"You'll forgive me if I am a little out of practice."
"I was born in 1980. Britain was under siege by a Dark Lord calling himself Voldemort and had been for some ten years. There was a prophecy that a child would be born who could defeat him, and my parents and I fit the description. They went into hiding, but Voldemort found them a little more than a year later. He attacked the house and- I was the only survivor. They called me the Girl Who Lived and credited me with Voldemort's defeat. Which was absurd, of course. But I didn't find all that out until I got my letter for Hogwarts, ten years later. Dumbledore shuffled me off to live with some Muggle relatives who were, shall we say, less than enthused by the idea."
"Over the course of my first few years of study, through various misadventures, it became clear that Voldemort had in fact survived the night he killed my parents as well. I'm not sure when Dumbledore put the pieces together, but he didn't tell me about the mechanism until much later. All I knew at the time was that Voldemort existed in some kind of wraith-like state, subsisting off dark rituals, possession, and unicorn blood. At the end of my fourth year, he kidnapped me to use my blood in ritual to resurrect himself to a new body. He succeeded. We fought to a draw and I managed to escape. Of course, the wizarding world did not want to believe their boogeyman was back, so I was generally disbelieved until the following year, when his attacks started back up in earnest."
"It was then that Dumbledore told me what he had learned of Voldemort's survival. There is a Dark object called a horcrux, which is created by murder and anchors a piece of the wizard's soul to this world. Voldemort had created seven of these, and by chance, I had found and destroyed one during the early misadventures. Dumbledore had found another but been caught by one of the traps laid to protect it, a slow-acting withering curse. Reluctantly, he began teaching me what I would know to find and deal with the others. Apparently he still believed in the prophecy. At the end of that school year, before we had begun to search for the remaining horcruxes in earnest, Voldemort staged an attack on Hogwarts. Dumbledore died. That summer, Voldemort openly conquered the Ministry and took control of magical Britain."
"I didn't return to school. Instead, with a few allies, I began hunting down the other horcruxes. It took us most of the year, scratching up old history and dodging his hunters. And I began to get the feeling that seven was the wrong number. I was experiencing- flashes, visions, of what Voldemort was doing or seeing in moments of heightened emotions, even through my Occlumency barriers. Dumbledore, I recalled, had been unaccountably relieved when he learned I had already been practicing that art when it came up in the context of the beginning of the hunt. There was one obvious reason that Voldemort and I might be connected, given the way he had been sprinkling bits of his soul around."
"I don't know for sure how Dumbledore planned to dispose of the horcrux that resided in me, but the only things that work to destroy one are basilisk venom, fiendfyre, and the Killing Curse. I was not likely to survive any of those. In the end, it came down to another fight between Voldemort and I, after all his other horcruxes had been dealt with. He believed in the prophecy too, you see. 'Either must die at the hands of the other'. He hit me with a Killing Curse. His horcrux died, but I didn't. I got back up and blasted his head off his shoulders."
