When we were children, we always hoped that bad things were like nightmares—gone when we woke after a night's sleep.
Our beds were our safe fortresses, and a thin blanket could ward off every danger.
But people had to grow up someday, and we gradually came to understand that "miracles," like Santa Claus, were merely legends.
Yet some still believed in the plots of fairy tales, such as the Tale of the Three Brothers, and the Invisibility Cloak the humble youngest brother used to escape Death's gaze.
That thin piece of cloth could not truly ward off anything, but as long as the villain could not find you, the person hidden beneath the cloak was safe.
Until one day, the "miracle" they had already given up on descended again in the form of a nightmare. The Dark Lord, who had vanished on Halloween night, returned. For those sunk deep in despair, it was no small temptation, even though Albus already knew that the Resurrection Stone could not truly resurrect anything—it was merely a magical artifact Grindelwald used to summon Inferi.
Hope, sweet dreams, nightmares—they shifted endlessly like a carousel, gradually transforming into dazzling phantoms.
What did people see at the brink of death? The person they loved most, or the person they least wanted to see?
Voldemort was different from Harry. Or rather, Tom Riddle, who had grown up in an orphanage, placed too much hope in the father he had never met. He believed his father was a wizard, even if the orphanage he had lived in was not particularly terrible compared to those of the nineteenth century.
People like them actually shared similarities. When someone had no home of their own, they would treat the larger community as their home. It was simply that "white wizards" and "dark