Harry Potter and the Secret Treasures - H.P.S.T Chapter 1633: Horcruxes

At the very moment the basilisk’s fang pierced the golden cup, Harry felt a sudden, searing pain in his scar.

He saw Tom Riddle’s face, in its vaporous form, pass through Evan, finally wailing and dissipating into the air.

It felt as if he himself were fading away too; the scene before his eyes vanished, and pain cleaved Harry’s head like a sword stroke.

He was standing in a dimly lit room, and a semicircle of wizards faced him, and on the floor at his feet knelt a small, quaking figure. Also kneeling were Bellatrix, her body almost entirely wrapped in bandages, the Lestrange brothers, and the two hulking Death Eaters. The five of them knelt a short distance behind the goblin.

The Death Eaters cleared a space around them; though the room was crowded, they still avoided them as if they carried the plague.

“What did you say to me?” Voldemort’s voice was high and cold, but fury and fear burned inside him.

Unlike the joy he had felt not long ago, this time the overwhelming emotion was anger, tinged with a hint of fear.

The goblin was trembling, unable to meet the red eyes high above his.

“Say it again!” said Voldemort in a cold and ruthless voice. “Say it again!”

““M-my Lord,” stammered the goblin, its black eyes wide with terror, “m-my Lord … we t-tried t-to st-stop them. … Im-impostors, my Lord … broke — broke into the — into the Lestranges’ v-vault … and Vault One below … the one be-belonging to Slytherin. …”

“Impostors? What impostors? I thought Gringotts had ways of revealing impostors? Who were they?”

“It was … it was … the M-Mason b-boy, the P-Potter boy and t-two accomplices…”

“And they took?” he said, his voice rising, a terrible fear gripping him. “Tell me! What did they take?”

“We… we couldn’t en–enter the Slytherin vault, so … so a … a s-small golden c-cup was lost from the Lestrange vault, but…”

The goblin never finished his sentence.

The scream of rage, of denial left Voldemort as if it were a stranger’s.

It was just a small golden cup, and the goblin had no idea what it represented!

He was crazed, frenzied, it could not be true, it was impossible, nobody had ever known: How was it possible that those two boys could have discovered his secret?!

A wand slashed through the air and green light erupted through the room; the kneeling goblin rolled over, dead; the watching wizards scattered before him, terrified: Bellatrix, the Lestrange brothers, and Lucius Malfoy threw others behind them in their race for the door, and again and again his wand fell, and those who were left were slain, all of them, for bringing him this news, for hearing about the golden cup —

Harry saw it all: the same two hulking Death Eaters he had seen earlier in the room at the Leaky Cauldron didn’t even have time to rise before the green light hit them — dead on the spot!

Alone amongst the dead he stormed up and down, and they passed before him in vision: his treasures, his safeguards, his anchors to immortality — the diary was destroyed and the cup was stolen. Those idiots ruined everything.

What if, what if, the two boys knew about the others?   

Could they know, had they already acted, had they traced more of them?

Was Dumbledore at the root of this?

Dumbledore, that old man, who had always suspected him, how damned!

He could see Dumbledore’s shadow in all of this; it had to be the old man’s plot.

Dumbledore, that old man, dead on his orders, yet he reached out from the ignominy of death through the two boys, the boys —

But surely if the boys had destroyed any of his Horcruxes, he, Lord Voldemort, would have known, would have felt it? He, the greatest wizard of them all; he, the most powerful; he, the killer of Dumbledore and of how many other worthless, nameless men; he who would become even more powerful, he who would achieve immortality!

Only one wizard had ever done that, and he would be the second, even more powerful, unbeatable: How could Lord Voldemort not have known, if he, himself, most important and precious, had been attacked, mutilated?

True, he had not felt it when the diary had been destroyed, but he had thought that was because he had no body to feel, being less than ghost. … No, surely, the rest were safe. … The other Horcruxes must be intact. …

Though their importance would diminish greatly after achieving immortality, they were still precious and important. They were his last resort.

There could be no mistakes; absolutely no chance of failure.

He paced the room, kicking aside the goblin’s corpse as he passed, and the pictures blurred and burned in his boiling brain: the lake, the shack, and Hogwarts —

A modicum of calm cooled his rage now: How could the boys know that he had hidden the ring in the Gaunt shack? No one had ever known him to be related to the Gaunts, he had hidden the connection, the killings had never been traced to him: The ring, surely, was safe.

And how could the two boys, or anybody else, know about the cave or penetrate its protection? The idea of the locket being stolen was absurd. …

As for the school: He alone knew where in Hogwarts he had stowed the Horcrux, because he alone had plumbed the deepest secrets of that place. …

And that statue, now in his hands, was a crucial tool for his immortality.

Furthermore, the evil within the statue alone was beyond the reach of those two boys; they couldn’t possibly destroy it.

As for the last one — that curse — he had just personally confirmed it; it was his trump card, his ultimate weapon.

A Horcrux bound to magic — seemingly the most dangerous, yet in truth the safest of all.

No one could possibly know of its existence or whereabouts, and therefore it could not be destroyed.

In fact, even he himself was shocked when he discovered the magic within the boy. He had murdered a Centaur, split off the soul, and left it on the Centaur’s sacred relic, on the powerful Philosopher’s Stone left by Gryffindor. He had never imagined seeing it within the boy again.

If even he hadn’t anticipated it, how could anyone else speculate about its whereabouts?!

Who would ever imagine that a Horcrux of Lord Voldemort’s would be hidden in the body of a weak, stupid wizard boy?!

Especially since the boy’s identity would arouse no suspicion at all, this Horcrux was absolutely foolproof

Translating_Wizard

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