Hogwarts' Golden Glory

Then he felt it. A very slight vibration, emanating from inside the golden cup, as if something was slowly flowing through the cup's walls—not a liquid, but more like something resembling water ripples yet not quite, spreading out within the metal. The sensation traveled to his fingertips, then to his palm, then to his wrist, then to his forearm—and then it stopped, as if something had completed a confirmation and was waiting.

"What else is inside?" Dumbledore asked.

Kane didn't speak. He turned the gold cup over so that the bottom was facing up. On the metal surface below the inscription, there was a tiny, almost invisible dent, like a dot made with the tip of a pin.

The spot was almost invisible in the gray-green light, as if the light was refracted at a certain angle to be faintly visible.

“There’s one more,” Kane said. “Not the Copying Charm. It’s the Beacon.”

He reached out and touched the dent. The surface of the dent was slightly warmer than the rest of the gold cup, as if something inside was continuously consuming energy to maintain its existence.

That wasn't a countermeasure, nor a trap; it was more like a signal light, a light that was always on and would never be extinguished.

"When Voldemort set up this beacon, he bound it to the Horcrux itself. He could collect the status of the Horcrux without having to walk up to it; he only needed to be close enough and sense it in a specific way to know if the Horcrux was still in its original position."

Dark. Damp. Sultry.

Snakes have different senses than humans.

It cannot smell, but it can taste everything in the air. Every time it flicks its tongue, it is reading the temperature, humidity, vibrations, and subtle chemical components in the air. It has no ears, but it can feel the vibrations of the ground and can distinguish between the rustling of grass and the movement of living things from hundreds of feet away.

Voldemort was coiled on a protruding rock at the deepest part of the cave, his serpentine body coiled into a tight spiral, his scales clinging to the rock, like a dark green stone that was slowly breathing.

His soul had been inside the snake's body for so long that he sometimes forgot he once had hands, feet, and a face—those things had become blurred, like memories of someone else from long ago.

A faint sound came from outside the cave.

A hare passed by the burrow, its gray fur gleaming in the moonlight.

The snake slowly raised its head, and two faint beams of light shone from its scarlet eyes in the darkness.

The body moved—slowly and deliberately, as if instinctively responding to a command that had been repeated countless times.

The snake slid down the rock, moving close to the ground, its scales rubbing against the gravel, making an extremely faint rustling sound.

The hare didn't notice it. Voldemort made the snake stop behind a clump of low bushes.

He felt a familiar yet unusual sensation—not hunger, not anger, but something else, a deeper sensation, as if a crack had been torn open within his very soul.

Before he could figure out where the feeling was coming from, the hare had already pricked up its ears alertly, ready to run away.

The snake shot out faster than he had anticipated. Before the hare could even cry out, the snake's fangs had pierced its throat. Its body twitched twice in the snake's tight grip, then fell silent.

Voldemort did not loosen his grip. He began to eat.

The snake swallowed slowly, the hare's body compressed, forming a bulging outline inside the snake's body, before slowly moving downwards. During the meal, his consciousness was not focused on the food.

He was thinking about that feeling—that sensation coming from a very far place, like something being touched in another dimension.

He could accurately identify that it was a piece of a Horcrux, as if a part of his body had been gently tapped, not damaged, but merely touched.

He didn't know which Horcrux had been touched.

But the moment that touch occurred, he felt something he had never felt before, as if something had been gently tugged at the edge of his defenses, and then loosened. Not that it was breached, but that its position had changed.

He felt a sharp, inexplicable pain surge up from somewhere inside his body, like a needle piercing his soul and then being pulled out.

He stopped eating. The snake remained still, its scarlet eyes staring unfocused in the darkness, as if trying to find some vanished signal, or as if the snake itself needed stillness to orient itself.

Then he felt it again, not a new touch, but confirmation, a continuous confirmation that he couldn't ignore—the Horcrux had been taken away, moved from its original location, and was being transferred from one place to another.

Voldemort's forked tongue flickered rapidly, catching the subtle vibrations in the air, but he couldn't find any information to tell him where the Horcrux had gone.

He began to move. His body climbed up the cave wall, his scales scraping against the rock with a broken, intermittent scraping sound.

As he crawled out of the hole, the moonlight shone on the snake, illuminating the tiny cracks on its dark green scales.

He moved quickly down the hillside, as if trying to confirm that something was still there before it completely disappeared from his body.

He killed a fox. His fangs pierced the fur without hesitation, but even as he bit his prey, he didn't stop thinking about that touch.

When he killed the second fox, he moved even faster than the first time.

The third time he killed a deer. His movements became rough, the snake's body tightly coiling around the deer's body until the deer's spine made a dull snapping sound, then he loosened, not eating the deer, but simply leaving it there, a still twitching body.

When he stopped, the snake's head was lowered, its scarlet eyes staring at its scales. He remembered something—long ago, he thought he would never die, and when his soul split, he felt he had found a way to bypass death.

But when the Horcrux was taken away, he felt that a part of his body was indeed missing, like a piece missing from a complete picture, never to return.

His consciousness began to become unstable—sometimes he would forget that he was in the body of a snake, and sometimes he would briefly remember that he used to have hands, could hold a wand, could draw magic circles, could stand on high places, and feel the wind blowing on his face, instead of only being able to feel smells, touches, and vibrations as he did now.

Those moments were fleeting, like bubbles rising to the surface and disappearing, but each appearance brought him something he had never felt before. He didn't know what it was; it could be fear, or it could be anger.

He stopped. The smuggler's head turned east, towards England.

He is not invincible.

He felt himself dwindling, and he needed to act quickly.