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Merope suckled Tom on milk and stories.
Some nights, she told him of his father. “He was a dashing nobleman,” she would say, or, “he was a sailor, always looking for adventure,” or, more rarely, “he was the moon itself.” And, always, “you have his face, dearest. And his name, and his voice…”
She spoke of the beasts of the forest, eagles with fire in their bellies and wild horses that dance in the moonlight. She told him about the secrets hidden below the earth, underground rivers of knowledge, stones that speak your name. She told him there was magic in the world, as sure as there were fish under the tumbling waves of the sea.
Something about storytelling transformed his mother. Watching her in the light of a candle on the bedside, he would have thought her a princess were it not for her wandering right eye.
He was never a naturally trusting child, but something deep within him absorbed her words, inked them into the fleshy mass of his moldable young heart. Many of the stories contradicted. He still believed them all.
Tom was raised thinking himself the reflection of the moon on the water, secure in his own beauty. He peeled apart flowers to look for fairies hiding behind the petals, fell in love with his own shadow, danced on the dirt floor of their house to music only he could hear.
Day one hundred and eighty-one. He doesn’t have writing implements, but the numbers are woven into the fabric of his mind. He is a falcon in a too-small cage, sinking his talons into any available distraction. Numbering the days centers him.
The high tower is fitted with huge, arching windows. To the north is the sea. Calm, today. Cerulean and lovely. He imagines he can smell the salty decay of it through the window on the other side of the bars. If he could get closer to the glass, he might be able to look down and see the beach.
To the south, poppy fields. A red spill upon the land, the crimson of baby’s blood. He spends the daylight hours staring out into the world he can’t touch, spreading his hands against the glass to see the bones caught under the confines of his skin.
It’s beautiful. This place was not built to be a prison.
“You’re new,” he says. He feels the rust in his voice, the brief crackling pang in his throat, but the sound that comes out is clear.
He hears the fresh guard shuffle. Reaching for a sword that isn’t there, he guesses.
They haven’t let the guards have swords in ten days. Not after what happened to lanky Billy Stubbs, with his blue eyes and soft voice.
The poppies out the window sway. Tom stares down at them wonderingly. It’s funny, from this height, to think how that great swath of scarlet is made of individual blossoms. He remembers liking poppies. Plucking the petals off, rubbing their pigment into his hands, the black of the pollen catching on his clothing.
There’s something out there, in the fields. A figure sticking like a lonely tooth out of the flowers.
He blinks and it’s gone. Just red and blue and the white of a single cloud.
It’s been so long since he’s had a new guard to play with. Abraxas was fun once, but he has gone faded and quiet. Minerva is nearly as clever as Tom himself; she’s never danced on his string. The two of them have seen too much of his grisly innards to tolerate his games.
Tom turns his head, angling his face so the sun paints his face and neck in rich gold. He knows what other people see when they look at him, the want he inspires in them. He sees it in this new guard: the slackening of her face, the unconscious darting peek of her tongue through her flower-red lips.
She’s afraid of him, but trying not to show it. She’s hungry for him, and trying not to feel it.
“Why have they sent someone new?” he asks her. “Are they finally replacing dear Billy?”
The guard is pretty, he decides. Young. Probably younger by a year or two than him. Hair like something dyed red, then left to fade in the sun. Freckles spread in thick clusters over her cheeks. He thinks about prying them off with his teeth.
She doesn’t answer him. Eyes like a horse, brown and sweet.
“They warned you not to talk to me.” He turns fully. Drops his feet off the windowsill. Smiles in a way that once made Abraxas laugh in surprise and say, ‘you look almost human like that.’
Her jaw tenses. She’s looking at him like she wants to look away. Like she can’t.
Merope died before he’d been weaned off her fairy tales and left Tom mewling and cold, clinging to the bleached bones of her stories.
He picked wildflowers for her unmarked grave and left town, learned to hide the hollowness. He wandered for uncounted seasons. People recognized him by his father’s face, even before he’d shed the vestigial softness of boyhood.
“You look just like that rascal, Tom Riddle,” they would say. “The minstrel! He stops by every two years, he and his musician friends. Sings us pretty songs and knocks up our daughters, eh?”
Tom sang for them, too, and went nowhere near their daughters. They flipped him coins, and laughed drunkenly, and told him he had a prettier voice than his father by far.
He looked for magic in the world. He found it not in enchanted springs or whispered incantations, but in a chance meeting: a man with a face like his own, wandering alone in a moonlit forest.
“Tom Riddle,” Tom said, and waited just long enough to glimpse horrified recognition in his father’s eyes before he sunk a silvery knife into the thin skin of his throat.
By then Tom had grown into himself. Long limbs and adult voice and something new, something that frothed at the sight of dried blood and whispered him scarlet stories in the dead of the night.
Day one hundred and eighty-six. The number tastes of cold glass.
The poppies aren’t red at night. Their petals shine in the moonlight, more reflective even than the still plate of the sea.
There’s someone in his bed. He can taste its breath on the air, feel the cold of it like an iron band around his neck. He sleeps curled up on the windowsill instead, staring out at the silvered fields until his eyes can’t stay open.
“Ginevra says there’s something wrong with you,” Abraxas says, two mornings later. There’s gray in his hair. Tom was the one who put it there.
Tom stares at him until he looks away. “There are many things wrong with me.”
Once, Abraxas would have said something interesting. ‘His Majesty will have you executed for that, one of these days,’ Tom fills in for him. No: perhaps instead, ‘nothing wrong that a good axe to the face wouldn’t solve.’
Abraxas wouldn’t really have said either of those things. Too direct. The thought of an axe, though. Tom likes that. An execution. Splitting a person in two, up and down, a long, clean cut shearing neatly through the spinal cord. One eye on each side, one hand, one breast, one flopping piece of halved tongue.
“She says you haven’t been sleeping.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“There’s something watching me in my dreams.” Something that feels like death, the bitter wrongness of poisonous mushrooms, the still of the air before a lightning strike.
“So, your mind has tired of bleeding the rest of us dry and has turned in on itself. It was only a matter of time.”
Perhaps Abraxas would have said those things about executions. “It’s been so long since we’ve talked like this.” Eighteen days, to be precise, but Abraxas finds it ‘creepy’ when Tom brings up his fixation on dates. And he mustn’t scare the man away now, when he’s finally speaking properly with Tom. “I’ve missed you, dearest.”
Abraxas’s fingers twitch. Looks as though Tom has failed to not be creepy.
He goes up close to the bars. Abraxas is a tall man, but Tom is taller. “Haven’t you missed our chats? Come now. Let me touch your fingers again.”
The sea yawns over Abraxas’s shoulder.
“Funny that they took your weapons away to protect you,” Tom says softly. “It certainly doesn’t make you feel more secure to be without them, now does it…?”
He can feel the cold from his bed eating away at his bones, even from here.
‘Tom Riddle’ was only ever a stage name. He never learned his father’s true name.
Now, when he went to settlements and introduces himself by the name, he looked old enough that people would say, “ah, yes, I remember you,” and sometimes, flirtatiously, “why, you’ve practically aged in reverse!”
He sang in his father’s voice and told people his mother’s stories, whispering to captivated crowds in the dying light of a bonfire. He cut the legs off thatched rabbits, just to watch them bleed. He wandered through moonlit forests and dreamed of portals to new worlds hidden in the husks of lightning-struck trees.
Tom was among the first to hear the whispers of the mad king by the sea. He’s seeking magic, the rumors said. Looking for a remedy to death itself, and willing to offer a fortune in exchange.
He doesn’t know what day it is. His mind is too busy fragmenting, dashed apart like a ship against the sea cliffs.
The thing from the bed watches him. Its eyes are green, shockingly so. He feels its cold in his bones, now, a thin coating of frost along the lining of his stomach that crunches when he moves.
The poppies sway in the breeze. He can finally see them up close. A thousand individual blooms, hairy-stemmed and lush with pigment.
A dream.
Tom stares down at the flowers, gripped by an impossible terror. He can’t stand to look upon the thing standing before him. He must look at the thing.
He looks and not-looks all at once. It’s an incomprehensible smear of black against the perfect sky, sucking in all light. He can’t name it, can’t properly describe it.
Green. Horns of some kind, glimpsed out of the corners of his eyes. It speaks to him. There are no words. It makes a noise, but it comes out of Tom’s own lungs, air forming meaningless syllables that leave frost on his tongue.
A rash of scarlet. Blood, he thinks. Ink. The juice of flower petals.
The color seeps from his neck, diffusing out of him like he’s underwater. It rushes out of him until the sky itself is soaked in violent sunset.
The rumors of the mad king enthralled Tom, and he found his feet on the northern-bound highway. He traveled for weeks, through forests older than empires and over mountains that touch the stars.
It was lonely, wandering through the empty landscape with only his voice for company. He kept thoughts of immortality, real magic, and the pulsing glory of the ocean close to his heart. Those were enough to keep him going.
Tom came at last to the castle of the king by the sea. It was surrounded by fields of poppies, blossoms coming up to the middle of his thigh. He picked one, marveling at the richness of its red, the darkness at its center.
As he wandered up the dirt road to the castle, he picked the flower to pieces, leaving petals scattered behind him.
The court were easily charmed. They seemed in a daze; beautiful people dancing their days away, loose with both coin and lips. In their midst were magicians and fortune readers and alchemists, attracted by the king’s promises and whispers of eternity.
It was simple to slip among them and find himself a noble to bed, to cloth himself in heady crimson. The king himself took a liking to Tom. He bought him an ornate fiddle and had him play it quietly in the throne room for hours on end.
None of the alchemists produced a true elixir of life, the magicians were full of cheap tricks, and the predictions of the fortune readers were insubstantial. There was no immortality to be found here, in this castle by the sea.
Still, Tom lingered, weaving songs, waiting.
The king had grown old, and produced no heir. Once he gave up his quest for eternal life, he would need to bequeath his kingdom to someone.
Day one hundred and ninety, and Ginevra brings Tom poppies in a vase of carved wood.
“Thank you,” he says, idling by the bars, looking at her through his eyelashes.
She shifts anxiously. She still has yet to say a word to him, in the nine days since her assignment.
He’s sung to her, crooning ballads he’s written himself, watching the blood rise under her skin at the sound of his voice. When he’d asked for poppies, he didn’t think she’d actually humor him.
He places the poppies in the window, fascinated by the play of sunlight over the petals. His fingers itch to crush the plant, dissect it and hunt for the little rows of unripe seeds at its core, rip each of the petals along their lengths. He restrains himself, barely.
Ginevra is watching him, frozen, close enough to the bars that he could touch a finger to her freckled cheeks.
He makes his face go open and vulnerable. “They’re beautiful,” he says, softly enough that she leans in slightly to hear. He puts a hand up against one of the bars. It’s chilled despite the heat of the afternoon.
She turns away, stumbles back a safe distance. So, she’s remembered what he is. He watches her go with an expression of calculated sorrow, seeing her neck pull in response. Oh, to touch that neck – so much more satisfying than crushing the flowers.
The thing stands behind him. He feels its touch on his own throat, utterly merciless, cold as the glaciers far to the north. He gasps.
Ginevra looks up, wary. She’s seen the way he sleeps in the window. She thinks he’s half-mad.
The window hasn’t been far enough, though, has it? No, the thing is stalking him, in his dreams and his waking moments both. It’s made a home for itself in his very lungs.
It was only later that he learned her name. Myrtle.
In the end – no, not the end. In her end, it was an impersonal thing, the murder.
People talk about crimes of passion, but Tom never quite understood – what passion? Even when he killed his father, he’d felt at best a vague sense of satisfaction.
Passion. Had Tom ever felt passion…?
If so, it certainly wasn’t that night. He crept through the castle on silent feet, wandering moon-silvered halls and sketching out lyrics to a new melody.
He was bored, in those days. So bored he could hardly breathe. He needed to leave, but there were a thousand things keeping him in the castle by the sea.
He hadn’t been tied down by anything since his mother’s death, over a decade past. He hated it. Passionlessly. The hatred was a splinter in his skull, a grating, constant misery in the pit of his stomach. He was done with this place, but he was also so close – he could taste it, sometimes, on the old king’s breath. Death.
The mad king needed an heir, and none of his subjects was more favored than the beautiful wanderer Tom Riddle, scarlet-cloaked and mercury-tongued.
It was then when the little handmaiden bumped into him, scurrying out of one of those hidden servant-doors and colliding with his side.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, shivering and mousy.
“Don’t trouble yourself over it,” he said with perfect gentleness, helping her to her feet.
It was only when she started pulling away that he realized he’d neglected to release her hand, and by then the ravenous part of him had made up its mind.
Her neck was so fragile. She was a girl, still. Just a little thing. He slit her throat, holding her body out the window so the blood fell in a gruesome fountain from her now-corpse. The blood wasn’t red in the night, but silvery instead. Like starshine on poppy petals. He imagined if he were to milk the moon, it would dribble out something of the same color.
There are no more days. He’s lost in an eternity of blooms, red to the horizon, the sky such a perfect blue that it hurts.
The cold, monstrous thing with its empty green eyes stands before him. Stands in him.
It is Death. He knows that now.
He recognizes its eyes. He always has.
The thing touches him, colder than winter frosts. Its – hands? – touch his face, now.
It is a mirror. A reflection of his own face stares back at him, horribly distorted. Green-eyed.
No, not his face at all – skin darker than his, features softer.
The cold settles deep into his bones. He can’t breathe any longer. The layer of ice coating the inside of his lungs has solidified.
All he can see is green. The chill on his lips stays until long after he’s awoken, panting, snarling at a disturbed Abraxas to hide his terror.
It was springtime when the Seer came. The poppies were softly swaying buds, the barest hints of red peeking through sweet green sepals.
She was a shabby thing, all worn shawls and magnified eyes, but the mad king welcomed her with the same open arms he extended to all who came claiming magic.
At first, Tom thought she was as fraudulent as the others. He was there, though, when she spouted her prophecy. Half the court was there – she recited the thing in the throne room, in the sickly warmth of midafternoon, just as the evening’s drinks were coming out. Tom was playing a soft little line on his fiddle, a wordless scrap of music that he thought could do with some brass accompaniment.
The Seer stopped in the dead middle of the throne room, and something in the air changed. The spinning of the court stopped. Conversations cut off. Every eye in the hall turned upon the tiny woman.
She threw out her arms, something ancient in her eyes, and began to speak.
At that moment, Tom realized he’d never seen magic before. This – this was true magic. The court, sceptics all, knew it. They recognized as well as he did the rattling ring of truth.
“The heir to your throne approaches, child of thorn and flame. At his fall, the moon will rise… and at his whim, the moon will fall in turn. The true heir approaches…”
She collapsed. The world stopped for a moment, breathed – choked on its own silence.
The next few days were hectic. The Seer, though she remembered nothing of her prediction, was given a favored position in court. Every scholar in the kingdom scrambled to unwind the prophecy and find its hidden meanings.
They succeeded. The true heir was a child from a duchy to the far south.
‘Thorn,’ the scholars explained with pride, represented the Potter sigil, the rose. ‘Flame’ was the duchess, a common woman with hair like a bonfire. And ‘moon’? They shrugged.
The mad king was pleased. He called for his unborn heir to come to him, to journey through forests older than empires, over mountains that touch the stars, across the sprawling poppy fields, to the castle by the sea.
Tom crushed delicate poppy buds between his musician’s fingers, inhaled the sweet perfume of their destruction, and imagined them as the heads of infants.
Day one hundred and ninety-five. One hundred and ninety-four? It’s difficult to remember. The sunlight seems to blend into night; dawn is but an illusion.
Tom's lips burn with the icy kiss of the ghost. The green of its eyes consumes him whenever he blinks.
Ginevra watches him from the window overlooking the sea. She seems concerned.
Tom has taken such good care of the poppies in the wooden vase. He spends hours daydreaming about peeling them apart and smearing their red, wet remains against the windowpanes.
He touches his lips. They don’t feel cold to his fingers, but they ache with it. He’s read tales of frostbite, extremities falling away in the northern climate. Can that happen to a person’s mouth?
“Ginevra,” he says, and finds he’s suddenly already as close to her as he can get. Pressed up against the bars, draped up against them. He imagines he’s still beautiful, even like this, but he just feels wounded and empty.
Her face is still making that expression. Concerned for him, or concerned by him?
“Come here,” he says.
She ventures closer, glancing around as if to make certain they’re not being observed.
He tries to smile in a way that’s more welcoming than victorious. This will be the third day in a row that she’ll have come closer, have spoken to him.
Tom has taken such care with her. He hasn’t dared touch, not yet.
“I’m glad you were assigned here,” he confides, lowers his voice so she can pretend this is their little secret. “You’re so much kinder to me than Abraxas and Minerva.”
Her wet red lips part. “They don’t care much for you, do they? Imagine, Minnie told me you were too dangerous even to speak to…”
Tom tempers his laugh into something thin and pretty. “Why, how she exaggerates! If I were that dangerous, the king would have done away with my head long ago, I think.”
Ginevra laughs, too, leaning closer. His mouth waters. Each of her freckles is a star, distinct against the white sky of her neck.
He glances up into her eyes, and then she’s looking away, backing up a step, pulling her arms close to her chest.
“You can’t think I actually did those things,” Tom says, fingers itching with the memory of a knife and peach-soft skin.
“I saw Billy,” she says. “Someone did that to his hand.”
“Billy was deeply unstable.” He makes a production out of an anxious swallow, savoring the feel of her eyes on his throat. “He did it to himself, right in front of me – I think he thought it was funny, some way to torment me. What did the others tell you? That I somehow overpowered him and sawed his arm off with his own knife?”
“And what about – what about the thing you were incarcerated for in the first place?”
Tom smiles serenely through numb lips. “Do I look like a man that could kill a baby, Ginevra?”
The duchess gave birth in the midst of the poppies, mere fathoms from the castle itself.
They bore the newborn away from its parents, its screams echoing across the stone cobbles and drowning in the cheers of the court. The king looked down upon the mewling, bloody thing and smiled. “I present to you my true heir, child of thorn and flame.”
The party lasted almost a week. They gave the child to a wet nurse, sent the mother away to a private quarters to recover from the birth, and provided the duke with all the fine wines he could desire.
Tom stood at the forefront of it all, of course, with music and smiles and a treacherous, screaming bloodthirst that he tried to smother in sunlight and drink.
He found the child’s room easily, and spent hours lurking in the vicinity, listening to its cries, savoring glimpses of its nurses, tracking their movements through the door. He hid a knife under his jacket and dreamed of sinking it into another human neck.
It was over a month until they brought it back out to the court and displayed its wrinkled glory, dressed in fine red silks.
They named it Harry.
Its eyes were green as death.
He’s forgotten the days. Time’s passage, now, is marked in the cold creeping its way through every cell of his being, the icy claws of the ghost around his neck, the crackle of frozen marrow in his bones whenever he moves.
“Do you need a doctor?” Minerva asks, sneering as he shivers uselessly in the morning sunlight.
He unfurls his fingers, looking down at his fine white hands. They’d belonged to a musician, once. They’d belonged to a murderer. Now what purpose do they serve, save to crush delicate, wilting poppies in a vase of carved wood?
There’s a smear of red on his palm. Blood, or the juice of red petals? He can’t recall.
He tries to speak, but finds that he can’t form words through the ice in his throat.
The green-eyed thing looms just behind him. He can feel its claws embedded in his skin, piercing the delicate skin of his throat. Surely she can see it?
Tom always liked to think of himself as a planner. Thoughtful, careful. Precise.
In murder, he was none of those things. The hunger scraping away at his insides rendered him a monster of the moment.
The night he killed the child – the heir – Harry – was a night like any other. The cold light of the moon on his back, the pulling weight of his knife.
And then, suddenly and smoothly, it was like no other night before it. The machinery of his mind whispered to a halt, gummed up by the hungry, frothing thing within him.
He slipped in through the child’s window, simple as anything, the nighttime world wrought in polished silver.
A wet nurse snored in her bed across from the child’s crib. She stirred as Tom came in, changing the light in the room like a cloud passing before the moon.
The child came awake. Its eyes were a scrap of color in the dark, luminous and paradoxically ancient.
In the days to come, he would wish that he had been more thoughtful, that he had acted on something more than the fickle burn of instinct.
At that moment, though, he was too caught up in his fell bloodlust.
The wet nurse awoke to the sound of the infant’s cries, then those cries choking to a gurgling halt. She screamed.
There was no defense his silver tongue could spin to get him out of this. They chained his arms behind his back, presented him to the court with the child’s rusty, flaking blood still staining his bound hands.
To the tower with him, then, to live out the rest of his days.
There, surely, he would not be able to hurt anyone.
“What day is it?” he asks, barely managing to force the words through his numb face.
They’re the first words he’s spoken in an eternity, but he can’t hear if there’s a response. The frost has covered his ears, now.
He had woken up blind to the world, vision consumed by green. All he can feel is the cold, his aching bones, and the kiss of the sun on his face.
He leans into that warmth, desperate, feeling the press of Death’s claws in his neck.
There’s sensation in that, finally. A tremor running through the glass he’s pressed up against.
He lurches his shoulder against the glass – he’s on the windowsill, yes, that makes sense.
Hits it again.
Somewhere, he imagines, one of his faithful guards is saying his name. This is highly irregular behavior for him. Tom doesn’t care anymore.
Another hit into the window.
Another.
There should be pain in his shoulder, but he can’t feel it through the aching cold.
And then, at last, a crunch.
Freefall, and it feels like ecstasy.
He hits the ground, and there’s still no pain. Just the frostbite in his lips and his throat, the nauseating knowledge that his body is broken, broken.
The collision has cleared the green out of his vision. He blinks up into the abyss of the sky, the perfect poppies growing serenely up into eternal blue.
It’s so bright that it hurts his eyes. He shuts them, staring for a moment into the bloody red backs of his eyelids.
A shadow passes over that red.
Death leans over him, his face warm. There’s a wound on his throat, seething with blood, redder than the poppy fields.
He stretches a hand out for Tom. He takes it unthinkingly, and this time Death’s touch is like summer distilled.
The numbness washes away, leaving a moment of remembered pain – then tranquility.
“I killed you,” he tells the beautiful ghost.
“You did,” says Death – says Harry. “But now it’s time to go home.”
So they do.