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Numengard


Dumbledore was in his tower office late that afternoon, still chuckling to himself about James’s outburst in the Great Hall at lunch, pouring a wax seal on a letter he was about to send to the Minister for Magic, when Fawkes soared through the window. The phoenix had been gone for several days - something that he did often, so that Dumbledore had thought nothing of the phoenix’s absence. He smiled merrily at the bird as he landed on the perch by the window with a flutter of fiery feathers. “Hullo Fawkes,” Dumbledore greeted him, “Welcome back. I do say, you’ve missed a most splendid --” he paused, having looked up at the bird. Fawks clutched a scroll in his beak, a weathered and tattered scroll with curled edges and spots from rain. That message had been carried a great way, which meant it could only be from one person.

Dumbledore stood swiftly and walked across the room, stretching out his palm for the scroll and Fawkes dropped the parchment into Dumbledore’s hand, his eye glinting in the reflection of the fire place’s brilliant, dancing flame. “Thank you, Fawkes,” the headmaster said, and he held the scroll in both his hands as though he were carrying the most precious thing in all the world. And in a way, to him, it was.

He brought it back to the desk, his hands shaking as he turned the scroll over to find the seal, marked with an untidy “G” in the wax. So he was right about who it was from, then. It had been ages since he’d last received a scroll bearing that mark, and the memories that G raised up within him were strong and he paused, staring at it, his mind crossing over thoughts of “what might have been, if only” before he finally slid his thumbnail beneath the seal and cracked it open. Dumbledore’s heart was in his throat as he unraveled the scroll across his desk.


Albus -
I know I have been told not to send you any more letters with Fawkes, and I have largely obeyed your request. However, tonight is an exception as I write to tell you of a curious happening, which I believe you shall find most interesting, and altogether more important than our old fight...


The letter went on to tell the following story:




Nearly two thousand miles away, a wicked storm was blowing in the valley of the mountains outside of Numengard. The thick black clouds churned and wrapped about the peaks, filtering among the trees, sending rain hard as bullets to the ground. High in a tower peak, in a castle prison that seemed made from the stone of the mountain itself, and overlooking the dark mass of the Black Sea, crouched a man. He was greying with boredom and of age, staring down at the road below. Suddenly, the man shifted for the first time in hours. He was leaning forward to squint down at the road leading up to the prison… Improbable as it seemed with the raging weather outside, there were people were coming up the road, determined and clutching their robes as they fought their way through the dark and the rain.

Only the worst sort of people risked their lives to meet in a storm such as this one, the man thought. He should know - he himself had held many a meeting under the disguise of horrid and unpredictable weather.

He crawled his way across the room, dragging the heavy chains that secured him to the wall, to crouch beside the cell bars that held him in, pressing his face tight against them, listening carefully to the echo that travelled it’s way up the stairs. There were two visitors, he had seen two figures on the walkway, but he heard the voice of only one - it was low and unpleasant, the sort of voice that belonged to privileged aristocrats and people who had never seen the more sullied sides of life. The man in the cell sneered, already hating the visitor, whoever he was. Most of the words they were saying were lost in the echoing and the groans and cries of other prisoners in their cells, but there were a few words that made it to his ears - among them, the words our arrangement.

There were footsteps on the stairs which wound their way up the tower to the cells where they kept only the worst of the worst - the wizards and witches who had so offended society that they were to spend the rest of their lives in chains and shackles in the highest towers, where the dementors that glided silently from one end of the hall to the other were given the orders to kiss on sight should any of the prisoners escape their cells.

“She’s right down here,” the prison guard said, and there was the sound of the keys from his pocket, clinking against one another on their large ring as he withdrew them. A stirring went up among the dementors, and there was a cry of disapproval that seemed to scream through darkness outside the cell. The man winced away from the cell, his knuckles white from tightening them. A dementor’s screech was as painful as the cruciatus curse to those who were held so deeply beneath their melancholy trance.

The man covered his ears and turned to look at the guard and the two figures who stood behind him in the dark, now just across the hall from him. The guard withdrew his key and he brought it to the lock on the door and turned it and from within the man heard a cackling that he hadn’t heard in sometime - that he recognized from days long passed, when she’d first arrived, before the dementors had drained away the amusement in the woman’s eyes. She pranced her way out of the cell and wrapped her arms around the guard, then turned to look at the two figures.

“Knew it was only a matter of time!” she hissed darkly as she gleefully embraced the first of the two figures, flinging her arms about him. “Knew it was only a matter of time!!” She danced her way to the second figure, before pausing. Even in the dark, the reverence in her grey eyes was quite clear. “Your Lordship,” she whispered, and bowed low to the ground, hitting her knees to the uneven stone floor, her wildly unkempt hair turning even more silver in the moonlight, “At your service as I have always been!”

The second figure, the one that had so far not spoken at all, reached up and lowered his hood and a face that had probably once been rather handsome looked down upon her, a smile upon his lips. He reached out a hand and petted the woman gently, running knuckles across her cheeks as he raised her up to stand before him. He nodded to the guard and to the first figure, then turned and began to walk away.

The man stared, his eyes wide. “Are you the one they call the Dark Lord?” he croaked, his voice so thick with disuse that the word was scarcely a scratchy breath.

The second figure - the one who might have been handsome once upon a time - turned, leaning close to the cell bars to see the old man, and his features were more illuminated in the moonlight than they’d been previously, and they were terrible, half in shadow. “So this is what cowardice looks like,” whispered the Dark Lord, his voice soft, but high and snake-like, slithering from his tongue like a sentence of ribbon, twining its way through the old man’s ears.

The man’s cracked lips quirked in amusement. “I was once a coward, yes,” he said thickly, “Funny how we recognize our kind.”

Voldemort hissed, then leaned away.

“He’ll defeat you, too,” the man whispered. “Just as he’s done me, and you’ll be locked up in chains, too.” He grabbed hold on the chain securing his ankle and shook it at the cell bars. “Or else he’ll do you the courtesy of striking you dead.”

Voldemort stared upon the man without flinching, not even at the sound of the clanging metal chains hitting the cell door.

Voldemort smiled. “You couldn’t do it.”

A clammy feeling crawled up the back of the man’s spine.

“Faced with the opportunity to kill your final opponent, you stood facing him, in that most famous of duels, that most heralded moment when Dumbledore defeated the great Gellert Grindelwald... and it had nothing to do with the power of Albus Dumbledore, did it, you old fool?” Voldemort laughed, sifting through the memory in the man’s head, “It had to do with your hesitation. Yes, I feel it, the spell stuck in your throat, the prospect of killing your precious Albus too painful for you…” His laughter echoed creepily off the old iron bars and the stone walls and the high vaulted ceiling. The sound of several other prisoners dragging themselves to their cell doors to peer out could be heard, shifting chains and groaning men. “I hope it was worth the cost you pay.”

Druella clapped and hopped foot to foot. “Kill him, kill him dead, my Lordship,” the grey-eyed woman sing-songed and cackled, “What I wouldn’t do to see his carcass rot upon the floor of his cell!”

Voldemort shook his head, “No. Not today. Today, we shall let him lie here and fester in his cowardice and the harsh memories of his unrequited love.”

The man lunged for the cell bars, his body hitting them and arms sliding through, but Voldemort was quicker, dodging away from the outstretched arms. He laughed, high and long, as he swept his cloak around himself and walked away. The guard, the other figure, and Druella turned and walked swiftly from the hall, and the man lowered himself back to the ground, pulling his arms back into the cell. The dementors resumed their gliding keep, the cell across the hall wide open and the storm flashing lightning across the sky lit up the dark figures passing by, their horrible heavy breathing as they sucked any shreds of happiness from those in chains.

The man had none left to give anyway, and he crawled away, back to the window, his chains scraping across the floor, and he waited.

Days had gone by before Fawkes came. The phoenix carried a parcel that included a small vial of tonic, a couple of butterscotch toffees, and a book. He perched upon the man’s knee and dropped the parcel down. The man reached a weak hand to run his knuckles over the bird’s thick red plumes… and then he took up a quill and a bit of parchment he’d hidden beneath the ratty old mattress of his bed ages ago, and he wrote the letter.




Dumbledore paused in his reading, his hand upon his mouth, and he looked at Fawkes, then to the window, thinking of the thousands of miles that separated him from that old stone tower. It was not just miles which separated them, he thought.

His thoughts turned to the news of Druella Black’s escape from Numengard, and he thought of the story Charlus Potter had told him about his brush in Diagon Alley. A woman with grey eyes. Of course it could be a coincidence that Charlus Potter’s exposure to a vial of dragon pox had been at the hands of a grey-eyed woman… but Dumbledore doubted it. He stood and paced for a moment, his hands clasped behind his back as Fawkes preened on his perch.

He returned to the letter that laid unsheathed upon his desk and lowered himself into his chair once again, taking it back up. His eyes flickered across the farewell at the end of the letter…

Your mercies -- always yours, Gellert.

Dumbledore closed his eyes.