THIS IS AN AU. HORCRUX LOCATIONS AND THE EVENTS OF THE WIZARDING WAR MIGHT NOT NECESSARILY BE THE SAME.

In case it isn't obvious, I do not own Harry Potter. That's ok, didn't want it anyway. (* ￣︿￣)

Just to clarify I'll be calling 'witches and wizards' mages instead, as I can't be bothered to write 'witches and wizards' every time.

Chapter 1: Kronos

Harry wiped his brow free of sweat once more as he crawled along the baking hot sand, huffing in annoyance as grains rubbed against his chest from where they'd somehow managed to get through his layers of armour. The sun beat down on his back furiously, steadily eating its way through the cooling charms imbued in his BDUs.

He didn't know exactly where he was, except that he was definitely still in the Sahara judging by the endless sea of sand stretching around him. Probably still in Algeria… somewhere.

For the last month or so he'd been tracking the bloody trail of a particularly nasty Dark Witch called Aigamuxa who had been massacring the local muggle populous using magic that the ICW had thought destroyed centuries ago. Harry suspected that the mad bitch had managed to find and break into one of the infamous vaults left behind by the immensely rich African trader mages that used to collect knowledge from all across the continents, using the gold they mined from the area along with very nasty wards to protect the knowledge they hoarded.

He and Bill had found one in Tunisia while Harry was on a contract out there 27 years ago. Some of the tomes that they had found—after going through the arduous task of translating languages that hadn't been used in centuries—had been nothing short of groundbreaking in some cases and horrific in others. Harry wasn't sure why someone had wanted to make a parasitic worm that ate a mage's magic and then duplicated before spreading, but it had made him slightly queasy. The artist had been unfortunately accurate in depicting the stages of transferral. The method the worms used to enter and exit a human wasn't pretty.

Not many people could do the job that Harry did, but he'd made a living out of it. And he was damn good at it. He'd killed one of the worst Dark Lords seen in centuries when he was in his early twenties, and he'd only gotten better since then.

After completing his NEWTs and getting counselling for some severe mental trauma from his run-ins with Riddle's merry band of psychopaths he'd joined the Hit-Wizards when they found that he could qualify for the more elite group of mages. The purpose of the Hit-Wizards was to actively hunt down and move in on dangerous targets while the Aurors investigated and did general policing. He was the youngest to join in a long time, and he'd risen through the ranks quickly. In the five-year process of tracking down the remnants of Riddle's little fan club, he had risen from being a recruit to commanding a squad of his own. He still had fond memories of his squad. There were 5 of them, and by the end of his time with the Hit-Wizards, he had managed to get them through it all alive apart from one due to his own stupid mistake, which was saying something with Harry's tendency to attract trouble and history of friends dying around him. It had been one of his proudest achievements.

He had managed this because it was what he did best. He was a master at simply living through whatever was thrown at him. The 11 long, lonely, dark years at the Dursleys would have broken him if he was anything less than he was. He had been repeatedly dodging death even under the supposedly best wards in the country every time he returned to Hogwarts for a new year. By the time he was 17, he was at the centre of a civil war and had seen countless deaths, dodging death himself more times than he could count when he was on the run for five years starting in his 7th year. He had killed before his balls even dropped, although some would question if Quirrell counted as a murder, as he had died when Voldemort left his body after possessing it. But it had still been something that an 11-year-old shouldn't have had to see.

After 21 years with the Hit-Wizards Harry had shown himself to be the best of the best. He and his squad had taken down countless dark mages and run-of-the-day criminals, gaining the respect of both his peers and superiors in the process. This was important to Harry, who had always wanted to be respected for something that he actually did, instead of something he did as an infant.

Eventually, he caught the attention of the ICW, who discreetly approached him through a branch of itself that didn't officially exist and offered to employ him to take down up-and-coming or already existing dark mages and even the odd muggle terrorist from all around the world. It was a tough choice for him. He had gained the respect and loyalty of his squad, who he had carefully built a friendship with based on the understanding that they couldn't let friendships get in the way on missions. In the end, though, he acquiesced. Some were confused as to why Harry left the Hit-Wizards—A job that everyone knew he loved—for a desk job at the ICW managing and maintaining the Statute of Secrecy for the UK, but they got over it.

Of course, he was doing nothing of the sort. Instead, he was being tested by some of the most formidable fighters and knowledgeable teachers from all over the world before they deemed him acceptable. They paid him monthly like any other job, and highly at that, but it also through a bounty system that was adjusted for how dangerous the mage in question was. Call it an incentive to go after the more insane ones. He had grabbed the job with both hands. Nothing got his blood pumping like going against dark mages. After all, it was all he had ever known. He had grown up running from people and the occasional animal that wanted him dead. And though people would always be disturbed when he said it, he enjoyed it. In the years of peace between killing Voldemort and joining the Hit-Wizards he had felt out of place and antsy, itching to get back into the action and fling curses at something. His mind healer called it a combat stress reaction. Harry didn't really give a shit.

He had been working as a Hunter for around 49 years now, and in that time had maintained his ability to go through the most arduous trials and somehow come out on top. Harry still remembered one particular contract where he was ordered to hunt a Bosnian wizard who was turning trolls into inferni, which of course meant they were immune to fire and still had the magic resistant skin. The ten idiot Ukrainian mages that the ICW forced him to babysit made jokes the whole time about undead trolls, disrespected the women in every public place they stopped at and generally pissed Harry off at every turn.

In the end, they (read: Harry) tracked the mad bastard down to a plot of land in the middle of nowhere New Mexico where the trolls promptly rose from the earth midway through their attempt to kill the bastard. Harry had spent around 5 hours gleefully sending steel javelins through the skulls of the trolls, keeping up spell fire on the wizard at the same time with a second wand. He hadn't really paid attention to the mages he was sent with, assuming they could handle themselves. At the end of the fight, all that remained were hundreds of dead trolls, one dead dark wizard, 8 dead Ukrainians and one thoroughly pissed-off Harry. That guy had been worth 45,000 galleons. On a completely unrelated note, the ICW decided that pairing people with Harry wasn't necessary anymore. 'Economically inefficient' were the official words, he believed.

The six-figure price tag attached to this one's head told Harry that this 'Aigamuxa' was extremely dangerous, and high on the ICW's need-to-kill list. Now that he had seen her handiwork, she was pretty high on his as well. He'd never liked it when mages killed muggles. Muggles were like ants to mages; they had no defence against magic. To kill them was an act of cowardice. Even an imbecile like Mundungus Fletcher could kill a muggle with a couple of words and a flick of his wand.

Harry pushed images of that coward out of his head and grimaced as he heard the metallic rasp of his false leg scrape along the sand. He had lost the right leg to the same curse as Moody, just above the knee. He even had a wooden stump like Moody before he managed to dig up a book from Riddle's personal library on some really obscure body modification magic, in which was the magic that Riddle used to fix up the rat's arm when he lopped it off. He had never gotten used to the sound of metal whenever something hit it, even if it felt just like it had before he lost it, feeling, pain and everything. The Elder Wand had a tendency to do the impossible like that.

Along the way, he had also lost his left eye to an obscure Scottish tribal curse from the 500s, from a former Death Eater hiding out in Malaysia who he knew for a fact had researched it just to piss him off. It specifically targeted only one of the eyes, and he had only had his eyes fixed a year previously. Everyone knew his eyesight used to be abysmal. That guy had died slower than the others. It had taken 3 years to figure out how to fix it and it took an eyeball-sized diamond, some irritatingly delicate transfiguration, 2 rituals and some equally finicky enchantment work for it to function like a normal eye. That Russian noble family was pissed when they found out their diamond had been taken. Their fault for having shit wards.

Harry was pulled out of his fond memories of robbing the Kerimovs and finally crested the dune he had been climbing for the better part of half an hour. He was then greeted by a sight that made him want to go straight back to the ICW headquarters and demand more money and maybe an obliviation or two. Maybe a complimentary bottle of good whiskey and a Veela-attended massage parlour, too?

In front of him was one of the most sickening sights he had seen in a long time. And considering his occupation, that was really saying something.

A small village had been ruthlessly torn apart as if a rogue tornado had torn through it. The bodies of the inhabitants were uncaringly piled off to the side in a heap, each one unnaturally pale, even for a dead body. Children lay unmoving on the bodies of their parents, even the animals weren't spared. A raven was perched on top of the pile. It turned its head to the side and fixed him with a look that was far too intelligent to belong to a creature.

Evidently, Death was keeping an eye on him. It was always more powerful around areas of death. Harry mentally flipped it off and returned to his observation of the scene.

The reason for this gruesome sight was painted into the sand where the village used to be. The entire area had been turned into one huge ritual circle, coated with the blood of the villagers. In the centre a tall, dark-skinned witch was painting what seemed to be the last of the runes for the ritual circle. She was completely naked and covered in blood. If he hadn't seen the hundreds of deaths she was responsible he might have been aroused at the sight, she wasn't bad looking and all those rituals had given her quite the figure. She must have been doing it for days, the sand was covered in more runes than Harry had ever seen before for a single ritual. Scattered around at different points of the circle were also piles of sand that sparkled brightly, contrasting harshly with the dull, dark sand of the Sahara. Harry didn't really understand why, so pushed it to the back of his mind.

"I'm getting too old for this shit," Harry grumbled, ignoring the fact that he stopped visibly ageing when he was around his mid-30s. He had to resort to using his metamorph abilities to prevent suspicion. Handy thing, being a metamorphmagus. The metamorphmagus he had to sacrifice to gain the ability would probably disagree, but hey, he'd been a mass murderer anyway.

Harry stood as quietly as he could, slid his wand from its holster into his hand, and immediately sent off a whispered killing curse at the woman while her back was turned. ICW clearance level 7 was a handy thing. He'd lost track of the number of bounties that became a lot easier because of it. The reduced payout from them being dead was oftentimes worth it when you took in the time it cut down.

She noticed it, of course, and dodged it effortlessly, blood falling off her in droplets as she twisted and turned towards Harry in one smooth movement before snapping up a pale white wand (why do all evil mages have pale wands? Maybe it has something to do with yew?) and sending a very nasty rainbow of hurt-flavoured curses back his way without hesitation, teeth bared in a feral snarl like a cornered animal.

Harry dodged the first three, sand spraying the back of his head from where they impacted the dune behind him, narrowly avoiding being decapitated, having his eyes boiled and… castrated? What the fuck? Harry growled as he threw up a shield for the last, a bright white piercer splashing across the equally pale shield before him. Harry dropped the shield along with himself and sent off two bone-exploders before the role and another killing curse as he stood again, quickly conjuring a protego with his left-hand wandlessly to stop the banisher that would have caught him off guard.

She paused for a fraction of a second, shocked or intimidated by his use of wandless magic. Not many could do it to that degree.

In her brief moment of hesitation, Harry cast three more bone-exploders followed by a bone-breaker, favourites of his due to the fluidity and shortness of the wand movements and how well they fit together. On top of that, to his annoyance, they were really some of the best for the situation due to the curses not being area-of-effect. Harry had witnessed the aftermath of what happened when someone accidentally hit a ritual circle with a spell, and safe to say it wasn't pretty. As in, picking up body parts for days, not pretty. If you scuffed it with a stick, it wouldn't be a problem, but when magic interacts with rituals it can get tricky, and sometimes it accidentally activates it, which can then cause a cascade failure and mess it up spectacularly. Suffice it to say in some cases it goes boom, and with the size of the one before him, Harry really wasn't keen to see what would happen.

She dodged two and batted away the other, but missed the bone-breaker, which he had purposely snuck off at the last second at an angle to try and get lucky and predict her dodge. It worked, and connected with an audible snap as the shoulder on her wand arm was viciously broken as Aigamuxa twisted to avoid the bone-exploders. However, to his disappointment his hope that the beautiful psycho would drop her wand and the fight could all be over quickly was for nought as to his annoyance, she was one of those pesky ambidextrous mages, and simply switched her wand to her left hand before quickly correcting her posture and composure. She evidently had used a ritual to lessen the pain as well, as she only winced slightly when the bone-breaker hit. A dangerous ritual, as sometimes you could do something stupid like hold something hot and burn right through the skin on your hand to the bone before you realised, but it was useful in fights.

Her dark eyes were burning in fury as she cast two dark green curses at him that he couldn't identify, evidently not hampered by the arm hanging limply at her side. Harry played it safe and flicked his wand up in a jerky motion, causing a sandstone hand to rise from the ground in front of him and catch the curses, which proceeded to hiss angrily and start to melt through his transfigured hand. 'Right, acid spells, the Bellatrix special. Haven't seen those in a while,' Harry thought irritably, even when that insane bitch was dead, she still pissed him off and tried to kill him through the fucked up spells she created.

Harry fired a blaster at the back of the hand, sending the corrupted sand flying at her then followed up with another bone-breaker and his favourite spell, velox iaculum. It translated to 'swift javelin' and sent a roughly 4-foot long, inch wide metal spear with a pointed end at a velocity that would happily tear through most things. It was what he'd used against the trolls.

She let off a shrill scream of frustration that reeked of insanity as the sand that Harry blasted away from him took on the form of a huge snake and lunged at her. Harry internally winced as he continued to slowly advance on the witch, unpleasantly reminded of the creator of the two spells he just blocked.

She banished most of the sand away with a ventus and a shield, but some still hit her legs and feet as the magical barrier didn't cover her full body. She didn't notice. His javelin also caught her off guard and grazed her cheek, barely keeping herself from being shish-kebabbed. He wasn't surprised that she didn't see it coming, the wand movement for velox iaculum was simple, just a tight circle then a jab forwards, and he'd learnt to cast it silently and quickly. It was one of the fastest spells he had in his selection. The dull grey spear was also harder to spot than the bright light of the spells, and thus could be snuck into chains to greater effect.

She looked positively mutinous now. As with all dark mages, she had underestimated him and just assumed she would beat him easily, that he was just another bounty hunter. Harry was happy to dissuade her of that assumption.

She completely ignored the sand making its way through her feet and responded with a blood freezer and cutting curse, cursing and screaming incoherently the whole time. Harry dodged both of them by angling his head slightly to avoid the first and just taking the second to his fake leg, which made a bell-like noise as the runes protected it. Harry used the extra time to try and catch her off guard with some piercers, another one of his spears and an obscure spell created in the British DoM that shrunk the brain of the target. Funnily enough, it was made so they could pull the brains of their experiments out easier. It was never intended for the living.

She dodged all but one of the piercers which tore a perfectly circular hole through her right hand, which was a shame since he had always wanted to see what the last one would do. Harry advanced further while she cauterized her hand brutally by straight up conjuring red hot steel to burn it. She then dropped the shield and fired off 3 curses in rapid succession.

Harry grunted in annoyance as one of the curses, a light violet one that caused bones to shrink, actually hit him. One of the metal strips inside his armour caught it and absorbed it for a few seconds before glowing a bright violet and fading away. A tricky bit of rune-work and enchanting that took a couple of years to figure out, inspired by the magic inhibitor cuffs the ministry used.

Harry shielded the other two, a blood-boiler and an obliviate that would have left him brain-dead, then returned with an overpowered bombarda which she shielded again, this time keeping the shield up and pouring seemingly all of the magic she had left into it. Harry recognised the shield, it would feed directly off the life force of the mage who cast it until they died, so understandably was very rarely used. She slumped when she finished then glared at him balefully before slicing a finger off her already abused right hand with a cutting curse. The blood started to spray freely from the wound, which she apparently also couldn't feel.

Harry started grumbling various unsavoury comments on the subject of the witch's parentage as she began chanting and he started sending his strongest shield breakers at the pale blue shield to indirectly kill her through it. A killing curse at this point would be useless. The curse would pass through the shield like it did all others and wouldn't break it, and she would dodge it far too easily. The shield was a much larger target, a better plan than playing AK dodgeball with Aigamuxa. She was too fast, she'd just dodge it, and even he wasn't powerful enough to waste that much magic on so many killing curses.

As his shield-breakers splashed against her shield she began painting the floor with her own blood, slowly and painfully nearing completion of the final part of the ritual, the centre rune. She slumped slightly every time a shield-breaker hit but continued stubbornly.

After around a minute of Aigamuxa painting the ground with her blood and Harry continuing to send shield breakers as he advanced, the dark witch seemed to finally finish. Aigamuxa started to shout at him from behind her shield, apparently deciding that now she'd finished the ritual it was time to monologue. Her manic arm waving, screaming and shouting did interesting things to her chest, he idly noted. Harry had no fucking clue what she was saying of course, since he knew none of the African dialects apart from a few written ones for obscure rune languages. But who was he to get in the way of evil mages and their precious monologues? It had always only ever given him more time to kill or capture them.

If he had understood what the witch was saying he might have caught her gloating about 'banishment from life' and 'soul ripping', and maybe not have ignored it.

Harry eventually got bored with casting shield-breakers as her sodding shield was being a pain in the arse and refusing to break. The ritual circle was also starting to concern him, giving off twisted strands of magic and humming with increasing intensity, distorting the air around him. There wasn't a way to explain how it felt, it just felt wrong. Harry was incredibly in tune with his magic and had felt many different types of magic from many different parts of the world. But he had never felt something this... backwards.

It wasn't the same as Horcruxes, which were still the most black, twisted and evil things he'd ever come across. It was wrong in that his magic felt that what the ritual was trying to accomplish shouldn't be possible, that laws that shouldn't be bent were being broken. Like knocking a glass off a table and watching bemusedly as it falls upward, leaving you bewildered and questioning your whole worldview. Harry's mind started to race as he desperately thought of a thousand ways to get out of the situation. The ritual was starting to get to him.

Eventually, he settled on probably the most inelegant and brute-force way forward. Dumbledore would have wept if he saw what he did, Albus was always a stickler for elegance and grace in spellwork.

"Fiendfyre!" he roared. Normally, he would kick someone's ass for shouting spells like a third-year, but in this case, he really needed the emotion behind it. He would know, he was probably one of the few that could control it and definitely the most proficient. The Elder Wand seemed to like the spell as well, or maybe it was him. He should probably be concerned about that. Hmm.

The witch's eyes widened comically in a way that Harry would have found amusing if he wasn't busy trying to control the intent of the spell he was casting, namely its desire to destroy everything within a wide radius including him. The roaring flames took the shape of a thestral, just like his patronus did ever since the battle of Hogwarts. He didn't really want to think about why right now. At the same time a part of him was also wondering if casting chaos magic into an activating ritual circle was a good idea, but fiendfyre ate everything, and he really needed it to eat her at that point, and that pesky shield didn't look like it was going to break anytime soon. He didn't know what the ritual would do, and also didn't know if he wanted to know, but any ritual that requires a whole village's worth of blood probably didn't have the best intentions. He just had to pray that she was the source that the ritual was feeding off and that killing her would stop it.

The flaming red and orange thestral rang almost as foul against Harry's magic as the ritual did as it charged towards the now panicky witch in its way, rearing its head and snorting jets of blood-red flame as it approached. Fiendfyre tended to do that, the aura it gave off was just so malevolent and intimidating and hateful that mages tended to panic when confronted with its full ire. She could have just apparated away, but instead, her brain turned to mush.

Harry grit his teeth, beads of sweat rolling down his face, eyes and wand fixed on the swirling flames of hate barrelling towards the witch, who finally snapped out of her terror as the flames converged ten meters away from her. She looked at Harry with pure hatred in her eyes.

Maybe she knew what would happen, one last act of defiance before she went onto the next great adventure, or maybe the next great killing spree in her case.

She screamed. It was a scream of pure desperation, with a charming sprinkle of madness and defiance on top. She pointed her wand at the main rune in the centre of the circle and shouted an unintelligible phrase, one laced with power. As the thestral caught her, jaws opened impossibly wide, the humming grew at a fever pitch, and the very air around him seemed to shiver with magic.

Harry felt his knees buckle and the hairs on his arms rise as he fell to his hands and knee under the oppressive feel of the ritual activating, as the witch in the background screamed in pain before being cut off abruptly.

He watched in horror as the fiendfyre thestral then seemed to get pulled into the centre of the ritual, along with the rapidly burning witch. Both were inhaled by the huge centre rune. Harry got a brief look at the rune glowing, and then the heavy ritual magic suddenly stilled. Everything was deathly quiet.

'The calm before the storm.'

Harry felt the weight of the ritual lift off of him and immediately started to scrabble desperately away from the circle, his instinctual sense of danger, honed after roughly 90 years of being in the middle of shit-storms, kicking in in full force. His heart was in his ears, the rasping of the sand against his boots a dull ache in the back of his head. The iron tang of blood sparked on his tongue, and he realised he'd bitten right through it.

Then, from the centre of the ritual a terrible, unnatural, eldritch shriek pierced the sky. The noise seemed to echo off things that weren't there, and Harry felt his ears start to ache under the pressure of the screech, which continued to reverberate around him. Everything around him had gained a strange double image, as if it were being shaken faster than he could see. The sand in the centre started to swirl, and the other sand from other points around the ritual circle also started to pour into the centre rune, following the mage and the fire. All this time the scream continued until it stopped when the last of the mysterious (but somehow familiar) sand poured in.

For the second time, the night stilled unnaturally. Then, before Harry's widened eyes, a tear formed where the rune was, unzipping with taunting slowness. The rip in reality was filled with pure black, not a single feature marring it, and a claw made from shadows tore out of it, grasping around itself. Harry watched in morbid fascination, reminded for some reason of dropping something underneath a bed and grasping wildly underneath it in search.

The hand stilled, then honed in on Harry. His eyes widened further, but he still didn't let himself freeze. He had been in too many situations like this to do something so amateur. He cast his strongest shield, Aegis, a golden sphere made from interlinked hexagons which appeared around him instantly. But the hand went straight through as if it wasn't there, and grabbed him.

Harry cursed colourfully as a distressingly familiar feel emanated from the hand from where it grasped him around the midriff and pulled.

'It feels the same as the Elder Wand.' He thought absently, as he was dragged helplessly towards the centre of the ritual through the runes, leaving a dark furrow of the blood of the villagers and sand behind him as he struggled helplessly to set himself free. He couldn't apparate and the arm seemed to be entirely resistant to magic in a way that he had never encountered before. The spells he was furiously casting, animation cancelling charms, high powered blasting hexes, even one that banished poltergeists just went straight through the it as if it was non-corporeal, even as it held him and dragged him forward.

Nothing worked.

Resigned, Harry eyed the centre rune of the ritual where the fiendfyre and the woman's charred remains had gone into. The tear was pure black, and around it, the runes were blazing orange and spinning. It emanated a feeling of wrongness so strong that it made his head spin. Not good.

'Well… bugger.'

These were Harry James Potter's last thoughts before he was pulled into the rift, and ceased to exist.

AN: This is my first ever fanfic. Be absolutely brutal in the reviews, I can take it, I promise! Plus, I want to get better. I have two chapters ready to edit after this one. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed.

Edited to make some spelling and grammar corrections 05/11/2022