A scene this horrifying belonged in a nightmare.
A swarm of rats bigger than cats, their fur all different colors, all carrying themselves with an eerie, unnatural intelligence, hidden away in a place no one would ever think to look, worshipping some nameless, unspeakable god.
The young wizard felt his scalp prickle so hard it was almost painful.
"What in God's name...?"
He let out a startled cry.
It was not loud, but in the silence of the culvert it rang out with startling clarity. At once, the rats all snapped their heads around and stared at him with red eyes.
The air froze.
"Squeak, squeak..."
The chattering died down.
One rat had half a biscuit clamped in its teeth, crumbs still dropping from its mouth. Another still had its front paws pressed together in the middle of a prayer-like pose.
They looked as though someone had pressed pause.
Or as though a secret had just been exposed to the one person who should never have seen it.
The tableau held for a moment.
Then several oversized rats shrieked, and the other hundreds seemed to receive some silent command all at once.
Tap tap tap tap—
An entire tide of cat-sized rats sprang into motion, claws scraping the tunnel walls like a sudden downpour. They rushed at the young wizard in a widening fan formation.
"?????"
He froze on the spot, scared witless.
His feet were nailed to the ground. His fingers shook. He clutched his wand, but his mind had already gone blank.
Were these rats about to eat him?
Of course they were.
They had to be man-eating rats. How else could they have grown so huge and hideous?
The thought flashed through his mind, and his fear only deepened.
"You idiot! Run! This is all Dumbledore's scheme!" the voice from the back of his head exploded, shrill as a snake with its tail stepped on.
As always, the Dark Lord reacted first.
"Right! Right! I have to run! I don't want to die here and get torn apart by rats!"
That snapped the young wizard out of it. He spun and scrambled away in a panic, moving far faster than he had on the way in.
Hands and feet both working.
His knees scraped raw against the rough tunnel floor, but he never noticed. All that remained in him was the frantic instinct to survive.
Unfortunately, two legs could not outrun four.
The scrape of rat claws on brick grew louder.
Closer.
Denser.
It sounded as though even more rats had joined the chase.
"No! Damn these things!"
At last, the young wizard burst out of the pipe and back into the woods outside the village. The moment he looked back, he saw countless rats pouring out after him.
"Incendio!"
For the first time, he remembered what he was.
He raised his wand in panic and cast.
A tongue of flame burst from the tip, sharp and fierce.
The spell had power. It lashed through the darkness like a fire-serpent, lighting up the tunnel mouth and the ground around it.
Several rats were scorched, their fur blackening in patches.
None of them retreated.
They simply shook themselves, shed the burned fur, and fresh fur sprouted back almost immediately.
"Squeak!"
The rats circled him.
"Get back! You filthy things!"
The young wizard cast another fire spell, brighter and larger this time. The blaze illuminated the whole clearing, painting the rats' red eyes and multicolored coats in violent flashes.
Then, after seeing the trick once, one fire-red rat simply leapt up, opened a mouth lined with sharp teeth, and swallowed the flames whole.
Smoke puffed from its nostrils.
It was completely unharmed.
So this, then, was probably the giant mutant rat the villagers had talked about, the one that could breathe fire.
The little wizard's potions had not given them X-genes, but they had clearly given some of them magic. They were no longer ordinary vermin. They were genuine magical rats, creatures on the level of Fantastic Beasts.
"How is this even possible? Fantastic Beasts never said Hogwarts had anything like this!" the young wizard cried.
He knew a fair bit about magical creatures.
But what he was looking at had gone far beyond the limits of his knowledge.
The rats closed in.
They did not attack.
They simply surrounded him, squatting in a ring, heads tilted, staring at him with their red eyes as if he were the curiosity.
"Squeak, squeak, squeak!"
They kept chattering, as though discussing some rare specimen.
"Oh no. They're deciding how to split me up. They're way too intelligent!" The young wizard shuddered harder, terror creeping under his skin.
"My lord! Save me! Save me! These are magical creatures!"
Just like every other host body unfortunate enough to run into danger while carrying Voldemort around, he cried for help.
The voice in the back of his head roared.
"Shut up! I know that!"
Voldemort's voice was trembling too.
Not from fear.
From rage.
And from a dreadful suspicion beginning to take shape.
"I understand everything now! Dumbledore has spent all these years at Hogwarts not because he's noble, but because it gives him cover!"
"There are endless children there for him to choose from. He hasn't just been using children as experiments to cultivate the villains he needs—he's been using the school itself as a front for forbidden biological enchantment!"
"Yes! Yes! No one believed me when I was a student, but I saw it with my own eyes! I saw the great, kind Dumbledore the world worships studying Dark Magic!"
"He was researching the boundaries between life and death... researching the possibility of disrupting time... He fears death just as much as I do. He's simply better at hiding it!"
"And now... now I see how laughable I was. My own magical modifications were probably nothing compared to what Dumbledore has achieved!"
"He... he is the only true Dark Lord of the last several centuries! He deceived the world! And he deceived me!"
Voldemort paid no attention whatsoever to the desperate state of his follower.
He was too deep in his own revelation, reconstructing the world, and his former professor, in a terrifying new shape. The truth, as he now saw it, was bigger and worse than he had ever imagined.
"It was him. He made me into what I became! That burning wardrobe was one of his carefully laid traps!"
The Dark Lord's emotions surged violently.
It was as though the secret he had uncovered had shattered his understanding of the world.
"My lord, what do we do?" the young wizard asked tearfully.
By now, the rats had forced him to the edge of the woods, his back pressed against the hillside.
Voldemort, drowning in the shadows of his own childhood, had no attention left to spare for him.
He had already assembled the clues and found the answer to his ruined life.
"Use Fiendfyre, you idiot!"
He tossed out the suggestion carelessly, then plunged right back into excavating his own past. He had even begun to suspect that his missing capacity for love had been Dumbledore's doing as well.
First Grindelwald.
Then himself.
And now, because the public had begun to lose its reverence for Dumbledore, along came a ten-year-old boy who opened with the Killing Curse.
That boy living in Dumbledore's house could not possibly be a coincidence.
This evil old wizard, Dumbledore, always needed a monster for the world to fear, some villain to elevate his own image until he stood in everyone's mind like a god.
"Yes. Yes. That must be it."
For a fleeting moment, Voldemort even felt something dangerously close to grievance.
Had his mind not already been so thoroughly corroded by Dark Magic, he might almost have felt tempted to rise up in rebellion himself.
To become the savior who would rescue the world from Dumbledore's grasp...