The Eye of Insight burned behind my eyelids like a brand.
Buying it had cost everything I'd scraped together — System Points evaporated until the shop read zero and my pulse through the aether stuttered — but it was worth it. With that sight I could read wards like weather patterns, count the twitch of talent in a child's aura, and see the fragile lattice of a soul as if it were written in bone.
The orphanage smelled of boiled cabbage and old wool. Children's laughter leaked through cracked panes. They were all small, ordinary lights flickering in the dark. Then one of them caught my attention: a steady, curious spark hidden at the edge of the playroom, a small thing with a hunger for pattern and a hunger for answers. Not the brightest of the bright, but strong in the way raw ore is strong — unrefined, intact, with the potential to harden into steel.
I slipped in during a rainstorm. I was still a thin thing, a paper-thin spirit moving like smoke between the rafters. I watched this child — he sat at a table, fingers stained with coal from drawing, humming under his breath as he tried to fold a paper boat that refused to obey his geometry. The Eye told me everything: the child's magical resonance, the shape of his soul, the small, stubborn courage at its core.
It would do.
There was no drama. No great ritual. I moved in the way predators move: silently, directly. One moment he was there, chewing his lip; the next, the warmth of a stranger's breath was in his lungs and I poured myself into the hollow where his mind had been.
Devouring their soul was a ritual of practical cruelty. I absorbed the residue of a life I would overwrite; their memories and fear collapsed like old scaffolding. I took what I needed and set the rest aside — a mercy for me, a theft from them.
When the transformation finished the mirrors in my head flickered and reassembled into flesh. The face in the puddles and cracked glass of the orphanage did not belong to the child for long. The features shifted, sharpening: cheekbones aligning the way I remembered, lips folding into a smile I had practised as a boy in dim, lonely corridors. Dark brown hair I brushed back out of habit — an old, almost comforting reflex. I did not look like I expected to; I looked like Tom Riddle had looked when he was burdened by charm and menace. Hands that remembered how to weave knotwork and curses flexed experimentally.
A whisper of Tom's old prejudices slipped out with my breath. "Filthy Muggles," I thought, reflexive and ugly, and recoiled from the thought as if it were a hot iron. Half of that phrasing was his; half of it was the phrase I'd learned while studying the man I'd absorbed. I pushed it away with rational disgust. Blood purity was a strategy, nothing more — a crude lever that worked on the gullible. I kept the tactics, discarded the dogma.
The orphanage staff never noticed. I left in the small hours, hood pulled up against the drizzle, a coat I had no business owning wrapped around my shoulders. The child's clothes smelled of starch and cheap soap; I burned them in an alley and traded for garments that said less about poverty and more about possibility. The Eye of Insight hummed weakly in the back of my mind — it had been drained by the purchase and by the soul-siphoning, but enough remained to read wards and routes.
Austria felt a world away, but England was a country of danger to a drifting soul. I crossed the Channel like any refugee — port at night, a floo-tube here, a forged name there. I kept my face low, let homeless smells cloak me. I did not yet dare to step into centres of power; Grindelwald's network was not a thing to be bargained with casually.
The System announced my change with a cold, bureaucratic efficiency that would have made me smile if I still had the stomach for irony.
SYSTEM UPDATE:Vessel acquired: Orphan (Name: unknown — designator: ORP-214)Vessel compatibility: 87%Reward queued: +12 Soul Integrity (pending)Eye of Insight charge remaining: 18%
Twelve percent more of myself felt like new muscle knitting under the skin.
I slept — the sleep of someone who has borrowed a life — and in that sleep the child's skeleton rearranged to fit me. Dreams of lectures, of exams and dissertations, threaded with dark rituals and blood-marked altars. I woke with a plan.
Grindelwald's circle would not be impressed by a runaway orphan, not by itself. They needed reason to notice me. They responded to talent, to prophecy, to spectacle. I had talent — the old knowledge, the half-remembered incantations, the science of magic and ritual. I had the Eye and necromancy. What I lacked were points and patrons.
So I set about converting my practical needs into a performance.
First: establish credibility. I would travel to a small market near the border where traveling wizards bartered charms and information. I would offer a demonstration — subtle, controlled, lethal only to a rotten branch or a fox in heat — something that would not get the attention of the Ministry but would sit like a bright coin on the tongues of merchant gossip. A show of competence. A whispered name: "Riddle." That might be enough to prod the right curiosity.
Second: seed a message. Grindelwald's followers had ways of listening: coded sigils, riddled owl posts, portraits that spoke in the dark. I could not yet summon the Elder Wand from a shop window, but I could send a provocation. I learned the pattern of their sigils with the Eye and carved a rune into a scrap of wood. It was crude, but it would be noticed by those who knew where to look. Grindelwald's circle was proud and theatrical; they loved symbols. A sigil saying, quietly, I am here. I am useful.
Third: gather a bodyguard. I would not trust the Death Eaters yet — they were old pieces of a broken machine — but I could sow seeds of alliance among those who answered my show. There were always ambitious men and women who wanted a rising star to latch onto. I would offer them knowledge, protection, and purpose. Grindelwald wanted a new world; I wanted weapons against the world. The two aims were compatible enough to begin.
When I arrived at the market, the air smelled of horses and hot iron. Witches bartered in languages I pretended not to know; traders from the Continent hawked dragon-bone trinkets and cloaks. I adjusted my voice until it was reasonable, cultured, the voice of someone who had read more than his share of manuals and legends.
The demonstration needed to be small and undeniable. A dying sapling on the square provided the stage. I laid a finger on its bark and closed my eyes — no, the Eye of Insight was not physical, but it felt like closing a circuit. Magics answered me in notes and seams. I sang a quiet syllable, ancient and clean. Light crawled along my skin and into the wood. Where the sap had been clotted in rot, it cleared; where the wood split, it sealed. The roots trembled and the tree lifted a little from the earth like a waking thing.
A murmur — then a hush.
Eyes turned. Two men at the edge of the crowd exchanged glances, and the one with the crooked nose mouthed a phrase I recognized from Grindelwald's followers: Blue rose — not of this world.
They would talk. They would speculate. And someone would send word north to those who listened for talent like moths to flame.
I left before the sun fully set. The sigil was carved and hidden in a place known to the network — a dry well beneath a chapel that had long since made way for superstition. It would be found by the right hands.
Back in my rented room that smelled faintly of smoke and old papers, the System chimed again.
QUEST UPDATE:Objective — Acquire a suitable patron or attract alliance attention: InitiatedReward: +40 SP upon patron contact.Eye of Insight recharge time: 3 days.
Forty points. Not enough for the Elder Wand, but enough to buy a few discreet advantages: a forged lineage, a useful charm, a small grimoire of forgotten rituals. I felt my hunger for points like a second pulse.
But first — consolidation. I needed to learn the child's mannerisms so perfectly that no one would suspect. I needed to read the small scars on the palms and remember them like scripture. I needed to go slow, because speed kills when you have a borrowed life.
I sat in the dim light and worked through lists: language, mannerism, contacts, safe houses, alyssum of Grindelwald's known supporters. I catalogued the people I would court and the ones I would cut loose. I planned for contingencies — Dumbledore's shadow that still hovered like a persistent fog, the Ministry's inquisitive probes, and the unpredictable greed of the Death Eaters.
When the fear rose — the old terror that someone might find the soul-as-smoke and tear it into nothing — I breathed the memory of my university caps into my bones. Two doctorates taught me strategy and patience. Tom Riddle taught me ambition and ruthlessness. Together we were calculus and blade.
I was no longer entirely Tom; I was not entirely whoever the child had been. I was a fusion: the careful mind of a scholar with the cold appetite of a fledgling Dark Lord. Grindelwald was a bridge I would cross when I had reason to. For now, I would be patient. I would be brilliant. I would be careful.
At the edge of the page, a single sentence settled like a spell I meant to bind to the future:
Get noticed. Get stronger. Change the rules before the world learns what we are.
The night outside my window was very quiet. Somewhere in Austria, a circle of men and women raised glasses to old ambitions and new rumours. One of them would hear the right story. One of them would answer the sigil in the dry well and ask: Who is the new Riddle?
When they did, I would be ready.