Magic flips the script
October 31, 1988
Ironically, despite all the pain and suffering caused by his first Samhain, and the events that surrounded that day it was his 8th Samhain that saves young Harry Potter from a life of suffering hatred and early death.
Unknown to everyone else, by killing the boys parents on Samhain while Lilly Potters soul shard was still bound to Andromeda, Tom Riddle had left a way for that soul to find its way back whenever the boundaries between our world and theirs thinned and so it was that every Samhain, when the barrier between worlds thinned Lilly Potter’s soul returned to the mortal plain shielded from death itself through the Peverell family magic, and her very magical essence returned with it, until one day on the 7th anniversary of his parents murder the ritual that Lilly Potter had started and which had remained dormant all these years snapped into effect.
The moment the ritual took effect was not a moment too soon for young Harry Potter, as over the last few days he had been experiencing more 'freakish' events than normal. This was the same as he did every Samhain except this time his uncle had snapped. His uncle recognising the relationship between the boys ‘freakishness’s and the holiday had taken to trying to beat him enough in the days before that it would not matter what magic became available to him. But this time the man had gone too far and Harry was dying.
Harry lay there his body broken, his very life-force pooling on the floor beneath him as Vernon Dursley held a broken table leg in hand his face red with effort a malicious eager gleam in his eye.
As the man started to bring the makeshift bat down for the final time there was a snap as the magical tethers that had been held in place by Dumbledores magical bindings and malicious vampiric ward scheme shattered and, in their place, emerged the soul shield that Lilly and James Potter had given their life to form.
In an instant every ounce of magical power for miles disappeared from the environment, the ley line which Harry was too young to see or understand, that ran beside the property promptly pulsed as a massive current draw was placed on it. In moments Harry Potter’s formerly destroyed body was soaking in the purest form of magic conceivable as the magic drawn by the soul shield began to run rampant within his body and mind.
But magic is not a mere force of the universe, it is not as unthinking as gravity, magic has a mind of its own in the Lady Magic herself. Just like the gods of old Lady magic oversees all within her domain, her children as she sees them and in this child the Lady Magic found something that enraged her. She found anger and fury and boiling hot rage at the people who had dared to harm one of its children. She found disgust and fury and malicious desire and suffering for those who had placed an innocent in such a place.
As the magic of the world runs rampant through Harry's mind it conveys this to him the sorrow and pain at his suffering, the fury and hatred of those who would harm a child. Then the Lady Magic grants him some gifts, the same gifts that had been granted to those elder magicals, in reparation for his pain and suffering.
She grants him knowledge, understanding, and power, but not like humans understand it.
She granted him the memories his parents had used to fuel their protection of him, their warmth, their love, their desire to protect him.
She grants him knowledge of magic in its true form, driven not by words but by intent, need, and want tempering this knowledge not by placing it within the fore of his mind as it would break the minds of many far older and more educated than he, but within the subconscious, available to him in moments of need and intuition, allowing the knowledge to leak forth over time.
The power she grants him was his own, that which was stolen from him and repressed by the actions of those who would harm a child of magic. She burns away the ward schemes of Dumbledore, the magic stolen from him over years returned to his core, enhancing and strengthening it with the force of his suffering.
And then the remnant, all the magic absorbed otherwise she used to do two things, the first was to send Harry away to where she sensed he would be safest, a small town outside Cannes, where she could could feel the magical strings of fate pull taut, and the rest she turns against the world that had tried its best to destroy one of her children, that had ignored his pleas for help and doomed him to a life of pain and suffering through avarice and ignorance.
That evening as the muggle news reported a catastrophic gas leak in little whinging the Daily prophet reported the detonation of an unregistered and unreported obscurial. Reported was the loss of the entire muggle suburb and its residents in an explosion so large it had set off the alarms in Gringotts and required the entirety of the magical catastrophes department and DMLE to respond.
What wasn't reported were the actions taken by the bearded headmaster of Hogwarts who on arriving back in his office had apparated directly into what he believed to be Harry Potter’s prison; only to find himself falling hundreds of feet into a crater the likes of which he could scarcely comprehend.
In the end it was only luck that saved him that day, but even still he found himself under the care of one Poppy Pomfrey after returning to Hogwarts with multiple broken limbs from Fawkes efforts to save him. That the man's alleged familiar a Phoenix would not offer him a tear to speed his recovery should have been a sign to those around him, but they were all too busy wondering just what had happened in that town in Little Whinging