The afternoon spring sun of Paris was golden, warming the limestone facades of the buildings. Darius Zogratis, a Master of eight disciplines, was folding a newspaper at a small outdoor table. He had just finished a week of lectures on Squib genetic reintegration. He looked like a young aristocrat—calm, handsome, and dangerously still.
Suddenly, the birds went silent. A chill that had nothing to do with the weather swept through the street.
With a sound like a whip-crack, Lord Voldemort appeared thirty paces away. His skin was the color of a dead man's bone, his red slits narrowed with a predatory hunger. He stood in his jet-black robes, the Yew wand held loosely. To him, Darius was a minor biological obstacle—a celebrity whose timely death would signal the return of true dominance.
Darius didn't stand up. He didn't even reach for the wand in his soul dimension. He simply looked at the Dark Lord with his own scarlet eyes—eyes that held a clinical, terrifying clarity.
"I expected you in London, Tom," Darius said, his voice smooth and devoid of any tremor."But I suppose the French air suits your penchant for the dramatic."
Voldemort hissed, a sound of pure malice."The world whispers your name, boy. They call you a Sage. A miracle-worker. I have come to show them that there is no miracle greater than death, and I am its only Master."
"You aren't the Master of Death," Darius replied, finally setting down his spoon."You are its most terrified runaway. You didn't come here to kill a 'rival.' You came here because you are a scientific anomaly that is afraid of being corrected."
Minute One: The Theory of Futility
Voldemort didn't waste time with pleasantries. He raised his wand.
"Avada Kedavra!"
The green light roared toward Darius, a scream of killing intent. Darius, possessing a perfect mastery of the mind arts, had seen the intent before the spell was even fully formed. He did not dodge. Without a wand, he performed a complex Transfiguration on the air in front of him.
The air hardened, not into a wall, but into a dense molecular lattice. The Killing Curse hit the "hardened" air. The energy didn't bounce; it was absorbed into the lattice and dissipated harmlessly into heat.
Voldemort's eyes widened."Wandless… and silent?"
"Your spells rely on the assumption that the target is a passive recipient," Darius noted, standing up slowly."I simply changed the medium of the conversation."
Enraged, Voldemort launched a barrage of highly complex, ancient Dark Arts. Blades of pure darkness sliced through the café tables; Life-siphoning curses turned the nearby flowers to dust; internal boiling hexes hissed through the air.
Darius moved with an unnatural, almost liquid grace. He didn't use shields. He used elegant charms that counteracted the base magical theory of Voldemort's attacks. Every time Voldemort cast, Darius intercepted the spell's core logic, unraveling the magic before it could even manifest its effect.
"You use the magic of the 15th century, Tom," Darius said, stepping over a pile of smoldering debris."It's poetic, but inefficient. You're trying to use a blunt instrument against a surgeon."
Minute Two: The Possession and the Loop
Voldemort realized he was facing an opponent who understood the mechanics of magic better than he understood his own essence. Growing desperate, he realized his physical form—his new, "immortal" body—was a vulnerability.
He saw a nearby French Ministry clerk frozen in terror. Voldemort's form blurred as he attempted a Legilimency-based possession, a move he hadn't used in years. He intended to hide within the man's mind and strike Darius from within a human shield.
"This was your final mistake," Darius said, his voice echoing in the mental plane.
Darius recognized the psychic intrusion immediately. He didn't fight the possession; he inverted it. Using his mastery of Mind Arts, he mentally sealed off Voldemort's escape routes within the poor man's mind. He locked the Dark Lord inside the clerk's consciousness.
"What is this?" Voldemort's voice shrieked inside the mental void."Let me out!"
"You wanted to see a miracle?" Darius asked.
He deployed a modified version of his Cognitive Restoration spell. This wasn't designed to heal. It was designed to force balance. Darius forced Voldemort's fractured, seven-piece soul to confront its own myriad inconsistencies, its traumas, and its illogical horrors. He forced a mind that had lived in fragments to become a single, unified whole.
The effect was a catastrophic mental feedback loop. Voldemort's mind, already unstable from years as a spectral being and the trauma of his rebirth, could not handle the forced stability.
The Aftermath: The Blue Ash
Darius calmly extracted Voldemort's consciousness from the clerk, who slumped to the ground, unharmed but unconscious. The Dark Lord, stripped of his host body, could not survive the psychic whiplash.
Voldemort's physical form, still standing in the street, began to scream—a silent, mental shriek of agony. His jet-black robes seemed to be consumed from the inside out by an eerie, bright blue glow. This was the side effect of his own soul magic collapsing inward as it tried to reconcile the "balance" Darius had forced upon it.
Within two minutes of the fight beginning, Lord Voldemort's physical form disintegrated entirely. There was no explosion. No grand finale. Just the sound of rushing wind as the Dark Lord vanished.
Darius Zogratis looked down at the small pile of glowing blue ash on the pristine Parisian cobblestones. He brushed a single speck of dust off his immaculate black robes.
"A minor biological and magical inefficiency," Darius murmured to himself.
He did not call the Aurors. He did not celebrate. He looked at the ash with complete indifference, adjusted his collar, and continued walking toward the French Ministry building to deliver his lecture. Lord Voldemort was dead, erased by a 17-year-old who viewed him as nothing more than a poorly solved equation.