𝐀𝐈𝐒𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫.

𝟕.𝟏𝟎 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐡𝐞𝐜𝐲 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐟𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝

Harry lay facedown, listening to the silence. He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there.

He was not perfectly sure that he was there himself.

A long time later, or maybe no time at all, it came to him that he must exist, because he was lying on some surface. Therefore he had a sense of touch, and the thing against which he lay existed too.

"Harry." Albus Dumbledore was walking toward him, sprightly and upright, wearing sweeping robes of midnight blue.

He spread his arms wide, and his hands were both whole and white and undamaged.

"You wonderful boy. You brave, brave man. Let us walk."

Stunned, Harry followed as Dumbledore strode away leading him to two seats that Harry had not previously noticed.

Dumbledore sat down in one of them, and Harry fell into the other, staring at his old headmaster's face.

Dumbledore's long silver hair and beard, the piercingly blue eyes behind half-moon spectacles, the crooked nose: Everything was as he had remembered it.

And yet. . .

"But you're dead," said Harry.

"Oh yes," said Dumbledore matter-of-factly.

"Then . . . I'm dead too?"

"Ah," said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. "That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not."

They looked at each other, the old man still beaming. "Not?" repeated Harry.

"Not," said Dumbledore.

"But . . ." Harry raised his hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. "But I should have died — I didn't defend myself! I meant to let him kill me!"

"And that," said Dumbledore, "will, I think, have made all the difference."

Happiness seemed to radiate from Dumbledore like light, like fire.

"Explain," said Harry.

"But you already know," said Dumbledore.

"I let him kill me," said Harry. "Didn't I?"

"You did," said Dumbledore, nodding. "Go on!"

"So the part of his soul that was in me . . ."

Dumbledore nodded still more enthusiastically, urging Harry onward, a broad smile of encouragement on his face.

". . . has it gone?"

"Oh yes!" said Dumbledore. "Yes, he destroyed it. Your soul is whole, and completely your own, Harry."

"But if Voldemort used the Killing Curse," Harry started again, "and nobody died for me this time — how can I be alive?"

"I think you know," said Dumbledore. "Think back. Remember what he did, in his ignorance, in his greed and his cruelty."

' Harry thought. Then the answer rose to his lips easily, without effort.

"He took my blood," said Harry.

"Precisely!" said Dumbledore. "He took your blood and rebuilt his living body with it! Your blood in his veins, Harry, Lily's protection inside both of you! He tethered you to life while he lives!"

"I live . . . while he lives? But I thought . . . I thought it was the other way round! I thought we both had to die? Or is it the same thing?"

"You were the seventh Horcrux, Harry, the Horcrux he never meant to make. He had rendered his soul so unstable that it broke apart when he committed those acts of unspeakable evil, the murder of your parents, the attempted killing of a child. But what escaped from that room was even less than he knew. He left more than his body behind. He left part of himself latched to you, the would-be victim who had survived."