Chapter Text
The cold, damp air of the cupboard under the stairs had been Harry Potter’s first school, a claustrophobic introduction to a world that seemed designed to keep him small, quiet, and perpetually overlooked.
Even as the doors of Hogwarts swung open to reveal the golden, candle-lit grandeur of the Great Hall, a part of him remained curled in the dark, bracing for a blow that never quite came but always seemed imminent.
His sorting into Gryffindor had felt like an improbable fluke, but also very expected. For him though it was a sudden, blinding light in his life.
It was that light that drew him toward the vibrant, stubborn warmth of Ron Weasley and the relentless, brilliant logic of Hermione Granger. They were his anchors in a sea of shifting staircases and moving portraits, yet even as he learned to wield a wand and command the spark of magic, the shadow of his reality remained jagged and unyielding.
Years of fame and danger though felt less like a gift and more like a heavy, gilded cloak that never quite fit. He lived his life as a public spectacle, his every move scrutinized by eyes that saw only the Boy Who Lived and never the boy who felt profoundly, achingly hollow. As well as the constant drangers of Voldemort and hogwarts.
The friction of his existence was amplified by those who refused to see him as anything other than a nuisance or a relic. As if he asked to be a symbol and hero.
Draco Malfoy walked the corridors like he owned the very stone beneath his feet, his sneer a practiced art form, his words sharpened to draw blood from Harry’s heritage and his perceived commonality. Each encounter with Draco was a calculated assault, a reminder that in the rigid, ancient social architecture of the purebloods, Harry was merely an interloper trespassing on hallowed ground.
If Draco was the jagged edge of a blade, Severus Snape was the slow, suffocating chill of a winter draft that refused to dissipate. In the dim, potion-fume-heavy air of the dungeons.
Snape’s gaze functioned like a physical weight, pinning Harry to the floor with a toxic blend of loathing and unresolved history. To Snape, Harry was not a student, but a living, breathing testament to a choice Lily Evans had made—a choice that had effectively erased his own existence from her heart.
The hatred of Snape was a cold, acidic thing, radiating off the man in waves that made the skin on the back of Harry’s neck prickle. Transforming simple brewing instructions into a battlefield where every mistake was met with a scathing, personal rebuke.
Then there was Theo Gorgon-Nott, a figure who moved through the shadows of the school with a quiet, simmering resentment that felt distinct from the overt disdain of the others. Theo’s animosity was a precise, surgical instrument; he watched Harry with a calculating intensity that bordered on the obsessive.
His distain and hate was never just about status or house rivalries, with Theo; it was a visceral reaction to Harry’s presence, an irritation born from the observation that Harry possessed an effortless, unintended grace that captured attention even when he tried to fade away. Theo, caught in the thrall of his own unrequited fixation on Draco, saw in Harry the mirror image of everything he believed he was denied.
Every time a professor praised Harry’s latent talent or a peer glanced his way with curiosity, Theo’s jaw would tighten, his fingers curling into his robes. As if he measured his own worth against the backdrop of Harry’s perceived, and deeply resented, perfection. Harry walked through these halls, an unwitting catalyst in the lives of his enemies, never realizing that the very essence of his being was a rising tide, one that would soon shatter the boundaries of the world he thought he knew.
The truth of Harry's life did not arrive with a thunderclap, but rather as a slow, corrosive erosion of everything Harry had been taught to believe about himself. It started in the quiet, dusty corners of the library, where the ink on yellowing records and discarded family ledgers began to tell a story that contradicted the carefully curated narrative of the Boy Who Lived.
Harry sitting in the dim light, the smell of decaying parchment and trapped ozone thick in the air, his fingers trembling as they traced the lines of his true lineage.
Name: Hades Regulus Potter-Black
Harry realized that he couldn't tell his friend about this. That the friendship he had clung to like a drowning man were, in reality, a gilded cage.
Ron’s affection was a transactional currency, one that plummeted in value the moment Harry deviated from the role of the humble, slightly bumbling sidekick. Whenever Harry excelled, or when the spotlight shifted toward his own internal growth rather than the communal success of the trio, the jealousy would bleed into the air between them, sharp and sour.
Hermione, for all her brilliance, demanded a world governed by rigid, predictable logic, and Harry’s burgeoning, nameless complexity—his growing, unbidden instincts—was a variable she could not categorize, and therefore, one she could not truly embrace.
The realization of his life had settled deep in his marrow, a cold, heavy stone that made his own skin feel like a garment that no longer fit. He was not merely the product of the Potter legacy, a convenient figurehead for the light’s war.
He was Hades Regulus Potter-Black, the scion of a bloodline that hummed with a different, more ancient frequency. The name alone felt like a key turning in a long-rusted lock, unlocking memories of a heritage he had been forcibly blinded to.
He thought of Sirius, not just as a godfather lost to the veil, but as the uncle who had been the first to recognize the truth of his blood.
Sire: James Fleamont Potter Bearer
Lily Evans Potter
Third: Regulus Orion Black
The weight of his three parents legacy and blood began to manifest as a phantom pressure behind his ribs, a hollow ache for a connection that had been severed before he could even name it. He was not a Gryffindor lion, nor was he the property of Dumbledore’s grand design; he was a vessel for a power that the school’s static walls were never built to contain.
As he stood up, the chair scraping sharply against the stone floor, the sound echoed like a gunshot in the near-empty library, Harry felt the shift in his own body language.
He couldn't hide anymore, he wanted to make all of his family proud of him. He was going to show what was truly inside of him. He wasn't going to be the boy-in-a-cupboard.
He no longer slumped to appear smaller; his shoulders pulled back with a grace that felt entirely foreign and yet perfectly instinctive. He caught his reflection in a passing window—the dark, brooding intensity in his eyes, the subtle, feline tilt of his posture—and finally recognized the stranger staring back at him.
When Hermione approached, her brow furrowed in that familiar, bossy rhythm, her words were a catalog of expectations about their upcoming assignments and their shared future. Harry barely heard the substance of her complaints, noting instead the way her voice held that slight, proprietary edge that suggested she believed she knew his mind better than he did himself.
He looked at her, truly looked at her, and realized he had been playing a part in a play written by people who feared the ending. With that realization he simply offered a soft, dismissive murmur, his voice vibrating with a newfound, subtle authority that made her pause mid-sentence, her eyes flickering with a momentary, confused flash of uncertainty.
He didn't bother explaining that he was done with the performative smallness, nor did he acknowledge the way Ron lingered in the background, vibrating with a suppressed, jealous tension that had once made Harry feel guilty, but now only made him feel a detached, chilling sense of clarity.
The air within the Gringotts office was thick with the scent of damp earth, ancient metallic dust, and the sharp, ozone-tinged tang of deep-mined ores.
Hades’s sat motionless upon the ornate, iron-wrought chair, his gaze fixed on the creature across the desk, a Gringotts archivist whose face was a map of deep, craggy wrinkles and whose eyes gleamed like polished obsidian.
The goblin’s claws clicked rhythmically against the stone surface as he gestured toward a series of forbidden, glowing scrolls that detailed a lineage Harry—or rather, Hades—had been denied
. The revelation that he was a Dragel, a creature of dragon-kin and ancient, volatile magic, felt like a structural change to his very soul; his blood, which he had always felt as merely a conduit for wizarding spells, now burned with the prospect of elemental manifestation.
The goblin, Rongnok, with a voice that sounded like grinding pebbles, explained with detached, professional coldness that Hades was an illegal species, a rarity that would draw predators from across the dimensions if his aura were ever fully exposed. If he want to survive he would have to wait and hide.
Hades’s internal world was a tempest of newfound clarity. He looked at his own hands, realizing the elegant, predatory strength lurking beneath the surface—the capability to shift into a full, scaled dragon, a feat of ancestral memory that required decades of mastery he had yet to begin. That it would take thousands of years for true mastery.
The goblin gestured toward a map of the realms, tracing a path away from the stifling, dangerous influence of Earth, where the tyrannical rule of Torvak loomed like a suffocating shroud. To stay on Earth was to invite death at the hands of his mortal enemies.
The goblin’s Rongnok, sharp, toothy grin held no warmth, only the grim satisfaction of a secret-keeper, as he whispered of Narvanah, the sanctuary realm, the only place where a Dragel of Hades’s potential could thrive. Yet, the trap remained: his magic was a tether, a glowing thread that the ministry and Dumbledore could pluck to find him should he attempt to traverse the barriers before his seventeenth year.
His posture hardened, a feline grace replacing the tentative, nervous energy he had carried throughout his youth. He tucked his chin, his expression cooling into an unreadable mask of determination.
He watched the Rongnok slide a small, intricately carved silver chain across the desk. Attached to it was a tiny, expertly shrunken trunk, a repository of his future, his independence, and his survival. As Hades reached out, his fingers brushing against the cool, dark metal of the chain, he felt a strange, rhythmic thrumming in his chest—the awakening of his Dragel instincts.
He fastened the necklace around his throat, the weight of the trunk resting against his collarbone like a promise. He didn't need to speak to convey his intent; his eyes, once clouded with the confusion of a boy who lived for others, now burned with a single, singular focus.
The goblin watched him, noting the shift in his presence, the way the shadows in the room seemed to bend toward him, and with a silent nod, he confirmed that the escape would be ready. Hades stood, his movements fluid and precise, the very air around him seeming to ripple with the promise of the coming departure.
He nodded his thanks as he left, his mind already mapping the long, grueling year that lay between him and his true life.
The cavern air was thick with the scent of stagnant, brackish water and the heavy, metallic tang of ancient, localized decay.
Every drip from the jagged stalactites above echoed with a hollow, rhythmic finality that seemed to mock the silence.
Albus Dumbledore stood at the edge of the subterranean lake, his movements jerky and disjointed, his eyes clouded by the fever-dream haze of the potion he had consumed.
He swayed on his feet, his robes heavy with the moisture of the cave, and his hand, blackened and withered by the curse, reached out with a trembling, desperate force to shove the crystal basin toward Hades.
The boy, who had spent the last year meticulously preparing for his flight to Narvanah, felt the cold stone bite into his back as he was backed against the damp, weeping wall of the cave.
The sheer, suffocating weight of Dumbledore’s delirium pressed upon him, a physical pressure that eclipsed the darkness of the surroundings. Dumbledore wheezed, his voice a fractured, wet rattle that barely climbed above the sound of the lapping black water, as he demanded that Hades continue the task, his grip on the boy’s arm bruising and erratic.
Dumbledore croaked "You must boy"hear Hades shuttered"your the only one who can"
Harry felt the familiar, dangerous prickle of his magic coiling beneath his skin, reacting to the malice radiating from the lake.
The inferi, awakened by the disturbance in their dark domain, began to breach the surface—pale, bloated hands clawing at the obsidian water, their movements accompanied by the wet, slapping sounds of rotting flesh against stone.
Dumbledore’s eyes were wide, unseeing, and filled with a frantic, destructive energy as he pushed, a sudden, violent shove that caught Hades off balance.
The world tilted; the scent of rotting kelp and stagnant death rushed up to meet him as he plummeted backward, the cold, abyssal water closing over his head with a shock that stole the breath from his lungs. As he sank into the freezing, oily depths, surrounded by the grasping, mindless fingers of the dead, the primal core of his being ignited.
The fear that had once defined his human life evaporated, replaced by an ancient, terrifying need for his family, for the circle that was not yet built but existed as a hunger in his soul.
He did not fight with a wand, for his magic was no longer a tool of the wizarding world; it was a living, pulsing frequency.
His mouth opened, and into the suffocating dark, he released the soul scream—a sound that transcended the physical, a vibrating, high-frequency cry that shattered the stillness of the cavern and rippled through the very fabric of the dimensions. It was a call of distress, a command to the unseen threads of the universe, and an absolute, non-negotiable claim of kinship.
As the scream tapered into a resonant hum that made the inferi recoil, recoiling in the water as if burned by the sheer force of his presence, Hades breached the surface, gasping, his hair plastered to his forehead, his eyes glowing with an ethereal, nameless light. He dragged himself onto the jagged shore, his body language shifting from that of a boy to something altogether more different.