Chapter 235: Self
It was a young male voice.
The sound did not travel through the stale, dust-choked air of the room. Instead, it rang out abruptly, echoing deep within the confines of Tamara's own skull.
Tamara tightened her grip on her holly wand. Her dark eyes remained as still and cold as stagnant water, fixing their gaze on the tarnished silver of Ravenclaw's Diadem. The ancient relic rested atop a precarious mountain of forgotten junk, emitting a faint, sickly blue glow.
She knew exactly what this artifact was. More, she knew exactly who cowered inside it.
It was herself.
Or, to be precise, it was a fragmented sliver of soul, personally severed and sealed away decades ago by a young Tom Riddle during his travels through the dark forests of Albania.
'A defective byproduct trapped in a piece of gaudy jewelry actually thinks it has the right to judge me?'
Tamara let out a cold, mocking sneer in the depths of her mind.
She raised her wand without a single ounce of hesitation.
"Confundo."
Several silent flashes of magic sparked through the gloom. High up on the cluttered walls of the Room of Requirement, the painted portraits of ancient wizards—who had been feigning sleep or shamelessly attempting to eavesdrop—were instantly blinded. A thick, impenetrable layer of grey fog coated their canvases, silencing their painted gasps.
With the audience handled, Tamara strode forward, her boots crunching over broken quills and shattered crystal vials. She marched straight toward the towering pile of junk and stopped before the diadem.
Raising her holly wand, she leveled the tip directly at the faintly glowing blue gemstone and whispered.
"Legilimens."
Two massive, identical mental forces collided violently in mid-air. The impact was entirely silent, yet it rattled the very foundations of her consciousness.
Tamara felt a massive, tearing pull. Her awareness was violently yanked from the dusty room and dragged into a freezing, desolate forest.
This was the soul vision contained within the diadem.
Standing in the dead center of this boundless, shadowed woodland was a handsome young man.
He wore a set of immaculate, perfectly tailored robes. His dark hair was combed back carefully, not a single strand out of place. His facial features were as flawless and cold as a marble sculpture, but his eyes ruined the illusion of humanity. They shimmered with a dark, cruel scarlet light.
The twenty-year-old Tom Riddle.
The Dark Lord at the absolute peak of his youthful arrogance.
"Look at yourself now..."
Young Tom raked his disgusted gaze over the frail, delicate girl standing before him, taking in her soft features and petite frame.
"A weak, pathetic shell. Actually wavering just now over a few meaningless tears and the hypocritical concern of a filthy mudblood?"
Tom began to pace slowly around Tamara. His footsteps made no sound on the dead leaves. His tone dripped with malicious mockery and high-and-mighty accusation.
"You could have easily tortured her. You could have snapped her mind and turned her into a drooling lunatic, or simply used the Killing Curse to erase her miserable existence from the earth. Yet you act like a wailing wretch! Trying to use your pathetic, scrap-heap magical knowledge to make a deal with her?"
He stopped, his lip curling into a sneer. "You have been completely corrupted by this ridiculous shell and those nauseating, mortal emotions!"
Young Tom halted his pacing abruptly. Those scarlet eyes locked onto Tamara, burning with absolute fury. His voice exploded through the dark mental space like a crack of thunder.
"You are not worthy of being called Voldemort! You are nothing but an inferior substitute... contaminated by emotion!"
Accompanying his furious roar, the mental space violently distorted. A surge of freezing, black-green miasma erupted from the ground.
This fog carried the stench of rotting resentment, dragged up from the deepest, darkest bogs of the Albanian forests. It was highly corrosive, hissing and coiling toward Tamara like a pit of countless venomous snakes, fully intent on swallowing this weak, defective product alive.
Facing Tom's theatrical mockery and the rapidly approaching tide of lethal miasma, Tamara merely furrowed her brow in mild irritation.
She had to admit, this twenty-year-old version of herself had managed to strike at that tiny sliver of unease buried in her chest. She really had been affected by that mudblood's emotional outburst just moments ago. The system's constant conditioning, the forced acts of virtue—it was leaving a residue.
But as Tamara raised her dark eyes to look at the arrogant, overbearing young man posturing before her, a strange sensation washed over her.
It was a deep sense of absurdity. Like watching a rabid dog chase its own tail.
Arrogant. Narrow-minded. Viewing every living creature as mere grass waiting to be trampled.
Staring at him, Tamara suddenly understood exactly why Voldemort—the dark wizard who had once stood at the absolute pinnacle of the Wizarding world—had ultimately met such a pathetic, tragic failure.
It was because of his utter, blinding contempt for others.
He was so consumed by his own superiority that he did not even deign to take a second look at the very weapons that could kill him. Love. Sacrifice. The messy, irrational forces that defied pure magical theory.
'What a pathetic blind man...'
Tamara watched the black-green miasma rear up, mere inches from her face. She did not bother to dodge. Instead, a conceited, chilling chuckle slipped from her lips.
If this so-called emotion was a potent poison—a poison strong enough to make the ultimate Killing Curse rebound—then she had already tasted it, had she not?
Whether it was that mudblood's pure, unfiltered concern just now, or that strange, alien hesitation blooming in her own chest, she had already swallowed the venom.
And yet, she, the great Dark Lord, had not been destroyed. She still stood here, her mind razor-sharp, her ambitions entirely intact.
A tidal wave of absolute superiority flooded Tamara's soul.
She was like a madman who had just glimpsed the tip of a frozen iceberg and arrogantly declared they had conquered the entire ocean.
In her conceited logic, Tamara determined that since she had experienced and endured this ridiculous, lethal emotion, it meant she had completely mastered the greatest variable that had once killed her!
"Truly laughable."
Tamara slowly raised her right hand.
The very moment the lethal, black-green miasma brushed against her pale fingertips, it did not burn her. Instead, the corrosive magic surrendered, converging obediently into a swirling vortex in the center of her palm.
Young Tom's cruel laughter choked off instantly. A flash of genuine shock shattered the arrogance in his scarlet eyes.
"Too weak."
Tamara looked at him. Her gaze held the exact same pity one might reserve for a frog trapped at the bottom of a dark well. Her tone dripped with a blood-chilling arrogance that far surpassed his own.
"You fear those emotions. You call them weak, and you throw them away like a sniveling coward. That is exactly why you will die choking on the very feelings you despise most."
She took a slow step forward. "But I am different."
Tamara suddenly clenched her fist. The swirling vortex of miasma in her palm violently warped, instantly transforming into a terrifying, jagged maw of pure dark magic!
"Those disgusting emotions you avoid at all costs? I have already touched them with my own bare hands. They are nothing special. And I have completely mastered them."
Her dark eyes flared. "Now, take your pathetic ignorance and disappear."
Young Tom finally recognized the cold, creeping threat of true death.
The entire reason he had chosen to reveal himself and launch an attack at this exact moment was because he had keenly captured Tamara's brief, emotional wavering.
In his pretentious, limited perception, the mental defenses of a main soul contaminated by such filthy mortal emotions would surely be fragile. He truly believed he could easily bite through her consciousness with his Black Magic miasma, turn the tables, and seize control of this fresh, young shell.
He never could have imagined that instead of being softened by emotion, Tamara had developed an even more morbid, terrifyingly arrogant desire for absolute control because she had been in contact with those feelings!
Realizing he could no longer resist her head-on, Tom made a prompt, desperate decision. He violently sealed his own consciousness, attempting to retreat into the deepest, darkest core of the diadem and force himself into a heavy slumber.
As long as the physical Horcrux itself remained intact, he would simply wait. One day, he would wake again and rule the Wizarding world.
But he was far too slow.
Tamara urged the corrupted miasma forward. That terrifying, jagged maw of power instantly tore through the defensive layers of mist shielding Tom.
She reached out without a shred of mercy. Her pale fingers clamped around the fleeing, translucent soul form. With a brutal yank, she dragged him backward, ignoring his silent screams, and ruthlessly stuffed him between her teeth.
She bit down.
Suddenly, Tamara's brow furrowed.
Something was wrong.
It was too weak.
Even though this was only a small fragment of soul severed at the age of twenty, the strength of its resistance and the sheer density of the spirit should absolutely not be this thin.
It felt exactly as if she had picked up a plump, juicy apple, only to turn it around and discover that the other half had already been crudely gnawed away by some unknown beast.
The soul hidden inside this diadem... was incomplete!
But this sudden sliver of doubt was quickly drowned out by a far more intense, overwhelming sensation.
As she completely devoured and digested the very last struggling remnants of young Tom's soul, a wave of unmatched satisfaction exploded deep within Tamara's core.
Obliterating her past self. Negating her former, narrow-minded stupidity. Reclaiming all that fractured power and strength, dragging it back into the one and only 'Me'!
This absolute supremacy, this intoxicating feeling of trampling all things in the world—including her own past—under her boots, allowed Tamara to experience an unmatched, shuddering pleasure.
It was not the vulgar, mundane happiness of eating sweet pastries or receiving a thoughtful gift.
It was a deep, twisted self-sublimation.
She had personally sliced open her flawed, inferior self and ground it down into raw nourishment for the 'New Me.' This violent reconstruction, completed entirely through the destruction of her own history, pushed her soul to a peak of supreme euphoria at the exact moment of reshaping.
This was a true, genuine happiness. A joy that belonged entirely to her.
"Now is the time..."
Tamara's consciousness instantly severed its connection to the mental space, snapping back into her physical shell in reality.
Her eyes flew open. Her dark pupils shimmered with a feverish, manic excitement.
She snatched the holly wand from the table beside her, her entire body trembling slightly as she savored the boiling pleasure radiating from the depths of her soul.
"Expecto Patronum!"
Tamara's voice echoed sharply through the cavernous, empty Room of Requirement.
A massive, blinding surge of white mist erupted from the tip of her wand! It poured out frantically, roaring like a torrential flood breaking through a shattered dam.
The thick, luminous mist instantly banished the gloom, illuminating the towering piles of junk in a brilliant, holy light. It churned and converged violently in mid-air, radiating a pure yet terrifyingly heavy pressure.
The mist swirled around Tamara in a roaring cyclone, thick enough to blind.
Yet, it did not form a physical entity.
Tamara stood frozen in the center of the white storm. The holly wand in her hand slowly lowered. Her manic excitement fractured, replaced by a deep, brewing confusion.
She had found it. She had finally grasped the ultimate pleasure, and the sheer volume of her magic had easily reached the standard required for casting the Patronus Charm. This gushing ocean of white mist was more than enough to repel a horde of Dementors.
But why did the Patronus still refuse to take shape?
What was she still missing?
Could it be that this immense satisfaction—a joy derived entirely from cannibalizing her own soul—was still not recognized by this ridiculous, hypocritical Light magic?
Tamara let out an irritated breath, waving her hand to disperse the lingering mist.
She turned her cold gaze back to the pile of junk.
Ravenclaw's Diadem still lay quietly atop the chipped stone statue. However, the gemstone that had previously emitted that faint, sickly blue light was now completely dim. It had been reduced to a lifeless, ordinary piece of dull glass.
The soul hidden inside had been entirely drained dry by her teeth.
But Tamara's expression rapidly darkened into a grim, murderous scowl.
She had not forgotten the fatal anomaly she had tasted during the devouring process.
The soul was incomplete.
Someone else had touched this diadem before her.
Not only did this unknown rat know about the existence of the Room of Requirement, and not only had they managed to find Voldemort's hidden Horcrux buried in centuries of trash, but they had actually managed to crudely extract a portion of Tom Riddle's soul from the artifact!
Who was it?
Dumbledore?
No. Impossible. If that hypocritical old fox had discovered a Horcrux within his precious school, he would have simply destroyed the container completely. He had absolutely no motive to carefully strip away a piece of the soul, let alone the dark, esoteric means required to do so without shattering the diadem itself.
Tamara's dark eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. A frantic, icy killing intent began to spread through her chest, freezing the last remnants of her euphoria.
Within this seemingly impregnable fortress of Hogwarts, there was actually a thief hiding in the shadows. A thief so skilled that even she had not noticed their presence.
And this filthy thief had actually dared to steal the power that rightfully belonged to the great Dark Lord!
"You must be truly tired of living..." Tamara sneered. Her voice was a soft, venomous hiss.
She reached out, neatly gathering the parchment notes scattered on the table, and locked them away securely inside a heavy wooden cabinet in the Room of Requirement.
"It seems it is entirely necessary to give Hogwarts a thorough cleaning."
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