Author's Note: Just a little window into a world in which the Horcrux experiments went wrong. Or, rather, worked too well.

Title is a line from Tennyson's poem Tithonius.

"Avada Kedavra!"

And then he broke: He was nothing, nothing but pain and terror, and he must hide himself-

And, as he tried to do so, the pain multiplied beyond imagining.

He was hidden behind four other books in a bookshelf with a false back. He was lying amid filth and muck on the floor of a decaying shack. He was shoved into a corner of a cramped cupboard - and why there, and not beneath the shimmering surface of a pool upon a pillar within a lake? He was at Hogwarts, casually tossed aside amid the refuse of a millennium. He was in a gilded vault, safe and secure amid the ostentatious wealth of centuries of magical blood. He had killed the boy - surely he had - and yet he was the boy -

He was at each of those points, and yet he was not. Against his will, he stretched towards each and yet could reach none, pulled this way and that by the other anchors. He stretched and stretched -

Even in the midst of pain beyond all mortal suffering, he still had been a genius beyond compare, and that genius multiplied the agony tenfold, for he knew what was happening. Drawing and quartering - the tying of the limbs of the condemned to four wild horses, which were then set to flight - a death regarded with the greatest of horror, even in the most savage of times -

But he had done one better, had he not, Lord Voldemort? For he had five ties.

(Six-)

Five, and each pulled on the tightest of bonds, that of a soul to itself. And yet they were apart. And the core of his soul, he himself, was being rent asunder.

And yet a soul could not be torn asunder. Not truly. That was the very trick behind the Horcruxes - the attachment was merely numbed by the murder, not sundered. If it were, it could not tie one to this mortal plane, now could it? No - like the mythical "red string" foolish foreign wizards believed bound destined lovers, able to endure even the greatest of traumas and connecting the two despite every effort of mortals to block its path, the integrity of a soul was inviolate, and the Darkest of magic could no more damage that than a raindrop could shatter a windowpane.

He had not fathomed the full implications. He had not understood why other wizards, more cowardly - not wiser, never wiser! - wizards, had never dared make more than one Horcrux. Why they had halted at two anchors, one the body itself and one the substitute "body" that formed a Horcrux, and gone no further.

Now, the answer was brutally clear: when the soul fled the one, it needed to only have one other. The alternative -

He was living the alternative now.

And the sacred integrity of the soul had become his unending damnation. He had made certain of that, in all his wit and arrogance and folly. The hapless fools who had suffered their executions had found peace when the stampede of the wild horses proved too much for their feeble, mortal frames and the living carcasses bled out. He would have no such mercy.

His soul - the part that he could feel, the part that he acknowledged as him - could not go to five different places at once (and one more, and the boy) and yet each demanded it. And, never satisfied, would always demand it. The deepest laws of magic, of what a soul was, demanded it.

Lord Voldemort, greatest and wisest and most glorious of wizards, screamed and screamed and screamed, and not a soul heard him. Not even his own.

The wild horses ran forever.