The main hall of Gaunt Manor was dimly lit, illuminated only by the glow of the flames in the fireplace.
Voldemort, settled into a velvet armchair that seemed to swallow his tiny body, stared intently at the flames. Aurelian, meanwhile, walked slowly around the furniture with a crystal glass in his hand, swirling the liquid inside it in circles.
"Are you still set on this, Dad?" Aurelian asked, breaking the silence with a hint of exasperation. "The resurrection ritual you want to use is complex, but the 'enemy's blood' variable is flexible. We could use almost anyone's. Do you really need to put on that whole circus at the Tournament just to bring Potter here?"
Voldemort slowly turned his head toward his son. His eyes flashed with stubbornness.
"It is imperative, Aurelian." His tone brooked no argument. "Lily Potter's protection is an obstacle I must overcome. If I use her blood, that protection will live on in me. I will be able to touch him. I will be able to destroy him. But if I use any other blood, that weakness will remain. This is not just a whim; it is ensuring that my greatest weakness becomes my greatest strength. There will be no further discussion on this matter."
Aurelian sighed, shaking his head. His father's arrogance remained his Achilles heel, and it was best not to press that point any further for now. Some battles were won with patience.
"Who understands you, Father. But if you insist on closing that cycle with something symbolic, so be it. We'll use Potter, happy?"
Voldemort nodded, satisfied that he had won that point.
Aurelian stopped in front of a display case containing several dark artifacts he had brought from Grimmauld Place, his gaze lost in a memory.
"You know," Aurelian began, changing his tone to a more casual, almost anecdotal one, "a couple of years ago I decided to... investigate our roots. I took a little trip and found an old cabin not far from here."
Voldemort's eyes narrowed. Hatred crossed his deformed face.
"The cottage? That place is a dump," Voldemort spat contemptuously. "A stain on our history, and I hope you burned it down. Why did you go to that miserable place?"
"Curiosity, I suppose," Aurelian replied, shrugging. "I wanted to see where we came from, and I must say I found something... peculiar."
Aurelian slowly turned to face his father.
"Under the rotten floorboards, in a golden box protected by some rather nasty enchantments, I found a ring. A ring with a black stone set in it."
Voldemort's reaction was instantaneous. The Dark Lord tried to sit up abruptly, ignoring his physical weakness, panic taking hold of his face.
"Did you touch it?" Voldemort shouted, his voice filled with fear. "Aurelian! Did you put on the ring? Tell me!"
The concern in his voice was genuine. Voldemort knew better than anyone the deadly curse he had placed on that jewel. A curse designed to painfully kill anyone who dared to touch the ring.
Aurelian stood still for a second, surprised by his father's reaction. There was no anger in his voice, no concern that his treasure had been stolen. He was concerned about the curse. He was concerned that his son had fallen into the deadly trap he himself had designed for any intruder.
A slow, warm smile spread across Aurelian's face.
"Don't worry, Dad," he said softly. "I'm not that reckless."
Aurelian raised his free hand and made a dismissive gesture.
"I detected the curse the moment I saw the box, and obviously I wouldn't touch it without being sure I could handle it."
Voldemort slumped back into the armchair, breathing heavily, his heart pounding in his fragile chest.
"Then... how?"
"I used a Muggle vagrant that Stinky found," Aurelian explained, closing his eyes. "I cast Imperius on him, made him put on the ring, and watched as the curse took effect. He dried up and turned black in a matter of minutes. It was unpleasant, but effective. The curse consumed him."
Voldemort let out a long sigh, closing his eyes. A proud smile twisted his lips.
"Good... good. That was clever. Using disposable tools to avoid danger," he murmured. "Very intelligent"
But Aurelian wasn't finished. He walked over to stand in front of his father's chair, his shadow falling over the Dark Lord's small body.
"I took the ring, and you know what I discovered when I studied it."
Aurelian leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees to come face to face with Voldemort. His expression hardened.
"I discovered it was a Horcrux, Dad."
Voldemort's eyes flew open, meeting his son's piercing black gaze.
"You divided your own soul," Aurelian continued, his voice losing all warmth, becoming harsh and critical. "You broke your essence, tore it apart to put a piece of it into an old piece of jewelry."
Aurelian straightened up, looking at his father in disbelief.
"Why?" he asked, the question hanging in the air like a sentence. "You are a genius, an Archmage, and a powerful wizard in your own right. Why would you be so idiot as to break your own soul and lose your sanity in the process?"
The word "idiot" struck Lord Voldemort's ego hard; no one, not even his own son, could call him an idiot.
"Idiot?!" Voldemort roared, his magic flaring briefly, turning the flames in the fireplace green and making them roar. "I have gone further than anyone else on the path to immortality! I have conquered death! While other wizards rot in the earth, I persist! I am eternal, Aurelian! I have achieved what greats like Solomon Graye or Dumbledore would not even dare to dream of!"
Aurelian did not retreat. He stood there, impassive, watching the tantrum of a fallen god with patience. He let his father shout, spewing his rhetoric about greatness and eternity, until Voldemort's misshapen chest rose and fell rapidly, exhausted from the effort.
Only then did Aurelian speak.
"You survived, but at what cost?" Aurelian asked, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Splitting your soul isn't just a trick to anchor yourself to life. It's fracturing your very essence. It's destroying what makes us us."
Aurelian took a step closer, looking into his father's eyes.
"Every time you tore your soul, you lost something, Father. You lost emotional stability. You lost rationality. You lost the ability to see the big picture. You became... unstable."
Voldemort opened his mouth to reply, but Aurelian raised a hand, cutting him off.
"Tell me one thing. Why did you go to Godric's Hollow that night? Why did you decide to hunt down the Potters and kill a one-year-old baby?"
Voldemort frowned, as if the answer were obvious.
"It was necessary," he hissed. "Severus... he heard a prophecy. In Dumbledore's brother's bar, The Hog's Head. A supposed seer said that the only one with the power to defeat me was coming. 'Born of those who have defied me three times, born at the end of the seventh month...' "
"And you believed it," said Aurelian, with a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. "The most feared wizard, dancing to the tune of the vague words of a drunk in a tavern."
"She said he would have a power I did not know!" insisted Voldemort, defensively. "I could not allow such a threat to grow! I had to eliminate him before he could raise a wand!"
"And in doing so, you created your own destroyer," Aurelian said relentlessly. "What you did is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy, Father."
Aurelian crouched down to meet Voldemort's gaze.
"If you had stayed on your throne, if you had ignored that gossip... Harry Potter would have grown up as a normal child, perhaps talented, but with no special reason to hate you beyond his family's political stance. He would not have his mother's protection. He would not have a mark that links him to you. He wouldn't be the 'Chosen One.' "
Voldemort fell silent. His eyes flicked as he processed his son's cold logic.
"You gave him importance," Aurelian continued. "You marked him as your equal. By believing he was a threat, you made him a threat."
The Dark Lord stared into the fire. For the first time in decades, his mind went blank.
"If I had ignored her," Voldemort murmured, his voice barely audible, "what do you think would have happened if I had never gone to that house?"
"Perhaps, just perhaps, you would have won the war thirteen years ago," Aurelian replied with a smile. "You could have ruled without opposition. Mom might still be alive somewhere, but those are just assumptions."
Voldemort closed his eyes, feeling the crushing weight of that possibility.
Aurelian got up and walked back to the window, looking at his own reflection in the dark glass.
"But you couldn't ignore her, could you?" said Aurelian, turning to look at his father one last time. "That's the tragedy. If you hadn't split your soul, if you'd kept your mind intact, you would never have blindly believed in a prophecy. The Tom Riddle who made my mother fall in love with him was a calculating genius. The Lord Voldemort who attacked the Potters was an unstable paranoid."
Voldemort sank further into the armchair. His son's words were not an attack, they were a diagnosis. And worst of all, deep down in his conscience, he knew Aurelian was right.
"You were no longer the same man who became a Archmage," Aurelian concluded softly. "You were only a part of him, and broken parts make broken decisions."
The silence that followed Aurelian's sentence was thick.
Voldemort did not respond. He stared at the dancing flames in the fireplace, his eyes not seeing the fire, but seeing an alternate past, a life where his mind was intact and his decisions were not born of paranoia. The revelation that he himself had been the architect of his own downfall had left him in a catatonic state.
Crack.
The sharp sound of an apparition broke the melancholic atmosphere in the room.
"Master Aurelian?" squeaked Stinky, appearing near the door. The elf wrung his hands nervously, casting fearful glances at Voldemort, who remained motionless as a statue in his armchair.
Aurelian blinked and turned to the elf.
"What's going on, Stinky?" he asked calmly. "Did Wormtail try to escape from the basement again?"
"No, Master. It's not the rat," said Stinky, his long ears twitching. "The outer perimeter protections have vibrated. There's someone at the main gate. A human."
Aurelian frowned. No one should know where his house was. Gaunt Manor was under powerful enchantments and repulsion barriers, both Muggle and magical.
"Who is it?" Aurelian demanded.
"He says his name is... Bartemius Crouch," replied the elf.
Aurelian's eyes widened slightly, a genuine spark of surprise crossing his face.
Barty Crouch Jr.
His mind processed the information in a fraction of a second. In the original story, it had been Voldemort who, upon learning of his faithful servant's survival, had gone to rescue him from his father's house, breaking the Imperius Curse that held him prisoner.
But in this reality, Voldemort had been here in the mansion all along.
"He freed himself," thought Aurelian, impressed. "He fought against his father's curse, broke the mind control through sheer willpower, and managed to track us down here without outside help. It seems that not all of my father's followers are useless."
Aurelian turned his head toward the armchair. His father was still slumped among the cushions, his gaze empty. Aurelian's words had shattered him more effectively than any duel. The great Lord Voldemort was, for the moment, out of commission, grappling with the existential horror of his own actions.
"Dad," Aurelian called softly.
Voldemort did not react. He did not even blink.
Aurelian sighed and adjusted the cuffs of his shirt. It was not the time to interrupt him. In fact, perhaps it was better this way.
"It's okay," Aurelian said. "Let him rest. It seems the Dark Lord needs time to process some uncomfortable truths. Don't bother him."
Aurelian walked toward the door of the room.
"Come on, Stinky. Come with me to the entrance," he ordered, a smile curving his lips. "I'm curious to see what state our new visitor is in."
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