Kevin fashioned a containment case from materials in his bag — three boxes nested inside each other, each layer a different magical barrier, the innermost specifically designed to suppress the Resurrection Stone's ambient pull. The ring sat at the centre like an insect in amber. He wasn't ready to destroy the Horcrux yet; he wanted to study the curse-architecture first, understand what Voldemort had wrapped around it before touching it directly. Dumbledore had no objection.
The ring's temptation — the pull toward the Stone, the specific hunger it created in anyone who held it long enough — was real, and significant. Kevin felt it. He simply filed it in the same category as all the other things he felt that he had decided not to act on.
They were preparing to Apparate back when Fudge appeared at a run, trailing two aides and a harried expression.
"Dumbledore! What are we doing about the snake?"
There was a pause.
Kevin and Dumbledore looked at each other.
The snake.
In the battle's chaos — the Inferi, the fire tornadoes, Kevin's destructive engagement with the surrounding landscape and Dumbledore's earth-and-lava counterwork — Nagini had been pinned under collapsed rubble when the Gaunt shack went down. Not killed. Not vanished. Just buried.
And Fudge, sending in his reconstruction crew, had found her.
"She burst out from under the rubble the second they started shifting it," Fudge continued, his voice climbing in pitch. "Nearly took off a man's arm. Spells bounce straight off her. We had to wall her in with conjured stone instead, and she's still trying to push through it."
He looked at them with the expression of a man who has done his part and is now firmly requesting that other people do theirs.
Kevin and Dumbledore Disapparated.
The containment site was at the edge of what had been the shack's foundations. Three Ministry wizards stood at intervals, maintaining conjured earth walls around a section of ground that was periodically heaving. As they landed, the snake — Nagini, six metres of muscle and malice — cleared the top of the nearest wall in one smooth lunge. A fourth wizard threw up a secondary wall reflexively.
Kevin assessed the situation in approximately three seconds.
Living Horcrux. Spell-resistant skin. Active, mobile, and apparently aware enough to recognise an encirclement and work against it systematically. Voldemort could, in theory, see through her eyes at any moment — could seize control and direct her, or more critically, could attempt to Apparate her out if the Anti-Apparition ward ever dropped.
None of those outcomes were acceptable.
He jumped the wall.
Nagini turned immediately. She knew him — there was something in her attention when it fixed on him that went beyond a snake's normal predatory assessment, an intelligence layered over the instinct, cold and purposeful. Her jaws opened, blood-red inside, and she struck.
Kevin caught her behind the head.
His grip closed on a neck the thickness of his forearm. She thrashed — the force of it enormous, scale and muscle trying to haul free, her tail end swinging wide and wrapping around his ankle with the focused intent of something that has tried this technique before. Kevin planted his boot across one of her coils and held. She didn't move him.
The Ministry wizards had cleared the walls, backing off as Dumbledore walked in.
"Unlike the others," Dumbledore said, observing the struggling snake with the considered look of a man making a final determination, "this one is alive. Voldemort's soul fragment has a vessel that thinks and moves — he can use it, spy through it, potentially direct it. It presents ongoing risk as long as it exists."
Kevin was already reaching into his coat with his free hand.
Nagini's pupils had gone fully dilated — the natural slits blown wide, the irises flooding red. Whatever looked out through those eyes in that moment was not a snake. Voldemort was there, watching, and the hissing that came out of her was shaped like words neither Kevin nor Dumbledore could parse but that carried unmistakably the quality of a threat being delivered.
Kevin drove the basilisk fang through the top of her skull.
The response was immediate and absolute — a full-body convulsion, then stillness, then the dissolution. The scales went first, softening and then fragmenting, the whole structure of her losing cohesion as the Horcrux component came apart. What remained crumbled to fine black ash that lifted on the winter air in drifting wisps.
Kevin looked at it.
He set a brief fire across the ash, more as a precaution than a necessity. The result was unremarkable.
"Right," he said, brushing dust from his coat.
They returned to Grimmauld Place in the early evening to find that the Order already knew most of it — Fudge had apparently been communicating with Sirius while the clean-up was ongoing, motivated by either genuine respect for the chain of command or the desire to ensure someone else shared the responsibility for what Little Hangleton now looked like.
Sirius caught Kevin in the hallway and grabbed his shoulder, checking him over in the wordless, specific way of someone who knows what a post-combat walk actually looks like.
"Fine," Kevin told him.
"You say that every time."
"Every time, I'm right."
Christmas dinner was already on the table. Dumbledore stayed — he'd plainly expected a quick errand and received instead an entire day, but he sat down at the table with the equanimity of a man who finds unexpected outcomes interesting rather than inconvenient. Mrs. Weasley served him a portion large enough to constitute a separate meal.
Afterward, with the dishes handled and the fire burning lower, Kevin walked everyone through the day's events. Harry listened with that particular focused expression — taking in, processing, filing, the way he always did when the information was going to matter later.
"Four destroyed," Harry said, when Kevin finished. "Diary, locket, ring, Nagini." He paused. "How many did he make altogether?"
"At least six," Kevin said. "Probably six, with the possibility of a seventh we haven't confirmed yet." He didn't elaborate on the seventh. That conversation would come when it needed to.
Ron had been doing arithmetic in his head with the look of someone who finds this particular arithmetic unsettling. "How much of a soul can you actually split? At some point there's nothing left to—"
"That's exactly the issue," Hermione cut in, reaching past him for her tea. "The soul isn't meant to withstand this kind of fragmentation. The more it's split, the less capable it is of any normal function — including things like feeling that something is wrong. Voldemort's made so many cuts that the parent soul has lost the ability to register what the fragments are doing. That's why he didn't react when we destroyed the locket."
"He's too broken to feel it," Harry said.
"He's too broken to feel most things," Hermione said quietly. "I think that's rather the point."
The fire crackled. Outside, it had begun to snow.
"Hold on," Harry said, working through something. "The locket, the ring, the snake — all Slytherin connections. The diary too, in a way. Is that deliberate? Does Voldemort specifically go after Slytherin relics?"
"It's a strong theory," Kevin said. "And it holds up if you think about his psychology — he built his whole identity on being Slytherin's heir, rejected his Muggle heritage entirely, needed the mythology to justify the image he'd constructed of himself. Using Slytherin's own treasures as Horcruxes would be completely consistent."
Dumbledore, who had appeared at some point beside Harry's chair with a sweet in his hand and no apparent awareness that his arrival had been unannounced, smiled. "Yes. Though there is a further layer."
Harry turned. Nobody was startled. They had all been here long enough.
"Sit down, Professor," Hermione said, and nudged a chair toward him.
"Thank you, Hermione. Yes — Harry's instinct is sound, and Kevin's analysis is also correct. But Voldemort's Horcrux selection tells us something about his ambitions more broadly." He unwrapped the sweet with the focused attention of a man who takes confectionery seriously. "He was not content simply to survive. He wanted to be remembered. What better vessels for immortality than objects that already carry history?"
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The story does not stop here. It NEVER stopped. More chapters breathe and pulse beyond this page, ready to be unlocked. Do not let curiosity go unanswered.