THE PROLOGUE

FATE WAS A FICKLE THING, he mused to himself.

No matter your creed, you were destined for fate to determine your path in life. That, along with the colour of your blood, was what connects you to every other human being. It was a fact he had long ago accepted, albeit reluctantly. From a young age, you are primed by society to fit the expectations it requires of you — personal beliefs and morals be damned.

As a young boy abandoned in what he considered his own personal hell, he watched and assessed those around him with calculated fascination; fascinated by the paths the children around him would walk in their life, however short or long fate decided those lives may be.

He'd spent many years in solemn waiting, subconsciously always being aware that eventually he'd have all the answers to the never ending questions that plagued his youthful mind. See, he was quite the curious child and had a thirst for knowledge — a thirst he was often mocked by the other children in the orphanage for — and it didn't really matter what type of knowledge it was.

Knowledge was powerful, and knowledge would deliver him to greatness.

Knowledge of him being a wizard didn't exactly come as a surprise, he always knew he was special. He could make people who deserved it feel pain, the bullies who cornered him every morning to steal his measly rations of food for their greedy selves and the wicked adults who he was supposed to trust, who couldn't quite comprehend that no meant no.

They deserved it, his deteriorating conscience would coo.

They deserved it.

Hogwarts was everything he could've dreamed of and more, the place that laid claim on his heart and the home he never knew he wanted or needed. The vault that was his mind had stored many memories away over the years, some for calculative reasons and others for personal, the memory of the first moment he saw Hogwarts being personal. Sometimes he'd revisit just to feel the raw and wholesome emotions that came with being an emotionally deprived child seeing his home for the first time.

He'd never been a sentimental man and he wouldn't be becoming one anytime soon but he was human and human nature always wins.

It was human nature, to a degree, that led him on the path he undertook in life. Humans, like fate, were fickle and the tempting fruit that was power was just too delicious to dismiss.

The temptations of unbidden desire and Morgana help him, love, was part of human nature too and although as a boy he never thought he'd fall victim to it, he did.

Like the ideological superstitions and paranoia of Muggles, Tom believed himself to have beenof been bewitched. Only once, though it hardly mattered how many times; the consequences of it had promised a compromising, troublesome and passionate story for all of Magical Britain, and dare he say the World, to write in the history books.

A daring girl she was and his darling she became, Iris Moore sought to gain Tom Riddle's hand in friendship and unknowingly to the both of them, for what could be described as the longest of times, she gained his heart too.