My Dark Lord

Chapter Thirteen: False Prophet

Wool's Orphanage -- Summer

The stench of boiled cabbage clung to the walls like rot.

They hadn't cleaned the basement since winter. The stone walls still leaked damp, and the single barred window let in only enough light to remind you how grey the sky above London could be.

It didn't matter.

Tom had long since stopped noticing the smell.

The taste of dust and mold and silence was a constant here-- his oldest companion. The other children avoided the basement. They said it was haunted. That things moved in the dark when you weren't looking.

They weren't wrong.

He made sure of that.

He had found it in a footnote.

A thin, crumbling genealogy book left discarded in a donation crate in Flourish and Blotts, buried under copies of The Wizard's Guide to Industry and several worn editions of theTales of Beedle the Bard.

It had listed the Gaunts-- a pure-blood wizarding family infamous for inbreeding, instability, and violent paranoia. Obsessed with blood purity. Descendants of Salazar Slytherin himself.

The line had dwindled. Mostly disappeared. But one name leapt from the fragile page like a curse.

Merope Gaunt.

Dead. Poor. Vanished in London.

Died giving birth at a Muggle orphanage--

Wool's Orphanage.

Tom had stared at the name for an hour, tracing the scrawl with shaking fingers.

It fit. The dates. The place. The silence surrounding his parentage. The strange powers. The Parseltongue.

He wasn't a mistake.

He was legacy.

The orphanage wasn't a punishment. It was a cover. A wound in history waiting to be corrected.

He was Slytherin's heir.

And they would all pay for forgetting him.

By the time he returned to Hogwarts in September, he had filled the margins of every page in his journal with notes. Snakes. Names. Runes. Sketches of rings he'd only seen in dreams.

The others returned to school with stories of holidays, of sunny France and wizarding carnivals and family hearths.

Tom returned with only one goal:

To awaken what slept beneath his name.

The Gaunts were broken. He would make the name something feared again. No one remembered Merope. No one dared speak of Marvolo.

But one day, they would whisper Tom Riddle the way they once whispered Salazar.

He spent his evenings in the library now, cloaked in shadows. The Restricted Section called to him like a half-buried altar.

He combed through scrolls, decoding half-erased passages on Hogwarts' Founders. There were stories of secret rooms, of serpents carved into stone, of a "purge" that had been covered up in the 13th century.

The other Founders had tried to rewrite the school's history.

But the truth was always buried in the bones.

Salazar had left a gift.

A secret.

A weapon.

And Tom was going to find it.