Hello!

This story is the translation of one of my project. This idea had been in my head for a while, as well as the desire to practice my English. So I hope I'm not scratching your beautiful language too much.

In terms of writing, the story is completed. It will be 53 chapters without counting the epilogue, I plan to release one chapter per week. As an introduction, here are the first two chapters.

I sincerely hope you'll enjoy the story.

/Warning : Some mature themes will be covered but nothing too detailed.

Prologue: Blood of my blood.

The ground was a dry, laboured creak under his feet. The pine needles, the dried leaves in an advanced state of decomposition crumbled under his heels. Upon hearing these creaks, a few small insects burrowed under dead stumps or stones scorched by the sun.

He knew it, he was approaching.

It was almost like a sixth sense to him; he could feel his magic intensify at the mere thought of getting closer to his target after several months. He had listened painstakingly to Helena Ravenclaw's lamentation. Eventually, she showed him the way and where she had hidden her precious treasure.

Tom grabbed the leather canteen strapped to his right side and took a sip from it. The water flowed into his parched throat like a rushing river. He wiped his lip with the back of his hand, then his sweaty forehead. The sun and heat of Albania were challenging for him, having been accustomed to the coolness of Great Britain for so long.

He surveyed the parched forest around him with feverish eyes. Under the furnace of summer, a haze of heat had invaded the woods, making the path to be taken indiscernible. Tom took off his wizard's robe to find himself in shirt and trousers; he put his canteen back against his side and resumed walking. He knew exactly where to go now.

After just a few minutes, he arrived at the level of a tree trunk and an old stump covered with dead leaves. His heart raced with excitement as he got down on his knees to dig at the tree trunk. In a few seconds, his fingers encountered a smooth and cold surface contrasting with the furnace of the surrounding woods. He brought the object to his eyes, which reddened with pleasure. It was Rowena Ravenclaw's Diadem.

Finally. After all this time he had finally found the relic of the founder of Ravenclaw house. With the Slytherin medallion hanging around his neck and Helga Hufflepuff's Cup hidden in his satchel, he had found three relics of the Founders now. All to his enthusiasm, he did not immediately feel that eyes were watching him hidden in the shadows and when he noticed it, the shadow had already slipped away.

Tom thought it was a bit too curious an animal, he surveyed the forest out of the corner of his eye with his hands clenched on his precious find. But there was only it seemed to him in this patch of the forest, him and a few small insects slowly cooking in the scorch of this scorching summer.

He returned his gaze to the sapphire, which a ray of sunlight between the tangle of foliage made glow with a bluish glow. Curious, he brought his gaze closer to the tiara.

In her moment of despair, Helena Ravenclaw entrusted him with the precious relic, feeling foolish for doing so. She had paid the price to obtain it for herself. It was enough to follow the path traced by the sapphire when exposed to light, for the tiara always shows the wisest way. The Ravenclaw girl who had stolen the diadem from her mother must have known that the wisest course of action was to follow the Bloody Baron, who had been summoned to find her. However, as foolishness rarely leads to wisdom, she chose to ignore the advice and followed her own will instead. Both had died in the forest centuries before. Wisdom is rarely heeded, yet it is often the mother of safety. That was why Tom exposed the jewel of the tiara to the light with a quiver of interest and concern.

Ahead of him, swirled a bluish cloud between the dead trunks that sank into the mist of the forest. Intrigued, Tom took a sip from his canteen and began to follow the cloud. She seemed to point to a clear path between broken branches, worm-eaten stumps and burning stones covered with yellowish dried moss. And Tom did not saw how wise that path could be at all, except to lose it deeper in the thick of the forest. He arrived in a thicker place in the woods, here the heat was hardly less stifling, the trees were taller and older, and he had gone too far.

As he was about to turn around and put the tiara in his bag to never use his completely useless power of 'wisdom' again, he was undeceived by a dark mass cut by the tree trunks. The bluish glow stopped right in front of the dark mass. As he approached, Tom noticed that it was a cart driven by thestrals.

It looked like the carts of the Muggle carnies of his childhood, but the presence of thestrals intrigued him, it was undoubtedly a wizarding dwelling. Near the thestrals was a figure brushing their skeletal bodies.

The figure seemed to sense him as it turned sharply towards him. It was a hollow-faced young woman who yelped before disappearing between two tree trunks.

Again intrigued, Tom went in pursuit of the figure but she seemed to have disappeared between the shadows of two trunks. As he walked around one of the trees, he felt someone violently grab the back of his hair and slam a cold blade against his throat.

"One move and you're dead," a hoarse female voice hissed in his ear.

Tom aimed and clung to his wand in his pocket, while holding the tiara in his other hand. Fury and interest vied for dominance in his mind. He darted from the corner of his eye the person holding him, trying to see the individual who had been aiming at him." His attacker asked him something in a language Tom didn't understand. Having seen his lack of reaction, she repeated in another language, and finally in English:

"Drop your wand and the tiara... you're English, aren't you?"

Tom did not answer, his hands still tightly clutching his possessions that he didn't intend to let go of anytime soon. Ahead of him, a shadow emerged from the shadow of a gnarled trunk. He had seen the young woman earlier, standing out from the shadows from which she emerged like the rosebud of an odd flower.

She was a tall, dirty girl, dressed in rags, with a sunken, dull face and long, tangled hair under a torn scarf. She reached over to grab her wand and the tiara but froze when she saw the Slytherin medallion shining around her neck.

"Mother," she hissed in parseltongue. "You have to come see this."

Surprised to hear the parselmouth in the mouth of this woman, Tom decided to take advantage of the situation and hissed in turn:

"I am not an enemy."

Not yet, at least. He had too much interest in these two individuals lost in the middle of the Albanian forest speaking the language of his ancestor. His answer surprised his jailer who loosened her grip, and as nimble as a snake Tom freed himself, turned and held the two women at gunpoint, satisfied to finally have them in his line of sight.

The other woman was in her sixties, although it was difficult to tell her age, she was so dirty and covered in rags, her white hair was tied up in a crazy braid covered with dead leaves. She smelled bad and her long, grime-blackened fingernails held her cutlass tightly as a makeshift weapon in front of her. Her eyes were down on Tom's chest where Salazar's medallion shone. When she looked back at his face, her eyes shone with evil, almost mad joy.

"A whistler… Who are you? What is your name?"

"I don't think you're in a position to ask questions anymore," Tom hissed back quietly.

However, the old woman did not seem worried at all. She looked at him, then at her daughter who did not move like a pillar of salt.

"You're one of us" she burst fiercely. "You are an heir of Salazar."

It was like a crushing blow for Tom. He had until then thought that he was the last heir of Slytherin, it was even a certainty in his eyes. He had never found any other heirs either at Hogwarts or even in England, but had never thought for a moment that his blood flowed across Europe in that burning, desolate forest. The thought inflamed his mind with powerful rage. The old woman began to pace despite the threat of Tom's wand and the look of the other woman who seemed puzzled.

"Your name," he hissed, burning with impatience.

The old witch finally deigned to stop her paces and whispered in a gravelly voice:

"Murciella Gaunt, and she's Meroe," she added, pointing to her daughter, who was still paralysed.

Murciella Gaunt. This name meant something to Tom. A few years ago after killing his filthy father, he had searched the filthy hovel where his uncle was holed up. Among the black magic trinkets and squalidness, was a family tree of their family. Marvolo Corvinius Gaunt was writtend, closely followed by the name of Murciella Aphomia, which had been crossed out. Tom had previously thought it was because she was dead, but his family were not done revealing their secrets, it seemed. This woman he had in front of him was Marvolo's little sister, by extension, consequently his great aunt and the other woman, Meroe, a distant cousin. Stunned by these revelations, he did not loosen his teeth.

"And you whose son are you? Morfin or Merope?"

"Merope. She's dead" he replied dryly, refusing to add more.

The woman looked pained. She sat down in front of a remnant of embers in full concentration. She poked the end of her blade into the still vaguely warm ashes and Tom noticed something tattooed on her skinny forearm between the tears in her rags.

"Sorry to hear, Merope was a good child. Not very smart, but brave. I wanted to take her with me when I ran away, but Marvolo would never let me. Will you sit down blood of my blood? I am old and tired, I need rest."

Undecided, Tom finally complied, sitting on a rotten stump not far from the stove while Meroe also sat down with feverish gestures. She looked terrified under the threat of his yew wand as she sought to hide behind the barrier of her dirty black hair, as Murciella seemed to sink further into madness. Tom wanted to ask a thousand of questions to this woman, but she took him by surprise:

"And you? Your name?"

"Tom," he finally blurted out.

As he answered this woman, Tom knew she would take his answer to the grave no matter what, —but he still had too many questions to ask. Meroe seemed to want to disappear behind the rickety shadow of his mother, but she scolded him something in a dialect that Tom did not understand. It wasn't English or Parseltongue, not even Albanian. The young woman rose slowly like a prey in front of a hunter under the threat of the wand of her opposite.

"Do you want to drink something with us blood of my blood?" asked old Gaunt. "If you have the blood of that muggle from Little Hangleton running through you, I still can't deny room and board to a member of my family."

Tom returned his attention so abruptly to Murciella that his neck cracked. She knew who her father was. Meroe ducked into the trailer and came back like a discreet shadow to bring a rusty carafe covered with limestone, which she put on the stove. Murciella, indifferent, smiled with all her blackish teeth.

"You look a lot like that muggle. When I left, he was only fifteen, Merope a little younger. She was already filled with love for him," she whispered in a strange mixture of English and Parseltongue.

"Why did you leave?" Tom finally asked in a cold voice to his great aunt.

"To stay with Morfin and Marvolo? I see the signet ring on your finger, you know who they were; you saw how they lived. I sure hope they are dead. They have sullied the honour of our noble blood in filth."

Tom could have pointed out wryly that Murciella and her messy daughter had nothing to envy to the grime in whom he had met Morfin, but he restrained himself. Old Gaunt's eye then drifted to the Ravenclaw's diadem still in his clenched fist.

"Interesting trinket, isn't it? He seems to have led you to us. I discovered it almost twenty years ago. To me, he showed me no way."

"What do you mean?"

Murciella's expression changed to a disharmonious crinkle of wrinkles and dirt mixed. It must have been a superior expression, or at least what was left of it behind that brownish mask of saltpetre.

"Sometimes, the wisest way isn't to move forward; it's to stay put. I was curious to see who would come next, so I put the tiara back in its place and waited. It turned out to be a good decision. Latcho Drom."

The lustful gleam in her eyes, obsessed with the Slytherin medallion and the ring on his finger, was not misleading. Tom allowed himself a sneer. The hissing carafe sat between them as Meroe leaned forward to pour the brown liquid into their chipped cups. When she handed him his, she hid behind her curtain of black hair, afraid to meet his gaze.

The young woman did not practice magic in these simple gestures, however he had seen her quite simply disappear in the shadow of a trunk as though evaporated. Tom narrowed his eyes and pretended to drink from his cup.

"How did you find this tiara?"

"You're asking the wrong questions, Tom Riddle," the old woman replied.

Annoyed at being so infantilized by this woman, the tip of his yew wand crackled. Meroe cringed as if she had been beaten, while old Gaunt frowned before agreeing to give her an answer:

"The question should rather be how I found this tiara. Thanks to my Gift. The one that the blood of Slytherins bequeathed to me. You have Gifts too my boy, don't you? Things ordinary wizards can't do."

Yes, Parseltongue, Legilimancy and of course a certain skill with fire. But that old Gaunt didn't need to know. With a nod of his head, he invited her to continue.

"I am an Augur like my mother was before me. Able to see some things, if they can get in my way, off course. Salazar sought purity of blood for the magical community, but for his own… his own, he wanted them superior to others. And we are. Our blood over the centuries has known many wizards and witches with strange gifts that we have mixed. I saw what would happen to my brother and Morfin, how miserable it was to stay with them who didn't have the gifts. I left, and my eye saw the tiara on my way. Then… finally there you are."

"And her? What is she?" Tom asked, pointing to Meroe, who cowered even more, glaring at him fiercely.

"It doesn't concern you, gadzo," Meroe muttered, speaking for the first time in their exchange.

She instantly disappeared behind her tangle of filthy knots as her mother's grip fell hard on her shoulder. She scolded him something again in that idiom that Tom didn't understand. This made his anger double. With a wave of his wand, he separated the two women; neither of them took out a wand to defend themselves. They were at his mercy. His hand still clutching the Ravenclaw tiara quivered.

"Whether you are an Oracle or an Augur," Tom said dismissively. "That's all you are, besides you're a half-mad squib, like your lousy brood."

"And wouldn't you like to know what I see for you? If the tiara led you to our lice, there's a reason, maybe it will be something nice", Murciella retorted grotesquely.

Tom figured he was going to kill her right away. He had his questions answered, as with Morfin a few years earlier. He would no longer have to bear the sight of his family members as crazy and miserable as each other. All he had to do was slay the two women, their repulsive bodies would go to feed the animals in the forest and he could search the caravan at his leisure to see if he could keep anything of value. The old woman's murder would be used to create his new horcrux, he told himself, but he hesitated. He had always wanted to control everything and the possibility of knowing his future excited him to the point. Since the orphanage, he had always seen himself more powerful and bigger than the others, -which was the case among these muggles. His future was to be the same, he would be immortal, powerful and would rule the wizarding world, and this was his destiny.

"Show what you have to show, squib."

"Stretch out your hand, blood of my blood," Murciella answered slowly.

Reluctant to touch the grimy woman, he reached out a hesitant hand to the clammy, dirty palm of the witch who had dropped her cutlass. When their palms made contact it was as if Tom had received an icy jet of water in the middle of the furnace of the woods. He felt himself exposed, Murciella Gaunt's eyes had stopped shining with evil joy, and they were on the contrary troubled as she continued in a guttural voice:

"You have been preparing for your greatness for so long… you are still preparing for it… The path you have chosen for yourself is dangerous, Lord Voldemort…"

His hand quivered on his wand. Meroe suppressed a yelp and Murciella gave a kind of rocky laugh:

"Lord Voldemort… yes you will steal Death… But you will not defeat it; in the path you have chosen, you will lose. I can assure you of that. You will have power, you will be feared, but… but a boy will stand in your way. He will defeat you. In this path of immortality, you will certainly lose Tom Marvolo Riddle. Such is my prediction."

"You lie, miserable old woman!"

Murciella giggled, Tom roughly grabbed her hand and grabbed the roots of her hair like she had done with him earlier and stared into her eyes. From there, with his powers of legilimens, and with violence he imposed himself on her mind. He then read what that crazy old woman had seen, twisting himself deeper into the twists and turns of her mind. When he released her, it was with pain. The cutlass had been deeply embedded in his shoulder by Murciella.

After she stabbed him, Murciella shouted something in her strange idiom at Meroe trying to snatch the Slytherin locket from him. It was like a detonator for him; he threw a curse at the young woman who rushed like a fury towards the trailer. He snatched the cutlass off his shoulder and stabbed Gaunt in the heart.

The old woman spat blood on him, choking with pain. However, Tom didn't take his eyes off her, there was a violent and unshakable certainty in her dull grey eyes. She had told the truth, he had seen it too. He saw himself losing!

In a guttural gurgling of blood and mingled pain, Murciella whispered something one last time in her strange language and her miserable life ended. Tom looked up at the trailer where his cousin had been moments earlier. She worked feverishly to detach the two thestrals from the rest of the trailer while holding a heavy black leather volume in her arms. When she realized that he had gotten up and that his mother was dead, she yelped in horror.

She abandoned the thestrals and fled between the trees with the heavy book under her arms. Foaming with rage and pain Tom cast a spell between the trees, which did not reach her because she had disappeared again. With a low bellow of anger, his magic ignited with him, and he charred the surrounding trees with a wave of his hand as the sun began to descend behind him.

With another flick of the wrist, more trees caught fire. With the ambient dryness, the inferno quickly flared up as if a Fiendfyre had been thrown into the woods.

Tom, despite the pain, had the satisfaction of seeing the silhouette of his prey emerge between two flaming thickets, her dress burnt. As she tried to free herself from the burning hold, he cast a hex on her that pinned her to the ground.

Unconcerned by the inferno around him, the thestrals flying insane with panic without the cart with them, and his own pain in his shoulder, he leaned toward the terrified squib at his feet. Her large dark eyes were just two small dots of horror in which the flames reflected.

"You need a shadow to disappear," Tom hissed in parseltongue. "I won't leave a shadow in this forest, believe me. Now what are you? Speak up or you'll join your crazy mother in the flames!"

Meroe coughed, trying to breathe something other than the toxic smoke from the brazier, and replied in a slow, fierce voice:

"Read this book… and you will know it."

She held the book so tightly to her that Tom almost had to snatch it from her hands. Reading the title of the old manuscript, his blood boiled. In silver letters circled in gold, The Codex of Slytherin was named. His heart raced powerfully in his chest, it was no longer rage, but a deep excitement towards this unknown work. Devoured by curiosity and unable to stand it any longer, he stunned the woman.

.

.

"Clean yourself," Tom hissed as Meroe emerged.

She looked confusedly at the tent where she was. This miserable tent that had sheltered him since the beginning of his trip and which had cost him no less than half of his last salary as a salesman at Borgin & Burke. In the middle of the tent there was a basin filled with water, a dress stolen from the tendril wire of Muggle peasants but above all candles absolutely everywhere. Tom had summoned it until his tent was iridescent and therefore impossible for the woman to escape. She seemed to have understood this fact by the way she eyed the place with a worried look.

"I asked you to do something, do it," Tom snapped at his cousin, threatening her with his wand. "You are filthy and repugnant to me."

She looked down and feverishly complied, Tom was in front of the tent entrance, sitting on a weathered armchair, reading the Slytherin Codex. He didn't glance at the woman's nakedness; too busy deciphering his ancestor's notes. Or rather of his ancestors, for inside those yellowed pages were the notes of every Slytherin born and dead before him, so many spells, incantations and notes about his family members that this item would have had its place in a museum. Murciella had taken this precious treasure with her, deeming Morfin and Marvolo unworthy of possessing it, without managing to get her hands on the medallion and the ring before her departure.

These three items were now in his sole possession, Tom thought wickedly. He continued his reading like this for several minutes, lost in the notes of his ancestors. When we reached the last pages, curious information was noted, and that Tom read with avidity.

He looked up. Meroe Gaunt had finished dressing and was dressed in the dress he had pilfered on his way back to his tent.

She was no longer covered in grime, her wet black hair falling to the small of her back, her dirt-free face a little less miserable than it looked with her long straight nose and high cheekbones. Tom realized that she was barely older than him. She darted at him dark inquisitive and submissive eyes. This reinforced Tom's satisfaction, he was the strongest, and they both knew that.

She therefore waited for him to decide her fate with the same submission that she had had all her life with her delusional mother.

Tom ripped out the last pages of the Slytherin's Codex, pocketed it in the pocket of his robe, and stood up oblivious to the pain in his newly healed shoulder. He noticed the Ravenclaw's diadem glinting in the candlelight. This day had been one of the most interesting that he had lived and it was an understatement to say it. The wisdom of the diadem had been right on many counts and led him away from a path where he would have been lost. With Seer Gaunt revelations still in his mind along with the information from the Codex, Tom realized that there was no one path to power and eternal life. There were many paths he would never have thought to take, convinced that his horcruxes would defeat Death.

But now, looking at Meroe Gaunt, illuminated by candlelight like a spectre of fortune, another plan occurred to him. A plan b. Something he had thought about, in the past and had just been confirmed by his ancestors.

"Did you like your living condition, squib?" Tom asked wickedly in parseltongue.

"No," she replied in the same idiom without hesitation. "I hated this caravan and this forest."

"I can get you something else."

He stopped in front of her. They were both almost the same size. Tom grabbed that skinny, worried face and inspected it. She could have been considered pretty if her features weren't so hollow, her eyes weren't so deep in their sockets, and her lips weren't so thin. Still, Tom figured it would do for what he had planned.

"I grew up in a misery similar to yours," he confided in a sweet tone to inspire confidence in her. "Salazar Slytherin's blood has rubbed dirtiness for too long. Don't you agree dear cousin?"

She nodded slowly, trying to figure out where he was coming from. He nonchalantly held out his hand.

"Together we can do great things. Together our blood will never again suffer such an affront. Are you following me?"

He saw it, that little spark that ignited the gaze of his comrades at Hogwarts, all it took was a few sentences and everyone was ready to listen. Meroe was no exception to the rule.

She took his hand.