Tom Marvolo Riddle.
That was his name, Tom Riddle, after the father he had always assumed (hoped, because that made it easier) was dead. At the cost of a few galleons that he had 'commandeered' from Abraxas Malfoy's chest, he'd found out from a Knockturn investigation firm that his father was in fact alive.
He had also found out that his idealised childhood version of his father as a wizard was also incorrect. His father was a capital-m Muggle, living in an old manor house in a tiny village in the Howardian Hills, west of the town of Malton in Yorkshire.
Marvolo, according to the investigators, was the name of his grandfather. Marvolo Gaunt, and Tom's uncle, Morfin, had both been imprisoned in Azkaban back in the '20s, and the older man had died not long after his release. Morfin still lived in a dirty, rundown shack not far from the Riddle house.
It had only taken a few days for the investigators to find his origins and piece together the story of his mother, Merope Gaunt. A near-squib, apparently, who had somehow tricked Tom Riddle Sr into a brief marriage, before she was abandoned and died. The muggles of Little Hangleton still talked about the affair.
Tom Jr's worldview had been shaken by the discoveries. Ever since last year, when he accidentally revealed himself to Orion Black as a parseltongue, he had known that he must have some magical ancestry, most likely noble, descended from Salazar Slytherin himself.
The knowledge that he couldn't truly be the "Slytherin mudblood" had been welcome, and his dormmates had finally begun to accept him. All attempts at finding the name Riddle in magical genealogies had failed though, and now he knew why.
His grandfather was a drunken old coot, his uncle is some sort of inbred, insane idiot. His mother was a squib, who needed to trick men into loving her and then went and DIED. His father is a rich, pompous twat who abandoned him, who never even looked for him.
He was better than them. He would be better than all of them. He would show them one day, and everyone else too.
Tom Marvolo Riddle would be a name that everyone knew.
Two years later, and a fifth year boy named Tom found himself standing in the middle of the third-floor girls' lavatories after curfew. He was more powerful and knowledgeable than he had been when he discovered his origins. He had plans now, long-term plans that went into motion today.
Today he was going to kill someone.
Intellectually, he knew he should feel something at that thought, something bad, something that would make him stop. But he didn't. It was like Mrs Cole always said, he was a devil child. He was born to sin.
For his plans to work, someone needed to die. And unfortunately, it needed to be a witch or wizard, so he couldn't simply wait until term ended and then go put down some dying soldier in one of the war hospitals.
As prefect, he was well aware of the bullying problems at Hogwarts. Slytherins and Gryffindors were prone to it, for different reasons, but for whatever reason, the most brutal bullying always happened within the girls Ravenclaw dorms.
Were one of the victims of this bullying to tragically and mysteriously die, it was likely that her bullies would be suspected.
Were the victim to be a mudblood, the investigation would be short.
It hadn't taken long to figure out his target. Myrtle Warren must die tonight.
She was crying in one of the stalls in the bathroom, having fled her dorm earlier that night. It was an extremely convenient location. It was as though the fates had ordained this. Myrtle Warren was supposed to die tonight.
He had put a silencing spell on the stall, so she wouldn't hear her death coming.
With a whispered hiss, the counters broke apart and slowly revealed the gateway to the Chamber of Secrets. It had been Abraxas Malfoy who first told him the myth of the chamber, after his dormmates found out about Tom's parseltongue ability, and after almost two years of chasing clues and talking to various hidden carvings of snakes, he had found it.
The Chamber was real.
The Monster was a basilisk.
He was the Heir.
"Come to me, Serpent. I need you to kill." was all it took, and soon his sensitive ears could pick up the slithering of the beast in the tunnels, and it's near meaningless hisses at the prospect of a hunt.
He stood at the rear of the room, half-hidden behind part of the counter that had hidden the entrance, so that the basilisks deadly eyes could not find him. His wand was in his right hand, and in the left, for the second part of tonight's events, was his diary.
He planned to begin his rise to world domination after the school year ended. He would first confront and deal with his family, and then, once his personal matters were all attended to, he could focus on solidifying his control over his dormmates, and extending connections to other Slytherin and pureblood families.
But, before he could risk openly working towards his goals, he needed immortality. He hadn't told any of the other Slytherins about this part of his plan, not even Malfoy, his closest minion, but the notes were all in his diary, and Slughorn had revealed far more than he should have.
When the basilisk's massive head appeared out of the tunnel, Tom removed the silencing spell on Myrtle's stall. "The mudblood is in that stall there," he shot sparks at the girl's location, "When she comes out, kill her." he hissed, and the basilisk rumbled its assent.
"Oy Myrtle, you in here? It's past curfew! Come out, I won't take any points." he then said, loudly, and in clear English. The sniffling stopped, and the girl said something, but he couldn't understand it with her voice wavering. Then, as he heard her getting up with a rustling of robes, he noticed a strange feeling in his gut.
What was that? It was part nervous fear and part excited energy. He stood with eyes glued to the stall door, unblinking, unbreathing, as he saw it open. The feeling spread to his chest as the door opened and the girl looked into the room. Myrtle was small, dark-haired, her glasses were in her hands.
When she saw the beast, her face froze into a look of terror, and without a sound, she fell to the ground, dead. It was honestly quite an underwhelming experience. Tom ordered the basilisk to return to it's slumber in the chamber, closed the entrance, and within a few seconds was by the girl's body.
She was already cold.
He put his left hand on her forehead, held his diary in his right, and performed the chant that he had discovered after searching out Slughorn's mentioned books. It was an old chant, devised by Herpo the Foul himself in the dreaded wizard's ancient dialect of Aromanian Latin.
As he said those dark words, the nervous energy disappeared from his body, and another feeling appeared. It was a strange thing, like the feeling of raw magic that he felt exactly when the flu powder hit the flame, or the feeling of a portkey as it activated, only it was wrapping itself around him.
The raw magic coating him started to envelop his body completely, filling him with a sense of freedom and power. Rightness. It was seeping in from the tight hold around his body, through his skin and bones and into his magic itself. The ritual hadn't mentioned this! It felt like Heaven.
As the chant finished, something snapped within him, he could feel it like happen like a bone breaking, but there was no pain. In fact, he couldn't feel anything at all other than the crushing joy of the magic holding his entire being.
As the chasm between himself and whatever had broken off grew larger, he suddenly realised that he could see himself. He was staring himself straight in the face. What is going on?
Is he the soul fragment? The books hadn't mentioned that his consciousness would come with him. He had thought that he wouldn't actually notice the change... Perhaps this wasn't such a good idea. Tom didn't do all this just so he could trap himself in a God damned diary.
The all-encompassing magic feeling started to wear off a little, and there was a vague nothingness, not even numbness. He couldn't feel his body at all! He tried to move, he tried to speak, he tried to cast a spell, or stop the ritual somehow, but he couldn't. His unmoving body just kept staring straight through him.
Why did he do this, fuck, there were other ways to become immortal. He should have just researched alchemy...
The nothingness too was fading now. It was like the visible darkness of closing both eyes, compared to the complete void of having one eye shut. He couldn't even create complex thoughts now, only emotion, something he had never been particularly capable of within his body.
As he stared at his now soulless body on the floor of the lavatory, beside Myrtle Warren, he felt fear. Fear of death. And for possibly the first time since hatred had taken control of him as a child in the orphanage, he felt regret.
The next morning, a first-year Slytherin girl woke earlier than usual. After a quick visit to the Great Hall for some jam on toast, she went for another early-morning exploration of the Castle, as she had been doing all year in the hours before and after classes.
She had mostly explored the dungeons already, at least those areas that students were permitted to enter. The first few floors were mainly classrooms and supply cupboards, as well as a bunch of abandoned or empty rooms and corridors.
Today, she was going to start exploring the third floor.
She found a lot more than she could have possibly expected. The fifth-year Slytherin boy prefect was lying on the ground in the bathroom, staring at the ceiling with glassy eyes and a slightly open mouth. His hand was reaching towards a Ravenclaw girl, who was also lying there, unmoving.
Running back to the Great Hall, the girl shouted out that she had found two students dead on the third floor. There were only a handful of students already at breakfast, and the only adult already at the head table was the transfiguration teacher, Professor Dumbledore.
The small crowd of students immediately followed the girl. Abraxas Malfoy was the first to get to the room, and stalled in the doorway in shock at the scene, before being pushed in by Avery behind him. Tom Riddle was dead, with some mudblood. What the fuck had happened last night?
Abraxas quickly scooped up Tom's diary, and hid it in his robes, before any non-Slytherin entered the room.
The exact circumstances of the night would never be known. There were many theories, one widespread one involving dementors, as neither student had a trace on them, neither student's wand showed any spells worse than a modified silencing spell.
The person who got closest to understanding what had happened that night was none other than Abraxas Malfoy. Using Tom Riddle's in-depth diary, he found all about Horcruxes and ritual murder. Using his family resources, he also found out that Tom's ritual had been incomplete.
By Tom's mistake, the future was robbed of a great figure. But some things were pre-ordained, and when he was removed, another's destiny shifted.
When the Dark Lord Abraxas made his horcruxes, after taking Tom's place as leader of the next generation of Slytherins and purebloods, he would use the correct ritual. The first item he would use was none other than Tom's diary.