Tom Riddle

Tom Riddle had been having a rough time lately.

To be precise, nothing had gone right since someone opened this wretched Diary.

Now he hid behind a row of old books on the bottom shelf of the Muggle Studies section. A thin layer of dust coated the Diary's black cover.

He had recovered a little strength and could observe a small area around him.

From where he lay, he could see the flicker of candlelight in the library's main hall and the ankles passing by. Yes, a Diary could only see ankles from that height, which made gathering information extremely difficult.

But the brat irritated him even more than his limited view.

Something had been wrong from the start.

A brat named Justin Finch-Fletchley had woken him from his slumber.

Tom had expected a textbook beginning: a naive boy hungry for approval, full of wonder at the magical world and ashamed of his background. Exactly the sort he was best at manipulating.

All he needed to do was write a few gentle lines in the Diary, show off some knowledge beyond the textbooks, and promise a little power. The boy would become his first sacrifice.

Instead, the brat had opened by asking whether he was a cat, then tested him on Muggle knowledge.

Worse, Tom couldn't even understand the question.

He recognized every symbol. He had learned addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division at the orphanage. But put those numbers and symbols together, and they became something he didn't recognize at all.

Then the brat had tried another angle. "Did you go to school? How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"My idol once said, 'Even if someone's stupid, how could they still not have learned calculus by fourteen?' How come you don't know it at sixteen?"

For one moment, Tom nearly spent