Harry went down on the sofa without any warning. It didn't even take a second. One moment he was sitting there, the next he was in a deep sleep.
"Morgan, you're up."
Everyone has their specialty. Tom's strength was growing like crazy, fast enough to make Morgan le Fay despair, but in certain fields he was still too green. That was just the gap in time and experience.
Soul work was the best example. You couldn't force that kind of thing.
Bringing Morgan in was the obvious call. Back in the day, her artificial human technology had filled out King Arthur's Round Table with a ton of fresh troops. R
"Finally!"
Morgan slipped into Tom's body with a thrill. This had become her favorite part lately.
Ravenclaw had already been revived, which left Morgan as the only dead one in the study space.
As for Mystryl, she didn't count. According to her, she could return to life any time she wanted, but she simply preferred to stay in the study space.
"Tom, is Harry okay?" Sirius asked, watching Tom wave a hand in front of Harry.
Maybe it was his imagination, but it was the same guy, and yet something about Tom felt strangely alluring right now. What on earth?
He wasn't the only one. Kamio got the same feeling, like she'd run into one of her own kind.
Well, foxes and the fairies were both famous for beauty and charm, so it made sense.
"He's fine. Just doing some prep," Morgan said, brushing him off. Then she got to work on Harry's problem.
Guided by magic, her mental power slid in through the lightning bolt scar. The first thing to greet her was a flash of green light, thick with killing intent. Morgan gave her mental power a small shake and the light was crushed. She kept going deeper.
"Well, this is interesting," she muttered as she worked. "A Killing Curse, a soul fragment, and Potter's own mind and soul, all living together this nicely."
"I actually believe in fate now. If I tried, I couldn't pull off an arrangement like this even on purpose. And that noseless freak somehow managed to..."
Somewhere in the middle of that, Morgan got angry.
A once-in-a-century dark lord type was better at being evil than she was. She could not accept that.
"..."
Tom's forehead filled with black lines. Women's minds were just weird. Was this really the time to compete over something this dumb?
'Finish up so we can go home, please!'
"Fine, fine, I get it. You're so annoying," Morgan huffed, and went back to examining Harry.
If at all possible, Tom wanted to get rid of the Horcrux fragment inside Harry today.
But when Morgan finished her examination, the news wasn't good.
"Sorry, Tom. I'm going to disappoint you today."
"Even you can't do it?" Tom was shocked.
Inside the mindscape, Morgan shook her head, looking grim. "Creating something is a thousand times harder than destroying it. Destroying something while it's still part of a creation is harder by orders of magnitude."
"Let me use the human body as an example. Say the soul is the blood in your body. That noseless freak's soul fragment is foreign blood. At first, you could tell which part was Potter's and which part was his."
"But after so many cycles, the two have basically become one."
"There's tens of thousands of milliliters of blood in there, and you want me to pull out a few dozen milliliters, and only his? That's really hard to do."
"And if I drained it all and put new blood back in..." Morgan rolled her pretty eyes at him. "Then you might as well just kill him. I'm only using blood as an analogy, I'm not literally drawing any. If you replace even his soul, is he still Harry Potter?"
Tom thought about it. She had a point.
Well, whatever. Harry was this world's protagonist, and he had his own way of getting by. If they couldn't fix it in one go, then forget it.
Today's main task was figuring out why Harry couldn't sleep well, and why he never remembered his dreams.
He didn't even have to guess. It had to be connected to Voldemort. What exactly was going on over there still needed a closer look.
"That's easy." Maybe to win back the face she'd just lost, Morgan showed off the skills of a fae princess. She forced open the door to Harry's mind, used Legilimency to find the mysterious link between him and Voldemort, and dragged Tom's consciousness in with her.
It was a weird sensation. Tom's mental power and Morgan's were squeezed together, like crawling through a sewer pipe. The tunnel twisted and turned, and there was no telling where it ended.
Fragments of images flashed past on both sides. Some were Harry's memories. Others carried Voldemort's particular cold, nasty feel. The two consciousnesses clashed inside the tunnel, and the walls around them kept rotting away.
It might have been a moment, or it might have been ages. Finally they squeezed out of the pipe and into a pitch-black space.
There was no light source, but they could still see layer upon layer of twisted, dark green fog drifting slowly through the space. Now and then it clumped into a blurry face, then scattered again.
The moment they arrived, a shrill, nonstop wail hit their ears, full of pain and hatred.
"I will not die. I cannot die. I have defeated death itself. What makes you think you can do what it could not?"
Voldemort's roars echoed through the space along with his screams.
"What's wrong with him?" Tom wondered.
Morgan was confused too. "No idea. Let's look through his memories."
They decided to search the space for Voldemort's memories. His mind was on the edge of collapse, and something unknown was pressing down on him and interfering, so everything was a mess.
Everything they saw flashed by, and there was no way to tell whether any of it was real.
In some images, Voldemort stood before a black altar. His body looked like it was being torn apart, then put back together.
Tom finally understood why Harry had been having such a rough few days.
Voldemort himself was falling apart. When he was in extreme rage and agony, he affected Harry through the soul fragment.
And then Harry woke up remembering nothing because of where Voldemort was. It was a strange place.
"Find anything?" Tom asked.
"Nothing useful." Morgan shook her head. "His memories are a complete tangle, but that makes sense. His soul's in pieces, so how could he be normal? Still, it looks like he really did find some ancient ruin. Otherwise our mental power wouldn't be weakened this much."
She sounded a little surprised herself.
Tom had Andros bait Voldemort with a fake ruin and a golden apple, and somehow the guy had gone and found a real one.
"So what do we do now?" Morgan asked.
Tom thought about it, then smiled, "Give him a little help."
With that, he used his mental power to pull the chaotic memories in around Voldemort and calm the violent emotions inside them.
You could say he was helping Voldemort fight off that unknown danger.
Sure enough, with some help, Voldemort settled down a little. But he also noticed that something was off deep in his own mind.
"Riddle?!"
A hoarse voice rang out. A giant green serpent with Voldemort's noseless head appeared in front of Tom, its eyes full of hatred.
The snake's body took up half the mental space. The moment it appeared, the chaos around them quieted down a lot.
Tom formed a body of his own and stood in front of Voldemort.
At that moment, Tom looked a little feminine. He was already handsome, and now that his consciousness was tangled up with Morgan's, the mental form they'd shaped had a few more womanly features.
"Calm down, Voldy. I'm helping you."
"You, help me?" There was no way Voldemort was buying that. The snake head turned, and then it seemed to realize something. "I get it. It's because what's happening to me is spilling over onto Potter, isn't it?"
"Sss-Hahaha!" Voldemort cackled. "How funny! You can't let Potter get hit by my condition, so you have to save me. Right?"
"Think whatever you want." Tom couldn't be bothered to explain. He looked at Voldemort with pity. "Right now, you're no threat to me at all."
"With things like that lurking out there, what does a small fry like you even matter?" A smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. "I don't know what you're going through, Voldy, but do your best. Survive, and then prove to me who the strongest dark wizard really is."
"Oh, and here's a free tip. The person working with Herpo the Foul is named Corvinus Gaunt. He's your ancestor."
With that, Tom and Morgan's mental power scattered and slipped away.
After a moment of silence, Voldemort's venomous voice rang out in the empty space. "Riddle. One day, you will regret this. I promise you that."
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