"Minister! We've got a major magical incident in Little Hangleton — nearly a thousand Muggle witnesses!"
Fudge had been working through the aftermath of the previous week's chaos when his aide burst in, and everything about the aide's expression said that this was not a routine interruption.
"What?"
He was on his feet before the aide had finished. The last thing he needed — the absolute last thing — was another uncontrolled incident on the heels of the Ministry restructuring, the death of three senior officials' political careers, and the very public confirmation that Voldemort had been operational for the past eighteen months while Fudge had been explaining to everyone why that wasn't the case.
"Aurors are on site. Report incoming."
Fudge was already pulling his travelling robes from the hook behind the door.
"Get every available Auror there. Pull in the full Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. I want a dome over that village inside twenty minutes, and I don't want a single Muggle photograph leaving it." He buttoned the collar with decisive energy. "And notify the Order of the Phoenix. My instinct says they're involved."
He was right.
Dumbledore's diversion had been functioning perfectly.
The steam cloud from the black water extinguishing the fire dragon had blanked the clearing completely — not just visibility, but magical signature, reducing the whole space to a flat interference field. Voldemort had compensated immediately with the wind blades, shredding the fog in under three seconds. But three seconds was enough.
The only thing standing in the clearing when the fog cleared was Dumbledore.
Kevin was already inside the shack.
Voldemort understood what had happened approximately two seconds before the seals he'd spent considerable effort placing on the shack's inner room detonated in sequence — the magical equivalent of a safe's combination being systematically shredded from the inside. The sound was not dramatic. It was worse than dramatic. It was the sound of precise, knowledgeable work being done quickly by someone who knew exactly what he was dismantling.
"Kevin!"
The fury in Voldemort's voice had a specific quality — the genuine, unperformed anger of someone who has been outmanoeuvred cleanly and knows it. He drove his wand into the earth with both hands.
The ground responded.
A hundred metres in every direction, the soil went incandescent. Lava welled up from fissures that opened with audible cracks, and the temperature spiked fast enough to feel like stepping into an oven. The Gaunt shack, still standing in its post-battle ruin, melted to slag where it stood.
Anti-Apparition ward, still active. No one was leaving on their own terms.
Dumbledore threw up his shields, and the magic required to hold them against that much ambient heat was considerable. He did not waver.
"Hey." Kevin's voice, from somewhere inside the heat shimmer. "Tom. Look at this."
The fire columns parted. Kevin stepped out of what should have been an un-survivable heat pocket, his expression belonging to a man who has found something he was looking for. Above his open palm, the Gaunt ring levitated slowly — a heavy black stone set in an old gold band, catching the lurid light of the surrounding lava and throwing it back in flat, dark glints.
Voldemort looked at it.
Something happened in the red eyes — a crack in the absolute composure, quickly sealed, but there.
"Kevin."
The Killing Curse that followed was arm-thick, a pure green lance of coherent magic that hit the earth wall Kevin threw up an instant before impact and cracked it to rubble. The curse dissipated into the ground without touching him. Kevin was already moving, reaching Dumbledore in four steps.
Voldemort ground his teeth. His gaze moved between the ring floating above Kevin's palm and the two people standing on the only solid ground that remained in the immediate area, and the calculation was clear on his face: how do I retrieve what I cannot physically touch.
The answer, currently, was: he couldn't.
The standoff held.
Then, at the edge of Kevin's awareness — a ripple. Familiar. A letter arriving via phoenix fire, the particular snap of it settling into his pocket. He didn't reach for it.
Instead he let a small gesture burn it to ash without opening it. Message received. Content irrelevant.
Dumbledore felt the same thing, and his expression settled into resolution.
Voldemort sensed the shift. His body coiled slightly — the posture of a mind that has just identified an unknown variable and does not yet know what it means.
He powered up.
Dumbledore raised his wand.
What came from it was moonlight.
There was no moon visible. It was daylight, overcast, the sun somewhere behind the smoke above them. But moonlight fell from Dumbledore's wand tip regardless — silver-pale, liquid, spreading outward in slow rings like ripples from a stone dropped in still water. Each ring moved independently, carrying their own momentum, each one aligned precisely on Voldemort.
The moonlight did not behave like light.
It pressed.
Voldemort took one step back — involuntary, the first involuntary movement Kevin had seen from him — and then stopped himself, and the fury in his face was replaced by the flat calculation of someone recognising that fighting the current directly would empty his reserves before the waves ran out.
"It's no use, Tom," Dumbledore said, with the calm of a man noting weather. "Moonlight has touched this ground tonight. There's nowhere to go inside it."
Voldemort fired.
A maximum-yield Killing Curse went directly into the leading ring of moonlight. The energy cascaded — light shredding, rings collapsing inward. It bought three seconds.
Kevin was already behind him.
The crowbar connected with the back of Voldemort's left shoulder — the arm he wasn't leading with, the angle outside his prepared defences. The impact was not intended to penetrate the Physical Immunity Spell. It was intended to move him. And it did: Voldemort drove forward into the earth, a crater opening under the impact, dust detonating outward.
The lava spears came in the same second — Dumbledore's follow-through, perfectly timed, driving into the impact site before Voldemort could recover.
The explosion that resulted was significant.
Kevin had already stepped back. He watched the fire clear with the professional assessment of someone who has done this before.
The black smoke spiralled upward from the crater.
"Dumbledore! Kevin!" The voice was retreating, fast, already far above them. The fury in it had been refined by the past several minutes into something colder and more precise. "You will answer for this."
Then it was gone.
Kevin looked at the ring still floating above his palm.
He looked at Dumbledore.
"He didn't feel it when we destroyed the locket," he said.
"No," Dumbledore agreed. "He didn't."
Kevin wrapped the ring in three nested containment boxes — the outer two standard magical shielding, the innermost his own layered construction, designed to suppress the specific pull the Resurrection Stone emanated — and pocketed the whole assembly.
"How long before Fudge shows up?"
"Less than five minutes, I would estimate." Dumbledore smoothed the front of his robes with the unconcerned manner of a man returning from a walk. "We should probably have a story prepared."