Prologue

Dinner in the Great Hall of Hogwarts was coming to an end. The students were full. They lazily sipped cold drinks. The older students were discussing the upcoming exams, and the younger ones were discussing their imminent departure home.

Since June 1943 proved to be a very hot month, the Great Hall's ceiling featured a magical, rainy sky that stood in stark contrast to the scorching sun outside the window. The raindrops from the enchanted ceiling did not reach the young wizards, dissolving into the air.

"Enough!" From the Ravenclaw House table came scolding and grumbling. "All you do is whine all the time!"

"Olive, that's enough." The squeaky voice of a girl of about fourteen unpleasantly hurt the rumor.

"I wonder if your Muggle parents are always whining, just like you? Moaning Myrtle! Moaning Myrtle!" laughed Olive Hornby and straightened her dark blue tie, which complemented her ashy hair perfectly in a tight braid.

"Olive!" squeaked the girl, whose eyes were wet.

"Stupid, four-eyed girl! You obviously don't belong in our house. How did you even get in here?!"

Myrtle Warren, unable to endure another attack from her fellow student, burst into tears loudly. She jumped up from her seat and quickly left the Eagle House table.

The hurried footsteps echoed down the hall and up the stairs to the second floor. The tears streaming down her cheeks made it impossible for the girl to see where she was running. And those damn glasses! Why not make fun of Moaning Myrtle? She was given such moniker due to her overly sentimental nature. No matter what the guys told her, she always took it personally. Almost every day brought another outburst of emotions and occasionally irrational tantrums. However, it would pass fairly quickly, and life would go back to normal time after time.

"Moaning Myrtle, of course," she sobbed, opening the first door on the second floor. "That's how they're going to call me from now on."

She let out a howl through her tears, calling herself by her nickname. Wiping her wet cheeks with her palm, the third-year student looked around. It turned out to be an abandoned girls' bathroom. Sobbing hysterically, Myrtle ran into the first bathroom stalls she came across.

After sitting there for what seemed like an entire evening, she finally calmed down. Her eyes were swollen, and her face was puffy. However, that didn't matter as she'd finally calmed down, which meant that everything was okay.

After an hour of tantrums, Myrtle was about to leave the bolthole when the bathroom door creaked loudly. She froze involuntarily, listening to the approaching footsteps. What if that vile Olive had come here to drive the poor girl to tears again? The decision to wait in the weeds was made right away.

The footsteps moved steadily toward the bathroom stalls but suddenly fell silent, apparently somewhere near the sinks. Moaning Myrtle barely breathed, listening intently to every echo. Her acute hearing clung to a quiet, calm voice, followed by the screech of a sliding mechanism. Unclear. Who was it? Myrtle leaned against the door, trying to catch the faintest glimpse of the person's identity. She felt shivers down her spine when she heard a second voice, one that was low, harsh, and disgusting. The quiet voice responded, only this time it was audible and louder. It's a young man! Or rather, two, and they are speaking in some incomprehensible language.

"What the hell are boys doing in the girls' bathroom?" Myrtle was indignant, but only in her head. In fact, she hadn't made a sound at all. "That's all we need! Boys are walking around in the girls' bathrooms! Which, by the way, are not only bathrooms but sometimes a bolthole from obnoxious fellow students, where you can safely hide and cry your eyes out!"

Myrtle pushed the door open with confidence, prepared to make fun of the unintelligible, gibberish-like language and scare off the boys who had broken into the girls' bathroom.

Two huge yellow eyes with vertical pupils were the last thing fourteen-year-old Myrtle Warren saw in her life. Her breathless body collapsed on the cold tiled floor of the bathroom next to the black diary.

A tall young man of about sixteen turned around slowly. He was incredibly handsome, yet he had a gloomy appearance. He inhaled deeply after casting a contemptuous glance at the lifeless body that was lying on the ground.

"Fucking mudblood..."

Then he faced the area of the room where the enormous white sinks had been. In that precise place, right out of the floor, protruded the scaly, as if armored, body of a large snake. Anyone who saw it would have been horrified. However, the young man was calm and, obviously, upset about one thing only: the corpse of the witness.

"Basilisk, go back to the Chamber of Secrets. We must close it before someone comes here," he hissed in an unusual language, and the serpent immediately obediently disappeared into the darkness of the pipe leading deep underground.

As the serpent king crawled away into the bowels of Hogwarts, the young student hissed in Parseltongue again, setting the mechanism in motion to conceal the monster's grim hideout. Then he leaned over the girl's body and touched her still-warm forehead with his fingertips.

"Silly girl," the whisper of a human language still sounded as frightening as ever. "Everyone knows that the basilisk's gaze is deadly."

There was an ominous silence and the same tension in the air. The smell of death had never been so close before. That horrible stench suddenly hit his body and his mind. It passed through like black matter, causing panic. Could it really be like that? So suddenly, so sneakily, death jumps around the corner and stabs you right in the heart! You were alive, then you are dead... All of those thoughts gave goosebumps. "You just have to make a human sacrifice... Well, or several!" a painfully familiar voice, turning into a playful laughter, arose by its own in the echoes of memories.

The defining moment.

The young man picked up the dark diary, with the letters "Tom Marvolo Riddle" gleaming on the back, and squeezed it tightly in his left hand. Listening to the silence, he made sure no one was around. Furthermore, it was unlikely that anyone would show up here—this was almost an abandoned bathroom, after all. From his robe's inside pocket, a white magic wand appeared in his right hand.

A light, graceful wave of a magic wand.

A quiet whisper of an ancient dark spell.

The hellish pain suddenly distorted the flawless face. Breaking bones, tearing into pieces, living flesh—it was nothing compared to the shredding of the most precious thing of all—the soul. Tom Riddle groaned hoarsely, falling to his knees in front of the dead girl. It seemed as if all the air in the abandoned room of the magical castle had simply disappeared. Disappeared, as once, when he lost something insanely precious that seemed to make him go crazy. The feeling now was sickeningly familiar. He let go of the diary and held onto his stomach. The agony filled him completely. With a mute, anguished cry, the soul split in two, bursting out in a gray cloud of smoke from his chest and disappeared into a dark diary.

Heavy breathing filled the space in the girls' bathroom. Tom Riddle slowly took the diary into his hands. He stood up cautiously. His legs became weak; they did not want to obey the owner. He left the bathroom on the second floor and strolled to the library. Away. He had never been here.

A fellow student was walking toward Tom Riddle in the fourth-floor hallway.

"My Lord," a young, tall student said and bowed his head, causing platinum hair to fall on his forehead.

"Later, Abraxas," Riddle replied coldly. He got a calm, barely noticeable bow.

There was a small table at the farthest corner of the library window, but no one ever sat down there, knowing that it belonged to a Slytherin student, the prefect of Hogwarts. Though it wasn't stated explicitly, all students followed the rule. Tom sank feebly into a chair and stole a quick look around the library; there were almost no students. He confidently opened his diary and levitated a jar of ink and a quill on the table.

The long, pale fingers trembled a little, but the handwriting was still elegant.

June 1, 1938, Wednesday

This feeling started growing deep inside...