"A machine does not improvise well because you cannot program a fear of death. Our survival instinct is our greatest source of inspiration."-Interstellar
No parent should have to witness the death of their child. Neither should they witness their grandchild commit murder. On January 1st, 1943, I watched my son die at the hand of my grandson.
Tom Riddle came to the door dressed as any young man should—despite the war, in slacks and sweater and tie. He was tall, and pale, hair close-cropped on the sides and left long on the top. He looked maintained. He looked like his father.
It was his smile, though, that gave it away. Mouth open, teeth bared, looking upward through his eyebrows; he immobilized us—my son, my wife, and I, in the sitting room, in our upholstered chairs, by the fire. We'd thought to offer him tea.
"You abandoned my mother," he said, pacing the length of the room, his footfalls heavy on the carpet. "Your filthy blood made me and killed her." He reared, as if to spit at my son's feet, but schooled himself, back to his grin.
"She didn't have to. Die, I mean," he said, stopping, holding his wand, I've come to understand, just below his lips, clasped in his hands. "She was weak. Just like you are weak. All of you." I recognized, then, the ring on his finger. The Gaunt family ring—the deformed mongrels who skulked in the village below the manor. The ones who'd 'taken in' my son. This was the evidence.
"First, a mercy, for a weakling like my mother," he said. A flash of green light, and I watched the life leave my beloved's eyes. I wanted to cry out to her, to Mary, but my mouth would not move and my hands would not grasp. For a moment, I believed it to be a night-terror, from which I would awaken, from which I would be saved.
"Second, a punishment, for giving, and for taking." A flick of his wand and a spray of blood ruined the carpet, my son's genitals a tangled mess—like he'd sat on a German grenade. My son had never seen the trenches, nor the Nazis.
"Third, a trade. My father's life for mine," he said, removing the Gaunt ring, cradling it to the floor and drawing a mark around it. A triangle, a line, a circle, in my son's blood. He drew a line, from the bottom of my son's legs to the top of his head, bisecting him with a magic that seemed to draw the light from the room and lock it somewhere beyond. "Open sesame," he said, jamming his wand into the wound and drawing out with it something broken and intangible. He drew it into the circle, and the circle, too, began to seep the light from the room.
"Fourth, from me," he said, drawing the same symbol from the floor onto his forehead. He touched his wand to it and screamed, tearing something from within. Tom Riddle placed it into the Gaunt ring.
"Fifth, making good," he said, and that same green light from before took my son from me.
"Sixth," he said, "for peace of mind," and placed the ring back upon his finger, washing away any traces of the ritual with a slash of his wand.
"And seventh, because I've always been superstitious," he grinned again, "and because I've never liked loose ends."
He turned the green light on me, and the last Tom Riddle died.
Lord Voldemort was born.