Ethan didn't move.
He wasn't even sure he could. The presence was still there, somewhere beyond the layers of parchment surrounding him, and now that he had noticed it, he couldn't shake the feeling that it was watching him.
It wasn't an echo, a memory, or some strange remnant of his damaged brain. There was intent behind it.
Someone was there. Watching him.
"Hello?" Ethan sent the thought outward.
Nothing happened. He waited for several seconds before trying again.
"Can you hear me?"
Still nothing. Perhaps he was imagining it. Perhaps his damaged brain was constructing another hallucination, just as it had constructed the strange parchment world around him.
That explanation would have been comforting.
Then the presence moved. Not toward him. Around him.
Ethan suddenly became aware of something changing in the space itself. The white haze began to darken, but only in one direction, as if an enormous pool of ink had started spreading through the parchment.
A thin black line appeared in the distance.
Then another. Then dozens more.
They twisted and spread across the white space, growing thicker with every passing second. Ethan watched as the darkness gathered into a shape.
First came the outline of a body. Then shoulders. Arms. A face. A boy.
He looked about sixteen years old, tall and slender, with neatly combed black hair and pale skin. His clothes were strange, old-fashioned. A white shirt, dark trousers, and what looked like part of an old British school uniform.
The boy stood several metres away, staring directly at Ethan.
Neither of them spoke.
Ethan felt something cold settle over his thoughts. There was something deeply wrong with this boy. Not physically. He looked normal, even handsome.
His eyes were different. Cold brown eyes. Sharp. Observant. Calculating. The eyes of someone who studied people while ensuring no one ever studied him.
"You're not supposed to be here."
The voice didn't come through the air. It appeared directly inside Ethan's mind.
Ethan stared. Telepathy?
The boy's expression tightened.
"You can hear me."
Not a question.
"Yes," Ethan projected back.
The boy went still.
Ethan realised something important: the boy hadn't heard words. He had heard thought. And Ethan had heard his in return. They weren't speaking; they were communicating directly, mind to mind.
A thrill ran through Ethan. He had spent years in that basement trying to build something like this, direct neural communication without speech or hardware. Yet this wasn't technology. At least, not anything he understood.
The boy stepped closer.
"You are inside my diary."
Ethan's awareness flickered across the fibrous layers around them. "A diary?"
"Yes," the boy answered, as if being trapped inside a notebook was the most ordinary thing in the world. He studied Ethan carefully. "How did you get here?"
"I was hoping you could tell me."
The boy stopped circling. The curiosity in his posture vanished, replaced by a controlled, deliberate stillness that felt far more dangerous.
Ethan noticed the shift immediately. This was no longer confusion. It was assessment. The boy was deciding what Ethan was and what to do with him.
Ethan looked down at himself, or tried to. There was nothing there.
The boy noticed.
"You don't have a body."
"I've noticed."
"You aren't dead."
Ethan paused. "How do you know?"
A thin smile crept onto the boy's pale lips. "I would know."
That was certainly unsettling.
"Who are you?" Ethan asked.
Pride flickered behind the boy's grey eyes.
"My name is Tom Marvolo Riddle."
The name, along with all the added context, made him realise where he was.
Tom Marvolo Riddle.
He hadn't thought about the books in over a decade. In his past life, fiction was something he only partook in to pass the time.
He had read the books when he was a kid and later as a young adult because they had some things about the mind and the arts of occlumency and legilimency.
Though they were not real techniques, he used to read anything that related to the mind whenever he had the time, regardless of what it was.
And the name was an interesting and unique one, with it being an anagram. So they were all filed away in the back of his memory.
A diary. 1943. A sixteen-year-old soul fragment.
This wasn't a digital network. This wasn't a higher plane of consciousness unlocked by his neural headset.
His consciousness had somehow been torn out of his world and compressed into a Horcrux.
Riddle was still watching him, his smile fading into something sharp and cold.
"You recognised my name," Riddle observed softly. "Fascinating. A bodiless mind drifts into my pages, possesses no magic of its own, yet knows who I am."
"I know what you are," Ethan replied, keeping his mental tone flat and devoid of emotion.
"Then you know what happens next," Riddle whispered.
Ethan felt the change before he saw it.
The white space around them seemed to contract, the parchment walls drawing closer as though the entire interior of the diary had suddenly become aware of the two minds occupying it.
Riddle didn't move. He didn't need to. The pressure came from everywhere.
Ethan's thoughts suddenly felt heavier, as though invisible hands had wrapped themselves around his consciousness and were squeezing.
He tried to pull away. The pressure followed, binding him to the place; it felt like the place was trying to devour him.
Ethan resisted while thinking about any counterattack he could do.
"You are being remarkably calm," Riddle observed.
His voice was quiet, almost polite. The kind of politeness that didn't belong to kindness, but to control.
"Most minds would be terrified by now."
Ethan struggled against the pressure.
"Too busy trying to survive, I guess." Ethan resisted instinctively.
The pressure increased.
And memories began to surface. Ethan's memories, which were what Riddle was after.
The memory of the machine was the first memory that surfaced.
Ethan saw the basement again—the cramped laboratory, the tangled wires, the monitors glowing in the darkness, and the neural headset waiting on the desk.
Riddle's presence pressed deeper, following the memory as Ethan relived it.
The scene moved forward until Ethan was sitting in the chair, the cold metal contacts strapped against his temples, his hand reaching for the power switch.
Then he turned it on.
Something shifted.
The crushing pressure that had been bearing down on Ethan's consciousness suddenly vanished.
It didn't weaken or become easier to resist; it simply became nothing, as though whatever force had been trying to tear his mind apart had ceased to exist.
Ethan froze.
Then the memory swallowed him completely.
He was back in the laboratory, back inside the machine, experiencing the exact moment he had spent his final seconds experiencing before death.
His thoughts became impossibly clear, every distraction disappearing until there was nothing left except pure awareness.
His mind felt vast. Powerful. He could think faster. He could perceive more.
Ideas seemed to connect before he had consciously finished forming them, and the boundaries that had always existed between thought, memory, and understanding seemed to dissolve.
It felt as though there were no limits anymore.
Then Riddle screamed. "What... WHAT IS THIS?"
Tom was beside him, clutching at his head, his face twisted in agony as he thrashed around as though his entire body were being consumed by fire.
For brief moments, parts of his body seemed to break apart into black fragments before snapping back into place.
The boy who had calmly invaded Ethan's mind only moments ago was now terrified and in so much pain, from what Ethan didn't know.
"Make it stop!"
Riddle's scream echoed through the parchment world.
And slowly, a terrifying possibility began to take shape.
Whatever the machine had done to Ethan's consciousness, Tom Riddle was never supposed to see it.
As Ethan looked at him, the pressure that was on him before wrapped around Riddle and trapped him.
Riddle's expression twisted with panic.
"What have you done?"
"You wanted to strip me of my memories," Ethan said, his mental voice calm as the pressure tightened around Riddle. "So now I want the same thing from you."
A faint smile touched Ethan's thoughts.
"I hope you won't mind it too much."
Riddle's expression twisted with rage. He tried to fight back, but the pressure holding him only tightened, crushing his resistance before he could form another attack.
"You wouldn't dare," Riddle hissed.
Ethan smiled.
"I already am."
He reached into the connection between them and pulled.
Something tore.
Riddle screamed as a stream of memories rushed toward Ethan, no longer hidden behind the boy's carefully constructed mind. Faces, places, voices, spells, and fragments of a life Ethan had only ever known from fiction flooded into him.
Ethan barely had time to process the first memory before another followed.
Then another. And another. And they kept coming.
He saw a young boy standing alone in a dark orphanage, watching the other children with cold, calculating eyes, to standing in the Great Hall beneath a ceiling of floating candles.
Ethan saw Tom discovering magic, devouring every book he could find and realising that the world was far larger than the orphanage had ever allowed him to imagine.
The memories accelerated. Spells. Potions. Ancient runes. Dark Arts. Parseltongue.
The years went by, and finally...
The diary.
Ethan saw Tom at sixteen, standing in a dark room with the diary open before him.
He watched the boy create it.
Riddle fought.
The parchment around them shook violently.
The boy's form began to distort, his body flickering between solid and transparent as pieces of his consciousness were torn away.
"You don't understand what you're doing!"
Ethan continued pulling.
"You're destroying me!"
Ethan almost laughed.
You were trying to do exactly that to me.
Finally, Riddle's constructed body began to disappear.
Ethan watched as the boy's form broke apart, dissolving into the white space until there was nothing left of him.
But something remained.
A small fragment floated where Riddle had been.
It wasn't a memory. It was something deeper. Something that felt alive.
Ethan stared at it, and for the first time since entering the diary, his scientific curiosity gave way to something close to awe.
He knew what he was looking at.
A piece of Tom Riddle's soul.