Chapter Two: Ship's Captain

The wind coursed through my hair. I could taste the salt on the breeze and the wood of the ship, and I could smell the aroma of the wood that made up the deck, and the slightly different wood that made up the hull of the ship. I grew to be an expert of observation in the month and a half we sailed along the ocean in a weary and tedious journey.

The crew spoke my language haltingly, a foreign language. They told me it was only used in rural villages anymore, and wasn't the International Standard.

Degun was a fisher man who had decided to find work on the ship setting sail to the distant lands of "Algradon," which was I assumed by the way they said it the most powerful land in the world. It was hard to understand them at times. He told me I should keep my head low. "People don't like wizards," He said to me in a whisper, at night, coming by my cabin with two plates of food. We sat down in front of each other and ate in relative silence.

He grew tense and uncomfortable. So did I. Tom prodded me to ask him more questions. "How does he know you have magic? He can't sense you're a squib like I can, but he can sense my magic. Ask him!"

I didn't ask him because I didn't care to. I had traveled through many worlds in many different times in many different ways and right now I needed a break, needed to relax and let myself flow with the river, not against it.

At the moment I didn't care much what happened to me. The crew didn't expect anything from me and they always fed me a meal a day. The ship was vast, and the crew were many and I hadn't seen the captain one. Though the Doctor aboard told me I had pneumonia and I also had the fastest recovery he had ever seen. I didn't visit him again for fear he might want to dissect me, such was the looks he gave me, the bug eyed scientist turned doctor.

But what Degun said got me curious. "Are you a wizard, then?" I asked him as he munched on a piece of broccoli. He lifted up his weather tanned face and squinted at me.

"No, I'm not," he said bluntly, "And I'll block your head if you suggest so again. Its bad luck to be a wizard. No woman wants a wizard for a husband. No Captain wants a wizard in his crew. No priest wants a wizard in his congregation. To be a wizard you dissociate yourself from the world, and are little more than a raving lunatic."

"Then how can you tell if I'm a wizard or not?" I asked him, grinning, "If you have admitted you have no extraordinary ability-"

Degun smirked at me, and pulled out an ivory knife made of elephant tusks, as he told me during his examination of the knife. I watched him play around with it and then said, "Okay what of it? You have a funny looking knife there, maybe it can skin a fish, maybe not."

"This," Degun proclaimed, "Is a wizard of a knife."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Don't look so skeptical. It led me directly to you."

"May I?"

He held it out to me and I touched it. I felt a jolt of electricity run up and down my spine like a bouncing ball bouncing on a trampoline. A consciousness that was not me and not Tom Riddle invaded us and I felt pushed aside as someone else took over.

Life returns to me.

So many years and years of watching, of being an observer, and now, Tom Riddle finally had a body.

I sat on the mattress and pondered my situation. Where was Harry in all this?

"I'm right here, Tom," said Harry in my mind, "Now you're in control."

"Amazing," I said staring at the knife. The ivory blade gleamed with a hidden malice. I felt almost afraid, but Lord Voldemort had nothing to fear. I had lived and learnt for a long life, until I was separated from my originator in that fateful spell – a reflection of my own ability used against me by a mother's love.

But what was this artifact that had restored me to power, to a young body and a life open ended?

"Enjoy it while you can," Harry said. His voice sounded condescending, as if he knew something I didn't. "It won't last for long."

"How can you be so sure?" I said cautiously, "This might be a permanent change. You'll have to get used to it, Harry."

Harry laughed. I heard his chuckle: it grated on my nerves.

I chuckled to myself, imitating Harry's laughter. I stopped when I realized what I was doing. The thought of losing myself again, of being an observer to Harry's idiocy was the most terrifying thought of my life. Perhaps worse than death.

No, nothing is worse than death.

I stared down at Degun, "Where did you get this knife?"

He backed away from me, looking slightly uncertain, "Uh, Harry? Are you alright? Your eyes-"

"Am I any different than five minutes ago?" I said, "I am the one and the same, and this knife feels like it belongs to me."

Degun turned white with fear. I invaded his mind with all the force and finesse of a sledge hammer. I wanted information. I wanted it now.

Memories flashed by me like a river. I swam up current to find what I wanted: where was this ship headed to? Why?

I saw Degun speaking with the Captain. His memory was not clear, because he was a muggle most likely. I saw at once he had no magic. Wizards and witches have much more organized minds. He was in the harsh sunlight sitting on a dock with his feet in the cold water. The Captain approached him, and he was a strong and fearful looking man with a grim faced square chin and a body that rippled with muscle.

"You are Degun," The captain said. "I have been searching for you. The Councilor of your village recommended you to me."

Degun stood up on the dock, and saluted, "Captain?"

"Yes, I own a ship. I set sail to Algradon in the morning. I have need of a fighter, a warrior."

"I am good with bow and arrow," Degun said, nodding his head. "I am good in a boat too."

"A fisherman's boat," grunted the Captain. "I march against Algradon! It is but a mere tiny island but on it there lies men of great power. Wizards."

"Wizards?" Degun's eyes widened. His thoughts were open to me like a book – the thoughts he had had in a memory were as faint and scattered as the hues of the rainbow on a foggy day, refracted light. Such it was with a muggle's mind. Everything refracted, redirected, tangled up. No organization. It made my task to find information so much worse. He was afraid and excited because he remembered his grandfather from his boyhood day who was also a wizard.

Before I could proceed with the examination, I felt a sharp pain in my mind.

I pulled out of Degun's thoughts and memories, as a painful headache throbbed and drove me to distraction.

"Stop it!" Harry hissed, "Degun's a friend. I won't allow you to rifle through his thoughts, you hear me, Voldemort?"

I grunted and clutched my head, the waves of pain intensifying for a moment of painful punishment, then receding into the horizon of my mind.

It appeared, I thought in a wave of fear, that I wasn't in complete control after all.

"The Knife," I prompted to a shivering Degun. That was my only weapon aboard the ship. I was wandless. But what I had seen in his thoughts and memories was enough: we were traveling to an island of wizards. For a muggle attack, but it was obvious they would fail.

"It's yours, take it!" Degun fled the cabin.

I pondered his retreat: "He might tell the Captain of our true nature."

"Your true nature," Harry said. I felt the triumph in his voice and hated him so much at that moment that I could have-

"You can't do anything to me." Harry taunted, and then vanished until I could feel him no more in my mind, though I sent out tendrils of awareness, watching for any signs of activity other than my own. Though our minds overlapped, we still had territory that was entirely individual. I knew he was there, but hiding in his own mind, as hidden from me as if he never existed. If only!

But I knew he was there, an observer just like I had been, with far more power. I wondered if he could step in at any time and control me.

It couldn't be. I knew Harry Potter like the back of my hand. He would never willingly give up control. What happened with the knife, nobody could have foreseen.

For now, I had a body. I would not waste time. Lord Voldemort had returned. I set my will to creating plans: I must have control of the island of wizards. I needed that power.

And I needed a wand. I stared at the knife in contemplation, and picked up. I casted in a loud and clear voice, "Lumos!"

A bubble of jubilation rose in myself when the Knife glowed faintly white and bright against the alastor walls of my cramped cabin.

I could do magic!

I reveled in that thought, and spent the rest of the evening studying as much as I could of the knife, finding out its strength and limitations. Throughout the analsysis, as I used a list of spells in my mind as a guideline and ran through each one individually – they ranged from weak to difficult in terms of casting power, or at least that was how I chose to order the spells – I tried to elicit comments from Harry.

"What do you think of that one, boy?" I asked as I cast a particularly fiery spell. The Knife glowed a dull orange, its blade shimmering in a luminescent glow that illuminated the dark cabin as bright as a lamp, and as offensive as the Sun's rays to a baby's skin.

A whip of fire emerged from the handle of the blade, moving like a living beast-snake! My breath hissed parseltongue as the snake uncoiled itself, its sinewy body made up only of fire, flowing and unwinding.

Harry chuckled.

I grew very very afraid.