"ɴᴏᴛ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ʟɪᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ᴍᴇ ʙᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ɪ ɴᴏ ʟᴏɴɢᴇʀ ʙᴇʟɪᴇᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀꜱ ꜱʜᴀᴋᴇɴ ᴍᴇ." — ꜰʀɪᴇᴅʀɪᴄʜ ɴɪᴇᴛᴢꜱᴄʜᴇ
Chapter Eight: The Boy Who Cried Kelpie
"Let's keep the curtains drawn" had become an unspoken rule in the Gryffindor dormitory, and Harry gathered, anywhere else that had windows. Classes were taught with blackout curtains shut over the windows and an abundance of candles; Fudge had travelled via Floo to give a speech in which he said that the situation was under control and things were being handled, but then Dumbledore stood up and started asking questions and then more people started asking questions and from then on it was clear that some people had died and everyone on the outside was scared, hoarding food and water.
Ginny looked especially terrified, until Ron reminded her that their parents could stay with Bill in Egypt or Charlie in Romania, and told Hermione that Dementors tended not to linger around Muggle areas as far as anyone knew and the library attack was probably a fluke.
Obviously, no one got any sleep that night, and a large group of people stayed up and roasted potatoes in the common room fireplace.
If worst comes to worst, thought Harry, we can go down to the Chamber and cuddle up with the basilisk, but didn't bother mentioning it to everyone.
After he was sure no one was paying particular attention, he said to Ron: "I'm going to see if I can get in the Slytherin Dungeon. Coming?"
"Of course he's not coming," said Hermione, who had overheard. "One, detention with Filch, two, we can't get in the Slytherin Dungeon anyway. No one who's not a Slytherin has been inside in the past seven centuries."
"And who's been in the Chamber of Secrets, before about fifty years ago?" Harry responded. "Besides, we can all fit under the cloak."
"I'll come," said Ron, very pointedly.
Hermione let out an over-dramatic sigh. "All right, all right, I'll come, too, fine. Just if we get in trouble—"
"Yeah, you told us so, right Hermione, brilliant."
At that, Harry scrambled to his feet and headed upstairs to get the Invisibility Cloak, which was currently collecting dust at the bottom of his trunk. In fact, he couldn't remember the last time it had been used — hunting Quirrell, perhaps?
He shuddered.
"Got it?" whispered Ron from somewhere behind his left shoulder.
"Yeah, got it," he whispered back, shaking the dust off of it, and then they set off, creeping out of the portrait hole, and into the corridor.
It was already past curfew, so the corridors were mostly empty apart from the prefects, ghosts, and staff.
"Isn't that Cedric?" Hermione whispered harshly into Harry's ear. He winced, and glanced over his shoulder.
Indeed it was, and standing beside one of the Slytherin prefects.
"... you don't want to get dear old Dad in trouble now, do you Cedric? Heard the Department of Magical Creature Regulation is having cuts made, and your dad works under Benjamin Goldstein, doesn't he?"
"Yeah," said Cedric uneasily.
"Bad time to lose his job, don't you think? With all the Dementors about?"
Harry could only see the back of Cedric, but he seemed quite angry.
"Don't go threatening my dad, Flint!"
"Easy, easy there Ced. Don't get so wound up. Just making sure you know the stakes if you don't stop attending those library meetings with the down-and-out librarian."
"Have you threatened everyone like this, or just me? No wonder Slytherins have a reputation, you're really helping your collective case—"
Ron nudged him. "Still going to the dungeon?"
"I don't think we need to," Hermione whispered back. "If Harry was looking for a Slytherin interested in stirring up trouble, he's found one — and look, it isn't Nott!"
Ruby could feel the gravel poking through the thinning soles of her boots, and her legs were exhausted. All she wanted was a break from walking; but the cliff was in sight and Tee a few yards ahead of her.
Now he wants to get somewhere, we walk fast! I see how it is!
The air smelled like sea: mossy and soggy and wet. The waves crashed harshly against the black, craggy rock — it was a sheer drop that no one could survive.
A black horse was grazing on the long grass by the edge of the cliff, its coat glistening in the weak sun streaming through the cracks in the clouds, powerful muscles rippling as it stepped forward.
It was the most beautiful horse she'd ever seen, like camera footage out of a nature documentary, beautiful and wild and strong.
Why isn't it frightened of him, she thought vaguely, as Tee went up to the horse as if in a trance, and climbed onto its back.
Kelpie, she realised, stricken with horror.
"Tee, that's a kelpie! Get off it, it'll drown you!"
"What are you on about?" he asked crossly, and made to get down, but couldn't.
"Here," she said, "I'll pull you off."
As soon as he reached for her hand, the kelpie took one bounding leap off of the cliff, plummeting down into the icy water below.
The water felt more like icy concrete, and she gasped involuntarily, breathing in water before reminding herself to hold her breath and pry her eyes open.
Something was churning the water above her into foam, with the force of a thunderstorm. The kelpie, all shark teeth and glistening mane, striking out with its powerful hooves and doing its best to bash Tee's head in. From what she could see, he was trying to grab its bridle, ambitious but often futile. Her lungs were burning with lack of air, and there was the kelpie between her and the surface.
"Stop panicking!" snapped Tee, coughing out icy water just as her head surfaced, too. "The more you thrash, the faster you'll drown!"
And then the black horse pushed down on her chest with his mighty hooves, and her lungs filled with water once more.
Tee got close enough and the silver bridle was in his hands; he pulled her up onto the now tame horse for what felt like the first breath of air in a century.
"It's a good sign," said Tee, once he'd caught his breath.
"Good — good sign?" she spluttered, boiling with rage. "For the seven hundredth time, are you insane? It nearly killed me — not you, maybe! Must be nice being bloody talented, mustn't it, so you can go around screaming at Dementors and taming kelpies?"
"If a kelpie's around, there must be magic here," he said simply, and told the horse to trot off in the direction of the cliff.
"You're unbelievable."
The fissure in the cliff was not very far. Tee put his wand between his teeth and felt his way along the dark wall of the cliff, until his hands hit empty space. Gripping the slick sides of the rock, he heaved himself out of the water, feeling for the ledges as he climbed up the side, and clambered into the tunnel entrance, then turned to pull Ruby in after him.
I'm sure there's nothing in here, kelpie or no kelpie, she thought, feeling her way through the damp tunnel after him and glaring resentfully at the bright light floating ahead of them, except slippery rocks to break our necks on.
The tunnel walls were so close that there was barely room for Tee's shoulders at the narrowest point as they waded through the knee-deep water. But after a while, it opened up into a small room, dark and cramped. The only thing that stood out from the surroundings was the shimmering outline of a door, upon which a series of slanted lines were engraved.
He stood in front of it, staring. A password?
Ruby, beside him, was trying to sound out letters.
"W-O-L-A."
"Fola," Tee corrected automatically. "The modern phonetic value of fearn is /f/. And don't ask me what it means, I don't know Gaelic."
"Fearn can protect and contain, onn refers to tools, luis sustenance, and ailm — the kenning's something like groaning, isn't it, like pain and suffering?"
"That sounds like an oversimplified gloss and it makes no sense," said Tee. "You can't just take the most general, obvious meanings of all the runes and string them into a word."
He thought that he heard the faint slip of scales on stone.
In Parseltongue, he called out, Hello?
"Snakes?" Ruby was flashing her wandlight around. "Where?"
The dark, lithe body of a black adder wound its way down a pile of jagged rocks, regarding Tee with a crimson eye, its black tongue flickering out like a jet-coloured worm, tasting the air
"Hello to you too, hatchling," said the adder testily, her voice cool and gravelly.
"How do I open the door?" he asked immediately, not quite sure how he remembered it, but thinking at the back of his head that one needed to be forceful with snakes.
"Don't. You won't like it much."
"But I need to see what's inside."
"So few visitors," grumbled the adder. "So hungry. Visitors so rude. Never listen."
"Like the idiot hatchling before," she continued. "Went in all by himself and fell in the water trying to find his trinket and got gobbled up."
"Who?" asked Tee, but the adder put her head inside her coils like a human covering their eyes. It sufficed to say that she wasn't interested in helping anyone get inside.
They just wouldn't go in the water then, if it was inhabited by some kind of flesh-eating fish.
He turned back. Ruby had both her hands pressed against the door, and her eyes shut.
"What are you doing?"
A strange sort of laugh came from her, and she stepped away from the door. "It's blood, Tee, that's what whoever opened it before did. It makes sense, with the letters: the door's a tool to protect whatever's hidden behind it, and it's impervious to magic. The spell that makes it open is sustained by suffering, which it takes in the form of blood from a fresh wound."
"How did you figure that one out?" asked Tee, half-impressed, half-annoyed that she'd been more successful that him.
"Someone's been here before and got in that way," she said slowly. "I think he died."
"Well, that's morbid."
"This place is morbid."
He shrugged, nicked the tip of his finger, and pressed it to the door.
At first, nothing happened, but then the whole cave started to shake and rumble underneath their feet, and a massive stone slab slid away to reveal a blazing, silver outline that seemed to lead into more darkness.
"Well, this is new," Tee said, staring at what lay before them as he stepped through the archway. The door led into an immense cavern filled with black water. The only light in the still blackness were the two wands and a misty, greenish light in the midst of the black lake.
The darkness was so tangible that Tee could almost reach out and grab a handful of it in his fist.
But instead, he knelt down to stare into the black lake. The surface was as clear and still as a pane of glass. If there were any flesh-eating fish in there, he couldn't see them. Maybe the adder was just trying to scare them.
Ruby said someone died here. But she's just a kid.
Something did feel deeply familiar about this place. Like the snakes. Like the Chamber.
The same way that a violinist could remember each finger's position on the strings or the way a compass needle knew north, that was how Tee felt about this place. Pure instinct.
He felt through the air above the lake fearlessly, not thinking about how deep that lake must be or what turned it that colour, knowing that something would be there— ssssshink!
A heavy, copper-green chain shot up from the water and into his hand, and he gave it one, sharp tug. The cool, water-slick chain threaded through his hand, each link hitting the floor with a soft clink which echoed against the rocky walls.
Click.
A small boat rose out of the water, glowing faint green like a deep sea creature. It floated towards the bank until it was nearly flush against it.
"Do you think it's safe?"
Ruby hadn't spoken in a while. She was standing on the edge of the lake and shifting her feet around, looking more uncomfortable than ever, even the Riddle House.
He did not respond, but instead carefully stepped into the boat. It rocked a little, as expected, but felt sturdier than it looked.
"Stay there by yourself then," he said, and then of course she got in after him.
The boat began to float across the water. It was quiet. Too quiet. Nothing was alive here.
Ruby was shivering under Mafalda's coat.
"It's so creepy," she whispered. "What if we can't get out?"
"Of course we'll get out," he said snidely, and leaned up to see what they were drawing closer to.
There was an island; not much, really, just a flat slab of dark stone and the source of the misty green light, which was growing brighter and brighter.
He clambered out of the boat, Ruby on his heels, clearly afraid of being left behind.
The green light was coming from a small, sink like basin of mother-of-pearl, filled with glowing, opaque liquid.
What is it?
He shifted closer to the basin, eying its contents. Even he had to admit that this place was eerie, but for some reason, he felt safer here.
"Drink."
Tee nearly jumped out of his skin.
"Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"Never mind," he muttered.
"Drink," said the voice again, strangely familiar. "Drink, drink and remember."
The first gulp was sweet, and then sweetness lingered too long and turned to bitterness. His stomach ached, cold stabbing pain like a belly full of cold knives.
"Tee, it could be poison! What kind of homicidal maniac with a sick sense of humour leaves a sink full of potion in the middle of a lake in this disturbing place? Let's go!"
He could see the sense in that, but his cupped hands were already bringing the green poison to his lips, running in emerald rivulets down his fingers, staining his fingers fluorescent green...
Smoke. Antiseptic. Grit under his nails. A repetitive motion. Grease. Machinery.
"Tom?"
That's original, he thought vaguely.
"I don't know you," he said, as if it were a script, swallowing to numb the pain in his throat, but that made it hurt even more. "Are you another doctor?"
Grinding.
"Get up, Riddle!"
He raised a hand above his eyes and squinted through it, the ground both smoothed wood and cold linoleum, the face above him warping.
"It's a grim night when a child dies." Tee turned his head. "Was he your friend?"
All he knew was that he felt sick. He could feel the potion sloshing around in his stomach. He was dizzy.
He was going to die. The certainty was heavy.
Something slammed into the ceiling above him; concrete, dust, warm blood.
Dust. Dust to dust. A funeral.
Peter. Dust.
Who was Peter? Who was he?
Tom.
Who is Tom?
He felt his body start to disintegrate from his fingertips, watching in numb horror until even his eyes dissolved into dust, settling into the pages of the diary.
I am probably going to die.
I am going to die.
I am going to die here.
I am going to die here, alone.
I am Lord Voldemort.
He would finally wash himself clean of his sordid beginnings.
"I'll kill you. I'll kill you. I swear."
Standing on rooftops... hundreds of Blackshirts, wearing belts, their pomade-slicked hair shining in the weak sun, a row of boys on the roof, wearing grey tunics that made them unmistakably orphans, making use of the week's worth of rubbish as projectiles because everyone said you should throw rubbish at them if they came down here...
"You are certainly an extraordinarily lucky young man."
Salazar's rumbling, dry voice. A man in the expensive coat? Same, or not?
You are not looking," he said, his voice full of disappointment. "I have told you before, many times. Do not look at the thing. Look at what it is."
"Tom."
Tom, for his father. Marvolo, for my father.
Father? You?
It was himself.
"Drink," said Tom Marvolo Riddle, slightly older, the true-red colour of the Philosopher's Stone reflecting off his eyes, with the focus of a scientist at the most crucial stage of experimentation, tipping the contents of the basin into his mouth. "Drink."
"You've been laying there for ages," came Ruby's voice, and then a bright light in his eyes. "I thought you'd decided to die on me all over again."
She didn't seem too put out about it, either, he thought.
"Well, after you'd tipped the entire basin into your mouth—"
I did that?
Sure enough, the stone basin had been taken off the pedestal and placed on the floor beside him, not a drop of potion remaining. Something sparkled within.
"—there was this necklace in the bottom; never touch magical jewelry that no one's touched in a while, or at least that's what Flitwick says."
He sat up. Tee hadn't been thinking too deeply about it, but he could feel its presence, like a second heartbeat that had taken up residence in his chest. He snatched up the locket, a crude, ugly thing worked out of heavy gold with a long chain and a 'S' in tiny emeralds on the front of the locket.
Ruby was staring at him in utter horror.
"Tee, you can't just pick up jewelry in a cave that someone clearly owns!"
"Why not?" he asked, gripping the chain as if it was going to steady him. "Who's going to stop me?" Tee — Tom Marvolo Riddle — Lord Voldemort — oh God, who else could he be? He was staggering under the weight of all the new memories filling up his head.
I am Lord Voldemort.
I killed her parents.
I really did become greater than all of them; me, mudblood scum, bastard boy, dirty orphan.
That makes things very... very different.
And then his mouth felt dry.
Terribly, terribly dry. His tongue clung to the roof of his mouth, and in a macabre fashion, he remembered torturing a boy with magically-induced thirst and a glass of water; oh, what utter irony.
Water.
He pointed Lockhart's wand at the empty basin, and from it, a steady stream of crystal-clear water poured. Shaking, he crawled over to it, his knees dragging across the rough stone, and—
"It's gone!" he cried out, and speaking filled his bone-dry mouth with blood.
He tried again, and again to summon water, but each time, it disappeared. Desperate, he crawled to the edge of the stone island, and bent towards the brackish water, swallowing gulp after gulp.
"Tee," said Ruby, turning towards him and holding her marble aloft, fire flickering inside it. "There are — oh, it's awful — dead bodies in the water! What is this place?"
Tee could not answer that question. Grimly, he held his wand closer to the water, and peered in, ready to scoff at her illusions.
But Ruby was not exaggerating. Tee found himself staring into a woman's face — cloudy, fixed eyes, and flesh that looked bruised and rotten.
And then the woman was no longer a mere corpse.
Her eyes flicked open, cloudy, without irises. And then a bony hand was reaching through the water towards him—
He jerked away. Ruby was racing towards the boat as fast as her legs would carry her, dodging skeletal hands and screaming bloody murder, not that it would help much.
What would help?
Call for the kelpie was his first thought, but the Inferi would tear it to pieces before it could reach them. Same for the snakes. His second thought was Legilimency, but he wasn't their master and Inferi had no minds.
This place must have a bloody failsafe!
He slipped the locket around his neck for safekeeping, and cast the nastiest variant of the Blasting Curse he knew (Mandarin, tenth century, added a little extra bang to the gunpowder), which took out every Inferius who'd dared to poke its head above the water, filling the cave with the noxious aroma of aerosolized corpse. Tee took the extra time to give the boat a hard shove and pulled himself in after her, blasting off every Inferius who begun to climb up the sides.
He strode towards where the doorway had been, and pressed his hand against the wall, but nothing happened.
"What's going on?" asked Ruby. "Why can't we get out?"
The panic in her voice matched the fear that he felt. There were no snakes in this cavern to consult; nothing alive was here but him and Ruby.
"It must need new blood," said Tee, hoping that it was that simple. "A new wound."
He reached down for another shard of rock, stifled his disgust and trepidation, and grasped it in the fingers of his injured hand.
But this time, both his hands shook as he dragged the edge across his palm, and Tee cried out in pain, dropping the stone.
He and Ruby watched in horror as the stone skidded down the narrow shore, skipped over the rim with a clink, then disappeared into the water.
The sh-sh sound of water parting for bone-white heads and limbs instantly filled the cavern.
Tee flung himself against the rock, stumbling through the archway.
"RUN!" he shouted, tearing towards the tunnel. Of all the places to run into a pack of Inferi, this had to be the absolute worst. Tom pointed his wand at what he hoped was a weak place in the ceiling.
"Reducto!"
Rock and dust rained down, momentarily separating them from the Inferi — but Tee knew that they would crawl through eventually. White hands would painstakingly shift stone with superhuman strength and ceaseless, bottomless desire to tear apart anyone who disturbed them from their death-like slumber.
"Jump!" he said, as they reached the end of the tunnel, staring down into the black waves churning beneath them. "We need to jump!"
Ruby was frozen with fear.
Tee grabbed her hand, wincing as his palm stung against hers, and pulled her down with him, closing his eyes and bracing for impact as they hit the water. He gasped as water shot up his nose, but managed to tighten his hold on both Ruby and the wand. Tee tried to stay calm, exhaling bubbles as he struggled to the surface, forcing his stinging, wet eyes open.
He could see a mass of white limbs struggling above them. As he feared, the Inferi were still coming.
He felt the water still around them, and his ears filled with a horrible silence.
The stench of sulfur and death was thick in the air. A hundred skeletal bodies with clouded, empty eyes lurched towards them. Tee stared into wide mouths filled with shark-like teeth. Strips of rotting flesh hung off of their bodies, and the Inferi's arms reached towards them, blackened, sharp nails hungry for flesh.
Tee tried to remember what killed Inferi, but all he could think of was a picture he'd been shown, long ago, of a person murdered by one. A pile of strips and a pool of blood. Tee had squinted at the slide with cold detachment amongst the gasps of horror in the classroom, trying to make out what had once been brain, skin, and bone.
Would it hurt as the creatures ripped them into bloody shreds? He cast Blasting Curse after Blasting Curse, but it never seemed to cull the herd. The monsters simply kept coming.
Tee imagined filthy nails sinking deep into his stomach, ripping and tearing at the exposed flesh as the water around him turned red.
Yes. It would be unbearable.
Maybe he should let himself drown. It might hurt less.
If he could only stop panicking.
Ruby did not know what they were, or how they killed people, and she was calmer than him now.
He saw her raise her fist (what good would that do?), something shining in the sunlight. She wound up, and it sailed through the air, hitting the nearest Inferius and turning it to ash. The entire herd faltered.
He could hear Dumbledore (now that name meant something), Dumbledore's voice telling him, like many creatures that dwell in cold and darkness, they fear light and warmth.
Tee laughed nervously. "Fire. Of course, flesh burns!"
He watched her expression turn from scared to determined, and summon a handful of Bluebell Flames into her hand, then turn them hot and crimson, skipping across the water and spreading amongst the herd of Inferi, the flames dancing in her eyes. Despite himself he couldn't help but be impressed; Bluebell Flames were harmless but waterproof, so altering the properties to make the oxidation a little more potent... but now wasn't the time to observe admirable spellwork.
Tee summoned a rope of fire from the tip of Lockhart's wand, raising his arm above his head, and dragging the flames in a slow circle until the rope was a flaming wall around them.
The Inferi finally began to draw back.
Tee felt sick and shaky, and he barely had the energy to keep the flames burning. Ruby didn't look any better, but eventually, all of the Inferi had been reduced to ashes floating in the water around them.
"We did it," he said, sagging in the water.
"Let's go," said Ruby, tucking her wand behind her ear and pulling herself up onto the closest ledge. "More of them might come out."
Tee nodded blankly. Yes, that was the logical thing to do, even though free-climbing a cliff was the last thing he wanted to do right now. He tried to swallow the nauseous feeling as he began to climb after her.
"It has been a while since I sold a blackthorn wand," Ollivander had said. "But you might perhaps have some trouble with it at first. A curious feature of such wands is that they appear to need to pass through danger or hardship with their owners to become truly bonded. I do hope that such circumstances will pass quickly. But once it is over, your wand will become as loyal and faithful a servant as one could wish."
Was that why, all of a sudden, the wand had seemed to change, Ruby wondered? She knew her wand the same way that a violinist knew the weight distribution of their bow, the tension of the hairs, the responsiveness to being dragged across the strings.
I wasn't sure I could turn those flames like I did when Harry was in his Obscurial form. But then I did, and I kept them burning, too.
She glanced over at, Tee, who had gone to sleep, his cheek pressed against the bus window, and thought of what she'd seen in the marble while he was unconscious in the cave.
What happened here?
"Clever, clever boy, aren't you... Regulus? Such a shame you were born so weak. The runt of the family. If only dear Sirius survived, he'd certainly be the favourite."
"You've lied to me for the last time, My Lord," said Regulus, a boy barely older than Tee, his prone form twitching under Voldemort's boot, holding a locket clenched in his fist.
Voldemort bent down, his face obscured by the hood of his robes, and then stepped aside, leaving Regulus sprawled on the ground, helpless. He went to the empty basin, and retrieved an identical locket. Ruby could only see his back, but she heard his dark chuckle.
"You insult me, boy! You believed this cheap trinket would fool me?" When Regulus did not answer, Voldemort kicked him in the head, and he cried out in pain, clutching his eyes. Voldemort dangled the locket over his face. "Answer me!"
"To make a Horcrux is forbidden magic," rasped Regulus. "Not even Grindelwald would touch it! I won't follow someone who is pure evil!"
"For all your morality, the Sorting Hat should have placed you in Hufflepuff," said Voldemort, his voice low and mocking. "Next, I suppose you will take umbrage to culling Muggle scum."
"I believe in truth!" spat Regulus. "Toujours pur— that's my family motto!"
Voldemort knelt down to be eye-level with him. "The truth? Which truth? The truth that I was halfblood scum, bastard boy, Muggle foundling, who lied and clawed my way to be greater than all of you? The truth that I was a shopkeeper's assistant, living a pathetic life on the pittance I was paid, until I realised that all I had to do to be great was to tell those with the deepest pockets and the most political power exactly what they wanted to hear, stroke their egos, tell them that their time is now to fight? The truth that I came from a line purer than any, that I can trace my ancestry back to the great Salazar Slytherin himself, that the locket is my birthright — my only inheritance, which my penniless mother sold off months before I was born? The truth that I hate each and every one of you? Sometimes, when a man has nothing left to fear but fear itself, in the face of infinite existence, all he wants to do is see the entire world burn. You will never understand, Regulus. A tadpole like you has not grown enough to understand— back to the water."
He summoned the locket into his hand, replaced it with the fake in the basin, and straightened up. Without ceremony, he shoved Regulus into the water, watching with an amused, gleeful expression as the boy was torn to pieces, each punctuated by a terrible scream until the screams stopped, and the cave was filled with a terrible silence.
Voldemort dropped the false locket into the lake.
"Oh well," he said absently. "Little rabbits have big ears. I had forgotten; I must take more care next time."
Something was eerily familiar about him, Ruby thought, and why, after all, did Voldemort own the hidden locket in what she had thought to be Tee's cave. If only she'd been able to get a good look at his face! The marble was broken, and she didn't know how to make another one or how to scry with anything else.
At least I've got a new word. Horcrux.
She looked across at Tee, sleeping very innocently, with his relaxed face, long, doll-like sooty eyelashes, and slightly-parted lips.
Halfblood scum, bastard boy, Muggle foundling... I can trace my ancestry back to the great Salazar Slytherin himself.
A terrible coincidence, Ruby thought it must be. Voldemort would have killed her by now.