Inception: Rise of the Heir
After the murder of Hepzibah Smith, Tom Riddle disappeared for ten long years. He sank deeper into the Dark Arts & pursued knowledge that others could only dream of, consorting with the darkest members of wizarding society. With his eyes set on North America, he has no idea that the magic he so desperately seeks will shape his life & his inevitable future for years to come. TomxOC
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing except for my o/c's and my own storyline.
Tom remained hidden behind the brush that encircled the large clearing and let out the breath he felt he had been holding in his chest, the spectacle in front of him more fascinating than he could have ever imagined. Blue flames lit up his dark brown eyes as he lay still, hungrily watching Lyra perform the spell, enjoying each moment that passed him by. For him the display of dark magic was something extraordinary to behold, his heart racing within his breast in anticipation, in proverbial excitement as she ended the wretched muggles life. He knew what was supposed to happen, having already read the ritual in detail at the Athenaeum, but to watch her carry out what he himself had desired, to see the life drain from his eyes, delighted Tom more than he could imagine.
As of yet, nothing had happened that would dictate if the enchantment had worked or not, to him that was neither here nor there, but being privy to her performance had been fascinating nonetheless. He himself, had of course no use for the knowledge of such spells, but to see someone else show an interest and inclination towards this kind of Dark Magic, the likes of which were taboo and banished from their world, was indeed something he considered extremely curious. Many of his colleagues - for lack of better words - had shown interest in the dark arts, using easy spells to curse or bully their way into positions of power, but none held his talent or thirst for it, none had his special skillset or intellectual diligence to master such exploits.
"Most of them wouldn't dare do something so dangerous...so remarkable...Not that they could if they tried..."
He let out a soft snort as he though back to how they cowered before him, how they fallen over themselves through their years at Hogwarts as they tried to gain his admiration. Tom smiled to himself and shook his head as how easy it had been to deceive them, how easy it had been to prey on their vulnerability.
It had been necessary, of course, for him to make them think that he truly valued their company, that they were special. That they were his chosen acolytes. How easy it was for him to gaslight them into causing mischief, giving him the ability to roam around the school unchecked and unwatched while the teachers and students dealt with their distractions. Like true sheep, they never thought to question why he would ask them to do such things...probably out of fear, out of ignorance -
" - Out of cruelty. Yes, they enjoyed that..."
Most of his acquaintances had come from high places, from families whose names were among wizarding royalty and with such expectations for their futures at their backs, had come extreme weaknesses, frail self-esteems from years of watching their parents success, their intentions and aspirations thrust onto them unfairly. Years of solitude had gifted him the ability to see such things in others and by the end of his first year, he had had them eating from his hand.
But just because they were cruel, frightened and ambitious...did not mean they shared all his interests, his obsessions. It did not mean they understood him. Nor did it mean that they could cast such difficult magic or care to.
But to have a real talent and understanding for dark arts of this nature, that was something that could not be taught. Diligence, determination and an insatiable appetite for knowledge were either qualities you possessed, or you didn't.
Most of them did not. They had only scratched the surface, satisfied with simplicity.
But she was different. Of that he was now sure.
He kept his eyes transfixed upon Lyra as she held the bloody chalice in her hands, the red beads of blood gleaming on her skin in the moonlight like morning dew on grass. He slowly parted his lips as he took softly took another breath, holding it as his heart started to thrum in his chest, waiting to see what would happen next.
Lyra's hands grasped at the cup desperately, her wet fingers slipping against it's metal surface, slick and wet with blood and whatever substance the tree had produced. She stood back from the giant black oak, still engulfed in a blue inferno and looked upwards towards the pale moon, hanging ominously in the sky, mute and mystic as she closed her eyes and raised the cup to her lips.
"Here goes nothing."
Feeling the night breeze against her face, cold and unyielding, the goose flesh started to rise up on her arms, her body shaking in response. Knowing what was required of her, a strong determination started to well up inside her, giving her the strength and resolve she needed to finish her work. With a fire burning inside her belly, she closed her strange mis-matched eyes parted her lips, raising the chalice up to them. Tilting her head back, she felt the malodorous liquid ooze down her throat, its putrid taste overwhelming her senses as she swallowed, her heart beating wildly in her chest. Almost instantly she felt herself gag and coughed, covering her mouth in fear her stomach would reject what she had just done.
The mixture was as foul as the deed itself, the co-mingling of iron, sulfur and the taste of rotten flesh lingered on her tongue like the blood on her hands, thick and unpleasant. A small trickle rolled down her chin as it escaped the goblet and she raised her thumb to wipe the residue away, her eyes hollow she looked down at the liquid between her fingers, rubbing it against them absent-mindedly.
"The worst is done."
Snapping back from her thoughts, she felt her focus change direction and stared straight into the dark distance ahead, confident and hopeful that her actions would have the consequences she desired. Closing her eyes, she began to chant the rest of the spell, eager to change her misfortune.
" Et luna, hoc sanguine, liberabo animam meam!"
Tom could not remove himself from the scene before him, his gaze transfixed on her as is he had been bewitched, for after she had spoken the last words of the spell, the small clearing became illuminated in an explosion of light that had suddenly erupted from the black oak tree, vanquishing the darkness in it's path. It lasted for a few moments and without warning suddenly disappeared, leaving the night to crawl back around them, worse than it had before, thick clouds of smoke blocking out whatever light had remained. He reached into his pocket slowly, his fingers brushing up against his wand as he tried to peer through the blanket of blackness.
His heart beat wildly in his chest as he waited, the smog beginning to dissipate after a few more moments in the dark and a bright blue light started to poke out from behind it, eventually revealing Lyra, her body covered in brilliant blue flames. Her expression was one of unadulterated joy, holding her palms out in front of her as she turned around, looking at the flames that adorned her body. He listened as she spoke to herself, her voice one of pure relief.
"It worked…." A small delighted laugh escaping from her lips.
"Well done then." He thought to himself, watching as she ran her hands through her hair, her chest rising and falling with every breath ecstatic with what she had supposedly accomplished. As to what she had achieved, or rather expelled from her body, that was unclear to him, he was not familiar with her struggle. Whatever it had been, it was no longer important, it was finished and whatever had bothered her gone. Noting that he had probably already seen everything of consequence for the night, Tom turned around slowly, preparing himself to walk away from the clearing, placing a safe distance between them before he attempted to apparate back to the inn.
"I never did get to find out what she was hiding from me, but no matter. I've seen more than enough to see that she could provide useful to me after all. Perhaps I've been too hasty in my desire to rid myself of her company..."
He smirked to himself as he thought about everything he had seen tonight...her power, her capabilities. She had taken extreme measures to get what she wanted and he respected her for it, it was an attribute not may possessed. Tonight had not only pleased him, but he had also seen something that would allow him leverage over her, if he ever came to need it. Blackmail was always a useful tool to get what he wanted.
Tom could care less that she had murdered a muggle, in fact it was quite the opposite, but he knew that the wizarding community would probably be less than pleased if they knew that one of their own was actively murdering for personal gain, all of course which could be revealed in a letter from an anonymous source. He grinned once more as he thought how he had perfected the art of manipulation. It was a skill he had learned to master early on in life, to pretend to befriend and understand, to watch when nobody else was looking and to use others weaknesses and vulnerabilities against them. A disreputable game to others, too weak and foolish to not use another's flaws to work in favor of their own fortune, but a past time that had always proven beneficial to him and still continued to be. He was sure Lyra would be more than willing to compromise with him in order to prevent others from knowing what she had done.
"It's proven to be a productive night indeed..."
His pleasure was short lived however as he heard a scream come from back in the clearing and he stopped walk at once, turning around towards the noise. Watching in confusion, he saw Lyra's figure fall to the forest floor, her body seizing, visibly writhing in pain.
Something had gone wrong.
Lyra screamed once more as she felt her insides start to burn and tremble, the bile rising up in her throat, acidic and tart. The ground underneath her began to spin as her fingers dug into the earth to steady herself, the dirt and grass lodging itself underneath her fingernails.
"I don't understand -" she stuttered as fresh tears sprang to her eyes, her stomach churning in pain.
The nausea clawed at her throat as she tried to stem herself from vomiting, but her efforts were too late. Without warning, the congealed contents of her stomach erupted suddenly from her lip, black, thick and tar like, it's taste unlike anything she had ever experienced before, worse than the concoction she had consumed only minutes ago. She heaved again and once more felt the grass under her grow wet what her stomach had expelled and it continued to wear at her, over and over again until she had nothing left in her to part with. Weakly pushing herself away from where she had become sick, she wiped the corners of her mouth with her sleeve and pulled her knees to her chest in pain.
"What could I have done wrong?...I followed all the instructions, I did everything that it had asked of me down to the last detail. Why didn't it work?"
She sat on the ground for a few moments as she recalled everything she had done, step by step, thinking back to what the book had said. She had made no errors that she could think of, yet she knew her body remained the same, unchanged and still diseased. For a brief moment after she had completed the act, she had felt like her old self again, free from how weak she was gradually becoming, free from the feeling that her body was no longer her own and finally rid of the perpetual dread that lay in her stomach when she would frequently wake with no recollection of the night before.
It was a cruel joke.
She clenched her fists tightly, her nails digging into her palms as she screamed and beat her fists into the ground in frustration.
"I mustn't give up." she thought to herself as she weakly got to her feet. "Maybe Salem wasn't the right place to look for answers, maybe the solution to my problem lies elsewhere. There's bound to be something that works. I just need to find it…"
Lyra tried to steady herself as she suddenly lost her balance, her head was still spinning from the after effects of the ritual.
"...and quick. I'm growing weaker and all of these experiments are starting to take their toll. I can't continue on like this...it's dangerous."
She grabbed her wand and slowly made her way over to the where the dead no-maj's body lay, looking callously at what she had done. Even though the spell hadn't worked, she held no feelings of regret for his death.
"He deserved his fate." Her eyes glanced over his body once more as she wrinkled her nose, holding her wand up.
"Evanesco!"
The man's body vanished, along with any remnants of what had taken place there that night. Satisfied with how everything looked around her, the woods now cleared of her dirty deed, Lyra placed her wand back into her pocket, turned to leave the glade in disgust.
"It's late. I should be getting back to the inn soon. I want an early start in the morning to figure out where to go next...and at some point I'll have to tell Tom to tell him we're leaving..."
She started to walk, making sure all her footsteps were solid and well placed, taking care to watch her balance, her body was weakened and in this state she hadn't the power quite yet to disapparate from the forest. The ritual and what had ensued afterwards had taken more energy than she thought, she needed a few moments to gather her strength before she could even bear the thought of apparition, which had always made her feel slightly queasy. Waiting for her body to rest, she felt her thoughts stray to Tom, despite her efforts to try to push him out of her mind.
"I need to be careful around him...last time we spoke, I felt almost as if he had waited up on purpose to see when I would be back..."
Lyra shook her head in frustration as she tried to ignore the thought, he had given her no reason thus far to even think that he was even remotely interested in the daily habits and routines of her life. Aside from their brief encounter the other night, every time she had ever seen him, he was always buried under a pile of books, writing and taking notes down furiously with his quill and paper, lost in whatever he was researching.
"You're being paranoid."
Suspicion was something she had grown accustomed to in the past two years. Her condition had forced her to gradually remove herself from society, becoming a ghost of an the otherwise remarkable person she used to be. In order to avoid tarnishing her old life completely and to escape the havoc now created, she found herself moving around frequently to avoid suspicion and kept no company other than small transactions, lest her secret get out. At first the task had been easy, she was able to control her episodes and only lost herself on a few occasions, but now, things were becoming different. The incidents had now become unpredictable, the after effects increasing in agony and there were no longer clues in advance to her change, before she had hours and could move herself to safety - now, she only had moments, minutes, before the world went black.
She shook her head in anger, thinking back to the life that she had been forced to abandon.
"Not that it was much." she thought bitterly. "It was nearly destroyed before all of this anyway...bound to come to an end sooner or later."
She had never had many friends, her mother's career had moved them around so much that instead of creating bonds and seeking friendship with others her age, she had instead been forced to find it in books. Over time, her own isolation and her desire for solitude intensified, leading her to prefer loneliness to companionship, human connections too hard and unpredictable for her to understand, not that anyone of interest had ever tried. Her job, the golden accomplishment in her short life, she had been forced to forfeit, for more reasons than one and it was the loss of her hard work and dedication that stabbed at her most of all.
Lyra rubbed her eyes as she leaned against a nearby tree, tired and irritated with the old memories and feelings that flooded her mind, wishing that they would disappear - she was in no mood. Self pity had always been a quality she reviled, treasuring her ability to often steel herself against such emotions.
"It's useless to feel sorry for yourself...it's an incredible waste of time...you know that."
Pulling her hands away from her tired and puffy eyes, she rested her palm upon her forehead, squinting as the woods around her began to grow blurry.
"It must be my exhaustion...that spell nearly took everything out of me."
Rubbing her face, the images around her only became more obscured and she felt herself grow alarming as her vision continued to darken, a familiar prickling sensation rising up in her spine, making the hair on the back of her neck begin to stiffen.
"Not now! Not tonight, please! " She thought, panicking as she pressed her body towards the tree nearest her, pushing her back into it as if it could prevent her from changing. "Haven't I been through enough tonight…"
Tears of agony started to well up in her eyes as a blinding pain seared through her head, rendering her body useless. Lyra violently dug her nails into the tree's bark as the forest disappeared, the world fading to black once more around her.
From a distance, he watched her intently as she writhed in pain on the forest floor, her body expelling the contents of her stomach on the the dirt and grass, signifying that something had gone awry. Tom grimaced at the scene, reminded by his own personal experience of what could happen when experimenting with Dark Magic, her pain looking eerily like what he had gone through to make his first horcrux.
"Sacrifices must be made in order to achieve what it is we seek..."
Forbidden spells that tampered with the body's natural state usually were accompanied with tremendous amounts of physical pain to the witch or wizard performing them, whether they worked or not. He remembered the searing pain he had felt as part of his soul was ripped away from him, how it had felt like a hot knife on flesh. How his stomach had emptied its contents all over the stone floor underneath him as he lay there in agony, weak and ravaged. He was not envious of her pain, he knew it's bite all too well.
He followed behind her quietly, observing her wander back in the direction towards where they had come from, his mind racing from what had happened. Tonight's events had clearly weakened her and he watched as she placed one weakened step in front of another, clearly lost in her thoughts, until her body forced her to rest on a nearby tree. Exhausted and spent. Suddenly aggravated by his continuing interest in her night, he started to question why he was still following her and found himself arguing with his mind, which for some reason kept nagging at him, telling him that her night was far from over.
"What else could be left to see?"
Still, he followed her, concealing himself behind a large tree as he saw her head dipped towards her chest, biting her lip in frustration, her eyebrows wrinkled in thought. Tom's eye traced her delicate hand, still stained with blood as she brought it up to her eyes, rubbing them in exhaustion, her shoulders slumping in towards her chest in defeat. Her face looked ethereal in the moonlight as its danced across onto her soft features, her expression calm and composed. From within him he felt something stir, a feeling that was unfamiliar and in confusion he ignored it, continuing to watch the light dance upon her skin.
Lyra remained like that for a moment until a sharp look of dread and panic washed over her features, her breathing suddenly becoming harsh and ragged. His hand went instinctively into his pocket, grasping his wand as he turned his attention towards her once more, preparing himself for any sort of threat he might be faced with.
Her body bent over once more in torturous pain as she cradled her head in her hands, the sounds escaping from her throat pitiful and strange and through the still air of the night he could hear what sounded like bones cracking loudly, similar to the branches that snapped under his feet. Sensing danger, Tom hid behind the tree quickly as the noises had abruptly stopped, the only sound he could now hear was the small exhale of his own breath.
"What was that?" he thought, struggling to listen for a footstep or a breath to indicate he was not alone. "...is she gone?"
A minute had passed, the seconds that ticked on feeling more like an hour to him until he finally heard movement, her body standing up from the ground. Moving his head silently from behind the pine tree to observe what had just transpired before him, he open his eyes in surprise, realizing that Lyra was no longer before him and had been replaced by something entirely different, something monstrous.
"So this is what you've been hiding." He thought.
His eyes narrowed instinctively as he watched the creature before him, decrepit and yet still somewhat humanesque in form, with skin like molten lava, wrinkled and as dry as a tanned leather. Its long hair was as white as snow, falling to the ground in filthy wisps, it's claws sharp and terrifying, but out of all the horror that stood before him it was the eyes that held his attention. Black diamond like eyes that glittered like coal rested above a skeleton-like nose, decaying and deformed like a rotting apple. It opened its jaw and Tom could see it's sharp teeth, yellow, broken and decomposing as if she had laid in the earth for decades before waking.
Tom sat still behind the tree, his hand grasped firmly once more around his wand and listened as the demon-like form breathed heavily, taking a step towards his direction. "Perhaps this is where the night should end." He thought sarcastically, unsure of whether the creature knew he was there or not, raising the small wooden stick above his head and off towards a thicket in the distance, muttering softly to himself. Feeling his heart beat heavily in his chest, he watched as the leaves in the bramble started to shake and move back and forth, providing him with the distraction he needed.
As the creature before him turned its attention from where he was hidden towards the spell he had cast off in the distance, it quickly took off towards the noise, Tom apparating from his spot quickly and without hesitation.
CRACK!
Apparating into the dark alleyway at the side of the inn, his heart beating heavily in his chest, unsure of what he had seen. His feet echoed quietly off the cobbled stone pavement as he made his way towards the door, entering the dimly lit inn, his mind racing as he made it up the creaky wooden stairs, passing Lyra's room, pausing momentarily until he unlocked the door that led into his quarters. He took his jacket off as he combed his hands through his hair, pushing back the dark black locks of hair that had fallen into his pale face.
In all his years at Hogwarts exploring the forbidden forest, throughout his travels through Europe and Albania he had never encountered anything quite like this. On the subject of spirits and poltergeists he considered himself quite learned, they could inhabit others bodies for multiple reasons, but he had never before read about or encountered a possession in which the hosts body had become altered or completely changed. This was something he was unfamiliar with.
"How is that even possible?" He thought as he grabbed the small basin by his bed.
"Aguamenti"
He watched as his wand produced a small stream of water, filling the porcelain basin. He shook his wand gently to stop the stream of water and cupped his hands into it as he bent down to splash his face. He gripped the sides of his nightstand as he let the water drip off his face, listening to it the wooden table as he sat there in silence mulling over his thoughts.
"I need to go back to the Athenium tomorrow. There's bound to be an answer somewhere that would explain all of this...and I'm going to find it."
PHEW. That took me a week to write and rewrite and try to figure out all the little details and where I wanted this all to go. I'm trying to give a little bit of insight into Lyras backstory which I don't want to give too much away of right away, because there will be more of that to come. Also there will be plenty more dialogue in upcoming chapters between the two of them, so don't worry-this story is going to be LONG! Also, this chapter is a little nod to Philosophers Stone, where Voldemort had possessed Quirrell in a HALF physical manifestation. I mean he had to get the idea from somewhere right? I think this is something Voldy would be super interested and perplexed about at the same time. Hope ya'll enjoyed! New Chapter hopefully in the next week or so, and as always please review, follow and favorite! All feedback is appreciated 3