A letter from Emrys
Albus looks over the letter again. It is exactly as unremarkable as it was the first time he read it, the second, the third, and the fourth. Short, friendly, and to the point. It’s penned in letters that jump from enthusiastic and bouncy to endlessly patient, the hand absolutely beautiful, like old scripture, but the content completely and utterly mundane no matter which way he looks at it. He looks at the signature again.
Myriddian Emrys.
Albus has heard the name before, at least the last one. Emrys is a name all well-informed people recognize- truly well-informed people, not surface-level hobbyists, which is to say, very few. If you care to look, it’s interwoven in both magical and Muggle history at a foundational level, forming the base off of which every other name enthusiastically makes their mark and wins their laurels.
The information on the line of Emrys is remarkably little, so those who may claim to know every old and important family will not have ever heard of such a clan. It isn’t lauded in any sort of records (strange- pureblood clans, especially those as old as Emrys, tend to be quite proud of their lineages). The family isn’t known for anything in particular, because the family isn’t known. Seemingly, it doesn’t want to be known.
Albus knows the name. Not from any records or from word of mouth. It’s just an observation he’s made, having been lucky enough to have studied in as many fields as extensively as he has. His life has led him down a very winding road to all sorts of destinations. No matter where he found himself, Albus always paid attention- he was rather like a sponge that way, absorbing everything he could at any opportunity- and as such, he’s encountered the name Emrys more than once. Enough, it would seem, to leave a suspicious impression. See, as unseen as the name is by history, Albus has noticed a pattern. Every now and then an Emrys will do something quietly ingenious. It usually isn’t anything that would make headlines, nothing that outshone anyone else in the field at the time by too far of a stretch. Nothing that anyone would look at for too long beyond cementing the idea in their head, or putting the result of the work to use. Emrys’ have a penchant for doing incredible things- all sorts of things, from academic writing that starts the cogs of a civil rights movement, to engineering a new way to approach flight, to inventing an entire new strain of spell work, to dissecting the linguistic theory behind latin incantations that is still applied today. Little things like that, hidden behind other people’s names, tucked into the third or fourth page of accreditations. Very few people read the third and fourth pages of accreditations, as Albus does. And very, very few people have meandered through life quite so thoroughly as Albus has, enough to find it strange that no matter how sharply they turned there was always a chance that somewhere in their studies the name Emrys would be sequestered in a dusty corner no one paid too much mind. No matter what language or field that study might be in. You never knew where an Emrys might pop up- not that anyone else, as far as Albus knows, has made this observation.
The only conclusion he’s come to regarding these strange and marvellous peopleis that there is only one Emrys clan. One family, quietly providing their brilliant service in the background of the happenings as they happen, since, for all he knows, time began. A humble line of untold geniuses that sparks so diversely across the spectrum of understanding. What a fantastic thought.
And here Albus holds a letter from one of them.
Of course he’s going to hire him.