Tom recoiled and flipped the journal shut. The small black journal looked as it should, perfectly crafted leather creasing flawlessly over thick parchment pages. The gold lettering of his name glinted on the cover. A tease and a warning of what lay inside. When Tom had created this first horcrux, the journal had positively thrummed with the magic of his soul piece held within.

Now, Tom couldn't feel his soul nestled in the pages anymore. There was nothing there. The journal was inert, void, as if it had never been his precious ticket to immortality. The only remaining sign of his absolute ownership of the thing was his name on the cover.

Tom stared at it.

It was empty.

Empty.

Riddle's hands shook as he grabbed a quill from his bag and pulled close an ink bottle. He dipped the quill in the ink and drew a rune to reveal hidden things on the first page. His journal had always absorbed the ink, drinking in the words, knowledge and his intent. It was a veritable confidante, something his followers could never be.

Now, the ink settled on the page and started drying into permanence. Seconds ticked loudly as the levers of his bedside clock ceaselessly twisted and turned, time moving forward on springs and tiny pieces of brass somehow fitting together. It would keep counting seconds and moving forward. It would not stop for Tom Riddle.

He stared at the rune he'd made on the page, his mind refusing to process what he saw.

What happened to his horcrux? How the bloody hell could it just cease to be?

Tom shifted his attention to the Gaunt ring sitting snug on his left hand's middle finger, pulsing with dark energy, comfortably resonating with the magic in his veins. All was well with the ring. Why the journal then? He hadn't felt anything untoward. The manuscripts he'd read about horcruxes said you were supposed to feel part of you dying when a horcrux was destroyed. And yet, he didn't feel weakened in any way. There was no sense of loss or a part of him dying.

So, if it wasn't lost or destroyed, and it clearly wasn't in the journal, where was the piece of his soul?

Stomach sinking, Tom realized the loss of his horcrux might have something to do with the dark rune experimentation he had indulged in. He hadn't written in the journal since that night, couldn't tell when exactly the soul piece went missing. Dark magic, strong magic, always extracted a price out of the caster. It could be as little as a headache, or a period of bad luck you couldn't avoid. What if his magic set the price of meeting Hermione from the future, to be a piece of his very soul? A trade of a fragment of his soul for the glimpse of a far-fetched future?

Was meeting a witch worth that much?

Moreover, why had his magic and his ancestor Salazar Slytherin's magic deemed it worthwhile to make the trade?

The bitter patina of abandonment from an abused childhood and an angry, vilified youth as an orphan, coated the back of his throat. The taste was familiar, the rage it brought in its wake an old armor he'd donned hundreds of times.

They had deserted him, Hermione and the soul piece, hadn't they?

Tom didn't want to think such things, but once it started, the anger built. Spiraling into darkness was one runaway train Tom had no control over.

What if, to see her again, he had to sacrifice more of himself, only for it to still not be bloody enough? How many times could he safely break himself apart before he lost it completely, trying to hold on to she-who-was-not-of-his-time in the first place?

This blow, on top of everything else going on, was almost too much to bear. A shaft of unadulterated anger shot through the heir of Slytherin and turned into a wave of magic that cascaded out of every inch of his body. His bed curtains caught fire, blackening the Head Boy and Hogwarts crests woven on the thick green fabric, dark char consuming the color of life, inch by glowering inch. Another wave pulsed out, turning his wooden desk and chair to ash, burning off part of the carpet the furniture sat on. The flames didn't touch his warded satchel and trunk. Everything else was fair game.

Tom uncurled his fist and ground his jaw as he tried to reign in the madness that was his magic gone wild. A huge crack appeared on the heavy glass window of his dormitory that looked inside the depths of the black lake.

The heir of Slytherin tilted his head dispassionately as he regarded the rapidly spreading crack. He wondered if any students or teachers would be killed should the dark waters of the lake suddenly flood the dungeons. Would the wards of Hogwarts keep the water in check?

Not if he weakened them.

After all, being Heir of Slytherin gave him special power over the castle. Hogwarts was his home in more ways than one, and the castle recognized it.

Tom mentally listed out the wizards and witches who had talent enough to escape the flood in time, the veritable survivors of the entire stupid herd. He weighed the rest of the students' chances if all the windows of the dungeon were to suddenly break. A few would die, wizards notoriously didn't learn to swim, thinking the act useless in the face of their magical abilities. It could be a lesson to never drop their guard even when they were comfortably ensconced in bed, at the safest school in the world. He wondered how the first years would fare.

A tiny part of the crack opened enough for a trickle of water to run down the glass. Tom looked at his reflection in the glass, haloed by the glowing red embers of the bed curtains, broken by a spider web of cracks. In the black glass, he looked like the devil, eyes wide awake at the prospect of reaping unfortunate souls, the shifting reflection of his body poised to wreak havoc in his own home.

Contemplating murder and thinking how he would maximize the carnage, brought a measure of rational back into his mind. Tom looked his image in the eye and nodded in recognition and acceptance at the red eyed demon he saw.

Then the last Heir of Slytherin uttered a reparo. The glass knit itself together, plugging the trickle of water. He murmured the charms to repair the window wards as well and nudged Hogwarts to hurry the process.

Would that a reparo was enough to cure him of his cracks…

Tom recognized that he was unnecessarily brooding. No doubt because of all the emotions battering up his guard. The appearance of the witch Hermione had shaken him up. He'd found himself maudlin more than an acceptable number of times. This was the reason he didn't like feeling too much. Damn sentimentality and the havoc it wreaked on his all too seeing mind. He needed to shore up defenses, box dangerous things up and think clearly.

He added the missing horcrux to the growing list of variables in his time travel calculations. To avoid nasty surprises, he had to find out what happened to his soul before he experimented with more fragments. His soul, his blood, his legacy was precious. He would not lose it to the forces of fate. That was a promise he'd made himself years ago and he meant to keep it.

Riddle knew the soul piece wasn't destroyed. Just that, it was no longer in the diary. He remembered he had read something about tracking things infused with one's magic. He needed to read that book in the restricted section again and make sure he was on the right track. He stood up and left the desperate wreck of his room. He found the ancient tome easily in the library's restricted section. It wasn't as if anyone else read or checked out such obscure books but him. He carefully carried it to a bench, cast a strong notice-me-not around himself and started to read.

Three hours and four progressively dark books later, Tom had formulated a fair plan around how to go about looking for one's soul. Of-course the books mentioned tracking objects carrying magical blood or magical signatures through blood sacrifices. He surmised that souls shouldn't be that different.

Next he needed to figure out what would be an adequately magical sacrifice, which would power the spell enough to take him to the location of the missing piece of his soul. He resolved to start testing out magical creature sacrifices and put some of his theories to test. It would behoove his knights to wet their feet in the practical application of dark magic again.

Win-win.

The next night, Tom Riddle stood in front of his knights as he enlightened them on the joys of dark magic he deemed necessary for them to understand enough of what they would be doing. He kept the real purpose of the ritual, tracking his horcrux soul piece, under wraps, telling the other Slytherins that they were working up and finessing the magic needed to travel time.

"Combined with our paradox calculations, the ritual we will be practicing is the way to travel forward in time. It is a rare piece of art, this ritual, it extracts little bits of life out of the living and builds it into a colossal punch of magic. That magic, when harnessed, can work things no one believes possible."

The knights looked a little unsettled. They knew of some dark magic Tom had dabbled in, in the past. Their Lord's experiments were always hair raising, always forbidden and always came with danger involved to one's person. Fear of him and his magic was a healthy emotion they'd all cultivated over the years.

"How much life does this ritual need, My Lord?" Nott inquired.

"However much it takes. We'll find out." Tom smiled.

"How do we harvest life?" Black asked, not to be left behind or for Tom to think he was slacking.

"We are going to start trying out this ritual with our blood. If that's not enough, we add creature sacrifices to the spell."

"Is there a possibility of failure?" Abraxas questioned, knuckles gone white from clutching his wand too tight.

"Oh do cheer up Brax." Tom smirked at his best mate, "Failure is always a possibility. We'll need to test the whole thing of course. Information about this ritual is not readily available, nor have the instances of use been documented much. We will have to do the heavy lifting. I am sure we'll find success." Tom replied.

"Of course, my Lord." nodded the boys, a few bowing their heads to try and hide the panic in their eyes or the grimaces on their faces. However, all of them were committed to their cause and their research on the Dark Arts. They were crucial to Tom's plans and wouldn't betray him. He would make sure of it.

"What are we going to use for the sacrifice?" asked Dolohov, glee bleeding out in his words. Out of all of them, Dolohov was the psycho who would stalk and then kill a creature without cause, genuinely enjoying the act. The more perverse, the better.

"Our magical blood, given freely, set in wax and burnt with candles. Together we might pull up sufficient magic to power a time turner once." Riddle replied, enjoying the white faces around him."If that fails, we will progress to magical creatures. Acromantulas, thestrals… …Elves."

The knights remained silent as they absorbed what their leader was telling them. No one raised objections. Where Tom Riddle went, they followed.

"We start on All Hallows." Tom declared.

"Yes my lord." murmured his followers.

They started on All Hallows. And failed to power the spell with their blood alone. So Riddle chose the next best night and next sacrifice.

And the next…

It was another dark moonless night when the Slytherins broke curfew and cloaked in barely visible dark robes, walked quietly to the forbidden forest. The Slytherins waited to reach a familiar clearing about a kilometer in before removing their disillusionment charms. Black got rid of a few scraggly weeds growing in the otherwise undisturbed dirt. Malfoy and Nott started marking points of an octagon with black candles, converging into a circle of bones in the center.

There was blood on the dirt within the bone circle, a leftover from their previous attempts at the ritual, when they'd sacrificed an acromantula. It was a waste in Tom's eyes because the magic expelled from the huge spider hadn't powered the spell enough to locate what they were looking for. His Knights didn't know what exactly they were looking for. They thought it was all part of trying to look into the future and time travel. Tom didn't feel it necessary to correct their assumptions.

Tonight, they would step up the sacrifice and planned to use a thestral instead. Gentle creatures that they were, thestrals were also leaps ahead in magical potential from their eight-legged counterparts. Earlier in the day, Tom had lured an aging male from its herd and secured it near the sight of their ritual. Now, he levitated the creature to the center of the octagon, inside the bone circle. The rest of the men started taking positions, while the head boy crouched to draw runes connecting the wizards to each other and to the magic circle of bones they were preparing. The bones were special. Each of the wizards had raided ancestral crypts and 'borrowed' the relics of their past.

"Gentlemen, if you please." Tom gestured at the seven places of the octagon, "Remember, don't stop chanting, don't step out of the circle. The circle would transfer pain and magic, but I will protect you from dying. I can't say the same if you leave your position."

The knights all nodded somberly, took their places and raised their wands as did their Lord. Cloaked and hooded, lit with enchanted black flamed candles, they looked ghoulish and sinister. Tom slashed his wand and made a gash in the thestral's side. The beast let out a rattling neigh as blood started oozing out of the wound. All of them started chanting the spell they had memorized to perfection. The thestral tried to raise its bony wings but was thwarted in its escape attempt by the power circle snapping into place. A pallor of pain and desperate confusion fell over the participants, a reflection of what the animal was feeling. It was a connection forged through the runes carved in the bones. They had gone through this before, with the acromantula, but a thestral's magical power was tenfold, as was its awareness of suffering. This was the precise reason why they had to build upon their ritual and not use, say, a unicorn, on the first go. Still, prepared as they were to feel pain, it was the coherent, mounting certainty of death that shook all of them off their mental rockers.

The ritual thereafter was straightforward enough. The magic of the wizard's or witch's blood, anchored and amplified as runes on the bones of their ancestors, connected to the magic of the sacrificial creature in the circle, again through blood. The closure of the loop made an infinite circle from the dead to the living to the dead again. What was then cast and spelled inside the circle by the channeler, Tom in this case, came to pass, a wallop of magic bringing it to fruition. The caster could kill their coven if they got greedy in pulling the magic. Tom decided not to be greedy while they were still trying out forms of the ritual to best suit his needs.

The Heir of Slytherin raised the hand that wasn't holding his wand and without ceasing the chant, he wordlessly and wandlessly started drawing a stream of blood from the thestral. The stream raced through the air, reaching the bones of the elders, where it traced runes of their tracking spell on the bones, closing the last part of the loop. The crimson lines pulled upon all of their magic, channeling it into the thestral. The beast neighed in agony and the wizards winced at the backlash they felt.

They kept powering the spell with words and magic.

Drops of blood started levitating from the bones, mixing, breaking and spinning in a macabre dance. Tom slashed his wand, another thin cut appearing on the creature's flank. Blood gushed out in a stream and flowed to the bones, from where it joined the quickly forming red mist above the dying thestral. The mist expanded, touching the chanting Slytherins at the edges of the octagon, never escaping the boundary of the power circle. A few coughed from the spray entering their breath. But they didn't dare stop casting.

The air became saturated with blood. An hour passed. Then another.

Avery, Lestrange and Mulciber dropped to their knees in agony over the phantom pains they felt all over their bodies but didn't stop saying the words they'd trained to utter even in sleep. Abraxas shivered in exhaustion and drew his cloak closer to remain conscious enough to keep chanting. Black and Dolohov's eyes had taken a similar manic gleam, as they threw their magic into the dark ritual, enjoying the sadistic slow death of the creature. Nott stood still, face blank and bloodless, elbows locked to keep the wand held in both hands pointed towards the center.

Tom Riddle's eyes were red as his splattered face, perspiration mixed with the thestral's blood, making him look like the spawn of the devil. The creature was in its last throes, projecting its wretchedness to all eight wizards connected to it within the octagon. They all felt the world getting darker with each labored breath, like their minds were dissolving and dissociating from within, like each and every one of them was dying with the thestral.

At the end, Tom waved his hand to silence the others and completed the rite by speaking out the last of the spell. Seven Slytherins went down like puppets cut from strings as Tom saw the blood in the air rush towards the center and start to coalesce into runes. If Tom hadn't been an overachiever at Ancient Runes, he would have missed the shape the blood took for the few seconds it took for him to finish saying the last of the spell. As it were though, Tom recognized the name of a place hidden within the notations along with a precise turn of seasons and the progression of the moon to form a date. He occluded it into the strongbox of his memories and passed out with the rest of his knights.

It would be a few days before any of them could use their magic without experiencing pain. It took the street smarts of the entire group to fool their schoolmates and teachers into not noticing their weakened magical cores and carry on with business as usual. The head boy was the first to get it back. Others took their time and followed at a more sedate pace.

XXX

PS: Reviews and feedback are the lifeblood of this ritual of writing :)