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Pompeii.
Situated in the southwestern corner of the Italian Peninsula, in the region known today as Campania.
This ancient city lies roughly ten kiloters southeast of Mount Vesuvius, near Naples, and approximately two hundred and forty kiloters from Ro, about twenty kiloters west of the Bay of Naples.
Many may not imdiately recognize the na. But ntion Pompeii, the ancient city entombed by volcanic fire, and even the most casual student of history will recall the tale. It remains one of the most haunting natural disasters in recorded mory, an entire city lost to fla and ash.
Founded in the 6th century BC, Pompeii t its cataclysmic end in 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted. As Ian ca to realise where he stood, a city dood to ruin by the turn of history, an overwhelming tide of emotion surged through him. He knew at once: 'Voldemort would never choose a historical node without purpose.'
Disguising his motives beneath the veil of "correcting his past," the sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle had chosen this precise ti and place to descend into history. It was no random coincidence.
'A city fated to die.'
'What did it offer?'
Naturally, it contained the people of ancient Pompeii, residents already written into the pages of history as casualties. They would not upset the great turning wheel of ti. And here, the air itself was thick with wandering spirits.
They were bound to die, destined to perish. Thus, to draw upon these final flickers of life and soul for darker ends before they vanished would barely disturb the tapestry of ti. The ending would remain the sa. Only its path would be rewritten.
"To bury wickedness within a disaster so vast that no one will question it… to deceive the world through tragedy," Ian murmured, eyes fixed upon the looming peak of Mount Vesuvius. A deeper, darker understanding of young Tom Riddle began to settle in his bones.
This Dark Lord who had crawled forth from a wizard orphanage now sought to beguile Death itself, and manipulate history as though it were a chessboard. He was no longer the aged, splintered soul who had unraveled his own sanity through countless acts of dark magic. No, Riddle, at sixteen, may not yet have wielded the brute power of Voldemort, but he was infinitely more dangerous.
Wisdom was magic's greatest ally, and Riddle wielded it like a blade. His sches were intricate, his cunning vast. Even evil, when guided by intellect, beca formidable. Voldemort with a wand was dreadful, Voldemort with foresight and a plan was truly terrifying.
"If he truly succeeds, then Riddle will no longer be just a cautionary tale, a spectre who killed a few yesterday and a few more today. He'll beco a real dark force. The kind that rewrites the world, not just wounds it."
Ian couldn't be sure how much ti he had. He only knew one thing: Tom Riddle had to be stopped. Otherwise, this shadow lurking in the folds of ti would surely blossom into catastrophe.
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius would be but the prelude.
What lay beyond, in Riddle's grand design, was impossible to guess.
But it would not be mild.
Ian was not the sort of saviour prophesied to love the world. He had long abandoned such lofty ideals. Even retrieving Malfoy, once his main purpose, had beco secondary.
What haunted him most was the possibility that he'd return to the future as nothing more than a whisper, an echo of a soul, and learn that he'd died in infancy, strangled by a dark wizard who had changed ti itself.
To place himself in the shoes of that version of Ian, who never had the chance to live, was chilling.
'Tom Riddle running loose in the past?' It was far worse than any nightmare.
"What's wrong with that mountain?" Asked a small voice.
A little girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, tugged at the hem of Ian's robes, clearly puzzled by the way he kept staring at Mount Vesuvius.
She was half his height, if that, and the neat arrangent of trinkets on her wrists and neck chid gently as she moved.
"You don't have any seers here?" Ian asked without looking at her, his gaze still fixed on the mountain, voice thick with concern. He couldn't quite understand how the girl beside him remained so unaffected.
As an outsider, and a traveller of ti, no less, Ian could sense it imdiately: sothing was deeply wrong with the volcano.
The summit was wrapped in brooding clouds, and now and again, he glimpsed the crimson glow of magma flickering at the crater. The land at its base stretched wide and dark, scorched, barren, still.
It clashed with the city's bustling life in a way that felt deeply unnatural. Just standing there, Ian felt the weight of what was coming. At any mont, it could erupt in a wave of fury and fire.
Even a Muggle, let alone a magical being, should have felt so unease.
"Seer?" The girl tilted her head, brow wrinkling in confusion.
"A prophet," Ian clarified, using the older term, knowing full well this era likely predated the rise of rlin's Circle, perhaps even Arthur himself.
"Oh! Oh yes, we have one," She said with a nod of sudden understanding.
She nodded eagerly, her head bobbing up and down like a baby hippogriff pecking at feed.
"Can you take to your seer?" Ian asked, thinking that sothing as catastrophic as the obliteration of a city surely ought to have triggered a premonition, even from a seer with weak Sight.
This was no trivial matter, it concerned the complete destruction of an entire city. Surely there must have been so form of on or warning.
During a particularly dull Divination lesson recently, Ian had leafed through the divination textbook provided by Professor Trelawney, and while he wouldn't claim to be an expert, he at least now fancied himself a touch more inford on the subject in theory.
"Aren't we eting right now? Every Dream Queen is a seer. Only a seer can beco a Dream Queen. Otherwise, the songs we sing wouldn't reach your ears, oh!" The little girl gave him a puzzled look, and her unexpected reply made Ian pause, his thoughts catching up to her aning.
"Er…"
Ian, montarily nonplussed, realized he'd been so preoccupied with thoughts of Tom Riddle that he hadn't properly considered the specifics of the ti and society he had entered.
Of course, her lack of concern after hearing his warning about the volcano had thrown him off. It hadn't occurred to him that her nonchalance might stem not from ignorance, but from true Sight.
"How powerful is your Seer's Sight?" Ian tried to phrase the question casually, probing without giving away too much.
He couldn't just blurt out that the volcano was about to erupt, he only knew because it was recorded in future history books. Telling her that might frighten the poor child or unravel the tiline further.
"I'm the strongest! I must be, the only one who can see you! But the High Priest and the others say I'm just imagining it. Only I know I'm not!"
She puffed out her chest proudly, her voice filled with unshakable confidence and bright excitent, perhaps because Ian's sudden appearance confird for her that she wasn't mad, after all.
She had always known she wasn't rely dreaming.
"You can see ?" Ian had heard her ntion it before, but now her words carried new weight. His eyes narrowed slightly, thoughtful. In the wizarding world, nothing truly happened by chance.
"Mhm!" The girl nodded with all the enthusiasm of a child who had just won a ga of Gobstones.
"What exactly do you see about ?" Ian asked, more seriously this ti.
"I see you eating and sleeping and sitting in a roaring iron carriage that moves like a charging dragon. I can only catch little glimpses, but the thing I see most often is you hitting people, all sorts of people!" She said without hesitation, recounting the scattered visions she'd apparently seen over the years.
"…"
Ian was, for a mont, thoroughly at a loss for words.
There was clearly so kind of unknown magical connection between them, one he couldn't yet na, but the way she described his apparent dream self… left a lot to be desired.
"That's, er, punishing dark magic, you know. Defending the innocent, restoring balance, that sort of thing," Ian muttered after a long silence, doing his best to justify what was, in all fairness, a lot of punching.
"And for the record, that's not a dream." He hesitated, then gently corrected her misunderstanding.
"Not a dream? But there are charging iron boxes, flying tal birds, buildings taller than the temple itself… I've never seen a city like that in any historical scroll."
The girl blinked at him, clearly confused.
(To Be Continued…)
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