Chapter 58: The Gaunt Ring
It was the first Hogsmeade weekend since his birthday party, and Timothy's mind was... loud.
He woke that Saturday morning with a feeling of deep irritation. Normally, his mornings began with a single passionate thought: a new runic theory, a transmutation problem, or the elegant physics of his "Senjutsu" project.
But this morning, his first thought was: Hermione.
The kiss at the party had been... fascinating. It had been an explosion of sensations and emotions he had enjoyed far more than he expected. But the aftermath was a disaster. She was avoiding him.
She had spent the last week fleeing from him. If he entered the library, she suddenly remembered she needed to be somewhere else. If he sat at the Ravenclaw table near the edge, she made sure to sit on the other side of the Gryffindor table, out of his line of sight. It was predictable. And exasperating.
His mind, which thrived on the beauty of systems and the pursuit of knowledge, was now constantly distracted by a whirlwind of messy human emotions: his own confused feelings, his playful jealousy, his new attraction, and now, frustration at her evasion. It was a distraction. A wonderful, intoxicating distraction, yes, but one that was interrupting his real work.
This is chaotic, he thought as he dressed in his dormitory. I need clarity. I need a victory.
He needed to return to the only passion that always made sense, the only one that never fled: magic.
His obsession with the Deathly Hallows was his anchor. His failure to archive Harry's Cloak had been the challenge. His failure to archive the Founder's magic in Ravenclaw's Diadem had been an insult. But the Diadem had given him a gift. His mind's Archive had devoured Riddle's soul fragment, and with it had come a new treasure map.
He saw Riddle's memory with crystal clarity: a decrepit shack on a wooded hillside. Little Hangleton. A dusty wooden box hidden beneath the floorboards. And inside it, a heavy gold ring, set with an opaque black stone.
The Gaunt Ring. A Horcrux, yes. But, far more importantly, the Resurrection Stone.
A slow, determined smile spread across Timothy's face. That was the plan. While the rest of the school prepared for a day of buying sweets and butterbeer in Hogsmeade, he had a pilgrimage to make.
He put on his cloak, but not the school one. It was a simple charcoal-colored traveling cloak. He left the Ravenclaw common room, his mind now clear and focused. The noise of Hermione faded, replaced by the thrill of the hunt.
He left the castle, avoiding Filch with ease. Once on the grounds, away from curious windows, he found a secluded corner near the Forbidden Forest. He didn't need a broom. That was clumsy. With a fluid gesture of his hand—a stylistic flourish he had perfected and loved—a cocoon of invisible power wrapped around him. A mastery-level Disillusionment Charm and a broomless flight spell.
He rose into the air, a silent distortion in the morning sky, and headed south, toward Little Hangleton. It was time to collect another Hallow.
The broomless flight, a skill he had perfected in the Room of Requirement based on Muggle aerodynamics and pure channeling of will, had been invigorating. The freezing November wind had cleared the last remnants of his emotional "hangover."
He landed softly on the wooded hillside, his Disillusionment Charm dissipating like mist. The village of Little Hangleton lay in the valley below, but his target was up here, hidden by gnarled trees and a reputation for madness.
It was exactly as Riddle's memory had shown him: a decrepit shack, barely standing. The wood was rotten, the roof caved in in several places, and a dead snake was nailed to the front door. The place reeked. Not just of decay and misery, but of magic. Dark magic, ancient and incredibly paranoid.
As he approached, his Occlumency, now a passive shield, hummed as it sensed the hostile magic. They were curses. Layers and layers of them, woven into the rotting wood and into the earth itself, designed to maim, madden, or kill anyone who came near.
Timothy stopped at the door, his hand extended. He didn't need to touch it.
He activated his new perception, the "Sight" Luna had helped him unlock. The world changed. He stopped seeing the rotting wood and saw the intention behind it. The curses were... ugly. They were tangled, like a nest of snakes made of barbed wire. He saw the sickly green glow of conceptual poison curses, the jagged red of pain hexes, and a murky, confused gray of repulsion and disorientation spells.
Timothy felt a pang of almost artistic disdain. Not for the darkness of the magic; he loved all magic. He was offended by the sheer clumsiness.
How... chaotic, he thought. No elegance. Pure brute force and paranoid desperation.
It was the magic of a family that had collapsed in on itself, each generation adding another rusty lock to a door that no longer protected anything. It was the antithesis of Salazar's elegant engineering or the cold precision of Flamel's notes.
He could have blasted them to pieces. A simple mastery-level explosion spell would have wiped the shack off the map. But that was loud. And, more importantly, boring. No. This was a puzzle. And he adored puzzles.
He raised his hand, his fingers curling slightly. He concentrated, using his "Sight" to follow the threads of the tangled magic. He found the central knot: a particularly nasty blood curse on the threshold that acted as the anchor for all the others. He didn't cast a counter-spell; that would have been tedious. Instead, using his pure will as a conceptual scalpel, he simply pulled.
There was a sound, not in his ears, but in his mind, like a thousand old violin strings snapping at once. The green and red auras surrounding the shack flickered, convulsed, and dissolved into harmless sparks. The air stopped smelling of death and went back to smelling like damp forest. The shack door swung open with a pitiful groan.
Timothy entered. The interior was even worse. Broken furniture, decades of filth. He followed Riddle's mental map, his gaze going to the floorboards near a collapsed fireplace. With a simple gesture of his hand, the floorboards lifted, revealing a small dark hollow in the earth.
There it was. A small wooden chest, bound with rotted leather straps.
Timothy levitated the small chest, pulling it from the dirty earth. It landed softly on a rickety table, raising a cloud of dust. The air in the Gaunt shack was heavy, charged with the stench of madness and dark magic.
He was fascinated. He felt the two layers of power inside the chest even before opening it. One was loud, furious, a psychic screech of arrogance and pain: Riddle's soul fragment. It was a signature he recognized instantly, identical in flavor to the diary and the diadem. But beneath it, there was something else. Something vast, silent, and ancient. A cold power, not like ice, but like the depth of space, filled with a melancholic longing. It was the Resurrection Stone.
His obsession with the Hallows made his hand tremble with anticipation. But he was, first and foremost, a man of processes. He couldn't study the artifact until it was clean.
With a gesture of his hand, the chest lid opened. There it was. A heavy gold ring, set with an opaque black stone that seemed to absorb the little light entering the shack.
And the magic spilled out.
He felt the killing curse before he saw it. A wave of murderous magic, bound to the ring, designed to instantly annihilate anyone arrogant or stupid enough to put it on. It was brilliant work, a masterpiece of defensive dark magic. Riddle had been a genius, no doubt.
But Timothy wasn't impressed. He was prepared.
"What a mess," he murmured.
With a fluid gesture of his free hand—a stylistic flourish he had come to love for its drama—he faced the curse. He didn't cast a counter-spell. He didn't try to disarm it. He simply unraveled it. Using his Archive, which now contained Flamel's notes on "Death magic" and "conceptual entropy," he saw the curse's structure. He saw where it was anchored to the ring, where it drew power from. And with a surgeon's precision, he simply disconnected the threads.
There was a hissing sound, like water being thrown on embers, and the aura of death surrounding the ring dissipated. Fascinating. Mastery-level magic, dismantled in seconds.
Now, the pest. The Horcrux.
From his shrunken trunk, which he placed on the table, he took out a thick crystal vial, reinforced with runes. The dark green liquid inside swirled lazily. Ophion's venom. There was no ritual. There was no grand speech. This wasn't a heroic act; it was pest control.
He uncorked the vial and, with a chemist's precision, tilted his hand and let a few drops of the most lethal venom in the world fall onto the ring.
The effect was instantaneous and violent.
A psychic SCREAM, sharp and furious, exploded in Timothy's mind, much stronger than the Diadem's. Riddle's soul fragment, older and more conscious, realized its annihilation. The drop of green venom hit the gold. There was a violent HISSSS!, like acid on metal. A cloud of black, oily smoke burst from the ring. The smoke twisted, trying to form a face (Tom Riddle's face), its eyes opening wide with hatred and panic.
And then, the venom annihilated it. The soul cloud dissolved, its scream cut off. The Horcrux ceased to exist.
Timothy watched the process with clinical fascination, his Archive recording every second. Pure conceptual negation. Basilisk venom doesn't attack the object; it attacks the soul anchored to it. Fast. Clean.
The black, oily smoke, Tom Riddle's last psychic scream, dissipated in the stale air of the shack. The oppressive stench of dark magic and the sensation of a killing curse disappeared with it. The air went back to smelling like rotting wood and damp earth. Timothy watched as the last drop of Ophion's venom sizzled and evaporated from the gold's surface, leaving the metal clean. Another soul specimen cataloged in his Archive, another piece of Voldemort's puzzle stored away.
But that wasn't what he had come for.
He reached out and picked up the ring. He no longer needed to levitate it. The curse was gone. The gold was heavy in his palm, but the stone... the stone was the real prize. It was still there, black, opaque, and visibly cracked, with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows engraved on its surface.
The instant his skin touched the stone, he felt it.
His passion for magic, that obsession that defined his life, soared. It was unmistakable. It was a Hallow. But it was so, so different from Harry's Cloak.
The Cloak had been a void. A cold hole in reality, a concept of absence his Archive couldn't touch. This... this wasn't absence. It was a presence. He felt a conceptual pull, a longing, a deep and melancholic gravity. It was as if the stone were full of echoes, of whispers, of the sadness of Death, not as an end, but as a place.
It was beautiful. It was the most fascinating puzzle he had ever encountered.
He closed his eyes, his hand closing around the ring. The kiss with Hermione had been an intoxicating experience, yes, but this... this was ecstasy. This was the unknown.
He focused his will.
Archive.
Nothing.
He frowned. No. Impossible. Not again.
He refused to accept another failure. The Cloak was one thing, but this... this was different. He felt it.
He tried again, harder. He opened his mind, his secret Archive, and pushed against the stone, trying to force the copy. His passion demanded an answer. He wanted to tear out the secret of Resurrection.
And then, something happened that he didn't expect.
The instant his Archive pushed, the Stone's magic... vanished.
The vibration stopped. The melancholic longing faded. The vast, ancient power he had felt moments before... withdrew. Timothy opened his eyes, bewildered. He held the ring in his palm. He felt nothing anymore. It was... an ordinary stone. A simple black rock, cracked and worthless, set in gold.
He wasn't frustrated. He wasn't angry, as he had been with the Cloak. He was deeply, absolutely, and deliciously intrigued.
A slow smile spread across his face in the dusty shack.
How... clever, he thought. It turned itself off?
He laughed, a short, amused sound. It was a puzzle! Harry's Cloak was a conceptual brick wall, a total rejection. But the Stone... the Stone was a closed door.
It's not immune to my Archive, he realized, his mind burning with excitement. It's... shy. It hid from me!
It was a defense mechanism! Conceptual magic that was reactive, almost conscious. This was far more fascinating than a simple wall. The Cloak was a "No." The Stone was a "Catch me if you can."
He pocketed the ring. His obsession with the Hallows had just found a new and delicious layer of complexity. He returned to Hogwarts, his mind already burning with theories on how to "persuade" a Hallow to let itself be read.