Gaia's heir

Chapter 12

during the time aspen had been living with the gods getting to know his family and learning how to control his powers Voldemort hadn't been idle in his pursuits, after his body had been destroyed his soul had been forced into a wraith like form as it fled from the clutches of death thanks only to the horcruxes he had used to make a safety net against his own demise. on the surface making horcruxes had looked to be the perfect solution for his plans on gaining immortality but he hadn't planned for the state he would be left in should his body be so completely destroyed.

being stuck as a weak and flimsy wraith had been the most demeaning thing Voldemort had ever done as he was forced to go from animal host to animal host draining the life force from the simple minded creatures until he found a village of muggles in the wilds of Albania to take over.  draining the people in the village of their life energy had been easy as the entire village had been filled with nothing but muggles who believed that a pandemic had come over their village, with so many people dying many of the villagers left hoping to find a better place to live unknowingly taking him with them as they left to other villages.

after years of slowly draining the muggles and animals around him to regain as much power as he could Voldemort was both very pleased and mildly annoyed when a wizard finally managed to find him though the fact that it was a random wizard rather than a death eater looking for their master did raise his ire. he decided to remain pleased with the situation when the weak willed quarrel willingly welcomed the dark lord into his body to use it as a host not realizing just how much strength Voldemort had regained while he was wandering around in the muggle world. 

with quarrel's mind completely subdued in the bodies subconscious it was much easier for Voldemort to go about looking for answers without drawing attention to himself from anyone Dumbledore might have set up to warn the old fool about suspicious activity going on in the darker side of the wizarding world. in his youth Voldemort had prided himself on his intellect and he refused to lie to himself about anything as he believed that only the weak or the blind walked thru life deluding themselves to the reality of their situations, the realization that he had been stronger in his host bodies than he was in his past body was a bitter pill to swallow but once he was in quarrels body and could feel the massive difference between the flow of his magic in this body compared to the half functioning shell his original body had turned into made it undeniable. Voldemort knew that before he could focus on making a new body for himself he needed to find out the reason why his magic and mind had degraded so rapidly towards the end of his reign so that he could prevent his new body from degrading to such an extent. 

searching thru the ancient texts he had managed to hide away in his most secure hideouts library and supplementing them with obscure texts found in the back shops of knockturn ally Voldemort was able to find books that detailed the risks of creating multiple horcruxes that were written by a man who had created five of them himself before he began to notice the effects that it was having on his mind and magic. the ancient wizard was addiment that while theory suggested only a piece of the soul would be taken for the horcrux in reality the soul would be split in half by the ritual, while a magical being could survive just fine with only half of their soul in their body but the more horcruxes you made the smaller your soul became and over time that small sliver of soul would begin to destabilize due to the strain of trying to maintain the connections between a wizards body, mind, and magic.

the first thing to go was usually the thing you would miss the most and while for some like the author that was their ability to control their magic for others it could be their ability to move gracefully, Voldemort easily realized that the thing he had missed most was his intelligence. while using a host body he had realized that the biggest difference for him was his ability to thoroughly plan out his next couple moves with the intelligence and planning that had seen him not only survive in Slytherin house while he was assumed to be a mudblood but had allowed him to take his place at the top of the house's hierarchy. with the aid of this new foresight as he looked back on his past actions Voldemort cringed at how Gryffindor he had become in his later plots and schemes, unwilling to allow himself to fall onto that path again Voldemort quickly set all other plans aside in order to recollect and reabsorb his horcruxes.