Looking at the ornate signature on the title page, Professor McGonagall felt as though she had returned to the past, to when Voldemort was still Tom Marvolo Riddle.
Back then, Dumbledore had merely been Hogwarts' Transfiguration professor, McGonagall had been his assistant, and Tom had been nothing more than an ordinary child brought out of an orphanage.
Perhaps not entirely ordinary, because his middle name, Marvolo, came from his maternal grandfather, Marvolo Gaunt. The Gaunts were direct descendants of Slytherin, but Marvolo's daughter had fallen in love with a Muggle—the Muggle who became Tom's father.
Tom himself had not been born of love, but as the result of Amortentia. He had never understood what love was, and he had inherited Slytherin's domineering, arrogant nature.
Thinking back on it now, Professor McGonagall could practically see Tom as a student again. From his very first year, he had scorned anything that tied him to others, anything that made him seem ordinary.
Even then, he had wanted to be different—to stand alone, be independent, and become famous.
At the time, Dumbledore had hoped to shape Tom through stricter methods. But Tom enrolled in 1938, and the trouble Grindelwald caused always kept Dumbledore occupied, leaving him unable to focus fully on nurturing his students.
By 1945, when Grindelwald had been defeated and imprisoned and everything had settled down, Dumbledore discovered that Tom, who had graduated from seventh year, had already founded the fanatical, extremist pure-blood faction known as the Death Eaters and put on that tattered black robe he seemed never to change out of.
After 1956, Tom began calling himself Voldemort and committed many major crimes. What followed was the rise of the second Dark Lord, the war between the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix, until he was unexpectedly defeated