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Those words detonated the crowd.
"What did she say?!"
"Bring You-Know-Who back? Is she insane?!"
"That's You-Know-Who!"
"Stop her! Someone stop her!"
Panic surged through the field, worse than when they'd watched Voldemort rise. If his resurrection was a natural disaster, then Hermione was actively inviting the disaster in and complaining it wasn't big enough.
"Silence!"
Dumbledore's voice rang out again, carrying a weight of magic that pressed down on the crowd like a physical force. Every voice cut off at once.
He looked at Hermione for a long moment. Something complex moved behind his eyes. "Hermione," he said carefully. "I imagine you have your reasons. Am I right?"
Hermione gave him a single nod. An acknowledgment of his trust.
She turned to face the still-shaken crowd. "Voldemort's greatest weapon, his Horcruxes, have already been completely destroyed. By me."
Silence.
Then, from somewhere in the crowd, the unspoken thought rippled through like a wave: So you're not even pretending anymore. That Basilisk incident really was you.
"If he'd stayed in that drifting, disembodied state," Hermione continued, "searching the whole world for him would have been genuinely inconvenient."
Her smile shifted into something faintly unsettling. "But now, thanks to this resurrection ritual, he's obediently gathered himself a physical form and walked right out into the open."
She spread her hands.
"Once he's fully back and has a body that can be destroyed, we kill him again. Clean and simple."
Dead silence.
You could hear the grass.
Every mouth in the field was open. Every eye was fixed on the girl standing on the platform, wide with disbelief.
Kill Voldemort?
Voldemort. You-Know-Who. The Dark Lord who had the entire wizarding world so terrified they couldn't speak his name. The most powerful dark wizard in a century. The one who had burned through families and left entire bloodlines in ash.
Aside from Dumbledore, no one had even dared to imagine going up against him.
And even Dumbledore hadn't managed to finish it.
But then, the silence shifted. Because the person saying this was the Witch.
If anyone else had said those words, they'd be dragged to St. Mungo's before the sentence was finished. But from her mouth... the crowd found themselves thinking, almost against their will, that maybe she meant every word.
"Even granting that you have the capability, Lady Witch..." Barty Crouch stepped forward and nodded. "The reality is we can only see what's happening through Mr. Potter's eyes. We have no way of actually reaching them."
Hermione's lips curved.
"Do you really think," she said, unhurried, "that I went to all the trouble of brewing Harry a monitoring potion — arranging a full live broadcast of everything he was going through — and left an obvious gap like that? Just to stand here and watch helplessly?"
Dumbledore's eyes lit up. Something clicked behind them.
"You don't mean..."
Hermione looked at him. She smiled, quick, sharp, and conspiratorial, and nodded once.
The next second, the air above the empty lawn twisted.
Two figures snapped into existence without a sound.
One had his hand locked around the other's throat, a savage grin carved across his face.
The other's eyes were wide with terror, completely lost.
They were frozen in the exact position they'd held in the graveyard. Suspended. Like a photograph.
Time stopped.
Every person in the field went blank.
The savage grin on Voldemort's face went rigid. His red eyes moved over the crowd, sweeping across the stunned, gaping faces, and for a moment, even he looked lost.
What happened?
Where am I?
Is this still the graveyard?
Into that strange, suspended silence, a voice broke through. Barely controlled. Shaking. Shot through with sudden, horrified understanding.
"A Portkey!"
Snape's face had gone the color of chalk. He jerked his head toward Harry, dangling in Voldemort's grip, then snapped his gaze up to Hermione, standing composed on the platform above.
"You turned Harry into a Portkey?!"
Every eye in the field swung to her at once. Terrified eyes. Baffled eyes. Searching eyes.
Hermione met them all and tilted her head slightly. "What did you think the potion was for? You really believed I put all that work into it just so everyone could watch a live broadcast?"
The so-called Felix Felicis. The monitoring function had been a side effect, almost incidental. The real purpose was to temporarily transform whoever drank it into a Portkey. She'd built it herself, working from the Space Stone's principles, fusing alchemy with potion-making into something that had never existed before. Voldemort couldn't have detected it. Nicolas Flamel couldn't have detected it. No one could.
The crowd was still processing this when Voldemort, dragged back to Hogwarts with no say in the matter, finally clawed his way back to awareness.
He looked at the students. Rows of them, in their house robes, staring at him in open horror. He saw the old man on the platform. The one person in this world he had ever genuinely feared.
And he understood.
He was back. Hogwarts. He was at Hogwarts.
Impossible.
His plan had been perfect. The Triwizard Cup was supposed to carry Harry Potter to the Riddle graveyard. There, he would complete his resurrection. Kill his enemy. Announce to the wizarding world that the Dark Lord had returned.
Why had it come apart when it was barely half-finished?
His pupils contracted to pinpoints. His gaze cut through the crowd and locked onto one figure.
A man with a cane.
Him.
Only Barty Crouch Jr. knew the complete plan. The Cup was his work. And now Voldemort was inexplicably standing in the middle of Hogwarts, in front of an audience he'd never intended to have.
It had to be him. The treacherous little rat.
"Barty Crouch Jr.!" Voldemort's voice cracked through the field like a whip. "You dare betray me?!"
The man disguised as Moody began to shake. Visibly. Every muscle, every limb.
"No! Master — no! It wasn't me! I didn't, I would never betray you! I swear!"
He threw his hands up, scrambling for words. But Voldemort's eyes were on him, flat and lethal and certain, and every explanation died before it reached his lips.
The crowd fractured into noise.
"What is he saying?"
"Professor Moody, he's a Crouch?"
"Which Crouch?"
"Is that, Barty Crouch's son?"
Every head turned toward Barty Crouch Sr.
The old man's eyes were wide. He stared at Moody with an expression that looked like the floor had dropped out from under him.
Into the chaos, Hermione's voice cut clean and clear.
"Mr. Barty Crouch Jr." She looked down from the platform at the shaking, terrified figure below. There was a smile on her face. Unhurried. Almost pleasant. "It seems your plan to lure Voldemort out and destroy him has already succeeded, at least halfway."
The entire field: "?"
Barty Crouch Jr.: "?"
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