This is the first installment in the stories of Tom Riddle at school—from the Harry Potter series written by J.K Rowling.

One

It was chilly when Tom woke up. Not cold—not so much that it made him curl up tighter in the sheets and make his breath come in ragged gasps—no, it wasn't cold. He knew cold from the orphanage, but this wasn't it. Nor was it cool. It wasn't a light breeze playing on his skin, dancing between his mind and his body, tickling his senses and making his hairs stand on end. It didn't mean warm spring days and a yellow sun strung up way high in the sky. Those were too good of days to see him any longer.

It was chilly. But Tom welcomed it. It meant that the air outside was cold—freezing perhaps, but inside...inside, there was enough comfort provided so that it was merely chilly. It didn't make him uncomfortable. No, on the contrary, the fact that someone obviously cared enough for him to put a wall between him and the cold—just that fact was enough for him to treasure the chilliness, the goosebumps suddenly welcome friends.

The others in the dormitory were still asleep. My schoolmates. He had never had schoolmates before. Well, they'd been forced at the orphanage to suffer through a few hours of schooling everyday, but the teachers were obviously so inadequate, so caught up in ignorance themselves that little of what they said had any scholarly relevance at all and he didn't even deign to call it "school." Tom knew they were kind people, but that just made them weak. It was the one thing he learned in the orphanage—the real rule.

The volunteer teachers had repeated the golden rule to them again and again. "Do to others what you wish them to do to you." They said the rule with a strained smile, with eyes glazed over. Tom thought they talked to them like that because they themselves knew the lies that sprouted from their mouths. No, Tom finally realized. That was not the golden rule. That was but a lie to comfort the consciousness of those people who've lived their entire lives. They never just survived, they lived. Well, for us here, for those of us who don't have our nice warm houses to go home to, who don't have a home, but are jammed into this god-forsaken building that provides them with the barest of necessities and teaches them the lies that they all want us to believe...for us, living is a dream. We survive; that's all. If you don't survive, then one becomes weak, and then one does not survive any longer. That is the golden rule. Survival of the strongest.

But here, within these thick castle walls, where the never-ending food was prepared by creatures who's only happiness was derived from serving them, where fire was not made, but conjured, where the teachers weren't there as volunteers, but paid in gold coins to do what they did. He was in Hogwarts. The name itself was magic, unbeknownst to those muggles out there. Those people. Tom spat the word out. It wasn't worthy of them. Of wizards and witches. The word they used was muggle. Yes, that is a word that indicates a separation of races. Wizards and witches were above those muggles as they were above the animals that roamed the forests. Muggles like his father put his mother to the blade of Old Man Grim, and the muggle father that crammed him into that orphanage, that made him suffer for all those long years while he ran, scampering back to his rich family. It was also his muggle father that gave him his name. That forced upon him the curse that slithered along in his footsteps, revealing itself everytime someone called out to him, so that even his identity was a reminder of the smudge in his past that just wouldn't go away, no matter how hard he tried to rid himself of it.

Tom Riddle.

He could just scream from rage.

This name was not for him. It was for that bitch of a father. It was for someone human. For a muggle, but please, not for him. How could he function with that label? How could they expect him to walk, to breathe, to live with that monstrosity imbedded in his very skin?

No, a new name must be adopted.

But first, the nature of this one must be changed. It was already smeared with a cowardly character, one who left his wife and abandoned his child to idiots and savages. Now it would require an offbalancing effect. It needed one who could battle the muggle effects of the previous user.

Tom rolled off the soft feather bed, and straightened himself up. The chillyness was still there, but that was good. He wanted it. It kept him frozen.

He dressed quietly and descended the stone steps to the common room with just as little noise. It was still early in the morning, and light had barely lit up the grounds. He settled next to a window and gazed outside.

An early morning rain was starting to fall, coating the grasses in its cold droplets.

Another day starts.

Continued in Two.