Post by tom on Jun 30, 2010 15:05:12 GMT 1
Nickname: Swishyclang (Swishy)
How You Found Us: Leapfrogging site recs
Contact Via: PM
How You Found Us: Leapfrogging site recs
Contact Via: PM
What can be found in a name:
RIDDLE, Tom Marvolo
On the day I was born:
DOB 31/12/1927
The Angels screamed:
Merope Gaunt and Tom Riddle
And Hell shut its doors:
Nagini (snake, venomous, type unknown)
While creatures retreated:
Half-blood
To depths unknown:
Slytherin alumnus
I hide from them:
During his latter school years, Tom would hide away in the Chamber of Secrets when the pressure of society became too much. In his better moments, he was the star around which all others revolved in the Slytherin common room. The Hogwarts school library was a favoured haunt, as were secluded areas of the grounds. After leaving school, Tom ceased his attatchments to places and people, realising that they would only hold him back. His house is not a home, his meeting places are not sentimental. The only place that calls to Tom is Hogwarts, his former sanctuary now denied him.
Be who they want to see:
Tom is tall, and was once handsome. Now his blue eyes are tinged with the red of the Darkest arts and his face is pale, wasted beyond repair. He is still the shade of a handsome man, but more attractive still is the aura of power that surrounds him.
But that leaves no one:
To discover that inside:
Tom Riddle – the man now called Lord Voldemort – is made up of contradictions. Though highly intelligent and single-minded in pursuit of his objectives, Tom is bound by his hatred and fear into a restricted set of actions. He will never rely on anyone, has never claimed anyone for his friend, and has never known love. The only thing that comes close is the adulation and respect of his Death Eaters.
Tom sees death as the next stage in a life of being ignored and looked down upon, and consequently fears it pathologically. He has an addictive personality, and channels the frenzied energy that comes of this into his various project – at school, it was discovering his ancestry and escaping the orphanage in which he was raised. After Hogwarts, it was cheating death through the Dark Arts. Now, it is changing the world order so that he and others like him never suffer the indignities of the Muggle world again.
The instability of Tom’s mental processes could be put down to the rituals he has undergone in order to achieve immortality, but, in fact, the problem is much more basic at its root. Tom suffers from acute bi-polar disorder, a form of depression that send him reeling from euphoric highs to debilitating lows and affects his ability to think rationally to such a degree that - even had he never begun down a path of darkness – he will never be considered sane.
This soulless being:
Power
Adulation
Vengeance
Charms
Arithmancy
Is just as lost:
Fear
Idiocy
Albus Dumbledore
Muggles
Restrictions
As everyone else:
Immortal
Intelligent
Powerful
Charismatic
Parselmouth
In a world that knows only hate:
Altered appearance
Fearful
Distrustful
Irrational
Divination
And causes pain for the soulless like me:
Muggle father
Horcruxes
They left me to die:
Merope Gaunt – mother – deceased
Morfin Gaunt – uncle – imprisoned in Azkaban
Marvolo Gaunt – grandfather - deceased
On a bed of roses:
Tom Riddle – father – deceased
Henry Riddle – grandfather – deceased
Sarah Riddle – grandmother - deceased
Blood seeping through:
Through his mother’s side, Tom is both the Heir of Slytherin and related to one of the fabled Peverell brothers
The satin sheets of fame:
Tom is well-off due to ‘freelance’ work undertaken while abroad, and graciously allows some of his richer Death Eaters to fund his terrorism in Britain
What a bitter story of love:
Tom Marvolo Riddle was born to Merope Gaunt – a pureblood witch – and Tom Riddle Sr. – a muggle.
Merope and her family had lived on the Riddles’ land all her life, and she had grown up admiring the young heir to the estate. When her father and brother were imprisoned for crimes against Muggles, Merope was left alone in her small house, and saw her chance. She enchanted Tom Riddle with a love potion and convinced him to run away with her to London.
Soon after their runaway marriage, Merope fell pregnant. Tom and Merope lived in the Muggle world, Merope having kept her magic a secret from her new husband. This secrecy, and Tom’s magic-induced love for her – left Merope unable to gather further ingredients for the potion she had used to ensnare Tom. The first dose wore off… and Tom Riddle woke up to a wife he had never loved.
Desperately, Merope attempted the Imperius curse to hold Tom temporarily in her thrall. However, Merope had never been particularly strong at spell-casting, and the curse failed. Tom – terrified and with his mind once more his own – returned to his parents in Little Hangleton still unaware of Merope’s pregnancy.
Merope remained in London, disheartened and alone. She sold her last link to her family – a locket which was said to have belonged to Salazar Slytherin, her ancestor – for a few Galleons.
On the night of December 30th, 1927, Merope went into labour. She collapsed on the steps of St Mary’s Orphanage in Muggle London and was brought inside. Though she stayed strong throughout the twelve hour labour, when her son was born Merope lived only long enough to name him: Tom, for his father, and Marvolo, for his grandfather.
Tom Marvolo Riddle was raised at St Mary’s Orphanage with only the barest information about his family. He was quiet, intelligent, and content with his own company from an early age. He learned cunning and artifice at the feet of a drunken caregiver, and how to read and write under the cold eyes of a cane-happy priest. The cruelty of children, he learned early and experienced repeatedly.
Quiet children are often singled out. Intelligent ones even more so. Those who watch their supposed playmates with curious eyes and make no move to join them… Those children find themselves learning how to keep secrets, how to find the best hiding places, and, sometimes, how to hurt their tormentors back. Tom learned.
Tom didn’t only learn how to hurt back, he learned that he really was as different as the other children whispered he was. He learned how to make things happen – how to hurt things, how to break things, how to look that cold, cane-happy priest in the eye and hear his mind break.
No one knew that Tom had killed before he even started school.
When Tom was eleven years old, Albus Dumbledore came to his room and told him what he already knew; that he was magic.
Tom went to Hogwarts with none of the wide-eyed wonder that characterised the other first years. That, he knew, would only end with him having to hurt a new set of ‘others’. Instead, Tom watched with a curious, calculating gaze as the other children greeted each other, touched each other, laughed with each other. This was friendship? Tom had never seen the like.
Tom was sorted into Slytherin, one of the four Hogwarts houses, and sat quietly observing. If he was to thrive here, he would have to learn how.
It didn’t take long. Tom excelled at his lessons and found that he was placed in the right house for doing so. His housemates began to gravitate towards him – at first for his intelligence, and then for the power he so clearly possessed. It was a heady feeling, this solicitation from others. Tom appreciated it, catalogued it, and realised how to make such a strange thing work for him. The quiet, antisocial Tom Riddle began to craft the persona of Lord Voldemort, someone greater and more terrible than he had thought he could be – and somehow the man he could feel himself becoming.
There was one course at Hogwarts which could not hold Tom’s interest. History of Magic was taught by a ghost who was fixated on the Goblin Wars. Late in Tom’s first year, he started to quietly avoid the class, going instead to the library to research. It wasn’t, he told himself, as though he was breaking the rules. He was studying History of Magic, after all. Tom was studying the four founders of Hogwarts.
He learned that Salazar Slytherin was a parselmouth, like him, and it made Tom wonder. He followed the line of Slytherin through many generations, eventually reaching the Peverells, then the Gaunts… and there the line appeared to stop.
Disappointed, Tom sidelined the project for his favourite hobby; attempting to discover the location of the Chamber of Secrets. Tom was convinced that, as a parselmouth, he had a great advantage, and was determined to find Slytherin’s lair.
His first summer back at St Mary’s, the other children avoided him more than ever. Tom merely stuck to his books. It was a beneficial arrangement to both sides; Tom went unbothered, and the others went unhurt.
It was that summer that Tom realised that he might have been approaching the question of the Slytherin line from the wrong angle. He had assumed since finding out that magic was real that his mother could not have been magical, as she had died at his birth. But… what if she had been a witch? Though Tom had supposed that witches and wizards were immortal before attending Hogwarts, he knew better now.
Upon returning to Hogwarts for his second year, Tom made an effort to find out his mother’s maiden name. It took a complex potion brewed with the help of Horace Slughorn, Tom’s head of house, to discover it, but the result was what Tom had both hoped and expected.
Gaunt.
Tom Marvolo Riddle was the Heir of Slytherin.
This new sense of home and family led Tom to be more confident within the walls of Hogwarts. Over the next few years he continued to excel at his studies – both in class and extracurricular – and to gather around him those who sensed and admired his power. He grew into an attractive and charismatic leader of his house; an example to others.
Growing dependent upon the adulation of others, Tom feared a return to obscurity. He could think of only one way to remain in the hearts and minds of his followers; to cheat death.
Tom’s research into immortality took him ever-deeper into the Dark Arts. By his fourth year, Tom’s knowledge of the subject was second only to a Master of the Arts, his thirst for power and his outstanding mind taking him well beyond the skills that could be expected of a fifteen year-old boy.
In Tom’s fifth year, he was made prefect. The added privileges of the position allowed him to progress in his research on Slytherin’s Chamber, and in early 1943 he found it.
He also found a piece of information that would change the Wizarding World. Tom Riddle discovered how to make a Horcrux. It was only a matter of time now, he knew, before he could reveal himself to the world.
Deep in the bowels of Hogwarts castle, the Chamber of Secrets was a place Tom could go to study those things that were not approved by the ICW exam board. It was also the home of the basilisk Salazar Slytherin had raised.
Eager to continue what he considered his only family member’s work, Tom released the basilisk into the school. He led it through the pipe systems, hoping for he knew not what. In the grip of his mania, Tom had ceased to consider such things as plans.
Over the course of several weeks, Tom released the basilisk multiple times. Each foray resulted in at least one injured student – petrifactions became the main patients in the hospital wing – and then, one day, a girl was killed. Though an accident, Tom made the best of it; he had carried something with him for many months now in the hopes of completing its creation. He didn’t know the girl’s name, but it mattered not. He had a Horcrux, and Lord Voldemort was immortal.
The death of the girl – Myrtle, he discovered later – turned out to be an error on Tom’s part. Calls came for Hogwarts to shut down, and Tom’s only home was under threat.
On June 13, 1943, Tom framed Rubeus Hagrid for Myrtle’s murder. Playing on the prejudices of the Wizarding World, Tom knew that Hagrid, a half-giant, had no chance of being believed when he protested his innocence. Hagrid was expelled, his acromantula banished, and Hogwarts was ‘safe’ once again.
Reluctantly, Tom sealed the Chamber of Secrets, leaving the basilisk to sleep until he could return to finish his work.
Tom’s studies of Arithmancy had led him to the conclusion that, though one Horcrux was a successful line to the immortality he craved, seven would be a more magically powerful number. In the summer after his sixth year, Tom followed his birth records to his parents’ home town of Little Hangleton, and swiftly murdered his father and grandparents. Their deaths – Tom’s first use of the Killing Curse – powered the rituals to create a Horcrux of Tom’s maternal grandfather’s ring, which he buried under layers of traps in the Gaunt shack. With a curse of his own devising, Tom implanted false memories into his mad uncle’s head, leaving the man convinced that he, and not Tom, had murdered the Riddles. Morfin confessed, and was sentenced to life in Azkaban.
Tom returned to St Mary’s orphanage for the last time.
When Tom graduated from Hogwarts, he was prefect, Head Boy, and top of his class. He had received a Special Award for Services to the School for his ‘capture’ of Hagrid and Aragog in his fifth year, and a Medal of Magical Merit for his outstanding NEWT scores.
In June 1945, Tom Riddle left Hogwarts, silently vowing to return and guide the next generation in the true founders' footsteps.
Tom began working in Borgin and Burkes, a shop in Knockturn Alley. His job was to find items of value and obtain them at the lowest price possible; it was the perfect cover for his actual goal – to seek out items that had belonged to the founders of Hogwarts and to create Horcruxes with these totems of great power.
When Tom discovered a locket belonging to Salazar Slytherin and a cup that had been Helga Hufflepuff’s in the possession of Hepzibah Smith, he murdered her for them and disappeared from Great Britain.
Tom underwent many magical rituals in his time abroad, moving ever closer to the immortality he desperately wanted. He created three further Horcruxes using Hufflepuff’s cup, Slytherin’s locket, and Ravenclaw’s diadem, which he disbursed among his followers, telling them only that they were important magical items.
In 1965, Albus Dumbledore advertised the position of Defence Against the Dark Arts instructor, and Tom knew it was a sign. He returned to England a changed man. He applied to Dumbledore in person, sure of his qualifications and, indeed, his right to guide his future students.
Tom's anger when he was refused access to his birthright made him cold in his revenge. He cursed the title of Defence Against the Dark Arts professor using his own mixture of Oriental and Eastern European Dark Arts, creating a constantly transferring spell that would affect anyone who took the position he so craved. Some would die, some would have their darkest secrets exposed - some would be lucky and merely resign. Whatever the method, the curse would hold as long as Lord Voldemort lived.
The being who called himself Lord Voldemort appeared to the British Wizarding World at large in 1970, more powerful than any Dark Lord before him and so steeped in the Dark Arts that few knew him for the boy who had left Hogwarts twenty-five years before. He gathered around him those who believed, as he did, that the time had come for change in the Wizarding World. Muggles and Muggleborns had threatened the Wizarding way of life for long enough. He, Lord Voldemort, would change the world for the better.
It was dark in his mind – always dark. Tom found it comforting. Too many people inhabited the light, scurrying around on their terrifyingly mundane business, determined only to find their next meal or their next lover. The darkness was solitude, velvet. Serenity. No one ran through the darkness.
A tendril of thought tried to make itself known. Tom crushed it. Now was not the time. Now was the time for silence, for reflection and fortification. He was the strongest; he need not fear those who sought to topple him. They were light-dwellers, all, too afraid of what might live behind their vanity and their idiocy to step into the embrace of freedom. He was their future, and they could not see it for their insistence on a skewed morality that would kill them all within a few generations. Could they not hear him when he spoke? Could they not understand?
Tom breathed deeply, pushing the thoughts down and away.
A wall, high and deep and midnight black, plunged upwards into a sky Tom couldn’t see. He ran questing eyes-that-were-not-eyes over its blankness, hands-that-were-not-hands across its immensity. The wall was smooth, silent, still under him.
He moved on.
The sky was clear and dark. Tom walked among the clouds that obscured everything below. No moon shone here, no false light borrowed from an old God. The stars dared not show their faces to him, and Tom was pleased with imagery.
The wall stretched to the borders of time - Tom could feel it – with not a sign of weakness. Its song was pure and rang through Tom with pleasurable intensity. He used no ears to hear it.
The ground was as unbroken as the wall, composed of hatred and fear and power all together, and held down with an unseen force of will. Tom walked from one side of time to the other, finding no flaw.
He was satisfied. He was strength and freedom. He was darkness and power. He was the future.
Tom opened his eyes. His Death Eaters knelt silently at his feet.
I am Lord Voldemort.
A tendril of thought tried to make itself known. Tom crushed it. Now was not the time. Now was the time for silence, for reflection and fortification. He was the strongest; he need not fear those who sought to topple him. They were light-dwellers, all, too afraid of what might live behind their vanity and their idiocy to step into the embrace of freedom. He was their future, and they could not see it for their insistence on a skewed morality that would kill them all within a few generations. Could they not hear him when he spoke? Could they not understand?
Tom breathed deeply, pushing the thoughts down and away.
A wall, high and deep and midnight black, plunged upwards into a sky Tom couldn’t see. He ran questing eyes-that-were-not-eyes over its blankness, hands-that-were-not-hands across its immensity. The wall was smooth, silent, still under him.
He moved on.
The sky was clear and dark. Tom walked among the clouds that obscured everything below. No moon shone here, no false light borrowed from an old God. The stars dared not show their faces to him, and Tom was pleased with imagery.
The wall stretched to the borders of time - Tom could feel it – with not a sign of weakness. Its song was pure and rang through Tom with pleasurable intensity. He used no ears to hear it.
The ground was as unbroken as the wall, composed of hatred and fear and power all together, and held down with an unseen force of will. Tom walked from one side of time to the other, finding no flaw.
He was satisfied. He was strength and freedom. He was darkness and power. He was the future.
Tom opened his eyes. His Death Eaters knelt silently at his feet.
I am Lord Voldemort.
