Harry shut the door to Regulus's old room behind him, the soft click swallowed by the eerie quiet. The locket sat cold in his palm, heavier than its size should allow—heavier than gold or chain or cursed metal. It wasn't just weight. It was presence.
He sat on the bed and held it up to the candlelight. The snake-shaped S twisted in the flickering glow like it wanted to writhe off the surface. A Horcrux. He knew it the moment he touched it.
And yet… nothing happened.
No voices. No visions. No crushing despair.
Just a strange, restless pull. It wanted something from him, but it didn't know what. And he wasn't sure it could reach him properly. There were… protections inside him now. Or perhaps just something darker that Voldemort's fragment couldn't bend.
Still, he couldn't leave it. He would destroy it. He would finish it.
A sudden crack of Apparition shattered the quiet.
Harry spun—and there was Kreacher.
The old house-elf's eyes glinted with rage and something rawer. They locked on the locket in Harry's hand, and for a second, Harry saw real hate.
"You stole it," Kreacher hissed, stepping forward, gnarled fingers curling into claws. "That was Master Regulus's! Kreacher was given orders—Kreacher failed! Give it back, you filthy thief!"
"I didn't steal it," Harry said evenly, but Kreacher kept advancing.
"You mock Kreacher! Think Kreacher stupid? You take it to throw away, like all his treasures? No—no—Kreacher will complete his master's task. Kreacher must!"
Harry stood now, locket still clutched in one hand. "You want to destroy it, right?" he asked.
Kreacher stopped, lips trembling.
"I know what it is. I know what it does. I know what Voldemort made it into."
Kreacher flinched at the name, teeth bared like a cornered animal.
Harry stepped forward slowly. His voice dropped to something quiet and dangerous.
"No one hates him more than I do. You think you failed Regulus? I saw what Voldemort did to my parents. I lived through it. Every year of my life has been haunted because he wouldn't stay dead. You think I'll let this piece of him survive?"
The room was silent, save for the soft crackle of the fire.
Kreacher stared at him, breathing hard.
"I'm going to destroy it," Harry continued. "Not throw it away. End it. Properly. Just like Regulus wanted."
Kreacher's fists trembled. "You… can't. Kreacher tried. It does not break. It screams. It fights. Kreacher is not strong enough…"
"I am," Harry said.
Something flickered in Kreacher's eyes—doubt and devotion twisted together.
"You would… finish Master Regulus's task?"
"I swear it," Harry said. "On his name. On mine. I'll end it. I promise."
Kreacher stood there, hunched and furious and unsure. Finally, he gave a sharp, shuddering breath and looked away.
"Then Kreacher will not stop you," he said. "But if you lie… if you waste his sacrifice…"
"I won't."
With a resentful pop, Kreacher vanished.
Harry stood there, the locket burning in his grip. It had grown heavier again.
He slipped it into his pocket, ignoring the faint hum under his skin.
He would destroy it.
When he finally turned back to the room, the candle had burned lower. The locket in his pocket pressed against his leg again—not with menace, but with meaning.
He moved to the tall bookshelf, running a hand across its spine-lined surface. There was no order to the tomes—half had no titles at all, just symbols burned into leather bindings. One thin book bore the Dark Mark itself, half-faded and inked with silver.
Harry picked a volume at random—one with no name, only a black tree etched into crimson leather. It cracked as he opened it, the smell of aged ink and something older rising up to meet him.
The contents were exacting, not wild. Theoretical. Controlled.
The first book he'd pulled—Fragmenta Animae—felt older than the others. Not in parchment or ink, but in origin. The Latin was precise, clinical. It read like a thesis, not a grimoire.
It spoke of the soul not as an abstract essence, but as a structured thing—layered, fragile, and connected to magic through specific channels called cordae vitalis, life-threads. The soul was mapped like a rune array: outer shells protecting inner cores, each shell corresponding to identity, memory, will, and emotional imprint.
Harry traced a finger over a diagram of a fractured soul. The central core was intact—but jagged holes riddled the surrounding layers. It looked like a glass sculpture cracked under pressure.
Beneath the sketch were chilling words, neatly inked:
"Each division of the anima inflicts an exponential degradation of self. Repeated fractures may preserve magical power, but at cost of identity coherence. Subject may experience instability, obsessive behavior, and emotional dysregulation—particularly paranoia and rage."
Harry stared at that line for a long time.
That's why he's like that, he realized. Why he couldn't feel things like a person. Why he doesn't even understand fear of death properly.
Further notes hinted at a magical phenomenon called resonance instability—when two fragments of soul exist in proximity, they can influence one another. The stronger one typically dominates, but the interaction is unpredictable. If one piece tries to return to the whole, the consequences could be catastrophic.
That explained the locket's pull.
It wanted something from him—but couldn't quite act. Couldn't get past whatever protected him now. Not just the residual magic from his mother's sacrifice. No, something else. Something… more ancient. Rooted deep. Possibly from him—the fractured soul merged with his own.
He turned the page.
A list of soul-anchoring methods appeared—each more dangerous than the last. Most involved blood, sacrificial rites, or symbolic bindings. One method detailed a way to stabilize a fractured soul—not heal it, but force it into coherence through a magical tether bound by oaths and legacy.
That was how Regulus had tried to understand Voldemort's Horcrux.
Harry skimmed faster. There was a warning scrawled in the margin, in a different hand—hurried, underlined twice:
Beware the false whole. A soul that seals its wounds with stolen essence is not healed, only warped.
He exhaled slowly.
Some parts were still too difficult. Magical soul detection techniques relied on instruments he didn't know how to craft. The spells referenced metaphysical theory far beyond anything Hogwarts had taught.
But the idea stayed.
He could sense it now, in the locket. A dissonant note. Like a key that didn't belong on the ring.
And worse—he felt its curiosity.
It was probing. Not intelligent in the normal sense, but aware. Seeking cracks.
It wouldn't find any.
He closed the book slowly, the weight of it lingering on his chest like a prophecy.
He reached for another book.
This one opened with a delicate puff of ash and a rune of warding on the inner cover. He didn't hesitate. He dispelled it.
Hexametrica, it read—an advanced cursecraft manual focused on defensive enchantments and counter-patterns. It described in detail how certain curses "rooted" into the magical pathways of the body—and how they might be cut away, like infected flesh.
He flipped to the next diagram—an anatomical sketch of wand-movement harmonics to reflect a Killing Curse.
It was elegant. Precise. Almost beautiful in its cruelty.
And utterly beyond him.
Harry leaned back slightly, frowning at the dense notations scrawled in old-fashioned Latin, overlaid with magical equations he had never seen before. The book assumed familiarity with the foundational principles of spell matrices and intrinsic willcasting—subjects Hogwarts had never so much as mentioned. Even with the clarity granted by the fractured soul fused inside him, this was knowledge outside his reach.
He turned another page and found a detailed spell schematic layered with overlapping magical fields—some meant to bend, others to unravel. The intended effect, according to the marginalia, was to forcibly sever an enchantment bound by love magic.
Harry blinked.
Even understanding half of what that meant felt like trying to decode a foreign language whispered through water.
I need time, he thought. I'm not ready yet.
He didn't feel frustrated—just aware. This was no childish fantasy where power could be absorbed by flipping a page. The magic here was deliberate, deep, and dangerous. The people who wrote these tomes weren't students. They were warlocks.
Still, the pieces he could understand, he began to memorize.
A dark arts primer—buried between tomes bound in dragonhide and dust—gave him grounding: terminology, gestures, warnings. The magic was seductive not because it whispered promises, but because it made sense. It offered tools. Power wasn't a side effect. It was the point.
Most of it was far too advanced. Whole pages were diagrams so intricate they gave him headaches if he stared too long. Other sections referred to spell components he didn't recognize—roots that had to be harvested under moonlight, blood from specific magical creatures, relics now lost to time.
But that didn't matter.
What mattered was that the knowledge existed.
What mattered was that Voldemort thought himself the only one willing to touch it.
Harry closed the book and ran a hand through his hair, his fingers pausing for a moment over the faint scar on his forehead.
He wasn't Voldemort.
But he wasn't the same Harry Potter anymore, either.
He would never delight in cruelty. But he would no longer flinch at truth. Power wasn't evil. Cowardice was. The refusal to understand one's enemy, to match them, was what got people killed.
And he had no intention of dying.