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Prologue

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People usually shook their heads when they passed the Rosewood orphanage in the centre of London even though nobody exactly knew why they did it. It was just a habit, and as somebody once said: 'old habits die hard'.

Many children from the orphanage looked at the people passing by with jealousy visible in their eyes. As everyone knew the orphanage was old and dusty, with doors that creaked when you opened them and with loads of spiders in the cupboards. Still it became a home to many children whose parents had died and who had no further relatives or a home to those abandoned by their family.

On the bright and sunny morning our story starts there was only one orphan playing outside. He was known as Tom Marvolo Riddle. Tom was a bright-eyed and loveable ten-year-old ('almost eleven' as he always said), but he did not have many friends. Strange things had happened to the other children whenever they had come too close, or made him angry, and now nobody wanted to play with Tom.

Tom didn't care about that. He was used to threats (he got them at least five times a day) and he was used to bullying as well. He knew that most people filled their words with lies and empty promises, at least when they talked to him, and he also knew that he was different from everybody else.

Tom was a wizard.

He held a letter in his hand as he walked over the grounds. This letter came from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, telling him that he had been accepted as a first-year student. It could be a silly joke from Mark, one of his frequent bullies, but Tom had a feeling in the pit of his stomach that told him that this letter was real.

Mark could not have written this letter because Mark was too stupid to make something like that up, Tom reasoned with himself, and he knew that the others in the orphanage could not even read. This letter was real and it offered Tom a way out of his miserable life.

He ran inside, careful not to make the floor dirty because he was sure of the fact that Madame Martin would have his head for that, and made his way up to the dormitory he shared with the other boys. Nobody would be present anyway; they were all eating breakfast. Tom had been sent away from breakfast with one old sandwich because he had spent too much time in the bathroom.

He grabbed his bag and some things from his bedside table and seated himself on his bed. He pocketed his watch and put his toothbrush and toothpaste in the bag before he grabbed two spare sweaters and a pair of pants and put them in the bag as well. He chucked the letter in too, just in case he would need it, and the book he had been reading. He lifted his pillow up and picked the thin necklace up gently. Laura Seideira, a girl who had been adopted, had given this to him before she left. She had been his only friend in the orphanage.

He sighed and put the necklace on, even though he knew that it would look girlish. It wasn't as if he would ever see her again anyway. She had been adopted by a family going by the name Malfoy a couple of days before her seventh birthday and was currently living in Scotland. At least, that was what Madame Martin had told him.

He swung the bag over his shoulder and left the orphanage; hoping that this would be the final time he had to look at it. Opening the large gates wasn't a problem because somebody - Tom expected it to be Harry Kensington - had left the keys in the lock. He earned some strange glances from people passing by as he walked through the gates and closed them behind him carefully. Tom didn't know why, though, for he was allowed to go into town every once in a while. It was perfectly legal to look like a little criminal too, so he shrugged and walked down the street feeling as if his birthday had come a week earlier.

The letter had said that he should go to the Leaky Cauldron and ask a man called James to help him get into a place called Diagon Alley. If this proved to be true then the letter was real and he would be going to Hogwarts in September. He felt a jolt of happiness in his stomach and put a hand into his pocket. He fingered the little key nervously. This key was the access to wizarding money, or so the letter had said, and he would have to use it at a bank called Gringotts.

Startled, he noticed that he had already passed the street the Leaky Cauldron was supposed to be in. His eyes darted over the crowd, looking for the place, until he noticed a quite grubby-looking pub going by the name 'The Leaky Cauldron' squashed in between two large buildings. The people passing by did not seem to notice - Tom personally thought that they might not be able to see it at all - so it would be pretty safe to enter it.

"Well, this is it," Tom muttered to himself. "All you have to do is walk in there, ask for James, and you will have left the ordinary world far behind."

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