While the castle's interior echoed with the distant, frantic shouts of prefects and the heavy thud of Dumbledore's boots moving toward the northern stairs, Richard Prewett walked out of the heavy oak front doors into the crisp, moonlit night.
He didn't wear his standard charcoal teaching coat. Instead, he wore an old, battle-tested traveling cloak of deep midnight blue, its edges lined with the silver-thread containment loops he had brought back from Beauxbatons. He didn't look back at the illuminated windows of Hogwarts; he knew the troll would keep the Headmaster occupied for at least twenty minutes—more than enough time to slip past the outer boundaries.
Reaching the edge of the gates, where the ancient stone boars kept watch over the path to Huckleberry Lane, Richard drew his primary wand. With a silent, fluid motion, he turned on his heel, vanishing into the fabric of space with a sharp, muted crack that sounded no louder than a snapping twig.
The transition was instantaneous.
Richard materialized at the crest of a steep, desolate hill overlooking a deep valley. The air here was different—sharper, decaying, and thick with the stagnant smell of old rain and neglected soil. Below him, nestled in the shadows of the valley, lay the dark, silent village of Little Hangleton.
He didn't descend toward the village itself. His eyes, tracking the faint, greasy residue of ancient dark magic that always lingered in the air like black oil, fixed on a copse of tangled, overgrown yew trees on the opposite hillside. Hidden beneath the choking briars and skeletal branches was a small, derelict stone hovel, its roof partially caved in, looking like an old tooth rotting in the earth.
The House of Gaunt.
Richard walked down the ridge, his boots moving through the high grass without making a sound. As he approached the perimeter of the property, he stopped, his wand held flat across his palm. He didn't need to step closer to know that the area was a graveyard of lethal, protective enchantments.
With a slow, deep breath, Richard initiated the breath-control techniques he had observed at Uagadou. He allowed his internal magical frequency to drop, slowing his pulse until his body's natural aura perfectly matched the damp, decaying vibration of the surrounding soil. To the ancient, automated wards guarding the threshold, he was no longer a living wizard; he was merely another stone shifting in the dirt.
He stepped over a collapsed stone wall. Instantly, a low, menacing hiss echoed from the rotted wooden doorframe—a dead adder, preserved by a crude preservation charm, was nailed to the timber, its empty eye sockets tracking his movement.
"Frivolous," Richard murmured.
He didn't use a standard revealing spell. Instead, utilizing the Asian mind magic techniques of cognitive dilution, he allowed his own conscious mind to become an expansive, silent ocean of white noise. He didn't project intent, nor did he offer a target for the localized legilimen-based traps Voldemort had anchored to the threshold. The house searched for a mind to tear apart, found only the vast, empty echo of his surface thoughts, and remained dormant.
Inside the hovel, the floor was a treacherous maze of rotted timber, broken pottery, and decades of thick, undisturbed dust. Richard walked directly to the center of the main room, beneath the highest point of the caved-in ceiling.
He pointed his wand at the floorboards, executing a complex, multi-layered sweeping gesture—the exact runic containment loop variant engineered by Nicolas Flamel. A faint, golden thread of light unspooled from his wand tip, tracing a perfect circle around a specific patch of collapsed stone near the hearth.
Under the influence of the loop, the dust began to separate. The floorboards peeled back like old parchment, revealing a hidden, iron-bound cavity beneath the foundations.
Resting inside a small, velvet-lined box that had long since rotted into black sludge was a heavy, crudely hammered gold ring. It was set with a large, black stone, incised with a vertical line inside a circle, enclosed by a triangle.
The Resurrection Stone. The Horcrux.
The moment the ring was exposed to the night air, a violent, suffocating wave of dark magic erupted from the cavity. The air grew instantly freezing, the temperature dropping until Richard's breath misted heavily in the dark. A low, mocking whisper—a voice that sounded like a chorus of dying men—echoed from the gold band, reaching out to grasp his consciousness, promising the return of his brothers, Fabian and Gideon, if he would only reach down and slip the ring onto his finger.
Richard's dark eyes fixed on the ring. His face remained entirely expressionless, a mask of absolute, unyielding stone.
"A poor imitation of a choice," Richard said softly to the dark air.
He didn't touch the gold. Instead, with a sharp, violent snap of his wrist, he deployed a highly compressed, silver-light variant of the Beauxbatons enchantment space. The silver threads shot from his wand, weaving themselves into an intricate, parallel pocket of reality around the ring, completely isolating the dark magic's localized feedback loop before the curse could leak into his skin.
With a final, non-verbal sweep, Richard lifted the isolated ring—still encased in its shimmering, silver cage of parallel space—and deposited it into a secure, iron-lined pouch at his hip.
The low whispers vanished instantly, the freezing air returning to the normal chill of the October night. The hovel was once again just a ruin, empty and dead.
Richard turned on his heel, his midnight-blue cloak flaring behind him as he walked out into the clearing. He looked back at the valley one last time, his fingers tapping the iron pouch. The first piece of the board had been moved.
With a silent crack, he vanished into the dark, leaving Little Hangleton to the shadows.