"He disappeared after leaving the school... traveled far and wide... sank so deeply into the Dark Arts, consorted with the very worst of our kind, underwent so many dangerous magical transformations, that when he resurfaced as Lord Voldemort, he was barely recognizable."
— Albus Dumbledore
vagary (noun) — an unpredictable instance, a wandering journey; a wild or unusual idea, desire, or action
vagrant (noun) — a person who wanders from place to place
Chapter I: The Hollow Tree
1946 — Tom begins his journey in a remote Albanian village, searching for Rowena Ravenclaw's lost diadem.
Chapter II: The Queen of Death
1950 — While tracking down a remnant of the past in New Orleans, Tom finds an unexpected ally in the city's reigning voodoo queen, who is hiding some dark secrets of her own.
Chapter III: The Great Serpent
1953 — Tom arrives in India for the Nag Panchami festival of snake worship, intending to collect a rare and potent venom for a spell—and uncovers a revelation in the process.
Chapter IV: The Foul One
1956 — Tom concludes his travels in Greece, seeking the counsel of the most powerful Seer in the world... and becomes consumed with discovering the fate of Herpo the Foul, creator of the first Basilisk and inventor of the Horcrux.
We are the hollow men.
Those who have crossed to death's other kingdom remember us.
Between the idea and the reality,
between the motion and the act,
falls the shadow.
— from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot
Lundër, Albania — 1946
A hollow tree in a forest in Albania.
As a pretty poetic picture, reflected Tom—staring out at one such forest from the window of a dim Albanian pub full of dim Albanian villagers—it was very enchanting, very evocative, very... Ravenclaw. As a practical set of directions, it was maddeningly useless.
Albania was positively overrun with trees.
"Can I get you another?"
Tom tore his gaze away from the window and glanced up. The barmaid was smiling at him, leaning over the table to better display her considerable cleavage—pretty, he supposed, for an Albanian peasant girl, but not nearly pretty enough for him to find appeal in any of the lewd images he saw dancing across her mind as she looked at him. She was intrigued by him, a handsome, polished stranger in her remote rural village full of coarse farmers and coarser cousins, and his seeming disinterest had only intensified her lust—she was accustomed to men finding her intriguing, too.
Withdrawing from her mind, Tom looked to his half-empty glass of raki—a vile Muggle alcohol that tasted more like a rancid Dark potion. "Why don't you sit down," he said in smooth Albanian, "and help me finish this one?"
Her eyes widened in pleased surprise. "Oh—but I'm working—"
"Sit," ordered Tom with a steel edge to his voice. The girl slid into the chair across from him immediately, looking rather flushed. "I'm unfamiliar with these parts," he told her, placing his hand over hers on the table with calculated nonchalance. "Perhaps you can make me more... familiar."
The barmaid's voice hitched a little in her throat as she breathed out, "Perhaps I can."
Tom trailed light fingers up her arm. "Lundër is a fascinating name for a village. It means 'hollow tree', does it not?"
"It does," she said faintly, fixated on his fingers flitting across her skin. "I don't know why."
"I would think," said Tom, tracing her collarbone now, "a lovely town like this—filled with such lovely people..." She let out a nervous little trill of a laugh. "...would have all sorts of charming local lore." He leaned closer. "No stories about the forest? No songs or ballads or legends about... hollow trees?" Helena Ravenclaw being chased across medieval Europe with that priceless crown on her head was bound to inspire some sort of folkloric legacy. It was as good a start as any.
The girl furrowed her brow, thinking—something Tom suspected she did not do often. "There is one," she said slowly. Before he could press further, the doors swung open with a rush of cool night air, and a hush swept over the pub at the entrance of two armed, uniformed men. Sigurimi. The Albanian secret police.
Tom fingered the wand concealed in his coat as they approached. The rest of the pub's patrons averted their eyes, flinching away in fear. By now, every third Albanian had been interrogated by the Sigurimi, or served time in one of their labor camps: the new post-war Communist regime was ruthlessly efficient at rooting out rebellion and dissent. It was admirable, really—having been in the country just three days, Tom already found himself taking notes.
The officers had locked in on him immediately upon entering: no doubt the Sigurimi's intelligence network had informed them of a visitor to the village. Considering he had been there less than half an hour, he was rather impressed. They moved at once to his table, ignoring the terrified barmaid shrinking back in her seat, and stepped somewhat closer than necessary—gloved hands resting on their guns. The fact that these Muggle men thought they could intimidate him—he who had lied to Albus Dumbledore's face and gotten away with it more times than he could count—was much less impressive. Tom wanted to laugh.
"You," the taller of the two was saying in a voice like gravel, "are not a citizen of this municipality."
It was not a question. "No," Tom said flatly, all the same.
"What is your business in Lundër?"
Tom gave a knife-edged smile. "Getting in touch with my roots."
The Sigurimi officer narrowed his eyes. "You are Albanian?"
Tom's smile sharpened. "Not exactly."
The officers exchanged a significant look. "Papers," the other barked, holding out a gloved hand. "Now."
Tom reached for the coat pocket not concealing his wand and retrieved his travel documents, handing them over with raised brows. They were entirely authentic, not even charmed: Antonin Dolohov had taken the assignment of procuring them very seriously, and his family's connections in Moscow's magical underworld were unparalleled.
The Sigurimi examined them with sharp scrutiny as Tom tapped his fingers on the table, impatient to be done with it. "Tomas Ledrov..."
Tom traced the rim of his raki, imagining shattering the glass and sending shards into their throats as he said, "I go by Tom." If he could not travel as Voldemort, then Tom Ledrov would do.
The first officer turned to the other and hissed, "Sovjetik." Soviet. "Apologies, comrade," he said to Tom in Russian, handing back the papers with a conciliatory shrug. "There have been unauthorized British travelers, inciting uprisings in the north. We thought perhaps—"
"No harm done," interrupted Tom, also in Russian. "I am not here to start a revolution." He would be returning to England for that.
The officers laughed as if he had made a marvelous joke. "That is fortunate for us," the taller one said lightly, clapping Tom on the shoulder in a way that made him want to murder. "You Bolsheviks could teach us a thing or two about those, eh?"
Tom opened his mouth to reply, then shut it tightly — he had noticed a man, staring at him from the shadows across the still and silent pub.
Gaunt and pale, with high, hollowed cheekbones and a shock of wild dark hair, his bloodshot eyes alone took in the scene—rather than pointedly averting his gaze or cringing back in fear like the rest of the pub's patrons, he was observing impassively, refusing to look away when Tom leveled him with a cool, penetrating stare. A quick attempt at Legilimency revealed this brazen stranger's mind to be closed off, unreadable: not protected by the mental walls of Occlumency, but curiously blank and... dead.
"Udači, Comrade Ledrov," the first officer was saying. Tom wrenched his gaze away from the stranger with effort and nodded curtly. When he looked back as they turned to go, the dark-haired man had stood, was heading toward the door to slip outside unnoticed behind the Sigurimi.
Tom shut his eyes tightly, then opened them again, cursing the raki, sure it had affected him more strongly than he'd thought—but no. He'd seen correctly.
The stranger had no shadow.
As soon as the doors had closed, the pub could breathe again. Sound returned in a rush of clinking glasses and nervous laughter, and the barmaid said breathlessly, "Tom." She leaned in, placing her hand, this time, over his. "A good name. It suits you."
Tom forced out another mechanical smile, wishing he could hurt her. "It was my father's name. He was a cruel, wicked man." Her face fell, and she seemed about to apologize—Tom removed his hand from hers and picked up the glass of raki. "My mother, though..." He took a sip and quirked a brow. "She was Albanian. Like you."
She giggled, revoltingly. "No wonder your Albanian is so good."
Tom gave a thin-lipped smile. His Albanian was so good due to months of focused study behind the counter of Borgin and Burkes. That his knack for languages appeared as effortless as any of his other acquired skills—Dolohov had been quite startled to find Tom one day addressing him in perfect Russian, with no preamble whatsoever—was a credit to one of his foremost personal philosophies: all actions and accomplishments must seem natural and executed with ease. All toil and practice and clever tricks must be concealed; kept private. When Tom did choose to act in public, it was always with the appearance of effortlessness, as if he could do much more... and he could, of course.
Another patron was waving her over impatiently—with a quick, flushed apology, the barmaid hurried to refill the drinks of a nearby table. Tom took advantage of her momentary absence to down the rest of the raki with a shudder. Waste not.
The Muggle girl hurried back over moments later, looking rueful. "I am sorry—I have to get back to work—"
Tom reached up to seize her by the jaw, ignoring her sharp intake of breath. He sent an image of the stranger without a shadow into her mind, compelling her to answer without questioning why. "Who is this man?"
She paled, trembling in his grip. "I do not know his name. We... We do not speak of him."
Tom tightened his grip as tears sprung to her eyes, feeling pleasantly warm from the alcohol and pleasantly stimulated from the exertion of pain—then gathered himself and released her, casting a Memory Charm under his breath to erase his fleeting harshness. Her features settled back into sweet docility as he snapped, "Why?"
"They say he is a djall." Tom furrowed his brow, trying to place the unfamiliar Albanian word—the closest he could translate it to English was devil. The barmaid blushed, seeming to take his puzzlement as judgment of her quaint peasant superstitions. "It's foolish, I know, but they say he is... not human."
Interesting.But more pressingly—"Sing me the folk song," he implored with a slow, suggestive smile, letting his gaze linger on her curves as he looked back up at her. "About the hollow tree."
She shook her head, blushing even redder in the dim light. "Singing is not among my talents."
Tom stood, encircling a hand around her waist as he brushed aside her hair and breathed into her ear, "I'll be the judge of your talents." He led her out the nearby back door while she was still too startled by his sudden interest to protest. "Sing," he commanded, leaning her up against the wall, and she drew a shaky breath, shivering in the cool night air.
"The wicked witch in the wood," she sang softly, in a light, lilting voice—not half-bad, really, though Tom's impatient expression did not change—"hides a stone beneath her hood." Now, Tom didn't bother to hide his fervent spark of interest. Seeing it, she sang with more surety, gaining confidence. "It will make you wise to look in her eyes, the wicked witch in the wood." Tom hardly dared breathe as she finished: "She'll curse you, too, from her hollow yew, the wicked witch in the wood."
Hollow yew. Tom's hand twitched toward the yew wand concealed in his coat, fingertips buzzing, Dark magic stirring to life underneath his skin. That moonlit forest on the outskirts of the village—a yew tree, a hollow yew tree—it was perfect, too perfect—
"My mother..." Tom jolted, reminded in an infuriating rush of the peasant girl's continued presence, still expectant of his time and attentions even after ceasing to be useful. "...sang it to me as a child," she was saying shyly, smiling up at him. "What do you think?"
"I think," said Tom, pulling her closer and entwining one hand in her hair, "that you..." He twisted sharply, pulling her head back as she gasped—preparing to snap her neck. "...are a terrible singer."
A sudden, obliterating explosion of pain.
Tom staggered to his knees, throwing the barmaid backward—her head hit the wall, sending her collapsing to the ground unconscious as Tom clutched at his chest. His heart.
A sharp, wooden—stake—was in his heart.
He wrenched it out immediately and seized his wand, casting a cauterizing charm to stop the bleeding and climbing quickly, if unsteadily, to his feet. The Killing Curse was on the tip of his tongue as he whirled around, but died in his throat upon seeing his attacker. Stunned, stricken, and... strange.
The man without a shadow.
"What are you?" The stranger's voice was soft, and shook, a little. He spoke Albanian smoothly and fluently, without Tom's careful foreign enunciations, but with a strange, somehow archaic accent.
"I could ask the same of you," Tom managed, grasping through his shirt at the chest wound that by all rights should have killed him. It was closed now, no longer bleeding. Shock and fleeting pain aside, he felt no different: his Horcruxes had done their duty, and the locket—thank Salazar—was unharmed.
He had tested various means of lethal injury on himself before, of course, but never stabbing. How incredibly crass. How... Muggle.
This man, though... this man did not seem to be a Muggle at all. He was bending down, picking up the bloodied wooden stake, looking back in understanding at Tom's still-outstretched wooden wand. "You are a warlock."
Tom brushed off his clothes, breathing rather less hard now. His heart had nearly stopped racing, but adrenaline was pumping madly through his blood alongside rushing currents of Dark magic, jolting like electricity against his nerves. Brushes with Death were always a shock to the system. "We prefer the term wizard these days."
The stranger's gaze was as sharp as his weapon. "Whatever the word, a stake to the heart should kill your kind as well as any vampire."
"Vampire?" Tom stared, taken entirely aback. "You—for Salazar's sake, you thought I was a vampire?" Filthy, night-bound creatures that required regular infusions of Muggle blood to reach some lesser approximation of immortality—how revoltingly insulting.
"You were going to kill the girl."
Tom smiled tightly. "Yes."
"Why?"
Why indeed? Tom looked down at the Muggle peasant, still unconscious in the dirt. Weak. Foolish. Pitiful. The Gaunt girl's face appeared unbidden in his mind, and when he spoke, his voice was hard and cold, like metal. Like the locket weighing heavy on his whole, uninjured chest. "She was unworthy of life."
"And are you a god," the stranger without a shadow said scornfully, "to decide who lives, who dies?"
Tom trailed his gaze down to the bloody stake with a pointed glare. "Are you?"
"Not a god, no." He gave a short, bitter laugh. "Perhaps a devil."
Tom raised a brow. "A djall." The stranger's mouth opened in surprise. He seemed about to speak, but Tom spoke faster: "Avada Kedavra!"
A brilliant, blinding flash of green—Tom's very favorite color—lit up the darkness.
When it cleared, the man without a shadow was still standing, shaking his head with a small, sad smile. "You are not the only one immune to Death."
"So it would seem," said Tom, lowering his wand and stepping closer. "That's not quite right, though is it?" The stranger's eyes glinted in the moonlight, but he did not speak, and did not step away. "Not quite immune, not quite immortal..." Tom tilted his head, taking in the stranger's bloodshot, yellowed eyes; his pale, waxen skin and hollowed, somehow ageless features. "Death has already taken you."
"Djall is not quite right, either," the deathless stranger said softly. "I am no ordinary devil. And you are no Albanian—" Tom smiled coldly. "—but perhaps you know the word lugat? A creature of darkness, a corpse who creates more corpses..."
"A vampire," finished Tom. He was unable to restrain a short laugh—the audacity. The absurdity. "You thought—you truly believed—that I could be one such as you?"
"A killer pale as Death with blood in his eyes and darkness in his very pores, toying with his prey in the shadows?" Tom blinked, and the vampire snorted. "I cannot imagine why I would think such a thing."
"I have a shadow," snapped Tom. He fingered his wand, considering possible curses. He had never met a vampire—who could say what uses he could find for one? A Dark creature that could not die, except by a stake to the heart...
"True vampires have shadows," the creature was saying with quiet patience. "I myself am only half vampire."
Tom looked up sharply. "A half-breed?" Who hunted true vampires, apparently. How charming.
"Of sorts. Now that we have each attempted to kill each other, perhaps introductions are in order. You are Tom Ledrov, or so you would have the Sigurimi believe. I am Trocar Dhampiraj." He extended an elegant, long-fingered hand.
Tom took it. Trocar Dhampiraj was cold as a corpse.
"A newly-turned lugat," he said now, releasing Tom's hand with a puzzled, searching expression, "may visit his widowed wife and can have children with her. A dhampir is the half-breed, as you say, that results. These undead children do not have a shadow, or a soul, but they have the ability to find, see and kill a lugat." Trocar's dead, dark eyes had gone distant, fixed on something Tom couldn't see. "True vampires can be destroyed by staking, but my kind cannot be destroyed at all. We are cursed to wander the world forever, never fully alive or dead. I have found my purpose in hunting and destroying as many of my fellow fiends as I can find. I began with my father, seven hundred and eighty-two years ago."
Tom studied him with new eyes, this ancient, bloody, soulless creature. "I, too, began with my father." A fellow fiend indeed. "You have remained in Albania, all those many years?"
"Borders," shrugged Trocar, "have always shifted with the centuries. I was born in a land called Arbanon, and I have roamed many lands since then."
The land of Arbanon, Helena had said, now called Albania.
"I am new to these lands," Tom said carefully, "and in need of a guide. Perhaps you can help me. Perhaps I could even help you."
Trocar smiled grimly. "Your quest, I suspect, has little to do with mine." He replaced the stake into a satchel at his side and turned to go, toward the dense, distant forest. "There is a lugat near this village. There are signs. You are not the predator I seek." He looked back at Tom, then down at the Muggle peasant girl, stirring slowly back to consciousness. "I suggest you leave your prey as bait for a different devil."
The shadowless creature sank back into the shadows, disappearing down the dark path leading toward the forest within moments.
Tom watched him go, then turned to see the barmaid struggling up, moaning, clutching her head. She shrank back in fear upon seeing Tom, seeming about to cry out.
"Shh," he soothed, moving closer—reaching out into the wounded coils of her mind, rearranging her memories. "That djall attacked you, didn't he?"
"Y-yes," she stammered out, eyes glazed over in Obliviated confusion. "He was—so fast—"
"You're safe now," purred Tom, tracing a finger down the throat he had so nearly snapped as her breath hitched in her throat. "I saved you."
"Thank you," breathed the girl. "Thank you, Tom."
"You'll repay me, won't you? When I call for you, you'll come." She nodded, breathless. "Good girl." He led her over to the door of the pub, smirking at her dishevelment—leaves in her hair, dirt on her clothes. "Go back inside now," he murmured in her ear, adding one final memory, "and tell them all we've had a very good time."
She obeyed with a flushed, dazed smile.
On returning to his room in the village inn, Tom released the protective curses he had placed on every square inch of the premises and went at once to the small, warded suitcase containing his diary Horcrux.
The ring was buried (and good riddance), the cup was hidden safely back in England, and Salazar's locket would remain only a locket until a worthy arrangement could be devised—the diary, however, was useful. He seized a quill.
The wicked witch in the wood, he wrote, hides a stone beneath her hood. It will make you wise to look in her eyes, the wicked witch in the wood. She'll curse you, too, from her hollow yew, the wicked witch in the wood.
All other ink sank away into the parchment, leaving only one word illuminated on a blank white page: yew.
The tree that lived longer than any other, growing for thousands upon thousands of years. The tree that had made his wand.
How many ancient yew trees filled that ancient forest?
Show me Helena, he wrote. That day in the forest, sixth year.
At once, the pages began to flutter, and the shabby furniture around him began to tilt and blur. Tom leaned forward into a whirl of shadow and color, with a soft woman's voice breathing in his ear: "You shouldn't be here, Tom."
He opened his eyes to find himself in the Forbidden Forest.
It was always less foreboding during the day. Sunlight slanted through the trees, casting warm light on the forest's sharp stones and thorns. Harmless birds chirped in the distance: the darker creatures that roamed these woods at night were still and silent in the light of day, though that did not make the forest any less forbidden to the students of Hogwarts.
The translucent ghost of Helena Ravenclaw floated by a gnarled oak with ancient runes carved into its wood, speaking to someone more invisible than she was. Tom, settling into the memory, leaned against a nearby tree and watched as a Disillusionment Charm melted away, revealing his own sixteen-year-old self in Slytherin robes: slightly lither, with shorter hair; perhaps somewhat less pale. The Gaunt stone glinted on his right ring finger.
"Shouldn't be here?" he was repeating. "Did you say that to Perpetua Fancourt, when she invented the lunascope over a series of illicit nighttime visits to the Astronomy Tower? Or perhaps to Ignatia Wildsmith, when she created Floo powder while experimenting with plants stolen from the Herbology greenhouses?" The usually austere lines of Helena's mouth twisted in amusement, and Tom's younger self shrugged with an easy smile. "Both, as I recall, were quite intrepid Ravenclaws."
"You, Tom Riddle, are no Ravenclaw." She studied him with a pensive, probing expression. "Which is all the more the pity for Ravenclaw House."
"The Baron does not deserve me?" Tom said in that same light and teasing tone—pretending not to notice as Helena's solemn features darkened.
"The Baron," she said with a knife-sharp edge to her voice, "deserves nothing."
"I can say with certainty, my Lady," Tom said quietly, "that he did not, at very least, deserve you."
If a ghost could have paled, Helena would have. "What has he told you?" she whispered, circling the oak.
Tom examined a rune carved into the tree with careful interest. "He does not often speak, but when he does, he speaks of a brilliant, beautiful woman—a woman far too good for him, a woman that he loved." He paused, seeming to hesitate a moment before continuing. "I have seen how he looks at you, and I—" He swallowed, casting his eyes downward in a convincing impression of sudden shyness. "I recognize that look."
Watching from a few feet away, a ghost himself within the memory, Tom nearly laughed.
Fortunately for Helena, ghosts could not blush, either. She shook her head as if to clear it, not meeting Tom's eyes. "And did he say," she asked in a hard, unsteady voice, "why he wears those chains? I presume he did not tell you why he is so Bloody."
"No, my Lady," said Tom, widening his eyes.
Helena gave a short, humorless laugh. "I thought not." She looked up at the trees, closing her eyes: for a moment, it seemed almost as though she was at peace. "I died in a forest," she said softly, "in the land of Arbanon, now called Albania." Tom stood very still, listening closely: she was speaking as if to herself, as if she had forgotten he was there. "It was much like this one, ancient and twisting, too dark and frightening for most to wander. I stayed there for years, in a grove near a stream... I built myself a cottage, then a life. Muggles came to me for help, for magic cures, for... wisdom." She opened her eyes, and Tom saw that they were filled with ghostly tears. "I was hiding, but it felt like freedom. I come here, sometimes, to remember."
"The Baron," Tom prompted, as if in dawning comprehension, "found you."
"Yes," said Helena, looking away. "He tracked me down, at my mother's urging. I took it, you see." When she met Tom's eyes again, her gaze was hard. "Her diadem." His memory self said nothing, but Tom, watching closely, could see his breath catch in his throat. "I was foolish, but so was my mother, to think I would ever return with him," Helena finished flatly. "The Baron killed me, then himself. For a thousand years he has stalked and haunted me." She let out a scornful scoff. "That is his idea of love."
"Desiring wisdom and freedom," said Tom, stepping forward with calculated sympathy and understanding in his eyes, "is not foolish or a crime."
"The diadem did not belong to me," she said in misery, "any more than I belonged to the Baron."
"And now it belongs to no one. With her fear that you would overshadow her in wisdom, your mother ensured that the wisdom of the diadem was lost forever." Helena's mouth opened slightly as she stared at Tom. He shook his head sadly. "How tragic that she, wise as she was, could not see that."
"It is not lost," breathed Helena. "Only hidden."
Tom tilted his head, looking for all the world only passingly curious. "In the forest?"
She nodded slowly, reaching out as if she could touch the oak tree—tracing the rune that Tom had been examining, seeming once again lost in thought. "The people of the sídhe—you would call them the Druids, now, I suppose—knew the language of trees."
She spread out her fingers, motioning for Tom to do the same—he did so, raising a brow. "Each section of each finger corresponds to a word or letter, which then corresponds to a particular tree that possesses certain properties. Oak, for instance, summons strength. Draw upon the power of the tree as you move your fingers—" Tom mimicked her as she twisted her hand into a fist and opened it again, feeling a buzzing in his fingertips. The rune began to glow. "—and you are spelling out your intent."
With a low rumble and a resounding crack, the oak tree split open at the rune.
"Spelling in the literal sense." Tom looked at its ancient wooden entrails, then down at his hand. The Horcrux ring felt searing hot around his finger. What could he do with other runes and symbols, other trees?
Helena nodded, wistful. "My mother taught me the old ways, when I was young."
"Will you teach me now," asked Tom, not bothering to hide the hunger in his voice, "and pass on her knowledge?"
Helena eyed him, almost smiling. "Perhaps."
From his place in the shadow of a different tree, Tom observed his younger self observing Helena as she demonstrated a dozen signs and signals, laughing the first real laugh he'd ever seen her laugh when an improperly drawn rune caught one of the branches on fire, sending Tom leaping out of the way as it fell, narrowly singing his robes.
"I expect this would be much less difficult," Tom said—again, that light, teasing tone, seizing on the fondness in her laughter—"if I were wearing a certain diadem."
Helena stared at him a moment, laughter dissolving into silence, then sighed. "Salazar had the same insatiable thirst for knowledge. A Ravenclaw is content to bask in cleverness. A Slytherin never feels he has enough to be content."
Tom couldn't argue with that.
Helena leaned in very close, almost touching his skin—he shivered, feeling a chill run over him. "A hollow tree in a forest in Albania," she breathed into his ear. "That, Tom Riddle, is the only riddle I will give you." She drifted through the ruptured tree, calling as she floated away into the woods, "If you find it, someday, clever boy..."
Tom sat up in a small, shabby room in an Albanian village inn, Helena's parting words written in stark black ink on the diary's parchment:
Bring it back.
The following day, he entered the forest at nightfall.
Seven years exploring the Forbidden Forest at his leisure—tracking down magical beasts for personal projects or potions; experimenting with new spells better suited to the outdoors than to the Chamber of Secrets; practicing curses on enemies or unsuspecting paramours—had made him fondly familiar with the terrain of a dark wood. Helena had been right: these knotted, twisted trees felt familiar in their unfamiliarity; every sinister shadow and ominous sound felt more like home. Whatever Dark creatures lurked here, they were not as Dark as Tom.
He went over the folk song as he slashed his wand through the thorny underbrush, making as much noise as possible.
The wicked witch in the wood hides a stone beneath her hood.
Helena Ravenclaw, playing the fairytale witch out of a cottage in these woods—
It will make you wise, to look in her eyes, the wicked witch in the wood.
—putting the ancient power of that diadem to use solving the mundane problems of Muggle villagers. Such freedom, Tom thought in disdain.
She'll curse you, too, from her hollow yew, the wicked witch in the wood.
No medieval witch was a stranger to Dark magic: in the days of the Founders, most spells had yet to be categorized or formalized into standard domestic Latin. Rowena Ravenclaw, a descendent of Druids, would have taught her daughter all manner of raw, unfettered magic—tree languages, Tom knew, were only a taste of what Helena must know. Wherever she had hidden the diadem, it would be easier to find than to take.
The sound of crunching twigs behind him made him stop, and smile.
By the time the creature attacked from behind—baring sharp, bloody teeth—Tom had already silently Disapparated and re-Apparated behind it, restraining it with a lazy Incarcarous. The thwarted vampire thrashed wildly in its bonds, screaming and cursing in Albanian: Tom hit it with a Silencing Spell, and a Stupefy for good measure.
"Trocar," he called to the trees, "come collect your... predator."
A beat—perhaps two—and the dhampir stepped out from the shadows, bloodshot eyes gone wide.
Tom lifted his brows in amusement. "I would say I make better bait than the barmaid, wouldn't you?" Trocar snorted, not dignifying that with a reply. Kneeling quickly over the vampire, he raised that accursed stake—"Wait," snapped Tom.
Trocar froze, watching warily as Tom knelt down beside him and Conjured an empty glass vial. A Slicing Spell to the throat filled it with blood in an instant: Tom pocketed the vial, and stood. "Very well," he said with a dismissive wave. "You may proceed."
Within moments, the vampire was dust.
Trocar stood as well when it was done, at eye level with Tom. "You knew I was following."
"Naturally," said Tom.
"You lured the lugat to you, knowing it would attack."
"Naturally," said Tom.
"And now that you have felled my prey, you think that I will be your guide." Tom smirked, and Trocar shook his head, starting toward the trees again—stopping abruptly when the branches flung themselves toward him and around him, trapping him in place.
"I am seeking a grove, near a stream," Tom said lightly, lowering the hand simmering with magic. "Perhaps you can show me the way."
Trocar met his eyes, resigned. "Perhaps I can," he said at last, in accented English.
Tom smiled.
As he allowed himself to be led deeper into the woods with his wand lighting the way, Tom began to see that there was more to this foreign forest than he had suspected in his initial survey. Worn, burnt-out candles—the remnants, he assumed, of forgotten pagan rituals—could be found in many of the whispering trees, and he could have sworn there were strange, floating lights visible just through the branches, always disappearing just as he noticed them.
Most eerily of all—although the vampire that had been following him was gone, and the half-vampire that had been following it was at his side—and although repeated silent castings of Homenum Revelio revealed no one else nearby—Tom could still not shake the feeling of being watched.
"There are places," Trocar said quietly, as if he could hear Tom's unsettled thoughts, "that are liminal, between the borders and boundaries of worlds. The place you are seeking is one of them: a circle deep within these woods where nothing grows, and strange apparitions can be seen." Helena's lost forest grove. "As we near it, you will feel it."
Tom tightened his grip on the yew wand. "Your English," he said dryly, "is quite good."
Trocar spared him a sidelong glance. "I have had, shall we say, many years of study."
"What gave me away?" asked Tom. The sound of their voices in the forest made it feel less threatening, somehow—reminded him that they were, after all, two immortals.
"Salazar," answered Trocar, seeming satisfied as Tom looked to him sharply. "For Salazar's sake, you said. I have known none but English warlocks to swear by Salazar."
"How many English warlocks have you known?" Seven hundred and eighty-two years ago was a hundred years too late to have known the Founders (or Helena and the Baron, for that matter; pity, that)—but how touching, for Salazar's name to have spread so widely within a century of his death.
"You," said Trocar, neatly side-stepping the question, "are the most interesting by far."
Before Tom could reply, Trocar raised a hand to stop him, pointing to a rusted concrete grate just visible beneath the leaves in front of them when Tom shone his Lumos-lit wand on the ground: a bunker. "Not all mortals," he said in response to Tom's questioning look, "fear this forest. Some have very different fears."
No doubt.
"The Sigurimi seemed not to see you, in the pub," said Tom, remembering the way Trocar had slipped behind them like a shadow. "How do you do it, without magic?"
"I can avoid being seen by mortals, if I wish," was all he said, "and even I do not wish to be seen by them." Tom imagined, for a moment, what he could do with an army of Trocars: undead warriors that could not die, able to hide themselves at will. "If they discover you are English," his deathless guide was saying now, stepping around the bunker entrance and continuing through the woods, "they will try to kill you."
"Yes," Tom said archly, "they're very good at killing. Fortunately, so am I."
"They are better. I have lived eight hundred years, and never have I seen such a war as was just won. Such death… such horror… such desolation. Never did I think men capable…"
"More than men waged that war." Grindelwald had raised plenty of hell in wizarding Europe before Dumbledore had cut him down.
"Yes," Trocar nodded. "Your kind, too, killing in the shadows. Your kind kills cleaner, I will give you that. But mortals… they kill better."
Tom considered this with the memory of London air raid sirens ringing in his ears, echoing around a damp, cold basement—the closest thing Wool's Orphanage had to a bomb shelter. He had swallowed his pride and requested to be allowed to stay at Hogwarts over the summer in his fifth year, when the Blitz was at its worst—Dippet would have let him, but Dumbledore, predictably, had intervened. (In a way, he had finally made his first Horcrux that summer out of spite.) The summer before his final year at Hogwarts, British Army recruiters had arrived unannounced at the orphanage, leaving with half a dozen eager new conscripts. All were dead within the year. "Next year, lad," they'd said to Tom—a threat disguised as a promise.
Hitler, the man who had commanded the Blitz, the Muggle who had slaughtered millions of his fellow Muggles on a scale that Grindelwald could only dream of, was rumored to be part Jew. Tom knew in his bones it was true, and suspected Trocar knew it, too: hatred fostered from a distance was nowhere near as powerful as hatred festered from within.
No Pureblood could hate Muggles as viscerally, as intimately as the half-blood who lived among them at their darkest hour, who might have been collateral in their war if he had not been the only seventeen-year-old boy in the world with Horcruxes.
It had never come to that, of course: by the time Tom was old enough to be conscripted, Hitler had fallen along with Grindelwald. From what Tom had been able to tell, the Muggle weapon that had finally ended the war was in a new league of annihilation, beyond what anyone—magic or Muggle alike—could comprehend. Splitting the atom, just as Tom had split his soul—the Muggles' own Darkest Art.
What good were wands against a bomb that could level a city?
He would restrain them before it came to that—Muggles, with their unparalleled taste for terror, their unquenchable thirst for destruction. He would restrain them, and contain them… but he would learn from them, too.
"I suppose," he said aloud, "we are agreed on that point."
Neither of them spoke further, for they had arrived at a clearing in the forest.
One might even call it—as Godric did, in naming his little village by the woods—a hollow.
Enormous, looming trees, the largest and surely most ancient he'd seen yet, encircled a starlit expanse of leaves and overgrown greens where a witch's cottage had once stood. The faint bubbling of a brook—a stream, Helena had said—was audible nearby. There was, Tom noted instantly, an abundance of yews. Many of the trunks were burnt—more rituals—but how many of them were hollow?
Tom stepped into the center of the clearing and removed the vial of vampire blood from his pocket, feeling Trocar's piercing dead stare on him as he did.
"You must know, knowing blood as you do," Tom told him with a slight, mocking bow, "that blood is the carrier of magic." Uncorking the vial, he turned in a slow, steady circle, dripping the blood out drop by careful drop and watching as it sank into the forest floor.
"Vampires have no magic," said Trocar, expression unreadable.
"Don't they?" Tom sheathed his wand and lowered himself to his knees, placing both palms flat on the cool, damp ground. "The force that animates a corpse to life again, that drives it to drain the life force of the living—is that not magic?" Tom closed his eyes. When he opened them again, a glowing crimson circle had surrounded him where the blood had seeped into the dirt.
Trocar stepped back, eyes wide, as red, smoldering streaks beneath the ground stretched out vein-like from the circle and crawled up each of the yew trees. One by one, they lit up from within, then dimmed again: no Dark magic lay inside them. Until finally, with a final searching crimson thread, one of the yews on the outskirts of the clearing lit up brighter than the others, then continued pulsating—as though it had a secret, beating heart.
Tom's own heart was pounding. He checked the time with a watch in his coat—a quarter of an hour to midnight, just as planned—then stood and stepped forward, breaking the fading circle, each step feeling heavy with the inevitability of fate.
"I was a child when I unlocked the mysteries of Death," he heard himself say, approaching the glowing red yew. Trocar was silent, watching intently as Tom raised the yew wand and carved an ancient sigil into the yew tree. "Death was slinking all around me, following me, hovering in the air beside me like a levitating shroud. I sensed that no matter how I prepared my body or protected my mind, Death would eventually come for me, would come for everything. I would not—could not—accept that. Life was poisoned for me. The shroud was strangling me, wrapping itself tighter around me with every passing day." He shuddered involuntarily. Even now, the sensation of Death so close by for sixteen years—through the war, through his early experiments, through how many scrapes and illnesses and accidents and duels—was sharp and vivid in his memory. Even now, he knew, Death lingered just beyond his Horcrux shields, hating to be kept at bay.
"I couldn't understand," he continued after a steadying moment, now placing the wand over his wrist, "why those around me did not abandon everything else—all diversions, all distractions—and devote their every waking moment to defeating Death. And then I realized…" He lowered the wand with the same silent spell that had cut open the vampire's throat: the veins in his wrist burst open in the shape of the rune he had carved into the wood: an ancient symbol of death. "The only way to defeat Death," he finished, ignoring the pain, ignoring the life rushing out in a mad, red gush from his body, "is to become a dealer of Death. To devour it before being devoured."
"Only the dead are true dealers of Death," Trocar said softly from behind him, fixated on the blood pouring from Tom's skin. "Life should produce more life."
Tom did not reply. Lifting his bleeding wrist to the tree, he pressed it against the matching death rune.
Dark magic was old magic, and blood magic was oldest. The most sacred sigils, the most powerful portals, the strongest seals, required a sacrifice—required blood.
Rowena Ravenclaw had known it. Her daughter had known it, too.
As his blood drained into the wood, Tom could feel the tree's bloody pulsations like the palpitating of his own heart. Dizzily—rapidly growing faint—he raised his other hand and performed the sign of the yew.
Yew summons death, Helena's ghost had told him in a brighter, now faraway forest, but it summons life as well. If it can be said to stand for anything, it stands for resurrection.
The tree split open at the rune.
Inside, where she had used her last breaths of life to lock herself within the yew's dark, hollow depths for a millennium, the skeleton of Helena Ravenclaw grinned back at him—and on her rotting yellowed skull sat a glittering, untarnished sapphire diadem.
Before Tom could move or speak, he was dragged to the ground, with Trocar Dhampiraj sinking sharp teeth into his arm.
Tom tried and failed to throw him off, weakened by the blood loss, his vision dotted with sapphires. "You cannot kill me," he gasped out, the trees and stars above him seeming to spin in a dizzying whirl. Trocar was clearly past caring what he could or could not do to him—or, perhaps, past hearing. His bloodshot eyes were crazed and feral; his mouth locked onto Tom's wound as if sealed to it by magic. Tom wondered dimly, fading fast, if he would have enough blood left inside him to make the Horcrux.
"Tom!"
He heard the Muggle girl's scream as if from very far away; vaguely saw the owl she had followed into the forest fly away as she raced into the clearing. Meet me at midnight, he had written her earlier that day. This owl will know where to find me.
Trocar had released him at last, startled out of his blood-crazed stupor by her frightened scream. "What have you done," he choked out to Tom, rolling away and retching blood onto the forest floor. Tom felt his strength starting to return now that he was no longer being forcibly exsanguinated—with concentrated effort, he pressed his fingers to the now-bloodless wound and murmured a cauterizing charm. The rune, he was certain, would scar.
"Tom," the barmaid was sobbing, "oh, Tom."
He beckoned her closer, and she came—glancing fearfully at Trocar, still on the ground several feet away. "You saved me," he whispered, pulling her down toward him, "as I saved you." The peasant girl smiled through tears as he brushed aside her curls to cup her tear-stained cheek with his bloody left hand. "Would you like your reward?"
Without waiting for a reply, he kissed her. She moaned against him in pleased surprise as he parted her lips with his tongue—then screamed into his mouth when he bit down upon hers. He held fast as she struggled, sucking and swallowing her blood as Trocar had taken his own; hurrying along the Horcrux healing process, feeling stronger by the second. She tasted sweeter than his father, or the Warren girl, or even Hepzibah—killing her, he could already tell, would be a pleasure.
Feeling suitably restored, he shoved her aside and climbed to his feet, reaching at last for the diadem. It was larger than he had imagined, and heavier—weighted with millennia of wisdom. It would soon be weighed down with something even heavier than that: a piece of his soul.
Helena's bones had crumbled to dust as soon as he'd taken it. Ignoring the weeping girl for now, Tom turned to Trocar, feeling sudden inspiration. Perhaps it was the diadem, already sparking fresh genius within him.
"Your kind," he said, "cannot be destroyed, is that right?" Trocar glared up at him in revulsion, wiping blood away from his mouth. Tom raised his free, unbloodied right hand.
Wandless magic caught Trocar up into the air—Tom threw him into the recently vacated yew. Vines sprung up to trap him in place: one covered his mouth and muffled his screams, leaving his horrified bloodshot eyes visible as he struggled fruitlessly to free himself.
"Enjoy eternity, Trocar," Tom said softly.
The hollow yew tree sealed itself shut again, looking no different than it had looked when he had found it—but for a small, carved rune on its trunk.
In the fresh, fraught silence of the forest, Tom set down the diadem and unsheathed his wand, finally ready to create his fourth Horcrux.
"Ju jeni djalli vërtetë," his impending victim spat out in slurred Albanian, hardly able to speak with her wounded tongue. You are the true devil.
"That," he agreed with a sharp, bloody smile, "is exactly right."
NOTES
If Tom returned to England in 1956 (the year Dumbledore was made Headmaster of Hogwarts) following an approximate decade spent abroad, it can be assumed that 1946—after a year spent working at Borgin and Burkes post-graduation and immediately after the murder of Hepzibah Smith—would have been the earliest time he could have stolen away to Albania to retrieve the diadem. The post-war Albanian government really did disallow British travelers in 1946, so Tom certainly picked an interesting time to visit...
The precise dates of the Hogwarts founders are ambiguous in canon, but if the Bloody Baron was in fact a baron, it can be inferred that he lived later than 1066, when William the Conqueror introduced the noble rank of baron to England. At that time in the Middle Ages, what is now Albania was an autonomous principality within the Byzantine Empire known as Arbanon.
All aspects of vampirism discussed or mentioned here are grounded in real-life elements of Albanian folklore without contradicting anything we have been told about vampires in the Potterverse. "Trocar" was the name of a discarded character that J.K. Rowling originally intended to be a vampire teacher at Hogwarts, while "Dhampiraj" is a real Albanian surname originating from the word dhampir—the folkloric half-breed that results from a human mating with a vampire.
Djall is the Albanian god of youth, later demonized by Christianity to refer to Satan and used as a synonym for any demon or devil.
Lundër is a real Albanian village whose name derives from the Old Norse lundr, originally meaning a boat made from a hollow tree trunk.
The murder used to turn the diadem into a Horcrux was described by Rowling only as "an Albanian peasant".
The Gaelic Druids really did have a secret tree language known as Ogham, in which the names of various trees can be ascribed to individual letters and hand signals, used for cryptic ritual purposes.
Tom Ledrov is, of course, an anagram for Voldemort.