The four founders' relics each said something true about the person who made them.
The Sword of Gryffindor spoke of strength, and Godric himself had always preferred settling disagreements through direct confrontation. The most combative of the four, comfortable in battle in the way other people were comfortable at dinner.
The Cup of Hufflepuff spoke of abundance. Helga had been a practical peacemaker, most interested in the daily welfare of her students, the kind of person who solved problems by feeding people first.
The Locket of Slytherin spoke of legacy. Only families with genuine historical weight appreciated objects that carried no obvious utility but communicated, quietly and without effort, that you had been important for a very long time.
And Ravenclaw's diadem? A diadem wasn't a symbol of wisdom. It was a symbol of sovereignty. The kind of thing a ruler wore.
At her core, Ravenclaw had never quite considered other wizards her peers. Only those with talent that genuinely arrested her attention, or those who stood at comparable power, qualified as equals. The rest were simply part of the landscape.
She was the proudest of the four founders. This was not a controversial observation.
And now someone had not only made a Horcrux from her most personal object, but had written his name beside her own motto with the casual presumption of someone leaving a mark on a park bench. Rowena Ravenclaw not furious about this would not have been Rowena Ravenclaw.
"Tom Riddle!"
She ground the name between her teeth. The wrongness of it was layered: the violation of the object, the violation of the inscription, the sheer confidence of the act. There was no worse category of person to offend than a woman who was smarter than everyone around her, because she would remember it with perfect precision indefinitely.
Tom felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. "Rowena, could you please direct that at Voldemort? When you say Tom Riddle in that tone it creates significant personal discomfort."
"Whose side are you on?" Ravenclaw gave him a look that communicated her feelings about the interruption. "And he doesn't deserve to be called Voldemort."
The name Voldemort was Tom Marvolo Riddle rearranged, with "Lord" prepended, meaning sovereign or master, the address reserved historically for high nobility and royalty. It was a title Voldemort had invented for himself, which through repetition had become the name everyone used. Had Grindelwald applied the same logic to his own name, he would presumably have been called the Dark Lord as well.
Ravenclaw was not going to call anyone lord. Hence: Tom.
The smaller Tom, currently standing to the side, felt this was deeply unfair to him personally. Voldemort had managed to tarnish the name from beyond his current state of non-corporeal misery.
"Tom." Ravenclaw's expression shifted from fury to something more deliberate. "Whatever you decide to do with this, do not kill Voldemort first. Resurrect me. Let me have a conversation with him."
Previously she had felt no particular urgency about resurrection. The learning space was comfortable, the library grew steadily, the research continued without interruption. It had been, in many ways, a more peaceful existence than her original one.
But this changed the calculation. She needed to deliver a lesson he would not recover from, thorough enough to ensure he understood, with complete certainty, which objects were never to be touched.
"I'll do my best," Tom said, with a smile that suggested genuine sympathy for Voldemort's eventual situation. He was also quietly curious what form of creative suffering Ravenclaw would develop given sufficient motivation.
"Destroy it. I can't look at it." Ravenclaw's patience with the object's continued existence was visibly running out.
"Hold on."
Tom turned the diadem in his hands, tried a cleaning charm to address the rust and discoloration, and failed. Dark magic soul residue corrupted differently than ordinary decay. The tarnish wasn't physical.
"Don't you think destruction is wasteful? This is a thousand-year-old artifact with your name and reputation attached. World-class cultural heritage isn't overstating it."
He set the diadem on the cabinet and let the argument sit for a moment before continuing.
"I can teach you how to make another. As many as you want."
Ravenclaw, who had been ready to refuse anything he said, recalibrated. Her voice shifted, something warmer entering the edges of it. "Rowena Ravenclaw herself is already yours entirely. Why fixate on a discarded piece of old metalwork?"
"Why not simply have both?"
Tom tapped the diadem lightly with his wand. A thread of deep black surfaced briefly and then receded. Under normal inspection a Horcrux revealed nothing, but magical probing oriented toward soul or mental influence produced a detectable response.
Ravenclaw's curiosity overrode her anger. "Tom, what exactly are you doing?"
"Thinking about how to make Voldemort work for me."
Ravenclaw stared at him.
What was wrong with young people today? Nobody spoke in plain sentences anymore.
After Tom explained himself during the day, Ravenclaw exhaled slowly and spent a moment simply looking at him. "Where do you even learn these things? You're a child. You can't finish a sentence without..."
She stopped herself.
He was a child, technically. He also had more girlfriends, more assets, and more ongoing research projects than most adult wizards managed in a lifetime. The child framing kept collapsing under the weight of the evidence.
Tom looked at her with an expression of complete innocence. "The Wizarding Academy's library is extremely varied. I didn't know it would contain material like that."
"Spend less time at that institution," Ravenclaw said, abandoning the lecture.
She refocused on the actual problem. "So you're not planning to make another Horcrux. You've just eaten a golden apple. What exactly are you trying to do with this one?"
"I'm not making a Horcrux," Tom said. "You're still thinking too narrowly. What I want is to convert Voldemort's Horcrux into my diadem. The object and the soul both."