Book #2 |
willowsevern@yahoo.com |
At the age of one year old, Harry had somehow survived a curse from the greatest Dark sorcerer of all time, Lord Voldemort, whose name most witches and wizards still feared to speak. Harry's parents had died in Voldemort's attack, but Harry had escaped with his lightning scar, and somehow - nobody understood why Voldemort's powers had been destroyed the instant he had failed to kill Harry.
So Harry had been brought up by his dead mother's sister and her husband. He had spent ten years with the Dursleys, never understanding why he kept making odd things happen without meaning to, believing the Dursleys' story that he had got his scar in the car crash that had killed his parents.
Chapter: 1
Harry said nothing. He felt a bit awkward. Stored in an underground vault at Gringotts in London was a small fortune that his parents had left him. Of course, it was only in the wizarding world that he had money; you couldn't use Galleons, Sickles, and Knuts in Muggle shops. He had never mentioned his Gringotts bank account to the Dursleys; he didn't think their horror of anything connected with magic would stretch to a large pile of gold.
Chapter: 4
Harry lay awake for hours that night. Through a gap in the curtains around his four-poster he watched snow starting to drift past the tower window and wondered . . .
Could he be a descendant of Salazar Slithering? He didn't know anything about his father's family, after all. The Dursleys had always forbidden questions about his wizarding relatives.
Quietly, Harry tried to say something in Parseltongue. The words wouldn't come. It seemed he had to be face-to-face with a snake to do it.
But I'm in Gryffindor, Harry thought. The Sorting Hat wouldn't have put me in here if I had Slytherin blood...
Ah, said a nasty little voice in his brain, but the Sorting Hat wanted to put you in Slytherin, don't you remember?
Chapter: 11
But McGonagall said we've got to stay in our tower unless we're in class -"
"I think," said Harry, more quietly still, "it's time to get my dad's old cloak out again."
Harry had inherited just one thing from his father: a long and silvery Invisibility Cloak. It was their only chance of sneaking out of the school to visit Hagrid without anyone knowing about it. They went to bed at the usual time, waited until Neville, Dean, and Seamus had stopped discussing the Chamber of Secrets and finally fallen asleep, then got up, dressed again, and threw the cloak over themselves.
Chapter: 14
Harry's brain seemed to have jammed. He stared numbly at Riddle, at the orphaned boy who had grown up to murder Harry's own parents, and so many others .... At last he forced himself to speak.
"You're not," he said, his quiet voice full of hatred.
"Not what?" snapped Riddle.
Chapter: 17
"No one knows why you lost your powers when you attacked me," said Harry abruptly. "I don't know myself But I know why you couldn't kill me. Because my mother died to save me. My common Muggle-born mother," he added, shaking with suppressed rage. "She stopped you killing me. And I've seen the real you, I saw you last year. You're a wreck. You're barely alive. That's where all your power got you. You're in hiding. You're ugly, you're foul -"
Riddle's face contorted. Then he forced it into an awful smile. "So. Your mother died to save you. Yes, that's a powerful countercharm. I can see now ... there is nothing special about you, after all. I wondered, you see. There are strange likenesses between us, after all. Even you must have noticed. Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by Muggles. Probably the only two Parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since the great Slytherin himself We even look something alike ... but after all, it was merely a lucky chance that saved you from me. That's all I wanted to know."
Chapter: 17
"So ends the famous Harry Potter," said Riddle's distant voice. "Alone in the Chamber of Secrets, forsaken by his friends, defeated at last by the Dark Lord he so unwisely challenged. You'll be back with your dear Mudblood mother soon, Harry... She bought you twelve years of borrowed time ... but Lord Voldemort got you in the end, as you knew he must . . . ."
Chapter: 17
Mr. Malfoy ripped the sock off the diary, threw it aside, then looked furiously from the ruined book to Harry.
"You'll meet the same sticky end as your parents one of these days, Harry Potter," he said softly. "They were meddlesome fools, too.
Chapter: 18