Naught but Oblivion

At the head of a table of black stone sat a man dressed in a cloak so dark that it could've been woven from the shadows themselves. His features belonged in a nightmare, eyes of gleaming crimson bejewelling a pale, noseless, serpentine face. He had once been handsome—but that was a long time ago, and power came at a cost.

In the middle of a sentence, Lord Voldemort paused, rising from his obsidian throne.

"My lor-" a man with white-blond hair began.

Voldemort cut across him. "Silence, Malfoy," he hissed, his narrowing eyes darting around the room. "The wards have been breached. Prepare-"

The shattering of glass elsewhere in the manor interrupted him. A rapidly silenced scream followed. Yelling arose immediately after, the incantations of dark spells flying from the mouth of wizard and witch alike, but they too fell silent after what could've only been seconds.

The Death Eaters at the table–Voldemort's Inner Circle–quickly followed their lord's lead, getting to their feet and drawing wands, all pointing them at the room's only entrance as they hurried to don their pure white masks. Any emotion that might've dared to flicker across their features was immediately obscured by the visages of skulls, twisted into grins.

As the doors burst open, it was proven that the guards had done nothing to halt their attacker, for the thing that came flying through was a bloodied and twisted corpse clad in black robes, its eyes wide open and face twisted in terror.

Half-finished incantations died upon the lips of the Inner Circle as they registered what had come through the doors. It was a state similar to which that many of them had previously reduced their foes to in order to gain a position among Voldemort's elite, but one they had rarely seen inflicted upon one of their own.

Further inspection revealed that the cause of death appeared to be a fist-sized hole torn through the man's chest. Voldemort frowned. This was not the work of Dumbledore, or any of his followers. They did not kill—not like this.

No, this was most certainly not an attack from his greatest foe. Direct assault and such violent murder were not the old fool's style, but who else could it be?

Most feared him too much to dare raise their wand against him, let alone raid his headquarters. Who even knew where his headquarters were? A few months ago he had been resurrected at the graveyard in Little Hangleton using the sacrifice of seven wizards who had fought him in the first war, and since then he had been careful to shift his location semi-frequently, liberating a muggle manor of its owners every week or so.

In the past week, however, a few low-level Death Eaters had gone missing. He had merely thought it coincidence, but with this attack days later, it seemed highly unlikely. He glanced back to the corpse of the Death Eater whose name he couldn't be bothered to recall. Perhaps Dumbledore had procured the help of Grindelwald. In his recent studies, he had discovered that the two had shared a rather...interesting relationship.

Slight fear ran through his body at the thought of such an alliance, but he knew that whilst, in some ways, Dumbledore was stupid, his idiocy was not the type that would drive him to bring back a dark lord to slay another.

Voldemort allowed himself to relax slightly, though didn't let the slender stick of yew in his right hand drop to his side. It had been at least half a minute since the dead body had been thrown into the room and nothing had followed. Perhaps it had been some ambitious group of wizards trying to prove themselves a threat, but Voldemort did not find himself impressed,

Even if it had been a single person, Voldemort had no doubt that they would be incapable of matching him. He had not lost a duel since his teenage years, and some upstart vigilante was no threat; no one would ever match his power and skill unless they happened to be Albus Dumbledore himself.

They had probably already escaped, the cowards. Next time he would make an example of them, next time he would—

Voldemort was ripped from his train of thought as the wall next to him exploded. He was instantly spinning, raising his wand and bringing up a shield that sent debris flying away.

A blur of red and blue shot past him and spells began to launch at it from the Inner Circle, but they were hopelessly slow compared to whatever it was.

Voldemort went straight for Killing Curses. Bolts of green light lit the room again and again, brighter and more powerful than the spells of the Death Eaters yet utterly useless as the blurring figure tore through the room, replacing incantations with screams and gurgles as it crippled and killed wizard after wizard.

Voldemort calmed himself. He needed to know what the threat was in order to deal with it efficiently. Separating himself from the screams that were so much like those he had often revelled in, he turned his wand upon himself and cast a silent spell that would increase his perception of time.

Even as the rest of the room slowed to a crawl, debris and blood hanging in the air, the figure still moved rapidly. Voldemort could now see it was a man–no, a boy. He could be no more than sixteen, with jet black hair, eyes that reminded him of the Killing Curse, and a bloodthirsty grin upon his somewhat familiar face. And then the boy turned to him, and Voldemort suddenly knew why that face was familiar. It shared the features of the wizard and witch that had fallen by his hand almost fourteen years ago.

A flash of fear like none he had experienced in a decade travelled through the Dark Lord. Before him was the boy who had been prophesied to either kill him or die by his hand. The fear was made tenfold as the green eyes of who could only be Harry Potter began to glow red, and then a blast of crimson light burst from them.

There was no time for Voldemort to feel pain as his wand and hand were incinerated by a beam of searing heat. No, the burning hot agony came a moment later as Voldemort fell to his knees, time restoring to its normal state as he clutched at his already cauterised stump. Clamping his eyes shut, he separated himself from the pain, allowing himself no time to mourn the loss of his beloved wand.

His raging eye snapped open a second later and found a decapitated corpse lying a meter or two in front of him, a glance upwards at the head a bit further away revealing it was Lucius Malfoy. Voldemort crawled forward and snatched the wand from the still-warm hands of his dead servant. It was not a good fit for him, but it would have to do.

Looking forward at the tornado of red and blue tearing through his ranks like they were paper, Voldemort called up his magic, and began to whisper, "Fiendfy-"

He didn't get time to finish as the force of a charging rhinoceros smashed into his side, crushing his ribs and hurling him into the wall. Dazed, he had no option but to slump to the ground, struggling to remain conscious.

Several of his internal organs had been damaged severely and he couldn't do anything but heal them if he sought to survive. His escape would have to wait a few minutes. For the mean time, he would have to focus on Potter and ignore the panic currently coursing through him.

As he looked back to the whirlwind of destruction, he somehow got the feeling that the boy was playing with the Death Eaters. Occasionally he would kill them with a single blow, but he seemed to prefer hurling them aside and then knocking them down again as soon as they attempted to stand. What was this magic that allowed the boy to move at godlike speeds and strike with the strength of a titan? What let him blast rays of heat from his eyes, hot enough to destroy anything upon contact? Voldemort had never heard of such things, and that immensely annoyed him. This had to be the power the Dark Lord knows not.

When the boy had not attended what should have been his first year at Hogwarts, Voldemort had been surprised. Perhaps he was dead, or maybe he was being trained in secret by Dumbledore. Voldemort had hoped the former but thought the latter, until now.

For a moment, Harry stood still as he suspended a Death Eater by his throat, allowing Voldemort a good view of him. The boy was wearing a skin-tight blue costume of some sort, a red cape flowing from his back. A symbol of matching shade shone from his chest, appearing to be an s-shape of some sort. Like with the boy's magic, Voldemort had never seen anything like it.

And then there was a flash of red light and the head of the man being held by Harry was reduced to ash. His corpse was punted across the room before it hit the floor. Voldemort looked around for the boy's next victim and found nobody.

The room was full of ripped off body parts and blood, but no one alive remained. No one but Harry, who had just blurred to a halt in front of Voldemort.

As he stared upon the boy's form, blood splattered across his face, yet not on his suit, Voldemort knew that Dumbledore was no longer the only one he feared.

"So you're Voldemort," the boy said with an arrogant smile. "I expected you to be-"

"Taller?" Voldemort mocked, not letting his terror show as his heart began to race. Even if the boy did kill him, his Horcruxes would save him from the cold clutch of death. "I expected you to have better insults."

Harry raised an eyebrow. "Well, I was going to say more of a fight, but that works too."

A flash of anger coursed through Voldemort. How dare this child mock him? He began to subtly raise Malfoy's wand, only to find it impaled in his wrist a moment later. The beginning of a scream began to rip from his throat before he could lock away the pain. He hadn't even seen the boy move.

"Nonetheless, I suppose I do admire your effectiveness. Your magical skill is nigh-on unparalleled and you're probably the best dark lord in a few centuries." Harry cocked his head. "Then again, it proved no match for me."

Voldemort sneered. "You would be surprised, child. Perhaps you should tell me what you are, so that I make your death a little quicker when I return. Or maybe you should lay down to die now. I promise that I'll make it completely painless." He wouldn't, of course, but the boy didn't have to know that.

"You're lying," Harry said, grinning at the brief shock that passed over Voldemort's face. "Don't look so surprised, I can hear and see your heart. If you like, I can let you see it as well?"

Voldemort had no doubt that the boy would carry out his threat, but perhaps that was for the best. The faster this body was killed, the faster he could get on with resurrecting himself. "Go on then," he said with a smirk.

Harry laughed. "I don't think you understand, Voldemort. I had a link with your little trinkets which made it a whole lot easier to find them." Once again, horror began to rise in the pit of Voldemort's stomach. "I compliment you on how hard they were to destroy. If I were human, it might have been impossible. Unfortunately, it only took a single blast of lasers as hot as the sun to erase them from existence."

"W-what are you?" Terror leaked into his voice as death lurked closer to him than it ever had before.

"Lily and James Potter were not my true parents, you see. No, they were unable to conceive. After finding me and my ship in a forest, they decided to adopt me. You may know me as Harry Potter, but I was born as Kal-El, the last of the Kryptonian race." He pointed at the symbol upon his chest. "But then you killed Lily and James, and I was put with people who put hatred in my heart. But then they died too. I killed them, you see."

And then he leant down and easily yanked Voldemort into the air by his throat.

For a few moments, he struggled in the titan's grasp, gasping for air that wouldn't come.

Harry's expression was cold and cruel. "I say I am a Kryptonian–an alien–but here, under this yellow sun, I might as well be a god." His lips twisted into an icy smile, and Voldemort saw death in it. "And whilst you may walk as a god among men, among gods, you are but a man."

Green eyes began to glow red, and then Voldemort knew naught but the cool embrace of oblivion, for he was no god.