Over the years, (I am)Lord Voldemort, also known as Tom Marvolo Riddle, found out that he hadn't really known enough about Horcruxes, specifically about their effects over time, as he had originally thought.
He was not aware, for example, that simply by using Nagini's venom as a food source (prior to his returning to a more or less human-like form in the graveyard following the Tri-Wizard Tournament), would lead to where he was at now...
"Lord Voldemort aka Snakeman". By Merlin's hairy...! How could things have led to this?! And what could be done about it?
He really hadn't minded, at first, the snake-like features that he'd wound up with following his rebirth. They'd been rather useful in fact, particularly as an additional fear-factor. No, what had irked him, however, was the fact that the change had... continued.
He hadn't noticed, not at first. In fact, the change had been so slow that it took more than thirty years until his attention was brought to it's beginnings by his now-elderly, but no less still-beautiful, deranged and faithfully love-struck consort, Bella LeStrange-Riddle.
He recalled the horrific denouement only all too clearly. But had it been hubris or some unknown facet of magical "karma" at work that had led to the horror he already was and steadily becoming even more so as time went on?
Would he have done anything differently had he known the price he would pay?
(More than a quarter century ago...)
Yes, he had defeated Harry Potter quite easily, so much so that it had almost been laughable; giving him yet another reason that the Wizarding world had needed his - reforms - so badly.
Love. The "power of love" was to have been Lord Voldemort's downfall, as per one Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. (What hubris or arrogance had Albus' parents had to name their firstborn son as if he was one of the Muggle British Royal Family? Their second-born son, Aberforth, had only been given but the one, Daniel.) It was Voldemort's private opinion that the death of Albus's sister, (the Muggle-attacked and subsequently deranged, Ariana Dumbledore) had begun Albus' descent into, finally, actually transforming into the public face he'd assumed: an addled, old sentimental fool - rather like an over-aged relic American "hippie" from the 1960's!
In his delusional belief, Albus hadn't even killed the psycho- and sociopathic Grindelwald upon defeating him! Instead, Albus had quietly and privately magically confined Gellert behind multitudinous layers of wards; perhaps a nod towards a very warped Wizarding version of "Rapunzel" utilizing the defeated wizard's own stronghold, Nurmengard, in Germany; the last Dumbledore house-elf serving as jailer/caretaker. Rita Skeeter's sensational "unauthorized" biography of Dumbledore had provided Albus's motive in his handling of the love of his youth.
The old fool had made many mistakes by simply having had his hand in too many pies at once; the fatal error of leaving the prophesied "savior" of the Wizarding world to be raised by abusive/neglectful and rabidly magi-phobic Muggles was his worst; ending in the defeat of the "Light"; due to the smarmy old wizard's own misconstrued interpretation of the events of that Halloween's night.
Simply put, Harry Potter hadn't received his infamous scar due to his dead mother's sacrifice having somehow protected the toddler from the Killing Curse. No, Tom had merely stumbled, accidentally stepping on the dead woman's left arm as he stepped forward to do away with the boy, his spell then missing the boy and (by mere chance!) hitting the mirror on the wall behind the child instead. The spell impacted the mirror, shattering it, somehow the flying shards had become curse-embued and had then ricocheted around the room; one jaggedly slicing through the skin and flesh of young Harry's forehead and the majority impacting the wizard himself.
Of course, his physical body had disintegrated into ash instantly, thus releasing his earthbound soul. Earthbound due to the Horcruxes, of course, he was relieved to find.
He was therefore witness to the benighted Dumbledore's Disillusioned arrival on the scene; the wizard must have had some sort of alarm in place; where he next saw, barely a minute later, the arrival of soon-to-be notorious Sirius Black; his inherited, mentally susceptible mind going into full mental breakdown at seeing his only friends laying dead had sent him off to seek revenge on Pettigrew; completely forgetting his Godfatherly obligation to the little boy screaming in terror and pain; for vengeance sake.
After Black's departure, the evidence the Headmaster had then gathered of the magical signature of the Killing Curse was also completely misconstrued by Albus. Finally, Tom watched Dumbledore taking the injured, but still living, child back with him to Hogwarts.
Nigh on ten years later, he'd encountered the now eleven-year-old Harry at the school; having tricked the then-Dark Arts professor, Quirrel into becoming host to Tom's parasitical spirit. His overhearing of Albus speaking to the traitor, Snape; in the corridor outside the troll-damaged washroom, of the prophecy and the Sorceror's Stone; had set Tom on the biggest wild-goose chase of all time.
Infuriating! The years and expenses he'd then spent to retrieve the "full" prophecy; years and resources he could have used to far better ends; only to result in the almost disastrous debacle of the battle at the Ministry of Magic. The only positive result was, unbeknownst to either Albus or Harry, that he'd obtained Potter's memory of the entire, now-laughable, "prophecy" while attempting to possess the badly-damaged mind of the abused and ill-used teenager following the violent, yet brief, battle with Dumbledore in the Atrium of the Ministry.
Prophecy indeed!
Sybil Trelawney; recently widowed and having exhausted the meager means to support herself that had been left to her by her late Muggle husband; had banked on the "mystique" of her family's link by lineage to the infamously cursed Seer, Cassandra, in responding to the ad from the school in the Daily Prophet, seeking a new Divination Professor for Hogwarts. It had been mere happenstance that Severus Snape had chosen the Hogshead for a firewhiskey binge that same evening. The sherry-fueled "prophecy" had been swallowed, hook, line and sinker by the self-aggrandised Headmaster and resulted in more than a decade of theatrical and nonsensical "teaching" by the flamboyantly fraudulent frump.
Voldemort had then wished the taciturn, sallow man had chosen any other pub but that one!
Horcruxes. A now-admittedly poor choice to ensure his immortality, though, after discovering them - in that dusty, heavily Dark-imbued tome in the Hogwarts library - they'd seemed the perfect means at the time. He hadn't meant for Myrtle to die that day, accidentally stumbling in upon her weeping self as he was returning from the Chamber of Secrets with the basilisk (that he'd tamed by the use of Parseltongue and strong compelling spells to be his familiar). However, he capitalized on the serendipitous death of the odious girl, thus with only his diary at hand, Tom had made his first Horcrux. It worked! He'd felt the successful splintering off of the shard of his spirit and it's resultant occupancy in the book, just as that old book had taught!
He'd made his second using Salazar Slytherin's locket.
Firstly, using the Time-Turner he'd stolen from then-Headmaster Dippet's "hidden" Library, he'd gone back in time to when he'd still been an ignorant resident at the orphanage. Posing as a compassionate benefactor, he'd then organized an outing to the coast for the children. Next, using a de-aging potion, he'd swapped places with his younger self and then later used the orphaned brother and sister's deaths to split-off another spirit-shard into the Slytherin locket he'd stolen from his erstwhile employers.
Upon re-aging when the potion wore off, he'd "adopted" the siblings, thereby sealing their fate, whom he'd previously Imperioused before they all rejoined the rest of the orphans. (They eventually became the first Inferi "watchkeepers" that he'd installed in the magically Disillusioned cavern, adding others as the years went by).
Tom had then had an Imperioused Severus Snape brew the Lake of Living Death, as well as the insidious poisoned potion that filled the bowl of the pedestal Tom had then hidden the locket in, afterwards quickly Obliviating Snape; Tom having uncharacteristically forgotten to pay attention to the incoming tide; rapidly dragging the almost insensate then Potion-Apprentice out of the anti-Apparation bespelled cavern and sealing it and Port-Keying out in barely the Nick of time.
Obviously, the Obliviate had not been done correctly in Tom's haste; as Regulus Black, Severus's roommate at Riddle Manor, had pieced together Snape's sleeptalking mutterings and the agonized report of the Black Family's head house-elf, Kreacher, after the Dark Lord had "borrowed" the already elderly house-elf to test the caverns security measures. Due to his own denouement of what being a Death Eater truly meant, he'd set out to find and destroy the Horcrux; only to have to hastily order Kreacher to hide and destroy the real locket before Transfiguring a duplicate that he barely managed to drop into the magically refilled potion-basin; moments before the Dark Lord had Port-Keyed into the cavern himself.
Tom had discovered Regulus' treachery, but not the switch, punishing the traitorous scum by turning him into an Inferi, joining the others already languishing in the Lake.
Unbeknownst to his followers, Voldemort had often gone to their scenes of murder and torture - Disillusioned and Silenced - and subsequently, after transforming some body part of the victim(s) into a replica of the deceased so as to retain the individual magical signature, he'd transferred the real bodies, minus a finger or toe, to the Lake.
By the time of his "death", the Lake had held many hundreds of victims.
He'd made a habit, in an ironic jest, of using Founder's relics to as vessels for his Horcruxes: The Hufflepuff cup, the Ravenvclaw diadem, the Gaunt ring, the locket and diary as well as his familiar, Nagini, had all already been made Horcruxes before that dreadful Hallow's Eve. He'd intended, that night in Godric's Hollow, to find and use the Peverell Cloak in Potter's possession, as his last Horcrux, while serendipitously doing away with the Potter child; the possession of the Cloak having been the reason for choosing the Potter brat over the Longbottom's offspring, based upon that fake "prophecy".
Things had, subsequently, gone horribly awry.
Arising from "death" as a hybrid human-snake, later on, had been bad enough, though temporarily useful.
Having his soul-splinters forcibly reunite with that last portion which he'd retained had been excruciatingly painful, while usefully cluing him in to the breach of secrecy regarding his chosen method of immortality. Obviously, whoever had found out about them was seeking them out, one by one, in order to "destroy" the soul shards each contained.
Horcruxes didn't work that way.
Tenacious as each shard was to remain in their chosen receptacles, the destruction of the vessel did not destroy the shard itself; rather the shard would merely launch out and seek out the "living" soul within whatever physical or quasi-physical form Voldemort was residing in at that time.
Painfully.
The destruction of the diary had caused Tom to retreat, temporarily, into Nagini, thus regaining two shards.
The Gaunt ring's destruction brought yet another, but the synchophantically loyal, yet stupid Peter Pettigrew, had managed, for once, to do something right in enabling Voldemort to once again have an independent physical form prior to regaining that shard, lessening the agony. The murder of a non-descript Death Eater (Barron? Jeffries? What did it matter?) allowed Nagini's shard to be returned to her that night.
The locket, then the cup - these he retained upon reintegration, intending to make new Horcruxes after completing his victory over the deluded forces of the so-called "Light".
A/N This is a new story, thus far entitled "Volda da Hutt". I think it may wind up being "crack-fic", due to it's wildly AU/EWE premise, loosely based on two works of sci-fi fantasy-fiction; as imagery and title are referenced and/or borrowed from both "Star Wars" and "God Emperor of Dune". I know, I know. Trust me!
(Length is amorphous at this time, as being a chaptered fic still remains a possibility. I'm merely trusting this, admittedly, very strange muse at this point in time.)
