Ginny, the Heir, and New Discoveries

Find prey that had not been chosen by the "Gift of Protection," prey the Basilisk's gaze could easily penetrate.

After questioning, investigating, and using a few unsavory little tricks of the soul, he could conclude that, aside from the five pure-blood students who had bought the potion and the dozen or so members of Slytherin's Shadow Circle, not one of the remaining hundreds in the castle had that damn film.

The half-bloods, the Muggle-borns, the students whose parents did low-level clerical work at the Ministry of Magic, whose families could not even scrape together seventy Galleons, who could only rely on school aid to buy secondhand textbooks and robes—they had nothing to rely on.

They had only their own bodies, wands laughably slow to cast spells with, and the pathetic comfort of huddling together in their dormitories, too afraid to go outside.

Riddle watched them like a starving, maddened wolf trapped outside a fence, watching a flock of fat, defenseless sheep wandering within. His stomach contracted, his teeth itched, and every nerve ending in his body screamed—Kill them!

Ginny's body trembled. It was the quake-like shudder that spread from within whenever Riddle's will churned inside her. Her fingers curled over the page, her nails tearing through the paper and leaving a long, black, wound-like scar across the chapter titled "Fundamental Principles of Transfiguration."

Riddle held himself back. Not because of a strong man's mercy, nor because of anything that could be called "kindness."

It was because of Dumbledore.

That old man's response was far too strange.

Five attacks had happened at once. Four students had been petrified, while one student remained alive—but that survivor had that damn film over him. Dumbledore could not have failed to notice. He would put every detail in his mind and piece them together like