Chapter 120: Cooling Down
Although her declaration of controlling everything in the corridor had been dripping with domineering arrogance, Tamara Riddle was never a brainless brute. Once her high fever completely receded and cold, calculating reason reclaimed the high ground of her mind, the Dark Lord immediately recognized a very practical, very irritating reality.
She was no longer the Voldemort who could reshape the world with a flick of her wand and strike terror into the very marrow of the wizarding world. She was currently trapped in the fragile shell of a twelve-year-old witch, her magic so severely restricted by this absurd reality that she couldn't even cast a basic Avada Kedavra to solve her daily annoyances.
Under such pathetic hardware conditions, if Potter truly went off the deep end and caused some extreme, uncontrollable disaster out of sheer fanaticism, cleaning up his mess would be incredibly tedious. To cool down this dangerously escalating progress bar, Tamara decided to adopt a much more secure tactic.
A perfect, flawless detachment.
Over the next few days, the general student body of Hogwarts noticed nothing amiss. Harry, however, was plunging headfirst into a suffocating abyss of panic.
Tamara did not ignore him. That would be too obvious. When their paths crossed in the drafty stone corridors, she would still pause, offer a slight nod, and even allow a faint, utterly faultless curve to grace her pale, exquisite features.
"Good day, Potter."
Her voice remained soft. Yet, beneath that gentle cadence lay a bone-deep frost. Not a single trace of her previous, albeit forced, sincerity remained.
In the damp, echoing dungeons during Potions class, she would still calmly pass him the crushed roots or the horned toad he needed, even thanking him with impeccable politeness when he handed her a stirring rod. But that was precisely the most suffocating part of it all. This carefully measured detachment felt like an indestructible pane of thick, transparent glass erected right between them. Tamara was still looking at him, but the dynamic had violently shifted. They were no longer close friends who had shared life-and-death hardships. They were just ordinary classmates.
"What's wrong with her?" Harry asked, his green eyes clouded with confusion. He kept glancing up from his brass scales toward the cold, elegant silhouette at the Slytherin workstation. His silver knife hacked at a poor daisy root, reducing it to a mangled, useless pulp.
"What do you mean, what's wrong?" Ron muttered quietly beside him, trying to salvage the ruined roots. "Didn't Riddle just nod to you? You should be counting your blessings that a Slytherin has that kind of attitude at all."
Ron didn't understand. The others didn't understand either.
But Harry had grown up locked inside the Dursleys' dark cupboard under the stairs. He was intimately accustomed to reading microscopic shifts in facial expressions, surviving by handling the treacherous cracks of other people's moods. He possessed a razor-sharp intuition for such subtle emotional withdrawal. He would honestly rather Tamara scold him, calling him a reckless troublemaker in that nasty, arrogant tone of hers, than face this impenetrable politeness. It left him with absolutely nothing to complain about, no opening to argue.
This politeness was a silent, absolute rejection.
A heavy wave of frustration and panic surged in his chest, tightening his throat. Back in the Hospital Wing, she had tacitly accepted his vow. At the Duelling Club, she had mercilessly rebuked the entire student body for his sake. But now? Now she had elegantly, cleanly pushed him back into the faceless crowd.
Had he done something wrong again? Or did she simply think he was too weak, too pathetic, utterly unworthy of standing by her side? Was she using this dignified, untouchable manner to kick him out of her world entirely?
This agonizing panic of gain and loss did not make Harry back down. Instead, like dry wood tossed into a roaring furnace, it completely ignited the reckless Gryffindor stubbornness in his bones and a dark, clinging obsession born from a lifetime starved of love. He ground his back teeth together. No matter why Tamara wanted to build that freezing wall between them, he absolutely refused to be left standing on the outside like a coward.
Sitting a few cauldrons away, Tamara felt the heavy, burning weight of that gaze fixed upon her back. Instead of cooling down, the boy's stare had become even more scorching. She furrowed her brows, the movement so slight it was almost imperceptible.
She suddenly realized that the System's earlier warning hadn't been a mere joke.
'What a nuisance.'
Tamara calmly lowered her eyelashes, staring at her perfectly simmering potion, deliberately ignoring the obsessive gaze glued to her spine.
While Harry agonized, the happiest person in the castle was undoubtedly Draco Malfoy. Seeing Tamara finally treating that Scarhead like the air she breathed, Draco strutted through the halls like a peacock with its tail in full display, an arrogant spring in every step. He smugly concluded that Tamara had finally seen the light, that Potter was nothing but a walking jinx who only attracted disaster, and that he, Draco Malfoy, was the only pure-blood elite truly qualified to stand at her side.
However, this one-sided peace was short-lived.
On Thursday afternoon, the moment Transfiguration class dismissed, Professor McGonagall's stern voice cut through the chatter. She stopped Tamara and Harry just as they were packing their parchment to head to the Library.
"Potter, Riddle." Professor McGonagall pursed her lips into a tight, thin line. "Please come with me. The Headmaster wishes to see you."
Harry's heart violently leaped into his throat. Did Professor Dumbledore also suspect him of being the Heir of Slytherin?
Tamara, on the other hand, let out an impatient, icy sneer in the dark corners of her mind.
'What was bound to come, comes.'
How could that sharp, meddlesome old fox possibly remain indifferent to the grand, theatrical speech she had delivered at the Duelling Club?
The two students followed behind the rigid posture of Professor McGonagall, ascending the moving spiral stone staircase, and stepped into the Headmaster's office. The circular room was filled with the rhythmic ticking and whirring of delicate silver instruments.
The last time she had stood in this exact spot was decades ago, when she had returned to Hogwarts specifically under the guise of Tom Riddle. In this very room, surrounded by these same irritating silver trinkets and the watchful eyes of Fawkes, she had demanded the Defense Against the Dark Arts teaching position from Dumbledore.
Stepping over the threshold in this new life, Tamara let out a disdainful cold snort in her heart. This spacious circular room was exactly as it had been back then, suffocatingly full of that old fox's terrible taste for eccentric mystification. Her gaze swept coldly past the ornate portraits of past headmasters, all of whom were putting on a pathetic show of pretending to sleep, before finally landing on the tall gilded perch situated behind the heavy oak door.
Standing upon it was a decrepit, miserable-looking bird. Its crimson and gold feathers were falling out in ragged patches, and its head hung listlessly. It looked exactly like a half-plucked, sickly turkey that might simply stop breathing at any given second.
Anyone else might be entirely deceived by this wretched appearance, but as the former Dark Lord, she naturally recognized this creature at a single glance. A Phoenix. The ultimate representation of light and rebirth. Clearly, this creature of pure, burning light was currently enduring its weak period just before its fiery renewal.
An instinctive flash of intense disgust crossed Tamara's dark eyes, followed immediately by a biting, venomous sneer in her mind. Yet, simultaneously, her bone-deep greed and insatiable desire for absolute control over powerful forces gave rise to a heavy sense of resentful gloom.
'What a waste of a celestial object.'
Tamara commented coldly to herself. This legendary magical beast, possessing top-tier restorative magic and a literally immortal body, was actually willing to be domesticated as an old madman's exclusive pet. Reduced to acting as a molting singing turkey in a room full of ticking scrap metal.
Beside her, Harry Potter looked exactly like a country bumpkin who had never seen the world. The so-called Savior, raised in the mundane Muggle world, was staring with his green eyes blown wide open, practically vibrating with immense curiosity and childish wonder at the smoke-puffing, whirring silver contraptions scattered across the tables.
Fortunately, because Tamara was standing right there, the Savior managed to maintain a relatively mature facade. At the very least, he didn't lunge forward, grab that filthy, ragged Sorting Hat off its shelf, and shove it onto his head again just to stupidly ask if it had sorted him into the wrong house.
After a brief moment of waiting, the heavy office door pushed open, and Albus Dumbledore walked in.
"Sit down, children."
Dumbledore settled into the high-backed chair behind his massive claw-footed desk. He interlaced his long, crooked fingers, resting them on the polished wood. He watched Tamara through his half-moon spectacles, his gaze carrying a gentleness that entirely failed to mask its piercing sharpness.
"I heard that a rather... small accident occurred at the Duelling Club a few days ago." Dumbledore spoke with a soft, easy smile, his tone perfectly mimicking that of a kind, harmless grandfather chatting about the weather. "Harry displayed an extremely rare talent."
Harry nervously gripped the hem of his school robes, his knuckles turning white. He opened his mouth, desperate to explain himself, but Dumbledore merely raised a single, gentle hand to stop him. The old Headmaster's piercing blue gaze never left Tamara's exquisite, pale face.
"I also heard that Miss Riddle proposed a very... novel viewpoint regarding the incident." A heavy light of intense inquiry flickered within Dumbledore's eyes. "Dark Arts Trauma Aftereffects?"
He leaned forward slightly, closing the distance.
"Forgive this hundred-year-old man for his ignorance, but in all my years studying magic at Hogwarts, even after scouring the deepest corners of the Restricted Section, this is the very first time I have ever heard of this fascinating theory."
The old man smiled, the twinkling in his eyes sharpening into blades. "I wonder if Miss Riddle could solve the mystery for this curious old man?"
This was a polite, softly spoken, yet absolutely oppressive probe. Any other twelve-year-old wizard, suddenly pinned under the scrutinizing gaze of the greatest White Wizard of the modern era, would have likely been scared into a stuttering, incoherent mess. They might have even broken down and confessed their deepest, darkest secrets on the spot.
But sitting opposite him was not a normal twelve-year-old. She was the world's greatest master of disguise, manipulation, and lies.
Facing the old fox's heavy scrutiny, not even a single one of Tamara's long eyelashes trembled. She naturally straightened her posture, squaring her shoulders. Without a hint of a blush on her cheeks or a single spike in her heart rate, she smoothly activated her expert nonsense mode.
"Professor Dumbledore, the deepest truths of magic are often hidden within the forgotten cracks of history."
Tamara's tone was perfectly calm and absolutely certain, carrying a subtle, irrefutable arrogance that demanded to be believed.
"You may not have heard this exact terminology, as it is merely a simplified name I summarized myself. I coined it to make the concept easier for my classmates, who severely lack basic magical common sense, to understand."
"But its underlying logic is clearly documented in fifteenth-century Defense Against the Dark Arts manuscripts."
She smoothly began to throw out incredibly obscure, archaic references that an average person would have absolutely no way of verifying on the spot.
"In the third chapter of 'A Study of Ancient Runic Soul Imprints', as well as in Alexander Griffin's 'The Malleability of Curses', there are highly similar records."
"When an... evil soul attempts to parasitize or forcefully attach itself to another living organism, the violent assimilation of magic and the host's extreme stress response will forcibly record some of the physiological or magical traits of the perpetrator."
Tamara looked directly into Dumbledore's piercing blue eyes, eyes that were said to be capable of seeing straight through people's hearts, her logic completely, flawlessly airtight.
"Potter faced the dark presence hiding within Professor Quirrell last year."
"He is merely a twelve-year-old boy. When facing that level of extreme, concentrated Black Magic, isn't a defensive imitation mechanism produced by the soul the most logical magical explanation?"
The corner of Tamara's lips curled into a faint, challenging smile. "Or... do you also believe he is the Heir of Slytherin?"
[Akarin's Note:
Enjoying the story? Dropping a quick review, comment, or Power Stone means the world to me and keeps these daily updates flowing!
Want to read 50 chapters ahead or just want to help keep a shameless translator alive? (My livelihood actually depends on this, haha 😭). You can support me directly here:
(P.S. Just remove the brackets and replace the [.] with a regular dot . to use the links!)
✨ Patreon (50 Advanced Chapters): patreon[.]com/AkarinTL
☕ Ko-fi (Support / Sponsor): ko-fi[.]com/AkarinTL
🔗 All My Links: linktr[.]ee/AkarinTL
Thank you so much for reading and keeping this project alive!]