Introductory Note:

So, here's a second version of the Lord of the World plot-bunny story I had begun to write some months ago. Much like its predecessor, this one is also a plot-bunny. Also, while Harry has an older sibling, and both James and Lily survive Voldemort's attack, this is NOT a Wrong-Boy-Who-Lived story. To finish this intro note, I have to point out that this story takes place in a AU, meaning the world background will be very different from that seen in Harry Potter canon and general fan-fictions.

Chapter 1 – Return and Recovery

There were two words James Potter had hoped to never hear near his family. Two words that had caused much grief across history and were now the favoured weapon of a psychopath that threatened his family.

A family that he was powerless to defend.

Voldemort, the sadist bastard, had decided that freezing him in place while he went upstairs to kill his wife and children was a better alternative to decimating the entire family. He had heard Lily's pleading, his wife becoming silent moments after. The Killing Curse had not been spoken, so James could only imagine what had happened. But when he heard those words being shouted, James felt as if time itself has stopped.

"Avada Kedavra!"

The explosion upstairs was something he had not been expecting, nor the scream of pain and terror coming from Voldemort, immediately followed by absolute silence. Something had happened, something which had broken whatever magic had kept James in place, with the wizard grabbing his discarded wand and quickly making way to the bedroom of his two children on the floor above. James's heart was beating at a furious pace, the sight of his wife on the floor, his two sons seemingly unmoving on their cribs, and the missing chunk of the roof and wall doing little to ease his mind.

The slow movement of their chests almost made him whimper with relief, although the bleeding wounds in their heads concerned him. Mayhap it had been from whatever had destroyed part of the room?

He quickly moved to Lily, and noticed that she too had been rendered unconscious. Unlike the two boys, she had no visible wounds, and a quick diagnosis spell he had learned from Madam Pomfrey confirmed that Lily had no internal wounds, and another showed that both Michael and Harry only had those two small wounds.

He pointed his wand at Lily and spoke, "Rennervate!"

Lily stirred and opened her eyes, the woman being slightly dazed from whatever had happened to her. "James?" she asked, standing up with the help of her husband. Immediately, she went to both cribs, her disposition doing little to halt her. "What happened? Where is he?"

"I don't know," he answered honestly. "I heard him use the Killing Curse, but something went wrong. He screamed and I got free."

Lily nodded slowly, taking in the events of the evening. She looked around the room, observing the damage, before her eyes fell upon something near the door, or at least what remained of it.

"Look," she said, crouching down before the object of her attention.

"His robes," James noted, a bit confused, before Lily showed him something else. "And wand?"

It was just too unbelievable, that Voldemort had come to attack them, only to mysteriously fail and disappear.

"You think he's… dead?"

The words seemed strange in Lily's mouth. The concept of Voldemort dead was as foreign as it could be, especially considering the events surrounding his possible demise. It was her opinion, but if Lily had been a dark witch, then she would have liked to go out in a blaze of glory – maybe during a duel against powerful enemies – which was exactly the opposite of what had happened to Voldemort.

"Either he's gone, or he got sent naked to some random place," said James. "And we're not staying here to find out which one is right."

Lily sighed. She had prepared in secret for the possibility of Voldemort finding and attacking them, but her plans were not exactly fulfilled. Something had prevented the death of her children, and it had not be her. The blood protection she had engineered required a living sacrifice, specifically one of a willing blood relative of those that would be protected. She was supposed to have been said willing sacrifice, but here she was – alive. And so were her children, with Voldemort nowhere to be see, the only thing remaining of the dark wizard being his robes and wand. Something had prevented the deaths of her sons, and she would very much like to know what it had been.

Yet her thoughts were interrupted when a voice came from downstairs.

"Lily? James?"

The two looked at each other. Sirius was here, and by the tone of his voice, their friend likely presumed the worst had happened.

"Go talk to him," said Lily. "I'll take care of the kids."

James nodded, moving past the remains of Voldemort and down to the entrance hall, where Sirius Black stood. Immediately he was grabbed by his old friend and pulled into a hug.

"Bloody hell, James! I thought you…," managed Sirius. "What happened? Where Lily? And the kids?"

Suddenly, all that had happened fell down on James once more. But this time, the implications of their discovery hit him as well.

"Sirius, we…" James was at a lost for words, the pain of betrayal mixing with the numbness that had taken hold of his mind. "… Peter betrayed us."

He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath, but that did not stop the fury quickly growing within him.

"Puheti reht!" he spat in the tongue of his ancestors. "Eghóm héo fakioimmai mrtósyo."

Making the accursed traitor suffer was high in James's list of plans, but he really needed to clear his head. Now, of all moments.

"Prongs?"

The voice of Sirius made him calm, but the fury towards the one who had betrayed his family remained. James took a deep breath and began to speak.

"He came to the cottage. I don't… I don't know what happened. The boys are okay… Lily too."

Sirius knew who the "he" James spoke about was, and it certainly wasn't Peter.

"They're upstairs. Lily's with them," continued the Potter patriarch. "The blast wounded the boys, but it's nothing serious."

The joy and cockiness that usually accompanied his old friend was utterly absent, and the way James seemed to lose his focus greatly disturbed Sirius.

"Oi mate, you there?" spoke Sirius.

James sighed,

"I… sorry Padfoot. I'm not…"

"Hey, calm down," Sirius wasn't used to situations like these, when he had to be the one to comfort other people. Yet he was doing the best he could. James was his brother in all but blood, and now the four Potters needed someone to help them out. "Let's get you four out of this place and back to Adamant. You can recover better there."

The young Potter took a deep breath, doing his best to calm down and focus on what was important.

"You're right. Come on… let's help Lily."

It began as a small keep called Kel-Nedemh – which meant "Unconquerable Hall" in the Old Tongue – and it was where the ancestral Kerhihno clan once resided, or as they were known in the modern day, the Corvinus clan. As the family amassed retainers, and their own families grew, so did the settlement around the keep. In time, the keep was demolished and in its place were built the foundations for the legendary Tower of Adamant, seat of House Corvinus. Yet that had been so centuries ago. As one of the surviving branches of the Corvinii, the Potters succeeded in filling the vacuum left behind by the extinction of their parent clan and took for themselves all that once belonged to House Corvinus.

Yet that was not where the family lived. The tower was great, and that itself was a bit of a problem, as the Potters quickly got tired of having to constantly climb stairs to reach the lower and upper parts of the structure. Apparition was unreliable, and children could not do it. To solve this problem, the old Potter ancestors decided to commission a new home in the city proper – a relatively small but magnificent townhouse that reflected their status as the rulers of the oldest bastion of the First Tribe. For that was what James Potter was – the Cardinal of Thule, who upon returning to the island of his birth was received as a returning king.

Their time in Godric's Hollow had been necessary. Remaining in Thule was far too obvious, so choosing a random village in the mainland had been a good alternative. A shame that their plan did not include contingencies for a possible betrayal.

It took a week for James to get things in order, and with the cardinalate in total lockdown, interaction with the other territories of the First Empire was nigh impossible. And that's just what James wanted. If nothing could get in, then nothing could get out. At least in theory. Dealing with the aftermath of Voldemort's attack and apparent demise would be much easier if he had all things in order. But James also needed time to relax, and he did that by doing something he loved to do since he was a child.

"So…what brings you here, Cardinal?"

The coastal ruins of Wednhkehiweyk, whose name meant Home of the Celestial Waters in the Old Tongue, were close enough to Adamant that he could get there quickly, but far enough away that he had blessed privacy there. Perhaps it was a selfish action, but the ruins were out of bounds for anyone other than him or those he allowed to approach the site, Sirius being the only one with that privilege. Although he had brought Lily there to propose, she respected how special the ruins were to James, and kept from going there.

Not that she had any reason to.

"I need to think. And relax," admitted James. "Too much work these last few days. Got to keep the island in check, after all."

"Look at you, all grown up," said Sirius in his best 'old man' voice. "Makes ol'Sirius proud of ye!"

James snorted, before focusing on the feeling of the water on his legs.

"Got to get my mind fresh for the best part too."

Sirius blinked. "Best part?"

"Calling in old family debts. Many of my enemies are ruined, and I intend to ruin a few more."

Having practically spent his adolescence with James and his family, Sirius was well aware of how many debts were owned to the Potter family. "Ouch. You're going to make a lot of people angry."

"Good. Let them be reminded of who they're dealing with. Voldemort came to my house and tried to murder my children. And now he's gone. And now he's gone. Mysteriously, but he is gone. I will bolster my family's reputation with this, and possibly make us either revered or feared. I don't have any preference, but people will learn that no one tries to harm a Potter and lives. If I have to hire bards to sing 'Dunstan's Wings' at every tavern and pub across the Empire to remind people about the consequences of harming us, then I will."

There was a determination and anger in James's voice that Sirius only had heard whenever Snape was being discussed, and even now, there was an edge on his friend's tone that was usually absent during such discussions.

"And then there's Peter," continued James, his voice adopting a calmer, but far more emotionless tone. "Our good friend Peter."

Every since returning to Thule, none of them had spoken about either Peter or his betrayal.

"I'm thinking about presenting a petition to the Council of Cardinals. To have a caput lupinum applied to him," said James.

"Okay," drawled Sirius. "Not that I'm arguing, but you know how the Merlinists will react to that, don't you?"

"The Ministry obeys, and the Merlinists howl," responsed James. "Same as usual."

Both could not count the many times James's father had said that sentence. It was no wonder to Sirius that James had begun to emulate some of Fleamont's traits.

"Oh, I almost forgot," began James. "Sirius?"

The man turned to his friend, finding James's wand pointed at him.

"Call me 'Cardinal' again, and by Dunstan, I'll chop off your balls."

Author's Note:

The "Old Tongue" which James spoke (translations are below) is a con-lang which uses both reconstructed Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Italic vocabulary, or at least close approximations in order to give it the feeling of an old "mother language".

The name Kel-Nedemh uses the word "ḱel", which with the suffix "-nā" created the word from which the Latin word "cella" and the English word "hall" descend from. The word "Nedemh" is a fusion of the negative prefix "ne-", meaning "not", and the word "demh₂", which when fused with the cognate negative prefix "n-" creates the word from which the term "adamant" comes from. I used "ne-" instead of "n-" as the final word sounded and looked better than just "Ndemh".

The name of Wednhkehiweyk comes from the fusion of an adaptation of three reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words, specifically wédn̥h₁ (instrumental inflection of the word wódr̥, meaning water), keh₂i (from where the world celestial descends from), and weyḱ (from where the word villa descends from). As such, the name of the ruin can literally be translated as "water-sky-villa".

Translations:

Puheti reht – filthy rat

Eghóm héo fakioimmai mrtósyo – I will kill him (polished); I will make him dead (literal/rough)