Voldemort's Last Stand

Voldemort's Last Stand

10 May 2028

Professor Xavier Parkes sat in his office at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry putting the finishing touches on his latest gadget. This device was the technomagical equivalent of the crystal balls used in Divination. Xavier called it a Time Viewer, and it was capable of showing events occuring at any point in time, as if you were watching a video recording of those events. Xavier soldered up the last connection, connected it to his computer, then turned the device on. He loaded up the interface software and thought about a time and place to view.

The first thing that came to Xavier's mind was Harry Potter's defeat of Lord Voldemort on the 5th of June, 1998. Xavier entered the time and location where Harry's final battle with Voldemort had been, and sat back to watch history. What he witnessed gave him one of the biggest shocks in his life, and left him with a mission to perform.

***

5 June 1998

Harry Potter stood in the middle of an overgrown graveyard and dropped the golden goblet he was holding in his hand.

"Damn Voldemort and his blasted Portkeys," Harry cursed. "The pathetic excuse for a wizard must be around here somewhere."

"Pathetic, am I?" asked a high, cold voice, and Harry could see Voldemort striding across the graves towards him.

"Yes, you are pathetic. Only the most pathetic of people would go around killing or torturing others just for the fun of it. If you had any decency as a person, you wouldn't be committing such atrocities," snapped Harry.

Voldemort stopped a good twenty metres from Harry and drew out his wand. Harry did likewise.

Suddenly, a large red sphere appeared next to Harry and vanished with a flash of red light. When Harry could see again, there was a man in his mid thirties with waist-length curly brown hair and grey eyes standing next to him. The man was wearing square glasses and green robes with the Hogwarts crest on them and the Gryffindor lion on the crest was glowing in the darkness. In one hand he held a rather unusual-looking wand that appeared to have a cable connected to the base of it that ran up the man's sleeve. In his other hand, he held a crystal ball that looked just like the prophecy that Harry had been tricked into stealing two years ago.

"Hey, Voldie, remember that prophecy you tried to steal two years ago?" the man asked Voldemort.

'Voldie?' thought Harry. 'He's not going to like being called that.'

"Of course I remember, you idiot," snapped Voldemort, obviously insulted at being called such a childish name.

"Well, this globe here is the last remaining copy of that prophecy. You want it?"

"What's the catch?" asked Voldemort.

"Catch? I give you the prophecy, and you let me take Potter. Simple as that," replied the man.

"Take me where?" asked Harry apprehensively.

"You'll see," replied the man, with a nasty grin.

"Give me that prophecy," said Voldemort.

"Then we have a deal. Catch!"

The man threw the globe over to Voldemort, grabbed Harry, held his wand out at arm's length, and drew a glowing red horizontal circle in the air. He touched his wand to it, there was a purple flash, and Harry and the man were rushing up a purple vortex at high speed. Suddenly, the rushing stopped and the pair landed in the exact same spot they had been in before, only now, everything looked different. The graveyard was even more overgrown than before, and all that was left of Voldemort was his wand, and that looked like it had aged a thousand years.

"What just happened?" asked Harry.

"To us? We've travelled three hours into the future. To Voldemort, that sphere was a temporal acceleration bomb, keyed to detonate ten seconds after Voldemort touched it," replied the man.

"A what?"

"A temporal acceleration bomb. When it goes off, it speeds up time within its radius dramatically. When that one went off, a thousand years passed in a matter of minutes. Voldemort and his Death Eaters all died of starvation or old age, trapped inside the radius."

"If it only took a few minutes, then why did you send us three hours into the future?"

"Safety precaution. Those bombs leave some nasty temporal side effects around for a couple of hours after they go off. Want to watch from a distance?"

"Sure."

The man drew a green box and a red circle around them in the air, then touched his wand to the circle, and they were falling through a red vortex. They landed some distance from the graveyard, and Harry could see himself and Voldemort in the graveyard. The red sphere appeared and vanished revealing the man standing beside Harry right now. They were too far away to hear the conversation, but they were able to observe what was happening. When the man threw the sphere to Voldemort, Harry saw himself grabbed and a bright purple flash as he and the man vanished. Seconds later the sphere in Voldemort's hand exploded, sending out a bright blue shockwave and forming an expanding dome over the graveyard. The sphere stopped growing and sat for a few minutes, before finally vanishing.

The man was right about the side effects. There were lots of little time-bubbles all over the area where the giant bubble had been. They sat and watched the bubbles vanish for a while, before Harry asked the man who he was and where he was from.

"All you need know is that I'm the Transfiguration teacher at Hogwarts thirty years from now, and that I saw this entire sequence of events unfold using a kind of reverse Divination. After witnessing these events, I came back in time to perform my role in them. Now, we should go back to the point we left from."

The man drew another circle and box around them, then they were rushing up a purple vortex, and landed back in the temporally affected graveyard. Harry went and picked up Voldemort's wand as proof that Voldemort was dead and asked how to get back to Hogwarts.

"That golden goblet that brought you here should still be intact, and will act as a Portkey."

"Will I ever see you again, whoever you are?"

"Count on it. Sorry about the horrible grin I gave you, but I had to make it look like I really wanted to kill you for Voldemort."

"That's alright. I guessed you were acting for Voldemort's benefit when you started explaining things to me."

"You live up to your reputation as being a bright young man, Harry. We will meet again at some point in the future. Oh, by the way, your kids are the second-worst trouble-makers twenty-first century Hogwarts has ever had. Farewell."

The man drew a red circle and green box around himself, touched his wand to the circle, and vanished in a flash of purple light.

Harry walked over to the goblet lying on the ground amongst the grass and picked it up. He immmediately felt the familiar sensation of Portkey travel and landed back in the Great Hall at Hogwarts.

When he landed back in the Great Hall, he immediately approached the staff table, placed Voldemort's wand in front of Dumbledore, then turned around and announced to the whole school: "Voldemort is dead!"

The cheers from everybody present were so loud that the whole hall shook.

***

10 May 2028

Xavier reappeared in his office in a flash of purple light and felt very satisfied with himself. For the second time in his life, he had ensured that history ran its correct course.

"Mission accomplished," he said to himself, smiling.