Turning over the details of how I intended to spend the next few days, I continued to wander through Diagon Alley and the side streets branching off it. Yes, the place was growing grim. I'll admit it to myself plainly: I wanted it back the way it was — bright and absurd. Because this sort of grimness, soon set to rival full gothic, was associated with one thing and one thing only, and that thing was bad.
In the shards of elven memory, every dark event had been accompanied by precisely these kinds of dark shifts — some medieval city riot, and they were all medieval in their way, with allowances made for magic — or some blight, a failed initiation, an attack by necromancers, forever dissatisfied with their half-lives. The dwarf's memories were the same. The scraps belonging to wizards from various other worlds were entirely the same as well. It seemed that wherever magic existed, bad events were invariably accompanied by something of this sort.
On the other hand, a similar — if less extreme — phenomenon existed in the ordinary world too. I recalled one particular memory from a past life, though all its vividness lay purely in associations and sensations. I was walking home from a nightclub in the city centre one summer. A Sunday morning, early dawn, not a soul or a sound anywhere. The feeling hit me especially sharply as I crossed the central market square, past one of the oldest shopping centres in the city. Empty stalls, silence, no birds, no people, no cars — only various scraps of litter drifting here and there on the wind. In those days I'd never seen that place so empty. Post-apocalyptic films weren't yet ubiquitous, and the absolute uniqueness of the sight was genuinely striking.
But without magic, you can't achieve the right depth of grimness. Because magic is not just images and colours. It's a sixth sense, or a seventh — the number doesn't matter. And that sense often conveys mood and atmosphere more precisely than any image or piece of music.
Lost in these thoughts, I didn't notice myself walking into Knockturn Alley until I was already there. More accurately — the moment of transition had passed entirely beneath my conscious attention. And frankly, the contrast between Diagon Alley and Knockturn Alley was no longer sharp enough to catch the notice of a distracted mind, given that the main wizarding thoroughfare was darkening while this one simply remained as it always had been.
Was there any point in my being here? Regardless, ordinary folk considered Knockturn Alley a sort of sanctuary of darkness in every sense — not darkness as in the Dark Arts or anything of that nature, but simply a refuge of Evil. Just that, capitalised. Everything a wizard could imagine as being bad, everything that could conceivably exist within a city, was here, in the popular imagination. The amusing thing was that this stereotype had embedded itself so deeply in the wizarding consciousness that the representatives of Evil had begun to believe it themselves — criminals of every sort, wizards who'd gone round the bend, and other various inadequates, regardless of whether they actually practised Dark Magic or were simply unpleasant people in their own right.
I doubted many stopped to consider that a Stronghold of Evil could not realistically exist right alongside the Ministry. The world might be magical, but the rules governing it were more or less the same as in ordinary life. Demand creates supply; whoever is stronger is in the right — the factors determining strength simply being somewhat different — and if a whole district exists right next to the main street, a Stronghold of Evil at that, it was either profitable to someone, or the effort of cleaning it up simply wasn't worth the return.
I hadn't gone far into Knockturn Alley before I encountered "the darkest wizard of the millennium" — Hagrid. The great shaggy giant recognised me immediately.
"Oh, hello, He— hm—" He waved a hand at me, smiling broadly — you could tell from the way his beard curled — and in the process startled a pair of suspicious-looking individuals in gaudy clothing who had been behaving rather like addicts of some kind. "What're you doing in a place like this?"
"Hello to you too, Hagrid," I said, silently crediting him with more wit than he was usually given — simple as he was, he understood perfectly well that calling out the name of someone making their way through Knockturn Alley without advertising their face was inadvisable. "You won't believe it — I didn't notice I'd wandered in. Diagon Alley's grown so grim and dreary that there's no longer enough contrast between it and here to notice the difference."
"Aye, dark times. Come on then." The big man drew alongside me, and it became clear he had made it his mission to escort me out of this disreputable place. "Respectable wizards have no business strolling around somewhere with a reputation like this."
We set off through the narrow passages of Knockturn Alley toward Diagon Alley.
"What are you doing here, then? You're a professor, after all. Won't it damage your reputation?"
"Have I got a reputation?" he rumbled, rather louder than the situation required. "I mean, I'm not the brightest, right, but I know my reputation is... what's the word? Middling."
"Come now, don't sell yourself short. Show me anyone else who can handle any dangerous creature you care to name. The more dangerous, the faster you manage it."
"Aye, that I can do. I just don't see what's so dangerous about 'em, tell the truth. I mean, there's an approach to every single one." Hagrid leaned down slightly as we walked, as if about to share a secret — though with that voice of his, such manoeuvres were somewhat futile. "They say you can even get on all right with Dementors."
"Not surprising. There's an approach to everyone."
"Aye. Only the way to get on with them might be... not a good one."
We came out onto Diagon Alley.
"Thanks for the escort," I said, raising a hand to Hagrid.
"Don't mention it. It's the right thing to do. Mind where you're walking next time."
And off Hagrid went, lumbering away to whatever business he had, settling something more comfortably in the inner pocket of his old brown coat.
If fate itself had seen fit to prevent me from exploring Knockturn Alley, then perhaps I had no need to be there. Or perhaps the opposite — perhaps I needed to be there very much indeed. I preferred the first interpretation.
This time I made directly for the Leaky Cauldron, and once in the back alley, cast a Notice-Me-Not and Apparated close to home.
The house was quiet. I sensed Hermione in her room — as I'd expected, she had taken refuge in her book paradise and was undoubtedly reading with great absorption. I wouldn't disturb her.
Passing through to the kitchen, I looked into the refrigerator and quickly assembled a straightforward meal — a substantial stack of sandwiches with ham, cheese, and greens. Though strictly speaking they ought to be called sandwiches regardless, given that the word buterbrod didn't really exist in English. Everything of that description got called a sandwich here. I might be wrong about that, but I'd yet to hear the word used otherwise.
Piling this considerable quantity of food onto a plate, I poured myself a jug of juice and settled on the sofa in the sitting room, setting everything on the coffee table beside me. I opened the rucksack, from which I was very rarely separated, and drew out the first book from Grimmauld Place — time to go through their contents. Perhaps there was something genuinely useful in there, rather than pure darkness for darkness's sake.
Reading, eating, drinking. Reading, eating, drinking.
I can say that the contents of certain books would produce a reliable gag reflex in anyone of delicate nerves or excessive sensibility. I suspected that had I been a simpler sort of person, I would at minimum have had to stop eating during the more unpleasant passages.
As I'd expected, the majority of magical subjects addressed in these books were oriented toward the infliction of harm upon one's fellow beings with extraordinary ingenuity. Sometimes fatal harm. Sometimes incurable. Sometimes for the purpose of torture. Sometimes for the purpose of killing outright. And sometimes simply in order to extract, through highly unusual magical methods, as much magical energy as possible from a sentient creature — for the purpose of yet more elaborate and entirely pointless magical manipulations.
What I would never understand was this particular variety of excess cruelty toward everything in reach. Every wizard had at their disposal a genuinely inexhaustible supply of universal magical energy — but rather than using it rationally, rather than optimising their efforts for maximum return, some preferred to do things of complete absurdity that caused suffering to everyone around them.
Why bother with complex calculations, material schematics through which magic could flow and produce grand effects — or at the very least create reservoirs, if one couldn't independently release the required volumes of energy — why bother straining one's brain at all, when you could tap into negative emotions, stage a mass sacrifice of sentient magical beings, complete with suffering and torture, and simply extract the needed energy that way? Why indeed.
I could understand and accept the existence of such a path if there were no unlimited access to energy. But given that there was...
These perversions accounted for two thirds of the Dark Arts as I now knew them. Only a third constituted genuine arts in any meaningful sense. If the majority of the darkness was simply a crude means to an end — often carrying an enormous risk of killing oneself in the process, or ending up as a gibbering wreck — then that remaining third was something else entirely. It was not a whit simpler a science than ordinary magic. If anything, more complex. More formulae, more conditions, more manipulations, more elaborate constructs. And the emotion-altered energy was not the primary driving force, meant to make things easier — it was a beautiful garnish on the cake, but one without which the cake itself would not function at all.
Now that was interesting. Finally encountering books of pure darkness alongside the genuine treatises on the Dark Arts, something had crystallised. What local wizards called "the Dark Arts" was actually two entirely distinct branches of magic. One was oriented toward the creation of complex effects through extraordinarily complex manipulations that would only work with emotion-distorted energy — yet the effects themselves might not carry an iota of evil or negativity, beyond what was inevitably transmitted by the energy itself. The other was oriented purely toward harm, consumed enormous quantities of distorted energy in place of calculation, and through its application to a target produced an outpouring of death-energy and related forces which were, in themselves, capable of producing a variety of effects in the category of: death, viscera, suffering.
Against the background of these thoughts, I arrived at a conviction that the purpose of the Killing Curse was not so much murder as such, but rather the generation of a very large quantity of death-energy in a single instant, for subsequent use toward other ends. Simply because... there existed an enormous number of other, no less effective, instantaneous, and above all considerably safer and less costly means of killing by magic.
"What are you reading?"
Hermione had intended to appear silently, but no — I'd sensed her coming, so I looked up without any particular reaction.
"A book from Sirius Black's house."
"Is it? Interesting?" She settled onto the sofa beside me and glanced at the pages in my hands. "This is — Merlin, why are you reading this—"
The illustration was not a pleasant one — a diagram of a ritual infant sacrifice. That it was not depicting surgical procedure was self-evident, in fact. The stylistic choices throughout the volume were very much in keeping. Perhaps this was an opportunity to disrupt her assumptions.
"In order to know what one might encounter in this life. Dumbledore gave it to me."
"Dumbledore?" The switch in her head flipped from abomination, burn it to approved by authority, proceed with reading. "Oh... Does he know what's in these books?"
"I rather think he knows their contents very well."
"But—" Hermione was visibly torn — this was a book, a rare one, from the house of an ancient wizarding family, and moreover one sanctioned by Dumbledore despite its contents. "But Dumbledore is a great Light wizard. He doesn't hold with Dark magic..."
"Who on earth told you that?" I set down my book to look at her face, which was full of uncertainty. "He is great, powerful, and all the rest, but the fact that he doesn't use Dark magic doesn't mean he knows nothing about it. And 'Great Light Wizard' is simply a title — from books, not from real life. At nearly seventeen, one ought to understand that books—"
"May have nothing to do with reality. I know. That's long since been established. I worked it out in second year. But — why do you need this?"
"In order to know. I've very nearly secured an apprenticeship with a Master Healer, as it happens."
"Have you? That's wonderful. Probably." Hermione made herself more comfortable and seemed to pull herself together slightly — though on reflection it was less pulling together and more drawing inward. "It would be wonderful for me to study under someone as well."
"Study at your own pace. Study effectively. Don't chase me or anyone else. As I told Potter — don't try to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself."
"Right. Fine. Understood. But you should know — I need to make sure you're not reading anything in these books that... that really oughtn't to be read."
"If you want to read them, just say so, rather than inventing a justification." I began pulling books from the rucksack one after another. "If you need an excuse, you're looking for a clearly formulated description of Fiendfyre."
"I've heard of it," Hermione said, taking the top book from the first stack — there were three stacks in total, all fairly tall. "That it's an extremely dangerous spell. Beyond that I've been able to find nothing about it."
"Nor have I. And I need it. The books themselves I'm studying for the knowledge — a coherent account of Fiendfyre is a secondary objective."
And so we settled in to read. Hermione did, however, occasionally direct a disapproving look at me as I periodically consumed sandwiches in the course of this important process. Catching the look, I simply smiled.
"Not even going to say something like: how can you keep eating?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Experience suggests it would be pointless."
"Ah — and I can even guess which experience. Ginger sort of experience..."
"Ron's not as bad as he seems."
"You girls are always determined to dig deep enough into someone to pull out their virtues. I'm not disputing it — he almost certainly has good qualities. Only when you're talking about a person, what matters is the whole picture, not one or two traits. And that whole picture, in Ron's case, is not impressive."
"You're no ideal yourself."
"I know. I don't go about helping people. I don't rush to correct injustices. I'm not particularly kind. I'm not accommodating."
"There'd be more, if one looked carefully."
"And yet the overall picture?" I said, with a slight smirk.
"Mordred only knows."
On that fine note, we both submerged ourselves entirely in the books.
By evening the parents were home, and the pleasant ordinary bustle of family life resumed — conversation, discussion of everything under the sun. The days passed like this, one after another. Hermione was delighted to be reading genuinely rare books, but their contents entirely offset her good mood. The sheer volume and degree of darkness that wizards had conceived seemed to be beyond anything she had imagined. Much of it had purposes that were, frankly, questionable even by the standards of its own genre — of the because we can variety. Nonetheless, knowing all of it was necessary, if only to recognise it should one encounter it in life.
On the second of July, owls finally arrived bearing letters from the Ministry — that was where our examination papers had been sent, along with the results of our practical work and the marks and assessments from our professors. There, as Hermione explained, they were verified for authenticity by magic and formally certified. Ordinarily this took very little time, and absent any specific reason for delay, results could theoretically be received before one had even left Hogwarts. That, however, rarely happened. Bureaucracy, as ever.
It was morning — we were at breakfast, in fact. The parents had long since stopped being surprised by postal owls at the windows — they barely looked up, beyond: "Children, post for you, go and get it." It was decided to open the letters at the table and read out the results then and there.
"Well then?" Dad said, hurrying us along as he sipped his tea. "How did you do?"
"All Outstanding!" Hermione exclaimed, all but bouncing in her chair, and promptly went to embrace Mum.
"And you?" Dad turned to me, smiling.
"The same," I nodded, with an equal smile. "I won't be doing the hugging."
"Ohhh," Dad said, with mock solemnity. "Tough wizards don't go in for hugging."
"The result was predictable. I don't see grounds for excessive celebration."
"And yet there's Hermione, still unable to detach herself from your mother."
"Gryffindor," I said, with a shrug and a smile, and Hermione immediately shot me an indignant look. "However intelligent, clever, and so on — the dominant trait of character is an impulsive temperament. Which can ignite in any direction and for any reason. She'll have composed herself in a minute."
"Already composed." Hermione returned to the table with a smile, finally releasing Mum and giving her back her freedom of movement. "How did they not put you in Slytherin with that character of yours? Cunning, calculating little beetle."
"The defining Hufflepuff virtue is diligence."
"Hm. Can't argue with that."
The parents congratulated us on our excellent marks, and produced from somewhere — as if by magic — a small celebratory cake that had clearly been prepared in advance. It appeared they had not entertained any other possibility. Then they hurried off to the clinic. Their business there was not yet finished, and their official holiday didn't begin for another ten days.
The door had barely closed behind them before Hermione asked:
"Shall we carry on reading? There's not much left."
"Mm. Not much, accounting for the fact that we've each been working through half the books. But no. I need to send a few letters now. I promised to write to Daphne today, as it happens. I need to send a copy of my results to the Master Healer and arrange a time for the assessment of my skills and knowledge. And besides — I still haven't been in touch with the twins because of all this reading."
"But you said yourself they're busy setting up the shop. They must be desperate to open as soon as possible. If they had a free moment, believe me, they'd have written themselves. Your joint venture is far too profitable to forget about."
"Fair point."
Regardless, I wrote the letters quickly, and the moment I'd finished, a fidgety Crookshanks — no, Pigwidgeon — came hurtling into the room where Hermione and I had been reading together. He squeaked, ruffled his feathers, performed an impression of an aeroplane on one of the many improvised perches scattered around the house specifically for him, and volunteered himself for postal duty. Asked whether he'd prefer to carry all the letters at once or make individual trips, the little owl — as if he understood every word, which was in all likelihood actually the case — indicated agreement with the second option, and a rather extended dispatch process began.
Replies came back within a couple of hours. As for our postman: he was stretched out on the sofa, face buried in a cushion, legs extended — fast asleep.
Having read through the replies, I was able to form a reasonably clear picture of the next few days. Daphne, by her account, had been waiting for exactly this letter in order to arrange a meeting on the fourth of July, at noon, outside Florean Fortescue's. The twins said: drop in at the shop whenever you've got a free moment, we'll talk things through. And Healer Smethwyck, not inclined to put things off, suggested meeting at St. Mungo's tomorrow at one o'clock and proceeding from there to his friends'. A solid plan — and better yet, today there was ample time to finish working through my half of the books. Books in which, as it happened, there had not been so much as a mention of Fiendfyre. That was a problem.
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