Disclaimer : I don't own Harry Potter or any of JK Rowling's creations.
The Ceremony
The Tales of Fortescue
August 16, 19—
This diary begins as an experiment. It is a simple object, easy to use and repair and replace.
He paused. The ink he was using was an ink of his own design. He had prepared it in Hogwarts. Before writing the brief entry he had decided to add another ingredient to the ink. His own blood. The blood was extracted from a small cut on the tip of his finger and then poured into a glass. He then removed a blood replenishing potion that he had prepared last year with his friends and poured drops of it into the glass. He watched with fascination as the brief drops of blood began replicating and duplicating itself. The potion worked best inside the body where the blood regulation was controlled by a beating and pumping human heart and flowed through active arteries. The blood now pooling in his glass up to quarter length would clot at once and become useless in minutes. However he had no intention to use it for transfusion, he poured the glass into the gourd of magical ink and watched as it congealed and mixed with each other. The ink he used now was something that could not be used by anyone else and that would only reveal itself to his eyes or to someone who carried his blood in their bodies.
It had been two days after he returned to the Orphanage. He had told Mrs. Cole that he had not found any information in his trip and that it had been a false step. She had mistaken his fatigue and exhaustion for disappointment and despair. Probably thinks that I'm crying here or something.
He returned to the diary.
My Name is Tom Marvolo Riddle.
But I am Lord Voldemort.
That is my true name. The name of my father was imposed by some accident of birth that I am incapable of reversing. I reject it and its namesake. I will make my own way from here on. I will learn more about magic than anyone in the school. I aim to go further beyond the confines the world has forced on to me, the world of this orphanage and the world of the wizards. I obey no laws, I accept no order. But I am not an anarchist. Great Salazar Slytherin detested the reckless ways of proud Gryffindor. He would let any enter our world. I will impose a new order and new will. Mine will be a world where wizards will remain standing at the pedestal of the world standing over all the giants, the goblins, the elves, the centaurs, the werewolves, the vampires and below them all, the mudbloods and muggles. Society will be free of all indulgences to Muggle ignorance. We shall no longer suffer recalcitrance, submission and defeat. The new world will be a happy world where no child will be separated from the power that it bears.
Riddle paused. No, it's too much like that muggle from Germany bombing London. He erased the entire paragraph and sighed.
Hogwarts had kept him safe from the Blitz as it had many Muggleborn students at school. Dippet and Dumbledore had even allowed some of the Muggleborn students to use magic to protect their houses and neighbours from the rockets and Riddle was reminded by the Transfiguration teacher to cast charms on his building walls. As such the Orphanage was safe from the Blitz attacks. Riddle personally would not care if the entire building was levelled and torn down but he didn't want interfering questions from the Ministry as to why a wizard residing in a building did not magically protect his fellow residents. The arrival of the Second World War was not a main concern for the wizarding world in so far as their buildings and houses were protected from muggle weapons but the Minister for Magic was using it as a chance for wizard-muggle solidarity. The ministry was even creating Good Samaritan legislation to charge and try wizards who were found wanting in their efforts to protect their fellow Muggle countrymen. The pureblood advocates were in the distinct minority insisting that aiding Muggles was a security breach and letting them die for their own war was only fair. Except of course it wasn't just the Muggles' war.
Riddle was interested in the war in so far that it concerned the wizarding world. He suspected that the Ministry let some of the Allied Heads know about Grindelwald. He was from Switzerland, the village with which he shared his name and he was expelled from Durmstrang, where he had started his career. He had built his army of Giants, goblins and many other dark creatures and an army of wizards loyal to him. He had already put the Imperius curse on many heads of wizarding societies in Europe, leaving it in disarray and that too in the midst of a brutal Muggle war. The level of chaos he was creating was unprecedented. His plan was simple, creating a new world for the greater good. Tom scoffed, For the Greater Good. He was unimpressed by Grindelwald, unlike some of his fellow Slytherins or friends in other houses. He was bent on creating a world where he and his army would dominate over the Muggles so that the wizarding world no longer had to stay in hiding and yet after amassing a force and army of great power across many wizarding nations, instead of taking on the Muggles as he had planned, he instead chose to support the Muggle dictators of Europe and help them win their war. This stupidity was intolerable to Tom as was Grindelwald's feeble attempts at sabotage such as sending house elves on aeroplanes to chew equipment and wires.
Of course Grindelwald's deluded puppets believed it was For the Greater Good to support the Muggle war believing that helping the most brutal and bloodthirsty of the Muggles win over the less brutal and defensive ones would leave fewer Muggles to bind to him. Riddle's own opinion about Grindelwald was that he was insane and unbalanced. He was known to constantly laugh and giggle during his attacks. "Giggling Grindel" was how the Prophet called him and it suited the fool right, thought Tom viciously. Parading himself before the whole world, justifying his actions, attending weddings and even occupying himself with girlfriends and mistresses, Riddle didn't know how anyone could take him seriously. His ghastly crimes and mass murders were messy, brutal and vulgar. It had no other interest than rampage and chaos. There was no purpose and no sense of ceremony behind these murders. 'The Unbeatable Grindelwald' was how they described him in Europe. This interested Tom greatly as not even the feared and wanted wizard or witch duelists commissioned by some of the magical governments had been able to do it. Grindelwald was too fast, too forceful and brutal. Even his basic disarming spells had left wizards and witches concussed. However there was more to magic than brute force and Riddle was arrogant enough to plan on ways of defeating Grindelwald, not out of any altruism but out of the glory and infamy any young wizard would get for defeating a feared and wanted dark wizard in his teens.
That is if someone else didn't do it first he thought idly. Dumbledore could do it. Everyone wants him to anyway. But would Dumbledore devote time to hunt down a crazed gloryhound. Tom wasn't entirely serious of course. Tracking, hunting and defeating Grindelwald on his own required resources no one in the world would pass to a young teenager just out of Hogwarts. More prudent to work on the Experiment.
Riddle made daily diary entries into the book, filling it with all that he planned to complete before the year was finished. In his free time, he would make visits to Diagon Alley, first to change the muggle paper into real money and then to purchase whatever he needed. Occasionally he would run into some of his old Hogwarts friends and he even allowed Matilda Bennett, a pretty seventh-year Ravenclaw to treat him to ice-cream at Fortescue's. Riddle had enjoyed taking some of the girls out to dates and his smooth charm allowed him to be on best terms with them even after his attention left them; this kept him a regular on their gift list or to take him out on expensive treats he could ill afford. Beyond a certain level of sensual and physical pleasure, Riddle felt nothing for them. Some witches at school were intelligent and powerful of course. Some like Minerva McGonagall, the Gryffindor Quidditch Captain even earned his respect if not any personal interest or want of companionship. But he as yet never felt nor yearned for the love even some of Riddles' friends claimed to share with women (and occasionally men). Riddle saw people always as what he gained from others and what he had to give in return of their commitment to him. None of his relationships went beyond that. And he himself was an accident, a popped pill exchanged between mother and father. No love as far as his life was concerned.
At the Leaky Cauldron, he had experienced the impact of the Riddle murders first hand from the wizarding world. It had caused a controversy because they were prominent wealthy muggles and the brutal murders gravely dented the wizard-muggle party line the ministry were maintaining. The case was open and shut of course. Uncle Morfin had a record for crimes against Muggles, including to Tom's great surprise, a prior attack on his father. It amused him slightly that he, the unwanted abandoned product of the union of the two feuding families had effectively destroyed both with a single stroke. Morfin was committed for life in Azkaban with Dementors to feast on his broken mind. He had confessed to committing these murders, his wand had vindicated it clearly and that was that. Tom was quite pleased with the outcome except for one small doubt. He had intended for the Riddle killings to be his final clearance of all the ancestry that tied him down. Now with the printing of the names of the Muggles on a newspaper widely circulated in his world, many would come forth and inquire about the coincidence that a similarly named Muggle was killed in the papers. Tom Riddle wasn't an unusual name of course. And he could explain it by suggesting that his mother named him randomly and it perhaps did not mean anything. It wouldn't fool Dumbledore however. Dumbledore who knew him from his orphanage, who had asked Mrs. Cole all about him and knew what he was really like. He expected Dumbledore to talk about these killings with him at Hogwarts and he began wondering what he should prepare to tell that old fool. But surely he can't think I'd track them down and kill them and then frame someone else to do it. That's way too absurd to expect from any prospective sixth year, he thought ironically.
Spending time at the Leaky Cauldron allowed him to think clearly about how far he had come. It gave him a profound sense of power in wielding a wand to kill and then succeeding to conceal his actions and divert attention away from them. On some level he wondered about his complete lack of any guilty feelings, of remorse for his actions. But Tom didn't feel any remorse for murders of a pack of Muggles who had lorded above their fellow villagers who subsisted on their own hard work and hard earned daily bread while the Riddles paraded their riches and luxury for all to see and envy. He felt no remorse for their deaths when they had abandoned him to a dirty bin of a home. As for Morfin, he was wasting away in that shack and there was hardly any difference between that place and a cell in Azkaban and there was no way he could let the Peverell ring rest on his filthy rancid fingers. Tom had taken to wearing the ring since that day. Besides, Morfin had hated those Muggles for taking away his sister and fulfilling what Morfin had wanted all these years would have pleased him and Marvolo, thought Tom.
Tom rose from his chair and walked out of the Cauldron pub and went to the back entrance. A few taps of his wand and he was in Diagon Alley again. It had astonished him when he had first seen the key commercial centre for Magical business, all those hidden shops and places living boisterously alone in their world. High above the district was Gringotts Bank. His eyes stared at it with the same hunger and greed that he felt when he first saw it coming into the alley. It was the safest and strongest of all banks in the world. Many had tried to break in and all died foolishly in their attempt to steal treasure that was never theirs. It was a bank of powerful magic that ran deep below the earth. Not even Grindelwald had dared to disturb the banks, signing an agreement of neutrality with the goblins.
Tom walked down the street to meet a person who had information that he sought – Florean Fortescue. It was slightly ironic that the man who possessed the knowledge he sought was a cheerful owner of an ice cream shop. But Tom knew that Fortescue knew a great deal about history, including the history that was not in the books. It was Fortescue who had told him of the legend of the Chamber of Secrets which he had been searching for at Hogwarts and which he had discovered late last year and unleashed on the student body. He had also mentioned to Tom, a mysterious lost wand made of elder that was supposed to be unbeatable, about the rich untapped resources of the Albanian forest and about famous dark wizards and their defeats.
"So Tom, the usual?" said an auburn haired young man in his 20s.
"What else can compare?" said Tom raising his eyebrow.
Florean smiled as he served Tom his favourite chocolate sundaes with snake shaped chips (as per his request) as toppings.
Florean began talking to Tom about the war's effect on business ("People want to be cheerful and so I send sundaes to their homes by Floo!") and also how even pureblood obsessives had taken the war as a serious threat.
"They think Muggles are beneath them but they don't want to live in a London without their Big Ben, Westminister Abbey, Piccadilly Square or St. Paul's Cathedral!" scoffed Florean, "Imagine that us pagans rushing to the defense of the Anglican Church."
Tom laughed. He removed the ring from his finger and showed it to Florean and asked him what he thought of it.
Fortescue looked at the ring for a minute, "Where did you get this?"
"Some fool sold it to me at the Hog's Head," lied Tom smoothly, best to pass it of as worthless. "I thought it was interesting and didn't have any obvious fake jewellery on it and so I gave him a few knuts for it."
"Interesting," wondered Florean. "This crest looks familiar but I can't place it." He returned it back to him and Tom placed it back on his finger. He decided to supply more information to his source. "He said that it belonged to the Peverells."
"The Peverells?" asked Florean frowning. He turned Tom's hand and stared at it again and then nodded. "Yes this is the mark of the Peverells."
"Mark of the Peverells?" asked Tom with interest.
"The Peverells" asked Fortescue in excitement, he loved telling obscure historical stories, "were one of the first Pureblood families. That is, the first ones to identify themselves as Pureblood as opposed to mixed blood or muggle blood sorcerors. They were among the first Slytherins as well. The first students who Salazar Slytherin handpicked for his own house when Hogwarts first started. But I told you about that."
"Yes," nodded Tom.
"One of the Peverells married Slytherin's youngest grand-daughter but he fell out of the family line when he sent her to Hogwarts which Slytherin forbade any of his immediate direct descendants in doing. The Peverells played a big role in the early years of the Warlock's Council, the government before the Ministry and they even culled influence with the Muggle rulers. They died out in a few short centuries. They were renowned for being powerful, reckless and self-destructive."
"Interesting," said Tom.
Florean laughed, "Well those are the kind of people worth telling stories about." He paused. "There are all kinds of funny stories about the Peverells, you find references to them in many contemporary accounts in their time and some of it even passed on as children's stories. But if you ask me most of it is just fanciful mythmaking of the sort that the Peverells would have encouraged. There is little reliable record of what they did in their time other than they were respected, feared and sought after. Some of them moved to France and there's probably more traces there than anywhere else of their forgotten grandeur. "
"Who were the most famous of the Peverell families?" asked Tom inquisitively.
"Well, so much of it is mired in legend and tall tales," sighed Fortescue. "The most well known branch were the three Peverell Brothers – Antioch, Cadmus and Ignotus. Ignotus Peverell has absolutely nothing to offer to history beyond his grave in the Godric's Hollow cemetery which has the Peverell mark on it. If you want to go there and see it for yourself that is," Tom gave him a look of utter disinterest. "One thing for sure is that he was a rare Peverell who lived a long life had left many children to continue the family line if only for a short period. The other two, well Cadmus killed himself. The most well documented of any Peverell is Antioch."
"Antioch went dark you see. Obsessed with power and he took to randomly duelling and killing for the sake of it. Just to show that he had great power. He eventually got killed in his sleep you know," chuckled Florean. "All that power and you still need a good night's sleep. Anyway…during his time, Antioch would cast this symbol wherever he went to show that he had walked through there. It was a symbol of provocation and fear. To put a bit of himself wherever he went. That must have started the fashion."
"What fashion?" asked Tom, not restraining his interest.
"Well any time Dark Wizards get together and decide to overthrow society or hunt Muggles and house elves and the like, they began using marks, symbols to style themselves. Usually they are crude copies of the Hogwarts House emblems, vicious looking lions with a deer in their mouth…that was Yardley Platt's style, or meaner snakes or even magical snakes like Runespoors. Some of them used the family emblem like Antioch did. Not very smart since it makes you easy to find but that was part of the provocation, telling people who you are and who is behind it and letting them know. Making a spectacle of it."
Tom breathed in these words, ideas lighting in his mind for various designs of fearsome symbols. He asked lightly, "Does Grindelwald have a mark?"
"Oh yes," said Florean frowning. "You know, my cousin in Germany sent me an owl once. It had a picture of a Durmstrang wall after Grindelwald left there. He carved a symbol in it, permanently scarring it. I'm sure that it looks like this. But then that's no surprise," he added with a dismissive wave of hand. "Dark wizards are eternally stealing ideas from their forbears. It falls in a predictable pattern. Grindelwald must have read of the Peverells and decided that it looked impressive and enigmatic, it looks like an eye inside a triangle (it might have influenced the Muggle Freemasons). As if his eye is everywhere and watching you always. Very theatrical." His tone was droll as if Grindelwald's poor taste was far too vulgar for his high standards. Tom concurred.
"Thank you, Florean," he said softly. He then decided that now was the good time to divert the conversation to his interest. "So Dark wizards are eternally stealing from each other, are they?"
"Oh yes," nodded Florean Fortescue. "Which is really dumb because all of their influences died doing all the dangerous and forbidden magic that they think will make them powerful and they do the same thing in turn and end up killing themselves."
"But Dark wizards aren't the only ones who kill. Aurors kill don't they?"
Fortescue nodded, "But there is killing out of duty to protect, out of self-defense, even killing out of anger and passion and then there is killing for power, for some insane twisted goal. Grindelwald for instance is insistent on creating an army of Inferi out of the many victims in his path and that magic is repulsive." He shuddered, "There is nothing more revolting than violating the laws of life and death and killing people magically and making them inferi is perverted."
Tom stirred, the very thing he was about to ask. "I hear that Dark wizards use all sorts of magic to keep themselves from dying."
Florean frowned, "My ancestor Dexter Fortescue's portrait is in my house and in his time there were problems of Dark Magic in society. He was the one who insisted on controlling the study of Dark Magic in Hogwarts. Oh yes, they used to teach Dark Magic at Hogwarts" he added seeing the hungry look in Tom's eyes. "But most of it was for research and restricted to the brightest and most trusted students in their NEWT levels and they worked with independent researchers in the field, all strictly under review by Hogwarts and Ministry staff."
"I'm just interested in it for…academic reasons," he said in a placating tone. His tone assured Florean that he had no plan on going dark or using the magic.
"Dexter told me that the Dark Arts were fundamentally related to death, Dark Wizards were known to use unicorn blood to keep themselves protected in case they were near death and that they all used various potions of other sorts to protect their bodies from various curses and side-effects but…most of them failed and most people ended up dying horribly or end up with unbelievable hideous transformations," shuddered Fortescue. "But then that's restricted to dark wizards who worked to protect their bodies. It's the souls they should be worried about. The usual negative emotions that drive Dark Arts cause damage to the wizard or witch's soul allowing their souls to be blackened and tarnished."
"Is there any magic to protect the soul?" whispered Tom, he had the air of setting up a mouse trap and was presently sweetening the cheese.
Fortescue shook his head, "I don't even know if there is a physical soul inside of you. Magic abides by laws and they are hard to apply to the incorporeal and the metaphysical." He stared at Tom and smiled, "I don't know anybody else who's came to my parlour to talk about the soul."
Tom smiled. Florean's knowledge of history was that of a devoted amateur. He knew little about how the magic functioned but what he knew he did not embellish and that was good for Tom.
"There are however stories throughout the ages of wizards experimenting on their souls," he said thoughtfully. "Even Muggle literature has some references to it."
"Muggle literature?" said Tom incredulously.
"Yes. Most wizards and witches don't read them unfortunately but they should," he said assertively. "Ever heard of Faust."
"Yes," said Tom. "That morality story of a man who sells his soul in exchange for immortality." As soon as he said it, comprehension entered him. Of course that was the Muggle explanation of that magic.
"Yes," said Florean. "Our magical stories and historical facts mention many cases when witches and wizards believed they could be immortal if they mutilated their soul, living less than whole lives. It's something that's killed many people. They all died in their attempt to do it. There's no such thing as immortality any way."
Tom then pressed on, "I read in one of the magical books, it mentioned something. It calls it the most vile and evil of magic but it has a name, Horcrux."
"Horcrux?" asked Fortescue puzzled. "I don't know what a Horcrux is but I think Dexter mentioned that it was banned from his school. Why are you interested in it?"
Tom shrugged his shoulders, "Because it's banned."
Fortescue laughed heartily as Tom walked away.
The word Horcrux had resonated ominously from the moment he came across the word in Magick Moste Evile. He yearned to gain knowledge of this forbidden word. Yet nothing in the Hogwarts library had told him anything about it He learnt more about the Horcrux from talking to his friends families than anywhere else. Lestrange was especially helpful as his mother was ever knowledgeable about the Dark Arts. Of course they talked about the Dark Arts as if it wasn't anything real as if it was some idea worth considering, worth entertaining but not putting to practice, as he would be doing. He had learnt that the Horcrux was first associated with the breeder of Basilisks, Herpo the Foul. He had succeeded in casting out a fragment of his soul out of his body to prevent himself from dying. The Horcrux meant "the cross which stood on end" roughly translated from its Latin and Celtic origins. It meant precisely an object which bore the weight of living at the end of one's life. The man who created a Horcrux could not be properly dead even if killed by the most powerful Muggle and Magical means. Once cast out of one's organic shell, the soul had to be grafted onto some other earthly element. Herpo chose one of his Basilisks for the task. Assuming it would be impossible to destroy and therefore keep him safe. Eventually it died when his enemies released a coop of roosters to its nest, their cries destroying the beast and leaving Herpo unprotected.
Later Dark Arts theoreticians attempted to use inanimate inorganic objects as objects fit to bear fragments of their soul. Yet it had led to such horrific catastrophes and caused such mutilations that eventually few even attempted to do it. Tom was fascinated with this most priceless of magical secrets. He had become fascinated with the idea that one could be protected from death. None of the many poisons and curses which otherwise would have killed him destroyed Herpo the Foul. The Killing Curse had not yet been available in his time and Tom didn't know if the Horcrux was safeguarded from the killing curse. Those who came closest to death ended up becoming inhuman and vapourish, not yet a ghost but a kind of parasite that eventually withered away when the Horcrux was destroyed.
Of course there was the exact questions – How is a Horcrux made and what objects worked best, and most important of all to Tom – if one could make more than one?
This would be the Experiment he would undertake. Perhaps his life's work.
