Professor McGonagall's voice broke through the silence as Dumbledore set Harry softly on the threshold of Number Four, Privet Drive, and turned to head back into the dark—sharp, uncertain, and worried.
"And what about him, Albus?"
Dumbledore stopped; his subtle eye glimmer went out. "Elian Vale?" he queried, half confirmation, half unreadable, the name hanging in the chilly air.
"Yes," she said softly. "His mother, Elisa, was found barely an hour after the Dark Mark faded. And his father—"
"Albert Vale remains… committed to the Ministry," Dumbledore said delicately.
"Committed?" McGonagall raised a brow. "Cold as frost, that man. The boy's not a file to manage, he's—"
"A child," Dumbledore finished for her. "One who has already bent time without knowing it."
McGonagall's lips thinned. "He'll need more than Ministry medals and locked doors."
"He will have his time," Dumbledore said. "But not yet."
Dumbledore turned away, his cloak rustling against the ground and leaving two names behind on the same still street: one cradled in prophecy, the other trapped in silence.
Miles away, in a bungalow at the Golden Valley's far end, silence was the only thing daring to create noise.
Staring at his mother's dead body, a boy not yet one sat in his crib.
"Take him somewhere else, Stephen!" Albert Vale yelled from the living room, sharp, authoritative and unaffected by sorrow.
Stepping out of the living room, a young man in his thirties wearing a butler's uniform moved toward the crib. As he bent over and gently carried the youngster into his arms, his eyes, heavy with grief and tired, softened.
"Let's go, Master Elian," he murmured.
Elian didn't cry or resist; it was as if he recognized the pattern—not understanding it, but accepting it.
Stephen carried Elian with one arm, and with another hand he flicked his fingers, which formed shiny magical glitters like snowflakes that started floating around Elian, but Elian's eyes were fixed on his mother's lifeless body.
Stephen, with a soft voice and trying to hold his tears, said while floating the glitters near Elian. "Look, Master!" But that child's eyes were locked on Elisa's lifeless body, not crying but trying to understand something.
A breeze stirred the hedges of Golden Valley, where silence reigned under the ink-stained sky. Across the country, people raised their glasses in secret, whispering, "To Harry Potter—the boy who lived."
But none of them knew of Elian Vale—the paradox who helped the boy who lived before he was even born... and who would one day become unforgettable.