the seven virtues [tom riddle]

chapter eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Nicholas Avery was not a noble man, far from it. He had grown up different from most aristocrat heirs, diagnosed in his early years with relentless anger management problems and a flimsy tendency to psychopathy.

That made him eccentric amongst the well-educated bourgeoise, always one step away from imploding and absolutely annihilating any witch or wizard in sight. There had been many instances where the boy had reached his culmination of madness, seconds away from slitting the throat of anyone who dared send him a disagreeable flash.

His parents were more than vaguely dissatisfied with their son, unsure how to restrain his sheer mania and outlandish behavior. It had started with small animals at first—the boy would bring corpses of road-kills in their backyard, play with them as if they were toys that he had discovered, frightening any children that might have otherwise befriended him.

Few dared approach him, out of fear of the wizard's atomic fury, which commonly manifested in erroneous recreations of ghastly trials and tasteless morbid humor. He had learned how to throw knives at the age of nine, had mastered the bow and arrow when he was ten, and had even dabbled with torture during his first years at Hogwarts.

Nicholas Avery was a volatile man that hid behind the myth of a supremely charming bachelor. He was the murmur of duskiness, a tuneful incantation of deceit and tumult, the raven's sonata of despair—an assassin hidden in plain sight.

He had met few people that shared his need for blood in his early years—Maxwell Nott had been the first, followed by a toothy Icarus Lestrange and a pig-tailed Elladora Selwyn. The four of them had started an unusual alliance two years before Hogwarts, and although there had been a fair share of bickering and momentary hatred amongst the years (especially involving the cunning poisoner), Avery considered them to be the family he had chosen. Said tight-knight group had only extended once they had attended their magic school, and with each year, it grew into a reasonably odd entanglement.

So, when Rosier barged into the Manor, eyes wide and hands trembling tensely, Nicholas had simply known that something had happened.

"Who is it?" he urged impatiently, pushing himself out of the comfortable chair he had taken by the fire. He wielded a knife in his hands, a token he rarely missed, and strolled to the other Slytherin with critical steps. "Who is hurt?"