"VOID"
The name rippled the Great Hall like a stone across water. Heads turned; whispers flared, puzzled and sharp.
At the Gryffindor table, Harry's fork paused halfway to his mouth. The knot that had eased all evening tightened—and then, as the dark-eyed boy he'd been noticing all day stepped forward, it loosened again, as if someone had released one notch on a too-tight string.
On its three-legged stool, the Sorting Hat waited, brim cocked like a listening ear.
Professor McGonagall checked her parchment, hesitated, and read, clearly: "Void." Just that.
As the boy moved toward the Hat, the hall's light thinned sound dulled —
—and the world tipped backward.
Before Hogwarts: The Orphanage
The building was the colour of old dishwater, its bricks smoked black by the city. Corridors smelled of cabbage and disinfectant; linoleum had been scrubbed to a permanent grey. Children's voices clattered in stairwells and fell strangely flat, the way laughter does in places that never feel warm.
Albus Dumbledore stepped through the front door with the quiet certainty of a man who never had to knock twice. His wand wasn't in his hand, yet the air seemed to make room for him.
"Headmaster—" the matron said, flustered, smoothing her skirt. She didn't know why she called him that. She didn't remember that she didn't know.
"I will not be long, Mrs. Cole," Dumbledore said pleasantly; the name fit her because his voice made room for it.
A boy sat in the office chair, hands folded, eyes too old. Brought in days ago, he hadn't cried. He didn't speak. He slept too still. Older children muttered he read too quickly; the younger ones didn't notice him unless they tripped over him. Meals appeared on his tray. No one recalled setting them down.
Dumbledore closed the office door.
The Geas of Overlooking
He raised his wand and worked the first net of magic—not to erase, but to tilt. It settled over the orphanage like a clear, thin film.
Matron, staff, children—each received a careful twist of attention: do not pry; do not ask. Feed him; do not starve him. Tend wounds; do not seek their cause. Let him pass like a draft under a door. See him only enough to keep him alive.
The room sighed as the geas took. Filing-cabinet labels became oddly compelling. A loose pane rattled and urgently demanded a nail.
"That will be sufficient," Dumbledore murmured. "For now."
The Ritual
The second net was older.
He drew the blinds, set a silver bowl and a vial the colour of cold tea, and placed three runestones in a triangle—one at the boy's feet, one beneath the chair, one on the sill.
He spoke then—neither English nor schoolroom Latin, but the tongue old magic uses when it wants to be obeyed. Syllables dragged like stone on stone; levers shifted hidden weight. The wandwork was spare; this spell required will, not flourish.
The draught dulled the boy's limbs. The chair creaked once and fell quiet.
The Chains
The darkness wasn't real. It was inside him.
Chains wound through mind and soul—cold as iron though no iron touched his skin. They looped thought, wrapped bone, knotted around the very sense of who he was. They fastened with the brutal logic of ritual: bind, bind, bind.
In the dark within, the boy thrashed.
"Why?" The voice lived only in that inner black, cracked and raw. "Why are you doing this?"
"You should not be able to speak," Dumbledore said softly. His wand faltered, then steadied. He shifted cadence and sank deeper.
The chains dug. Memory burned away not like paper, but like a root torn from brick: fibres clung, dust fell, an outline remained even as the thing itself was ripped free.
"You call this protection," the boy said, voice shaking with fury. "It isn't."
The ritual stuttered. For a beat, the air pressed back. Not a boy's mind, Dumbledore realised—a will: vast, cold, patient as a noonday shadow.
A thin, precise fear touched his spine.
He changed keys. Not Obliviate. Older. He spoke the names of forgetting that cut past memory's leaves into its trunk.
Skin-chains sealed. Bone-chains bit down. Soul-chains settled with a sound like frost racing over a pond.
Outside the dark, the boy's head lolled; his eyes glazed; his chest rose and fell.
Within, he screamed without sound.
I will not stay here, he said into the dark. I will not be kept.
The vow didn't echo; it burned. A single soul-link quivered—hairline thin; not enough to free him; enough to prove chains can crack.
Dumbledore's breath caught. His wand dipped. He looked for flames that weren't there.
The runes steadied. The bindings held.
"It is done," he said, mostly to hear the words.
He opened the blinds. The world flowed back.
Shadow
Beneath the boy's cuff, a small snake lay coiled like a bracelet. It had ridden silent through the whole of it, tasting the air as if tasting the spell.
When the door shut and the Headmaster's steps receded, the serpent stirred. It slid down the boy's palm, lifted its head, and struck.
Fangs pricked skin; heat flared; darkness and light threaded his veins. Scales blurred into motes and sank beneath his skin. When the last fleck faded, a faint outline remained on the back of his hand—nothing to ordinary eyes; to those who knew, a guardian coiled and watchful.
:Safe, always: sighed the little voice in his mind.
And Shadow slept—a deep, warding sleep—its life twined into his.
First Return
Weeks later, Dumbledore came again. The matron gushed. "Quiet boy, sir. No trouble at all."
Void—the name the records now bore—sat docile, hands folded. The geas hummed like a wasp in the walls.
Inside, he pulled. A crack widened. No one heard.
In the Headmaster's Office (With Severus Snape)
The next time, Dumbledore did not come alone. Oak and instruments whirred softly; beyond the window a phoenix watched, silent.
"Look at me," said Severus Snape.
The body obeyed.
In the dark, something surged. The chains of skin had shattered slowly, painfully. Bone-links groaned.
Snape's mouth thinned. "What have you done?" he asked—not the boy, but the man beside him.
"What was necessary," Dumbledore replied.
"You've hollowed him," Snape said, the word too raw to sit politely. "You've buried Amara's fire under your fog. You will let him rot because you fear what it means for your prophecy."
"He lives," Dumbledore said—smooth as a lid sliding into place. "He endures. That is enough."
"Is it," Snape said. Not a question.
Feathers whispered as Fawkes turned his head. He did not sing.
"One day," Snape said very quietly to the door and the dust motes alike, "you will answer for this."
Dumbledore did not answer at all.
Inside, the boy pulled. A bone-link split. Pain lit him white. He did not stop.
Liar, he said where he was still allowed to speak. You call this mercy.
The Wiltons
Footsteps echoed in the orphanage corridor. Not the Headmaster's—different. Human in a way that had nothing to do with magic.
The Wiltons were ordinary. Margaret's smile was soft and weary at the edges; Richard's handshake careful, as if he knew the weight of breakable things. Devon sunlight lay in their voices even here, under city soot.
They watched the children thunder and whirl. Noise clattered like tin cups.
Their eyes found the quiet boy reading in the corner.
"He listens," the matron said, too brightly. "Never trouble. Learned his letters quick. Finished the whole shelf, that one."
"Still," Margaret murmured—the word neither praise nor worry, only noticing.
Still is not broken, the boy said into the dark.
A crack opened another hand's width.
Margaret knelt to bring her eyes level. Up close, she saw what polite reports skip: not emptiness, but depth. It caught at something old in her—the part that had once cupped loneliness like water.
"I think," she said, steadying, "this is the one."
Richard nodded. "He looks ready for a home."
They remembered the man who had met them a fortnight earlier in a tearoom off the High Street—a man called Red. He was not a social worker, not a council officer; he represented a private trust that placed hard-to-place children. He had spoken quietly, precisely, and then slid across the table a typed agreement stamped with a red seal.
The Contract
The document was titled Guardianship in Trust Agreement.
Term: Minimum 24 months, maximum 60 months from date of placement.Domicile: The child will be domiciled with the Wiltons at their Devon address for the duration, save brief, scheduled absences arranged by the Trust.Care Standards: Food, shelter and ordinary clothing to be provided; the Trust will reimburse extraordinary expenses upon receipts.Confidentiality: The Wiltons will not contact previous institutions, publish the child's image, or discuss his history beyond school and medical needs.Mobility: No change of address beyond Devon without written notice to the Trust; no international travel without consent.Access: A Trust representative (Red) may conduct quarterly welfare checks and arrange occasional day appointments ("family matters"), with written notice.Removal/Termination: Immediate termination for endangerment; otherwise by mutual consent, or upon reaching the maximum term.
There was a stipend, modest but steady. There was a twenty-four-hour number. There was a single signature line marked Red—no surname—above the red wax seal.
Margaret had signed with a pen that shook; Richard had set his hand firm beside hers.
Ottery St Catchpole
They drove south and west. The city peeled into hedgerows and fields; the road shouldered through villages with stone churches and lopsided pubs. On A-roads, lorries hissed in rain; on lanes, hawthorn and dog-rose pressed close.
By late afternoon the road dropped into a valley cut by the River Otter, bright as steel under a pale sky. The village clustered where the water looped—crooked lanes, tiled roofs, a church spire pricking the clouds. On a hill above distant meadows, a ramshackle tower leaned at odds with itself; as they passed, something small and potato-shaped shot from a garden and a man in a threadbare jumper gave chase, muttering about gnomes.
At the village edge, where fields rose toward beech and oak, a cottage stood on a low rise. Ivy held to brick and timber. Windows shone clean; a lavender path curved to the door; blue smoke drifted from the chimney as if it had been expecting them.
Inside, everything was ready: two beds made up fresh, a hook for a school coat by the door, plates stacked in the dresser, a fire laid in the grate. The kitchen smelled faintly of beeswax and thyme.
Void set his suitcase at the foot of the stairs. His gaze moved over hearth, windows, the ivy-shadow wavering on the glass. Home, for now.
Margaret stood just behind him, throat tight. I could love him, she thought, quick and scared. If he'll let me.
Uneasy Care
The cottage was warm and orderly, but quiet pooled in its corners. Void moved like someone who had learned not to be in the way: careful, precise, never clattering a plate. He ate what was set before him, slept where he was shown, and took up as little space as possible.
Richard tried village talk—Mr. Palmer at the post, Mrs. Withers and her back-door eggs, the best view for Bonfire Night—but sentences thinned against silence. Margaret portioned an extra spoonful onto Void's plate and watched until he ate. Once, when his fringe fell in his eyes, her hand twitched to brush it back; she stopped herself and folded a tea towel instead.
He never misbehaved. He was too contained for that.
Late at night Margaret stood at his open doorway and watched him sleep. He did not toss or murmur. He lay very still, as if listening to a sound no one else could hear. The ache in her chest sharpened into something protective.
The Visit
The knock came just after washing-up. Margaret wiped her hands; Richard opened the door.
A tall, weathered man stood on the step. Dark hair with a copper cast in lamplight; a simple coat; a leather folio tucked under his arm.
"Good evening," he said, low and certain. "May I come in?"
They knew him. Red. The man from the tearoom. The one who'd brought the contract.
"Of course," Richard said, stepping aside.
Red took in hearth and table, the narrow stair, the hook by the door where a small coat now hung. "You've done well," he said simply. "You brought him here. That was your task."
He set the folio on the table and clicked it open. A duplicate of the Guardianship in Trust Agreement lay within, embossed with the same red seal. He slid across a single confirmation page for the file.
"Routine," he said. "Term acknowledgment—minimum two years, maximum five—quarterly checks, and occasional day appointments. The stipend letter has been updated for the new quarter."
Margaret read every line again, though she could have recited the terms from memory. "He stays with us," she said quietly. "This is his address."
"Domiciled with you, yes," Red affirmed. He rested two fingers on the confirmation page. "And I need you to be clear on this as well: I will be taking him for a while. From time to time he will be away under my care. You will have notice, and he will come and go by this door."
Richard's mouth thinned, but he nodded once. "All right."
"If anyone comes asking for the boy," Red continued, "you turn them away. If you must speak, you say: 'He's with his grandfather—Richard's father—learning about family history, and he's away.' That is the whole of what you say. No other explanation. No forwarding messages. If it is the council or the police, you call me first."
Margaret's hands tightened on the back of a chair. "We'll say it exactly."
Red left a card with the same midnight number and a red-stamped envelope marked Copies—For Your Records. He did not mention councils or courts; he did not mention any world beyond the one they could see. The contract—and the cover story—were the whole of what they were asked to carry.
He turned to the doorway where the boy had been standing quietly, watchful. "We'll go for an hour," Red said. "A matter to attend to. Back before ten."
Red paused at the lintel. "One last precaution—for your privacy," he said, tone mild.
He spoke a soft, precise word and tapped the air once, as if settling a dust sheet. The fire sighed; the room seemed to clear and hush. Margaret felt the faintest coolness along her throat, like mint; Richard swallowed against a pressure that wasn't pressure at all. They wouldn't have named it—but any sentence that might lead someone to the boy's whereabouts gathered itself, from that moment on, into the harmless shape they'd been given: He's with his grandfather, learning family history, and he's away.
Red inclined his head. "Thank you for the roof and the name," he said. He meant it.
Void glanced once at Margaret. She held his gaze with the steadiness the contract had asked of her and the care it had not needed to ask. He followed Red into the night.