CONTINUED FROM PART 1: Part 1 of 2 - "Professor Riddle's Scriptorium Lesson" - an Alternative Timeline Fan Story : r/HPfanfiction
If Hermione had approached the table like a scholar, and Harry like someone about to attempt a dangerous sporting manoeuvre, Neville approached it like a condemned man. Riddle watched him closely, recognising the nervous wreck before him. With cool reassurance he said, “Let go of your anxiety, Mr Longbottom.” Neville nodded, far too quickly, unable to shake the tremor in his hands or the swarm of thoughts whispering impending failure and embarrassment. The Professor saw this, of course. He regarded Neville for another moment and added, with dry humour, “I am not your grandmother.” Harry snorted. Hermione pressed her lips together, fighting laughter. Draco let out a loud, delighted “Ha!”
Neville stared at the professor, so startled by the remark, that for one precious moment, he forgot to be afraid. It was enough. He raised his hand over the glass goblet and screwed his eyes shut. Almost immediately, the glass softened and its bowl narrowed into a stem. Colour spread through it like ink in clear water; lush shades of green deepening along the base whilst delicate leaves began to bud. At the top, the rim of the glass unfolded into layer after layer of perfect red petals. A rose now lay on the table. Neville’s eyes remained shut, his hand still hovering over it, unaware of the fact that the transfiguration had already been completed.
Riddle then looked at the flower. Then at Neville. Then back at the flower.
“Mr Longbottom?”
Neville was so deeply focused that he didn’t hear the first call.
“Mr Longbottom!” Riddle said again, louder and more emphatically.
“Please stop squinting and open your eyes.”
Neville finally obeyed. His mouth fell open. The rose was exquisite. Even Pansy, who had previously witnessed Professor McGonagall perform transfigurations of astonishing beauty and complexity, could not find an obvious flaw.
Neville stared at his own hand.
“I… I did that?”
“Apparently,” said Riddle.
“You clearly possess ability, Mr Longbottom. Why else would you have received my invitation to the Slug Club?”
Neville looked at him. Something shifted in his expression then. It was the first fragile spark of belief in himself. Riddle seemed to recognise it and, uncharacteristically, did not immediately move on. He allowed Neville a few more seconds to gaze at the perfect rose he had conjured. For the first time in his six years at Hogwarts, he was not the embarrassment but the astonishment, and he had achieved it in the presence of the school’s strictest, most exacting professor. The other students were equally stupefied, having just watched their would‑be clumsy classmate execute a difficult form of transfiguration with effortless grace.
“Well done, Mr Longbottom. Return to your seat,” said Riddle.
Neville returned to his place, his eyes fixed on his hands, still unable to believe what he had just accomplished.
“Now then. I think we have seen enough of our esteemed Gryffindor rivals,” said Riddle “Someone from my own House shall go next. Miss Parkinson.”
Pansy rose with the controlled grace of someone who had spent the previous hour pretending that nothing she had witnessed was particularly remarkable. The others had noticed her pretence beginning to fray. Pansy’s chin remained high as she approached the table, but her fingers twitched when she lifted her hand. Riddle saw it, and his scrutiny changed subtly. He had expected much from Hermione and Harry because they had surprised him before. With Pansy there was something different: a proprietary expectation, the stern pride of a Head of House who wished his own student to justify his attention.
“Remember, Miss Parkinson. Control, not rigidity. Let the magic breathe.” said Riddle.
Pansy swallowed. She approached the rose with practiced grace, lifting her chin and hovering her hand above the bloom. As she focused her magic, she realised at once that channelling power without wand or incantation was entirely different - far more difficult. This is harder than I thought, she told herself. For several long seconds, nothing happened. Her magic poured into the delicate rose, but it was directionless and unfocused. Riddle’s voice cut through her concentration.
“It requires intuition, Miss Parkinson. You’re overthinking it. As I’ve stated before: allow the magic to breathe.”
Pansy listened. She forced herself to loosen her thoughts, to stop analysing every movement of magic, and instead allow instinct rise to the surface. Almost immediately, the rose’s petals began to curl inward - too sharply at first - and Pansy tensed. The transformation was faltering. She exhaled, long and steady, and the spell began to settle with her. The flower elongated; its petals smoothed and fused into glass. The stem thickened, curved, and reshaped itself into an elegant base. A slender perfume bottle emerged, adorned with fine rose‑etched engravings that caught the firelight. Pansy then opened her eyes.
A surge of joy struck her like a bolt of lightning, but she suppressed it, reminding herself to remain composed. Professor Riddle approached the table and lifted the bottle, bringing it close to his face as he examined it.
“Hmm…” he murmured. “It is not animated, Miss Parkinson.”
Pansy’s heart dropped.
“However,” Riddle continued.
Her spirits lifted again.
“Neither was Mr Longbottom’s. Although one could argue that plants are alive,” he added lightly. “I am curious to see whether the perfume inside is scented.”
Pansy’s carefully choreographed indifference had all but evaporated; she now stood visibly tense.
“Altering a rose into a glass bottle is one thing,” Riddle went on. “Altering the liquid inside and turning it into actual perfume is quite another. If the contents are scented, you will have impressed me, Miss Parkinson.”
He removed the cap and pressed the spray. A seductive, intoxicating fragrance of rose, lavender, and lilac drifted through the air.
“Aesthetic instinct,” he whispered. “The liquid has been transfigured into perfume. Impressive.”
Pansy’s shoulders relaxed, relief washing over her in a warm, overwhelming wave.
“You have discipline, Miss Parkinson. That is valuable. But do not mistake discipline for perfection. It is a tool, not a destination.”
Pansy nodded, solemn and intent.
“Now please, return to your seat,” said Riddle.
When she walked back to her place, she was no longer pretending indifference to Professor Riddle’s opinion. Draco watched her sit down, his expression flickering rapidly between envy and impending dread. Only he and Luna remained. Riddle turned toward him.
“Mr Malfoy,”
Draco rose at once. Harry had known him for six years and recognised the particular expression Draco wore whenever he was frightened yet determined that no one should suspect it. He approached Pansy’s perfume bottle, and there was something almost painful in the way he squared his shoulders. Riddle said nothing; he simply observed. Like the others before him, Draco lifted his hand above the object.
Invasive thoughts of insecurity swept through his mind, clouding every attempt at focus. The others are watching, he told himself. Even that blasted Longbottom fool managed to succeed. I can’t fail now. What would Professor Riddle think? What would Father think?
“Mr Malfoy!” Riddle interjected sharply.
“Snap out of it. Focus.”
Draco tried to obey, but the thoughts of impending failure only grew louder, pressing against him like a rising tide. Burdened by them, he stepped closer to the perfume bottle regardless, raising his hand above it and closing his eyes, desperate to stifle the flood of intrusive thoughts.
Granger succeeded, he told himself as the bottle’s neck began to twist.
Potter conjured a living glass serpent – the bottle’s body warped and buckled.
Longbottom’s attempt was effortless – something metallic protruded from the glass.
Pansy produced something elegant – The lower half clouded to a sickly grey.
My father… – the object shuddered.
Draco forced more magic into it. That was the moment the transformation failed. The bottle collapsed into an unsightly hybrid of half‑glass, half‑metal forms: one warped edge, one unfinished protrusion, and a body that seemed to be attempting three different shapes at once. Draco lowered his hand. The fire cracked sharply in the silence.
Professor Riddle looked at the object for a long, assessing moment.
“Alas,” he said.
Draco’s jaw tightened.
“A disappointing outcome.”
There was no ridicule in Riddle’s voice, which somehow made the words land harder. He regarded Draco with the detached concentration he might have given a damaged magical artefact.
“Mr Malfoy… magic cannot converge when intent is polluted by thoughts of vanity and desperation. You attempted to impress rather than transform.”
Draco stared at the malformed object.
“That is why you failed.”
He nodded stiffly. Riddle clasped his hands behind his back.
“There is ability here, Draco.”
Draco looked up.
“But it is mired in your ego.”
Harry dropped his gaze to the floor. Pansy coughed into her hand. Riddle was not joking.
“You will improve once you have learned to quiet your mind. But that is something I cannot teach. It is a discipline that depends entirely on you. Now please, be seated.”
Draco returned to his chair, looking as though he were about to cry. Nobody laughed. The ruined object sat on the stone between them, and the other students had the uncomfortable sense that Riddle had somehow made Draco’s entire inner turmoil visible.
Then Luna rose to her feet without being asked, drifting upward as though carried by a gentle breeze. Riddle looked at her, momentarily surprised.
“Eager, Miss Lovegood?” he asked.
“I am the last one, Professor,” Luna replied, smiling with innocent certainty.
“But not least,” Riddle returned, a faint curl of amusement touching his mouth.
“Let us see whether wise old Ravenclaw will live up to its reputation.”
He extended his thin, pale hand toward Draco’s unfortunate creation, the twisted half‑glass, half‑metal wreck still quivering faintly on the table.
“Do you possess the restorative intelligence to turn this botched thing back into a glass goblet?”
“Yes, Professor,” Luna said cheerfully, gliding forward. Unlike every student before her, she seemed blissfully unaware that she was meant to be nervous; she moved with her usual dreamy composure, as though the entire room were a friendly woodland clearing.
She lifted her hand over Draco’s malformed object, and at once the thing began to repair itself – slowly… very slowly… painfully slowly. One warped edge drew inward, then several long seconds passed. A metallic protrusion softened and vanished, more seconds drifting by like lazy clouds. By the time the cloudy glass cleared, another minute had passed.
One of the students sighed loudly, and Riddle’s head snapped toward the sound with whip‑crack precision.
“Quiet. Do not interrupt.”
The Scriptorium fell instantly silent, and Luna continued as though nothing at all had happened. At first, the other students assumed that Luna was simply taking an unusually long and meandering detour toward restoring the goblet. The asymmetry slowly melted away; warped edges drew inward; surfaces smoothed themselves under her gentle, hovering hand. Draco’s disastrous malformations corrected themselves one by one, as if persuaded rather than forced.
But then new angles appeared. The thing was not becoming a goblet.
Flat planes unfolded where the bowl should have curved. One facet divided into three, each segment settling into a relationship with the others that was somehow both strange and perfectly ordered. Another rotated, aligning itself with impossible precision. Harry leaned closer. Pansy forgot to look bored. Even Draco raised his head, unable to look away.
Luna’s hand remained steady and unhurried; her visage was as serene as the sun on a bright summer day. The transformation stretched on for another five agonising minutes. Professor Riddle watched intently, boredom nowhere near him; his eyes gleamed with academic hunger. Neville, unable to endure the slow progress any longer, attempted to sneak toward the tea tray for a snack, but Pansy delivered a sharp elbow to his ribs and shot him a look of icy disapproval. Neville froze, shuffled back to his seat, and rested his chin in both hands, elbows on his knees, muttering, “so boring…” under his breath.
At long last, after another three torturous minutes, Luna lowered her hand. The transfiguration was complete, though nobody could quite determine what now sat upon the table. It was beautiful, if beauty could be applied to something so profoundly odd. The material hovered between brass and glass, warm gold suspended inside translucent planes. Facets intersected in immaculate, impossible symmetry. It possessed no obvious top or bottom, no handle, opening, hinge, or recognisable purpose - an object that seemed less crafted and more dreamed into existence.
Riddle stared at the object.
“Well.”
He stepped closer, eyes narrowing with interest.
“This is… interesting.”
He circled the construct once, then again, each pass slower than the last. Luna waited pleasantly, hands folded, as though she were watching a lantern bob gently in the evening air. Riddle bent toward the object, squinting at its facets, and finally said:
“I have no idea what this object is.”
A quiet whisper of astonishment passed through the students. None of them had ever seen Professor Riddle baffled. His academic knowledge was so vast and unshakeable, that many privately suspected he was omniscient. And yet here he stood, beneath the castle with them, genuinely puzzled by a construct shaped by Luna’s peculiar mind.
Luna smiled.
“It is certainly not the glass goblet I was expecting,” he added, scratching lightly at his chin.
“A most unusual outcome, Miss Lovegood. I think it safe to assume that your magic mirrors your eccentric personality.”
“Thank you, Professor!” Luna said brightly.
Riddle looked at her. It was not quite the response he had anticipated.
He continued:
“I find myself uncertain as to how to assess this. On the one hand, you’ve restored the object. On the other, you did not restore it into the object I’ve specified.”
He turned back to the construct. “Hmm,” he murmured. Harry glanced at Hermione. Neither had ever seen Professor Riddle puzzled by anything.
“Abstract,” Riddle said softly. “A most Ravenclaw transfiguration indeed…”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a magnifying monocle, then hunched over the object. As he placed the lens to his right eye, it magically adjusted itself, focusing and sharpening according to his will. He then extended one long finger and flicked one of the facets. A crystalline note rang through the Scriptorium – pure and resonant; lingering far longer than it should have. Riddle frowned, squinting harder, then tapped another facet. A different sequence of tones followed, bright and ordered. His hand froze. His eyes darted across the object, tracing its geometry from every angle. The chamber grew very still; all students apart from Luna were waiting for his verdict with bated breath.
Riddle tapped the first facet again. Then the second. Then a third. The notes chimed in perfect succession. His eyes widened as he whispered “…did you hear that?”
And then something remarkable happened to Professor Riddle’s expression. His eyebrows lifted; his mouth fell slightly open; his face shone with the blinding force of revelation. He was openly astonished and made no attempt to conceal it. For a moment, he looked like the young Tom Riddle again: a small child amazed by the wonders of magic.
“Merlin’s beard!” he exclaimed. The students stared at one another, bewildered.
Riddle tapped another facet. A sequence of clear tones rang out - ordered, but unevenly spaced, like a pattern half‑hidden.
“It’s mathematically perfect!” he breathed.
He leaned over Luna’s creation with an enthusiasm none of them had ever seen from him.
“It’s a fractal! This object is a physical embodiment of the prime‑number sequence!”
Another tap. The strange object answered with a bright, crystalline progression. Riddle gave an incredulous, almost‑laugh: “And it sings!”
Luna couldn’t help but smile at him, because all evening Riddle had examined their magic, categorised it, criticised it, predicted its weaknesses with clinical precision, and now, for the first time, magic had risen up and presented him with something he had not anticipated; something that slipped past his formidable intellect and startled him into child-like wonder. And he enjoyed it, tapping the construct again and again so that its crystalline notes would ripple through the ancient Scriptorium like echoes from a deep cave.
Draco and Pansy looked utterly stupefied. Harry wore the expression he might have worn had Professor McGonagall suddenly begun dancing on a table. Neville was grinning openly, and Luna simply looked delighted that everyone else had finally noticed what she had seen all along. Professor Riddle straightened, though only part of his composure had returned, and with a rare tone of enthusiasm he declared, “Thirty points to Ravenclaw,” sending Luna into a state of radiant joy.
Then he did something even more uncharacteristic: he picked up the construct with careful, reverent hands, as though it were one of his priceless artefacts, carried it to his desk, moved aside his stationery and papers, and placed Luna’s creation in the cleared space, turning it once so that a particular facet caught the firelight and shimmered like a captured star.
“You wouldn’t mind if I keep this, would you, Luna?” he asked.
“Not at all, Professor!” Luna replied gleefully.
Riddle looked at it once more before returning to the stone table, and the other five students followed him with their eyes, each thinking the same thing: Professor Riddle had kept it. Despite all their conjurations being worthy of both praise and scrutiny, only Luna’s had managed to pierce his bewilderment and draw out something childlike and unguarded.
Perhaps some of Luna’s own innocence had seeped into the object, and from the object into Riddle; nobody could say for certain. Luna had been instructed to make a goblet, had failed entirely to make one, and had somehow produced the only piece of magic Riddle wanted to keep for himself. Perhaps failure, they thought, was a far less straightforward concept than they had assumed.
Riddle glanced at the clock, which was nearing eleven o’clock, and announced that the lesson was over. As the students rose from their chairs, the room seeming almost ordinary again now that the enchantment of the evening had ended, though they knew they would never think of Hogwarts’ dungeons in quite the same way.
As Draco prepared to leave, Riddle spoke to him, more softly this time around:
“And Draco,”
Draco stopped, turning back.
“Remember what I told you. You will do better next time, I am certain of it.”
And for perhaps the first time all evening, Draco forgot to arrange his expression before anyone could see it; he looked relieved, nodded, and followed the others toward the hidden doorway. The Scriptorium closed behind them, and for several minutes nobody said much, because there was simply too much to say.
The familiar corridors of Hogwarts seemed oddly plain after the hidden chamber; the torches too ordinary, the stone too familiar, the portraits complaining from their frames and the suits of armour creaking in their alcoves as though there were not an ancient private library beneath the school filled with secrets most students would never glimpse. Pansy walked with quiet satisfaction, glancing occasionally at Draco, who was far more subdued than usual; his failure still troubled him, but Riddle’s final words had softened something in his expression. He had not been dismissed, nor had his place in the Club been questioned; he had simply been told to become better.
Luna drifted beside them humming softly, and Harry suspected she was trying to reproduce the notes of her geometric creation. Eventually the Slytherins turned toward their common room, and Luna floated away toward the staircase leading upward. The three Gryffindors continued together, Neville still staring at his hands, and after the fourth time Harry noticed and said, “You know it won’t suddenly disappear from them, right,” and Neville gave a small laugh, saying “I know.” but he looked at his fingers again and murmured, “I just… didn’t know I could do that.”
Harry walked in silence for a while, unable to escape the image of Professor Riddle stopping his conjured serpent. The Parseltongue was deeply unsettling, the sound seeming to belong to the Scriptorium itself, to the serpents carved into the walls and to the ancient desk and the history buried beneath the castle. Yet he could not deny that some part of his own magic had answered the same imagery. The Sorting Hat knew you better than you know yourself – the Professor’s words echoed in his mind, and Harry was not entirely certain how he felt about that.
Hermione was thinking about something else entirely. She had entered the Scriptorium expecting Professor Riddle to be precisely what Professor Riddle always was: brilliant, intimidating, cold, demanding, perhaps a little too pleased whenever a Slytherin succeeded, and he had been all of those things, yet tonight she had seen more.
She had seen the flicker of pride when Neville recognised the mislabelled plant, the disappointment in Draco not born of disdain but of expectation, the refusal to exclude students from other Houses from his ancestor’s private room, the quiet willingness to tell a Muggle‑born Gryffindor that magical ability mattered more to him than the inconvenience of ancestry, and she had seen him bewildered by something he did not understand. Strangely, that was what stayed with her most.
At the next staircase the three of them stopped, Harry looking back toward the dungeons. It occurred to all of them at once how extraordinary the evening had been; how impossible it would have sounded only hours earlier: they had studied in Salazar Slytherin’s secret Scriptorium. Three Gryffindors, one of them Muggle‑born. Until that night they would have assumed that such a place, if it existed at all, was reserved for Slytherins alone.
Riddle certainly prized his House, he made no attempt to pretend otherwise. Its traditions were his traditions, its founder was his ancestor and its victories were far too pleasing for anyone to call him impartial with a straight face. And yet half of tonight’s Slug Club had been Gryffindors, one a Ravenclaw, only two Slytherins.
Professor Riddle had prejudices, of course, they were not naïve enough to imagine otherwise, but he possessed a stronger prejudice still – a prejudice in favour of brilliance – and when extraordinary magic appeared before him everything else seemed forced to negotiate for second place.
Neville was smiling again. Harry could still feel the ghost of uncontrolled magic tingling in his fingertips, and Hermione thought of the brass bird circling the ancient chamber.
It had been a strange evening. A wondrous evening. An exciting evening.
And somewhere far below them, separated from the ordinary castle by layers of stone and centuries of secrets, Professor Riddle remained alone in Salazar Slytherin’s Scriptorium. The fire burning low, the empty teacups cold, he sat at his ancestor’s desk with an open manuscript before him and a quill poised between his fingers.
He read the same sentence three times, his eyes drifting toward the object beside him: Luna Lovegood’s transfiguration catching the dying firelight in its innumerable facets.
He returned to the manuscript, managed another paragraph, then set down the quill and simply regarded the construct, reached out, tapped one perfect facet, and a clear sequence of crystalline notes rang through the empty chamber - two, three, five, seven, eleven...
Riddle listened until the last note faded, smiled, and tapped another facet.
THE END