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Ollivander is under the Cruciatus for 20 minutes before he swears to never tell another soul that Voldemort is Tom Riddle.
Then he is left, shaking and terrified, on the floor of his shop.
There are two main components to each and every wand that Ollivander makes. The core is, arguably, the most important part. The core, at the end of the day, is what makes each and every wand capable of magic.
Ollivander does not collect every core himself. Sometimes he is gifted bundles of unicorn hair by Hagrid, on the occasions the man is in Diagon. Dragon heartstrings come in large deliveries, sealed boxes from the MacFustys and the Y Ddraig Goch Memorial Dragon Reserve, each time one of their charges dies. Occasionally a witch or wizard will drop in with a Phoenix feather and explain that their companion shed it, and insisted it be given to him.
On one particularly memorable occasion he had gone into his workshop one morning and found a pair of perfect amber feathers.
(Those two, he recalls, ended up in a pair of blackthorn wands, held by a pair of twins.)
But, sometimes he goes venturing out. Sometimes he will walk with Hagrid through the Forbidden Forest and pluck up stray hairs from bushes. One time he is almost gored when he pulls a hair right off the tail of a stallion, but Hagrid’s hand catches the unicorn’s horn before it can manage to. On occasion he will go to the Dragon Reserves and help with the butchering directly until he’s shoulder deep in dragon carcass and has to wring his robes out of all of the remaining dragon’s blood. Other times he writes reams of long letters to individuals with Phoenixes he’s never seen a feather from, politely cajoling an invitation to visit.
This is how, one day, he ends up in Albus Dumbledore’s office, explaining his desire for a feather. Fawkes, perched in the corner, watches with an air of bemusement. Ollivander’s never known if the Phoenixes truly understand when he asks for feathers. He knows they understand enough to form strong bonds, answer to their names and insist, sometimes, on a feather going here or there. As for if they understand what exactly goes on after, he does not know.
He leaves that day with two feathers and they are the hardest he has ever had to work with.
Ollivander first meets Tom Riddle when the boy is eleven years old. He walks at the side of Albus Dumbledore and his eyes are sharp-darting things, going here and there, ready and waiting.
“Young master Riddle,” Albus introduces the boy as. “Tom, this is Mr Ollivander.”
Riddle jerked a nod, his eyes darting around the room. He took in the huge stacks of boxes, piled to the ceiling, the doorway through to Ollivander’s workshop where dowels of wood waited ready to be worked, cores waiting to be Switched into the centre of the wood.
“Which is your wand hand, young man?” Ollivander asked. Frowning, the boy lifted a hand.
He was a hard boy to get a read on, and Ollivander tossed his measuring tape in the air to start. The measuring tape was, for the most part, a distraction. It allowed Ollivander time to analyse a customer’s behaviour and assess what wood and core would likely suit. After all, when dealing with eleven year old children, one could never truly know how they’d end up, let alone know if you’d need to adjust a wand’s length to suit their eventual frame.
Blackthorn, Ollivander considers. Dragon core. Thirteen inches. Or perhaps Dragon core again with Hawthorn. Or Black Walnut, perhaps, or maybe Cedar. The boy seems sharp enough.
He bustles around the room gathering wands and sets fifteen in a stack on his desk.
Fifteen. The number of inches he’ll go to if given a choice by the wand. It seems fitting.
“Now lad,” Ollivander says. “Try this one.”
Woods are a tricky thing. Cores, cores he can trust to other people, or wait for. Cores, while tricky to handle and tricky to match, are by no means the trickiest to find.
Woods, on the other hand require a personal touch. Oh, anyone can spot a tree filled with Bowtruckles. A few can even get close enough, can forge a bond with the little beasts and convince them to let them take a piece of wood for a handful of woodlice or a scattering of fairy eggs.
But very few can tell if the tree’s wood is actually suitable for a wand.
A core is simple. A core needs to be magical, and that’s it. It channels the magic and so it needs to be strong enough for any spells it might be called upon to cast.
The wood though. The wood directs. The wood conducts. The wood must be just magical enough to be able to contain all it will be asked to handle and yet not so magical as to interfere with the core. Must be flexible enough to change with the power flowing through it, but also solid enough to take the strain.
There is a reason, after all, why so few softwoods get matched to a core as formidable as dragon.
Ollivander remembers the wood he gathers. It is not the age of the tree which is essential, after all, but the magic. The magic which hums and sings beneath his fingers when he strokes a tree-trunk, which sparks out in response to spells, the magic that calls to the Bowtruckles that inhabit its branches. The very magic that lets him know every wand he has ever made, and know to which individual’s magic it now matches.
He remembers the Yew he cut, years before in Godric’s Hollow. It had rested by a grave and grew tall and thick. Leaves dark and glossy, fruit a bright matte red. Distinctive.
Trees take on qualities of what they’re near to. Especially the magical ones. In Japan, a tree even mildly magical left standing on a battlefield can absorb all of the blood, suck it in and feast on it, until it's magic warps and makes it a Jubokko, fiercely feeding on anyone and everyone who passes by. Cypress trees in Corfu, if steeped in dark magic, learn to steal the mind of those who sleep beneath them, sending them into a sleep one may never return from. In Europe, Yews were often planted in graveyards. Collected for bow-wood, yes, used sometimes in building, yes.
But they were of the dead.
Ollivander plucks the yew-and-phoenix wand from its box and almost shivers. Its bone pale, handle carved distinctively: a femur, with one end of the bone worn into a hook.
It wouldn’t let him make it any other shape.
“Garrick,” Dumbledore says when he returns later - the boy, Ollivander learns, is getting his robes fitted - “May I- Something about that wand worried you.”
“I remember every wand I’ve ever sold,” Ollivander says. “Every last one.”
Dumbledore stays silent. Dumbledore simply watches.
“Two feathers,” he says. “Your bird, he gave me two. Only one other bird has ever done that, and those wands went to twins.” Ollivander nods out the window, in the vague direction of where young Tom must be standing, poked and prodded with needles and pins. “Who is his twin, I wonder?”