It detonated inside Harry’s mind like a thunderclap in a blast so enormous that it left him completely deaf to the world around him. The entrance hall of Grimmauld Place ceased to exist. The concerned faces, the reaching hands, the shouts of alarm—all of it vanished into white noise.

He couldn’t make out a single word of what Remus and the others were shouting as they threw themselves to his side.

‘Just let me die.’

Harry’s green eyes were shot through with violent red. They bulged from their sockets grotesquely, like a goldfish being slowly cooked alive under a merciless sun.

It felt as though a steel saw was working its way along the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead, millimeter by excruciating millimeter, splitting his skull open from the inside out—a pain so overwhelming that no words in any language could adequately describe or encompass it

“Watson, Bones, and those goblins!”

The words emerged not from any mouth but directly into Harry’s consciousness, bypassing his ears.

A flash of green light blazed before his eyes. The evil coiled within that light was so profound in its malice, that a single glance at it made his stomach lurch.

In the trail of the green light, a shrieking roar erupted inside Harry’s skull.

His consciousness hovering somewhere in the space between waking and oblivion, trapped in a grey liminal zone where reality bent and twisted, Harry saw it:

A vast hall in grey and shadow like an old photograph come to life. In the center of this colorless space stood Voldemort. His snake-like face was twisted with fury beyond anything Harry had witnessed before.

Voldemort stood with his wand raised high above his head, his red eyes blazing like burning coals. Then he brought the wand slashing down in a vicious arc, and the words that fell from his lipless mouth were spoken with such venom they seemed to poison the very air:

“AVADA KEDAVRA!”

The wizards before him didn’t even have time to cry out, didn’t have time to beg or flee. The green light struck them simultaneously, and they simply fell like puppets with cut strings, their lives were extinguished completely.

Fury. Disbelief. Fear.

In that moment, only Harry knew—only Harry could know—what emotions beat like war drums inside the chest of the most feared dark wizard in all of Britain.

Voldemort was terrified.

It was Lucius Malfoy who came to his senses first among the Death Eaters. Years of self-preservation instinct kicked in immediately. He seized his wife Narcissa roughly by the arm and bolted toward the grand double doors at the far end of the hall before anyone else could even process what was happening.

Malfoy’s flight jolted the other trembling Death Eaters into panicked action. They scrambled over one another like rats fleeing a sinking ship, desperate to put distance between themselves and their raging master, trampling on robes, shoving companions aside, thinking of nothing but escape.

Even Adam Vogel, who had been standing closest to Voldemort and attempting to calm him, abandoned the effort after watching the Dark Lord kill messengers without a flicker of hesitation.

Rage and terror were feeding on each other in an endless cycle.

Only the scattered repeated bursts of green light—Killing Curses fired at walls, at furniture, at empty air could give the slightest release to the volcanic fury churning beneath Voldemort’s inhuman body.

“I need to know their plan.”

A dozen cold bodies scattered across the floor had done nothing to soothe the anxious fury churning beneath Voldemort’s wrath. If anything, the killing had only sharpened his focus, burned away the initial shock and left behind something colder and more dangerous.

He fixed his burning crimson gaze on the doors through which his followers had fled, his stare so intense it seemed it might bore holes through the wood. His merciless voice prowled through the blood-drenched hall like something alive and predatory.

The Death Eaters who had just fled in terror crept back one by one, moving slowly. They were trembling and their faces were pale waiting with dread for their lord’s next command.

“Bring Severus to me. Now. I need to know exactly what Watson intends to do next.”

Voldemort paced before the floor-length windows in long, sharp strides. He hissed with fury at irregular intervals. Two minutes passed in tense silence broken only by that sporadic hissing. Then he stopped abruptly and fixed his followers with a cold, cutting stare that made several of them flinch.

“I will contact Severus for you at once, my Lord—”

Lucius Malfoy’s voice was strangled, barely recognizable. His usual smooth composure had been shattered completely, replaced by naked fear barely held in check by decades of adept political control.

“This is an intolerable insult to the Dark Lord’s authority—an insult delivered publicly and deliberately by Watson and the Ministry!”

Voldemort’s crimson eyes swept slowly over his followers, taking them in one by one. Every Death Eater that his gaze crossed lowered their head further, bowing deeper, terrified that the smallest sign of insufficient reverence or loyalty might draw his murderous wrath upon them next.

“I will show the Ministry and Watson what it means to provoke me,” Voldemort said softly.

“My Death Eaters—the time has come to defend the honor of your Dark Lord. The time has come to remind the wizarding world why my name is spoken only in whispers. Bones and those creatures must be made to suffer the severest punishment imaginable. We will make examples of them that will be remembered for generations.”

His voice turned vicious, dripping with malice and promised violence.

“Since the Ministry has seen fit to tell the entire world that the Dark Lord has returned—since they have broken the silence that protected them and announced my presence to every witch and wizard in Britain—it is time to remind the wizarding world just what that means.”

He smiled, and the expression on that inhuman face was worse than any scowl.

“Let them scream. Let them burn. Let them learn.”

The Death Eaters took their leave with poorly concealed relief, each one more eager than the last to be away from this room.

“Bella.”

Voldemort’s voice stopped one figure in particular—a woman with wild black hair like dark seaweed tangled by ocean currents,.

Bellatrix Lestrange froze mid-step, her entire body went stiff.

Something strange happened then.

As the woman prostrated herself before her master in trembling, desperate appeal—Harry felt his perspective begin to shift in a way that made no sense.

It was as though he were a camera on on invisible rails, drifting around her in slow arcs, seeing her from different angles without having moved his own body at all. He saw the side of her face, then the back of her head, then the other side, all while some part of him remained stationary.

Stranger still, and far more unsettling, was the look the woman gave him: a flash of direct, unmistakable eye contact, and in that instant Harry saw her flinch. She could see him.

The pain in Harry’s scar had reached such an extreme intensity that something in his mind had crossed a crucial threshold—paradoxically, it had pushed him past agony into a state of cold clarity.

What he was witnessing was real. This was actually happening, might even be happening right now, in this very moment, somewhere else in Britain while he lay collapsed in Grimmauld Place.

But why could he see Voldemort and his Death Eaters when none of them—except this one woman—could see him? Why, when his vantage point shifted without his control or intention, had this woman whose face he recognized from the newspaper suddenly looked at him with unmistakable fear?

Harry was still turning these questions over in his mind when—

“CRUCIO!”

The screamed incantation tore him violently from his thoughts, dragging his attention back to the grey hall.

The woman’s screams that followed were raw and visceral and utterly inhuman, and Harry felt his emotions split violently, sickeningly down the middle.

Part of him wanted to look away, wanted to close his eyes against this horror, wanted to feel only revulsion and pity for another human being subjected to torture.

But another part, a darker part felt something else: a shameful, poisonous exhilaration.

The conflict between these two reactions made him feel sick in an entirely different way than the pain did.

“This is your punishment, Bella.”

Voldemort’s cold, emotionless voice began to recede, growing fainter and more distant as though Harry were being pulled back through a long tunnel. At the same time, Remus’s urgent calls drifted in and out of his awareness, growing paradoxically closer even as Voldemort’s voice faded.

But Harry found, strangely and disturbingly, that he didn’t want to leave. He wanted to hear more.

“Punishment for what you have done to—”

“Harry, Harry—oh, what do we do!!”

Hermione’s familiar voice shattered through the grey hall in an instant. The warm, softly lit entrance corridor of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place flooded back into Harry’s vision, initially blurred and swimming, then gradually focusing.

Ron and the twins were pressed flat against the wall several feet away, their faces pale as parchment and completely helpless. They stared down at him with blank, shell-shocked eyes.

Hermione and Mrs. Weasley and Ginny were all kneeling beside him on the hard floor, crowded close, their faces were hovering above him like concerned angels. Their eyes were bright and red-rimmed with tears. They were calling his name over and over in desperate, frightened voices.

Remus knelt at his side as well, his face showed a terrible grey color, drained of all blood and vitality. His wand was moving in quick, precise strokes through the air above Harry’s body, tracing complex patterns as he cast diagnostic spells, healing charms, anything that might help.

“Oh—he’s stopped screaming…”

Harry heard Mrs. Weasley’s voice, barely above a murmur, trembling with residual shock.

“He’s alive—oh, it’s horrible, I’ve never seen anything like it—Merlin, your spell worked, didn’t it, Remus?!”

“It may have had nothing to do with my spell,” Remus said, his grey, drawn expression not softening by even a fraction.

“Harry, can you hear me? It’s your scar, isn’t it? If you can hear me, blink.”

Blink. Of all the possible responses in the world, he wanted Harry to blink.

Harry opened his mouth to say something—anything to reassure them but when he tried to force words out, he discovered that his throat had been scraped completely raw, scraped from the inside as though he’d been gargling broken glass.

He must have been screaming without knowing it, screaming for minutes on end while he was trapped in that vision.

So, feeling faintly ridiculous but unable to do anything else, Harry blinked.

The whole room exhaled at once. Ron wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with a shaking hand and slumped against the wall with relief.

“He’s back… he’s back with us.”

Ron’s voice was hoarse and shaken.

“I’ve never seen Harry’s scar hurt him that badly before. Never anything even close to that.”

Once it became clear that Harry had truly returned to himself, Remus sat down heavily on the floor beside him and caught his breath.

But Ron’s words brought his head up sharply, his brows were drawing together with concern and a new urgency.

“Does Harry’s scar do this often?” he demanded, looking between Ron and Hermione.

Ron’s face went blank. He glanced at Hermione, then at Harry, clearly uncertain about how much he ought to say.

“Sometimes,” Hermione admitted after a long pause, biting her lower lip anxiously. “Not often—maybe a handful of times over the years. But never anything this severe.”

“You need St Mungo’s, Harry.”

Mrs. Weasley was watching him with tight, frightened eyes. Her voice was unsteady, as though she expected him to seize again at any moment.

“St Mungo’s won’t be much help with this particular problem, Molly.”

Remus drew a slow breath, his expression remained troubled.

He was not entirely ignorant of what Harry’s scar was capable of.

“You saw something just now, didn’t you,” Remus said. It wasn’t quite a question. His gaze on Harry was sharp and level, demanding honesty. “The same as last summer—when you saw……”

What had he seen?

There was no question in Harry’s mind about what he’d witnessed.

He had seen Voldemort in immense rage upon learning that Professor Watson and the goblins intended to seize his Death Eaters’ Gringotts vaults. He had seen Voldemort kill messengers simply for bringing him bad news.

He had seen Voldemort preparing to strike back, planning some retaliation. And at the end, he had seen him turn on Bellatrix with the Cruciatus Curse, punishing her for some failure she had committed.

But what failure? What had Bellatrix done or failed to do—that warranted torture?

And more urgently: what would Voldemort do now?

“I need to see Professor Watson.”

Harry stopped trying to breathe evenly. He pushed himself up onto his elbows despite the protests from everyone around him and fixed his gaze on Remus’s somber face with intensity.

“You want to see Bryan? Now? In your condition?”

Remus frowned deeply. He hesitated.

“You know he and Dumbledore are stretched thin right now, Harry. Minister Bones can’t hold the Ministry together on her own much longer. And the measures Bryan just proposed publicly against the Death Eaters who escaped Azkaban—I’d wager the people unhappy about them go well beyond just Voldemort and his followers.”

Harry said nothing in response. He simply stared at Remus. His expression said everything that needed to be said.

“All right, all right.”

Remus looked at him for a moment, reading the determination in Harry’s face, then pressed his lips together and gave in with a heavy sigh of resignation.

“I’ll get a message to Bryan. And I’ll specifically mention your scar, what just happened. That should get his attention. Speaking of which—”

He seemed to remember something suddenly. He looked around at the faces in the corridor.

“Where were you all headed before this happened?”

“Diagon Alley,” Mrs. Weasley said, her earlier enthusiasm was completely deflated.

“These poor children have been shut inside this house for nearly a month now without setting foot outside or seeing the sun properly. Now that their troubles with the Ministry are finally over, I thought perhaps a little fresh air…”

She looked at the children with an apologetic expression, and then thought of the news Remus had brought.

“Though I suppose our outing will have to wait now.”

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