Chapter 6

Harry stood up from behind the grave marker he was using as a shield. "Wow Tom, I would ask if you kissed your mom with those lips, but well, you don't have a mom so I guess it is all right for you. I would take offence at what you said about my parents, but then again, my mother wasn't so ugly and inbred that she had to either marry her brother or potion a muggle squire to love her blindly, the operative part being blind." Harry noticed that his opponent was speechless with rage and so he continued while moving himself into the proper position needed to succeed in the end game that Luna and his advisors had planned for this night.

"I am sure that you know as well as I do that this can only end badly for one of us, and I am sure that a certain manipulative old fool wants us to duel each other in a righteous until we are both almost spent before you kill me, and then he will step forward and defeat you, thereby establishing himself as greater than even Merlin; but really, why should he get anything from either of us since it was him who caused us to be who we are. There are some things you should know before we fight Tom, so I would appreciate if you would hear me out before we commence to the battle royale."

"I am listening Potter, but do not expect my mercy or patience to last, the only reason I am allowing you to speak is because I am curious as to what Dumbledore's golden boy has to say about his mentor."

"Well Tom, it all goes back to two prophecies, one you know about as it was partially passed on to you by Severus Snape; the other being given before you were even potion ingredients in your mother's cauldron. The one you know is thought to be about you and me and if true, means that it will be either you or me as one of us is destined to kill the other."

"You say that as if you believe that the prophecy is not about the two of us. Do you know the whole prophecy or is all of this prattle just mere speculation?"

"I will get to that in a minute Tom, but first I want to tell you about a prophecy that was given to two young men who were the best of friends, so close in fact that they often shared the same bed to 'keep warm, ' if you get my meaning Tom. One day, the two of them were planning their path to world domination, all for the greater good of course, when the younger sister of one of them went into a trance and began to speak in a voice unlike her own. She was a special girl born from a long line of seers and having been adopted by the wizard's parents when her own were killed in a tragic fire, and not having any known family in the area."

"Her prophecy went as follows;

Two will come who believe that the world should be theirs,

One determined to rule by force, one to rule through control,

Both will be dark, though one will cloak himself in light, and both will pursue power,

The world will pay in blood; the dreams of the two will war,

But only one will come to victory, for in time will come others,

One who will challenge all in hate, the other will survive with love.

Many years will pass before the world can one day be balanced,

The ruler will fall by the cunning of the chimera and his fold,

And the world will enter a new age like no other before."

"Now, the thing you have to understand Tom is that the little girl who gave the prophecy was born from the direct line of descent from the Oracle of Delphi and it was not the first prophecy she had given, though they had been hidden from her adoptive brothers. The two young men who heard the prophecy given each felt that they were the hero of the prophecy, and they wanted to keep her near in case she made more prophecies so they could use them to their advantage. They began to argue with each other about who would take her, and their tempers flared as the argument became more heated. It was only when the other brother came in that violence erupted and the young seer was killed in the ensuing fight. After the fight, the two young men split their paths and the world moved on."

Harry paused for a moment to lock gazes with the evil Rowan Atkinson look-alike to make sure he had his attention before continuing with his tale. "Many years later, a seer from a lesser family made a small prophecy while trying to acquire a job and the dark wizard who cloaked himself in false light saw it as his opportunity to make fate turn out his way. He erased her memory, and then sent her to a tavern to be interviewed again where the prophecy could be overheard. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the meddlesome drama queen couldn't leave well enough alone, and so he Imperioused the young seer to spout a heavily modified prophecy with certain embellishments he added to help himself in his quest to rule all. He made sure that one of your followers was there outside the door to hear the false prophecy, but his brother caught the eavesdropper and threw him out before he heard it all. The spy went running back to you with his information, and soon after that, the rat was sent to you to join your ranks so that you would attack the family that the old manipulator wanted you to."

"I am no one's puppet, boy; I am the most feared Dark Lord in history. Your story is interesting, but I think you are telling it to me to buy yourself time to work out a way to escape from meeting your fate at the end of my wand. Enough of this Harry Potter, it is time for you to die."

"Okay Tommy, I tried to tell you what was going on, but I guess being Baby-mort for so long, you haven't got the temper tantrums out of your system."

Lord Voldemort's face became red with rage, and he screamed out his curse at the insolent boy before him. "Avada Kedavra!"

Harry watched the curse fly toward him, a smile on his lips until just before he was struck by the green light. Dropping his right shoulder back as he bent his knees allowed the acid green curse to fly past him into an area clear of any of the robed figures that surrounded them. If any had been paying close attention, they would have noticed the distortion of light behind Harry, which held someone disillusioned and waiting for their moment to come. The curse struck the hidden figure dead center, and to everyone's shock, it was the figure of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore that hit the ground with no life in his eyes. It was even more shocking for Lord Voldemort when a shade rose from the body and began to curse at himself and Harry Potter.

"You couldn't just follow the plan and die like a good little sacrifice, could you Potter. Years of planning and manipulation ruined because of the hormones of a teenage boy. Tom was always such a good boy, following the path I set him on without fail, but Harry Potter just had to do things his way, and now I will have to have you killed and start all over."

"I am no one's puppet, old man. Everything I have done has been by my own design. I became so great that not even you, the defeater of Grindelwald, could beat me in battle." Riddle screamed like a guilty school boy.

"Tom my boy, use the intelligence you have to think for once. When you were in school, who do you think arranged for you to get all that extra tutoring about magic, politics, and the wizarding world? Who do you think put the books about methods of immortality on that little hidden bookcase you found in the Slytherin study room? Who made the head of Slytherin answer your questions about making horcruxes by blackmailing him about his activities with first, second, and third year boys? All of the elicit knowledge you gained at Hogwarts, and all the old family libraries that opened to you after were all by my command. I needed you to scare the populace so they would allow me to shape them in the way I wanted. It was my design from the first moment we met that led you down the path to being a dark lord. Face it Tom, in all that matters, I am your father and the one who has guided you through every step of your life."

Tom Marvolo Riddle, aka Lord Voldemort, was stunned speechless at the revelations that he had just heard, and his prodigious intellect was busy going over his entire life step by step and realizing that it had all been a lie. He had never been in control of his own destiny, and the scope of the manipulations that he had been a mere piece of was staggering in their grandeur and ambition. His thoughts were interrupted by the disembodied spirit who had been for all intents and purposes his master for most of his life.

"It is time for you to finish this Tom, and then I will tell you how to remove the knowledge of tonight from the minds of your followers using your brand. Kill Harry Potter and I will reveal to you magic that you never even dreamed of in all your travels and quests for power." By now the spirit form of Dumbledore had moved over and was hovering in the air next to his puppet, waiting for him to play his part in the next stage of his grand design.

With a shrug of acceptance, Tom Riddle turned to do the old man's bidding and end the Line of Potter once and for all, only Harry Potter, last of the Ancient and Noble line of Potter, was not intending to let either of the evil beings get away with their plans for global domination.

If Dumbledore had still had a face to wear the enchanted spectacles he was notorious for, he would have seen that streams of magic were pouring in from every direction and charging the runes of the warded ritual circle that Harry now stood in the middle of.

-Flashback-

Last Hogsmeade Weekend before the Final Task

"Luna, are you sure that this is where I have to stand for the plan to come about to completion?" Asked Harry as he stood in the open without any type of cover nearby.

"Harry, you have to trust in Luna and her plan, we all do." Hermione stated; having become one of Luna's biggest supporters after the young seer Ravenclaw had led her to a hidden library that had once been the personal library of the warrior mage Godric Gryffindor.

"If you want everything to end the way it should, then you will have to stand here and let old Baldyfarts fire a killing curse at you, without firing back. Just make sure to drop your right shoulder back and down and you will be fine. The death eaters will all have been snagged by our runic snatch stones while you taunt Tommy, and those loyal to you will be in their place. Once the curse goes by, you will need to activate the runic array and the power draws for the ritual."

"Luna, what happens if the draws don't work?"

"Well, you might have enough power on your own to activate the ritual, but it will leave you as a squib at best, and most likely dead at worst." Luna said with no more inflection than if she had told him about the weather. Harry decided to make sure he had the sequence for the ritual perfected by the time he was fated to be here in the graveyard.

-End Flashback-

Tom Riddle, the newly revealed puppet, fired a killing curse at the boy standing completely still in front of him, only to be stunned once again when the curse seemed to swirl around him before being absorbed into his body. Determined to break through whatever protection Potter had and kill him, Riddle began to fire off every curse he could think of, all to no avail. Every dark curse imaginable flew at the young man, and the only effect on him was that his eyes began to actually glow green with the power he was absorbing. By now the dark spirit of Albus Dumbledore was screaming in his ear to destroy the impudent brat before them, whipping Tom to greater and greater feats of magic, all with no more effect than a lumos.

A wind sprang up that surrounded the grave yard, going from sporadic gusts to ravening howling storm intent on ripping the flesh from any who would brave it. Magic began to crackle in the air, like the static build up before a lightning strike, pulses going outward from Harry in tune with the beat of his heart, destroying gravestones and markers as they fed the wild magic surrounding them.

"Stop giving him power," screamed the shade of Dumbledore. "If he gets too powerful, we will both have to start over, as both of us will need followers to give us a new body."

"What should I do? I have sent every draining spell and curse at him, and he just absorbs the magic and the power around him becomes greater." Voldemort questioned as he watched the whelp become as powerful as a god.

Before Albus could answer, Harry began to whistle, click, and chant in a language not heard on earth in several millenniums outside of a few families known for ritualistic magic. Some scholars would have said he was speaking in Oromo or Amharic, but they would have been wrong since what he was speaking was the pure language of the divine as spoken to man by the Creator at the origin of life. As the chant grew louder, the magic began to solidify, freezing all in place be they embodied or disembodied, and collecting in coronas of power around each soul there.

With a scream, Tom Riddle arched back as if in great pain and a piece of him came racing into him from a shack a few hundred yards away. He kept screaming as one by one his anchors gave up their fragments and the magic called them to join with their owner in an attempt to make him whole.

If Albus Dumbledore had been in possession of a body at that moment, he would have been smirking at the knowledge that his soul containers were contained within runic circles of their own, and so he believed that he was safe from what Harry was doing to his puppet Tom. He was supremely confident that he would survive this moment to rise even greater than before, at least until he noticed that a piece of his soul was now floating next to him in the graveyard and another was just coming into the trap from the North, passing within feet of Harry Potter. Now, his only hope was that the magic surrounding them would not be able to bring the body with his last soul piece here to this place of judgment.

When Lord Voldemort had attacked Harry's parents that fateful night, it had been with the intention of making Harry his sixth horcrux, which the magic would keep in stasis for the time when his body was destroyed or just ran out of time. It was a ritual that had been created and used successfully by Albus Dumbledore using a first year muggleborn to make sure he would never be without a body. Using blood rituals, he had made his living horcrux into an exact clone without the aging that could wear the body out. When Voldemort's spell backfired on him because Harry's core was greater than his with the boost his mother's sacrifice had given him, the process was incomplete and failed.

It terrified the two dark lords when Harry's chanting began to raise in volume, his song and melody joined by the song of the newly freed phoenix, Spiral, who Dumbledore had enslaved and renamed Fawkes as a joke. The phoenix flew in an ever tightening circle, before flashing out in a pillar of fire, only to appear moments later with the clone of Dumbledore clutched in his talons. The clone and last horcrux of Albus Dumbledore, dark lord who masked himself as light, opened its eyes and began to scream as it and the other pieces of Dumbledore's soul were forced into one whole.

As one, the death eaters who were surrounding the three pawns of destiny threw off their robes to reveal the fact that they were all supporters of Harry Potter and began to chant their parts of the ritual that now had trapped the two dark souls. Faster and faster the chant progressed, rising in volume and force in harmony with the voice of Harry and Spiral. Albus and Tom could only look on in hopelessness and fear as Spiral landed on Harry's shoulders and began to glow with a white flame that spread until it surrounded Harry as well. As the crescendo of the melody was reached, Harry and Spiral threw their heads back in an unheard scream, the magic of the chant turning the two into something not seen since the heady days following shortly after the creation of the world, when beings with the power of the divine walked the earth among men; a being of purifying flame and flesh, called upon to judge the souls of men.

Eyes that shown with the purifying light of a thousand suns turned to focus on the two dark lords, the gaze peering deep into their souls revealing all of the darkness within them. With a deep voice that seemed to be filled with the voices of a heavenly throng, the being before them spoke.

"ALBUS PERCIVAL WULFRIC BRIAN DUMBLEDORE, TOM MARVOLLO RIDDLE, YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED AND BEEN FOUND WANTING." Power rolled over them in waves as the being spoke to the two. "Your pursuit of power and your greed have led you down a path that only leads to the further blackening of your hearts."

The voice emanating from the being that Spiral and Harry had formed was like a chorus from heaven to those who were from the side of the light, uplifting and empowering to those with a clean soul. To those who were on the side of the darkness, their souls stained with the blood of the innocents that they had caused the demise of, they heard a voice straight out of the deepest pits of hell, making their blood chill in fear and the faces and fears of their victims flashing before their eyes. The pause in their judge's invocation did not free them from reliving their crimes, but only made it more intense as there was nothing else for either of the dark lords to focus on.

"You, the self-styled Lord of the Light Albus too many names and titles Dumbledore, you have been found guilty of harming the innocents in your pursuit of what you claimed was the greater good. Oh wait, there is another who needs to be here as well, your friend and lover who you sacrificed Nicholas and Prenelle Flamell so that he could hide from the world while you accomplished your goals."

Harry lifted his glowing eyes to the sky and raised his hand. "GELLERT GRINDELWALD, I SUMMON YOU TO BE JUDGED!" A beam of light shot to the sky and then flashed to the north, revealing to those watching that the dark lord behind the atrocities in World War 2 was neither dead, nor in the prison in Germany that he was rumored to have been placed in by Dumbledore. Moments later a man came flying into the graveyard, along with two soul pieces that joined with him as he landed next to Dumbledore.

"Now that the three of you are here, it is time to face your judgment. Gellert, you are responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of magical beings, along with millions of mundane in the war and death camps you helped initiate and establish, along with your best friend and lover Albus. It was only when it was obvious that with the American's entering the war, both magical and mundane, that your side was going to lose and your idea of pureblood Wizard Rule through force was going to fail, that the two of you came up with the idea of your epic battle to end the war, so that Albus could try to manipulate everything from the side of the light. It really was a brilliant plan, bringing your lover back and getting him a job by replacing the one who had the position so that the two of you could manipulate the next generation into the sheep you wanted, grabbing the most talented over the years and making them look up to you or owe you favors. When the two of you came up with your plans to make another dark lord to give the people something to fear, the blood he spilled became part of your true legacy to this world."

The new man fought through whatever power was holding him, trying to get a word in. "My legacy and the legacy of Albus are for the good of the world as a whole. Look at what the muggles are doing to each other and the world in general. They are polluting their own world with their machines, technology, war, and especially the idea that they are dominant on this world. Their greatest achievements and their greatest accomplishments were when they followed us as the gods we are compared them. It is said in their own academia that when the gods walked among men, guiding them in their endeavors, there was peace across the known world."

"So you claim to be a god, knowing that you are mortal and are held to the standard of the infinite by the maker himself. Your arrogance is astounding, even at your judgment; you still claim that you have the right to rule over your fellow man. It is time for you to learn that the only reason you were put on this earth, was for the betterment of your fellow beings. Your task in life is to leave the world a better place than when you came into the world, and all three of you have failed."