Hogwarts felt fragile that morning, as if the castle had been sitting up all night worrying. Word had spread in small, nervous ripples: Snape was missing; Dumbledore had been called away for urgent business; the portraits muttered uneasy things. The ordinary clatter of breakfast felt thinner, as though someone had taken a single, bright thread out of the fabric of the day.
Harry noticed every detail. The way a house-elf's ears twitched as she passed. The way a window caught the early light and threw it like a signal across the Great Hall. He had slept none that night; the hum in the stone had been too loud. When he moved, it was with a quiet, taut purpose.
He found Hermione and Ron near the stairwell. Hermione had the look of someone who had used three books to cross-check one footnote and found a dozen new questions.
"Harry," she said when she saw him. "You look dreadful. Are you all right?"
He had a hundred answers and none of them would be suited to her expression. Instead he kept it short and practical. "Something's wrong. Snape went after something last night and hasn't come back. Dumbledore's away. I felt the wards shift again — the castle's been restless." He swallowed. "I'm going to check something. I need you two to do me a favor."
"What?" Ron asked, eyes wide.
"Tell Professor McGonagall. Tell anyone on the staff. Tell them Quirrell moved last night toward the third-floor corridor and the wards felt broken," Harry said, as plainly as he could. "I can't bring you with me. If I'm wrong, I don't want you hurt."
Hermione's mouth made a tiny O of worry. "Harry—"
"Go," he said. "Now. Get help. If I'm wrong, I'll come back and tell you I was being an idiot. If I'm right, you'll be glad you told someone."
Ron opened his mouth, then closed it with a look that was part fury and part respect. Hermione came forward and kissed his cheek. "Be careful," she said.
They hurried away, shoulders set, arguing about which professor would believe them first. Harry watched the backs of his friends until they rounded the corner and were swallowed by morning, then turned toward the forbidden corridor.
He told himself he was not being reckless. He reminded himself of the conversation with Snape — the thin crack of respect they had started to build. He reminded himself of the forest and the unicorn and the way life had felt fragile and luminous. He did not think of dying again. He thought of the Stone and of the cost of waiting.
⸻
The third-floor corridor was darker than he remembered. The air pressed against him like wool. He walked until he heard it: a faint scuff, a sound of something dragged and then abandoned. Scorch marks marred the wooden panels near the door; a faint smell of burnt hair lingered. The slabs of floor were scratched.
Near the doorway two things lay oddly — Snape's daggered notes scattered like ink-bloomed leaves, and a broken vial whose contents had steamed away to nothing. Harry stooped and pocketed a scrap, fingers trembling not from fear but from adrenaline that felt like cold fire.
He pushed the great wooden door. Fluffy's heads moved, three pairs of yellow eyes blinking slowly, not quite awake but watchful. The harp — the same enchantment — trilled in the air. Someone had been — or been — here very recently.
He tested the ward with one quiet charm; the runes answered, thin and torn. The words he had been learning to hear in magic — rhythm, resonance, intention — told him this was no amateur effort. The pattern had been forced: a violent, jarring intrusion into a structure meant to sing.
He slipped beneath the sleeping dog's flank, heart thudding, and dropped the trapdoor ring.
⸻
The fall grabbed him and spit him into shaded air. The smell of damp earth and old spells flooded his nose. He landed as he had before: landed and listened.
The first chamber was thick with plant-magic — Devil's Snare, coils like sleeping ropes. The vines moved at the breath of his arrival, testing for heat and fear.
Harry had known the theory of these things once. This time, his actions reflected different knowledge. He could feel the plant's tempo: it tightened when the heart quickened and loosened when breath smoothed. Where once he had panicked or followed instruction, now he breathed to a metronome he set himself. He lowered his center of gravity, flattened his breathing, and whispered rhythmically, modulating the tone of his intent like he would tune a string.
"Don't fight it," he murmured, the words more to himself than the plant. He let his wand-tip make the faintest sun-prick of light — not harsh, but pure, a note tuned to heat rather than scorch. The plants recoiled as if heat had always been a word they understood, and their grip uncoiled.
He slid past.
In the key-room, the keys flowed like a school of silver fish, twisting in a near-hypnotic pattern. They were enchanted, yes, but magic had its own choreography; he recognized the flaw in it — one key flapped contrary to the flow, like a fish swimming upstream. Rather than bat at every key in blind desperation, he mounted a broom and let his motion lock to the negative rhythm; the opposing key, unable to reconcile itself with his counter-rhythm, stalled long enough for him to seize it.
He felt strange pleasure in this. It was like hearing a cadence and stepping into the space it expected. The lock turned with a sound of pressure relieved.
Then the chess room. He could have tried to run past; instead he watched the pieces move with careful eyes. The chess-protections were less about brute force and more about choreography and sacrifice; he remembered moves he'd seen — his past life's memory like an old muscle responding. He considered tactics not as a game but as a set of interlocking incantations. The ward-bindings tied the board to the chamber; breaking the wards required each sacrifice to be intentional. He pushed and pried at the runes underlying the squares, coaxing the protective magic to misalign by creating a small, controlled interference with a charm of counterbinding.
When the knight toppled with a thunder of stone, Harry felt relief more than triumph.
He reached the final antechamber and paused. The air here vibrated with a dense, greedy music. Roses of cold flame curled along the walls, black and violet tongues licking ancient lettering. It smelled of old things — spent power, ambition, the stale tang of desperation.
The final chamber breathed wrong.
The Mirror of Erised stood in the center, catching the torchlight and breaking it into warped, trembling reflections. The air shimmered like heat on stone. Everything — the floor, the walls, even the torches — seemed to hum with a pulse that didn't belong to Hogwarts.
Harry slipped inside and froze.
Near the doorway, Professor Snape was on one knee, breathing hard. His left arm hung limp, sleeve blackened, the edge of his collar burnt. Blood ran down his face and darkened the collar of his robe. His wand hand trembled — but his eyes were fierce and alive.
The moment he saw Harry, he reacted with a shock of fury and fear that almost broke his usual control.
"Potter!" His voice cracked like a curse. "Get out!"
Harry flinched but didn't move.
"I'm not leaving you."
Snape's teeth clenched, his breathing ragged. "You idiot boy, you can't—"
He cut off mid-sentence, his gaze dragging past Harry to the figure before the Mirror.
Quirrell stood there, trembling violently. The turban was gone, revealing a pale, sweating scalp. Dark vapors crawled up his neck like veins of shadow, coiling toward the back of his head.
And then the air changed — colder, heavier, alive.
A voice drifted from nowhere and everywhere at once, soft and dreadful,
"Severus…"
Snape froze as though turned to stone. The color drained from his face.
"Still loyal?"
That voice — elegant and cruel, made of silk and ice.
Voldemort.
The word didn't need to be spoken; the name itself pressed like frost against Harry's skin.
Snape took a half step forward — on instinct, old and ingrained. "My Lord—"
"My Lord?" The voice coiled with mockery. "You would raise your wand against me?"
Harry's stomach dropped. Voldemort was real, awake, here.
Snape's wand quivered. He swallowed something bitter. "You cannot win this fight," he said softly, trying to reason with a shadow. "You are too weak. You need—"
"I need nothing."
The air rippled. Quirrell's body straightened, stiff as a puppet.
Snape's control cracked for the barest instant. "Potter, listen to me. You can't fight him. Not like this. Go — get Dumbledore. Run!"
Harry didn't move. His voice was steady, too steady. "Dumbledore isn't here. You know that."
Snape's breath caught — the truth hitting like a blade. His eyes flicked toward the Mirror, then back to Harry. "Then run to the others—"
"I sent them," Harry interrupted. "They're warning the staff."
Snape's expression twisted between fury and disbelief. "You… foolish child—"
"Better me than no one," Harry said quietly.
The silence that followed was sharp enough to bleed on.
And then Quirrell turned.
His eyes rolled white for a heartbeat before focusing on them. His lips stretched into something that was no longer quite a smile.
"Ahh… two for one."
Snape instinctively raised his wand, stepping in front of Harry despite his injuries. His voice, when it came, was pure command. "Stay behind me."
Harry didn't argue — but he didn't retreat either.
The voice that poured from Quirrell's mouth was no longer his own.
"How touching. The loyal dog, still guarding the boy who ruined me."
Snape's wand hand shook, but his aim was precise. "He's just a boy, my Lord—"
The voice hissed, sharp as broken glass.
"He is my unfinished work."
Harry's scar flared — a white-hot brand. His stomach turned as the air grew dense with shadow.
Snape shot a look back at him — one second of silent, furious pleading that said everything words couldn't: Don't make me watch you die.
But the moment passed, and Harry's answer came in a voice that was almost calm.
"I'm not dying again."
The words confused Snape — startled him enough to glance back — and by then, the air had already ignited.
The first curse struck, and the duel began.
Voldemort struck first.
Quirrell's wand lashed out with a surge of red-black energy, a curse so violent it cracked the stone floor. Snape conjured a shield — quick, clean — but the impact shattered it like glass, sending him staggering back.
Harry moved instinctively, diving forward, wand tracing a spiral through the air. "Aegis Tempora!"
A shimmering barrier of light spun into being, catching the next curse and bending it aside. The reflected energy scorched the floor beside Quirrell's feet.
Voldemort hissed through his vessel. "Impressive. Dumbledore's tricks?"
Harry's eyes hardened. "Mine."
Another volley — cutting curses, flame bolts, spectral tendrils — rained across the chamber. Harry danced through them with impossible precision, movements economical and sure. Each dodge was measured, his counters flowing like a language learned long ago.
He didn't fight like a first-year. He fought like someone who knew what battle meant.
Snape, though bleeding, joined the rhythm. His wand flared with surgical control, spells slipping in between Harry's — sharp counters, subtle bindings, each precise. The air filled with streaks of light and shadow intertwining like dueling composers clashing over one violent symphony.
Quirrell faltered. The vessel's body was weakening, trembling under the strain of the possession. Voldemort snarled, voice splitting the air:
"He is MINE!"
The temperature dropped; frost spread across the mirror's frame. Voldemort's essence began to separate — black vapor coiling around Quirrell's body, half-forming into something serpentine and spectral.
Harry felt his scar burn like molten ice. He faltered, knees nearly buckling, but Snape's spell intercepted a killing curse that would have struck his heart.
"Focus, Potter!" Snape barked, voice rough but alive. "Anchor yourself! He feeds on fear!"
Harry clenched his jaw, raised his wand, and felt something shift. The rhythm of the battle — the beat beneath the chaos — clicked into place. He could hear it again, that pattern he'd begun to understand: intention, resonance, harmony.
He stepped forward, shoulders square, and struck.
"Luminis Arcana!"
The chamber exploded with white light. The wave of energy tore through the corrupted magic like sunlight through mist. Quirrell screamed, hands clawing at his face, skin blistering. The voice of Voldemort howled — furious, disembodied, fragmented.
Snape shielded his face with his arm, eyes slitting open just enough to watch.
And what he saw burned itself into memory.
Harry Potter stood in the heart of that storm, light bending around him, wand a seamless extension of his will. His magic didn't look raw or uncontrolled; it sang — harmonic, resonant, impossibly alive.
It wasn't power Snape saw. It was understanding.
That — more than the strength — shook him.
Voldemort's shriek peaked, echoing through the stone. "NO—"
Quirrell lunged one final time, desperate, and Harry didn't flinch. He sidestepped, caught the man's wrist, and pressed his free hand to the turbaned head. The moment his skin made contact, pure agony tore through both of them — Quirrell's flesh blistering, the parasitic soul screaming as it was forced to unbind.
The world flared white.
When it cleared, Quirrell's body was collapsing, the spectral vapor of Voldemort screaming as it tore through the ceiling, escaping in a rush of frost and smoke.
Harry staggered, panting, eyes wild but unbroken.
Snape caught his arm before he fell. "Easy," the professor rasped. His grip was trembling. "He's gone."
Harry nodded once, staring at the ruined floor. "For now."
⸻
They stood amid ruin — shattered glass, scorch marks, the faint hum of dying wards.
Snape's gaze drifted to the boy beside him — hair singed, robes torn, blood on his cheek — and the faint glow still pulsing faintly from Harry's wand.
For years, Snape had imagined James Potter's son as a mirror of arrogance — reckless, loud, stupidly brave.
But this… this wasn't James.
This was something else.
Something precise. Controlled. Dangerous in a way Snape couldn't quite define.
He met Harry's eyes, and for a moment saw neither a child nor a copy of James — but a wizard standing at the edge of something vast and unknown.
"You…" Snape began, voice thin, "you should not be capable of that."
Harry smiled weakly, exhaustion making it soft. "Guess I got lucky."
Snape said nothing, just holding on to the now unconscious boy. But deep in his chest — past the suspicion, the disdain, the layers of bitterness — a small thread of curiosity began to burn.
Whatever Potter was becoming, it wasn't ordinary.
And that realization terrified him far more than Voldemort's shadow ever could.