Chapter 21 - Far and Wide
After the death of the Riddles, nothing was as it had been. The idle dreams of Tom’s youth were gone, replaced by a clear vision of what he would become. He forgot all about his mission to end what Salazar Slytherin had begun. The goal was to become perfect. He paid less attention to the secret society of the Knights of Walpurgis and his Head Boy duties. While the other students crammed for their NEWTs, he was researching immortality. The hardest was to keep a straight and smiling face as he lied to all of them and tried not to shout at their faces how pathetic they truly were.
He made a last visit to the Chamber of Secrets and took the few things that meant something to him: the private diaries of Salazar Slytherin and a few ancient texts about spells and potions. These texts, as old as they were, contained the most powerful knowledge he had yet come across. Salazar Slytherin, had been on the way to eternity, to unbelievable power “ but he had started too late, had wasted too many years in this school and had in the end been deceived by his fellow Founders. Tom would not make this mistake. He was in the prime of his years, and he would not waste them.
There was only one thing missing: his own diary, created in fifth year and full of complicated magic. Originally it had been written to preserve this sixteen-year-old memory of himself so that one day it might control another student and open the Chamber again. But by now Tom had changed his mind about this. The diary wasn’t flawless, it was experimental; it might make crucial mistakes. And even worse, the diary version of himself might be dangerous. It had the potential to free itself from the diary and become a powerful, corporeal creature and then it might do even more harm. Not that harm in general was bad. Harm to the Mudbloods was very good. But the flawed diary, forever sixteen, might do harm to Slytherin’s cause. It might even expose the entry to the Chamber. Flawed as it was, it might even turn against him, its creator.
But the diary was gone. He had kept it with his other books and had not thought about it for a year. There was only one explanation: someone had stolen it.
It took Tom almost half a century to identify the thief, and then it happened only by coincidence. Alphard Black had taken it, and after his death a member of the Black family had taken it and given it to her daughter. Years later her husband discovered the true purpose of the diary. As luck would have it, this husband fancied himself the right-hand man of Lord Voldemort...
So Tom left Britain without the diary. His purpose was clear: gain knowledge, gain power, possibly even become immortal. Most sources told him that there were only two ways to true immortality: either you were born immortal, or you managed to create the Philosopher’s Stone. But only once in history had the Stone been created and the only man knowing the formula was extremely reclusive, extremely paranoid and a close friend of Albus Dumbledore.
Had Tom acted more quickly, he might have gotten his hands on Nicholas Flamel. For a brief period after the Grindelwald incident that went all over the media, Dumbledore was said to be in bad shape. But he missed the chance. And not much later he decided that the Stone was imperfect: it granted immortality, but it could be stolen and destroyed and then it was not likely to be recreated.
In Prague he had talked with clandestine strangers. In Venice he had unwittingly signed a magical contract with a demon who let him read all the books of the ‚Bibliotheca Occulta‘ in exchange for the ability to taste food and feel the sun on his skin. In Delhi he had learned from a master of enchantment and mind possession how to control his natural talent at Legilimency. He had questioned oracles in the abyss of an Icelandic volcano. He had drained the minds of a whole witch order in Utah. He had visited the Western Indies to learn how to raise the dead. He had learned how to travel through the dreams of people in the heart of Africa. Hungrily he drifted from continent to continent, looking for answers, devouring knowledge. There were times when he enjoyed this life, when he learned for the sake of learning. But he was like a fire, the more wood you threw into it, the higher and hungrier the flames rose.
Slowly, as time went by and he gained in power and knowledge, patterns began to emerge. There were rules to magic, things you could do and things you couldn’t do. Everything, he learned, had a price, and almost everything had hidden clauses. You couldn’t have the strength of a vampire without being allergic to light. You couldn’t have the enhanced senses of a werewolf without having to undergo a painful and useless transformation each full moon. Vampirism and lycanthrophy were like contagious illnesses: the price you paid was by far too high for what you got in return. But some things were worth their toll.
Give up his human looks in order to become immortal? All the better. He was not too attached to the handsome features of Tom Riddle anymore. Give up his humanity in order to be more than human? He would not mourn for it, weak and flawed as it was... what good had this human body or this human soul ever done for him? The only thing worth preserving was his mind and magic, his power...
He spent years with research and experimenting, always on the hunt for ingredients and information. He lived a life in shadows, apart from people, but always watching. He studied their moves, their voices, their minds. He learned how to extricate the deepest and darkest of secrets from their souls. He knew, once he was immortal, he would need this skill. He would use those people. They would form the stairs on his ascent to power.
The path to immortality would include several dangerous steps. The first steps would be to obtain an immensely powerful body. The only flaw it would have is that it would be vulnerable to Avada Kedavra, the words which severed the soul from the physical body making it irreversibly dead.
The soul was what held the different components of a human being together. It created a whole that was indivisible, the true atom of the human being; without it the mind, the memories and the personality would disintegrate and break apart. Normally, when a person died, the soul passed on and took all the other parts with it. Tom would create a copy of himself. He would have two minds, two sets of memories, two personalities “ both perfectly identical, but one with a soul and one without it. The one with soul could die, dragged to death by the soul, but Tom would remain alive, incorporated by the soulless copy. Only things with souls could live and die, be it plants or men, but his soulless self would elegantly exist without living, and therefore be unable to die. No power in the world would be able to vanquish him.
The second group of steps would be to find that entity to go into the soulless copy so that with death of the body, this entity would not only not pass on but hold all the parts of his mind memories and personality together. It was risky. It was unheard of. But it in the end it would be failsafe and perfect: an immortal body could always somehow be destroyed, but an immortal spirit was truly invulnerable.
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Lucknow, India
1952
Wrapped in thick layers of silk and even thicker layers of scent, the Naga sat with crossed legs on a heap of cushions. The smell of Indian food, rice and spices, curry, ginger, pepper and hot butter seemed to ooze out of the very walls of the building, from the living quarters of the family below, even from the street. Blue clouds of smoke, heavy and sweet, swirled around their heads.
The Naga was a man, but other than that there was barely anything you could tell about him. His smooth, scaly skin betrayed no age; his golden eyes that had no eyelids were devoid of human emotions. He had no hair, but the bald, blunt head of a serpent. His thin lips were sucking smoke from the water pipe he cradled in his lap. But even in his relaxed position, the Naga had an air of royalty around him.
“There will be plenty of dowry,” Tom repeated. He was not speaking in Parseltongue with the Naga, but in flawless Hindi. It was easy to learn all kinds of languages by magic. He had learned to absorb knowledge out of people’s heads and books. “Give me one of your daughters, Lord Narada.”
Several of the cushions around Lord Narada were not cushions at all. They were the huge, golden coils of snake bodies. The scales of these undulating bodies shimmered beautifully like jewels and diamonds. They were Lord Narada’s daughters, princesses of the Naga, serpents as huge as a fully grown python.
The Naga had inhabited India long before mankind. They had been a serpent people, living under the water in holy rivers and secretive places. The Hindu religion had worshipped them as demigods, but they were more than mythological creatures. Able to appear in a serpent’s body and in a human body, they possessed immense magical power.
“My daughters are of noble birth and they belong to me, foreign wizard,” Lord Narada said.
Tom kept his expression calm at the insult. He even smiled. “Lord Narada, your nobility is but a title. The time of your reign is long gone.” Narada, having been a lord for thousands of years, was now a poor man without a kingdom. He laid aside the water pipe and stood up gracefully. Tom reciprocated. One of the daughters raised her snake’s head and looked at them, then slithered back among the cushions.
“In the old time, a warrior who entered our kingdom uninvited would have to fight one of our warriors,” Narada said in a voice that did not betray his anger. He was challenging Tom to a duel. “They would compete against each other and the loser would be killed. Your kind never won.”
Tom lazily pointed his wand at Narada. “They never won because they weren’t my kind, Lord Narada. They were but Muggles.”
As quick as a hunting snake strikes at an unsuspecting mouse, Narada moved forward, intending to break his bones with his strong, inhuman hands. But Tom was faster. He vanished from the spot, appearing behind Narada and pointed his wand at the Naga’s scaly neck. He didn’t even have to utter the spell that ripped the age-old body apart. In the matter of seconds, he had added another scent to the room, the smell of blood, forever impregnated into the walls and floor. It was red as human blood, but luke-warm as the Indian rain on Tom’s face and bare arms.
“Blood of a Serpent,” Tom whispered in Parseltongue as he collected the blood in small pewter jars. His expression was ecstatic. The Naga daughter lifted her blunt head again. She slithered across the ground, over the body of her father and nudged the wizard’s feet. Tom bent down to touch her head admiringly. His hand, covered in blood, left slick traces on her scales.
“I belong to nobody,” she hissed in Parseltongue.
“So do I,” Tom answered.
When they met again years and years later, in the woods of a country far away, he but a ghost and she a wanderer, he would call her Nagini, in honour of her forefathers.
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Aztec Pyramid of Chichén Itza, Mexico
1963
The sunset over the frayed silhouette of the jungle looked like a firestorm, but the sky above the pyramid was already clear blue and littered with stars. In the tree tops, hidden birds called for the night in witch-like voices.
The pyramid stood in a great clearing, many shadowy steps until it reached the temple on top, eighty feet high. It was made of pale stone with strange patterns and figures were carved into it; they seemed to come to life in the darkness that crept in from the forest. It had once been the temple of the serpent god Kukulcán, also known as Quetzalcoatl, the Winged Serpent God.
For centuries, no one had made offerings to Kukulcán.
Tom Riddle, thirty-six years old by now, was a man of tall and lean build. He had changed quite a bit since his school years. His skin, usually pale, was tanned from travelling in many southern countries. Power and age made his motions smooth and his stance confident. All this showed in his face: he looked determined and more stable than ever before. But underneath these very human changes, others had taken place. It was in his eyes. They were red and cold as the eyes of an albino snake.
Tom’s hands were also red. Diamond-coloured feathers clung to them. Up in the temple he had danced with a Serpent God and felt its powerful embrace. With the mighty curls of Kukulcán’s body around him, he had listened to the tale of the Feathered Serpent God. He had caressed the smooth scales and learned of the fate of Kukulcán’s people: the Aztec culture that had seen its decline long before and had left behind this lonely shadow of a god.
He had listened patiently to the mournful elaborate speech, his mind occupied with the creature’s beauty and the prize he would soon obtain. In the end he had convinced the serpent that death at his hands was the only possible end of its misery. It was a pity that he had to kill Kukulcán, he thought even as he thrust the ritual dagger into the soft flesh. It was such a graceful being, but it had tied his heart foolishly to the humans who had worshipped it.
Just as the sun died, Tom ripped the diamond heart of the serpent out of its body.
Now holding it in his hands, a clear jewel the size of a human head, Tom left the top of the pyramid, climbing down the many steps. After a few minutes, he stopped and sat down, examining the heavy crystalline heart. Its light was quickly fading from the stone, and Tom could feel the power passing into him. His breath went faster, power rushed through his body in harsh waves. Dizziness followed, he broke into a cold sweat and there was a painful sting in his chest. The jewel slipped out of his hands and he fell back against the stone.
It was sun-warmed and smooth against his cold, damp skin. Then this feeling left him, too. Fear flickered over his contorted features as he lay helpless like a human sacrifice before the temple. The stars and the earth seemed to tear at him. Finally, his own heart stopped beating and he could gradually breathe again.
He smiled weakly, staring at the sky above him. One step closer.
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Albania
1969
In the heart of the night, a man was bleeding to death.
Crooked trees were leaning close together, and in their shadows many shady creatures dwelt. A cauldron close by was empty and the fire underneath it was long extinguished.
Tied to a tree, the man had been bleeding for nine days.
There had been a potion in the cauldron, made out of the blood of serpents, the heart of a serpent and the skin of a serpent. But not just any serpent. A Naga, a Feathered Serpent God and a Basilisk had each made a contribution.
Silvery ropes, woven from fish’s breath and a cat’s footfall, from the roots of a mountain and the spittle of a bird, tied him to the tree and were cutting into his numb skin.
His left eye had been stabbed. His neck. His hands. His right side. His feet. His forehead, between the eyes. His heart.
There were eight wounds from which his human blood had been flowing at first, then dripping and now there was barely a drop of it left anymore.
His uninjured eye was closed. He barely taking in air. His original heart had stopped beating, six years before. His skin was pale as bones. His hair, once black, had greyed in the last few days and fallen from his head in whole streaks until he was bald as a skull. His hands were claws, his nails cutting into his palms in the aftermath of agony.
At the foot of the tree, the ground was black and sticky. The man waited for his last breath to leave. The man was closer to death than he had been in all his life. For many years into the future, he would not come closer to it.
The moment passed in silence, and then a strange process took place. All the wounds closed on their own accord, mended together by invisible threads. The lost blood was replaced by new, inhuman liquids. The man raised his head and sucked in a sharp breath. He opened his eyes. Both were red as dark rubies. He balled his thin fingers into fists, releasing the breath.
The man formerly known as Tom Riddle had been reborn.
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Britain
1969
He had not yet shown himself to anybody but the mirror on the wall. This house had been bought by somebody who had never seen his face but who was firmly under the Imperius Curse.
He could see himself in the mirror.
His cheeks were gaunt and white. His red eyes had slits for pupils now. He didn’t have hair anymore. And his nose looked a little changed, too, flatter and inhuman. He was hideous, and he knew it. But he was pleased. Only now his body expressed his being in its great and terrible entirety.
He touched his lips in awe. They were thin and frosty.
Blood, heart and skin of serpents. A few other, powerful ingredients. He had created the formula himself. The blood of the Naga would make him immune to all potions, poisons and illnesses. The heart of Kukulcán would protect him from all injury by weapons and physical forces. It would also keep him from aging, for Kukulcán could not die of old age. The skin of the basilisk, something he had brought with him from the Chamber of Secrets, would protect him from most spells and curses. It was nearly impervious to magic. He was almost unbreakable now, almost invulnerable. But there were still ways to kill him. A wizard as powerful as himself would be able to kill him with the Killing Curse. There were few as powerful as that. Dumbledore, of course. The thought haunted him, hang over his head like a blade ready to fall.
The closer he was to his aim, the more apparent it became to him that someone, somehow, would try and take it away from him, steal his power, steal his life. They could not possibly bear to have one as perfect as him among them, could they?
Once the world learned of his achievements, of his immortality, they would shiver in fear, and they would make plans to overthrow him...
He stared at himself in the mirror. He could almost see it, the treacherous light of the soul around him. The spark that could still trick him into dying, that would drag him to death. He wished to tear it out of his chest with his hands.
The last of his Transformations would take place in a few days.
Note: The 3 scenes in the middle all have mythological background. The Naga are a part of Hindu myths, they are a serpent people believed to live in palaces under water. Kukulcán or Quetzalcoatl was a god of life and death and the main god of the Aztecs (there are also winged snakes in Potterverse, but according to FB, they live in Asia). The ritual with the tree and the stabbing is similar to what the god Odin does in Nordic myth. The ‘ropes of fish’s breath etc.’ are the ropes that bind the wolf that will swallow the sun at the end of the world, according to Nordic myth.