Sun Tzu Says

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AN: Here's the update schedule beforehand. Expect weekly updates, usually on Saturday and Sunday- Monday if you're unlucky.

There was no update last week because of the Durga Puja carnival in my hometown, so.... here's the update for this week. If you have time, I would implore you to check out Calcutta's Durga Puja on the Internet, it is one of the largest festivals across the world.

Back to the story at hand, one more chapter of this, and I'll take some time off to work on my other story.

Oh, and just because a few of you were wondering, no. The story won't progress fast, it will be slow as fuck. Stories are meant to be slow, if I just had to tell you the plot, I would do so. This is a story, not a plot, so it will be slow as fuck.

And here's a little spoiler, Harry will be weak as fuck and insulted by everyone for the first half of the story. If you can't cope with his eventual rise to power, then get rekt. Also, he will be wearing his classic round-rimmed glasses until later, when he gets fashionable glasses- and yes, glasses are a must. I don't want to see any sort of discrimination against spectacles wearers because I myself am one.

Happy reading.

Time: Rose's Sorting Ceremony

Harry groaned loudly in protest as he was elbowed awake rudely.

For a moment, everything swam in his vision, blurry even through the round-rimmed spectacles that sat on his face, and he floundered to place a name to the chaos unfolding in his blurry vision. He tried to blink away the sleep from his heavy, bleary eyes, but his mind was distracted, elsewhere.

Harry couldn't believe he still fucking remembered that Halloween night when he had been but five.

He remembered everything in impossibly crystal clear detail- the acrid rotting smell of the killing curse zooming past his head, the loud crashing noise of the spellfire battering against his Dad's shimmering blue shield, the painful ringing in his ears and the ache in his muscles that still lingered perennially like haunting whispers of James' last petrifying curse-

"Wake the fuck up, Potter." A venomous female voice, as acidic as the killing curse, hissed from his right side. "Get your head out of dreamland and focus."

Surprisingly, her words seemed to do wonders for his vision, or maybe she had been right- Harry had just not been paying that much attention to the events that were transpiring in front of them.

Slowly, like a Polaroid camera trying to focus, the familiar sight of the Great Hall came into view.

Right, he was Harry Potter, fifteen, incoming third year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

He wasn't Harry Potter, five, and it wasn't Halloween.

Harry took a deep, shuddering breath, reinforcing his Occlumency shields, which surrounded his mind like a fortress around an open field, schooling his expressions into something more presentable as he looked around.

Hogwarts was as grand as ever- no expense spared to awe the incoming first years, as was Dumbledore's style. The charmed ceiling of the Great Hall mirrored the night sky outside, with a glowing full moon veiled by wispy clouds to match. Innumerable candles, seemingly one for each student in the castle, misshapen and half-molten to add to the magical atmosphere, were lit with orange flames that cast a golden glow across the entire room. The four great tables were decked out tastefully with white silk- which was, for once, not stained by the lingering colours of a dinner fifty years past, the gold and silver cutlery shining spotless and clean enough to be a mirror.