Hogwarts, a History: Revision I

[Tom Marvolo Riddle]

Burning motes of pixels flowed past me. Each step I took, brought me to deeper into the bowls of Hogwarts and further from the deepest parts of the concourse. The flickered from my wan that I kept bound in my hands. My focus in its one proper place as the world stretched around me. Unreality twisted into my reality. Laws of physics gave way to laws of magic. Each and every particle of dust, every fleck of pollen that had reached this far in the castle was mine. Every soul born here was bound my strength.

Echos of the stone underneath my feet gave way to stairs as a curtain of energy parted before me.

The wards didn’t even question my presence, the various defensive charms didn’t recognize me as anything but the Master. Because how could I be anything other than that? This place was an extension of my very being. It brought low many enemies, but it was my allies that I truly found value in here. Each on a perfectly honed tool. Might and Magic. They bowed to me in my senses like a old expectant whore awaiting the pain and ecstasy of my careful ministrations.

It had been this way for years. Simply was.

A cruel smile played on my lips as a siren song of power rang in my soul. Its taste that was as as intoxicating as the very act of drawing upon True Magic itself. Dark powers waiting like a begging and loyal serpent.

I took a deep breath, not of the power though, but the musk of dust, of books, of knowledge, and of potential.

Code dissolved in my wake completely. I could feel the fractals coalesce into sold matter. In this world after all, will is everything. There were limits though. Power was to expensive. Twist the bosom of reality too hard and it would slap me down like an overly pushy husband, too drunk to keep his balance. The dataverse however… there were certain things only possible there. A single spell could rewrite existence and there I had gained access to a wealth material and knowledge.

It was the under layer, the foundation, the beginning and end of the Omniverse. There was never a question that I would be a Slytherin, but on occasion, places like that verse brought out the eagle in me.

I took a deep breath, it tasted of contentment, of home.

A home that was mine, a place that was- happy?

The world tilted under me as I missed a step, or rather a trick step. I fought keep my balance and caught myself on the next stair up.

What?

I looked down at my plainly missing limb, submerged in stone as if it were nothing but air. Air given gray speckled form. The impossibility of it. The mundanity of it. I had removed those steps before they even had begun. They were never apart of my Hogwarts or the previous one.

My fingers tightened around thirteen and half inches of yew, something sickening sparked in the back of my pages.

Happiness wasn’t unfamiliar to me. Joy and passion were close friends… but like all human emotions I had imbibed, twisted and unmade, they came in flavors. This flavor however was wrong. It was innocent and disoriented. No! Not innocent. Imbecile. Moronic. Defective.

“Weak,” I hissed

It was disgusting in how familiar it was with these walls, how connected they were with it. This flavor did not belong. Diseased. Sickly sweet sweat of a dying child who had partaken to much sugar. Only it was ephemeral. They were of me, but it was not mine. It was not a facade, rather a very real, very authentic emotion. One I knew I would never let myself feel. It was a debasement. The mask had become the face, and the face had tainted the soul.

Hogwarts had been corrupted in a way most repulsive.

Stone turned to liquid held only in place by my will the halls, classrooms and everything else in between gave way to my demands. Here my will was law and nothing stood in my way. Paints fled the portraits, and House Elves who cleaned near invisibly disapparated before a torrent of rage unraveled their cores. I could feel it all. My home was my own and it fled.

They knew that its true master was calling.

What would have taken minutes, too mere moments as geometry reasserted itself in a quavering mess. Only a final door stood between me and my quarry. This one did not heed me like the others. Behind it there were muffle sounds of pleasure, and a shifting hollow wind.

I bore into it with my mind and reached into that which had born it into existence and twisted.

“Open!” I hissed at the door. A low keening was the only prelude to the barrier complying in haste to implode.

Molten metal and wooded ash filled the room like a fog would a valley. A fog carried by  a gale that three the room’s two occupants backwards in a loosely bound tumble of clothes, flesh, a book, tartan and a eerie silver mist.

The silver form caught my eye first. A look of fear passed through the ghost whole, churning its entire body an almost improbably white steel over the pimply mop of a form that was the girl Myrtle Warren.

“Leave,” I snarled. The unspoken threat upon my voice to her eternal existence spurned the spectre into motion. In one frightened fluid motion she bolted through the left hand wall, the only sign of her passage was a light splat of something biological on the floor. The sound was pointed in how it reinforced what may have been the regular happenings of my office.

I traced the room for more change. One large tartan robe, some sort of oblong potioneering device with a cigar attached to it, some herb with a five pronged leaf. Hemp related potentially. Incense. A portrait of a busty woman was partially disrobe and stirring her fingers in places I rather not imagine. At the center of it all was my face, or rather the face of the Caretaker. His pants were around his waist and wand on the ground, vibrating with blue and pink emanations.

Ah.

I raised an eyebrow at the construct, “Coitus, it seems was an ever the evolving mess while I was gone. Not surprising but…” I let the words play on my tongue a bit before giving it some bite, “I never knew that mudblood of a Warren girl was such a slag.”

“Take. That. Back!” It growled out.

I inclined my head, curiosity tugged at my better judgment, “Why?”

“She forgave me! Us!”

I blinked twice as his meaning settled in. “Oh, that’s-” I couldn’t help it, I laughed. A uproariously potent cackle heaved itself through the body and my very pages shudder in humor. Only a fragment of a warning alerted me a sudden danger. Weak human emotion.

A flicker emotions settled over the replica before me, some were correct others were decidedly not. One of them specifically burned in the back of my head that very much did not belong. Rage on behalf of another. Empathy beyond logic, beyond reason. A little was useful, a lot was dangerous. I felt a frown fall upon me, the realization just how extensive that damage was.

The freak had indeed been polluted- it twitched forward, soft coruscates of hot and cold light gave way to something decidedly darker. Emotion thrummed through the room and into my pages. It was the warning I had neither expected nor would have encouraged.

I jerked my arm forward and fell into a lazy dueling stance. My entire body thrummed with a force as  just in time, I caught a blood red curse on the tip of my wand. The ball hovered there almost innocently even as it washed the entire room in deeply enthralling light.

“A barb of Blood Churning?” It was very dark magic powered best by indignation. A painful way to die from what I understood. But what would that mean for me? My blood was ink, my flesh, parchment. It was no threat, or a poor one at most. “…that’s better,” I drawled sardonically.

“But… let me show you how its done,” With that I flicked the captured spell back into nothingness and drew upon my own energies. The reservoir of the entire school pooled into me and into my wand. My mind and words shaped it into wall of pure law, “CRUCIO!”

The invocation tore at my throat, but my veins roared in my ears with power. Each sweet note of the unforgivable curse rang with sultry iridescent maroon bolts of lightning. Each one racing across the creature’s body as its screams burned into higher and higher octaves before a silent horror replaced it. A horror that its lungs could not hope to express. The rest of its body tried until even the twitching ended.

The eyes were nearly vacant when I ended the spell. But as soon as I did its breathing resumed and one of its deadend arms started towards the shattered remains of a wand jerkily. It didn’t matter, that shaft of yew had been destroyed in its grip near the beginning of my first spell.

“W-why?” It sputtered out ink.

I hummed theatrically a bit, tapping my wand to my chin, “Ah. Why, you ask?” Annoyance bubbled in me, “Why, you ask! Here let me answer a question with a question. That’s how these things usually ago between Master and Subordinate… right?” I pointed my wand at him and hissed, “What were your orders, spawn?”

It stuttered, its moronic brain tumbling for a response before it fell upon its core original orders. I could see it in its eyes as I bored into his brain. Finally it managed to twist its mouth in a caricature of calm and subservience, images flashing in my mind as it did, “To maintain this School, your reputation, and projects as if you have never left.”

I didn’t break my gaze. My voice only got lower, the very potency of my magic tinging it with venom, “Did you?”

“Yes.”

It lies, its knowingly lied to me! How dare it!

Beautiful light of deepest crimson struck it once more. “Tell the truth! Did you follow my orders?!”

Even amongst the renewed screams I could make out a whimper of denial. That it had not. That it had failed this school, itself and most importantly me.

The grin that crossed my face was anything but of satisfaction.

“Thats a start,” I snarled, releasing the spell. Two steps later I was nose to nose with its quivering flesh. I brought wand to its temple, “Legilimens!”

★

It never stopped screaming in its digusting thrashing body during the entire trial.

I turned my eye from its jittering, ink soaked form. I had seen everything it had done these past two years. Intercourse notwithstanding, it had colluded with the usurper like a harlot to a sailor. Bit jangling which every way. It was not worth the magic that I had gifted it, let alone its existence, nor my face.

The thing had completely destroyed whatever little respect that had remained in me for it. Everything it done was a direct contradiction of what I had intended.

Even now, I could see where I had made my mistake in its creation. I had left it too mutable to its environment. Expected given that it had been born form my earliest workings in the Dataverse’s physical realm. Next, if there was to be a new one, I would have to anchor it more in my reality. Bound in blood and home like a House Elf perhaps?

I gave it a second glance. It was a possibility. Such that it was, it could not be allowed to remain.

“W-w-wha-t is t-t-to b’co-me of m-m-”

“What’s to become of you?” I muttered.

It shuddered.

I twisted my wand in my fingers, rotating it back and forth along its circumference several times before finally, speaking, “You are unlucky. You have nothing of the usurper I can use. Nothing of his supposed unmaking. If it happened… but no you don’t. Nothing at all. That is your folly,”

That was another thing. This older Harry Potter had not been seen in some time. That I had not found reports of it in the Dataverse, at all, meant its time among the primes had been brief. At least if there had been record  of the False one removing the Usurper from existence then I’d have more to go on and able to continue my goals… instead I had a hoodlum wearing my face, tupping a mudblood ghost that had been used to make my very horcrux. It was all very incestious.

“Had you something useful I would have made this short and painless. You are not worthy to be my copy.”

With a flick of wand I summoned ten thousand strands of crimson fire and shaped it into a rapier. Runic symbols blazed along the blade’s length and brought the smell of brimstone and the taste of hunger to the room. The glow casting the pitiful welp’s body in a maroon relief.

“P’p-pl-ease-n-!”

With a pivot and a swipe, I did not allow it to taint my presence any further. The blade hissed through like a thousand snakes. Where it touched nothing remained except a howling cry that deafened any pain wrought scream prior.

All at once it was silent, the body began to crumble and only an ash eaten book remained. Scored in half.

“Tilly!” I demanded of the air.

A pop drew my attention, but it was the slight screech and a whimper, that allowed to me find the House Elf in question. Young, floppy ears, saucer like green eyes. She was and completely in a restrained panic.

“Yes M-Masters of Riddles?” It squeaked.

I pursed my lips and stared down at the tiny teenage servant, “Clean up this mess and have the elves return my quarters to their state from two years prior.”

“Y-yes Master!”

I turned from my room and ignored the hurried popping that followed a frightened chatter that formed as soon as I was out of sight. There was to much to do and my home was far from the perfection it had been. At least the resident elf population knew well enough of how to follow orders.

For now though it was time to get back to work.