Lord Voldemort

Lord Voldemort, born Tom Marvolo Riddle, also known as The Dark Lord, is the primary antagonist of the Harry Potter novels.

Past
Born in 1926, Tom found himself in an orphanage at a young age and quickly discovered that hehad supernatural powers. As such, a teacher at Hogwarts (a boarding school used to teach wizards how to control their magic), Professor Albus Dumbledore, picked Tom up and bought him to the mythical school. Sorted into the house of the cunning Slytherin, Riddle quickly mastered his skills in wizardry and was widely considered a perfect student. However, his kind outline masked his true psychopathic natural and Riddle began researching how to gain more power. He eventually discovered that he could split his soul into seven so someone would have to destroy the seven before their ultimate death. In his middle years at Hogwarts, he discovered the Chamber of Secrets in the deepest pits of Hogwarts and tamed the Balalisk (an extremely huge snake-like beast) that laid within it. After graduating from Hogwarts, he performed the aforementioned soul-splitting technique, hiding the shreds of his humanity into certain objects he called the holocruxes and became nearly immortal. Every time he hid a sliver of his soul in a magical, hard to reach object, the less human he began, eventually becoming a ghost-like entity who thirsted for power.

Riddle, now labeled Lord Voldemort, became the leader of a cult-like following of sociopathic megalomaniacs called the Death Eaters. Voldemort viciously murdered several stronger wizards to enhance his abilities, becoming so feared that his named was forbade to spoke, triggering everyone to call him He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named and/or You-Know-Who. One day, Voldemort was informed by his double agent Severus Snape (who was also a professor at Hogwarts) that a prophecy stated that either the two recently born wizards Harry Potter and Neville Longbottom would cause the dark lord's downfall. Which one of these wizards would cause said downfall was unknown at the time, but Voldemort decided to assassinate an infant Harry anyway. One of Voldemort's Death Eaters, Peter Pettigrew, informed where Harry and his parents were staying (whoever, Harry's godfather, Sirius Black, was framed and later arrested for it). As such, the dark lord traveled to the Potter residence and murdered both James and Lily Potter in cold blood before he came across Harry, who was just a mindless baby. However, when Voldemort attempted to cast the killing curse upon Harry, it rebounded and ripped Voldemort's soul from his body, rendering him defeated and powerless.