her dark soul

e p i l o g u e

w h e n a u r o r s
had arrived at Grindelwald's dungeons, there had been only corpses left to greet them. Every single member of his following had been brutally cut down. It had taken hours to remove all the dead from the structure before it had been reoccupied in order to hold Grindelwald himself after Dumbledore had defeated him in their legendary duel.

Nobody had been able to find who had been responsible for the deaths, but some Aurors had reported that they must have been holding a prisoner in the castle's dungeons. One powerful enough to escape the magically designed collar and manacles that they had found in a pool of blood. The reports claim that the first victim had been down with the captive when they escaped, and whoever had escaped had worked their way up level by level in the keep. Although they had searched for the perpetrator, they hadn't put much effort into the hunt. From the amount of blood at the sight, it was believed that whoever had killed everyone must be dead.

In the year that passed afterward, all of the records from that night had gone missing. When asked about them, nobody, even the aurors who had been at the scene, could remember what the reports had contained.

Dumbledore had not cared about what had happened after his duel with Grindelwald, for the fight had gained him unimaginable glory, and he was praised for being the greatest wizard ever to live. He was offered the role of Minister of Magic multiple times, but he turned it down. Instead, he humbled himself to become the next Hogwarts Headmaster.

It was close to twenty years later that Tom Riddle returned to the school, asking again for a teaching position, which Dumbledore had turned him down. It had been Dumbledore's knowledge of Tom's growing darkness that had made him concerned about giving Tom the job, but it had been his erratic behavior that had been his excuse to deny him.

Dumbledore would never tell another soul what he had witnessed in his office that day, not even Harry Potter. He had first assumed that Tom Riddle had gone mad with power. He had seen Grindlewald act similarly during his rise to power, talking to himself and looking over his shoulder as if someone was there that Dumbledore could not see. But Tom had become irrationally cold and closed off when the Headmaster asked him about Ms. Maeve, assuming that they were still living together or at least stayed in contact.

The former professor hadn't known why he had asked about the girl, for he had been more concerned for her influence than Riddles, but he hadn't heard anything about her since she had graduated. Something told him that only Tom Riddle would know what had become of her. When Dumbledore had asked Tom about her whereabouts, he had changed from cold to irrationally angry. His face when he had said they had parted ways long ago had been nothing short of frightening.

Tom Riddle had left shortly after, and Dumbledore had watched as the boy, now grown, had whispered harshly and repeatedly to himself. That Tom had clutched his hand to his chest as if it bothered him. Dumbledore only caught the slight hiss of Evelyn's name leave Tom's lips before he left the Headmaster's quarters.

When Tom returned as Lord Voldemort and started the first Wizarding War, his followers had talked about the way he spoke to himself, or to the painting of a woman that none of them could ever see properly, when he was alone. About the ring band that had melded with his finger. It had grown over with red, puffy scar tissue. The amethyst stone in it always seemed to shine.

Avery, who had returned to Tom's service, remembered the girl who wore a matching ring. But nobody knew where Evelyn Maeve had gone. Avery had asked around after school, but all traces of her had simply vanished. It was as if she had been a false memory that he couldn't shake. He thought once that the painting in Tom's room had vaguely looked like his memory of her. When he had asked his master about it, he had suddenly forgotten all traces of the girl. Only later did he beg his wife to name their daughter Evelyn. She had agreed, for her family descended from the great Maeve line. And though Avery's wife was no longer a Maeve in name, she remembered the last heir that had lived in the family's stories as more of a ghost than a girl. Neither of them knew that they had been thinking about the same person.

When Tom Riddle had finally been defeated in the battle of Hogwarts, Harry Potter would never forget the last moments of the evil wizard's life, how he had looked relieved in a way to be finally greeted with death. How he had reached out and called a woman's name, it had sounded so soft in his wicked mouth. Harry wondered if even Voldemort had an angel waiting for him. He had thought it unfair.