AN: Hey everyone, quick interlude and a sneak peek into my version of Voldemort before I start to dive into the Chamber of Secrets and other escalations. I'd like to write him as a full-fledged character, and a powerful and cunning enemy. That he doesn't get such treatment in canon can only be excused by horcruxes driving him insane, but that's still a bad excuse. Don't worry - he's definitely not right in the head, but he won't be murderous to the point of stupid.
I also don't like the idea that creating so many horcruxes drove him insane. If the main soul shard in his body is chained to the mortal plane by each individual horcrux, then they must be connected on some level. Otherwise killing him would result in the main piece of soul dying off or merging with another piece, while the remaining horcruxes just float around. That this doesn't happen implies that they are connected as a whole soul on some level even though it remains in pieces. It is the physical and metaphysical distance between them that eats away at his humanity, not the fact that only part of the soul remains. As such he should only be a bit batshit, not absolutely and nonsensically crazy. Furthermore, I'll eventually provide an alternate explanation for why he looks like a snake (some of it will still be due to horcruxes, but not everything. We won't get to that in this chapter, but eventually).
Also, Tom Riddle's timeline is getting some minor adjustments from canon to ensure my timeline goes how I want it. I have Riddle starting Hogwarts in Fall '37 instead of a year later like he originally did. This way he's graduated and employed by 1945 (you'll see why this matters). In real life the Battle of Britain and the Blitz seem to have happened all throughout the Hogwarts year, starting and ending right about the same time classes would have. He might have seen the very beginning of it, but that's it. I adjusted it to happen a couple months earlier, starting during the summer holidays. This is fiction, I can do whatever I want (*cue evil laughter*).
This chapter gets pretty graphic. Just FYI and a heads up. Flashbacks from the WWII-era are generally not going to be happy business.
Completely random, the Netflix show the first quote below comes from is superb and wildly mind-bending, highly recommend a binge. It's in German, but hey, that's what subtitles are for.
"Man is a strange creature. All his actions are motivated by desire, his character forged by pain.
As much as he may try to suppress that pain, to repress his desire, he cannot free himself from the eternal servitude to his feelings.
For as long as the storm rages within him, he cannot find peace.
Not in life, not in death.
And so he will do what he must, day in, day out.
The pain is his vessel, desire his compass. It is all that man is capable of."
- Baran bo Odar & Jantje Friese, DARK
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CH - Interlude - Dark Stars Beneath Sand
It had been decades since he'd felt truly afraid. He had begun to forget what it felt like. Here, standing in a desert thousands of miles away from his foes, in a place long forgotten by the races of earth, he remembered.
The man who had once been Tom Riddle remembered how it felt to die. He recalled panic. His stomach dropping out from under him as he perceived the magic surrounding the toddler. Mouth opening in a scream his own Killing Curse flew toward him. The pain, not so much real as it was metaphysical. Obliteration, piece by piece, his very being crushed into nothing. Then there was only the aftermath, empty and aimless, no more than a wraith adrift amongst dust and ashes and debris.
That was not fear. His mind settled, though his body was nonexistent. His horcruxes had done their work admirably, he knew. What would have otherwise become a pitiful end was simply a massive hiatus in his plans. Logically, he could not have died. Though his new existence was barely a half-life, and while there remained a niggling dread that he would be stuck in this form forever, he would ensure his own return. He was still Lord Voldemort. That single moment of horrible alarm had been a reaction to the unforeseen, the result of his own arrogance, the inability to grasp the concept of his own defeat. Foolish and pathetic.
Arrogance. Even as the weak orphan boy Tom, he had recognized his hubris, and foolishly thought it justified. Dumbledore had been the first to bring it in check, via the literally fiery display of strength that had come alongside his Hogwarts letter. That day he had first learnt fear. The truth became clear. His pride, while valuable, was worth nothing to a society of magic-users who all knew more than he did.
Fear, Tom Riddle discovered, was not equivalent to panic, or nervousness, or anxiety. It did not come one second and fade away in the next. Rather, it was constant in its attempts to eat away at the mind. To him, fear was an evaluation, a warning sign of danger he had no power over. He did his research, scoured the limits of magic, pondered and looked for the weaknesses and strengths of wizards. But having seen Dumbledore and the magic he wielded, even after his thorough search he understood that he was not strong enough, not yet. And therein lay his fear: that until he held enough power, he would be weak, vulnerable, and alone, in a world where many of the inhabitants would have power over him. Just like the muggles in the orphanage.
Tom Riddle did not learn to fear muggles until years later, not until August of 1940. He hated them already, of course. He had for as long as he could remember, before he ever knew what set him apart from them. He'd known of the war quite early. Whether muggle or wizard, everyone did. But when the older boys at Wool's Orphanage scorned the Nazi's, and talked about joining up with the army to "fuck over those Kraut bastards," he did not think of infantries and planes and tanks and ships. He thought of Grindelwald, playing Hitler like a puppeteer. He was reminded of the pictures in the Prophet, of raids brought forth by the Dark Alliance, the conglomerate of wizards and vampires and giants and other creatures whose sphere of influence grew unchecked. The muggle war existed only in terms of how it was controlled by the magicals, Tom had thought. But he was wrong, and after that summer he would never think of the muggles in the same way ever again…
...because he remembered. He could still see the clouds in the sky as he sat in the grass and enjoyed the balmy late-afternoon, his only escape from the hell that was the orphanage. But it came from nowhere. The wailing sound pierced the heavens from all sides, an artificial mourning haunt, rising and falling as it carried on. Relentless. The warning sirens screamed for nearly a whole minute, and Tom sat up, heart pumping with some elusive emotion coursing through his veins, his ears straining and eyes scanning for a threat. The boys at the orphanage were all back home. He'd snuck out to get space for himself. Perhaps this has something to do with the war, he wondered.
There was no further warning. Only a minute or two later, humming began to rise in his ears. A low-droning whine of unfamiliar machinery. Slowly it began to grow, and grow. The confusion was beginning to become panic. His heart pounded in time with the fast steps of his feet, as he skirted through the streets and alleys. Muggles hurried past him, some crying and yelling out, others stone-faced and worried, most running somewhere they believed was safe, scurrying like rats from poison.
Then he heard howling shrieks, the screeching of winds. Tom Marvolo Riddle looked towards the skies, and found fear.
The planes were a swarm, looking like a horde of Doxies from so far below. Bombs fell from their bellies in long streams, like droplets of poison from a leaking distillation column. Bellowing engines roared in mechanized apathy as bomber-escorts swung forward, battling the RAF above the skies of London. He heard it in the not-so-far-away distance, the shuddering of the earth as the explosions blasted the city to smithereens. He ran then, ran ran ran even though he knew there was no outrunning this fear.
Am I going to die here...pathetic and scrabbling for my life?
The whistling of bombs dropping was shrill like the screams of the Beansídhe, an omen of death surrounding him on all sides for miles. The first near-hit shocked him, and he stopped dead as he watched the truck get blasted into shrapnel, tearing apart the street and the nearby shops. His ears rang as buildings rumbled and the street lay awash with burning cars. No longer could he discern between the pleas of the muggles and sounds of falling skies. His knees and palms bled, scratched and coated with dust. He no longer stopped when the bombs hit the ground, scrabbling over crushed bricks and flecks of glass and blackened wood and stone.
But there was always the sounds.
The humming of the planes.
The screams of falling bombs.
louder…
Louder…
Louder…
Then he felt something slam into his back with tremendous force, all the air leaving his lungs in a single swoop. He felt his feet rise off the ground, his body fling forward…
And the darkness swallowed his fear...
He'd awoken some time later that day with his face pressed against asphalt, bruised and broken, his back peppered with shards of nearly-molten brick. He remembered not being able to hear anything, just absorbing the ringing pain that jolted through his ears and skull with every step. As if Mrs. Cole had decided to box his ears with her cane instead of her palms.
He'd scrambled to his knees, then to his feet, and then began to walk, trying in vain to remember which way to go. It took hours. He came across many people, screaming and sobbing and moaning. A man had tried to call to him, pleading for help, but he had only seen the man's tears. Tom's broken ears did not aid him, but his eyes refused to let go. He'd gritted his teeth and acquiesced, pushing magic into his arms as he lifted wooden beams to help the muggle's trapped son. To this day he could smell the burnt flesh of the boy's legs.
It would probably shock Albus Dumbledore if the bearded codger learned that Tom Riddle's first human kill had not been made out of malice or anger or sadism, but mercy. He found her in the middle of the road, crawling between crushed and burning vehicles and fiery craters in the pitch. She crawled helplessly, her legs mangled and twisted, burned to a fused mass of red and black. A sickening white bone stuck out from one, leaving a trail of smeared, almost sizzling blood, as she wheezed incoherent keening gurgles of pain and sorrow. Even when he knelt beside her, trying to get her to stop, trying to stop himself from shaking, and trying to set her leg, she still crawled forward with her eyes not seeing him at all. It was only then that he saw what she wanted.
The shredded mass of what had once been a stroller, perhaps, tilted on its side, the bundle so utterly mangled he couldn't tell if it had once been a boy or girl.
It took him seven attempts before he successfully managed to cast Avada Kedavra, to put her out of her misery. Even without his wand, it had never been so difficult before.
The bint Cole had thought him dead, but he still returned that night, unkempt with blood and ash smeared all over him. She didn't say a word, merely glared at him in disgust, her eyes saying you should have stayed out there and burned, like the little devilspawn you are. And perhaps she was right. Maybe he should have died that day.
In a way, he had. He learned from his fear. Tom Riddle was dead. The seed that became Lord Voldemort was planted, ready to reach for the skies.
It would take time for the idea to truly take shape, for hatred and fear to become plans and thoughts. The elite pureblood idiots would pave the path to power, he'd decided. It was only fair that their penance for degrading him as "mudblood" would be to turn that hatred upon the muggles they so despised, if for all the wrong reasons. So foolish and insulated they were, flinging around their Galleons, spitting on the muggles simply because they didn't have magic, hating muggleborns for "stealing" magic.
Grindelwald too was a fool to believe that the muggles should learn the truth about the place they deserved in the world. To reveal magic was to reveal to muggles the true enemy of their existence, to declare war between two species who would one day be locked in mortal combat. The muggles would innovate and eventually crush magic, unless he could match them, unless one day his strength would be enough to grind them to gory paste under his feet.
Lord Voldemort knew better. The non-magicals of the world needed to be brought to heel, not because they were little more than livestock, but because they had learned what wizards had not: to make up for their lack of gifts. Magical humans were complacent fools, but muggles were not. They fought and competed and killed each other with unfathomable relish, over grabs for land and power on a far grander scale than wizards. Each believed the outsiders to be their enemy, furiously waging battle over stupid things. If they could do this much harm to each other without true pain of conscience, what would they do to magic? Witch burnings were a joke compared to what they would face.
Muggles were rabble. The most disgusting creatures in existence, far more so than himself. They destroyed nations with gusto and left population after population in the dark wake of genocide, scorning their own kind. They squabbled as if they were dragons amongst men. For muggles, the quest for power was eternal, but came not from willpower and intent, but instead from the exploitation of others and the natural world around them. He had learnt from their trade in some ways. Despite that power and knowledge, they still knew nothing of the great mysteries of the world around them. Only "God" had the power to manipulate reality as magic did. And for that, the muggles had decided wizards and witches deserved to burn for cheating. It was for that reason that Billy Stubbs had killed Tom's first friend, the little snake in the garden. It was for that reason Mrs. Cole summoned the priest who beat him and performed that stupid exorcism, as if a spirit could ever posses someone of his strength. For them, it was true fear, just as he had learned to fear them. He understood it well. Constant, visceral fear. Not the panic at facing an impossible foe, but the implicit understanding of a species facing extinction.
He worked tirelessly to further himself, to gather both magical and political power. He created his horcruxes so he would never again fear death, to know that he would return time and time again to continue his work regardless of the cost. Magic could kill him, it was true, but he had too much faith in his own abilities. One day, perhaps decades or even more than a century from the day he started, he would eventually reveal himself to the muggles and they would rain fire on him again, intent to bomb wizardkind to ashes. A final witch burning, they'd call it. Lord Voldemort would have to survive and lead at any cost, to keep magic safe.
He had died though, at magic's hands and his own. It was horrible, to float aimlessly through the bodies of rats and snakes, understanding that he had failed to account for the most important factor of them all: time. Immortality had made him complacent, disgustingly so. He had reigned supreme over Britain while Dumbledore and that idiot Minister, Harold Minchum, floundered to keep themselves afloat. Bagnold had not been any marked improvement for the year she'd been in power, but was clearly less oblivious to the corruption in her own halls. She would have been removed, given more time. All in all, he had had no true opposition. And it was then that he failed...because he stopped searching for ways to develop his power, and became too enamored with exercising it upon others. Foolish and pathetic, again. Fallen into the trap of hubris.
As a teenager, Tom hadn't been sure that he walked the correct path. Cruelty and hate came far too naturally to him, and he was aware of it. Never had he truly known love, being known as a freak or devil-spawn for the first eleven years of his life. Oftentimes he worried that he killed simply for the pleasure of it with no proper goal, and that he was little more than a poorly functioning psychopath. He would wonder whether he was gathering followers for a cause he truly believed in, or simply because he enjoyed the power of watching others bend before him, whispering platitudes of "my Lord." And he did, it would be inane to attempt to deny it. He was a scourge that lashed out at anything that attempted to touch his power, and he knew it well.
After his graduation from Hogwarts, he found a job at Borgin and Burke's within the month. Caractacus Burke hired him to be something between a fixer and a curator/collector of dark artifacts, a job Tom discovered to be even more valuable than he had initially believed. His original desire was simply to learn more about dark enchantments and objects, a subject that had been foolishly lacking within the Hogwarts curriculum. Additionally, he'd tracked down his mother's footsteps to learn that she had sold the old man none other than Slytherin's personal locket, merely days before she had died giving birth to him. He would take back his birthright.
Slughorn and several other professors and officials had pleaded with him by mail, saying that such a position was a waste of talent. In some ways, it was. His prowess at least matched that of a young Dumbledore, and he could have easily made his way through the ranks of the Ministry within a decade. Tom did not allow himself to be swayed. He desired the power that could flow between the tips of his fingers and the wood of his wand, not political power from a quill behind the bureaucratic desk. Hogwarts had given him access to the true strengths of magic, but it was never enough. Borgin and Burke's offered him knowledge and a freedom to pursue whatever he desired. As long as Burke received valuable artifacts and information to sell, he was a very satisfied employer. Perhaps he should have been a cursebreaker instead, he reflected: at least one recent Dark Lady was rumored to have chosen that path. Much like himself, the mythical adventurer Patricia Rakepick had become little more than a ghost, uncovering secret vaults within Hogwarts and vanishing from the castle in 1989 after taking the cursed DADA position. He wondered with idle amusement if she had recognized exactly what he'd done to jinx the job.
He banished the reminiscence as the descending stone tunnel began to open. He had journeyed to this place for clues regarding some more ancient magics, and perhaps he would find them here. The cave appeared a dead end, a large circular cavern that seemed to be entirely carved and chiseled from desert pavement. From floor to ceiling, the structure was a perfect dome, covered in small, angular, sharp carvings, easily recognizable as cuneiform. A peculiar pressure seemed to weigh on his magic as he stretched it outwards, hindering him while he searched for curses and traps laid into the runes. He turned his eyes to the only object in the room. Directly in the center, a large stone stele sat upon a small platform, foreboding and ominous, made of some form of obsidian upon first glance. The feeling of weight only increased.
Voldemort's lipless mouth pursed into a grimace, recognizing the artifact as similar to the first seal that had granted him entrance to this place. This magic, whatever it was, struck him as peculiar and likely quite dangerous. He was deep within an undiscovered ruin in what had once been the ancient civilization of Sumer, its location traced together from various fragments and artifacts. Some of those were his own possessions, a few more were stolen by spies in the Department of Mysteries and other magical governments. When he finally found it, he was struck by how odd the place was. The temple here, in the form of a medium-sized ziggurat, was decidedly different from any other of its kind discovered by magicals or muggles. Rather than the usual sun-baked bricks of sand and mud, this place was built of an eerie dark stone, the walls often paved with some strange concrete mixed with glittering pieces of obsidian glass, shining like dark stars.
The place was warded, first of all. It seemed that simply acknowledging the place existed was enough to allow him to bypass ancient and disturbing intent wards. It was, in many ways, similar to the Fidelius. Still, it had taken him several hours of complicated ancient runework in the dirt to ensure he would not be incinerated. His first steps ascending the pyramid had run a shiver through his body, signifying a breach through an ancient magic that was still heavy and powerful nearly 5,000 years later. It was his second clue that this place was even more daunting than it seemed. The shrine at its peak had left him with a thrill of foreboding as he had stepped over the eight-pointed star carved into the floor. He recognized it as a rune focus rarely used by English wizards, and the symbol of the ancient goddess of fertility and war, Inanna.
His third clue had come upon discovering the sealed opening carved into the walls of the shrine, atop the massive and strange pyramid which was itself hidden with a sort of proto-fidelius charm. The implicit double-sealing of the place alerted his mind that there was something truly dangerous here. No one would go to the effort of hiding something twice if it was not valuable and meant to be kept secret. The runes were old and weathered, but the intent remained in the door as sharply as the carved runes once were upon the day of their first inscription. Days of note-taking and decryption had passed before he felt at ease enough to attempt unsealing it. The sharp lines spoke of passing trials of the mind, of a first death of three. A loss of naïveté, he had come to extrapolate from the strange text. He'd touched it gingerly, and its dark magic had drawn him into that brutal recounting of his past, of the day the bombs had first fallen and turned the city of London into a hellscape. It lingered on his thoughts even as he stepped further into the dark hallways beyond the sealed door.
The stele before him was much like the first door, but instead showed carved images superimposed with the runic words. It depicted strange creatures with wings and horns, covered in scales, battling with wicked talons and spewing fire from their mouths and staves as they conquered a village of magic-wielders. The pictures were horribly recognizable. Demons. Grindelwald had studied them thoroughly, going so far as to use their magics frequently in duels and apparently even summoning some during the most terrible battles in WWII. Tom remembered reading the Prophet in horrified fascination as a child, recounting how only two of the monsters had slaughtered hundreds of Russian muggle troops in a single night, during the German invasion of the east.
The other carved panels on the stele showed a witch fleeing from the village, displaying her co-leadership of a small handful of survivors in an epic pilgrimage across foreign lands. The final two panels were by far the most chilling. They showed the woman and another man kneeling at a large temple by the ocean, looking up at a behemoth creature with bat-like wings and a tentacled mouth, eyes inset with a pair of gleaming emeralds that shined piercingly from the depths of black glass. The color reminded him of the Killing Curse. Then the woman was spreadeagled on the ground, spine arched, her face tossed forward in a rictus of mad agony, as something seemed to sprout and grow from inside her back.
Feather-like - 8 of them...the sprouting of wings. The symbols of Inanna, or Ishtar...
Lord Voldemort was discovering a record of a legend, the likes of which he had never even heard of before. He sat there on the floor of the cave with his books and an Undetectable Expension Charm on his belt. An odd position for a Dark Lord, but he had always been a voracious academic first, above all other things. It took him hours and repeated flipping through his notes to determine what he was reading. "Dark bargain with sleeping-dead-dream-walkers," he hissed aloud to himself, as he curiously pondered his rudimentary translation. "A second death of three. Magics of old-fallen-chaos-seekers for fight-survive new star-conquerors."
His ruby-red eyes flickered over the images, pausing on the final image of the goddess being born, her face frozen in torment. Most intriguing. Whatever these other creatures were had already been driven away, but Inanna made a deal...the power of the old to survive beyond the new. Of course, the parallels and differences were obvious. The demons were now the old forces, and the potential of the muggles were the new. Had Grindelwald discovered this place, once upon a time? Perhaps he too had desired to harness the power of the distant ancient realm that was falsely referred to as Hell. The German had been too weak and too shortsighted to keep his promises.
Voldemort's enemies were not "star-conquerors," but people born in the dirt like himself. Muggles had, of course, travelled to the moon in his lifetime. Within the next century they would venture onto other planets, other worlds. Perhaps within two centuries, they would realistically consider moving beyond. Not star-conquerors yet. But isn't that term so worrying...star-conqueror. He was drawn back to the second time where he'd learnt of fear, when he took his work as an excuse to go search for artifacts after the devastation had ended in the Pacific front. He'd wanted to see the aftermath of muggle destruction. A stranger's quiet words from a time long ago came back to haunt him.
"We are all but humble frogs, looking to the heights of the sky without understanding that we float at the bottom of a shallow well..."
He drew his hand back with a sharp snarl of rage, not realizing he'd almost reached out and touched the images on the glassy stones before him. Hissing, he slammed his Occlumency shields in place, carefully picking through his mind for evidence that the artifact had influenced him more than attempting to thrall his thoughts. Without mental preparation, the second seal might attack his mind beyond recovery. Not ever, by imperius or legilimens, had anyone come so close to breaching the sanctity of his mind. The thought that a block of 5,000 year old stone might attempt to do so was terribly disconcerting, but exciting nonetheless.
I have died and been reborn, he thought flatly after a moment. My second death then, was it not? The artifact seeks to draw in my mind and then crush me with my fears...Come, remind me then, of death.
He reached out and gently stroked the glass surface, still smooth and sharp under his grey skin.
Distantly he heard a scream of pain as his mind was ripped from its sanctity, trying vainly to focus on his shields, to focus on the present, the here and now...
And then he was gone.
It was a horrible mistake to come here.
Tom knew it as soon as he apparated. Something was attacking him, rejecting his presence. He couldn't breathe. He had taught himself to sense magic at all times, to stretch out his core to detect presences and spells in his vicinity. Now his skill had been turned against him. Everything around him was wrong. The air was heated and twisted, rancid ashes on the wind like a toxic volcano. The magic was attacking him, ravaging at his presence like his life was an affront, in and of itself.
He forced himself inward, drawing his magic around him like a cocoon. It barely helped. Billions of little rats were gnawing at him, the sensation of the corrosive magic burning away at his meagre shielding like it was paper. His stomach heaved and he vomited out something, unaware of his surroundings. Dimly he realized that he had fallen to the ground as he grasped weakly at the luke-warm debris and concrete under his clenched fist.
He forced himself to try and huff in a breath of air, only to choke. A horrible taste like burnt metal and acid lingered on his tongue. It's in my fucking lungs. It hurts there too, every breath a struggle. Ash and magic, eating away at him from the inside and out. He wonders if this is what it feels like for muggles with polio, struggling to breathe before they are stuffed into those disgusting contraptions called iron lungs. Cursing in his mind he shifts to one knee, intent to look around at this place and experience what he had come here for.
With a grimace, he forces his eyes to open, looking up toward the sky.
The clouds are endless, a horrible color of mottled yellow and black, the likes of which he could never have dreamed of in his darkest nightmares. There is not even an ounce of sunlight peeping through. His head lowers and stops, frozen in horror. There is nothing around him but wreckage as far as his eyes can see. The refuse is everywhere. Pieces of debris are scattered so haphazardly he cannot even tell where the muggles had built their buildings or roads. Perplexingly the power lines still stand, completely blackened in place of the wood that must have stood there before. He stands on the dirt road, swaying in place, looking down to find his knees are wet. They are stained black by some kind of brackish water. Little rivers of it run off along the edges of the dirt road, and he sniffs the air and smells something that can only be some sort of metallic rain.
For minutes he stands there, simply craning his head in horror and observing the fallen city around him. Two days ago there had been people here, and bustling wartime streets. Now there was nothing alive within miles. How was this possible? What had they done to create something so volatile, and what was this taint that corroded his magic and his sanity, that floated in the very air he breathed?
With shaking hands he bent and touched the puddle in the road where the water had collected, and hissed in fear and disgust as his skin blistered and stained. A quick wave of his wand, and the wound was gone. But somehow it still hurt, feeling as if he had taken a hot poker to his digits. This is impossible. Everything here is impossible.
He stumbled down the road like an invalid, intent on reaching the few buildings in the distance behind him that had not fallen. It took too long. He could barely walk in this place, the strength of his magic being the only thing keeping him alive. A lesser wizard would have fallen to the dirt and screamed in fear and pain until falling into psychic shock. Their cores would have been burned and twisted until they were nothing more than crying madmen unable to draw on their broken magic. His teeth ground harshly and the muscles in his jaws twitch as he forced one foot in front of the other. The pain was unbearable. His joints creaked and groaned. His skin burned constantly. His stomach roiled in agony and the organs in his body protested each jarring movement.
When he finally reached the broken structure he stumbled against it, palm scraping painfully against concrete as he tried to catch his breath. His legs screamed from exhaustion even though he had barely walked half a mile. He rested his head against it, turning to the side to see the contrast between the lone wall to his side and the empty wasteland that surrounded him. Then he stumbled back, a horrified moan escaping his lips as he stared at the surface of the wall.
There were shadows of people. Ghosts without form, as if the sun itself had descended to earth and imprinted their souls on the wall behind him. He couldn't possibly describe it. It was anathema of everything he had ever seen, but it was right there like a painting on canvas. Human shadows, the remnants of bodies that had twisted in fearful motion and panic in their final moments.
He remembers what that old man had said to him yesterday, when he had gone into a teahouse in disguise and asked about Hiroshima through translation spells.
"I've seen what the white devils did to our city." His eyes were wide and staring through him rather than at his face. "Our people have always believed themselves strongest, most civilized, that our Emperor was the living god and that we would bring honor to ourselves in his name. Bah! We were fools all. We are all but humble frogs, looking to the heights of the sky without understanding that we float at the bottom of a shallow well...Go there yourself, boy, and you will see."
For the first time since he was six years old, Tom Riddle broke down into sobs.
Lord Voldemort's red eyes glowed as his scream of rage pulsed across the cavern, dissipating the vision of memory that had attacked his thoughts. Around him, the runes in the wall glowed with black light, but he saw none of it. His inhuman heart pounded and he clenched his fists so tightly against the stone that he was sure it would crack at any moment.
All those animals must die.
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"If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who, in his callousness, can remain sane to the hideous end."
-H.P. Lovecraft, The Temple
AN: Phew that was hard to write, but soooooo fun. Also, in case you didn't notice by now, we love HP Lovecraft. I'll include the influence of some of his creations throughout the story though they will never be the primary focus, just pieces of magical history that might play interesting roles.
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