Embryo

VII

“Harry,” Tom repeats, tasting it on his tongue.

“Yeah,” says Harry, arms shaking as he tries to get up off of the floor. “And I know who you are.”

Sprung from Harry’s mind like an Eden in Spring, Tom sees a flurry of images:

Himself.

First, in the orphanage, watching his wardrobe burst into flame, Dumbledore looking down upon him in judgement. Condemned before he was made.

He sees himself again, slightly older, standing before the mouth of a seaside cave, the stricken faces of children being swallowed up in the dark.

He sees Professor Slughorn’s pale, sickened face as he stutters out the answers to his questions on the darkest of arts, the reflection of Tom’s own face triumphant and young in his wide eyes. There had been a shallowness, an emptiness to his own face then, Tom realises, whereas now he glitters with a perpetual darkling and knowledge of the Ether.

Has Harry been seeing Tom’s memories as he has seen Harry’s?

In the final image, Tom sees himself standing tall, presiding over a chamber. A great chamber with high ceilings and the towering statue of Salazar Slytherin. And curling behind him as his shadow, best of it all, a Basilisk! She is glorious, coiled around him, he her master, a bright light casting down on them like a halo. It is resplendent, intoxicating, it is righteous!

His mouth waters, his molars ache.

This is not Tom’s memory, nor his past.

It is his future.

Tom gives a short, breathy laugh.

“I know you!” Harry shouts again with more fury, more burning.

He manages to get his feet under himself, takes two fledgling steps and tumbles back down.

“So you’ve said.”

Tom works his trembling knees and manages to stand. The boy named Harry has gone for his pockets, and Tom kicks the wand from his hand before it can turn on him, skittering across the floor and rolling under an armchair into the dark.

He stares up at Tom, lustering eyes wide in the firelight, mouth firm and angry.

“I’m going to stop you,” he says with hate. “I’ll tell Dumbledore everything.”

Tom walks slow steps around Harry, twisting his own wand in his fingers, thinking. Harry’s righteous fury is a bright flame in the room, true, one that singes Tom at the edges of his mind and threatens to pull him in again, but Tom knows the nature of Harry’s mind now, better perhaps than Harry himself.

“Tell him what, precisely?” Tom asks, a smile creeping along the corners of his mouth.

He takes a step closer to the boy.

“Who are you, Harry?”

“I’m…”

“You’re..?” Tom goads, mocking.

“I don’t know, I’m just Harry!”

Another step.

“And from where did you come, Just Harry?”

The boy is getting angrier, trying and failing again to stand, clutching his head.

“What sort of question is that? Where does anyone come from? It doesn’t matter. I know you’re Voldemort, and I know I hate you! That’s enough.”

Tom leans down, practically crawling over Harry.

“Is that what you’ll tell Dumbledore?” he asks in a whisper. “Face it Harry. You are a complete stranger to everyone in this castle, yourself included. No one knows you; no one remembers you. No one but me.”

Tom lets that sink in, Harry’s eyes darting over his face, furious but unable to argue.

“Why, I could step aside and show you to Dumbledore myself, and do you know what would happen? You would tell him ‘Tom Riddle is Voldemort’ and it wouldn’t mean anything at all, because no one knows who or what Voldemort is. He would say—if he could even noticed you! People have a curious habit of forgetting you exist even when you are standing right under their noses—he would say ‘What is Voldemort?’ and then what would you do? So I’ll ask you now, Harry: What... is... Voldemort?”

Harry struggles. He is thinking as hard as he can, Tom can feel him treading the inky, oily mire of his mind desperately. There is a flicker in the black. What is Voldemort? Harry asks himself. What is Voldemort? Repeats it over and over.

“Voldemort is…”

Harry raps himself on the head several times and pulls at his hair.

The flicker grows closer. Tom peers at it through Harry’s eyes.

It is his own face.

“Voldemort is Tom Riddle,” Harry says at last, defeated. He simply cannot remember more. He clenches his eyes closed, frustrated with himself.

Tom stands tall, satisfied.

“You see? So you won’t go to Dumbledore at all. You wouldn't even if you could remember anything in that foggy little head of yours. Do you know why?” He does not wait to allow Harry to answer. “Because the only thing between you and being locked away in this room for all eternity is me. Petrificus totalus.”

Harry falls from his feet a third and final time, still as rock sunken to the bottom of an ocean.

“We can help each other, you and I. Help me find the Chamber of Secrets, and I can help you find yourself. Accio Harry’s wand.”

Tom catches it, turns it in his hand. Again, he feels an affinity with it. Not quite like his own, but almost. A cousin. Or perhaps a brother.

“Think on it,” Tom says, then leaves the Hidden Room, sealing Harry in.

He leans against the stone wall, shrouded in darkness, hand on his chest.

Beneath his palm, his heart is warm and quick, and it throbs and throbs.

—

“Bodyweight!” Professor Dumbledore calls to the class, writes a minuscule a into the air in gold. He taps the enchanted scales set on the table he’s conjured for this lecture, and the clear balls of amber within them tinkle and lurch.

“Viscousness,” and so writes beside the a the glowing v.

“Wand-power and concentration.”

Dumbledore turns to his indigo-coloured chalkboard and writes in lurid yellow chalk:

“The cornerstones of transfiguration. They help us understand the properties of our subjects, their matter, their density. These knowables further assist us in overcoming the fifth factor of transfiguration spells. Their resistance to our will!”

He jabs his wand at the majuscule Zed factor for emphasis.

Tom rolls his own amber sample in his hands until it’s warm, his magic seeping into the material to make it soft as into honey clay.

“Any of you under the tutelage of Professor Vector in Arithmancy will know: these factors must all balance to be greater than the infinite values of Zed and equal Phi in order for the spell to be completed with the desired results. Phi is the sleuth of numbers, reliable, indivisible. Irrational. It is of a pure and solitary vibrational upon which many physical truths of our universe are based.”

“You recall in your summer reading: a certain 1926 article in Transfiguration Today by Mr. Emeric Switch, that resistance can be mitigated. Might any of my bright, young pupils volunteer one such measure?”

“Certain wand cores are more adept at coaxing certain materials into the spell. My wand core, for example, is Unicorn hair, and amber is especially susceptible to it. Next week’s gaseous transfigurations will prove a much bigger challenge.”

“Quite right, Miss Bucklebee. Five points to Hufflepuff. Would anyone else care to share another piece of Mr. Switch’s wisdom?”

“The etymological power of the spell itself,” another classmate says with a raised hand.

“Indeed, indeed. Our very words have power, not just our intent. And the heavier those words are, with age, with cultural significance, simply: the more powerful your spell can be.”

Tom smiles into the palm of his hand.

“It is why we use Latin, Futhark, and other such ancient languages to derive our enchantments. We call upon their deep roots and channel their innumerable experiences into power without so much as a drop of sweat!”

There is power in a word.

A spell.

A name.

Many wizards, when crafting a spell, draw upon a singular source for the runes and words. One history, one era. It becomes erratic and untenable to craft spells with multiple dialects, particularly if there is a history of animosity between the sources of those dialects. Scholars battled for centuries over whether spells should incorporate non-standard sociolects; Vulgar Latin, Common Romance, Proto-Italic or so on.

Tom, for his part, has never shied away from the erratic.

A spell is not composed with a neat quill in one’s hand, or on paper, or by strict calculations, but in a whirlwind, in oblivion, when the soul rings out and every part of the body, breaking its normally indifferent attitude, becomes electric.

It is not simply a name.

It is an enchantment.

One which brings him power when he calls upon it, echoing through a dense web of linguistic endowment.

There is the German, vatermörder.

Father killer.

There’s the French, Vol de mor.

Vouloir, flight. Volonte, theft.

There’s the Latin, Volo de morte.

I wish away from death.

Volabesta mors. From Proto-Italic welō, from Proto-Indo-European welh, from Old English willan, from mertis and mr̥téys, on and on it goes. They are the tombstone of the past; they are more than a tombstone… Poetry, history, a father’s-father’s-father’s grave.

Each of these histories, these word-woven ancestries of survival, Darwinism, preservation, genetic superiority! Down to the last microbe; all of this, all of these powers… is the glory of one Name wholly imbibed with it. One. Its very word is as lightning, flashing suddenly, illuminating objects for but a moment, but with dazzling clarity nonetheless.

His name.

It is in defiance of the shortness of human life, de brevitate vitae, Aristotle’s greatest grievance. He and Tom both call Nature to account for bestowing so much time on the language, the written word; that they live five or ten hundred times the span of a human life. So it is: the life he is given isn't long, but he must make it so. Why should he endeavour to complain about Nature when she has birthed him with the hammer and chisel to sculpt her himself? She has acted generously: life, if one knows how to use it, is long.

But learning how to live forever can take whole lifetimes. It takes not a full breath to learn how to die.

And three syllables to defy it.

One Harry to so shamelessly invoke it.

He had mispronounced it, enunciating the t with vicious abandon, though Tom does not hate the sound of it in Harry’s mouth. His name had wrapped so sweetly around Harry’s teeth and tongue as it fell out of his lips.

Tom considers: Harry…

Familiar form of French Henri or Old High German Heimerich, literally “ruler of the house.” Or the Old English verb, to harry, to make war, lay waste or ravage.

No, Tom thinks, considering Harry’s features, his manner. Mystery. Righteousness. Undisturbed snow. It does not fit. Neither Henri nor ‘to harry.’ Perhaps a root earlier than Germanic. Persian? Proto Indo-European…

Hari.

Sanskrit, derived from the Proto Indo-European root “to shine.” Gold. Lion.

Hinduism, “to take away, to seize up all sin.” Forgiveness.

Harry’s eyes hadn’t seemed all that forgiving, if Tom is honest.

But Hari is also the other name of the supreme god Vishnu. The Preserver, who slumbers on the coils of the great serpent of time, who takes physical form and descends from his perch when the balance of the universe is under threat, and most notably to Tom, the defeater of Samsara, the cycle of birth and death.

Power over death is power over all.

Is that who Harry is?

“Tom,” Lestrange whispers. “Your amber’s uh, melted.”

Tom draws himself up from his reveries and addresses the sizzling amber that’s attempting to bond with the carpet. He banishes it with a wave of his wand and summons another fresh sample.

“Having difficulties, Tom?” Dumbledore asks, approaching Tom’s desk no doubt with barely suppressed glee. “Shall I demonstrate the spell once more for you? We will be starting our preparations for this term’s Complex Transfiguration project. Maintaining your concentration is more important than ever.”

Tom studies Professor Dumbledore, more closely than he has in the past. Albus Dumbledore, Harry’s dear saviour. He seems as he always has to Tom, a meddlesome, overly-suspicious, bloated ego of a man. What could his supposed relationship to Harry be, Tom has to wonder?

“No need, Professor,” Tom responds. “Your consideration is appreciated.”

With another nonchalant wave of Tom’s wand, the sinuous yew hums in hand. The clear amber stone floats momentarily then, as a flame creeps slowly orange and black up a strip of parchment, stretches into a perfect, crystal tumbler.

Dumbledore smiles and moves on.

“He could have spared us a few points to Slytherin for that, at the very least,” Lestrange mutters. “Cheeseparing blighter.”

“Are you still not feeling well, Tom?” Nott whispers from his other side.

“It was only a megrim,” Tom says, dismissing his worries.

When Tom does not provide any additional information, Nott concedes and none other inquire about further. A simple megrim, Tom has said, so it must be true.

All is as it should be. Nevermind that half his House witnessed him drag an unknown boy into the dark of the dungeons’ bowels, not to return. Not mellowed, not mingling, yet distinctly seen.

He will tend to his classes, his duties as usual. He will smile beautifically when necessary, lay a deliberate finger here, there. Tell nothing of his sleepless night in the lines of his face or the steadiness of hand. Tom has found many of his nights sleepless now; where once he was host to vivid and loud visions, all manner of colours, where he lived little dream worlds made not of clay or flesh but ephemeral mist, his mind now lies silent and awake.

What need has he for those dream visions now? Why dream of a mingling of the universe, of a more beloved existence, when that is his waking world? For the sword outwears the sheath, and the soul wears out the breast, and the heart must pause to breathe... or so Lord Byron says. While Death grows drunk with gore, and all insist that nothing gold can stay, Tom will be here still, and longer too than that.

A child born in bitterness and nurtured in convulsions is still a child born and, now, is one that never dies.

One day this will be known to all, along with his name.

—

What is known?

In general, this is an unhelpful question to pose, as it is impossible to answer its opposite: what is Unknown? For by its very nature, one cannot know it.

But in the isolated case of one ‘Harry’ Harrison, Tom finds it more sufficient to list what he concretely knows about Harry because it would simply be too long and arduous to list what he does not know.

These, he knows:

Harry is most likely cursed with a disinheritance or illegitimate offspring hex. This, Tom has gleaned by observation. The boy receives no post, has nothing to his name, not even a surname, and allegedly bears a marked resemblance to Charlus Potter, a rumour pending confirmation. Tom awaits Walburga’s mother’s reply with a photo of the Potter Heir. This accounts for why Harry is so forgettable, though does not answer why he has appeared at Hogwarts now of all times.

Harry has lost his own memories and sense of place, perhaps a byproduct of the hex, and what he does recall seems to be… glimpses of a far flung future. Tom can see Dumbledore’s face in his mind as though sprung up from his own memory, wrinkled, grey. The glow of a deep affection radiating from his face. Softer than Tom has ever seen.

Seemingly because of these fragmented memories or visions, Harry knows Tom Riddle is Voldemort. Knows Voldemort personally, somehow, but not what it means.

Harry can speak Parseltongue. Currently, Tom has no manner of explanation for this. Could Harry be an illegitimate Potter and Gaunt? Some other hidden descendant of Slytherin’s? The thought rankles. Irritates.

And lastly, Tom knows that Harry has an unprecedented physiomagical connection to Tom.

Somehow, without proximity, without eye contact, without limit, Tom can sense Harry at all times—the gentle vibration of a sleeping mind tucked away, whispering into his ear from where he sits in Divination Class all the way to that Seventh floor corridor and beyond the wall to the Hidden Room. Tom can concentrate on their connection, “tune in” like the knobs on a radio, but he cannot turn it off.

There are many marvels to be discovered with Mind Magics—and it is not for the meek or feeble. And while it is possible for masters to form deep connections with other compatible minds, it is clear Harry has never trained in either Occlumency or Legilimency. He screams his thoughts and impressions without consideration for volume or grace. But this is not Legilimency.

Other magical connections come to mind. Some Wixen form incredibly intimate, epistemic relationships with their familiars, able to understand one another’s needs without effort. But such a connection is very, very rare and necessitates a very powerful magical animal as a familiar. Phoenixes, dragons, unicorns.

Much as Tom likes to think of Harry in terms of strange bugs and small creatures, he is still just a boy.

Monozygotic twins can sometimes be born with a close mental link, able to sense when the other is hurt or happy or hungering.

But all of these connections are not unconditional. They bear limits. All Legilimency, to have any sort of power, requires close proximity, eye contact, or physical touch. Familiars speak only in urges and abstracts, and twins more often than not grow out of their psychic senses with age. They fade with time, distance.

So what manner of magic is this?

For now, Tom can only speculate, each theory more outlandish than the last.

He knows reality is often far simpler.

The Materials of Man, on his composition and reality, is a Known.

Man is of the earth, which is inert and heavy, and from it proceeds the flesh. He is made of the stones, which are hard and are the substance of the bones. He is made from the water, which is moist and cold, and is the substance of the blood; and from salt, which is briny and sharp, and from it are the nerves. He is made of the firmament, the wind, out of which proceeds the breathing. And Man is made of the sun, which is clear and fair, and from it proceeds the fire in his body.

Did Harry step out of the mystic planes into Abred wholly formed and one with the magics of the land? Or was he granted the powers of the Secret Sciences by traversing to Annwn, where changelings and faeries and elves hail?

Tom has seen the mystic planes, all but walked it once. With stuttered breath, he had glimpsed it over his shoulder, a radiant maw, a wound on the air, that beat at him with its might and left him carefully splintered. If he had stepped into it, he wonders, what would have become of him?

Or was it Gwynvyd, the realm of gods and death?

No.

Were Tom to ask, what would anyone else say of Harry? That he is no one. A forgotten child with forgotten memories who found his way to Hogwarts with a latent talent for Divination and precognition. A mind unnaturally opened by whatever curse was placed upon him and so unnaturally linked to anyone who might try to look into it.

However likely, this explanation leaves Tom deeply unsatisfied.

If one thing is certain amongst all the Unknowns, it is clear that Legilimency will not work for uncovering Harry’s lost thoughts—for finding the Chamber of Secrets. Another method is needed.

“I hate tea readings,” Nott laments, looking down at their table with trepidation.

Yes, Tom thinks. Like Legilimency, Divination requires natural affinity as much as skill. Thadeus Nott is a meticulous and quick-thinking sort of mage, but he has no talent for interpretation.

As he peers into Tom’s cup, dread weighing his expression, it is clear that on top of this, his concentration has been further worsened by his argument with Prewett. Tom is sure Nott is eager to repair this fracture, but lacks the courage to do so. He cannot imagine a better future and so he cannot make it.

“It could be… a bat? A dragon?”

Thadeus rotates the cup a few times, anxiously looking to glean something, anything from the leaves. “No, you're riding a broomstick and uh…”

He flips the pages in his book with sweating fingers as he searches for an answer. “Flight from something. But it’s pointing downward, so without wind, you’ll fall. And this little bit sticking out here, that could be wand?”

Thadeus looks up at Tom, eyes begging.

“Sooo, stay away from Quidditch or you’ll fall and drop your wand?”

“Illuminating,” Tom says, stolid.

Thadeus flushes, rubbing his neck in embarrassment.

This upset between Nott and Prewett is irritating to Tom, too. This late in his Hogwarts career, Tom needs his core to be unshakable. It had taken so long to overcome the resistance within his own House, to prove his natural, God-given superiority over them. Even longer to prove it to their parents. It is now an imperative that Tom quickly expand his influence among the students before it is too late and they are out of his reach. Collect them like sweet little dolls in his curio cabinet, them, their parents, their vaults, their manors full of powerful artefacts and private libraries. Tom means to take everything.

This will be made more difficult if Prewett falls away. He stays because Nott stays. If Tom can securely tie Nott to himself, Prewett will follow.

Therefore, if Nott cannot find the courage and urgency within himself, Tom will oblige.

“I should have taken Arithmancy with Lestrange. I’m no good at this. Would you have a look at mine?”

Tom glances down at the cup before him. The lovely thing about tea leaves is he can see whatever he wants to see.

“I see the profile of a roaring lion. It’s missing a tooth and it is looking at you.”

Tom flicks through his text, pretending to find Nott’s fortune there.

“Here. It may seem that the lion is your enemy, but take heart. Make the lion your friend and he will lend you his tooth for a bit of bravery,” Tom says and flicks his eyes up to Nott from beneath his eyelashes, looks at him directly. “Go against your nature and be brave, Thadeus.”

Tom passes him the cup, and Thadeus looks at the shapeless clump of tea leaves, eyes wide, cheeks flushed.

“Wow,” he breathes. “Brilliant.”

—

It is after dinner that Tom slinks up the stairs and along the halls, back to the Hidden Room. Frozen where he lay, Harry has pricked him all day between the drag of sleep and boredom with his impatience, his anger.

Tom has let him yearn—for the freedom to move, the privilege to speak. Perhaps now he will be more amenable to Tom’s way of thinking.

Tom slides the door shut behind him, snuffing the pillar of light from the Seventh Floor corridor spilling through the crack like the small flame of a candle. Now, they are shrouded in the dark, a weak light from the hearth casting an orange glow on them, he and a certain, strange wild thing.

In the centre of the room sleeps that wild thing, Harry, upon a Grecian daybed with gold inlay, sweat-sheened and tussled. It is the sort of unnatural slumber, disturbed by neither dream nor nightmare, the kind that clings to the skin and eyes and leaves one feeling ill-rested. Tom looks him over, at his bird-like ankles and wrists, at the flush brought close to the surface of his skin, the dark spill of his lashes, and suddenly thinks in poetry.

The nature of Harry’s dark, furrowed brow, the slope of his nose; it inspires. Tom can imagine his features mechanically broken into the cogs of hymn or limerick. Such is a form of immortality, being writ into verse, and it becomes him. Yes, poetic whims seize Tom in fits.

Harry’s face pinches as Tom draws near, perhaps the only movement Tom’s stunning spell allows. This vulnerability becomes him, just as much as the immortal. Can he sense the predation even in sleep?

There is a primal thrum beginning to run between them, flowing from one to the other. Their breath tangles in the small room and makes the air grow humid. Fear. Anticipation. They had fought and argued so heatedly before, but now all is still, all but for the slow ooze of blood that wells from Harry’s curious scar. It has pooled under Harry’s ear and paints his cheek and jaw a fetching red.

You know, of course, that they have called this boy my downfall, a high, hissing voice calls from Harry’s mind. But I knew the one I must use, for if I was to rise again, more powerful than I had been when I had fallen. I wanted Harry. Harry’s blood—

Tom craves the taste, suddenly, and braces himself for the sharp yearning—a recent fain that has come upon him since he made his Horcrux.

Tom supposes the body must yearn to supplement what his soul has lost.

He has never been so close to death as he is now.

Alongside and never touching.

But Tom is accustomed to the hunger now. It does not sweep him away and drive them to that feral place they were when Tom first dragged Harry here.

There is time now. He should have done this before, stowed Harry away for the keeping, when he first appeared...

He draws his wand.

For a moment, Tom wonders if in his unconsciousness Harry has reverted to his former state. Dazed, incomprehensible. Perhaps the effects of the Cruciatus are wearing away.

Perhaps Harry needs another?

The thought—Harry spilled on the floor under his wand, writhing, shrieking, skin-pinkened—spurns something sharp within him. It makes Tom keenly ache of all places, in his groyne.

“Rennervate.”

Harry jerks awake with a vicious spasm, his eyes falling immediately to Tom.

He wakes with anger and clarity.

“You!” Harry growls. He lunges at Tom. “Give me back my wand!”

“This?”

Harry stills when Tom draws a warm, golden wand from his robe sleeves.

“It is curious,” Tom remarks, turning the wand in his hands. “We have an affinity. What is your wand core?”

But Tom already knows. He sees the memory—Ollivander's old face, and old voice rasping terrible but great.

Phoenix feather.

“If I weren’t already certain, I would think we are long lost brothers.”

“No way,” Harry denies with obvious disgust.

Again, he darts forward for his wand, fingers just shy of reaching, but Tom manages to hold it aloft out of reach.

“Ah, ah, ah,” he sings, and Harry fumes. “Have you thought about our chat?”

Of course he has. Tom has sensed Harry’s turmoil all day.

“Yeah, and you know what? You’re not the only one who knows how to do this memory stuff. Dumbledore—”

“He will not help you!” Tom shouts.

This again! What is this obsession with Albus Dumbledore? Tom would crush it, grind it to dust. Though he may have to gamble to do so… Dumbledore may not remember Harrison the transfer student individually, but he may be able to form associations. Harry is a Slytherin, the crest on his chest obvious for all to see, and if Tom keeps him close, very close… Dumbledore will make his assumptions.

“I will even bargain with you—ask him for help. If he says yes, you may tell him what little you know, for all the good it will do. But if he says no, you will do as I say.”

Tom holds out his hand to seal the agreement.

Harry slaps his hand away.

“I’m not bargaining anything with you! You can’t keep me in here forever.”

Wrong.

Cold rage washes over Tom—how dare Harry squander Tom’s lenience?

Tom stuns him and watches Harry crash to the floor.

He leans over Harry, his shadow casting long over his frozen face.

“It seems you still need time to understand your situation. Much more time. It is a busy season coming, you know. More dinners with Professors, Hogsmeade, Quidditch, exams. I can very easily forget to come here. You must be oh, so thirsty… hungry, even…”

Tom straightens, tucks Harry’s wand into his robes out of sight, and makes for the door without a second glance. When his hand closes over the door knob, he is truck by a very sharp, very loud mental plea.

WAIT.

Tom stops, but doesn’t look, glee fighting to twist his face.

…Please.

He turns to Harry with a cold, unaffected countenance.

Wait, he pleads again.

Tom pretends to think it over, dallying, waiting to feel Harry’s desperation to reach a higher peak, then slowly saunters back over to him. He wordlessly releases the stunning spell.

“It is very rare that I extend my hand twice, Harry. There will not be a third time.”

With this, he holds his hand out. Harry wisely takes it, and Tom pulls him to his feet. Their skin vibrates when Harry’s hand closes around his.

“He’ll help me,” Harry mutters stubbornly. He tries to pull his hand free but Tom holds him fast.

“Then what have you got to lose?”

“Fine! Whatever. Can we get out of here now?”

“You promise to fulfil the terms of our agreement?” Tom asks. He does not restate any such terms. No wizard in their right mind would make a promise without the explicit agreement stated outright, but Tom is guessing Harry is not versed in these minor magical oaths.

“Sure, yeah,” Harry growls, rolling his eyes, shaking Tom’s hand aggressively.

“You have to promise,” Tom presses.

“Yes, alright, I promise!” Harry snaps impatiently.

Tom smiles. I win.

He hands Harry his wand.

—

Though the hour is late when Tom returns from the Hidden Room with an obedient Harry, the Commons are alive with activity. The din of conversation and game-playing reaches them as they slip through the entrance, a welcome sound that helps to put Harry’s wariness at ease.

Satine Selwyn, a Fourth Year, is performing Xylomancia for her yearmates, taking a bundle of fallen twigs and a strand of hair each, tossing them onto an enamel scrying board.

It is a Slavonian art of divination, Xylomancia, one passed through the Selwyn line as they travelled North of the Pannonian Basin to Poland, then West to the United Kingdom some twelve generations ago. It is her birthright, an ancestral gift, just as much as Parseltongue is to Tom.

“Oh dear,” she giggles at her housemates’ expense. “You’d better put in your hours of study now, Dolohov, or you’ll be in terrible trouble come exam time. And you, Yaxley, well. Don’t expect to find love any time soon!”

The crowd of spectators all titter at the poor fortunes, and Tom steps around them for the chairs and sofas at the hearth.

“Tom!” Lestrange calls the moment he is seen. “You patrolled late. Dock any points from Hufflepuff tonight? They’re in the lead, you know...”

Lestrange’s enthusiasm dies when he spots Harry trailing behind Tom. “Ah. You’ve been together the whole evening, then?”

All at once, his peers seem to recall they hadn’t seen Harry since Tom had absconded with him the night previous. Their eyes shift between one another, uncharacteristically unsure.

“Harrison,” Nott is the first to break the silence. “Welcome back, we missed you today.”

He is being polite; Tom doubts a single one of them spent any time at all to ponder on Harry’s disappearance. And now that they are confronted with the question, they daren’t ask.

“It’s Harry,” the boy corrects.

“I’ve decided to do as suggested and give our Harry private tutoring,” he tells them. Harry shifts uncomfortably at his side when this garners a wave of scrutiny.

“Oh? And what are you teaching him?” Walburga asks.

Tom smiles. He takes a seat, king among them, with Harry beside.

The boy is quite uncomfortable, shrinking back from the others with mistrust and suspicion. Does he not realise in pushing himself away from the room he has pulled himself close to Tom’s side?

“Many myriad things. Not having your futures told?” Tom asks, gesturing to where Selwyn is continuing to put her peers at ease or increase their worries tenfold.

He’d seen them on odd occasions, his housemates, walking the trail along the Forbidden Forest, collecting the small sticks that littered their paths. Eager to pry the secrets of their fates from dying branches. What will they find? Tom has read the script of the cosmos; it has been so seared into his very genetics, but he will endeavour to write his own fate among it.

Abraxas clicks his tongue in displeasure.

“We Britons are, alas, too prone to find in foreign systems that which is seemingly more desirable than what is native. So far as magical practice is concerned, we have not until the present had any real impetus to live in accordance with an exclusively Britannic tradition. The British mage is not compelled to seek ideals from his own ancestry, no. He looks instead to the Italian, the German, the Slav. Such is why our culture is in a state of disrepair.”

Tom feels Harry immediately despair of boredom, a fleeting longing to be locked back up in the Hidden Room, unbothered and sleeping.

Walburga laughs at Abraxas’s expense, and Tom laughs at Harry’s.

“I notice you skipped over the French,” she says with delight. “Have you been reading Lewis Spence again, Abraxas? You would believe him? You, a Frenchman? Tell me, what is English about the Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte? That is what inspired the latest renovations of Malfoy Manor, oui?”

Abraxas grows visibly sour.

“Lewis Spence wasn’t all wrong,” Lestrange, incidentally another Frenchman, says. “Throughout the Age of Romance, Britain was thought of as the island of faerie glamour, and dozens of visitors have come to witness it themselves. Why, even Caesar himself said our Island is the origin of Druidic cultus.”

“What of the Iberian? The Gauls? They were doing it first and brought it here, didn’t they?” Nott asks.

“Ah, the Gauls, fathers of the Druids. ‘With grand contempt for the mortal lot, they professed immortality of the Soul,’” says Walburga.

“Now you are quoting Lewis Spence.”

“That is Ammianus Marcellinus, my dear,” she defends herself. “And I make no claims as to who brought magic to England. They are one in the same, born together as in all places. Our limitations in documenting history may make it seem otherwise, but magic has been here and everywhere always.”

“The word or practice may change, but magic remains all the same?” Tom concludes.

“And who is that?” Walburga asks.

“Why, that is Tom Riddle.”

“Tom Riddle has many masks; he has appeared as the Grindelwald, the Slytherin, the Lenin, the Prefect, sometimes, as God. One need not know which Tom Riddle one will encounter. Who is Tom Riddle? I’m sure we’ve never met,” she answers, sly.

“Shall I introduce you?” Tom laughs.

“No...” Walburga answers thoughtfully, pretending to be coy. “I believe there is safety in the mystery.”

She is thinking about some nights before. Her dark eyes flicker to Harry most tellingly. She would not know its significance, but she would know it is indeed significant. That Tom had reacted so violently to Harry calling his name had been a show of his hand.

She does not yet know Voldemort, but she would remember the name.

Am I not a candidate for Fame, to be heard in this song?

“And mystery is more becoming.”

—

When the number of students still in the Common Room dwindles, when the Divination has ceased, and the last students, squinting at their essays and texts with sleepy eyes, pack away their things, they retire to the dormitories. The sounds of quill scratching and gobstone clinking fade, the crackle of the hearth’s embers chasing them to bed.

“Good night, Tom,” Lestrange bids, yawning and pulling his tapestries closed.

Tom sidles up to another set of tapestries and parts them just a hair with a single finger. Harry, sleeping soundly in his bed. He’d crept out of the Common Room unnoticed to all but Tom, in foul mood and eager to get away from tedious talks of philosophy, poetry, and ancient sciences.

Tom had allowed it—Harry will need his rest if he is to endure what is to come, after all.

“Tom.”

He withdraws his finger from the curtain, allowing it to fall closed again, and turns to Thadeus Nott.

“Yes?”

Nott hesitates, shifting from foot to foot. Finally, he breaks the silence with a whisper.

“I wonder if I might speak with you.”

Tom glances around the still dorm and beckons Nott with a smile into his domain. He drops his tapestries so that they are sealed within them, hushed by the silencing charms, cast in heavy, private darkness.

“You have my attention. Are you to seek private tutoring as well? I must admit, my spare moments are not so abundant that I may offer them to anyone who asks.”

“No,” Nott is quick to deny. “But I would seek a favour from you.”

“Oh?”

Tom sits on his bed, legs crossed, and waits for Nott to continue.

“It is rumoured you have witnessed and performed many arcane magics…”

“So they say,” Tom says with relish, mouth curled in a coy smile.

“I notice how you have tantalised us with morsels of your feats, but rarely the whole truth of it.”

“As Walburga says, the mystery becomes me.”

Though Nott does not lift his head through any of this, Toms sees his mouth thin. He’s carried a moroseness about him all Term, especially so after he’d returned from Nott, Sr.’s trial.

Millicenta Nott, eleven years old, murdered by her father for the insult of being a Squib.

“I notice how you are collecting us, arranging us to your liking.”

“A lovely bouquet you all are. Do I not make a fine florist?”

Tom arranges and prunes with unmatched discernment.

“You criticise Lords and how they operate the machine of war, but you study them closely. You have Lord Malfoy, Sr. and Madame Black sending you gifts and resources. And I know Lestrange’s father is funding a Winter research project for you.”

“What of it?” Tom asks, smiling cold. His blood thrums quick in his limbs.

What could Thadeus Nott want from him?

He finally looks up, his face soft and open.

“I believe you have a power few can claim. You are capable and accomplished, and you are the only one who can possibly help me.”

Nott can certainly turn a pretty phrase.

“How very handsome a plea, but you have yet to say what it is you are asking of me.”

“I need you to help me break into the Ministry and kill my father before they take him to Azkaban.”

Tom leans back, quite shocked but not unhappy. No, not unhappy at all.

A Squib is a genetic deformity.

A horrific stain to any of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, and particularly to the Nott family, who may count themselves among that list due only to Cantankerous Nott, the author of the Pureblood Directory. It is unclear whether the Nott lineage is actually Pure, but they may thank their ancestor for being so enterprising as to put them in the book anyhow. Such is the privilege of being the author of history, Tom supposes.

It is no surprise then, that Tycho Nott would take it upon himself to protect his family’s delicate and endangered status by eliminating an obvious threat to it.

The appearance of a Squib in the bloodline is an indication of weak breeding, after all. Exiled, it is then at liberty to breed with Muggles and produce the potential for Mudbloods. Kept within the family, and it is a brand of shame and inferiority. Personally, Tom does not disagree; in his position, he might have done as Tycho Nott had.

He understands keenly the precariousness of one’s lineage.

However, Thadeus Nott stands before him and presents an opportunity.

Without interference, Nott’s father is slated for prison, where he will whither for five or so years, then be returned to his home and station a stranger. Likely unstable from exposure and ill with any one of the wasting diseases brought on by the Dementors, he will be unpredictable and a legal obstacle to all the Nott assets.

But, if someone were to prevent Nott, Sr. from returning; if he were to pass away in prison, as is a frequent enough occurrence, Thadeus will come of age and take charge of the Nott affairs quite neatly. And if Tom were to be so kind as to be the person who arranges this for his housemate? Why, that would be a boon indeed.

Nott has been so coy these recent years, never quite falling into line the way the others have. He has respected Tom, yes, even admired him as an Heir, but never followed him unquestioningly.

The Malfoys, the Lestranges, the Blacks; they are easily tamed with the proof of blood, and Tom has more of that than most. Nott, on the other hand...

“I will help you with this, Thadeus…,” Tom says slowly, thoughtfully. “But know that one day I will call upon you, and you must answer. It may be you or your sons, or your sons’ sons. But call, I will. Do you understand?”

Thadeus blinks hard, an apparent relief rolling through him, relaxing his shoulders. He breathes deep.

“…I do.”

It is as good as a wedding vow.

A euphoric feeling falls over Tom; the pieces are aligning so beautifically, so meticulously.

“Then it shall be done.”

A bed over, Tom feels Harry stir, affected by the strong feeling echoing through him from Tom but oblivious to this pivotal moment. One that will put Tom on the path to being that Tom, the one in Harry’s mind who stands emperor over Salazar Slytherin’s Basilisk.

The one who is Lord Voldemort.