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English
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Anonymous
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Published:
2026-02-25
Updated:
2026-04-04
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3,755
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5/?
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the desire of the moth for the star

Anonymous

Summary:

In his final eighteen months at Hogwarts, Tom Riddle devotes himself to academic excellence, the study of forbidden magic, and writing letters to a boy who no longer exists.

Chapter 1: february 25th, 1944

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Harry Evans,

 

If that is, in fact, your name. I at least commend the simplicity of it. It is plain enough to be forgettable, which I suspect was the intention. I have my doubts about it regardless. I have my doubts about a great many things where you are concerned.

I shall dispense with the pleasantries.

I find the absence of even a cursory farewell to be beneath you. Or perhaps not. I confess I have been proven, rather recently, that I had deeply misjudged the kind of person you are. I will not make that mistake again.

There is a great deal I could say to you, but I will not. Know only this one thing. I know everything.

You were careless. Remarkably so, for someone who was otherwise so deliberate. If you intended this to be a vanishing act, you ought to have chosen a different audience. Did you really think I would not notice?

I am leaving this here because you will find it. You will come back to this place. Not because I hope you will, not because it would comfort me to imagine it, but because I am certain. I am more certain of this than I have been of anything in recent memory, and recent memory has given me considerable cause for certainty. You will come back to this place and you will read this and you will know that I knew. I knew everything and I want you to understand what it means that I am telling you so.

I am never wrong, Harry Evans.

I wonder whether you hesitated before offering the name, or whether it came as easily as the rest of the lies. I think you know what I think. I suppose I ought to at least commend the performance.

Think very carefully about what you owe me.

 

T. M. Riddle

Notes:

one word is too often profaned
for me to profane it,
one feeling too falsely disdained
for thee to disdain it;
one hope is too like despair
for prudence to smother,
and pity from thee more dear
than that from another.

i can give not what men call love,
but wilt thou accept not
the worship the heart lifts above
and the heavens reject not,—
the desire of the moth for the star,
of the night for the morrow,
the devotion to something afar
from the sphere of our sorrow?

- percy bysshe shelley