81 Chapter 81: The Game is Afoot
I decided to change things up a bit and alter the schedule slightly. From now on, I'm uploading a chapter every Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr
I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
I would like to thank my beta, Akisu, for his help in this chapter.
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15 October 1992, Hogwarts
Usually, Tom Riddle didn't like being surprised, this was no different. Back when he was in the orphanage and the other children liked to hide and beat him up for being different, for being special. Oh, he always got his revenge and probably punished them more severely than he should have. But how else were they supposed the learn? Tom had learnt from painstaking experiments that the best way to make people change their behaviour was through pain. It was a biological factor, like animals being trained, that uses that evolutionary reflex to make people wary of what had hurt them previously, and thus it was the path that he had taken as a child to protect himself.
He only used it when someone tries to do the same. The worse the act, the worse the punishment. For example, Billy Stubbs had heard that an aristocrat couple wanted to adopt Tom since they liked how calm he was, and chose to spread rumours about him liking to burn things. The couple left pretty quickly afterwards. The boy hadn't done it out of self-interest or in the hope that the couple would pick him instead. No, he did it purely to hurt Tom because he was different, and so, Tom retaliated by hanging his precious little rabbit. The boy had taken something he had hoped for ever since he understood what an orphanage was, and it was only fair to take away something just as precious from the boy.
The same could be said with Amy Benson and Dennis Bishop who had tried to push him off the edge during one of their rare trips outside the orphanage. Tom's magic had protected him, and he made them stay just at the edge, barely a fraction of a centimetre away from their certain death. They had learnt their lesson after a few hours of staying like this and Tom had found a nifty little cave that was pretty well hidden. With every conquest, Tom kept a little trinket as a reminder of what they had done to him. It was proof that having faith and trusting anyone other than himself was a fool's hope.
At the orphanage, Tom discovered humanity's unfortunate truth. For all they liked to show a mask of civility, every human being would revert to a savage if there were no consequences for their actions. In an understaffed orphanage with little supervision, everyone fought for everything, going back to their roots as beasts just for one hint of comfort and a chance at a better life. It was also there that the young wizard realized that adults weren't really all that different. Mrs Cole, for example, had done her best to prevent him from getting adopted, choosing the welfare of the other children instead of his.
But Tom didn't care, he understood their nature after all. He knew that he was smarter than the other children, like a lot smarter. He learnt a lot by looking at people walking in and out. The world outside of the orphanage was filled with stressed people, worrying about feeding their families, while the rich minority lived lavish lives. From what he had extrapolated from the newspapers his snakes had stolen from him, war was nearing. It was obvious, of course, considering how strict the Treaty of Versailles was, and its impact on the German economy. He was proven correct once more, years later, in both the muggle world and the magical world.
Honestly, all things considered, after sending a message about the consequences of people messing with him, Tom's life in the orphanage wasn't that bad. Everyone avoided him, even that stupid matron, but he had gotten used to being alone by then and if he needed anything, then he got his snakes to steal it for him. Everything was stable until Albus Dumbledore came into his room after his eleventh birthday.
The man had this well-hidden arrogance to him that Tom was able to clock. He was righteous and inflexible, yet there was this menacing feel hidden deep down that Tom was able to see when he revealed what he later understood to be his parseltongue talent. Yeah, he refused to go shopping with the man, because most of all, Tom wanted to understand if the rest of the wizards were like him or not.
They were not.
They were so ordinary, so human. He expected a community of people capable of altering reality to be condescending, arrogant, with a higher understanding of humanity, but all he got was normal humans with a few skills. Now, the noble families from ancient lines had this inherited arrogance that came with their ancestry but none of the higher understanding. Of course, that was only for the heirs he met at Hogwarts, not that he ever met an adult head of house, which was very feared in the magical community.
As for Hogwarts, it was rough at first. Tom's parseltongue meant that he wasn't a muggleborn and that he was a possible descendant of Salazar Slytherin himself. He kept that to himself, of course, since Dumbledore's reaction was enough to put him off. But being considered a muggleborn in Slytherin was quite bad. The entire house worked with a hierarchy with the skill of magic being the most important power. When Tom underwent the crest unlocking ceremony, nothing came of it, even if he felt like it was close for a few moments. And that had sealed his fate. The other heirs and their crests had their own magic to master, and poor Tom was left in the dust. Or he would have been if he hadn't worked ten times as hard as his classmates and it showed. Tom Riddle climbed his way to the height of the Slytherin hierarchy.
You see, Hogwarts was very encouraging of experimenting with magic, and Tom was a genius in just getting magic to work. It was hard to explain but things just felt right sometimes, and he could create new spells, potions, and wards on a whim. That alone offset any advantage others might have had with their crests, and his hard work just put him that far above others.
Everything was going according to plan. He was going to show himself as a young prodigy, reveal his connection to Salazar Slytherin, and start a political career in the ministry. He was planning on starting a small custom enchantment shop, maybe even joining a guild to get a mastery. The future was his to do what he wished, that was until he saw Death.
It was the best way to describe it. He knew intellectually that Grindelwald's war was happening, but it was different to see it in front of his eyes. In the middle of London, Dumbledore and Grindelwald battled and left a trail of bodies behind them. The Hogwarts student just felt weak at their display. It was so far above him that it showed how unremarkable Tom really was.
Tom had almost died on that day, he stared Death in the face, and something changed in him. It was terrifying and he wanted to avoid it at all costs. He wanted Dumbledore and Grindelwald dead. In his desperation, with one of the monsters that haunted his dreams being so close, Tom released a Basilisk trying to kill him by surprise, and yet the man was able to avoid it somehow. After accidentally petrifying a couple of muggleborn, he started this whole 'heir of Slytherin' to keep trying to kill the monster that portrayed himself as a benevolent man.
But when poor Myrtle Warren was accidentally killed, all that grief, all that pain washed away, and Tom chose to make her sacrifice not be in vain, he chose to use her death to make his first foray into immortality. At least, in a way, young Myrtle's death wouldn't have been just an accident, she would have helped him stop the monsters that were Dumbledore and Grindelwald.
That was when Tom inhabited the Diary and the rest of his soul continued. The goal of the diary was simple. It was to be used as a weapon against Dumbledore if he assumes control over the school and release the Basilisk in a way that would either discredit him or kill him. And so, Tom stayed in the book, untouched for what felt like seconds and centuries at the same time. Time was odd as an enchanted object. He discovered that it had been around fifty years since someone wrote in his diary for the first time, but that wasn't important, what was important was that his other half failed miserably.
Dumbledore had overhauled the educational system into a mockery of the nature of mages. He practically banned experimentation, any kind of weaponry. Sure, he had defeated Grindelwald and ended the war, but that was it. The man even became the headmaster, while still having two other posts with high influence. What in Merlin's name happened?
Well, his other half decided to become a dark lord with the nickname Tom had made for himself when he was nine. It was an anagram that he made since all he had to himself was his name. Not that he really cared where he came from, his mother had died giving birth to him, and his father was either dead or had abandoned his mother, making him irrelevant in Tom's eyes.
And while it was somewhat gratifying to find out that he was regarded to be stronger than Dumbledore, the fact that the entire ideology adopted by Voldemort for his campaign was nonsense and that the man ended up blowing himself up while miscasting a killing curse on a baby didn't help him much.
The man was alive, of course, since Tom himself still existed. And the fact that the Diary was given to someone going to Hogwarts was proof that Voldemort was planning something. And so, Tom would follow his purpose, to either discredit Dumbledore severely by petrifying muggleborns, or to just kill the headmaster. After all, it was what he was made to do.
To be fair, the Diary wasn't supposed to be a weapon. It wasn't even supposed to hold a soul, but it was the only thing near when he accidentally killed Myrtle Warren. It was a failed experiment, one that was deemed too far-reaching, but Tom wanted to change the world at the time. If only he could continue his work, it was very promising. He didn't know why his future self perverted the Diary in such a way as to turn it into a weapon, but Voldemort had to have a reason.
Outside of this, something else came to his attention. When he spoke to the writer of the diary, someone was obviously chasing after him on two occasions. Someone was looking for him, for the diary, and it was Tom's own intelligence coupled with the secrecy enchantments that allowed the diary to blend in anywhere by mimicking the surrounding ambient magical signature. It was a way for the diary to not get flagged as a dark artefact after all. His writer didn't know who it was, only that it was a dark-haired boy, but there were many ways to fool the senses, so it might not be even real.
But someone was looking for him before they had even gotten to Hogwarts, and this was more interesting than just following through the motions of his purpose. This was even more apparent today when Tom, possessing his foolish victim, opened the chamber for the first time. He had felt a small pinging. As the heir of Slytherin, he had access to the wards of the chamber, and something had sent a message outside the bathroom to say that the chamber had opened.
Wearing another body, Tom couldn't help but smile to himself. This was interesting, very interesting. Someone knew that he was coming here. It wasn't Dumbledore because this place couldn't be detected by the castle wards and the man would have found another way. No, someone knew exactly where the entrance was and made a simple detector to know when it would open. Someone knew that he was opening the chamber of secrets but didn't have any proof. Or maybe, they didn't even know who he was possessing. Were they some kind of seer?
Someone had started a game with him, a game he was more than willing to play. He had never been pitted against a Seer before. Well, a potential seer at least.
With a grin on his stolen face, Tom Riddle jumped into the bowls of the chamber making sure to close the entrance behind him.
After all, the game is afoot.
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