It was the soft, subtle syllables of parseltongue that woke him from his long slumber.
:...Harry, Harry Potter...:
That name. He knew that name.
"Not Harry! Please... have mercy... Not Harry! Please - I'll do anything!"
Harry Potter. The boy he had chosen to die. The boy who had, apparently, lived.
It was not long before he understood what had happened. His memory of that night was fragmented, barely coherent at first, but as he watched the world through the eyes of this little child named Harry, it all became clear to him.
Lord Voldemort had been played. Fate had taunted him, and he rose to the challenge, only to be cast down by fate's cousin, Irony. His body had been taken from him by his own curse, and this obliviously innocent child lived while he did not; instead of preventing his defeat, he had incited it. Lord Voldemort had been destroyed, his body broken and his soul shattered – but he was not defeated.
The soul is a curious thing. While his understanding of that elusive concept easily surpassed all who came before him, he would admit that its subtleties were still very much a mystery to him. Who knew one could accidentally create a horcrux? He certainly hadn't.
For that's exactly what he was. He was not the master soul of Lord Voldemort – he was but a sliver, nestled safely in the fractured soul of one six year old Harry Potter. And what a soul it was; never before had he encountered something so anomalous, so unexpected. It was a violation of nature as strange as a horcrux, and it could only have been the work of an exceptionally talented witch or wizard.
He had considered briefly the possibility of Dumbledore interfering, tampering with the Potter boy's soul in an attempt to engineer the defeat of Lord Voldemort, but he quickly discarded the theory - for the work of art that was Harry Potter's soul bore a signature that spoke of youth and desperation, the brushstrokes betraying an artist whose soul and magic were already tightly entwined with the boy's. The tampering of Harry Potter's soul was not born of the scheming of an old man - it was engendered by the love of a mother.
Had Lily Potter known? Had she known that her desperate experiment would save her son's life, while turning him into something so...broken? The mudblood may have been born a tainted creature, but there was no denying the potency of her blood and her magic, the ingredients to whatever crafty spell she'd created in her audacious attempt to save her family.
Let no one ever say that Lord Voldemort did not give credit where credit was due; for in that silent prison, the darkest confines of a little child's mind, he had nothing to do but reminisce, analyze, and understand – and he had to admit, of all his foes, Lily Potter had been the most dangerous. She must have been a formidable witch, and he had underestimated her. It was perhaps the greatest mistake he ever made.
It was an easy mistake to make. He had heard of her, in passing - but what he had heard of a brilliant young mudblood who had already published her first academic paper at the tender age of 19 was easily eclipsed by the large shadow cast by her husband, daring auror-in-training, James Potter.
No, most of what he knew of the girl came from routine sweeps of Severus's mind. Sweet Lily Evans. Severus thought so highly of her – he thought of her like a saint; a white lily flower untainted by the world. How wrong he was. He wondered if Severus had any idea that his childhood friend was capable of experimenting on her own son's soul in a desperate attempt to save his life.
For that is exactly what she had done. One cannot make just any object into a horcrux – rituals need to be performed, blood sacrifices made – it took time and effort. After all, if it was easy, everyone would do it.
Well, perhaps not, but still - there was a reason he was the only wizard to create a horcrux in centuries. His soul might have been fragile, after having created five horcruxes, but there was no possibility that crude magic like the Avada Kedavra curse would have been able to perform the delicate art that was splitting the soul and separating the pieces, and there was no possibility that the body of an infant would emanate enough of a grounding force to anchor one of said pieces without any preparation.
No, the boy's soul must have been altered from the beginning, twisted by the rarest of magics. He had come across it as well – whispers of magics even stranger than horcruxes, that could bend the soul, make it soft, hard, pliable, or brittle.
Somehow, the the red-headed mudblood had managed it, and the only evidence left behind were the potent tendrils of her magic he'd found sleeping in the crevices between Harry's soul and his.
It was an ancient and forbidden magic – her single-minded dedication to her son was no doubt what fueled the impressive feat of morphing his soul into the dense, mutant entity it now was, and her death was the last seal; her own life, magic, and soul embraced him and anchored him.
The result was a massive, bright soul unnaturally fused with the boy's earthly form, fractured by his killing curse, but still mostly intact. It would take time to fully understand the extent of Lily Potter's magic, but for now he could just conjecture, and watch the symptoms unfold, for there would be symptoms.
The soul was tied inextricably to both magic and mind, and the mind was interwoven with the body through what was perhaps the most delicate human organ, the brain. And it was so easy to alter the brain, to disastrous effects. He was no fool; he knew that he had sacrificed some mental stability for the insurance his horcruxes provided.
But Harry Potter - he would grow and develop with foreign, mutant magic seeping into his mind, distorting his thoughts and polarizing his emotions. He would forever be altered by the combined machinations of both his mother and would-be murderer, and would surely suffer for it.
If only Lily Potter had known what a monster she had created. Perhaps it would have been kinder to let the boy die.
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