Chapter Text
The ritual circle blazed with silver light, runes older than Hogwarts itself burning into the stone floor of the Room of Requirement. Harry's hands trembled as he held the three Hallows—the Elder Wand clutched in his right hand, the Resurrection Stone pressed against his palm, and the Cloak of Invisibility draped across his shoulders.
He was twenty years old, and he was so very tired.
The war had ended two years ago. Voldemort was dead. They'd won. But the cost... Harry closed his eyes against the memories. Fred. Remus. Tonks. Sirius. His parents. So many others. And now, whispers of new dark wizards rising, inspired by Voldemort's legacy. The cycle would never end.
Unless he could stop it at its source.
The ancient Peverell grimoire lay open before him, pages yellowed with age. He'd found it in the depths of the Potter vault, sealed behind wards that recognized only the blood of the last Peverell. The ritual was supposed to take him back—back to before Tom Riddle became Lord Voldemort. Back to when a child could still be saved.
Hermione would kill him if she knew. Ron would think he'd gone mad. But they didn't understand. They hadn't felt the pull of the Hallows, the weight of being their true Master.
Harry began to chant in the old tongue, magic thrumming through his veins like liquid fire. The Hallows responded, resonating with a frequency that made his teeth ache. The air grew thick, heavy with power that tasted of death and life intertwined.
The runes flared brighter. Too bright.
Something was wrong.
Pain lanced through him as the magic spiraled out of control. This wasn't the gentle pull the book had described—this was being torn apart and remade. Harry screamed, but no sound emerged. The world fractured around him like broken glass, each shard reflecting a different moment, a different life, a different choice.
Master of Death, a voice whispered from everywhere and nowhere. You sought to change death's design. Very well. But all changes have a price.
"I'll pay it!" Harry gasped into the void. "Just let me save him. Let me save them all."
Then go, child of my blood. But know this—you cannot be Harry Potter where you journey. That name exists in that time. You must become what you were always meant to be.
"What's that?"
The last Lord Peverell.
The world inverted.
Harry slammed into solid ground, his knees cracking against cobblestones. He heaved, gasping for air that tasted of coal smoke and horse manure. His magic recoiled inside him, different somehow—denser, older, as if the ritual had awakened something that had slept in his blood for generations.
When he could finally breathe without his lungs burning, Harry looked up.
He was in an alley between tall buildings that were distinctly... wrong. No, not wrong. Old. The architecture was early twentieth century, all art deco lines and iron fire escapes. A newspaper tumbled past, and Harry snatched it with reflexes honed by years of Seeking.
The New York Ghost - December 7, 1926
His heart stuttered. 1926. Seventy years in the past. Tom Riddle wouldn't be born for another three weeks.
Harry laughed, the sound slightly unhinged even to his own ears. He'd done it. Actually done it.
A wave of dizziness hit him, and Harry braced himself against the brick wall. His magic felt strange—not wrong, but transformed. He looked down at his hands and froze.
His skin was smoother, unmarked by the scars he'd accumulated over years of fighting. When he caught his reflection in a grimy window, a stranger stared back. Still him, but... refined. Older in the eyes but younger in the face, as if the ritual had reshaped him into something that fit this era. His features had sharpened, becoming more aristocratic. More Peverell.
And there was something else. A scent on the air that made his magic curl protectively inward. Alpha nearby. Multiple alphas. And he was...
No. No, that couldn't be right.
But even as denial rose in his throat, Harry knew the truth. The ritual hadn't just sent him back in time and changed his appearance. It had made him omega.
In his time, A/B/O dynamics were so rare they were nearly extinct, maybe one in ten thousand. Here, in 1926, they would be more common, more significant. More dangerous for someone trying to hide.
Panic clawed at his throat before Harry forced it down with the iron control he'd learned facing Voldemort. He could handle this. He'd faced worse. He just needed a plan.
First: establish his identity. The Peverell name would give him status, protection, legitimacy. Second: find Tom Riddle's mother before she died. Third: figure out how to navigate this era's society without exposing himself.
And fourth: try very hard not to think about the way his new instincts were already cataloging threats and safe spaces, or how the scent of alphas made him want to either run or hide.
Harry pulled the Invisibility Cloak tighter around his shoulders and stepped out of the alley into 1926 New York, into a world on the brink of magical chaos, carrying the weight of a future he was determined to prevent.
Behind him, in the alley where he'd arrived, a single silver rune still glowed on the cobblestones. The Peverell family crest—a triangle containing a circle and a line.
The mark of the Master of Death.