This is a chapter from my Tom Riddle prequel series that I'm writing. Think of this as the canonical precursor to the Harry Potter series rather than your ordinary fan fiction. Please scrutinize it as that much. That being said, I hope you all like it. If you're confused or curious about anything let me know.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Snow fell between open spaces in the canopy above, gently piling in layers on the ground. With the sunrise came the natural silence as the creatures of the night hushed and the day time animals had not yet stirred for their morning hunt. Tom’s crunching footsteps interrupted the quiet. Diadem in hand, his work was nearly done. He trudged along, heading back to the village where the tavern fireplace lie.
“Stop.”
Tom stopped. Without turning, he let his head pivot a fraction, speaking to a piece of black bark to his right as if it were the voice’s source.
“I hadn’t expected you, Percival,” admitted Tom.
“Who else but me?”
The voice echoed through the branches, unwavering and resolute.
“I had wondered whether I would meet Dearborn in these woods,” Tom spoke softly, “but clearly my attention was in the wrong place—I should have been more attentive of my Knights.”
“Caradoc’s future is bright,” said Percival. “I alone bear the burden of discovering your disgusting plot.”
“You come here alone? How noble,” Tom teased.
“I needn’t anyone but myself.”
“If remembrance was your aim, Prewett, you could have chosen an easier death.”
“I did not come to be remembered,” Percival’s words rung true. “I came because no one else dared.”
“How bold,” Tom chuckled. “How inspired. How stupid!”
On this last word, Tom had turned on the spot, his wand jutting forward. The violently bright curse he had wordlessly casted screamed as it hurtled toward Percival, who leaped out of the way. The curse exploded upon impact with the ground, causing felled snow and dirt to soar into the air, and leaving a smoldering wound on the earth. The air was thick with raining ash, dirt, and soot.
The crimson stream of light that answered Tom would have torn his wand from his fingers if he hadn’t thrown his shoulder back to narrowly avoid the spell. Tom’s eyes flashed scarlet.
“Still playing fair?” Tom observed. He flicked, long thin ribbons hissed out, coiling for wrists and throat. Percival’s counter came clean: he slashed his wand through the air, a blade of light cut through the the bindings, reducing them to threads that smoked on the snow. He followed it up with a rapid fire of spells, putting Tom on the back foot.
“Protego!”
One of the spells reflected back at Percival, launching him backward. To Tom’s surprise, Percival landed on his feet, kneeling down and digging his fist in the ground as he skidded to a halt.
“Crucio!”
Red lightning shot from Tom’s wand instantaneously, but Percival apparated at the last second. The next second, Tom felt something strike him from behind, and his legs snapped together.
“How’s that for fair, Tom?” Percival mocked.
Raged engulfed Tom as his face made hard contact with the ground, breaking the curse. He rolled forward, dodging a powerful hex. Tom jumped to his feet, turning just in time to block another of Percival’s hexes. He fought like a duelist who had seen Tom for years and catalogued him: never once wasting an angle, never repeating a hex in the same rhythm, never trusting success to theatrics.
“Come quietly, Tom,” spoke Percival. “Hand over the relic. We go back. You face Dippet. And you live.”
Tom laughed. “This isn’t my first time,” said Tom. “I am far beyond living.”
“Merlin’s beard, Tom,” Percival’s mouth tightened, not with disgust but with something graver. Pity, Tom decided. An insult dressed as mercy. “You’ve thrown away what makes life rhyme—what makes it poetic, beautiful…”
Tom slid the diadem into the inner pocket of his coat. “Spare me the sermon. Your house teaches children to run at fire and call that wisdom.”
Percival stepped forward into the clearing. Tall trunks rose around them like the ribs of an enormous beast, wind moved through the canopy with the voice of something sleeping. “My house teaches that what you protect defines you,” he said. “I came to save you from yourself. But I see now that you truly are lost.”
Tom moved first, not bothering with words. The jet of green flashed, the air cracked. Percival threw himself to the side, his next spell ripped up a sheet of frozen earth that Tom had to transfigure mid-flight into harmless needles of frost. They tinkled down between them like a pointless applause.
“Enough,” Tom raised his wand a fraction and let his voice lay like velvet over iron. “Imperio.”
The magic went cleanly. No splash, no waste. He saw it land in Percival’s eyes and meet that furnace inside. For a heartbeat the world held its breath, and Tom spoke into the space he had made.
Drop your wand, he told the boy, mildly, the way one tells a friend to sit. Walk away. Forget me.
The command hit stone and sparked. Percival’s jaw set. His arm trembled, then steadied. He took one disobedient step forward against the grain of the curse, as if wading into a river.
“No,” he said, simply, aloud, breaking Tom’s voice with his own.
The resistance interested Tom more than it irritated him. There was always satisfaction in measuring the exact height of a person. He tightened the band of the Imperius like drawing a garrote.
Kneel.
Percival’s knee dipped, then locked. Sweat beaded at his temple, turning into crystals in the cold. Each word wrestled free, “you… are not… my… author.”
Tom snapped the curse with a flick and followed it instantly with pain. “Crucio.”
Percival arched, a sound pulling out of him that made ravens burst from a neighboring tree. Tom held it there not out of rage, but attention. The way one watches a flame to understand how it burns. The boy convulsed, grit gouging under his fingernails as he clawed at the ground and refusing to beg. It was an irritation, almost, that he kept his eyes on Tom through it, as if taking in the truth of what Tom was and hold it like any other burden a Gryffindor carried.
Tom let the curse fall away. Percival sagged to hands and knees, lungs swallowing at the air, exhalation turning into clouds of vapor escaping through gritted teeth. He still had his wand, twisted and red.
“You will break,” Tom said, conversational. “Snap, like the branches of these trees.”
Percival pushed to his feet. Blood streamed from his nose, which Tom presumed had broken while he was writhing. He didn’t wipe it away. “Then I’ll break fighting for what is right.”
The duel changed temperature. Percival’s magic went colder, narrower. He dropped flourishes entirely. Where a student would have cast a blaze, he sent a colorless ribbon that made the air shiver; when it touched a stump, the wood rotted outward in a ring as neat as a coin. Tom moved, not evading, exactly, but letting the attack expend itself on things that were not him. Percival drove iron spikes up from the ground in a slick line to box Tom against a boulder. Tom dissolved them to silt with a word he had not taught anyone.
“You do know your way through shadow,” Tom said, approving despite himself. “But you refuse the simplest tools.”
“You made them simple,” Percival said. “That doesn’t make them right.”
Tom smiled and feinted left, then cut the feint into something real—earth buckled under Percival’s feet. The Gryffindor rode the shock, turned it to a leap, sent a spell in midair that would have taken Tom’s eyes; Tom turned it to smoke between them, and from that smoke threw a curse with no name he would ever print. Percival slammed a shield into place. It held. Tom felt it hold the way one feels a lock engage under a thief’s fingertip.
They circled again. Their breath made temporary ghosts. Somewhere far off, a wolf gave a single warning bark and then thought better of it.
“Tell me,” Tom said, weight balanced, “when you sat in my meetings and smiled, what did you tell yourself to sleep?”
“That I was closer to the fuse,” Percival said. “That when the moment came, I could stamp it out.”
“Here we are,” Tom said.
“Here we are,” Percival agreed, and hurled a lightless bolt that broke a stone in half without sound.
Tom answered with green. Percival slipped it by inches. Another. The clearing filled with ghosts of a future Percival did not enter. Tom adjusted. He started to herd him—not toward the boulder, but toward the oak with the black seam, the one where the roots rose just high enough to catch a heel. Percival saw it two steps before it mattered and changed his line with a move so clean Tom almost applauded. Almost.
They came close. The forest made a ring of its own. Tom dipped his shoulder as if weariness had found him; Percival bit, pressing, and Tom took the opening he’d baited: a wordless blast at the wand-hand, so minute in its shape that it struck the nerves like a pin. Percival didn’t drop his wand, but he flinched—a human thing, tiny, absolute. Tom called the ground to his purpose and it answered, throwing up a wall of iced loam between them. He stepped through his own obstacle at the corner and came out inside Percival’s guard.
“Look at me,” Tom said softly.
Percival did. No hate, again. Tom understood, in a small cold place, that the refusal would survive most curses he could name.
The green came as mercy comes to those who have stopped asking for it.
Percival fell backward into the snow. It received him without complaint. His eyes stayed open for a second longer than eyes should, taking in the tree above, Tom’s silhouette, the black mouth of the sky. Then they fixed on nothing at all, which is a kind of peace.
Tom stood over him and observed the body. The face arranged itself quickly into something like rest. The wind picked up and combed the hair from his brow. Kindness even now. Irrational to the end.
He waited for the aftertaste. There was always something: nausea, elation, a faint tremor at the wrist as if the body resented being made an instrument. Tonight the sensation that arrived was colder and more efficient. The clearing felt cleaner with one fewer obstacle in it.
“You wore my mask well,” Tom said, and the words made no vapor in the air because he had spoken them too softly to warm.
He drew the knife he had chosen for its honesty. No borrowed wand now. No scapegoat. He was almost moved by the correctness of it.
Snow gathered around him. The canopy watched. When he cut Percival’s palm, the blood steamed where it fell. Tom raised the limp appendage, allowing the life to drip into the his vial. Tom chose to sacrifice his other small toe this time. The pain seared as it did last time. His wand cauterized the wound. As he dropped the flesh into the potion it started to bubble furiously. He swirled it, then took it back like a shot of Fire Whiskey.
The heat was especially excruciating, his throat used to the breath of cold air around him. He felt it hit his stomach. He spit, the red leaving a stain in the snow beside him. He retched, and again, until finally boiling blood evacuated him. Doubled down in pain, he felt the familiar feeling of weightlessness.
A mix of saliva and blood poured like a fountain out of Tom’s mouth as he looked up to see a fractured white orb in front of him. He reached a shaking hand into his coat pocket, pulling out the ancient diadem. Using his wand, he guided what once was himself into it. There was a flash of blinding white light and a satisfying hum as the soul fragment made contact with its new vessel.
When the world came back to ordinary sizes, he glanced once at red on the snow where Percival lay, at the way the forest was already taking him into account. No one would know where he had gone. No one would remember him.
Tom picked up the diadem. It felt heavier, but simpler, as if it had always belonged to him and he had finally remembered where he’d put it down.
“I expected Dearborn,” he said to the trees, not because they needed to know but because accuracy pleased him. “Prewett will do.”
