[A/N] - A quick but important heads-up: this chapter marks a significant dark turn in the story. It contains explicit descriptions of graphic violence, gore, and character death.
Please proceed with caution. If this type of content is distressing or not for you, feel free to skip this chapter
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For thirteen years, the world had been a fog. A thick, grey, silent fog that muffled thought, stole will, and replaced life with a dull, trudging obedience. He had been a puppet, his strings held by the careful, disappointed hands of the man he was forced to call father.
But today, the fog was burning away.
It began as a flicker, a single, lucid thought that cut through the haze like a shard of glass: My Lord.
Barty Crouch Jr. stood still in the center of the drab, suffocatingly neat room. His real prison. He heard the familiar, dull thud of his father's footsteps approaching the door. For years, that sound had meant another meal, another potion to dull his mind, another check to ensure the puppet was still inanimate.
Today, it was a countdown.
Then came the feeling. It started as a warmth on his left forearm, a tingling under the skin he hadn't felt since that glorious night when the sky had been lit green. The warmth grew, blossomed into a searing, glorious fire that didn't burn his flesh but ignited his very soul.
The Dark Mark.
It was not a brand of servitude. It was a promise. A connection. A hymn only the faithful could hear. After all this time, after the silence and the fog and the endless, grey nothing… his Lord was calling.
The door opened. Barty Crouch Sr. entered, carrying a tray. His face was etched with the same weary disappointment it had held for over a decade. He saw his son standing there, placid and still as always, and his guard was down.
"Time for your soup, Barty," he said, his voice flat.
Barty Jr. kept his face slack, his eyes empty, playing the part he had been forced to rehearse for thirteen years. He took a shuffling step forward, as if to take the tray. His father turned slightly, ready to place it on the small table.
It was all the opening he needed.
There was no sound, no incantation. Just a flick of his wrist, a surge of pure, desperate will, and the wand he'd stolen from his father's study weeks ago, hidden beneath a loose floorboard, flew into his hand.
Stupefy.
The red jet of light was brutally fast, striking his father square in the back. The man crumpled without a sound, the tray clattering to the floor, soup splashing across the worn carpet.
Barty stood over the unconscious form, his breath coming in ragged, shallow bursts. He felt no remorse. No flicker of familial pity. He looked at his father not as a parent, but as a jailer. A blasphemer who had dared to cage one of the Dark Lord's most devout.
He needed to get to Albania. Apparition was impossible over such a distance. He would need a Portkey—an unregistered, untraceable one. There was only one place to find such a thing.
He pulled the hood of his father's old traveling cloak over his head, shadowing his face. With a sharp crack, he Apparated into the grimy, shadowed entrance of Knockturn Alley.
The air was thick with the stench of dark magic and desperation. Witches and wizards with faces hidden in shadow scurried past, clutching parcels that squirmed or rattled. The Mark on his arm burned hotter, a beacon guiding him through the filth. He ignored the hawkers selling shrunken heads and cursed artifacts, his mind laser-focused on his singular purpose. He remembered a name, a whisper from the old days—a dealer in illicit transportation.
He found the man in a cramped shop reeking of dried blood and bitter potions. The dealer was a hunched figure with eyes that seemed too small for his face, glinting with avarice.
"I need to go far," Barty rasped, his voice raw from disuse. "East. A forest."
The dealer eyed him, taking in the quality of his cloak, the glint of the wand in his hand. "Long-distance, unregistered Portkeys are expensive," he hissed. "Dangerous. Destination's not always... precise."
"I have money," Barty said, tossing a heavy pouch of Galleons his father kept for "emergencies" onto the counter. It landed with a satisfying thud.
The dealer's eyes widened slightly. He scurried to a back room and returned with a moldy, dented pewter flask. It hummed with a discordant, sickening energy. "Albania. It will get you close. It leaves in two minutes."
Barty snatched the flask. He didn't wait. He didn't want to linger in this cesspool a moment longer than necessary.
He stepped back into the alley, the flask cold in his hand. As the second minute approached, he felt a familiar, nauseating lurch behind his navel. The world dissolved into a chaotic swirl of disorienting color and sound, a far more violent and uncontrolled journey than any Ministry-approved Portkey. It felt like being torn apart and stitched back together all at once.
He landed on his hands and knees on damp, cold earth, vomiting onto a patch of moss. The air was ancient and corrupt, thick with the scent of decay and forgotten magic. He was in a forest, deep in the heart of Albania. Twisted, skeletal trees loomed over him like silent worshippers.
He pushed himself to his feet and stumbled forward, drawn by the undeniable presence of his master.
There, huddled at the base of a gnarled, blackened tree, was a shape. It was small, hunched, and weaker than anything he could have imagined. A frail, shadowed form that was barely more than a whisper of what it once was.
It didn't matter.
Tears of pure, ecstatic joy streamed down Barty's face. The years of silence, of degradation, of the fog—it was all worth it for this single, perfect moment. He fell to his knees, crawling the last few feet until he was before the huddled shape, and bowed his head to the ground.
"My Lord," he choked out, his voice raw with emotion. "I have come. I heard your call. I am here. I am your most faithful."
For a long moment, there was only the sound of his own ragged breathing. Then, a voice, faint as the hiss of a dying snake but filled with an unmistakable current of absolute command, slithered from the shadows.
"Barty," it whispered. "I knew you would not fail me. Our work can now truly begin."
The weak, spectral form of Voldemort seemed to draw the very warmth from the air. Barty remained on his knees, head bowed, waiting. The ecstasy of his master's presence was a fire in his veins, but it was a fire that demanded fuel.
"This form… is an insult," Voldemort's voice hissed, thin and reedy, yet laced with the pure venom of his authority. "I am a shadow. I require a vessel, Barty. Something physical. Something to anchor me to this world while you gather what is needed for my true return."
"Anything, my Lord," Barty breathed, his gaze fixed on the forest floor. "I will do anything."
"You will," the voice affirmed. "There is an old ritual. A profane one. It will grant me a temporary body—weak, mortal, but a body nonetheless. It requires three primal anchors. You will acquire them for me."
Barty looked up, his eyes gleaming with fanatical devotion. "Tell me, Master."
"First," Voldemort hissed, "the frame of life that was. The skeleton of the father. Second, the heart of life that gives. The mother, freshly taken. And third… the spark of life that is. A newborn."
There was no flicker of shock or horror on Barty's face, only rapt attention. These were not atrocities; they were ingredients. Steps on the sacred path to his master's glory.
"The Muggles in the village below… they are nothing," Voldemort continued, a note of dismissive contempt in his tone. "They are cattle. Find a family. A new one. Do not fail me, Barty. My patience has worn thin over these long years."
"I will not fail, my Lord," Barty swore, rising to his feet. His movements were sharp, energized by purpose. He was no longer a prisoner; he was the right hand of a god.
The storm had passed, but the earth still reeked of death.
He stood alone on the outskirts of a crumbling village in Albania, half-swallowed by the forest and time. The trees whispered. The wind bit through his tattered cloak. But Barty Crouch Jr. smiled.
His skin was pale, lips cracked and raw, yet his eyes gleamed with manic purpose.
He pressed his hand against the cold stone wall of the abandoned chapel. There, on the ancient floor inside, the ritual circle had been carved—deep and ragged, chiseled with shaking hands and a cursed blade.
But it was not enough.
Not yet.
He turned his head toward the small cottage nearby—the last house standing in the ruins. Candlelight flickered in the windows. A family lived there. A mother. A father. A baby.
Perfect.
He knocked softly on the wooden door, a tremble of politeness in his fingers.
The woman opened it.
She was in her thirties, hair damp from a bath, expression surprised but kind. She started to speak—but the words died as she met his eyes.
Too late.
Barty stepped forward and drove his wand into her throat. "Silencio," he whispered.
She choked on the spell more than the pain, eyes wide in horrified silence. Her husband stood from the table, stunned, mouth forming a question—then a scream—as Barty flicked his wrist.
The man's body arched. Bones groaned beneath skin. Then they shattered.
With a twist of his wand, Barty pulled. The skeleton ripped itself free in one long, wet peel—sinew snapping, nerves tearing, as the man's skin and muscle crumpled like a discarded robe around the exposed frame.
It collapsed. Hollow.
Barty laughed. It rang sharp and joyful. "Flesh is so fragile," he said, stepping over the skin-husk.
The woman tried to crawl toward her child's room, but he kicked her down. The silencing charm still held, but her screams echoed in his mind—raw, voiceless terror. Delicious.
He knelt beside her.
"Your heart," he said, brushing bloodied hair from her face, "is quite literal in its devotion, isn't it?"
With surgical cruelty, he slit her chest open—not with magic, but a curved ritual dagger. He wanted to feel it. The tension. The resistance. The moment it gave way.
He held the heart in his hand, still twitching.
The baby cried from the other room.
He did not go in.
Not yet.
"It is done, my Lord," Barty reported, kneeling once more. He placed the heavy sack of bones at the edge of the clearing. Beside it, he laid a bundle of dark, blood-soaked cloth. A deep, coppery tang hung in the air around it. The cloth could not contain the wet, heavy reality of what was inside.
Voldemort's form drifted closer. "The heart?"
"Yes, Master. Still warm."
"And the child?"
Barty reached into his cloak and carefully brought out the final piece. A sleeping infant, wrapped in a stolen blanket. Its face was placid, its tiny chest rising and falling with each innocent breath. It was a perfect, unspoiled vessel of life, and its purity was essential.
"Excellent, Barty. You have proven your worth," Voldemort hissed. "Now, prepare the circle. There is no time to waste."
Barty worked with feverish energy. He cleared a patch of ground, drawing a complex circle of runes in the dirt with a paste made from his own blood mixed with the parents' and the grave soil. In the north, he placed the disjointed, yellowed skeleton of the father. In the south, he unwrapped the mother's heart—a grotesque muscle, still leaking dark fluid onto the cold stone he used as an altar.
Finally, he took the sleeping baby and placed it gently in the absolute center of the runic circle. The infant stirred but did not wake, its soft form a stark, obscene contrast to the death and viscera that surrounded it.
He stepped back, his work complete. The air grew heavy, charged with a corrupt, anticipatory energy. The forest fell utterly silent.
Voldemort's shadowy form slithered to the edge of the circle, his presence coiling like a striking snake.
"Begin the incantation, Barty," the Dark Lord commanded. "Give me form. Give me flesh."
Barty raised his wand, his heart hammering with a terrifying, ecstatic joy. He opened his mouth, and the first words of the dark, ancient ritual spilled into the night, twisting the very fabric of the life and death laid out before him.
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[A/N] – This chapter and the last one were supposed to be a single chapter, but as I was writing, I realized how big they were getting. So I ended up splitting them and I'm releasing both today.
Do tell how you're liking the story so far!