Dear Headmaster,
To be perfectly honest, I want no connection whatsoever with you or with the British Wizarding world as a whole.
I am content in Australia. It offers better opportunities, better people, and a life free of dark and light chess masters who manipulate thought, livelihood, and lives alike to satisfy their petty hunger for power and control. You and Lord Voldemort are welcome to share a fondue together and remain there indefinitely. If nothing else, it might finally spare ordinary people from being crushed between your respective machinations.
I have no interest in placing myself between your power plays.
As for my inventions, your disappointment is irrelevant to me. They were never meant to serve Britain's interests in the first place, it was my mode of livelihood, now that it's gone, I don't care whom it inconveniences further.
I owe you nothing further.
Regards,
Your former student
Someone who chose to run from two dark lords competing to rule the same country
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore sat alone in the Headmaster's office, the letter resting lightly in his hands, its words already committed to memory. Disappointment weighed on him, not loud or theatrical, but dense and familiar. Another student had misunderstood him. Another had chosen a path that veered away from what Dumbledore believed was… necessary.
Power, when placed in the wrong hands, was always a cause for concern.
That concern had grown sharper in recent years. Wizarding strength had once been measured by discipline, study, and innate talent. Now it could be purchased, assembled, activated. Alchemical devices. Tools. Shortcuts. As an alchemist himself, Dumbledore had long feared such inventions. Not because he failed to understand them, but because he understood them too well.
Advanced alchemy, like the Dark Arts, disrupted balance. And balance, fragile as it was, required guidance.
For decades, he had worked directly and indirectly to steer the wizarding population away from such dangerous conveniences. Progress, he believed, must be slow. Controlled. Above all, supervised. Yet ingenuity had once again slipped through his fingers.
Trix, they called it.
A toy, at first glance. Harmless. Clever. And then, quietly, it spread. Too quietly.
He had been distracted. Tom Riddle demanded attention, constant and consuming. While Dumbledore focused on containing one rising catastrophe, another had bloomed unnoticed. By the time he looked up, the Blacks and the Lestranges had already moved, circling like old predators recognizing opportunity. The conundrum had already formed.
Initially, Dumbledore had assumed the worst of them. That they had acquired the rune matrices and procedural knowledge themselves, then passed them on to the Dark Lord. It would have been… predictable. But the truth was subtler, and therefore more troubling.
The original creator had leaked the procedures directly to the Death Eaters.
So Dumbledore had written to confirm.
And this letter was the answer.
He sighed softly.
People rarely understood what was good for them. That burden, Dumbledore believed, fell upon the enlightened. To guide. To nudge. To arrange circumstances so that wiser outcomes emerged naturally. Still, guidance required consent. Even the most carefully laid path meant nothing if the traveler refused to walk it.
He remembered the Ravenclaw now. Quiet. Observant. Always present, rarely noticed. Dumbledore had overlooked him as one overlooks many capable students who do not demand attention. After graduating from the College the previous year, the young man had vanished. Dumbledore had assumed the worst. Another mind claimed by darker influences.
Then, months later, a shop had appeared in Diagon Alley.
Dumbledore had intended to visit. He truly had. But time, that most convenient accomplice, had intervened. He postponed the meeting until the end of term. By then, the Blacks, Lestranges, and Malfoys had already descended, buying the endeavor outright.
He had tried to intervene through the Ministry.
Too late.
The Minister himself, it seemed, had interests aligned with the transaction.
Only now, examining the sample device in his possession, did Dumbledore fully grasp the scale of his miscalculation. These were not toys. Not truly. Their potential reached far beyond convenience or novelty. The ground beneath the wizarding world was shifting, slowly but irrevocably.
Reins, he thought.
Someone had to hold them.
Someone had to guide the carriage, choose the road, decide the destination.
Yet a single lapse, a moment of divided attention, had been enough. The journey had already veered from the path he had envisioned. And correcting its course would require far more than gentle guidance.
Dumbledore folded the letter carefully and placed it on his desk.
For the first time in a long while, he wondered whether the age of quiet steering had come to an end.
He had always known the Aurors would struggle against the Death Eaters. That much was inevitable. What he had underestimated was not courage or numbers, but competence. Their coordination, their discipline, the precision of their strikes. It was not the chaos of fanatics, but the execution of veterans.
It reminded him, uncomfortably, of the last wizarding war.
And then there were the Trixes.
The devices had been integrated seamlessly into Death Eater formations, enhancing reaction time, shielding, mobility. Auror doctrine had not accounted for such an equalizer. Spells met counters they did not recognize. Maneuvers failed before they fully formed. The Auror retinue had been caught unprepared, and the result was not a skirmish, but a rout.
That failure, grim as it was, he could rationalize.
What he could not comprehend was motive.
The Blacks. The Lestranges. The Malfoys.
Pureblood families, now not merely patrons or investors, but owners. Manufacturers. Gatekeepers of a technology that threatened to redefine power itself. And he was certain, as certain as one could be in such matters, that they still stood in quiet alignment with the Dark Lord.
The contradiction gnawed at him.
He remembered well how the so-called Dark Faction had once supported Tom Riddle, despite his half-blood status. Not out of loyalty, but utility. Tom had been a weapon then, a counterbalance to Dumbledore's progressive policies, his slow erosion of pureblood privilege. A sharp blade aimed in the right direction.
They had believed they could control him.
Instead, Tom had devoured the leash. He had not remained their champion; he had become their master. The ideology bent around him, not the other way around. And yet, these same families now armed both sides of an approaching catastrophe.
Unless, Dumbledore considered, there was no contradiction at all.
Perhaps this was not about loyalty to Voldemort, nor opposition to him. Perhaps it was about leverage. About ensuring that no matter who emerged victorious, the reins of power would still pass through pureblood hands.
To test that theory, Dumbledore had probed Sirius Black. Gently. Casually. A question placed like a pebble dropped into still water.
The ripples had surprised him.
Lord Black, it seemed, was furious.
Not at the Ministry. Not at Dumbledore. But at the theft or leakages of procedures and knowhow.
The rune matrices. The procedural sequences. The refinements that made the Trix effective. According to Sirius, those had been leaked. Worse, the imitations now circulating were not merely copies. They were better. Cleaner execution. Improved efficiency. Lower failure rates.
Reputation had suffered. Profit had bled away.
That did not align with a controlled, pureblood strategy, or their monopolistic tendencies.
Which left only one conclusion.
A third party.
The pureblood families had intended to play both sides, to emerge unscathed regardless of who won the war. But someone else had entered the board and overturned the table entirely.
Dumbledore did not like players who revealed themselves only after the game had begun.
He sent Mudungus Fletcher to investigate.
The report that returned was… troubling.
The organization called itself New Dawn.
A commercial entity, ostensibly neutral, aggressively innovative. They dealt in alchemical gadgets, enchanted tools, hybrid devices that blurred the line between spellcraft and manufacture. Among their products were the improved Trix variants. Not identical, but unmistakably descended from the original design.
The Ministry had confiscated several shipments. Raids had been conducted. Licenses revoked.
And yet, the sales channels remained open. Black markets adjusted. Distribution routes adapted. Demand surged.
More troubling still was their workforce. New Dawn did not discriminate.
Muggleborns. Half-bloods. Veela. Goblins. Independent artificers and disenfranchised alchemists. Some were employees. Others contractors. All bound by secrecy and compensation rather than blood or ideology.
It was not merely a business. It also eroded his power base, either by accident or design, New Dawn is binding these people with interests.
For centuries, power in the wizarding world had been hereditary, ideological, or institutional. He himself tried to create a new font, for years he tried to slowly curb and steer the directions.
New Dawn offered something different. Access. Tools that flattened the traditional hierarchy. Devices that allowed a mediocre wizard to challenge an exceptional one.
That alone made them dangerous.
Dumbledore folded Fletcher's report and placed it beside the letter from Australia.
This was no longer a matter of steering children away from temptation, nor guiding nations through careful influence. This could mean structural change. Economic change. Social change.
Dumbledore was feeling the reins was slowly slipping for his hands, and he did not like it.