Harry Potter: the story so far

Harry Potter grew up unwanted at the Dursleys' until Rubeus Hagrid arrived on his eleventh birthday with the truth: his parents had been murdered by the dark wizard Voldemort, whose killing curse rebounded off Harry and left only a lightning scar.

At Hogwarts the Sorting Hat put him in Gryffindor. He made friends of Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger after the three of them brought down a mountain troll, won a place as the youngest Seeker in a century, and took an instant dislike to Severus Snape, who seemed to loathe him back.

A Christmas gift of his father's invisibility cloak led Harry to the Mirror of Erised, which showed him the parents he never knew. It also led the three of them to a three-headed dog guarding a trapdoor, and to the Philosopher's Stone beneath it, an object that grants endless life. Certain Snape meant to steal it for Voldemort, they went down after it themselves.

Ron went down under a giant chess set and Hermione stayed behind with him, so Harry faced the last room alone. The thief was Quirrell, the stammering Defence teacher, who had jinxed Harry's broom while Snape was countering the curse. Quirrell unwound his turban to show Voldemort's face growing out of the back of his skull. Harry's skin burned Quirrell on contact, a protection left by Lily Potter's dying sacrifice, and Voldemort abandoned his host and fled as a spirit.

Dumbledore explained the protection in the hospital wing and confirmed the Stone had been destroyed. Voldemort was bodiless, not gone.

A house-elf named Dobby warned Harry not to return to Hogwarts, then wrecked his summer trying to make sure of it. Harry got there anyway in Arthur Weasley's flying car, and found the school turning against him. A message daubed on the wall announced that the Chamber of Secrets had been opened, students and a cat were found petrified, and Harry alone could hear a murderous voice moving inside the walls. When a duelling club revealed he could speak Parseltongue, most of the castle decided he was the heir of Slytherin.

Ginny Weasley had found a blank diary belonging to Tom Riddle, a Hogwarts student of fifty years earlier, and its pages answered back. Riddle's memory showed Harry a young Hagrid framed for the last opening. Hermione worked out the truth just before she was petrified: the monster was a basilisk, travelling through the pipes.

Ginny was taken down into the Chamber. Harry and Ron found the entrance in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, dragging along Gilderoy Lockhart, the fraudulent celebrity teacher, whose memory charm rebounded and wiped his own mind. Harry went on alone. Riddle stepped out of the diary and rearranged the letters of his name into Lord Voldemort, while Ginny faded as the memory fed on her. Fawkes the phoenix blinded the basilisk, the Sorting Hat produced Gryffindor's sword, and Harry killed the snake and then drove a basilisk fang through the diary. Riddle vanished. Ginny woke.

Harry freed Dobby by tricking Lucius Malfoy into handing him a sock. Dumbledore told him Voldemort had transferred some of his own powers to him the night he failed to kill him, and that what a person chooses matters more than what they can do.

Harry inflated Uncle Vernon's sister Marge and ran, and was collected by the Ministry rather than punished. Sirius Black had broken out of Azkaban and everyone believed he was coming to kill Harry. Dementors were posted around Hogwarts, Harry collapsed near them hearing his mother's last moments, and Remus Lupin, the new Defence teacher, taught him the Patronus Charm in private.

Fred and George handed over the Marauder's Map, made by Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. Buckbeak the hippogriff was sentenced to death after Draco provoked him, Ron's rat Scabbers disappeared, and Hermione was quietly coming apart under an impossible timetable.

In the Shrieking Shack the whole story turned over. Black was Harry's godfather and innocent. Scabbers was Peter Pettigrew, an Animagus who had faked his own death, betrayed the Potters as their Secret Keeper, and let Black take the blame. Lupin was a werewolf, and the four of them had been the Marauders. Snape arrived to arrest Black and was knocked out. Then the moon rose, Lupin transformed, and Pettigrew slipped away in the confusion.

Dementors closed on Harry and Black by the lake until a stag Patronus drove them off. Hermione's Time-Turner sent the two of them back three hours, and Harry, watching from across the water, realised the Patronus had been his own. They cut Buckbeak loose and flew him to the tower, and Black escaped on him, still a hunted man. Lupin resigned once his condition became public.

Trelawney, in a genuine trance, had foretold that the Dark Lord's servant would return to him that night. Pettigrew was already gone.

The Quidditch World Cup ended with Death Eaters burning the campsite and the Dark Mark in the sky. At Hogwarts, Dumbledore announced the Triwizard Tournament and welcomed Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. The Goblet of Fire chose three champions, then spat out a fourth: Harry, fourteen years old and never entered. Ron stopped speaking to him for weeks and Rita Skeeter printed whatever sold.

Harry outflew a Hungarian Horntail, breathed underwater on Dobby's gillyweed and refused to leave the other hostages behind, and took Parvati Patil to the Yule Ball while Hermione went with Viktor Krum. Barty Crouch turned up in the forest raving and was murdered before anyone could get sense out of him. Mad-Eye Moody, the new Defence teacher, kept steering Harry through the tasks, and Harry's dreams kept showing him Voldemort.

Harry and Cedric Diggory reached the centre of the maze together and took the cup at the same moment. It was a Portkey. In a graveyard at Little Hangleton, Pettigrew killed Cedric on Voldemort's order, then used a bone from Voldemort's father, his own severed hand and Harry's blood to build the Dark Lord a body. The Death Eaters were summoned back. Voldemort duelled Harry, their wands locked because they shared a phoenix core, and echoes of Cedric and of Harry's parents held Voldemort off long enough for Harry to reach the cup and bring Cedric's body home.

Moody turned out to be Barty Crouch Jr under Polyjuice Potion. He had entered Harry's name and made the cup a Portkey, and confessed the lot under Veritaserum, but a Dementor took his soul before the Ministry would hear a word of it. Fudge refused to believe Voldemort had returned. Dumbledore said it out loud anyway, and the wizarding world split over it.

Dementors attacked Harry and Dudley in Little Whinging, and the Patronus that saved them both nearly got Harry expelled. Cleared at a hostile Ministry hearing, he spent the rest of the summer at Grimmauld Place with the Order of the Phoenix and his godfather Sirius Black.

The Ministry, refusing to admit Voldemort was back, installed Dolores Umbridge at Hogwarts. She banned practical magic, cut lines into the back of Harry's hand in detention, made herself High Inquisitor and then headmistress, and drove Dumbledore out of the school. Hermione's answer was Dumbledore's Army, a secret class Harry taught in the Room of Requirement. Occlumency lessons with Snape ended badly when Harry looked into a memory of his father humiliating Snape as a boy. Fred and George turned a corridor into a swamp and flew out of the school for good.

A vision of Sirius being tortured in the Department of Mysteries sent Harry and five friends to London on thestrals. It was bait. The prophecy waiting there was what the Death Eaters had wanted all along, and the fight over it cost the Order badly. Bellatrix Lestrange struck Sirius and he fell backwards through the veil. Voldemort appeared, duelled Dumbledore, tried to possess Harry and could not hold him, and fled in front of Cornelius Fudge and half the Ministry.

Dumbledore finally told Harry what Trelawney had prophesied before his birth: neither he nor Voldemort can live while the other survives, and one of them must kill the other. Voldemort's return was public at last, Umbridge was carried off by centaurs, and Harry went back to the Dursleys knowing exactly what was in front of him.

The war was open now: bridges collapsing, people vanishing, and Snape swearing an Unbreakable Vow to Narcissa Malfoy that he would protect Draco and finish Draco's task if the boy failed. Dumbledore's wand hand was blackened and dead, burned by the curse on Marvolo Gaunt's ring, which he had already destroyed. He brought Horace Slughorn out of retirement to teach Potions and finally gave Snape the Defence post.

In private lessons Dumbledore walked Harry through memories of Tom Riddle's life, and Harry coaxed the true one out of Slughorn. Riddle had meant to split his soul into seven, six of the pieces hidden in Horcruxes. The diary and the ring were destroyed. Four were left, the snake among them.

Harry shadowed Draco all year, certain he was working for Voldemort, and was right. A cursed necklace nearly killed Katie Bell and poisoned mead nearly killed Ron. Harry meanwhile coasted through Potions on a battered textbook annotated by someone calling himself the Half-Blood Prince, and used one of its spells, Sectumsempra, to tear Draco open in a bathroom. He and Ginny got together.

Dumbledore and Harry crossed a lake of Inferi in a sea cave, and Dumbledore drank a potion that left him barely standing. The locket they carried out was a fake, with a note inside signed R.A.B. They came back to the Dark Mark over the school. Draco had repaired a Vanishing Cabinet and let the Death Eaters in. He disarmed Dumbledore and could not finish it, so Snape killed Dumbledore on the Astronomy Tower while Harry stood frozen underneath. Fleeing, Snape told Harry he was the Half-Blood Prince.

Harry ended things with Ginny to keep her out of it, and decided at the funeral not to return for a seventh year. He was going after the Horcruxes.

Mad-Eye Moody and Hedwig died getting Harry out of Privet Drive. The Ministry fell during Bill and Fleur's wedding, and Harry, Ron and Hermione ran with nothing but the puzzles Dumbledore had willed them.

They stole Slytherin's locket back from Umbridge, and wearing it soured Ron until he walked out. A silver doe led Harry to Gryffindor's sword in a frozen pool, Ron came back and destroyed the locket, and Xenophilius Lovegood told them the tale of the three brothers: the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone and the Cloak, the Deathly Hallows. Godric's Hollow gave Harry his parents' graves and Nagini wearing Bathilda Bagshot's body, and cost him his wand.

Snatchers dragged them to Malfoy Manor, where Bellatrix tortured Hermione and Dobby died getting them out. They broke into Gringotts on a blind dragon for Hufflepuff's cup, then went to Hogwarts for the last Horcrux. Ravenclaw's diadem burned in Fiendfyre in the Room of Requirement with Crabbe beside it, and Hermione destroyed the cup with a basilisk fang.

Voldemort killed Snape for the Elder Wand. Dying, Snape gave Harry his memories: he had loved Lily all his life, worked for Dumbledore all along, killed Dumbledore on Dumbledore's own orders, and Harry himself was the last Horcrux. Harry walked into the forest with the Resurrection Stone and let Voldemort kill him, then chose to come back.

Neville cut Nagini's head off. Molly Weasley killed Bellatrix. Fred, Lupin and Tonks were among the dead. The Elder Wand had never answered to Voldemort: Draco had disarmed Dumbledore, and Harry had disarmed Draco. The Killing Curse rebounded and Voldemort fell. Nineteen years later, Harry and Ginny and Ron and Hermione put their own children on the Hogwarts Express.

Nineteen years on, Harry ran the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and could not talk to his second son. Albus Severus was sorted into Slytherin, was hopeless on a broom, and made exactly one friend: Scorpius Malfoy, trailed everywhere by a rumour that Voldemort was his real father. After a row in which Harry said something unforgivable, Albus set out to prove his father wrong.

Amos Diggory had asked Harry to use a confiscated experimental Time-Turner to save Cedric, and Harry refused. Albus and Scorpius stole it instead, helped by Amos's niece Delphi, and went back to the Triwizard Tournament to stop Cedric winning. Every attempt made the present worse. The first left Ron married to Padma and Rose never born. The second returned Scorpius alone to a world where a humiliated Cedric had become a Death Eater, killed Neville, and handed Voldemort the Battle of Hogwarts: Umbridge ran the school, Dementors patrolled it, and Harry was long dead. Snape, Ron and Hermione, fugitives in that timeline, helped Scorpius put it right, and Snape died doing it.

Delphi was no Diggory. She was the daughter of Voldemort and Bellatrix Lestrange, raised on a prophecy promising her father's return. She destroyed the Time-Turner and forced the boys back to 1981 to stop Voldemort ever attacking the Potters.

Stranded, they wrote a message on baby Harry's blanket. Harry, Ginny, Ron, Hermione and Draco read it and came. Harry transfigured himself into Voldemort to draw Delphi out, they took her alive, and then the adults stood in Godric's Hollow and let James and Lily die, because nothing else could be allowed to change. Delphi was sent to Azkaban. Harry took Albus to Cedric's grave, and started talking to him.