The pages of the little black Diary began to flutter violently, as though caught in an invisible wind.
Harry leaned closer, his eyes widening behind his round glasses. The creamy parchment did not merely rustle; it seemed to glow with a faint light.
Then the centre of the open book appeared to deepen, the page stretching impossibly inward until it became a dark, swirling funnel of ink and shadow.
Harry barely had time to recoil.
An irresistible force seized him.
His four-poster bed, the red velvet curtains, and the quiet sounds of the Gryffindor dormitory vanished in a sickening lurch.
Harry tipped forward, headfirst, tumbling into the spinning darkness as the Diary seemed to swallow the world around him.
Wind roared in his ears.
Colours rushed past in blurred streaks - gold, crimson, and deep twilight purple all twisting together until Harry could no longer tell which way was up. He tried to reach for something, anything, but there was nothing to grasp.
Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the sensation stopped.
Harry's feet struck solid stone with a sharp clack.
He stumbled forward, throwing his hands out to steady himself. For a moment he simply stood there, breathing hard and staring around in bewilderment.
The Gryffindor dormitory was gone.
He was somewhere else entirely, and Harry knew immediately where he was.
The circular room with its sleeping portraits, tall windows, and cluttered shelves was unmistakably Dumbledore's office. Harry had been here before, although something about it felt wrong.
The room seemed different somehow, the furniture less worn, and even the portraits looked different from the ones he remembered.
Then Harry noticed the man sitting behind the desk.
It wasn't Dumbledore.
A wizened, frail-looking wizard sat hunched over a letter by candlelight. He was bald except for a few wisps of white hair, and his tired face was drawn with age. Harry had never seen him before.
Harry took a cautious step closer.
"I'm sorry," he said shakily. "I didn't mean to butt in..."
The wizard didn't look up.
He continued reading the letter, his brow furrowing slightly as his eyes moved across the page.
Harry waited.
"Er... I'll just go, shall I?"
Still nothing.
The man didn't seem to have heard him.
Harry glanced around the office, suddenly unsure of what was happening. Perhaps the wizard was deaf. Harry raised his voice.
"Sorry I disturbed you. I'll go now."
The wizard folded the letter with a weary sigh.
Harry stepped aside as the old man walked straight past him without so much as a glance. He crossed the room and went to the nearest window, where he reached up and began drawing the heavy curtains.
Harry stared after him.
The wizard hadn't even seemed to notice him.
Harry looked around the office again.
There was no Fawkes perched nearby, no strange silver instruments whirring and clicking on the tables, and none of the familiar clutter that made Dumbledore's office feel unmistakably like Dumbledore's.
This was Hogwarts as Tom Riddle had known it. The realisation sent a strange shiver through Harry.
The wizened old wizard behind the desk wasn't Dumbledore at all, but the headmaster of fifty years ago, and Harry himself was little more than a phantom in the room, completely invisible to everyone in the memory.
Before he could examine the room any further, there was a knock at the office door.
"Enter," said the old wizard in a feeble voice.
The door opened, and a boy of about sixteen stepped inside. He removed his pointed Hogwarts hat as he crossed the threshold, revealing neatly combed, jet-black hair. A silver prefect's badge gleamed against his robes.
Harry stared.
"Ah, Riddle," said the headmaster.
**************************************
While Harry was busy experiencing the memories of Tom Riddle that Ethan had acquired when he devoured the Horcrux, Ethan was busy with something else entirely.
He wasn't showing Harry these memories for no reason.
Every moment Harry spent inside the memories, every time he followed Tom through the corridors of Hogwarts and watched the past unfold through the events Tom Riddle experienced, the connection between them grew a little stronger.
The Diary was acting as a bridge between their minds, carrying not only words across the distance but fragments of thought, sensation, and memory.
Harry didn't realise it yet.
To him, it simply felt as though he were watching someone else's memories.
But Ethan could feel the difference.
The connection that had formed when Harry first wrote his name in the Diary had been thin and fragile. Now, with Harry willingly opening himself to Ethan's memories, it was beginning to deepen.
And that was exactly what Ethan had wanted. The connection between them was not one-sided.
Ethan waited until the connection had strengthened enough before reaching through it.
At first, there was only darkness. Then came fragments: a cupboard beneath the stairs, the smell of dust and stale food, and a small boy curled up in the darkness, listening to laughter from the room beyond.
Fear, loneliness, and hunger. Ethan felt it all.
The memories came faster after that, no longer appearing as distant images but as vivid experiences. He saw Harry growing up with the Dursleys and felt the confusion of being treated differently without understanding why.
He experienced the sudden wonder of discovering magic and the overwhelming shock of learning that he belonged to an entirely different world.
Then came Hogwarts: the Sorting Hat, the Great Hall, his first flight on a broom, Ron, Hermione, the endless lessons, the Quidditch matches, the arguments, and the friendships.
Ethan watched it all.
He didn't merely see Harry's memories; for brief moments, he felt what Harry had felt, the excitement of discovering something new, the warmth of finding friends, the fear of facing things far beyond his experience, and the loneliness that returned whenever Harry felt nobody believed him.
Ethan didn't know why he was so good at this.
Experiencing a decade of memories should not have been this easy. Even when he had first absorbed the memories contained within the Horcrux, he had expected the sheer volume of information to overwhelm him.
Instead, the memories had unfolded before him almost effortlessly, as though his mind had been designed to sort through them.
It was happening again with Harry.
Years of memories were passing through the connection, yet Ethan could move through them with remarkable speed, separating important moments from meaningless details almost instinctively.
He could linger on a particular memory if he wanted to examine it more closely, or move past entire stretches of Harry's childhood in moments.
The same thing had happened with Tom Riddle's memories.
And now it was happening with Harry Potter.
Ethan couldn't explain it.
The only explanation he could come up with was the machine.
Whatever had happened when he had activated the machine he built back in his old world, it had clearly done something far beyond simply transporting him here.
There had to be a connection.
Perhaps the machine had changed something fundamental about his consciousness. Perhaps it had somehow allowed him to process memories in a way an ordinary human mind could not.
Ethan didn't know.
Whatever the machine had done, it had given him an ability that had proven to be extraordinarily useful.
Especially now that he had access to Harry Potter's mind. After all, one day Ethan would become Harry Potter, and when that happened, he would need to be prepared to face the scrutiny of Dumbledore and everyone else at Hogwarts, at least for a time.
With Harry Potter's memories and experiences at his disposal, that would be easy enough.
He would know how Harry thought, how he reacted, what he feared, and, most importantly, how to behave like him without anyone noticing the difference.
As Ethan finished absorbing Harry's memories and experiences, he tried to reach deeper, searching for the Horcrux within Harry. However, the attempt proved more difficult than he had expected.
Unlike ordinary memories, the Horcrux was tied directly to Harry's soul, making it impossible for Ethan to manipulate it properly without first possessing Harry completely.
Still, that wasn't a problem. With the connection between them strengthened to this extent, Ethan was confident of taking over Harry's body when the time was right.
Ethan wasn't sure how much of a magical disturbance taking over Harry's body would create. It might not even be something anyone could sense, but Ethan wasn't willing to take the chance.
After all, Dumbledore was not someone he could afford to underestimate, especially when the old wizard seemed to possess an ability to sense disturbances in magic, as he would show in that cave, which was enchanted by Voldemort.
So it was better to have Dumbledore out of Hogwarts. Once the old wizard was gone, Ethan would finally have the opportunity to make his move.
***********************************