Author's note: This will be a slow one, I'm writing it as I go, the idea hit me in a dream and now I'm pretty much doomed. It's so new and well, hard to make work, (actually if you ever seen this idea before at all please say so, I would dearly love to read that!) I would tell you more about it but that would spoil the surprise…
The Secret of Secrets
"Our soul, our true self, is the most mysterious, essential, and magical dimension of our being. In fact, it is not a separate reality, as traditional Western thought views it, but the cohesive force that unites our body, heart, and mind. It is not a ghost trapped somehow in the physical machinery of our body but the very essence of our being."
Chapter 1
It was Friday, the 29th of May, 1993.
A day that would forever alter the course of my life, everything was about to change drastically for me... I just didn't know it yet.
Messages scribbled on the walls, dark corridors, hidden passages. I breathed life again, for a few moments. The past months had been like that, stolen glimpses of a corporal form, with all its emotions, feelings, senses, the world in all its colours against the dull shades of sepia that permeated my own world.
I pushed the hair away from my eyes and carried on, to the entrance, after all I didn't have much time. It was sad to think that I was so weak that it had taken me this long to amass the control necessary to make a simple child bend to my will.
I had been... locked away for too long, far too long, my mind was not right anymore, I could feel the cracks slowly but inevitably showing in my actions. Madness was creeping in and clouding my judgment, madness which was rotted on fear, my fear to go back to that empty, broken, endless existence.
Letting that Basilisk out was the first mistake I could blame on this "madness", writing those messages was now that I look back, simply stupid, but perhaps also the cries of a desperate ghost to be "seen". Going through the entrance of the girls' bathroom on the second floor, was very obviously a grave mistake, that could cost me everything, but I was yet to make my biggest mistake that day.
"I suppose the real reason Ginny Weasley's like this is because she opened her heart and spilled all her secrets to an invisible stranger."
I remember it so clearly, decades had passed since my own time here, my own life, and yet here I stood again on borrowed time. Always on borrowed time. Hum, all my own time at Hogwarts had been like that after all, borrowed time, away from the Muggles at the orphanage, far away from weakness and pain, powerlessness.
From 1942, when I first opened this Chamber, till today when I open it again. To stand here again in 1993, is nothing short of a miracle. And I'd made careful study of those since my first coming into the magical world, I call them not miracles, but feats of magic. That which had allowed me to sustain my existence within the pages of my diary was after all nothing less than a unique feat of one of the most powerful, and darkest of magics.
That which I am about to attempt now can be identified only as the most extraordinary magic. My continued existence lies on the success of this feat and I commend my soul, or what is left of it to Magic itself, for the triumph of this ritual. May I live again, and through me, my life's work, and in my existence in this world, in this time, may Magic's glory prevail over death itself.
"Phoenix tears..." said Riddle quietly, staring at Harry's arm. "Of course... healing powers... I forgot..."
He looked into Harry's face. "But it makes no difference. In fact, I prefer it this way. Just you and me, Harry Potter... you and me..."
He raised the wand...
Then, in a rush of wings, Fawkes had soared back overhead and something fell into Harry's lap - the diary.
For a split second, both Harry and Riddle, wand still raised, stared at it. Then, without thinking, without considering, as though he had meant to do it all along, Harry seized the basilisk fang on the floor next to him and plunged it straight into the heart of the book.
At first, nothing happened. Riddle laughed abruptly.
"Fool!" he said, and looked down at himself. He was blurring at the edges, his essence drifting away like fog. Harry's eyes followed it. It was floating across the chamber all over it.
Riddle had ceased laughing, and was simply staring at his vanishing body.
As the fog seemed to began vanishing in the air around them, Riddle smirked sadistically and raised his wand. Harry gasped, he rolled over, strong again from Fawkes' tears. He clutched the diary to his chest and scrambled to get up.
"Avada Kedavra!" Riddle cried. There was a flash of green light; Harry's eyes widened in shock, their colour unearthly brighter from the green beam of light, he moved back, away from the spell... and slipped in the dirty water of the chamber. His head hit the floor with a sickening sound.
But then something happened that Riddle did not intend. The spell did not stop, it crossed the chamber, a haze of green light and it hit upon the most unlikely creature imaginable.
The last expression on the face of Tom Marvolo Riddle's 17 years old spirit was one of complete shock, before he dissolved into the air.
A strange calm seemed to settle on the Chamber... the calm before the storm.
Ginevra Weasley stirred.
A/N: Do you get where this is going?... if so tell me what you think in a review! :)