Tom pulled two books from Dumbledore's shelves without much deliberation, then moved to the window.
When he had left the paddock with Fawkes, the sky had still been clear, white clouds scattered across blue. Now dark storm clouds sat low over the castle, and somewhere in the distance, a dull roll of thunder was already building. Hagrid had dismissed the class and sent everyone back inside, so Tom made his way to the Entrance Hall to find Hermione and Daphne.
"What did Dumbledore want?" Daphne asked, running a hand through her wind-tangled hair.
"Grindelwald killed people in North America. The Picquery family, mostly. Former MACUSA President's line, nearly all of them gone. Dumbledore is furious. He's left to duel him."
Tom gave them the short version. By tomorrow or the day after, word of the Picquery massacre would be everywhere anyway.
It was also, he reflected, precisely why he had never had much interest in North American families. Their foundations were shallow. Manageable. The old pure-blood families of continental Europe or the East were something else entirely. You could not simply eliminate them. You might keep at it and eventually discover you were one of them yourself. A North American family was a straight wooden pole. The old families were trees, roots tangled deep, branches spread wide. Similar in height, perhaps, but not remotely comparable in terms of what they occupied and how far down they went.
Hermione pulled her cloak a little tighter around herself. For her, the casual erasure of an entire family was still something her mind needed a moment to process.
"That's horrible. Grindelwald is even worse than You-Know-Who."
Tom steered them into the Great Hall and chose a seat.
"They're not really the same thing. Voldemort kills because it pleases him, or more precisely, he uses killing as a mechanism to make people fear him. Grindelwald is taking revenge. He's not a madman. He's an ambitious one."
"Ambitious people cause more damage," Hermione said. "Like certain historical examples."
"Muggle history and wizarding history have things in common, but they can't always be mapped onto each other directly." Tom turned to face her. "A wizard's power belongs entirely to themselves. Magic is the expression of something miraculous. Grindelwald is dangerous primarily because he is powerful. That's what makes people listen to him. If you took the same ideology and handed it to Lockhart, asked him to rally people against the Statute of Secrecy, how many do you think would follow?"
He gave it a beat.
"If anyone did, it would be a collection of idiots. Nothing worth losing sleep over. Strength is the foundation of everything. Whatever someone believes, whatever kind of person they are, once their power crosses a certain threshold they become a genuine threat. Come to my room tomorrow evening. I'll work with you on building yours."
"Oh." Hermione nodded, somewhere between understanding and not quite.
...
Night settled over the castle.
The rest of the students had long since drifted into weekend rhythm, but Tom went to the eighth floor and entered the Room of Requirement.
He had Ravenclaw's key now. No more pacing in front of a stretch of blank wall three times like someone performing a ritual. The stone simply rippled like the surface of disturbed water, and he walked through without breaking stride.
The materials and equipment he needed were already arranged in the small garden inside. Ravenclaw had clearly put considerable effort into making her living space convenient, and the fruits of that effort extended to Tom now. He only had to think of something and it appeared. No incantation, no preamble.
In certain ways, the room had begun to approximate the learning space.
The worktable was over three meters long and covered with cauldrons, rune-engraving tools, rows of materials, and several toy bears. Tom picked one up and dissected it methodically, revealing the layered inscriptions and compound materials hidden inside its stuffing.
Ravenclaw had done all of this originally out of convenience. Tom was doing it now for the same reason, just with higher stakes.
He refused to spend the rest of his life chained to a production line.
Since no alchemist in this world met his standards, he would build one himself. He would compress his own memories into alchemical constructs and create workers capable of replacing him. At that level of complexity, calling them puppets felt inadequate. Alchemical lifeforms was closer to the truth.
Ravenclaw had already guessed his direction, which was why her instruction had been so precisely targeted. Even with both of them working at it, two genuinely gifted wizards, the difficulty remained severe. Alchemical constructs lacked the architecture of a human brain, so the problem had to be solved through runic engineering, and through the most essential ingredient of all.
Soul energy.
Cthulhu's notes had described several extraction methods. Tom was not going to slaughter innocents for experiments, which meant every test was cautious, measured, and slow.
"Tom, look at this section here. Shouldn't you anchor a Sustaining Charm into it? The escaping magic needs somewhere to go. You can't rely on flesh-based magic to carry all of it."
He listened to Ravenclaw's guidance carefully, nodding at intervals, adjusting with his own hands as she spoke.
Two bottles of Energy Potion disappeared over the course of the night without him really noticing. When he finally looked up, it was nearly dawn.
He had not forgotten Fudge.
Tom cleared away the waste materials, left the Room of Requirement, and walked directly toward the Headmaster's office. He planned to use the fireplace there to travel to the Ministry.
Outside the castle walls, the clouds had gone black. Something moved inside them, dark swollen shapes flickering at the edges, not quite visible, not quite not.