35 Harry Potter : Chapter 35: Wit Beyond Measure II
Sorry its short chapter.
...
"If you want to kill him, out of fear for something that could never come to pass, then do so," he shrugged, clearly expressing how he couldn't care less about it.
"but if you intend to use him as a bouncing board, you'll have to allow him to do the same: keep for yourself the ideas personally tailored for you, but if you truly wish to be the best you can, without a doubt Riddle's presence in your life, either as an equal or an opposite, will be a great boon."
...
The mere implications of what he was saying were staggering, and I felt my outrage at the situation slip between my lips as I lost my composure.
I had invested a lot to obtain the Diadem in a safe manner, and this was the result? A voice in my head that pointed at being as annoying as it could be?
"You want me to..."
"I want nothing," Other-Me cut me off before my rising voice could attempt echoing in the smoky room that was surrounding us: "I am merely a reflection aimed at the cracks in your head."
"Cracks?" I mumbled, disliking the implication while my arms unfurled from their crossed position, my muscles twitching as I felt the need to punch my Mirror-Self in the face.
"Hypocrisy turns a mind into a brittle thing, and pushed as you are by the wish for greatness, it wouldn't do to allow complacency or fear to make you blind to your own faults."
With this sentence, a technical question naturally rose to the forefront of my mind, and I decided to change topic.
"So you wouldn't needle someone else like you're doing with me?"
"I only make those questions and observations that are needed for someone to make informed choices." Other-Me smiled openly.
"The answers will always come from you."
I rubbed small circles around my temples as I took a deep breath: "What kind of answers?"
"To the questions you choose." Mirror-Me spoke as if what I had just asked was dumb, and in hindsight, I could appreciate how being annoying seemed effective to push me towards obtaining results faster than a calm, peaceful conversation would have.
"Ultimately, you'll wear the Diadem to seek Wisdom, but the answers you'll be able to build in here will be about those questions that you cannot always express consciously."
I clenched my eyes shut as the migraine seemed to reach a crescendo.
"Make your choice, and act upon it, that will tell me which questions your heart secretly harbors."
"What..?" I asked once more, lowering my hands from the ineffective massage that I was trying to use to soothe my sudden headache.
"It is simple, isn't it?" Diadem-Me used once more the annoyingly merry tone he had used to greet me.
"To learn about yourself, you must decide on a path, that in turn will shape who you will be, and it will ultimately tell us the most important thing."
I simply squinted at the strange sentience I was conversing with, attempting to understand what he was trying to make me realize, only to receive an annoyed huff as an answer.
"Don't wear me until you decide: what do you want?"
With a sharp stab of pain in my head, the grey mist ran over all of my senses, and I felt like I was falling in the void.
...
With a gasping breath, I took off Ravenclaw's Diadem, reality assuming once more well-defined shapes as I found myself into the living room of my home, with the dying embers in the fireplace that cast a gloomy, if warm, light in the otherwise pitch-black room.
Steading my racing heart, I hunched forward from the position I had unconsciously assumed when I sat on my enlarged armchair right before donning the Founder's Artifact: "So this is Rowena's masterpiece..."
The goblin silver gleamed in the faint light that persisted in the living room, the sapphire the size of a quail's egg looked now like the calm surface of a bottomless well, and given the forced self-analysis that I had just endured, I could smother the shiver of excitement that run down my spine.
Casting aside what I had just learned by talking with my Mirror-Self for a moment, I felt the savage grin on my face as if it belonged to someone else: "There are no limits, are there?"
Almost unconsciously, since my very first days in this new life of mine, I had been wondering what could actually be accomplished through magic: most of my canon knowledge was limited to Harry Potter's PoV, and the successful ritual that created the secrecy wards around my home dragged up more questions than answers.
Still, the Diadem remained cold in my hands, gleaming with an almost mocking tint as it seemed to laugh, the memory of the last question I had received ringing into my head.
What Do I Want?
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It took me a while to figure out a way to make interesting the Diadem of Ravenclaw.
I mean, I've read it used in some fiction as either something that gave you access to a mental library with everything its previous wearers ever thought about any given topic, as a thing that gave you eidetic-memory, and as something that built perfect occlumency as well as the overused and abused concept of 'mental palace'.
It is obvious that in this story eidetic memory isn't that important when the MC handles the magic in such a personalized manner, the occlumency and mental palace thing isn't all that interesting for an artifact claimed to be legendary.
And the simple 'well of knowledge' concept is... well, the MC enjoys discovering and figuring out magic on his own (which gives me the excuse to build up the lore from the simple elements I've spoken of during his first lessons).
And the only canon indication about the diadem is 'Wit beyond measure is a man's greatest treasure' (nevermind that's a woman that has built the diadem, or only enchanted it, I don't know).
I wanted to make the Diadem something not completely game-changing, but important, something that wouldn't have interested Tom Riddle once he first put his hands on it, but that still held value.
Which means making it unappealing to a megalomaniac genius.
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