I've always had two things driving me above all else. I'm a man of diverse motives, but these two stand out.

When I was six, two of the older kids took me into a cave. There was a pond inside. They took me by the arms and shoved me in, and they held me under the water and laughed. That rather embodies both of my motives.

I don't want to die.

And I don't want to let anyone, anyone, suffer like I did. The child of my most hated enemy deserves better.

I ensured my immortality, at least a little, last year. Myrtle Ebony was the sacrifice: an unpleasant child, one who was prone to doing unspeakable things to first years. She's no loss. I turned the statue of Salazar Slytherin within the Chamber of Secrets into a horcrux – a mass of stone that none had seen in generations, that only I and those of my line could access. It was secure enough for now.

The war with Grindelwald has already made too many orphans. Dozens of them are being sent to Muggle orphanages. I've written down every name I could find, put tracking charms on as many as I could. I'm still a student, I can't take them in yet. But I will.

The problem is that one man can have such a profound impact on an entire continent. And nobody is prepared to deal with so many children coming into their family at once.

Yesterday, I'd thought that, if I went to war, I would only destroy whole families at once. Never kill a child's parents without killing the child as well.

Today, I finally found the Diadem of Ravenclaw, and that changed everything.

A bit of background is in order. A horcrux will keep me in this world, thinking and acting, even if my body is destroyed. I would be reduced to a wraith, and I would only be able to possess someone who consented, but that would be enough for me to conduct a ritual to bring me back in a reasonable body.

But if someone stumbled on a horcrux – well. The traditional style wouldn't do anything. I invented a variation that should, I think, allow me to possess someone who simply held onto a horcrux long enough. A faster and surer route back from death, if I were so misfortunate.

So I needed something that a person would be likely to keep nearby for an extended period of time. A galleon tends to stay near people, but it didn't stick with someone for long. Someone's purse would stay with one person, but they do wear out. And there's something too banal about either option.

But yesterday found Rowena Ravenclaw's Diadem of Wisdom, and I knew it would be appropriate. Grand enough to sate my ego, valuable enough that anyone would at least hesitate to destroy it, and it gives benefits when worn.

Then I put it on, to get an idea of how much of an effect it has.

In a way it was a mistake. I had plans, and the added wisdom caused me to reconsider. Do I want to forgo empathy? Am I so callous as to deny everyone else a chance at life just to support a twisted form of my own goals?

No.

No more horcruxes. I could tell as soon as I put the diadem on that it had harmed me greatly to split my soul in two. I'm going to research soul magic to try to find a way to repair my soul while keeping the benefits of the horcrux in place.

And really, killing children and infants so they don't have to grow up without parents? I've been protecting the younger kids insofar as possible – or I did before making the first horcrux – and that made me happy. I had liked being a protector. It was a very clean, joyful form of status that I got from it.

And that reminds me of our dear Transfiguration Professor, Albus Dumbledore.

He's been gone most of the past year, fighting Grindelwald. He finally defeated him last month, put him in the Nurmengard. And today Albus Dumbledore can do no wrong. He is beloved by nations and more powerful than the Ministry. If he proposed to overthrow the Wizengamot and replace Minister d'Aubrey, it would be done in an afternoon.

That sort of power? It's not one of my core motives, but I'm still salivating at the thought of getting some of it for myself.

I'm rethinking that policy of turning anger into power. It's useful for now, though. Abandoning the following I spent the past five years building – that's not something you do without careful thought.

I'm not sure. I have a lot to think about. Fortunately, the diadem is helping.

I'm thinking now about the problem of magical children in Muggle hands. Muggles are garbage, and we shouldn't have to deal with them. As adults we can hold our own, escape if we must, but children are defenceless. I think Muggles can sense something different about us. Better. – No, the diadem tells me; perhaps we simply seem unnatural to them. Different in a way that causes many of them to lash out. Different in a way that makes it impossible for them to relate to us.

I've talked to the children in all the Houses, almost everyone in first year. Those who come from Muggle families... There are a dozen of them in first year. Seven of them have suffered abuse. Four of them were neglected. None of the children who grew up in magical families were abused. Not one.

I need to fix this.

It occurs to me that I can't wear the diadem everywhere. It's not practical. Nobody wears hats indoors, and the diadem resists transfiguration and glamours. I think better with it than I did before making the horcrux, but the instincts I had two years ago – they're more in line with what I want now.

My first priority is to restore my soul to one piece.

I had pieced together the ritual for creating a horcrux from several sources. I didn't have the theory behind it, just the ritual itself. I'm good with Runes and excellent at Arithmancy, but the magic relating to souls is not taught at Hogwarts. I'd scoured the non-Restricted books to verify the correctness of the ritual before using it.

Now I have to go deeper. I have to know enough to recreate the ritual from scratch. I have to reverse it, safely, and then I have to find a way to improve it.

While I'm at it, I have some other modifications I want to make. A horcrux staves off death, but it doesn't bring me back to life – a major weakness, to be sure.

I've done it!

I think I've done it, anyway.

It took a full month at least, and I have in fact worn my uniform hat everywhere. Abraxas is giving me funny looks, wonders why I haven't been calling meetings of my followers as often, why I haven't been using pain curses on those who annoy me quite so much. – I did when Orpheus Black dared to question me on my orders, of course, but some things are simply required.

Anyway! I have a list of properties that I need to find ingredients to fill. Unicorn blood willingly given would supply most of them, but that's in short supply. I've been paging through Mandelkern's De Herbarum Britanniae and Kettleburn's Bestiary of the Isles and I've found something that will do. A melange, and all the components taken from the Hogwarts grounds. Not perfect, but most of the major extraneous components are cancelled out, and I've got some runes that will fix the rest.

All I'm waiting for is the right phase of the moon and everything will be set.

I'm performing the ritual tonight.

Mistakes were made.

I'm alive, healthy, and sane. Better than I was, and appreciably so.

But it was a bit touchy there for a bit. The ritual had some sort of backlash. It hurt me. A lot. Similar to a Muggle grenade going off five feet away, I'd estimate. There is a gouge out of my wand, and I fear to use it at more than the barest fraction of power.

I can demand money from Abraxas and Orpheus, and use that to replace my wand. However, it would wound my pride, at the moment. I will consider it, but for now, I have a damaged wand.

I've worked on my wandless magic enough that I can probably transfigure a stick for myself and still keep up in class. Hogwarts doesn't have a taxing educational programme, after all. But at the moment, I've merely filled the gouge with clay and applied a small glamour.

I performed the ritual in the Chamber of Secrets, of course. And it injured me. I had a broken leg and gashes as long as my hand across my chest. I was bleeding more than a little. And I had a damaged wand.

If I had stood a little differently, if I had leaned over a little, it could have taken my head off.

I'm not happy about that.

But, it healed my mind. For the most part, anyway. I'm not as anxious about what I might do when I take off the Diadem. But I'm so much better now even with the Diadem, it's like night and day.

Big problem: I don't have a horcrux any longer. I'm vulnerable. Mortal. This can't stand.

So I'm off to the drawing board again, trying to find out how to make myself invulnerable without mind-altering side effects. I've been through the horcrux ritual forward and backward, and I haven't seen anything there that would explicitly cause problems. It must be something about splitting the soul into pieces.

I don't want to experiment with souls. I really don't. I could end up murdering people, turning them into zombies, or worse. I want to learn what I can from books, first. But I've read everything in the main stacks. That just leaves the Restricted Section, which I wanted to avoid – Albus can do no wrong Dumbledore is so suspicious of me, if he saw me in there, he'd get me thrown into Azkaban that day.

Dumbledore's a big fan of death, for all that he's best friends with the immortal Nicholas Flamel. If I told him what I was looking for, he'd burn me to the ground right then and there.

So, I need to be stealthy. This isn't going to be easy.

Useless, useless, useless!

Nobody has any bloody clue about souls.

Dark mages went the furthest in their studies, but they're barely beyond the most elementary parts. I learned far more dissecting the horcrux ritual than in the dozen tomes of blathering I found in the Restricted Section.

I found a little bit of valuable information in a discussion of ghosts, and a bit more about Dementors. Combine that with what I learned from a handful of Dark rituals and curses – including the Killing Curse – and I have a much better body of knowledge in my head about how souls work with magic than can be found almost anywhere else.

I might write a treatise on it, actually.

I've got a few different arithmantic models of souls, and that's a problem. If I only had one model, I could derive what I want from it and then do it. But I have three, and that just muddies the waters.

I need some way to disambiguate reality between my models. I need a safe project to work on. And I know just the thing.

I can see souls now.

I came up with a simple spell: just visualize souls. Hominem revelio has two components, one to look for warm human blood and one to highlight places with a lot of it all together. The highlighting is purely within your eyes, not in the real world, so it's nicely subtle.

In fact, I came up with three different spells, one for each of my models, each named Animus revelio, each with a different wand movement. Only one works. I have my answer; I have a working model of souls.

I'm working on a better type of horcrux, but that's slow going. In the meantime, I'm working on displacing my magical presence into a remote-controlled golem. Golems are well understood, but my research – both in souls and in other areas – lets me produce something I can control better, with a thought rather than command words or wand movements.

There's a lot more to be done with golems to make them useful for body doubles. My body size in clay weighs about twice as much as me, and it won't hold up to a close inspection, even with my best glamours. But if I can get them functionally working, it's an option in case I become a Dark Lord. A monstrous form, so long as it's appropriately fashioned, can be advantageous.

I'm being a little paranoid about my survival, I admit. Only a little, though. We're only a few months beyond the Grindelwald war. And – heh – young Myrtle Ebony met her demise in these very halls, after Rubeus Hagrid decided to keep a pet acromantula in his dorm room.

Regardless, winter break is coming up, and for once I have plans.

Winter break went as well as I had hoped.

I had limited information on my heritage. All I knew was that I'm a descendant of Salazar Slytherin and my mother was in Leeds when she gave birth to me. But that was enough for me to track down the Gaunt family, largely believed extinct, who claimed to be the direct heirs of Slytherin.

It wasn't so difficult, really.

My grandfather and uncle were there. Odd to think that I have a family. But they've fallen so far from Salazar's accomplishments, I may as well disown them. They speak only Parseltongue.

When I arrived, Marvolo tried to curse me. The Killing Curse. But he's nearly a Squib, so the curse failed before it left his wand. Not everyone can cast it, even of the powerful.

Then Morfin stopped him. "He looks like that boy," he hissed. "The one that Merope ran off with."

"All the more reason to kill him!" Marvolo snarled.

"Not before we ask what happened to my wayward sister."

"She died," I interrupted. "Not long after she gave birth to me."

Marvolo's jaw dropped so far I thought I'd have to pick it up off the ground before the hovel. I nearly rolled my eyes at that.

"And if you want to kill me, well, I'm just a Hogwarts student, not allowed to use my wand outside school. What could I do to stop you?"

They both attacked me.

In case you were wondering? The Trace considers all wandless magic the same. Accidental or not.

I dodged their paltry spells and stunned them both in two seconds. I've got both their wands, to limit the amount of mischief they can get up to. And I also claimed as my birthright the one thing of value in the whole place: the Gaunt family ring.

The family has nothing for me now. I've built more reputation for myself in my time at Hogwarts than the Gaunt family name has left, and I have no need of a tiny, rotting hut in Yorkshire. In my mind, I've already disowned them.

I think I've done it.

Twice over, in fact.

My magic displacement research led rather directly to the breakthrough. I can now displace my entire soul into a properly prepared receptacle, using a ritual based on the horcrux creation process.

Murdering another human to make myself immortal isn't something I am entirely opposed to. Even with my repaired soul, even with the Diadem on my head, I just don't see a problem with using death like that. But I won't murder someone at random for it. Like Myrtle, I need a properly deserving victim. I'd also like to avoid murdering in the next couple years, just to avoid suspicion.

And... I rather don't want to kill. Not if there are alternatives.

Having fully dissected the horcrux ritual, I know it doesn't take a thinking being's death. I can use an equivalent "weight" in souls. I thought I'd grab a brace of chickens from the groundskeeper, but turns out they don't have souls. A quick glance through the Slytherin dorms showed that, of the familiars, only the magical species or breeds have souls.

No, I'm not stealing and killing a few of their familiars.

I ducked out on a Hogsmeade weekend and headed off to Diagon Alley. Now I've got a dozen young Ashwinders on hand. They're so young, they can't even respond to me when I use Parseltongue, and I've used that with snakes less than six months old. My soul visualization spell suggested that two of them would be good enough for the spell.

I'm nervous. Of course I am. I'm the most knowledgeable person on the subject of souls in centuries. Perhaps all time. Oh, Herpo the Foul must have known a fair bit, but I'm not sure he could have bested me. And I've only been studying this for two months. Less.

But as knowledgeable as I am comparatively, there's too much I don't know. I would be foolish to make a pretence of certainty when I have only myself to mislead. So I am nervous.

I have no better options, so I'm moving forward with this.

Again, I survived.

I used Abraxas as a spotter, in case something went wrong. He doesn't know enough to be useful. – Note to self: consider training the minions. I don't want anyone smart enough to replace me, but perhaps, for each subject I master, I should have one of my followers specialize in it, enough for them to converse sensibly with me.

Anyway. I'd devised a spell – a simple spell – to restore a spirit to its body, which was harder to design than the initial ritual. It wouldn't solve any potential problem, but it could probably solve some of them. I was a bit more hopeful than certain.

I enacted the ritual. With Abraxas in tow, I couldn't exactly go down to the Chamber of Secrets. The basilisk wouldn't be so friendly to him, and he'd have too many questions.

No, we used the chamber of hidden things.

It went well enough at first. I chose the ring of my mother's family as the focus, and I was indeed able to displace my soul into it. That's about all the success I can attribute to the ritual.

While my soul was in the ring, I could do nothing. I was aware of the passage of time, and I had a vague sense of my surroundings, but I could not act. I could not even think. After the alloted time – five minutes on the clock – Abraxas cast the counterspell. It failed.

The spell was intended to restore me to my body. Instead it turned me into a wraith, a shade. It restored a small portion of my mental faculties, which was sufficient – after some time – for me to gravitate toward my empty body. With difficulty (and I cannot properly describe how I did it), I returned to my body and to consciousness.

The ritual was the work of a few minutes. From entering the ritual room to leaving it, two hours passed.

I must refine my precautions.

More work, more progress. I think I have the answer now, but I've no better safety net than before. I've given Brockelhurst a sealed parcel to deliver to Abraxas and Orpheus if something befalls me, and they might, with the passing years, be able to fix me if things go terribly.

But I can't stand to be mortal any longer.

Tentative success.

Yesterday, I turned the ring into a soul vessel, which I have chosen to call a reliquary. I can control my body while my soul is in the reliquary. Abraxas reports that he cannot detect a soul in my body, only in the ring.

I am calling this a tentative success for now because I must analyse my behaviour and thoughts. The original horcrux produced an unacceptable level of mind alteration. I haven't detected any changes yet and am cautiously optimistic.

Testing shows that I can control my body even when the reliquary is not on my person. I am reluctant to push the boundaries when it comes to my own body; however, my golem research begins to bear fruit. Last week, I directed a small homunculus in cartwheels across the school grounds while in the Slytherin common room. In order to make golems useful as a personal safety system, though, I need to be able to use them for everything I need to do.

I have one other point of concern: I have but one reliquary. That is a vulnerability that horcruxes could solve trivially. An American regretted once that he had but one life to live (with some maudlin patriotic sentiment); I am quite certain I would regret having but two.

I have prepared several simple items to be used as reliquaries. If I can analyse the wraith effect from the first attempt, perhaps I can use it to my advantage, fleeing to another reliquary when one fails.

I also decided that I will not attempt to make the reliquaries more complex than they currently are by adding provisions to recreate a body for me should I perish. Creating a proper human body is, it pains me to admit, beyond my current capabilities. Instead, I have another homunculus in the Chamber of Secrets. I believe I will be able to control it even without a functioning body.

But the Chamber will only be open to me for a little while longer. I am sitting my N.E.W.T. exams in three weeks' time. While teaching Defence is my lesser ambition –

No. Teaching Defence was my lesser ambition. Dominating all of the British Isles and purging non-magical humans had been the greater. Now, my primary concern is to safeguard my world, the magical world, and see it rise to its proper glory.

A schoolteacher cannot do that, and if I fail the magical world, it will be too painful to remain within it.

So, then: while teaching is an option that may be open to me, I will not be a professor for a few years. Headmaster Dippet has a policy of not hiring people fresh out of Hogwarts. I will not be able to come to the Chamber much longer. In my private moments, I can admit to myself that there is nothing of value there save what I put in it.

I know I have a tendency, a potent one, to self-aggrandisement. I have standards for myself. I must use items with a noble history for my reliquaries. The connection to the past that Salazar's chambers affords me is seductive. As a practical matter, though, it is no better for me than a proper workshop would be. Worse, for many purposes – I dare not brew potions in a place with such poor ventilation.

All in all, I view the impending change with mixed trepidation and optimism.

The N.E.W.T. results have arrived. I don't need to look at them; I know I have gotten Outstanding across the board. But a vein of nervousness is coming over me. I should look, if just for the form of it. –

Yes, even in Transfiguration. Professor Dumbledore's dislike for me extends even as far as grading me below what I deserve, but the Ministry examiners do not share his bias. I have all the N.E.W.T.s that matter, and also Care of Magical Creatures. (Since the Muggle Studies professor has still not heard of bicycles, I have assiduously avoided his class, and I saw the uselessness of Divination after paging through the major texts in first year.)

There's bound to be a Ravenclaw or two who matched me, and Desiderata Desford gave herself a stress illness taking all the subjects. She would be getting mostly Exceeds Expectations, and that with significant help from the staff.

But even if someone surpassed me numerically, I have been pioneering new avenues of research. And I survived! Who else can compare to me? Perhaps Dumbledore, with his work in alchemy to counter mine in souls, but he worked with a master rather than making independent discoveries.

– Abraxas is being nosy.

"How'd you do, Tom?" he asked, clapping a hand on my shoulder. "Perfect marks?"

He touched me.

"I don't know how you manage with Runes and Arithmancy."

He touched my person!

"I barely got an Exceeds Expectations in Arithmancy, and it would have been Poor if I'd had to worry about Runes as well!"

How dare he!

And yet...

This is a thing that friends do, no? I have been teaching him of late. Conversing, even. He's no dolt, and on occasion he's had a good suggestion. Do I... Is he a friend? Do I want a friend?

Regardless of what level of familiarity I decide on later, I haven't given him leave. "Remove your hand."

He blanches. "My apologies."

"None required." I say it through stiff lips.

"But yes, your marks?"

I sigh. He won't leave me alone. If anyone is to befriend me, though, it will take the tenacity of a terrier.

"All Os," I say.

"Congratulations! What say we celebrate at the manor this weekend?"

I had a perfectly good minion. Possibly a lieutenant. Now I have a friend. Where did I go wrong?