Darkness spread like a rising tide. In a single night, Grindelwald's shadow fell across the whole of the continent, and it kept spreading at a pace that left everyone reeling, racing to swallow the entire magical world.
The magical world here wasn't the narrow one people usually meant when they used that phrase, the one where "the wizarding world" really just meant Britain, and everything outside it barely registered at all.
But this time, every Ministry, whether they'd taken part in the operation or not, went dead silent. The reports had reached them all. Many hadn't wanted to believe it at first, and had checked and rechecked through every channel available, before finally, reluctantly, accepting the truth.
More than four hundred Aurors, and Grindelwald had walked through them like they weren't even there. A single spell had turned the entire battle.
Was there anyone left in this world who could stand in his way?
How had the International Confederation and the various Ministries ever managed to beat him the first time?
Driven by that question, long-sealed archives were dragged back out into the light, and old men who'd retired decades ago to live out quiet lives were pulled back in for questioning. Everyone scrambled to find some weakness in Grindelwald, some way to bring him down again.
But once they'd heard what those veterans had to say, once they'd read through the old records, they fell silent.
A price paid in blood. Leadership from the very best the world had to offer. And, above all, Grindelwald's own choice.
Take away any one of those three things, and the war could never have ended the way it did.
Back then, Grindelwald had chosen to fight to the last, and that was the only reason Dumbledore had ever managed to bring him down. This time, he had no interest in fighting to the death at all. Win, and he'd press the advantage. Lose ground, and he'd simply vanish.
As long as he stayed alive, every power set against him would live in a waking nightmare, and nothing anyone did could pin him down.
And that alone was a problem with no clean solution. The trouble sitting right in front of them now was worse still.
By the latest count, three hundred and sixteen Aurors from twenty-two different countries were currently in Grindelwald's hands, and nobody knew if they were alive or dead. If they'd all been killed, half the Ministers of those twenty-two nations would be forced out of office by morning.
Babajide was already under siege from every side. Bitterly, he'd announced he would step down once the negotiations concluded, but what good was that? Him stepping down wasn't going to bring anyone's Aurors back.
Only two outcomes remained on the table now. Either Grindelwald had gone fully feral and started killing without restraint, in which case everyone involved was finished, torn apart by furious, panicked citizens and the vengeful families of the dead. Or, the better possibility, the hostages were still alive, and if they were alive, there was still hope, still room to fight for them.
They tried reaching Dumbledore. The old man gave them nothing back. Every message they sent vanished without so much as a ripple.
...
A new week began at Hogwarts, and the young witches and wizards there had no idea the world outside had already turned upside down. The news hadn't crossed into Britain yet. Fudge, blissfully ignorant as ever, figured his relationship with the International Confederation had never been close to begin with, and saw no reason to involve himself in any of it.
The students were still caught up in yesterday's match. Even over breakfast, snatches of conversation drifted through the hall, students weighing Ginny's and Hermione's odds of taking the championship in their respective year groups.
Nobody doubted Ginny. What she'd shown on the field was outright domination, the kind that made even upperclassmen's scalps prickle.
Hermione was the one people worried about. Her win hadn't looked especially convincing, and it left an impression of shakiness that lingered.
Tom was in the middle of discussing an emergency training plan for Hermione with Daphne, when Daphne, in one of her wilder flights of imagination, suggested they head down to Knockturn Alley and round up a few dark wizards, the uglier and more obviously villainous-looking the better.
If Hermione could handle facing down opponents that repulsive without flinching, then sharing a dueling platform with students from other schools would feel like nothing at all.
Tom just blinked at her, caught completely off guard.
At first he'd assumed Daphne was joking at Hermione's expense, but the more he turned it over, the more sense it actually made. Dark wizards weren't any more frightening than fellow students, not really, and what Hermione needed most was exactly this kind of exposure. Practicing against Tom every day clearly wasn't cutting it; nothing about that ever made her nervous in the first place.
Just as the boy was seriously weighing whether a trip to Knockturn Alley was worth the trouble, he felt someone watching him from the staff table. He looked up and found Dumbledore's gaze fixed on him, tinged with something like worry.
He blinked once, then immediately arranged his face into that shy, guileless, boyish smile of his. No one looking at that face would ever have guessed the same boy had spent the previous day playing the Dark Lord.
Dumbledore certainly hadn't guessed it either.
Watching Tom smile so freely, an unexpected pang of guilt stirred in his chest.
Did he really have to drag Tom into all of this? But why had Grindelwald insisted, as one of his conditions, that Tom be brought along, that Tom stand there as a witness to it all?
"If you refuse to set aside your morals, your rules, you will never be my equal."
Grindelwald's parting taunt kept circling back through his mind, and Dumbledore found he had no answer for it. If he threw caution to the wind and stormed into Berlin, he couldn't hope to free all three hundred hostages at once, but a dozen or so at a time, sure, that he could manage. Do it enough times, and he could strip Grindelwald down to nothing.
After that, it would simply become a contest of who cracked first.
Just imagining it was enough to chill him. There was no real way he could go through with something like that, which left him boxed in, forced to play along.
Better to talk to the boy's guardians first. If he brought Tom along without so much as informing his family, whatever trouble waited for him afterward would make Grindelwald look mild by comparison.
Dumbledore made up his mind. As for safety, with himself standing there, Grindelwald would never lay a hand on Tom.
After breakfast, once the young witches and wizards had filed off to their classes, Dumbledore reached out to Tom's "guardians" to explain the situation.
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