affectation stood up from behind his desk. Albus Dumbledore was long and graceful and moved with a purpose that belied his many years.
He turned, regarding a portrait of a former colleague which hung among many on his office's crowded walls. In the portrait, watching with ill-concealed interest, was another old man with streaks of black in his receding hair and short, pointed beard.
"Phineas," Dumbledore called out to the painted portrait, who sat up straight and nodded within his frame, "inform the Minister that I am coming, and under no circumstances should she release any details until I arrive."
The wizard in the painting nodded, standing up. In a moment, he was gone, moving away past the edge of his frame.
The older man took a pinch of something from his crowded mantel and cast it into the flames burning in his office fireplace. The fire turned a brilliant green at once and flared up with a crackle and roar.
"The Ministry of Magic," the old man proclaimed, stepping into the flames, where he promptly vanished.
Alone in the office, a huge bird nearly the size of a swan briefly untucked its head from beneath its wing. It surveyed the empty office from its perch behind the desk. It had crimson feathers on its body and a golden tail as long as a peacock's. Its keen black eyes blinked and then closed, head tucking back under its wing. The magnificent bird's scarlet body feathers glowed faintly in darkness as the fire in the grate returned to its previous, natural state.