Embryo

III

Tom, in his heart, is a Romantic.

He aims for the Sublime, and so, becomes it. The artist’s feeling is paramount, and his art is self-moulding, evolving—elevating. His feelings? Passion, sensuality. His thoughts? Logic and law. He pursues the practical sciences with Romance. With love. For among the world’s offerings, be it science or sensation, Tom has a love for many things, and falls in love easily and every day.

The Romantic tastes. He revels, he indulges.

The Romantic dreams.

It is the language of desire, to dream; lust communicating with the unconscious mind. Id to Ego.

Tom is not prone to dreaming anymore; not since communing with the cosmos. His unconscious visions entail only vague impressions of drifting faces, incorporeal smoke, and large, open jaws that recede in the dark.

There is a wizarding fable that says dreams are long repressed memories of past lives, the magical manifestation of a fingerprint, the mental representation of a single looping whorl. That those who dream of darkness have no past lives from which to draw upon. Tom imagines himself within the cycle of earth and history, and cannot say he’d mind that he should have the very first life; first and last. That in the billions of years time has tolled, there is not but the one Tom Riddle.

To some, dreams are spiritual; they are visions of truth and premonitions granted by the Nameless Beings that forged the universe.

To Aristotle and Plato, dreams were reflections of one’s character. Of innocence or wickedness.

For a time, they even suggested that more frequent dreaming might correlate to higher magical ability, and in the very same era, a healer spent decades attempting to prove that dreams were a symptom of an infestation of dallymites in mattresses.

A more Mundane explanation, in light of the twentieth century, is that dreams are a result of electrical brain activity in the sensory lobes, a means of organising memory and one’s experiences.

Regardless of these innumerable theories of philosophes mentaux, almost all draw a certain distinction: the dream from the night terror.

Tom wakes in the cold, barren in-between.

He opens his eyes, sticky and blurred. The lake is a black sheet in the night, offering no glowing illumination through the window above his bed as it does in the day. It may as well be a void.

There is noise, some muffled commotion going on in the room which must have awakened him, and Tom is immediately alert. In one motion, he pushes both the covers and his drowsiness from his body. The charmed warmth of the rich carpet beneath his feet rushes up his bare legs as he grasps his wand and pulls aside the heavy tapestry which divides the dorm room. He rears back at the sudden light and volume, his senses overwhelmed with the hum of anxiety and fear which permeates the room.

A boy thrashes atop his bed, and Tom notices again that he takes a moment to recognize and name Harrison. He is trapped within a cord of sheet, eyes wide and unfocused. Thadeus Nott hangs over him, attempting to appease the senseless, garbled shouts coming from the boy. Their faces are pricked with sweat and the flush of blood. As Tom steps forward, Nott turns to him with relief.

“Oh, thank Merlin! Please make him stop,” he implores. His lip is bleeding, the result of a pinwheeling fist.

Raynaldus Lestrange looms half-hidden behind his own tapestry, visibly harried and annoyed.

“Return to your beds,” Tom tells them as he steps fully into Harrison’s canopy and draws the curtains back to their closed position behind him. He casts a silencing bubble around the area. Nott retreats gratefully, hand to his bleeding lip. He slips between the drawn tapestries, crossing back to his bed and leaving Tom and Harrison alone.

Tom watches the boy for a moment, his body contorted to the whim of whatever horror that controls him. He is reminded of small fleshy things, those small mammals that crawl in the basements of old London buildings, and squirm under his curiosity, his cruelty. The sweat of animal fear as he plays with them, deconstructs them.

Tom summons cold water directly from the lake, an icy, murky orb rolling above Harrison’s head, and unceremoniously drops it.

Harrison leaps up at the shock of cold water, ankle snared within the duvet, and falls hard to the floor. With every laboured breath, a mist lifts from his pallid lips, and he looks at Tom with open wonder; with preternatural clarity. His cotton shirt sticks to every hollow space, a ghostly imprint of bones that press against his skin with every rise and fall of his heaving chest. His hair, curled and oily black, has been swept away from his face, revealing a raw, gash-like scar.

Tom kneels beside Harrison. The boy shies away, shivering and watching Tom with the starched lines of horror clear in his face; perhaps still trapped by whatever tartarus he’d been dreaming.

“You’re—” he stutters, parched and choking. His dewy eyelashes shed lake water as tears. He squints without his glasses but there’s no mistake he knows it is Tom standing before him. He holds his hands up in front of himself, as though in self-defence, and Tom sees just the hint of something silvery resting on the insides of Harrison’s wrists; a pearlescent shine.

Tom reaches out—to comfort? To dissect? He isn’t sure, not until he grasps Harrison’s hands, flesh on flesh and—

A room filled with rusty keys on fluttering wings—Tom’s atoms are being pulled, dissolved, spun—a copper-framed mirror which reflects not his own face, but lineage and warm smiles. Tom grows and shrinks in a single instance, warped and tortured—a group of boys with scarlet hair, a ruby gemstone reflecting fire, red faces shouting, burning coals, red crests, red eyes, red—red…

Tom, with all his effort, wrenches himself away from the vacuum of Harrison’s skin, left stranded and breathless on the floor of their dorm room, head spinning.

They gasp large breaths together, sitting in a puddle of wet, bewildered and searching one another for explanation.

Tom looks at Harrison. His face is marble, grey and rigid, his lips a tight gash. His nose starts bleeding, and simultaneously, Tom feels it begin on his own, the warm wet of his blood dripping down his philtrum and smearing into the corner of his grimace. Harrison seems incapable of speech, red painting his gaping mouth, a harlot. He tilts his head back.

“Don’t,” Tom says automatically. He recalls every broken nose witnessed in the halls of Wool’s dust-stained orphanage. “You’ll only choke.”

Harrison drops his chin and watches warily as Tom lifts his hand, cautious. Tom presses the edge of his own shirtsleeve to Harrison’s lip, dabbing the red away. His thin skin around his nose is stained orange, and dark red seeps into the fibres of Tom’s only nightshirt.

“They told me your name first,” Harrison whispers, owlish eyes glowing.

Tom pauses, motionless. If he were not pinching his sleeve’s cuff between thumb and forefinger, he would be caressing Harrison’s cheek.

“No one would say it out loud.”

Tom’s viscera shivers, his breath uneven. Harrison has grasped his arm without him realising.

“What is my name?” he asks, compelled to a whisper as well.

Harrison drops his grip, draws away, confused. “Tom, of course.”

The moment, whatever suspense or magical design they were under, is broken. Thadeus peeks around a tapestry, eyebrows high, and Tom feels the silencio unravel and dissipate.

“Are you okay, Harrison? …Why are you all wet?”

⸻

At the breakfast table, as Raynaldus Lestrange spins a tale of the early morning’s events while the rest of the table largely ignores him, Tom receives a hefty parcel. The sleek owl drops it on his empty plate with a resounding crash, and Tom considers it in his hands.

He carefully peels the brown paper wrapper just slightly open to reveal the spine of a thick book. The binding is plain, an ashen blue with silver script. Poppyseed: Four-Hundred Uses. There is a square piece of calligraphy paper, signed To the Heir of Slytherin, Your Faithful Benefactor.

“—screaming about trolls being set loose in the school.”

“It was just a nightmare, Raynaldus,” Nott sighs. “You don’t need to be so dramatic.”

“He woke me up, I think I have a right!”

“Who?” Roman Diggory asks blithely, disinterested.

Carefully, Tom grazes his thumb down the spine of the still-wrapped book, his skin rubbing the canvas texture of the hardbound cover. The letters ripple, shudder, and a new title is revealed.

Alchemy: Transmutation Beyond the Valley of Death, by Nicolas Flamel.

He pulls the pad of his thumb away from the book and its original, innocuous title is restored. Walburga smiles at him.

“From Mother, like you asked,” she murmurs.

“No one cares about your whinging, Lestrange,” Albert Carrow, a Fifth year, says, taking a large bite of a scone. “Besides, something much more interesting than bad dreams was going on last night. Or haven’t you heard?”

Rosier pitches herself half-way on the table, slamming a copy of the Daily Prophet down.

“Muggle London was set ablaze last night!” she bursts, finger jabbing the picture of a shell-shocked neighbourhood. Much of it is a hissing ruin, still curling around the edges as it chars.

“Grindelwald?” Nott asks.

“That depends on your own speculation,” Rosier answers. There is a deviousness in her that delights in the destruction, even if it is her own Countrymen. They are only Muggles, after all. “Is Lord Gellert Grindelwald behind the Muggle wars? No printing press in the country would say that, but his manifestos state clearly that he is driving Muggles to self-destruction. Certainly, Germany is the driving force of the Muggle war, and who is it whispering in the Third Reich’s ear?”

“Muggles are always destroying each other, dear. It is merely convenience that Grindelwald seeks to take credit for it,” Walburga counters. “Such is the nature, the market of Muggle war.”

“War is profit?” Nott asks with distaste.

“Not for everyone.”

“The Daily Prophetnever covers Grindelwald’s speeches,” Cygnus Black complains. “He gave one in Florence last month, but we won’t catch a single glimpse of it while we’re at Hogwarts. Not since the Minister passed that decree banning propaganda from school grounds.”

Indeed, the decree doesn’t provide a definition for the word, and so anything deemed controversial and political is subject to censure.

“We weren’t even at Hogwarts last month, Cygnus. You were just lazy,” Diggory sneers.

“‘The feudal relations of Muggles and their property, their industry, their religion became no longer compatible to Us; they become too many fetters. They must be burst asunder; they will be burst asunder,’” Tom quotes.

According to Grindelwald, his movement is apparently Muggle asceticism and Wizarding supremacy. Escaping the cultural indolence which has ruled Wixen life as a result of living in shadows; gaining what has since been erased and stagnated by Muggle dominance:

To eradicate the mysticism of Muggle technology; so that any Muggle advancement might be made in service to Wizarding greatness.

To radically decimate the global Muggle population and restore Wizards as leaders of the world.

To recover lost magics that gave Wizards natural immortality, which has been corrupted by Muggle pollution.

It is not a well-supported cause, merely a loudly acting one. Still; all previous movements are movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities, until they prevail and are implemented. In the late thirties and the start of the Muggle war, it seemed Grindelwald was doing very well for himself, having aligned with Germany. Now, as Germany crumbles beneath the weight of a multinational resistance, so too does Grindelwald’s power.

“Riddle, you could recite from memory the articles of a paper fifty years out of print,” Prewett laughs. “Go on; educate us, we, the heathen masses.”

Tom considers, deliberates. Imparts.

“‘Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, veins and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every shift in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?’”

Walburga tsks.

“This general Man to which all progressivists refer; this man who belongs to no class, has no reality, and who only exists in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy. Where is Woman?”

“Wise enough to actualise her philosophies rather than endlessly drone about them,” Rosier says.

“Here, here!” Diggory cheers.

“‘What else,’” Tom perseveres, “‘does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion with change in material production? Who commands the means of production?’”

“Isn’t this Karl Marx, verbatim?” Nott asks.

“Another man’s sharp blade does just as well as one’s own. Marxism is all about expropriation, after all,” Walburga laughs. “Grindelwald is a known thief. He plagiarises Machiavelli too. Let Riddle finish.”

Tom obliges.

“‘Religious, moral, philosophical and magical ideas have been modified in the course of history. But magic, blessed magic, has constantly survived these changes. There is the Eternal Truth that is common to all societies, that the Mage shall inherit and rule the earth. This Eternal Truth demands of us to seek our liberation from Muggle persecution, which cripples the cogs of magical progress.’”

"Bit dry, isn't he?" Alphard Black mutters.

Rosier sniffs.

“You wouldn’t understand. Grindelwald’s Revolt is of a most radical rapture away from traditional Order; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rapture away from traditional Truth,” she says haughtily.

Prewett looks at her with incredulity.

"‘Most radical rapture?’ Finally picked up a book and feeling very mighty, are we?"

Rosier fumes, moves to retort, but is cut off before she can truly begin.

“That implies that the traditional order,” Walburga says, “is Wizarding society in a position beneath Muggles.”

“Look around, Black,” Diggory sneers. “We are made to be beneath them. When were these halls last filled with the chanting echoes of our Pagan rites? How many Solstices have passed us by, sanitised under a post-Christianized veneer? This has been the order of things. It takes a Grindelwald to rearrange it.”

“Dear, that is revisionist history,” Walburga tuts. “We were Christian long before the Statute of Secrecy. Wizards and Muggles invented Christianity side by side. Hell, Ireland was Catholic before Hogwarts was even built. You should see how the Russians perform Eastern Orthodox magic. It’s marvellous.”

“But it was never natural!” Diggory hisses. “Salazar Slytherin understood that, or would you disagree with him?”

“I would be careful not to speak for Salazar Slytherin when there is only one of us here with that right,” Walburga says coldly, eyes cutting to Tom.

Tom sits tall and innocently, a smile pulling at his mouth. He need not say anything at all, Diggory going quiet, eyes darting to Tom nervously as she feels the weight of her mistake. That is the undeniablity of his power.

“It is true,” Tom says, “that Salazar Slytherin imagined for us a future in accordance with what is natural and just. We are the superior being; that does not change as religion and language is subject to. Call it Celtic or Christian, the Muggle remains an animal, and the Wizard a god. Those who deny this simple truth will continue to bear our culture to decline. Grindelwald understands this, but lowers himself by collaborating with Muggles and blood traitors. They who imitate us, enjoy our wealth, trade with our money, feast on our fruits. They who would steal from us our power for themselves and scorn us for it all the while.”

Tom taps the moving picture of the ruined London, the smoke and fires casting sinister shapes in the wind.

“Their fate is as London’s.”

All of this, Slytherin table considers over the carrot pudding.

⸻

Tom does not have time to add Alchemy to his rubric. Instead, his schedule is laden with double Ancient Runes. It is a study he enjoys, one that is both challenging and interesting. In simplest terms, Ancient Runes is the question of a name and the power that lies there within.

In the British practice, a rune, Runo or Runa meaning secret, is derived first from Elder Futhark, arising from the proto-Germanic language of the second century. Each symbol is granted a name, a title, which prescribes its meaning and power. They are ancient, imbued with the power of centuries of belief. Runic spell-crafting is as old as the alphabet itself, weighted with time and magical intent. Even the modern alphabet carries some arcane power, echoes of its ancestry in each letter.

Such is the reason one signs their name on a contract, the reason titles and named lineages are so important in Wizarding life. It is not just a matter of economical or social status, there is very literal magic involved. The magical weight in the name Black alone is so intoxicating as to proliferate loving and faithful incest in all those who bear it.

Such is the power in a Name.

British Wizards, and indeed many Wizards of the Romance languages, invoke Latin for spell-casting. What is thought to be a dead language by Muggles is actually alive and well in the magical world. To spell-craft, one needs only to marry the Latin imperative with a runic base.

It is a weaving, a mingling of meanings and truths.

Tom glances down at his text, following the Professor’s lecture absently. Written in Olde English, there is īs, gēr, ēolh, there is… Tom pauses half-way down the page.

He recalls that early morning, when that child had looked upon him in fear and confusion, when he had forced into Tom images not his own. He had seen there in the boy’s flesh, in the centre of the brow—and perhaps deeper still, graven into the bone beneath—a rune; sæwelo, sigel.

Sun.

The rune, the phonetic S, is from the child alphabet to Elder Futhark, Anglo Futhorc.

Is that who Harrison is, “Sigel semannum symble biþ on hihte?” A herald of light until the coarser of the deep bears all to land?

Is that his Name?

Tom has seen the symbol used by Muggles in the city as a reference to Nazi Germany. Are Malfoy’s suspicions then founded in fact? Perhaps Harrison has all along been the victim of displacement, torture, and branding?

Printed neatly beside Sigel in Tom’s textbook, it reads:

Gatekeeper, guide.

He thinks of Cerberus, gatekeeper to the Underworld.

He thinks of Harrison.

He had left the boy to sort himself out in the dorms, still soaked and in his night clothes, shaking and utterly incomprehensible. It seems his fugue wanes and waxes in episodes and megrims. Tom wonders if the curse of confusion that hovers over Harrison in a shroud, causing all in his vicinity to forget him, also affects Harrison himself. And how curious it is that Tom no longer seems to be under its power.

The haze that lingered in Tom’s mind just days before is all the more apparent now that it is completely gone.

And yet, the same cannot be said for the rest of the students. Not a single mention has been made of the transfer student, Hogwarts’ very first in history, among the whole student body. Not today, not in the days previous.

It seems Harrison exists only where he is immediately perceived, and still only then with great effort.

Why is it, then, that Tom is no longer so affected?

He rubs his fingers together, recalling the moment this very hand had seized the boy. Those visions… He tries to hold onto them, but they slip away like oil slick.

Are his visions, the images he seared into Tom, prophetic in nature?

Tom has never met a true Seer before.

No, his instinct tells him. The magic swirling around Harrison, the scent of it, the heat; it is not divination. It is… something else. Familiar.

“They told me your name first.”

On his parchment’s edge, he scrawls a hard, deep V over and over until it cuts a sharp valley into the paper and scuffs the desk surface beneath. He carves the letter into the wood until he feels the mark burn in his core and the stench of charred pine wafts in the air. His quill’s nib snaps.

No one knows his Name.

⸻

Nicholas Flamel is accredited a great many feats. If one were to read the biographies, the first-hand accounts, the personal letters, the majority of them would agree thus: that he is the pioneer of his field, the Father of Alchemy. He is a wizard of unmatched calibre, having made the unintelligible intelligible, and having forged the one and only Philosopher’s Stone out of it. One of the firsts: a Merlin of his time. Of course, in those days, the Physician, the Astrologer, and even the Sacrilegious were all called Magician.

Alchemy, much like runic calculation, is a precise magic. Like hand-tatting lace, arduously slow and intricate, an Alchemist twists molecules and electrons, splits them, rolls them inside out and remakes them.

Like God.

Flamel first sought to further research the Sacred Sciences as a young man in his late thirties, back in the fourteenth century. He first encountered proto-Alchemy in conversation with a German thaumaturge, enjoying the sight of his sacred, hand-written texts, receiving therein the foundation of what would become modern alchemy.

But the practice had long been spinning already in the minds of great sorcerers well before Flamel came into it. In fact, all of Flamel’s expertise was firstly the property of another. In part from the images of Medes, the herbs of the Arabians, the rituals of the Persians, yes, but the majority of Flamel’s foundation came from that hand-written manuscript. It was penned by the German thaumaturge’s father, who walked all the earth, from Germany to Egypt, convening with Prophets, Oracles, and Demons, until at last he arrived at Abramelin, a devout mage of the Qabbalah. In those days, one had to make eternal oaths and endure trials for over six months before receiving such knowledge he learned from that mage.

But of course, what history book in all of Europe would acknowledge a Frenchman’s success is due to the lifelong work of a Jew?

In the manuscript, the rare and impenetrable Book of the Sacred Magiks of Abramelin the Mage, the Sacred Sciences are concerned with the celestial star courses, with understanding metals and planets, and invoking spirits—what are now called the elements.

In all the chapters, all the guides which detail ritual preparation, meditation, and materials, there are two which hold particular interest to Tom, and are furthermore relevant to Nicholas Flamel’s Transmutation Beyond the Valley of Death.

Chapter Ten: How to Hinder Necromantic Operations, and Chapter Thirteen: How to Revive the Dead.

In explicit detail, Flamel reconstructs the diagrams, the symbols, even which elements to invoke. This tome has earned itself a place amongst the most restricted titles in the country, and the weight of it in Tom’s hands is sheer ecstasy.

From these chapters alone, Flamel constructed the Philosopher’s Stone, and so the Elixir of Life. Eternal life.

While it is a feat deserving of many accolades to have made the Elixir, it is an incomplete feat all the same. The Elixir of Life provides a false immortality; it only prevents ageing. It does not prevent death. And Tom does not wish to stave off death, to simply delay it. He wishes to eradicate its possibility entirely.

For this, Tom thinks of Flamel as less of a pioneer forging new paths and more as a cook.

Someone who copies recipes and writes none of his own.

“Enjoying the read?”

Tom makes note of his page and snaps the book closed.

Walburga stands over the back of his armchair in the Common Room, her long, thick hair pouring loose over her shoulder. Her dark, hooded eyes glimmer.

“Verily. I shall write your mother in thanks.”

Walburga rounds the chair to lean instead against the sette. Nott and Prewett, ever inseparable, are settled into it, reading their own texts as well.

“She anticipates your letters more than mine.”

“Then I’ll endeavour to write to her more.”

How else is Tom to secure certain resources, after all?

Lestrange sweeps upon them, followed by Alphard and Orion Black.

“Shall we head to dinner?” he asks, using the end of a broken quill to reach behind Prewett and ruthlessly tickle his ear and nape.

“Bugger off!” Prewett snaps, tossing his Potions book aside in favour of his wand and hitting Lestrange’s cheek with a stinging hex.

“Yeowch! Really, Prewett!”

“I must first fetch our wayward proselyte,” Tom says as he rises. He casts a discerning eye about the Commons but does not see any sign of a small, bespectacled boy. His declaration is met with a series of blank stares. Disconcerting, though not wholly unexpected at this point.

“Our transfer student, Mr. Harrison,” he expands upon.

“Ah,” Thadeus Nott is the first to speak. His brow is furrowed, as he too seems to realise with strange disconnection, the cloudiness of his own memory.

“Must you?” Lestrange bemoans, as he is wont.

“You would not deprive us of our St. Sebastian, would you? Our new little urchin?” Walburga croons, now snatching the broken quill from Lestrange’s grip. She transfigures it into a small arrow, and with deft reflexes, pierces it through Lestrange’s outer robes and out again, the arrow resting right over his heart.

“Not yet full of arrows,” Tom says.

“I’m sure that will be corrected in time,” Walburga laughs.

He imagines Harrison then, pinned through to a tree by copper spearheads, the soft flesh of his belly creased with blood and the trembling shaft of an arrow buried deep inside, the bow still vibrating hot in Tom’s hands from a recent arrow let loose.

“He was up in the dormitory last I saw him,” Nott says.

He makes his leave of them without delay, unable to shake the image he’d conjured and feeling oddly obsessive of it.

When Tom reaches the emerald arches of his dorm tapestries, he hears nothing but the drone of the lake and the dripping of pipes in the showers in the adjoining chamber. The lanterns are as embers, sleeping through the remainder of their short lives until an elf comes to revive them once more.

Tom walks to a certain partition of curtains and pulls velvet fields of green aside. Harrison’s bed is dark, and he finds his figure huddled in a heap of bedclothes. He lies awake, but still, and peers over a duvet at Tom.

“Are you going to dump water on me again?” he asks petulantly.

“I am here to escort you to dinner. You never came down for breakfast or lunch.”

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“Hm, then you must be by now.”

Tom uses his wand to cast the tapestries back, new light shining on them.

“I have a headache,” Harrison says, wincing away.

“Make yourself ready, and we shall go together.”

Harrison sits up only when Tom advances on the bed. He can see the raw edges of the scar on Harrison’s pale forehead. Something in his chest seems to thrum when his eyes land upon it.

“Come,” he says again, and this time anoints it with compulsion, just a touch. If Harrison resists again, Tom will not be so pleasantly met. He will make the boy a Saint Sebastien in earnest.

Harrison obeys, sliding his feet out from under the cover, and Tom watches the progression of his robes as they slip up his calf, his knee, his too slender thigh. His teeth itch curiously.

They stand toe to toe, Harrison’s feet bare. They are slim as any part of him, and latticed with well defined veins that run silver over metatarsal. Tom wonders unbidden if their arches would fit within the curve of his palm. The thought strikes him as alien, but it is wholly his own.

It is thus I would ever have you, he’d read in Flamel’s book. Flamel had been referring to the Secret Sciences, but it feels suddenly appropriate here.

“Your shoes,” Tom prompts.

Harrison silently pulls on his soft soled slippers. The sparseness of his possessions is not missed by Tom. Harrison appears to own only that which the school has provided, the tailoring leaving Harrison’s narrow ankles and knobbed neck exposed; unprotected. He wonders if the fund for Misplaced Magical Children has aided him any… if anyone has remembered Harrison might need it at all.

Tom supposes they are both two children forgotten in the mess of bureaucracy and cultural irresponsibility, and they have come to drift in vicinity of one another. Tom intends, he is sure now, to grasp firmly.

At last in the Great Hall, the Evening Prophet greets them, circulating the tables. The front page continues to discuss the wreckage of London; apparently a historical Wizarding house was hit, though repairs are well under way. The article itself compares the event to the bombing of Rome earlier that summer.

And like the Italian Wizarding media, the Prophet continues to avoid mentioning Grindelwald by name.

Tom pulls Harrison down into the seat next to him and says,

“In Rome, I have discovered the secret of human life. Enjoyment lies in gigantic desires. The life of the nation and Man is despicable if it is without thunderous exploits.”

“Gogol, again?” Malfoy asks. “I suppose if anyone knows about thunderous exploits, it’s him.”

“They’re saying it’s a tragedy,” Rosier says flippantly, gesturing to the paper the Slytherins are leaning over. “But what do I care for a few hundred dead Muggles? Italian, British, what difference does that make?”

Prewett scoffs, staring at her with hard anger.

“Perhaps you should go, then. See London or Rome. And find that it is not only Muggles and Mudbloods lying in shallow graves! Grindelwald has purged at least a dozen Pureblood families from existence. Our culture is the least of his priorities, and if you think yourself immune to his or Germany’s ‘New Order,’ you wouldn’t see your executioner even if he were raising his wand in front of you!”

“Prewett, the Champion of the Mundane. Italy turned from its master; it deserved to be punished,” Rosier says and rolls her eyes.

“Silly girl! Keep your romantic notions of war and be the first felled by it,” Prewett persists hotly, glaring into his plate. Nott places a hand on his arm briefly.

“You’re just sore because your precious squib finally met her end this summer. Have you had the funeral yet, Thadeus?” Diggory sneers. “Your poor sister. At least she’s been put out of her misery.”

The table shivers, goes quiet. Thadeus Nott visibly shrivels. He wilts like a tormented animal. Ignatius abruptly rises to his feet, wand not quite levelled at her but nearly.

“How dare you. She was a child!” Prewett hisses. “And a daughter of the Sacred Twenty-Eight!”

Rosier purses her mouth, and says nothing more as Prewett grabs Nott by the arm and drags him out the Hall.

“You’re a piece of work, ” Alphard says.

“A spade is a spade,” Rosier mutters unapologetically.

“You spoke out of turn,” Walburga tells her. “Thadeus loved his sister dearly and she meant a great deal to Ignatius. She was promised to him up until it was confirmed she was a squib.”

“Falling for the Model Mudblood fallacy if you ask me,” Abraxas sniffs, though no one had asked. “How hard it is these days to find a Wizard who can stand by his principles. I commend Grindelwald.”

Walburga outright laughs.

“If you think Grindelwald is sticking to his principles, any principle for that matter, you are a bigger fool than I thought,” she says. “He’s chasing fairytales.”

“Whether he truly believes in the Pureblood way or not is irrelevant, as it will be his means of achievement. Why question the specifics of our victory?” Rosier says, forceful.

“Cordillia, you announce your inanity so confidently,” Walburga sighs.

Politics, that necessary evil. Tom cannot say he doesn’t appreciate the game or recognize Grindelwald’s methods. An architect has many fundations, after all. Indeed, Tom himself is an architect. It is simply that Grindelwald’s own material is thin, written with a certain vacuity of thought, concentrated into a few memorable phrases and slogans and none of a greater context. A Rosier then reads it and takes it for fact.

The Grindelwald before finding fame on an international stage had little to say on blood purity. His published essays, those few worth mentioning, can be found in the magazine Die Verzauberte Spiegel from the late twenties.

He had very little to say about anything, in fact, the least of which was on lineage or heraldry. His efforts were focused on mythology, particularly the myth that wizards were once naturally immortal and only became mortal by Muggle interference. He believed this could be restored by using the Deathly Hallows, a collection of novelty trinkets from a children’s story. Hardly an intellectual, and juvenile in his field, Grindelwald made pitiful attempts at expeditions at his own expense after failing to win any sponsorships. He made a poor treasure hunter and a poorer author. Grindelwald's first references to Purity do not appear until 1939 in the self-published manifesto that announced his declaration of war on Muggles.

Tom finds this amusingly curious and not curious at all.

Grindelwald is essentially running a scheme, setting before any easily-swayed youth the promise of glory and prescribing them the illusion of special status. It isn’t a bad scheme in principle, merely an untenable one. The moment the illusion lifts is the moment Grindelwald will lose all power. Such are the ilk of Grindelwald's knights! Susceptible to militant avant-gardism and prone to desertion. Cordillia Rosier is the ideal follower in this way, and though Tom has never been excited by sheep, he tempers his criticism. Grindelwald is a grand master; of sheep, certainly, but still a master.

“Some rather be gamed than to play,” Lestrange says.

“War isn’t a game,” Harrison declares, and the table startles. He stares hard at them.

“If only that were true,” Tom says, “but all of life is so.”

The game is a thirst, one for glory, and all the world participates.

It rushes against itself, shields of armoured legions, in a fit of indescribable ecstasy and deafened by the sound of clashing iron. One can hear the whole earth resounding with it, the brandishing of spears, the cries of battle, the beat of drums. They echo to the edge of the world endlessly, for the world has no edge, no end—and nor has desire.

Wild and vicious, seizing more and more—until eventually one may conquer heaven.

Or so says Gogol.

Walburga smiles, agreeing. She shies not away from the gruesomeness of war, revels in it even. “In war, we must align ourselves with greatness. If no greatness is present, then we must forge the way ourselves. That is the way of our House, the one you find yourself in, Mr. Harrison. You are ours now. For all our bickering, our disagreements, for all we may appear to dislike one another, we are players in this game, and so are you.”