1945
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The door to the headmaster's office closed with a hollow echo as Tom Riddle stepped into the silence. The summer sun filtered weakly through the high windows, casting long shadows across the stone floor, as if even the light itself feared to touch him.

He moved down the empty corridors with the slow, calculated steps of a predator, each stride echoing the simmering darkness that clawed beneath his skin.

Dippet had greeted him with a smile—an old man's warm but ignorant delight. He'd asked how Tom was faring, if he'd secured a respectable role in the Ministry, as though Riddle were one of the many bright-eyed fools content to let their talents waste in bureaucracy.

But the truth he'd delivered had shattered those illusions: he had been in Knockturn Alley, threading his way through shadows, breathing the thick, stale air of dark magic, his ambitions pulsing like a venomous wound.

Knockturn Alley—a place soaked in sin and secrets, its narrow paths slick with years of filth and darkness. The alleys whispered to him, spoke of the desperate, the wicked, the lost.

It was here he found himself, letting the shadows rise around him, feeding his hunger, drawing him closer to the inevitable.

Dippet had tried to hide his unease, his reluctance, but Riddle had seen the flicker in his eyes. After all the years of careful manipulation, of weaving a mask so pristine that even the headmaster himself had grown soft toward him, the man had seen through to the hollowness beneath.

For the first time, Dippet looked at him not as the promising young man he had protected, but as something else—something cold and rotting.

The rejection clawed into him, leaving a wound that festered with rage. But even that wound would serve him, feeding the furnace of his ambition.

Tom Riddle would not stop for a denial. He was building an empire, brick by bloody brick, and no door would remain closed to him. If Hogwarts would not serve his purpose, he would carve out his throne from darker places, forge his dominion with those who would bow to his will.

There was power in the venom of his hatred, in the slow, smoldering rage that filled every vein. His humanity, frail and thin, peeled away like dead skin, and what remained was something colder, something monstrous.

He could feel it now, as clear as the blood pounding in his head. He would rise, not as a man, but as a shadow, something to be feared and followed.