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by
J.K. Rowling
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February 10 - May 1, 2025
He had never learned how to repair wounds, and now he came to think of it — particularly in light of his immediate plans — this seemed a serious flaw in his magical education.
Albus Dumbledore was never proud or vain; he could find something to value in anyone, however apparently insignificant or wretched,
“I don’t think you’re a waste of space.” If Harry had not seen Dudley’s lips move, he might not have believed it.
“See you, Harry.” “Yeah . . .” said Harry, taking Dudley’s hand and shaking it. “Maybe. Take care, Big D.”
Harry could not help but feel a little humiliated as he got into the sidecar. It placed him several feet below everybody else: Ron smirked at the sight of him sitting there like a child in a bumper car.
A second’s relief, and then another burst of green light. The owl screeched and fell to the floor of the cage.
“Well said, Harry,” said Fred unexpectedly. “Yeah, ’ear, ’ear,” said George, with half a glance at Fred, the corner of whose mouth twitched.
“Ron and Hermione seem to think that the three of you are dropping out of Hogwarts,” she began in a light, casual tone. “Oh,” said Harry. “Well, yeah. We are.”
“Come and dance,” he added abruptly to Hermione. She looked taken aback, but pleased too, and got up.
“Sign?” said Harry, looking over at Xenophilius too. The strange triangular eye was gleaming on his chest. “Why? What’s wrong with it?” “Grindelvald. That is Grindelvald’s sign.” “Grindelwald . . . the Dark wizard Dumbledore defeated?” “Exactly.”
“The Ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.”
Her arm curved to the floor, her fingers inches from Ron’s. Harry wondered whether they had fallen asleep holding hands. The idea made him feel strangely lonely.
The room was spacious and must once have been handsome. There was a large bed with a carved wooden headboard, a tall window obscured by long velvet curtains, and a chandelier thickly coated in dust with candle stubs still resting in its sockets, solid wax hanging in frostlike drips. A fine film of dust covered the pictures on the walls and the bed’s headboard; a spider’s web stretched between the chandelier and the top of the large wooden wardrobe,
The teenage Sirius had plastered the walls with so many posters and pictures that little of the walls’ silvery-gray silk was visible. Harry could only assume that Sirius’s parents had been unable to remove the Permanent Sticking Charm that kept them on the wall, because he was sure they would not have appreciated their eldest son’s taste in decoration. Sirius seemed to have gone out of his way to annoy his parents. There were several large Gryffindor banners, faded scarlet and gold, just to underline his difference from all the rest of the Slytherin family. There were many pictures of Muggle
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Harry bent down, picked up a few of the pieces of paper, and examined them. He recognized one as part of an old edition of A History of Magic, by Bathilda Bagshot, and another as belonging to a motorcycle maintenance manual. The third was handwritten and crumpled. He smoothed it out. Dear Padfoot, Thank you thank you, for Harry’s birthday present! It was his favorite by far. One year old and already zooming along on a toy broomstick, he looked so pleased with himself, I’m enclosing a picture so you can see.
The letter was an incredible treasure, proof that Lily Potter had lived, really lived, that her warm hand had once moved across this parchment, tracing ink into these letters, these words, words about him, Harry, her son.
They had had a cat . . . perhaps it had perished, like his parents, at Godric’s Hollow . . . or else fled when there was nobody left to feed it. . . .
A black-haired baby was zooming in and out of the picture on a tiny broom, roaring with laughter, and a pair of legs that must have belonged to James was chasing after him.
It was a pompous little sign, neatly lettered by hand, the sort of thing that Percy Weasley might have stuck on his bedroom door: Do Not Enter Without the Express Permission of Regulus Arcturus Black
Remember all those awful things we had to get rid of when we were here last time? That clock that shot bolts at everyone and those old robes that tried to strangle Ron;
Lupin swallowed. “I — I made a grave mistake in marrying Tonks. I did it against my better judgment and I have regretted it very much ever since.”
No shit baby
A large picture of a familiar, hook-nosed, black-haired man stared up at them all, beneath a headline that read: SEVERUS SNAPE CONFIRMED AS HOGWARTS HEADMASTER
Harry looked more closely and realized that what he had thought were decoratively carved thrones were actually mounds of carved humans: hundreds and hundreds of naked bodies, men, women, and children, all with rather stupid, ugly faces, twisted and pressed together to support the weight of the handsomely robed wizards. “Muggles,” whispered Hermione. “In their rightful place. Come on, let’s get going.”
Hermione took it and poured three drops of the potion onto the bleeding wound. Greenish smoke billowed upward and when it had cleared, Harry saw that the bleeding had stopped. The wound now looked several days old; new skin stretched over what had just been open flesh.
The sword of Gryffindor was hidden they knew not where, and they were three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead.
It was in Godric’s Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house . . . He might even have had brothers and sisters . . . It would have been his mother who had made his seventeenth birthday cake.
She was pointing at the war memorial. As they had passed it, it had transformed. Instead of an obelisk covered in names, there was a statue of three people: a man with untidy hair and glasses, a woman with long hair and a kind, pretty face, and a baby boy sitting in his mother’s arms. Snow lay upon all their heads, like fluffy white caps.
Harry stooped down and saw, upon the frozen, lichen-spotted granite, the words KENDRA DUMBLEDORE and, a short way below her dates of birth and death, AND HER DAUGHTER ARIANA. There was also a quotation: Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Man they gonna have to dig up this grave huh :/
But it seemed that to Dumbledore, the fact that their families lay side by side in the same graveyard had been an unimportant coincidence, irrelevant, perhaps, to the job he wanted Harry to do.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.
Lily and James lay, bones now, surely, or dust, not knowing or caring that their living son stood so near, his heart still beating, alive because of their sacrifice and close to wishing, at this moment, that he was sleeping under the snow with them.
Some had merely signed their names in Everlasting Ink; others had carved their initials into the wood, still others had left messages. The most recent of these, shining brightly over sixteen years’ worth of magical graffiti, all said similar things. Good luck, Harry, wherever you are. If you read this, Harry, we’re all behind you! Long live Harry Potter.
The green light filled the cramped hallway, it lit the pram pushed against the wall, it made the banisters glare like lightning rods, and James Potter fell like a marionette whose strings were cut. . . .
The child had not cried all this time: He could stand, clutching the bars of his crib, and he looked up into the intruder’s face with a kind of bright interest, perhaps thinking that it was his father who hid beneath the cloak, making more pretty lights,
There was a scarlet oval over his heart where the locket had burned him.
Xenophilius raised his eyebrows. “Are you referring to the sign of the Deathly Hallows?”
“The Elder Wand,” he said, and he drew a straight vertical line upon the parchment. “The Resurrection Stone,” he said, and he added a circle on top of the line. “The Cloak of Invisibility,” he finished, enclosing both line and circle in a triangle, to make the symbol that so intrigued Hermione. “Together,” he said, “the Deathly Hallows.”
“Well, how can that be real?” “Prove that it is not,” said Xenophilius. Hermione looked outraged.
“I think you’re right,” she told him. “It’s just a morality tale, it’s obvious which gift is best, which one you’d choose —” The three of them spoke at the same time; Hermione said, “the Cloak,” Ron said, “the wand,” and Harry said, “the stone.”
Harry saw Draco’s face up close now, right beside his father’s. They were extraordinarily alike, except that while his father looked beside himself with excitement, Draco’s expression was full of reluctance, even fear. “I don’t know,” he said, and he walked away toward the fireplace where his mother stood watching.
“But then, that’s the Weasley boy!” shouted Lucius, striding around the bound prisoners to face Ron. “It’s them, Potter’s friends — Draco, look at him, isn’t it Arthur Weasley’s son, what’s his name — ?” “Yeah,” said Draco again, his back to the prisoners. “It could be.”
“Dobby, no, don’t die, don’t die —” The elf’s eyes found him, and his lips trembled with the effort to form words. “Harry . . . Potter . . .” And then with a little shudder the elf became quite still, and his eyes were nothing more than great glassy orbs, sprinkled with light from the stars they could not see.
He dug with a kind of fury, relishing the manual work, glorying in the non-magic of it, for every drop of his sweat and every blister felt like a gift to the elf who had saved their lives.
When Harry stood up again, the stone read: HERE LIES DOBBY, A FREE ELF.
Dobby would never be able to tell them who had sent him to the cellar, but Harry knew what he had seen. A piercing blue eye had looked out of the mirror fragment, and then help had come. Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.
“We do!” said Hermione. She had sat up straight, her eyes bright. “We protest! And I’m hunted quite as much as any goblin or elf, Griphook! I’m a Mudblood!”
The goblin stroked the sword, and his black eyes roved from Harry to Hermione to Ron and then back again. “So young,” he said finally, “to be fighting so many.”
“Hawthorn and unicorn hair. Ten inches precisely. Reasonably springy. This was the wand of Draco Malfoy.” “Was?” repeated Harry. “Isn’t it still his?” “Perhaps not. If you took it —” “— I did —” “— then it may be yours. Of course, the manner of taking matters. Much also depends upon the wand itself. In general, however, where a wand has been won, its allegiance will change.”
After five minutes or so, Harry lost some of his immediate dread that the dragon was going to throw them off,
Dumbledore, dead on his orders; Dumbledore, whose wand was his now,
DUMBLEDORE HAD THE ELDER WAND? BROOOOO
