I could smell them before I saw them.
Their fear seeped through the manor like oil—thick, rancid, impossible to wash. A congregation of jackals in stolen finery, assembled to witness the footfall of their sun. The old hall itself seemed to bow beneath them; mortar complained, ancestral bones shifted, as if the house recognized the ritual about to begin.
I apparated into the center of that sea of trembling bodies. My robes arrived with the sound of a storm breaking—cloth snapping, shadow spilling. Every head dipped, every knee hit cold stone. The scrape of boots was a hymn; the hush that followed, an offering. They did not dare look up. They did not need to. I knew their hearts by their silence.
I walked the length of the chamber to the throne of black oak and iron I had carved out of fear and history. When I sat, the movement itself was a sentence. I let the quiet grow heavy until it hurt.
"Rise," I said.
They rose with the obedience of animals that know their master's voice. Their faces were masked—pale, blank, bone-crafted grins that had become the emblem of dread across the country. It was a relief to them to be behind masks; confession could be stolen from an open face, but terror hidden under porcelain was safer.
"Report," I said, and the word snapped like a lash.
Mulciber answered first, a hound eager for praise. He painted pictures of burning hamlets and charred thresholds, his voice trembling with the kind of zeal that confuses brutality for faith. "The blood traitors in Devon, my Lord," he announced. "Purged. Their houses are ash. No survivors."
I let the image settle. "And the Aurors?"
"Slain," he added, as if the word were a medal.
Efficient. I nodded once, deliberately. The murmurs in my head—ancient, hungry—wanted more: Weak. Sloppy. Sacrifice less mercy. Spill more blood. Drown them all. I folded them back, keeping the madness as an instrument rather than a master.
The litany continued. Yaxley detailed tortures that had slipped into sadism, and Avery stumbled through excuses about a botched ambush. I bored him with the flatness of a man whose patience was a currency already spent. He attempted to explain; I cut him off with a flick of my wand and the Cruciatus took his protest into screams. His pain sounded like prayer—coerced, filthy, effective.
"Disappoint me again," I told him, voice colder than the stone, "and pain will be the last kindness you receive."
He choked. I let him writhe until the show tired me. Then I ceased it, as if mercy were mine to grant or withhold on a whim.
Nott's nervous mouth produced a weak, ill-timed excuse about intelligence lost to incompetence. Cowardice—so familiar, so boring—grated like sand in a wound. I raised my wand without a word.
"Avada Kedavra."
Green light, clean as a blade. Nott folded; his body hit the floor with the mundane finality of failed paper. Silence reasserted itself, thick and more valuable than any coin. The room inhaled as one; for a breath they were all children again, waiting for the rod.
I let my fingers drum the arm of my throne, watching the fear sharpen in the faces around me—delicious and bitter in equal measure. Their obedience was not love. It was terror, and terror is a stronger bond.
My gaze skimmed across those I had bent to my will, the loyal and the useful, the frightened and the fanatic, until it rested on the center of all consequence. The word left me like a blade thrown into still water.
"The prophecy," I said. It hung in the air between us—alive, cold, inevitable. "Tell me, has a child been born?"
Lucius stepped forward with the ceremony I had taught him—bow precise, every movement measured for effect. "My Lord," he intoned, voice silk over steel. "On July 30th, the Longbottoms had a son named Neville Longbottom. The next day, the Potters had a son as well and I believe that the Potter brat is who the prophecy is talking about."
At Lily's name the air seemed to thicken. A muscle in Snape's shoulder jumped, a secreted ripple of feeling quickly staunched into his usual lacquer of control. I noted it and kept it, a small ledger entry against a future day. The other voices—my own darker instincts, the whispers of things older than us—threaded through my head. Mark them. Burn them. Take their children and drown the world in grief.
"Two children," I said, tasting the syllables. "Both born as the seventh month dies, now who should I select? If I am wrong, I would hate to bring forth my own downfall."
The calculus of fate sat on the table between us. Choose wrong and catastrophe; delay and the world might elude our grasp. Either could be ruined.
"Harry Potter," I decided, the name striking like lightning and leaving me colder for its passage. It was not a decision made from mercy or malice but from calculation; he was the fulcrum around which prophecy might tip. "He will be the one that I will go after. I will deal with the little brat myself."
Bellatrix shuddered with anticipation, a creature electrified by promise. She smiled as if the world had become a private theater in which only she was allowed to perform carnage. "My Lord," she breathed, voice raw and reverent. Her devotion had always been an ache on the edge of fanaticism—beautiful, dangerous, entirely hers. "What of the Longbottoms?"
I allowed the shadow of a smile to pass across my face—an invitation to cruelty. "You, Bella, will ensure their line ends. Spare no form of subtlety; terror will do what open death cannot."
She gave a laugh that was more a war-psalm than anything human. She dropped to her knees like a dog begging a bone and looked at me as if I were both altar and god. "It will be my honor," she whispered, eyes alight with a frightening pureness.
Then Pettigrew spoke.
The sound of his voice in that chamber was small, as if it belonged to someone trying not to be heard by the rats nested in the walls. Peter—thin-lipped, twitching, forever a scent of fear—had the nerve to intrude upon a gathering of wolves. He flinched; I was delighted in the tremor. His presence had always been a stone in my shoe—annoying, yet oddly indispensable. Cowardice, after all, has its uses.
"My Lord…" he began. The syllables stuck in his throat.
I let him squirm a little longer. Threat is clearest when it is slow. "What is it, Pettigrew?" The question was a blade sheathed in silk.
He swallowed visibly. "I… I know where they are. The Potters. They entrusted me as their Secret Keeper. They hide in Godric's Hollow."
The chamber seemed to inhale at once. The voices inside me banged their drums—go, strike, end it. I could almost see the boy, small and pale, sleep-breathing in a cottage whose windows would soon be smoke.
"You did well, Pettigrew," I said, and my tone was an obsidian calm. "On Hallowe'en you shall take me there to kill the boy."
Relief nearly knocked the breath from his body. "My Lord—why wait until Hallowe'en?" The question was a mistake born of panic and ignorance.
The wand was in my hand before I felt the movement. It rose to his throat with the languid inevitability of death itself. Magic thrummed, thick and hungry, ready to snap. "DO NOT QUESTION ME, RAT," I said, and the shout that buckled from me was not wholly mine—ancient fury and present rancor braided together. My voice broke on a note too high to be tamed, and for a moment the chamber saw the monster I had become.
Pettigrew crumpled, the last of his bravado collapsing into pure animal fear. He clawed at the ground, voice like a squeal. "Y-yes, my Lord! Y-yes!"
The hall exhaled. The flattery of silence returned; the Death Eaters edged closer like moths to a lantern. They wanted violence because violence was easy and immediate; they wanted to taste the boy's blood and be done with it. They did not see, or perhaps they did and did not care, that cruelty without calculation is only noise.
I let them be hungry. Hunger makes men stupid.
I could feel the old thirst — not for blood alone but for a whole world rearranged, for a seat at the center of that rearrangement. Power has a weight. I had learned to measure it by the tremor in a man's hand when you name his child. I had learned to taste it in the silence that follows a command. The prophecy was a hinge; on one side, a door to ruin, on the other, the place where I would finally secure what had been torn from me.
Snape watched me, the question in his dark eyes a blade folded in silk. His loyalty is a complicated thing; there are debts no potion can brew away. I felt, for a fraction of a breath, the map of his esteem — a narrow alley where my face sometimes softened, where something like gratitude hid beneath the layers. I dismissed it. Softness is a betrayal.
Preparations were made in the margins: charms to cloud sight, whispers sent to crooked officials, a list of names to be erased. Hallowe'en was not a whim to me but a chess move, set up with exacting cruelty. Bellatrix would take the Longbottoms — she would make fear an artform — while I struck at the trunk of the prophecy itself.
As the murmurs rose and plans sharpened, I turned my face to the tapestry-strewn darkness beyond the torchlight. Gods and prophecies and the thin human lives tied to them — all of it bent toward one end. I felt my hands on the world as if I could squeeze and shape it into something that would never, ever hurt me again.
Pettigrew's whimpering faded. The hall filled with the dry rustle of cloaks and resolve. In the hush, I spoke only one thing, for the words were prayer and edict both.
"Mark Hallowe'en," I said. "And get ready."
I lowered the wand slowly, forcing my breath steady. The voices clawed for control, laughing at me, through me. I felt my composure slip, then snap back into place like a mask.
"Leave me," I commanded.
The meeting dissolved. They fled, one by one, vanishing with sharp cracks of apparition until only silence remained.
I sat frozen, my hand trembling where it gripped the armrest. Why—why did I lose myself so easily now? Each outburst felt less like mine and more like his. Voldemort. The name I chose, the mantle I created—yet it was not wholly me. A second self, twisted and ravenous, tearing at my mind.
I left the hall and returned to my chambers. There, upon the bed, lay Nagini.
She stirred as I entered, lifting her great head. Her scales gleamed faintly in the candlelight, her eyes unblinking, steady.
"Hello, my Lord," she hissed, voice curling in my mind.
"Old friend," I answered in Parseltongue. The language soothed me, a balm upon the raw edges of thought. I sank onto the bed beside her, pressing a hand against her cool, sinuous form.
She studied me with unsettling intelligence. You roared tonight. The halls shivered with your rage.
"I am losing control," I admitted. The words burned, but they were true. "The voice is louder than ever. It twists my thoughts, drives me to madness."
Nagini's coils shifted, pressing against me with something like comfort. You have split your soul too far. The pieces cry to be whole. Each fragment is a wound. If you keep tearing, there will be nothing left to command.
I closed my eyes, stroking her scales. "And yet, I cannot stop. Power demands sacrifice."
But not all sacrifice is survivable, she said. Be careful, Tom.
At her use of my true name, something fragile stirred within me. I had not been Tom in so long. To the world, I was only Voldemort now, the Dark Lord, the terror. But to her… I was still something else.
"I promised you," I murmured, "I would find a way to break your curse. To free you from this shell. That promise I keep, no matter what becomes of me."
She dipped her head, her voice softer. Then guard your soul more wisely. Hide what you have made. Or they will be your undoing.
She was right, I can not afford to have my horcruxes discovered and destroyed.
I summoned my most trusted—or least incompetent. Lucius, Bellatrix, and young Regulus Black arrived at my call, each bowing deeply.
"You will safeguard my treasures," I said, my voice sharp. "Helga Hufflepuff's cup, Bellatrix—you will hide it in your vault at Gringotts. The diary, Lucius, you will guard until I need it. Regulus—" I paused, watching the young man's eyes flicker with something almost defiant. "—you will keep Salazar's locket. Hide it where no one will find it."
They bowed, though I caught the flicker of doubt in Regulus's gaze as he took the locket. A dangerous spark. One to be snuffed out, if it grew.
"As for Ravenclaw's diadem, it will rest within Hogwarts, where no eye will think to seek it. The ring of my grandfather I shall place within the Gaunt hovel, to honor the filth from which I rose."
They obeyed. They always obey. Yet I saw the cracks, the faltering devotion. Only Nagini remained constant. Only she saw me—not the Dark Lord, not the legend, not the monster. Only Tom.
When they were gone, I sank back beside her, pressing my forehead against her scales.
"Soon," I whispered. "Soon it ends. Either I consume the voice, or it consumes me."