Still, they needed washing regularly. The two round creatures loved rolling around and inevitably came back coated in dirt.
Midway through, the unicorn appeared and inserted itself into proceedings. Tom counted his blessings that Usagi stayed aloft. He was already using enough hands.
Magic would have made it easy. The animals wouldn't allow it. They had been thoroughly spoiled and required actual human contact, or they sulked.
He dried his hands when Dumbledore's message arrived, finished Pixie with a warning that neither of them was to roll in anything before nightfall, tucked both pandas into the small world, and made his way to the headmaster's office.
"Mr. Riddle, it's been a while. You look even more remarkable than I remembered."
Vinda had a particular gift for making a compliment land without sounding rehearsed. Tom genuinely appreciated it. She was efficient, tactful, and didn't argue with him incessantly the way a certain old Dark wizard did.
"This is a gift from Mr. Grindelwald. He hopes you'll enjoy it."
She began unpacking.
Dumbledore's expression, initially composed, began to shift somewhere around the fourth item.
Oil paintings. Statues. Carved wands. Jewelry, clockwork pieces, decorative brooches.
Everything from a different category, nothing below extraordinary, and by Dumbledore's assessment, not a single piece that wouldn't command serious attention at auction.
This was a greeting gift?
If Grindelwald had sent all of this to him, Dumbledore might have understood it as a power statement. Sent to Tom, he turned it over in his mind for a while before settling on the most charitable explanation available: the man still hadn't given up on recruiting him and was investing accordingly.
A full quarter of an hour later, the gift presentation concluded. Tom collected everything with undisguised satisfaction and handed over the stockpile of goods he'd prepared in exchange. Vinda placed several new orders, declined to linger, and left Hogwarts.
Inside Tom's mind, the eighth palace blazed with light.
Eight months of work. Five million Galleons accumulated. Trial complete, arriving just over a month past his self-imposed deadline.
Grindelwald deserved most of the credit, having performed the role of a catastrophic threat with perfect consistency and driven the various Ministries into a purchasing panic that had been, from Tom's perspective, beautiful to watch.
He was already mentally heading back to claim his reward when Dumbledore, with poor timing, kept him back.
"Tom. What is your honest impression of Grindelwald?"
Tom thought about it. "A powerful wizard, difficult to deal with, but probably decent company. Not the raving Dark Lord type."
Dumbledore nodded slowly. The assessment was fair, neither romanticized nor dismissive.
"But there's something you haven't mentioned." He chose his next words carefully. "I've never denied that Grindelwald could be an enjoyable presence. Once, he and I... well. That was different. What concerns me is his ideology. You grew up in the Muggle world. Surely you don't want to see those two worlds go to war."
Tom stared at him.
The entire framing of that question, Professor, have you been taking classes somewhere?
He understood what Dumbledore was actually worried about: that the gifts, the contact, the ongoing relationship, were slowly pulling Tom toward Grindelwald's orbit. A reasonable concern under normal circumstances.
Unfortunately for Dumbledore, Grindelwald was already Tom's, in all the ways that actually counted.
"Professor." Tom placed a hand over his heart. "I swear to you: I will never join Grindelwald, and I will never follow his orders. A man of genuine ambition doesn't spend his career working under someone else."
Dumbledore's expression warmed into relief.
True enough. Tom's pride alone would have prevented it. Anyone who'd watched Tom face down Voldemort could see he wasn't built for subordination.
Satisfied, Dumbledore let him go.
The afternoon's final lesson was Hagrid's, which Tom skipped without ceremony, sending a brief message and heading directly into the small world. He opened the learning space, gathered everyone present, and reached toward the palace with his mind.
Golden light pooled before him. He reached into it and withdrew first a small seed, compact and smooth, and then a single apple, radiant and impossibly round, its surface catching the light the way precious metal does. The glow faded.
"Is that Hera's golden apple?"
Andros leaned forward, studying it. In the mythological tradition he'd grown up hearing, he had practically been nursed by Hera, though in practice the actual ancient Greek world had produced no witches of that caliber. Zeus was a fictional deity. Only the human heroes had real-world counterparts you could trace.
The apple was immediately pleasant to look at. No seams, no blemishes, every curve sitting at the exact proportion that an apple ought to have. It looked like the Platonic idea of an apple, the shape all other apples were imperfect approximations of.
Beyond that, none of the group could identify anything obviously unusual about it. Ravenclaw was the exception.
"You don't see it?" She turned it slowly. "The apple is perfectly unified. Every surface at its optimal ratio. It's as though this is simply what an apple is supposed to be."
Tom nodded. "That's... accurate. I'll be honest, I'm almost reluctant to eat it."
Ariana's tongue appeared briefly at the corner of her mouth. "Tom. It's making me hungry just looking at it. You should really just eat it."
"I've got the seed," Tom said, smiling. "Once the first harvest comes in, I'll save you one. Promise."
"Yes please!"
Tom held the apple and let the hesitation run its course.
He was, at his core, a selfish person about things that mattered. The best things, the one-of-a-kind things, he kept for himself first. Daphne, Hermione, the people closest to him, none of them would have gotten this apple. That was simply how he operated. He shared when something was reproducible and when he didn't need it. Not before.
So he had never seriously entertained giving this one away.
What he was actually uncertain about was something more practical. Was this thing literally made of gold? Would it shatter his teeth? Would ingesting it cause metal toxicity?
He pushed the thought aside. The Twelve Trials had not led him wrong yet.
He activated the Iron Body talent, took a breath, and bit down hard.
The resistance he'd braced for never came. The flesh of the apple yielded like soft jelly, slipping cleanly past his teeth, sliding down his throat and settling warmly into his stomach...