The Serpent that Devours Us

Chapter 6

“You split your soul,” Harry repeated, but no matter that he heard the words again, they still made no sense to him. “Why would you even think of doing that?”

“Immortality,” Tom said in the kind of tone that suggested he was tired of even thinking about the subject, let alone talking about it. But he soldiered on. “All throughout my Hogwarts years I asked Dumbledore and Dippet to let me stay at Hogwarts during the summer. They always refused, even when the war broke out and the Blitz hit London. I had to spend months during the summer hoping the orphanage wouldn’t take a direct hit while around us street after street, building after building was destroyed by muggle bombs dropping from the sky.”

Harry listened quietly, wondering why no one had thought to offer those magical kids living in London during the Blitz a place to stay outside of the city. He knew from his history lessons at the muggle primary school he and Hyacinth had attended that a lot of muggle children were evacuated from London to the countryside to stay with complete strangers for their own safety.

“I was genuinely terrified I wouldn’t see my next school year,” Tom continued. “So when I came across a method for immortality in the restricted section, it seemed like a perfect solution to my problems.” Tom fell quiet for a moment, eyes squeezed shut. “I was so terrified to die, so desperate to stay alive that I never wondered about the real consequences of such a method. As I know now, all rituals that promise powers of that magnitude come at a terrible price.”

“What was the price?” Harry asked, fascinated yet horrified by the idea of achieving immortality by literally ripping your essence apart.

“Insanity,” Tom whispered, eyes still shut as though admitting these things physically pained him. “The price was slowly becoming insane without even realizing it.”

Harry wrung his hands, his head down. That certainly explained a few things, didn’t it? Why Tom choose to do some of the things he did.

“But there was another price to pay,” Tom went on, finally opening his eyes and giving Harry a resigned look. “The only way to split your soul is to commit murder.”

Inhaling a sharp breath, Harry sat back a little and stared at Tom, meeting his yellow gaze head on. There it was. The reason Tom decided to kill someone, a fellow student if Harry guessed correctly.

“I wasn’t sure I could do it,” Tom said, coiling his body tighter around himself. “At this point I was a child that had grown up in a harsh environment, that had to fight for every scrap of anything he’d ever gotten, that gave as good as he got, but I wasn’t a killer. Still, I was desperate and terrified. I got lucky when I found the Chamber of Secrets.”

Harry, who had been staring at the floor, snapped his head up. “The what now?”

“The Chamber of Secrets,” Tom said slowly with an amused glint in his eyes. “Salazar Slytherin himself built it when they constructed Hogwarts. It requires parseltongue to enter it.”

Astonished there were still parts of Hogwarts he hadn’t known about, Harry slowly closed his mouth which had dropped open. He’d used his father’s Marauder’s Map diligently throughout his Hogwarts years and he was certain he’d explored every last inch of the castle. Apparently, though, he’d missed a spot.

“Slytherin left a basilisk inside the chamber and I used her to take out my anger and resentment on the student population during my fifth year. I didn’t mean for her to kill anyone, just petrify a few muggleborn students who got to go home to safe places in the muggle world. But there was a student hiding in the bathroom when the basilisk left the tunnel to her lair and before I could stop her she’d killed the girl.”