Chapter 4: A Name to Fear

After resigning from Borgin and Burke's, Tom laid low and traveled around Europe and Asia. Biding his time was the most strategic move for now, for if he was going to remake the wizarding world in his image, he would need to attack from a position of strength and when the time was right.

He moved through much of the eastern continent like a vagabond, a tramp, a ghost, belonging neither here nor there nor anywhere. Eventually, he found his way to the old cottage where his mother had lived, seduced his father and fallen pregnant with him.

It had required the assistance of some asking around, but by and large Riddle had come to the truth about how his parents came together largely on his own. The idea that someone could make someone else love them was disgusting – not the kind of power he sought. There were other, more productive and inspiring ways to wield power. Besides, what was so noble and pure about love anyway? His parents had never loved him! If they had, his mother wouldn't have died, and his father wouldn't have left. The resentment of being orphaned at a young age grew and festered inside of him anew until he began to despise even having to share a name with these people. That his only birthright seemed to have been getting saddled with his filthy, Muggle father's name!

… No. He would fashion himself a new name, a name he knew one day all wizards everywhere would someday fear to even speak, when he became the most powerful sorcerer in the WORLD!

But how to choose the perfect name? It couldn't be a knock-off, not even from wizards he admired like Salazar Slytherin and Gellert Grindewald, even as he was more and more questioning at least some of their methods.

It was painful, but nonetheless ingenious to go back to his given name and try to work something out from there. In the foothills and dirt of whatever camp he had laid out for himself in the countryside, Tom would write out his full name in block letters:

TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE.

He frowned. Maybe there was a way for him to rearrange the letters in such a manner that it created a name more fearsome…. or at least, something that wasn't nonsensical. And even if people would one day dare not speak it, it had to be something easy to pronounce. These considerations were, naturally, very important.

In Muggle primary school, at the orphanage, he had never been the one with the best marks in English and mastering his letters. He had learned enough to write twelve-inches of essay in his magical studies, and was glad that he had never needed to concern himself with such Mudblood nonsense as English lessons any more than he had to.

Still, Riddle was a learned man. Just as he knew a word, a name, could mean whatever you said it meant, he also knew there were laws for how to form those words, those names in the first place.

Perhaps he was overthinking this. Perhaps it simply wasn't possible, to fashion a new name out of the old one.

Although…. he tilted his head as he pondered the flickering, blood red letters of his name in the dirt. If he looked at it with fresh eyes…. there could be a pattern he was missing. A palindrome, maybe. But, no, a palindrome simply referred to a name or word that could be spelled the same way backwards as well as forwards. He inverted the letters of his full name, just for a lark, and he winced.

ELDDIR OLOVRAM MOT.

What the bloody….? Well, he certainly jolly well couldn't call himself Lord Mot: his enemies would sooner laugh at him than fear him. Olovram? …. It had a German connotation, invoking memories of the Second World War, which had been quite a time for wizards as well as for Muggles, with Grindewald stalking the land. Plus, he might have been a Muggle rat, but Adolf Hitler – now there was a man who had known how to take risks and boldly reshape the planet, bring it around to his way of thinking. Blooming shame what happened to that fellow….

Elddir sounded like Elder - supposing he prefaced his new name with a title like 'Elder' instead of 'Lord.' Yes…. Soon as he thought it, however, Riddle frowned. Elder to what? It made him sound old, if also wizened, and if there was one thing he was resolved never to be, it was old. Ah, set it aside for now, maybe keep most of the spelling. Keep the 'I' but get rid of the second 'D' – it was extraneous.

He turned back to the worst name of the lot – Mot – and was about to cross it out, vanish it with his wand in disgust, when something caught his eye:

Oddly, it was the 'R' in Olovram.

Riddle hummed curiously and used his magic to literally zap the R and carry it over to the word Mot. There seemed to be only one place for it: he placed it between the 'O' and the 'T' so that it now spelled Mort.

Mort….. a connotation, a prefix, that usually heralded a word associated with death. And death elicited fear. Yes…. Wait a minute….. Lord Mort.

…. No, too simple. But the hijacking of even one letter had given him sufficient pause, enough that he recalled another trick for reforming, rearranging words.

An anagram. What if his full name could be fashioned into an anagram?

Lifting his wand in a manner similar to a conductor before an orchestra, Riddle murmured a complex incantation, then flicked his wand. He left it up to the letters themselves to sort themselves how they may; if it was unsatisfactory, they would keep going again and again until they got it right.

Maybe it was fortuitous, destiny really, that it only took the letters forming the name of his birth one try to rechristen him:

I AM LORD VOLDEMORT.

Riddle – no: Voldemort grinned. Yes….. oh, yes….. it was perfect. Voldemort. A name of death. A name to fear.

Chuckling wickedly, he pulled the hood of his cloak low over his face.

In his travels, Lord Voldemort (he had briefly toyed with the title of Elder Voldemort, going back to the traditional spelling, then decided against it) continued to explore the mysteries of the Dark Arts. He had always been a top student at Hogwarts, Head Boy his year as well as Valedictorian of his graduating class, and he put these academic skills to good use, relentless in his pursuit of knowledge as much as he was relentless in his pursuit of power. Knowledge was power, it had often been said, and Voldemort was confident that one would eventually beget the other.

He assorted with many Dark Wizards, coming across so many like-minded people that it began to burgeon him with something akin to pleasure. He had had no idea there were so many magical people out in the world, of the noblest blood who felt the same way he did. It would seem they largely had kept these opinions to themselves in the decade or more after the Second World War, after Grindewald's fall. It was exhilarating.

Voldemort was so engaging, so charismatic, that he began to attract followers in these Dark Wizards, as if he was the rock on which he would build a perverted Church. They were drawn to him, not to become fishers of men, but to become grim reapers of those who thought themselves men, but were really mud and mice. These acolytes he would eventually knight as his 'Death Eaters,' an appointment to which his disciples devoted themselves with a cult-like fanaticism.

He continued to study the Dark Arts. He had fashioned more Horcruxes out of Hufflepuff's Cup and the locket of Slytherin. Even the diary in which he would write his most personal thoughts while over the fire and making camp – the quill-ink always invisible, so that his innermost musings would be known only to him.

He and his followers began to go through the countryside, usually into isolated towns, and hunt Muggle-borns for sport. They were always careful, as Voldemort cautioned them, not to become too engrossed in these power trips. They had not gathered enough strength to commit an all-out assault, and it wouldn't do to create a pattern that could be learned, especially not by inquisitive Aurors. Though occasionally, Voldemort himself would indulge in a bit of sadism. It was a better high than some other…. simpler pleasures, which many of his faithful also thought to indulge themselves in, usually with each other, if the fancy and the carnal desire struck. Moans and squeaks and creaks of cot bedsprings could be heard at all hours of the night in camp.

Voldemort's Dark Arts experimentation continued, until he was performing more ambitious magic on himself. He was his own best guinea pig, after all. Eventually, Voldemort was hooked so much on this most grotesque of makeovers that not only were these experiments affecting him physically. They were also affecting his mind – in the most liberating sense. The Nazi Josef Mengele himself couldn't have been so visionary!

"Has anyone a mirror?" Voldemort would call to his congregation more than once; there was always a mad scramble for someone to fetch it, in the hopes that their Lord might use his or her own personal mirror in which to study His glorious face.

Voldemort appraised himself judiciously. His skin was smoother now, almost scalier. He was pleased to see his nose was all but gone, leaving behind only slits for nostrils: he had always thought himself to have a bulbous nose, one he had inherited from his mother, the tramp! He was nearly bald, but this too, he didn't mind – his hair had grown long in his youth, and had always been a chore to cut.

Plus, Voldemort judged, he might think himself handsome – and he did – but he had to concede other, outside observers would be hard-pressed to find any beauty in such a man, for by the barest technical definition and despite his appearance, he was still a man. (Later, he would find that one person did still see some sort of beauty in him – an admiration, even attraction that would bemuse him more than anything else).

But others, nearly all others whom he met would recoil from him, run from him. Some of his own followers who had already pledged their loyalty might draw back at the sight of him. A healthy fear even among the faithful wasn't such a bad thing, was it?

Lord Voldemort studied his reflection in the mirror once and grinned cruelly. Perfect. He was immaculate. He was…. perfect.

And soon, everyone would know just how perfect he was.