DISCLAIMER: Any characters you recognize belong to JKR. this is her world, im just playing in her sandbox.

AN: i have been an avid reader of fanfiction for over a decade and have published another fic under another account name but that was abandoned years ago. this is something that has been bouncing around in my head and finally found its way here. constructive criticism is welcome. honestly so are flames as long as it is something about the writing and not something that i cant fix. i am only human after all. This work is being written as it is posted so if there is anyone who has ideas feel free to share. i will work in ideas and give credit where it is due. my old username is potterp and the abandoned story is the only one by that author.

Harry Potter and The Staff of Eternity

Chapter one

"Bow to Death, Harry." Said Voldemort with a sadistic smile.

Harry held his head high and his back straight. "I'll never bow to you. You murdered my family and made my life Hell." He spat at the ghostly pale, slit-nosed creature standing in front of him. Voldemort was playing games and trying g to humiliate him in front of the Death Eaters that had returned when their master had called through the mark that linked them to him.

"Such bravado from a boy about to die like his fool of a father. Your parents should have just let me kill you that Halloween night. They would still be alive if they had." Voldemort shot back with a curse of a sickly yellow-green color.

Harry dove to the side out of pure instinct. He hadn't even seen the Dark Lord's wand move he cast the spell so quickly. Rolling to his feet he shot back a bludgeoning spell followed by two cutting curses.

Voldemort wasn't the most feared Dark Lord in half a century for nothing, however. He deflected the bludgeoner back at harry with a flick of his bone-white wand and side-stepped the schoolyard cutters as if they were moving in slow motion. "you must do better than that, boy!" Voldemort mocked, laughing as he did.

Harry used a protego shield to block the reflected curse and gritted his teeth in anger, he hated that moniker more than any other due to his time with the Dursleys. In his anger he started using spells he had only read about in his nighttime visits to the restricted section of the Hogwarts library while researching spells for the tournament.

"defracto, expulso, hastam sanguinarus!" Harry shouted the incantations for the bone-breaking curse, exploding curse, and the blood spear. He had read about these curses and never thought he would use them for any reason. The first two were deadly if they hit the right spot, but the third, the blood spear was dark magic. It used spilled blood to send a javelin of blood at the target.

If Voldemort was at all surprised, he didn't show it but responded with a swift salvo of inaudible blood spears of his own. "Let me show you how to use that spell correctly, young Harry." He said with a sinister smirk and didn't let up, shooting one scarlet, jagged spear after another.

Harry tried to shield at first but quickly realized this was a mistake as the first spear went through his shield as easily as if it were not there at all, grazing his cheek and ear, making his face feel as if it was on fire. After that it was all he could do just to keep moving as to avoid the deadly magic.

Eventually, after what seemed like hours running and diving, he found himself pinned behind the tombstone he had been tied to not ten minutes ago while Voldemort taunted him.

"Oh, is that all you have in you young Potter? At least your parents put up a fight! What would they say, I wonder, knowing their son could do no more than run away like a kicked dog with his tail between his legs, eh? That he was a sniveling coward who hid and waited for me to come and end his miserable existence! What would they say to that?" Voldemort cackled maniacally, some insanity seeping into the laugh.

Harry felt something in him break at those words. He felt anger and hatred as he had never felt before. He found himself standing and walking from behind the Tom Riddle Sr.'s grave and started firing spells he didn't even know he knew at the insane Dark Lord. It was as if his wand was casting of its own accord in response to his rage. There were a large array of different spells leaving his wand and from their colors and the feel of the magic as it left him, they were all extremely dark magic but he didn't care as long as he took the abomination in front of him to the grave with him.

Voldemort seemed to not expect this reaction as he dodged and weaved with inhuman speed and dexterity. "Enough games, you will die today, Potter! Avada Kedavra!" he spat, trying to end the duel before this could continue any longer.

Harry dove behind another tombstone to dodge the green light of death. The tombstone exploded violently, sending him sprawling. Somehow, he had managed to keep hold of his wand and quickly sprung to his feet shouting, "Reducto!", just as Voldemort sent another Killing Curse at him.

The two spells met in mid-air and a golden thread-like connection formed between the two brother wands and a golden dome expanded from a ball of light where the spells met and formed a gilded cage, trapping the two adversaries inside. Harry swore he could hear Fawkes singing but the phoenix was nowhere near here.

"What are you doing potter!? What is this?" Voldemort exclaimed. Harry paid his words no mind as he noticed the ball between them slowly moving towards himself and his wand started to vibrate. On instinct he pushed magic into the connection through his wand and the ball moved away from him towards the Dark Lord.

As Voldemort realized what was happening it became a battle of wills. A battle that harry was confident he could win after being able to throw off Voldemort's Imperious curse. Both of them were struggling to keep the ball away from themselves and send it into the wand of their opponent. Voldemort seemed to be becoming fearful as harry pushed the ball towards him. "you will not win potter! I am the descendant of the great Salazar Slytherin!" Voldemort screamed.

Harry laughed "you are nothing more than the bastard son of a muggle. You have never once been able to best me any of the three other times we have met, and you wont now!" harry yelled, and with a will he did not expect to have, he pushed the ball of light into Voldemort's wand.

There was an awful chorus of screams and then something odd happened. Something squeezed its way out of Voldemort's wand. It was Cedric…or at least it looked like him, but it was wrong. This Cedric was not unlike a ghost but he wasn't pearly white like the Hogwarts ghosts, he was a smoky grey. If harry had to call him something, it would be a shade.

The shade of Cedric looked from Voldemort to Harry and said to Harry "Hold on a little longer, Harry, there are more coming." Sure enough, there were three more shades left to appear. There was a woman who Harry didn't know and an old man who seemed to be a muggle. However, it was the final two shades that surprised him so much that he almost broke the connection between his and Snake-Face's wand. His parents fell out of Tom's wand and came to him with smiles on their Faces.

"Harry, we do not have much time. We will distract him so you may escape. We are so proud of you, my son. As soon as you can go to Gringotts and ask for Jaggedclaw. He is the Potter family account manager, as the last male potter there are thing you must know and privileges that the last of the bloodline has access to upon reaching fifteen years old. Remember that we love you, Son." James's shade said to him with a ghostly smile.

"Harry when you go to speak with Jaggedclaw make sure you ask him about the bank account in the muggle world I had him set up discreetly just in case something happened to us. Your father is right, we are prouder of you than you could ever know. Keep learning everything you can to help you against this monster and his stooges." Lily said.

Harry couldn't seem to form words around the golf ball sized lump in his throat so he just nodded and did everything he could to hold back his tears; he would not cry in front of Voldemort and give him the satisfaction if seeing his weakness.

"Harry, try to take my body with you back to Hogwarts. Just don't get yourself killed trying." Cedric said to him with a smile.

"Harry go now!" His father said as all of the shades crowded Voldemort and obstructed his vision.

Harry jerked his wand up and broke the connection. As soon as he did the dome vanished and the phoenix song stopped. Not wasting any time, he started running towards Cedric's body.

The Death Eaters and weren't sitting idle either, they began throwing curses at him as he ran. It was raining multicolored lights and destruction around him. He heard Voldemort yelling at his minions, "do not kill Potter! He is mine!" he jumped behind a gravestone just in time to watch a killing curse shoot through the space he had just vacated. "It seems I won't kill you by just shooting spells at you, little Potter. Fine then, just remember, you refused to die easily!"

Harry heard Voldemort start chanting in a language harry didn't understand. There was a surge of magic that seemed to sink into the ground and Harry's gut told him to move quickly and get out of this place of nightmares.

Without thinking twice about it, he broke cover and ran to Cedric's body and threw himself on top of the cooling corpse of his friend, for they had become friends during this hell of a tournament. He quickly summoned the cup to himself praying that it wasn't only a one-off portkey. He deftly caught it by the handle and…nothing. No jerk behind his navel, no vomit inducing spinning, nothing! 'Bloody fuck, what am I going to do now!?' Harry thought frantically.

In the same moment harry realized he wasn't leaving the same way he had arrived, harry felt an excruciating pain in his left arm around the spot Wormtail had taken his blood for the ritual. Looking down he saw that Cedric's body was moving. He had bitten his arm near the cut and was attempting to rip a chunk out of his forearm!

Harry jumped to his feet and used a knockback jinx to get this Zombie-Cedric off of him. The animated body of his friend was propelled into a headstone and blood spattered the granite. Breathing heavily harry looked at the bloody mess that was now his forearm and saw he was bleeding profusely. Not knowing what else to do he used a quick "Incendio!" to cauterize the wound that had been inflicted by the zombie-Cedric.

Suddenly harry was grabbed around his ankles by hands that had come out of the grave he was standing on. Well, now he knew what Voldemort's chanting had been about. Bodies were rising from the dirt everywhere he looked and the non-Cedric was getting back to his feet. Harry used a cutting curse to free himself from the hands of dead flesh and ran for all he was worth, trying to reach some form of safety.

"you will not escape me, Potter! I will end your life today and then no one shall stand against me!" Voldemort cackled darkly.

"stop deluding yourself Tommy-boy! You will never be able to best Dumbledore! He is the greatest sorcerer of this century and you know it." Harry shouted as he ran. He would not die quietly if death was what fate had planned for him.

"Keep telling yourself that if it is what makes you accept the end of your life!" Voldemort said, smirking

"you know, Tom, your obsession with me is rather unsettling. I am a fourteen-year-old, after all. It is kind of creepy!" harry shouted as he did all he could to get under the older wizard's skin while using any spells that came to mind to keep the reanimated corpses away, "Dumbledore will find you and end your campaign before it starts!"

Suddenly there was a flash of fire above harry and he heard phoenix song, "of course! Fawkes! He must have come because of me defending Dumbledore!" he thought with relief.

"So, this is what the Old Fool sends his great protector? A glorified songbird?!" Voldemort laughed maniacally, unknowingly echoing the diary-Riddle from the chamber in Harrys second year. "you will still die here, Boy, and I will be rid of you forever!"

Harry was being backed against a wall of a mausoleum by the dead puppets of the Dark Lord. Without really thinking he shot a gout of fire from his wand and set fire to several of the zombies in front of him, and, to his surprise the others shrunk away from the flames. He pushed more magic into the spell and the torrent of flames doubled in size and washed over the zombies, reducing many to ash.

Fawkes saw this and dove right at him with angry shriek and batted a curse with his wing that harry had not seen headed his way. As soon an this was done, he hovered over his head and shook his long tail feathers expectantly.

Harry wasted no time in grabbing hold of the golden lifeline and felt heat suffuse his being, but not in a painful way. It was almost…protective. And the next thing he knew the graveyard, Voldemort, the Death Eaters, and the zombies were gone. So was Cedric's body however, and harry felt guilty at not being able to take it back to his parents.

Fawkes appeared with harry in the quidditch pitch in a ball of fire amidst screams and shouts. Harry looked around frantically and saw Dumbledore running toward him. "Voldemort! He's back!" he shouted and darkness engulfed him and he knew no more.