Half Blood Royalty

Meeting Tom Riddle

I found myself going up to bed before anyone else that night. Not unusual for me, if I do say so myself, but I did have to sneak away before Draco could stop and question my doing so. Honestly, I just wanted to examine Tom Riddle's diary once more in private... without having a situation much like what happened earlier today in the corridor. If Draco truly believed this was Harry's, he may assume that I swiped it for him to peer at. Nosy little twit, he is. I sat on the edge of my bed and flicked through the blank pages, observing as not a single one of the pages had even a small trace of scarlet ink on it. Quite bizarre, is it? I pulled out a bottle of ink and one of my quills from my bedside cabinet, dipped the quill into the ink, and dropped a small blot onto the first diary page. The ink brightly shone onto the paper for just a second just before, as if it was being sucked into the page, it vanished. I loaded up my quill once more with ink and wrote onto the page, "My name is Melody Snape". My eyes shined with excitement as I watched the words shine momentarily onto the page before they, also, vanished without a trace. Then, at last, something happened.

Oozing back out of the page, in my very own ink, came words that I had never written before. "Hello, Melody Snape. My name is Tom Riddle. How did you come by my diary?"

These words also faded away, but not before I had begun to write back, "Someone tried to flush it down a toilet." I waited for Riddle's reply.

"Lucky that I recorded my memories in some more lasting way than ink... But I always knew that there would be those who would not want this diary read."

"What? Why wouldn't they?" I wrote back.

"I just mean," the diary wrote back, "that this diary holds memories of terrible things. Things which were covered up. Things which happened at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."

"That's where I am now." I wrote back, "I'm at Hogwarts and horrible stuff has been happening. Do you know anything about the Chamber of Secrets?" My heart began to pitter-patter faster and faster in my chest. What if he did? It's not like a diary could actually help the school right about now. Would Dumbledore even take this diary serious if I told him about it; 'hey Dumbledore... you should probably know that I found this diary, and apparently it knows all about the Chamber'.

Tom Riddle's reply came quite quickly as his writing grew untidier, as though he was hurrying to tell all of what he knew, "Of course I know about the Chamber of Secrets. In my day, they told us it was a legend... that it did not exist. But this was a lie. In my fifth year, the Chamber was opened, and the monster attacked several students... finally killing one. I caught the person who'd opened the Chamber, and he was expelled. But the Headmaster, Professor Dippet, ashamed that such a thing had happened at Hogwarts, forbade me to tell the truth. A story was given out that the girl had died in some sort of freak accident. They gave me a nice, shiny, engraved trophy for my trouble and warned me to keep my mouth shut... But I knew it could happen again. The monster lived on, and the one who had the power to release it was not imprisoned."

Wanting to know more, and nearly spilling my ink bottle, I wrote back, "It's happening again now. There have been three attacks, and nobody seems to know who's behind them. Who was it last time?"

"I can show you, if you like." Riddle replied, "You don't have to take my word for it. I can take you inside my memory of the night when I caught him." My quill hovered over the pages before Riddle wrote back, "Let me show you."

"Okay." I wrote back, without hesitation. For some reason, there was something deep inside me telling me to trust him. Trust the diary. Trust Riddle. Almost as if he was a friend.

The pages of the diary started to blow as though they've been caught in a high wind, stopping halfway through the month of June. My eyes scanned over the page as the little square for June 13th seemed to have turned into a miniature television screen. My hands trembled slightly as I raised the book to press my eye against the little window, just as I began to tilt forward; the window widening as I felt my body leave my bed and get thrown headfirst into the page opening. Once my feet hit solid ground, I took notice as the blurred shapes around me suddenly began to come into focus. Immediately, I knew where I was. The circular room. The sleeping portraits. I was standing inside Dumbledore's office- a room I've come to learn quite well. Although, it wasn't Dumbledore who sat behind the desk. A wizened, frail-looking wizard, bald except for just a few wisps of white hair, was reading a letter by candlelight. Never have I've seen this man before.