As Harry uttered a command in Parseltongue, the Locket's little gold lid clicked open. A blast of scorching black vapor surged out. Coming to his senses, Harry flung his hand away in pain, and the force bursting from the Locket knocked him backward into Sirius's arms.
"Are you all right, Harry?" Sirius asked anxiously. "And what's this about Parseltongue?"
"I don't know! It's alive!" Harry pointed at the Locket hovering alone in midair and shouted, "It's talking to me!"
Just as Harry said, the Locket felt like a living thing. Behind the two little glass windows beside the snake design,
there seemed to be a living eye blinking in each.
Those eyes looked familiar to Brian. Add a red glow and more steam, and wasn't that Voldemort with only one-sixth of himself left?
Brian had personally reduced Voldemort to one-sixth while out of control. Even now, he remembered those scenes, which felt like someone else's memories.
Perhaps because the two were so similar, Brian even felt that loss of control returning, winding around his limbs and nerves like the red threads of an Unbreakable Vow. Just as that thought occurred to him, he discovered that he had somehow already moved directly in front of the Locket, his wand raised.
It wasn't his imagination!
The instant he realized he had lost control again, Brian's mind went taut. At that moment, he was utterly certain that this Locket was closely connected to Voldemort. It might even be the temporary residence of the Voldemort who had escaped from Hogwarts.
He only lost control when facing Voldemort!
A fierce battle was on the verge of breaking out, and the battlefield was Brian's mind.
Brian felt as though a whole crowd of voices was squawking inside his head, all of them his own. These unruly-dog