Burn to flame and Reborn from the Ash

Chapter 1:"Betrayal!" [✔ ]

Harry Potter knew he had a temper, that became clear after the war with Voldemort. He was angry when his friends got hurt, and he was angry when that snake dared to besmirch the memory of his parents, but now he is furious.

The source of this anger began when he got a letter from Gringotts, It was already a few months after the war, Harry is now 18 years old, and he can sense something in his soul is missing. His magic is in agony, he can feel it. It feels like half of his soul has been taken away. At first, he had thought it was survivor's guilt since so many had died in the warfighting Voldemort, but that doesn't really seem to be the issue, at least not the whole one.

Harry drifted around aimlessly, with no real purpose, mostly living in 12 Grimmauld Place or in the Burrow, though he rarely went to the Burrow except when he felt up to accepting one of the Weasleys' many invitations. Harry generally spent his days in the Black Library. Even though he'd never been much of a reader, after the war it was one of the few things he could do that didn't instantly remind him of those he'd lost. The Black family library was legendary amongst the pureblood families of Wizarding Britain, and for good reason. There was nothing that one could not find hidden in its towering dusty shelves.

During one of Harry's periods of introspection as he's curled up in one of the library's armchairs, he had come to the realization that he didn't love Ginny anymore. For the first month after the war, they'd tried , but it was like neither of them knew how to return to the people they'd been, the ones who had fit so perfectly with each other back in fifth year. It was as if, with the removal of Voldemort's Horcrux, the puzzle piece that was Harry had lost one of its connections, and he and Ginny had realized that they belonged to totally different puzzles now.

This was about the time when Harry started avoiding social interaction, when he started to sink deeper and deeper into himself, and started to spend most of his waking hours in the library at 12 Grimmauld place sleep restless, disturbed by dreams of the fallen, of Tonks, Lupin, Lavender Brown, and of Colin Creevey. He may not have liked Colin in life, but he was still just a child. Fighting in a war. Children should never be involved in war.

Over the parade of death and madness in his nightmares, suspended in the dust-choked sky above the Battle of Hogwarts, a crimson eye always gleams, looking all too familiar from that night in the woods. It enraged Harry that even as the others fade from his dreams, turning into wisps as their features get more and more blurred with memory, the crimson eye of Lord Voldemort glows ever brighter over the hellish landscape. He is gone– dead and gone– like all of the others, and yet he remains. Tortured by his dreams and spending all of his waking hours in the Black family library, the world spins around, but Harry stays still, not allowing himself to move forwards in time.

One day, Harry hears a faint tapping on the window from his armchair in the library– itself an unusual occurrence, since he hardly ever gets letters anymore, his friends moving on without him. He rises wearily from his seat, with the weight of one who has carried the world on his shoulders, and opens the window to allow the owl entry. Snatching the letter from the owl, he looks at the envelope.

Gringotts Wizarding Bank

614 Diagon Alley, London, UK

Urgent Mail

Harry raises an eyebrow, all sleepiness gone. Well, this should prove interesting , he thought to himself as he sank onto the nearest couch, already opening the envelope.

XXXXX

Harry scanned the letter from Gringotts again, just to make sure he hadn't missed anything. Judging from the contents, it was quite the emergency.

Dear Lord H.J. Potter,

We at Gringotts would like to sincerely apologize to you for our unacceptable handling of your accounts and our failure at guarding your account from thieves.