"But guilt and shame, remorse, ambivalence, those are foreign countries to our kind, which must be learned stone by stone."

― Madeline Miller, Circe


Most wizards and witches carried ill-matched wands from their first days learning magic to their deaths. Wands were expensive, after all, and were often passed down within families. Some outgrew theirs without ever realising it. Others could never find one that was quite right. There was, Mr Ollivander thought, nothing more frustrating than seeing someone use a badly chosen wand.

But the man who walked into his shop that morning had not had an ill-matched wand. He would never forget that one. He had known the boy would be something out of the ordinary as soon as he'd stepped in, all those years and decades ago. Working with wands had given Mr. Ollivander an instinct for magic others did not have, and Tom Riddle had arrived half in control of his already. Yew, of course. Thirteen-and-a-half inches of yew, with that marvelous phoenix tail-feather core. It had been a remarkable wand for a remarkable boy.

"People often mistake those with yew wands as being susceptible to the Dark Arts," he said to Tom Riddle as he entered Mr. Ollivander's shop, wandless, for the second time in the space of a century. "But really, they can suit the hand of a hero just as well as a villain."

Hermione had warned him, of course. He'd had time enough to prepare himself to meet this man again, this admired, feared torturer. Time enough to contemplate the extraordinary magic of it all. Yet seeing Tom, as young and strong and handsome as he'd been when he'd strode past Garrick's shop on his way to and from work, a young man slipping a toe into the dark, while his own body had withered to weakness, was shocking. For a moment it was the 40s again and he was in his prime, and then his feeble body shut down the memory. But his skin prickled with awe.

All the sins and ruination Tom Riddle had come to wear were wiped clean. He had been made new, the same and yet not, just as Hermione had said.

"That wood is just as likely to suit those who protect others fiercely… I wonder if you could ever have been other than you were."

He had often wondered, in fact, if he could have known, even then, what the boy would become. Few had ever connected the two but Garrick Ollivander had always known the identity of the human behind the monster.

"Mr. Ollivander," this new-old-changed-same Tom Riddle said. "You deserved better than that dungeon at Malfoy Manor. I am sorry for it."

The apology slid off the boy's tongue more easily than the old man had expected. He put down the wood he was carving: a lovely piece of rowan to fortify him for the meeting.

"Tom Riddle," he said softly and the words were a weight in his mouth.

"It's Eldritch now, sir."

"Apologies mean nothing when they're made by a supplicant," Ollivander pointed out as the dark-haired wizard stopped in front of his workbench. Eldritch indeed, he thought, as the young man loomed over him. He resisted the urge to stand, and wished he'd thought of it before. But he was old and tired and he stayed in his chair.

"True enough, and yet I find I am sorry, and not just because I am in need of a wand."

"I will not sell you a wand, Mr. Eldritch."

The young man's handsome face tightened but he nodded.

"I had expected that. Is there anything I can do to change your mind?"

"No," Mr Ollivander replied, "but you will come back tomorrow."

.

.

Tom had woken late that morning in the infirmary after a long and painful night growing from a teenager into a young man. He was stiff after the agony of the ageing potion and had struggled up, to stand naked in front of the mirror in the bathroom. His jaw had strengthened, shoulders broadened. He was perhaps three inches taller than he'd been the night before. The stiffness had eased with another potion and he'd been taken to his new lodging by a fully clothed house-elf with a clipboard who'd introduced himself as the island's refugee co-ordinator.

He'd been given a small cottage, a stipend of funds, a map, and a point of contact - a woman whose job was to help new arrivals settle in.

And then he'd escaped to find the wandmaker, who'd had less than a wand but more than a curse to give him.

Now, it was past lunchtime and though his stomach was growling all he wanted - bar a wand - was to find Hermione. He strode off in the direction of the University. It was impossible to miss, rising high above the town, its uncountable towers soaring above the great cliff it was carved into.

But the day was to prove frustrating on that count too. The Arch-Chancellor, a wizard at the main entrance told him, had been called away.

And so, instead he wandered.

It was disconcerting to be wandless in a place so uninhibitedly magical. He bought a box of food from a smiling young woman in a shop near the university, her hair wrapped in a bright-coloured turban, accent lying on her English like honey thick with spices, like she could taste it.

"Where are you from?" he asked, betrayed into curiosity about everything in this place.

She laughed and told him to sit while she served two students.

"Ghana, boy, but we all from here now," she told him after they'd gone. "You're new but not to the university and you don't have a wand. So you're like me and you came here because you weren't welcome somewhere else I reckon. What's your name?"

"I expect I deserved it," he said and felt another chip fall away from the boulder he'd worn on his shoulders since he'd woken from death. "I'm Tom."

It rested easier now. It was just a name after all.

"Mine's Xorlali. My mother used to help people," she told him, "and then one day this man - white people say him a witch doctor - came. He was a famous man but he was no good. He dint like what my mama did or the village and all around trusting her. So one night he had his people come. We had to leave in the night, and spent some time here and there. But no one wanted her help, they didn't know her. They burned my sister in one bad village. And then this woman she found us and she say - you are like me. And she was right, and brought us here. That was... six years ago now."

"Hermione?"

"Lord no," she laughed again, deep and rich. "That one too busy to be picking up all we strays herself. No this lady still in Ghana looking for people like me. She took us to one lady called Alu and it was she bringed us here."

"What do you think of it?" he wondered.

She shrugged. "I don't like all that magic much myself. My mother, she upstairs, she's learning some but her magic it's different. If I wanted a wand I'd have to learn it too, but I don't need one of those little sticks. My friend her have children and they say they have to learn it."

He stayed for a while, caught as he always was by the potential to fracture. Here was a weakness of the island and its jumbled population brought from anywhere and everywhere, some by choice, some for refuge. One wizard's magic was another's devilry, he learned as he sat in her richly-scented cafe.

A group of students came in a flurry, and he watched them too, picking up strands of accents, how they carried themselves, the chatter about the classes they'd left.

.

.

Tom went back to Olliverder's the next day and the next and the next -

First, the man asked him to tell his story.

Then, after he'd listened to hours of talking, he said he would not sell Tom a wand - but he would teach him to make his own.

"You learned to wield yours beyond perhaps anyone else. But you never really learned to respect it. If you want another wand you'll have to learn what that means."

.

.

Tom,

See you when you've made your wand.

Hermione

.

.

.

So, as the days passed Tom did not see Hermione.

It was one of her tests, he knew, a test that said prove yourself to me.

He did not see her but he began to learn her island.

.

.

Iðunna's residents could be roughly split into three categories. There were those who worked at or attended the university. Some were fleeting, others rooted. There were those who had been forced to flee their home countries, who had come seeking temporary asylum. Many of them stirred the fragrances of home into the dishes they cooked and wove familiar colours into their clothes and dreamed of a day they could go back. Some shook off the longing and made the best of it. Few felt as though their new home was indeed a home at all.

And then there were the people who had moved to the new island out of curiosity, adventurers and those who wanted a new start, no questions asked. Those who saw a business opportunity.

The reasons for living there, therefore, were a desire for something new, a need for refuge, or a desire to learn more about magic.

Mr. Ollivander, Tom learned, had been drawn in equal part by all three of the above. But primarily, he had been lured by the sheer magic of the place. Hermione had wooed him out of retirement, offering him a series of well-paid guest lectures. And then, of course, he had stayed. He was well over a hundred now, but his spryness had returned with his joy and one day he had turned the bottom of his house into a wand shop.

.

.

"Will you stay?" he asked Xorlali one day, eating a beef stew called shoko that surely had witchcraft in its making.

"If it is God's will," she said with a shrug. "It's safe here for my mother. She's decided to learn this western magic some. But I don't want magic."

"I could help teach her western magic," he offered. "If you liked."

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The days passed and then months and Tom made first one wand and then many. He spent early mornings in the forest learning to choose branches and then alone, evenings tracking unicorns, afternoons writing letters to spare the old man's hands, unwrapping parcels of wood and feathers and hair and heartstrings sent from all across the world, lunches in Xorlali's shop and slowly slowly slowly he felt the black hole inside him was being whittled away.

In the end it took more than a year to make his wand. By that time he had he'd helped to make dozens for the shelves, pressed some into the hands of wide-eyed children buying their first, and Xorlarli's crinkled-eyed wide-smiling mother the day she passed the test Iðunna required for adults without a magical education to carry a wand.

He'd helped sell wands to elves and goblins, to asylum-seekers of varied ages, to students who'd broken theirs or been told to find a better one. He'd seen a thousand long boxes leave the shop.

And then one day, he finished a wand and gave it an experimental flick as usual, and just like that the warmth raced up his arm and a great shower of golden sparks flew out of it and the old man laughed.

"Beech," Mr. Ollivander said. "Your mind must be opening up then, Tom Riddle."

.

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Sorry for the delay. I've had a lot of really beautiful messages in between these updates. I also moved country/job and have far few hours to write. But I've missed it so much.

The ending is in sight and the last few words will be Hermione's - this is and always has been her story.

This is dedicated to all the people who review chapter by chapter as they start from the beginning and make me fall back in love with this process every time.

PS Sally is on holiday so this is unedited - let me know if - when! - you spot any inconsistencies or mistakes. I just had a very rare free moment to get this out.