Chapter 175: The Beginning of the End

Chapter 175: The Beginning of the End

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I would like to thank my beta, Akisu, for his help in this chapter. This chapter is updated by nov(e)(l)biin.com

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24th January 1995, Hogwarts Earth 2

(Albus Dumbledore POV)

To say that Albus Dumbledore was nervous would be an understatement. The elder man felt like his world was falling apart, and the cause was a single woman who, as far as he could tell, destroyed everything without even breaking a single law or committing an evil act. Sayre had, in a few months, dismantled years of planning and manipulation and didn't even give him a clear reason why she had done so.

Albus does agree that he had failed Harry, both as his guardian and as his headmaster. He did not train the poor boy; he had caused him nothing but grief when he put him in his aunt's care. The boy never enjoyed the beauty of the magical world, nor did he experience the culture. It was for the boy's safety, of course, but Sayre was right; Dumbledore didn't do a good job in attaching Harry Potter to the wizarding world. It was a simple mistake, really, the aged Headmaster had assumed that Harry Potter was part of the wizarding world, that it was a forgone conclusion. The boy was already an outsider in the muggle world, and he thought that he would do anything to escape it.

Alas, this was a mistake on his part and Sayre had used it to her advantage to remove the fighting spirit from the boy. The boy will not seek out Voldemort now, so for the prophecy to be fulfilled, it has to be the other way around. Voldemort must seek a confrontation with Harry Potter, something that isn't that difficult to arrange, since the monster longed to kill the boy who had caused his downfall, but Tom was very careful, trying to avoid falling prey to the prophecy once more.

Perhaps, in the past, Dumbledore has been too hopeful in dealing with Voldemort, hoping that Lily's blood protection would be the power that the Dark Lord knew not, and would help Harry emerge victorious from the encounter. The problem was that the moment Harry reached his majority, he would lose the protection. Albus didn't fully understand the protection, he didn't even think that Lily understood what she had achieved in death, but the intent of whatever the woman did, was to 'protect her child', which means that the protection would fade when young Harry is no longer a child.

The main goal now, was to destroy the Horcruxes. Sayre seemed to have anticipated this and destroyed most of them. Did she know from this far back how pressed for time he would be, and destroyed the ones he wouldn't have been able to find? Albus had no idea, and he didn't care. He will not even try to understand that woman anymore.

But what is important is that there are only two Horcruxes remaining. Sayre destroyed Hufflepuff's cup, Slytherin's locket, Ravenclaw's diadem and the soul shard in Harry's scar, and Harry destroyed the diary. Which means that there are only two left, one of them being Nagini, Voldemort's snake and the other being the Gaunt ring that he just discovered could be a Horcrux from his research, in the last few months.

He was able to speak to Horace Slughorn to confirm the number of Horcruxes that Sayre claimed Voldemort to have made. It had taken a lot of convincing and the claim that he had already known of their existence and had destroyed a few of them, but only needed the number, for the man to give him the memory.

It had taken a lot of investigating to find memories of Voldemort's past and he was able to confirm that the founders' artifacts had been turned into Horcruxes, hence verifying Sayre's claims even more so. The Grey Lady, or Helena Ravenclaw, was quite content with the knowledge that the diadem was destroyed. Now, after a while, Dumbledore was able to find the memories of the Gaunt ring and its location. It was almost certainly a Horcrux, and he needed to destroy it as soon as possible.

Nagini, on the other hand, would be difficult to kill, considering how close to Voldemort she always stayed. The only way he could see it done without a massive loss of life, was for Severus to poison her using Basilisk Venom or to hit her with a killing curse before disappearing. Dumbledore would lose his spy, but if he was planning a confrontation between Harry and Voldemort, and to use the poor boy as a trap, the war would be over before anyone would try to hunt down Severus. The man would be celebrated as a hero, Albus would be sure of it.

He only wished that things wouldn't have come to this, that poor Harry wouldn't have to die for people he probably didn't even care about. But he really was out of options. When the boy survived the killing curse, Albus couldn't have known if the boy would end up a magical titan like himself or Voldemort and even then, it would take decades of training just to measure up to them in skill, far after Harry's seventeenth birthday when the blood protection, and Harry's biggest trump card, would expire. Dumbledore chose to prioritize the blood protection, and even if it condemned the boy to a miserable childhood, Albus was still convinced it was the better choice. Even now, the blood protection was what Albus was planning to use to kill Voldemort.

After dealing with the ring Horcrux, the aged Headmaster would have to find a way to make Harry vulnerable somehow, to give Voldemort an opportunity to send a killing curse at his enemy, killing them both in the process. Perhaps, he could release the prophecy's content or at least an edited version without the 'power he knew not', which would make Voldemort think that he would become invincible should he kill Harry Potter, prompting him to hunt him down even further.

That sounded like the barebones of a plan, but none of this mattered if the prophecy becomes false, or if the Horcruxes are destroyed.

He needed to destroy them as quickly as possible. He will start with the ring this very night. It was a shame that Fawkes just had a burning day, he would have made getting through the wards easier.

The aged Headmaster steeled himself and apparated to Little Hangleton, near a certain abandoned shack.