The Stalking and the Lure
By the middle of 1986, Alex Benjamin was twenty years old physically, his mind a terrifying reservoir of foreknowledge and dark scholarship. His five years as Dumbledore's "consultant" had not only secured his wealth (now held as physical gold, diamonds, and rare metals under the Hellflame Family Fund registry) but also his victim.
He had chosen Finnegan Rourke, a timid fourth-year with an impossibly stable, pure magical core. Finnegan, at age fifteen, was four years younger than Alex, making his body an ideal vessel for the upcoming ritual—young enough to reshape, old enough to sustain Alex's immense consciousness.
On a cold Friday evening in late February, Alex initiated the final, monstrous sequence. He waited on the edge of the second-floor landing, cloaked in the deepest Disillusionment Charm his Anchor Wand could manage. He had placed a beautiful, antique silver locket—not a Horcrux, but a powerful lure laced with Charms of Allurement—precisely in the path Finnegan always took to the library.
Finnegan, walking alone, saw the gleam of silver. Curiosity pulled him to the locket. As the boy bent down, Alex struck. A directed surge of ambient magic, channeled through the Anchor Wand and amplified by cold, pure intent, delivered a blunt, non-verbal Stunning Charm to the back of the boy's head. Finnegan dropped, silent and unconscious.
Alex moved with the brutal efficiency of a predator, dragging the slight body to the seventh floor.
The Tapestry of Barmy
He walked past the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy five times, his mind focused not on a room for general needs, but on a space for Soul Sequestration and Core Sacrifice.
The door that materialized was made of rough, bone-white stone, bearing a runic inscription that pulsed with contained dark energy.
Inside, the Ascension Chamber was vast, lit only by four obsidian braziers burning with flickering purple flame. He stripped both his Muggle body and the unconscious Finnegan, placing them side-by-side on the cold stone.
"Goodbye, Alex Benjamin," he whispered, a final epitaph to his Muggle existence.
He forced Finnegan to drink the required half of the thick, vile Sacrificial Potion, consuming the remainder himself.
The ritual was the most profound, agonizing experience of his life. It was a searing, white-hot, metaphysical trauma that felt like his very essence was being ripped from its anchor. Finnegan's soul, pure and terrified, was a bright, silver light; Alex's soul, dark and immense, was a churning mass of predatory, violet shadow.
The Core Theft was the climax. Alex violently forced his will into the new body, instantly flooding him with the raw, potent sensation of magic—a thrumming power that obeyed his will.
He heard a distant, terrible, choked scream—the sound of Finnegan Rourke's innocent soul being exiled and trapped inside the now-inert Muggle vessel of Alex Benjamin.
Silence returned.
The Ascension Chamber
In the dead of night, in the hidden chamber behind the seventh-floor tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, Alex Benjamin completed his darkest transaction. His consciousness was now forcibly housed within the magical core of the fifteen-year-old pure-blood, Finnegan Rourke. The Muggle body of Alex Benjamin, however, still lived, containing the terrified, exiled soul of the boy it had just stolen from.
Alex, operating in the stolen body, forced himself to drink the remaining Polyjuice Potion. The potion, tasting like boiled socks and stagnant water, took immediate effect. Finnegan's slight figure melted and shifted, growing into the unremarkable frame of the middle-aged Ministry janitor whose hair Alex had secured weeks ago. This temporary disguise was an absolute necessity; it would ensure that the cataclysmic spike of dark magic that was to follow would be attributed to an unnamed adult intruder, not the missing boy, Finnegan Rourke.
With cold, absolute resolve, Alex focused the raw, terrifying power of his new core on the Muggle body. He aimed his hand—now capable of raw, wandless magic—at his former self. He unleashed the curse he had spent years designing for this moment: Total Molecular Dissolution.
The Muggle body, and the soul trapped within it, instantly vanished into a column of ash and dark violet smoke. The sheer, final violence of the magic was an absolute affront to the ancient wards of Hogwarts. The air grew thick and heavy, and the entire castle seemed to shriek in despair. The Room of Requirement reacted to the obliteration, shuddering and immediately dissolving, its purpose fulfilled and its magical signature tainted.
Alex, disguised as the unremarkable janitor, snatched the concealed Portkey—a plain bronze buckle—from a crevice in the wall and whispered the activation phrase he had carefully chosen: Exsilium. The world spun away in a sickening, controlled rush.
The Muggle orphan, Alex Benjamin, was dead and cremated. The stolen body, now under a temporary adult glamour, was on its way to the Himalayas.
The Headmaster's Discovery
Twenty minutes later, Dumbledore appeared on the seventh-floor landing. He hadn't been alerted by a house-elf or a portrait; he had been alerted by the sudden, profound, and horrific shriek of the castle's most ancient, protective wards. The signature was unmistakable: immense, uncontrolled, and absolutely evil.
Dumbledore approached slowly, his face etched with profound tragedy. He found the landing empty, save for a lingering scent of ozone, burnt sugar, and something metallic and corrosive—the scent of dark, sacrificial magic. His eyes, now entirely devoid of their habitual twinkle, immediately fell upon a tiny, tell-tale pile of grey ash clinging to the grooves of the stone floor.
He recognized the signature: powerful, dark, and catastrophically unstable. He immediately understood. Alex Benjamin, the time-displaced Muggle orphan whom he had trusted and sheltered, had finally attempted a desperate, forbidden ritual—likely to seize a magical core—and had, as Dumbledore had always feared, destroyed himself in the process. The intense malice lingering in the air confirmed that Alex had met his end not with regret, but with a final, searing arrogance.
"Alex," Dumbledore whispered, his voice thick with profound, tragic sorrow. He mourned not the boy, but the catastrophic loss of the intelligence, the weapon that had finally shattered itself under the weight of its own ambition.
With a flick of his wand, Dumbledore vanished the ash. The incident could never be known. The truth of soul exchange and the dark rituals required to create a core were too dangerous to leak, especially when connected to the Muggle orphan he had brought into the castle. The official record, if ever questioned, would state that Alex Benjamin had simply vanished, an expected outcome for such a precarious temporal experiment. He sealed the knowledge of Alex's fate and the presence of the corrupt magic in the deepest, most isolated recesses of his mind.
The Muggle orphan who knew too much was gone forever, and the world was utterly unaware that his killer had just inherited a magical core and escaped to the other side of the planet.