Chapter 677: Chapter 677 Fraud (2 in 1)
The wall of the cell in Nurmengard Castle is now broken with a gaping hole.
Moonlight spilled in, but it was nowhere near as bright as the eerie blue brightness of the room.
Grindelwald gazed at the firebird outside the castle.
It is a very peculiar bird. Its body is silver-white, as bright as the moonlight, and it looks like a Patronus. But its delicate head, slender plumage, the surface of its back, and wings are covered in deep blue flames, which are constantly leaping. Its eyes looked almost identical to Grindelwald's.
"Go and bring back my wand, we have much to do after that." He said calmly.
The firebird cut through the darkness of the night and flew off into the distance. Grindelwald took a few steps outside as the air from outside blew in. He moved closer to the black wall and stood at the edge of the high tower of Nurmengard Castle.
At the very far end where the sky met the ground, there is a transition from pure black to deep blue.
Grindelwald lowered his head and gazed at his left hand.
The curse in his body is extremely stubborn and by no means something that can be dealt with in a short period of time, otherwise he would not have been trapped here for decades. He had previously burned most of the curse in his body with blue flames, but a small portion still remained, making it difficult to eradicate. Grindelwald could clearly sense that they spread all over his body and eating away the little bit of magic he had managed to regain and control, and if nothing is done, it won't be long before they will grow again.
The sky is growing lighter. He had to make a decision soon.
Grindelwald glanced back at the far corner of the cell; there is no point in hesitating, now is the best chance. Dumbledore - or someone else, should have appeared to stop him at the first sign of his attempt to break free from his restrictions, but nothing has happened.
Well, he had just destroyed the wall in passing, and the magic on the wall had nothing to do with Dumbledore, so maybe the International Confederation of Wizards would get the message and arrive soon.
The magic in his body gathered on his left hand and his body became empty, and then the tiny curse seemed to be attracted to it, pouring into his left hand, gathering and merging and becoming whole along the way, but Grindelwald let it happen.
At last, the remaining pieces of the curse came together, nimble and greedy as if they were alive, chasing and devouring the magic of his left hand, which glistened and glowed, and grew more complete with each passing second. It was at that moment that Grindelwald seemed to sense something - through the curse - and he vaguely saw a blurred shadow.
The figure seemed to sense something and looked back that way, with a blurry face, and strikingly light blue eyes.
Grindelwald's heart sank, the last bit of hope dashed, and he mustered a grim smile.
"Peng!"
The violent dark fire flared up intensely, splintering and burning his flesh and blood while destroying the last of the curse completely. After completing all this, he was fully bathed in sweat and trembling.
But it was all worth it - a new power had emerged, new, untainted magic from the depths of his soul, and it had merged perfectly with his body, which right now seemed near the end of its life.
He was reborn.
...
Hogwarts.
Felix glanced out the window and blinked in confusion; he had just seemed to see old man Grindelwald. Was it an illusion? Or was it a new ability brought on by the charm? But he is clearly still a little short of fully mastering the charm ... His heart sank, something couldn't have gone wrong, could it?
Half an hour later, Felix appeared at Nurmengard Castle.
It is his first time here, and he is not quite used to the damp air and the smell of rotting straw, plus there is a smell of burning mixed in the air. He examined the large hole in the wall where an extra line of black writing read: All for the greater good.
He felt a bit of a headache and after a while, a dozen figures descended from the sky outside the castle, Felix backed away into the darkness, not wanting to meet up with these enforcers just yet. From Nurmengard Castle he went around to a few more towns nearby, the charm on his arm did not respond one bit.
Felix glared at his arm, this thing just became useless, didn't it?
He had only just got his hands on it.
When Felix returned to the school, the sun was completely up and the school was no different than usual, with some early risers eating at the tables. He found Professor McGonagall, who notably looked more agitated when she saw him, and dragged him to the staff room without saying a word.
"Akingbade received a letter from an owl this morning, then turned pale and left in a hurry without even eating breakfast." She spoke quickly.
Felix asked thoughtfully, "Did he mention what it was about?"
"No. But his expression looked alarmed, it must have been something very important." Professor McGonagall guessed.
"Alas, Grindelwald escaped last night."
Professor McGonagall's eyes widened, and she looked very agitated.
"Felix ... you mean, Gellert Grindelwald?" Her voice trembled a little, and it dawned on Felix that she too had lived through Grindelwald's most active years and is well aware of his influence. Felix recounted the general story, including information about Grindelwald's disguised identity as a professor at the school.
Professor McGonagall gasped for air the whole time, her hand clutching the fabric on her chest in a death grip as her body shook.
"I totally didn't see this coming! He turned out to be Professor Bagshot, and clearly-" she paused, her eyes glinting with memories as if finding evidence from past interactions with Grindelwald, such as his superior knowledge of magic, and his hostile attitude towards Muggles.
Professor McGonagall tried to compose herself, "Albus - why did you do that?"
"I think it's because of a prophecy." Felix said softly, holding out his hand to show her the scene of the anti-wizard parade, "A year ago, Grindelwald escaped from Nurmengard Castle and made his way over to England. He got his exclusive wand at Future World in Diagon Alley - back then, vetting was not quite as strict as it is now - and after that, perhaps he saw the job posting in the newspaper and asked to teach at the school for a year using the scene you see now as an exchange.
"... The current Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, that is, Akingbade, was also aware of this, and they sent someone to check Grindelwald's health over the summer last year and determined that he was still bound by magic and his magic was highly tainted and not as strong as it once was, so they finally agreed to allow this. "
The actual situation is of course more complicated.
Felix still doesn't know whether reason prevailed or emotion secured the high ground when Dumbledore agreed to this condition, but in any case, there was a new professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts at the school.
As far as Felix could tell, Dumbledore was probably under quite a bit of pressure - it must be that the people at the International Confederation of Wizards wouldn't mind trying to goad Grindelwald and figure out what he knew before kicking him back into a cold, damp, dark prison, and Grindelwald certainly knew that well enough, so he found Dumbledore as a voucher.
"Did the transfer go awry last night?" Professor McGonagall asked perceptively.
"Yes, Dumbledore had a way to monitor Grindelwald's state, probably similar to a double-sided mirror ..." Felix briefly explained the principle of the same origin of restraining magic and the secret key of surveillance, "I guess when he modified this spell, he probably didn't consider the idea of transferring the spell to other people, so there might be a loophole. Of course, it's hard to say for sure, but if Dumbledore hadn't had the key in his hands, Grindelwald might have broken out of prison in his first few years ..."
The process of transferring the secret key to the charm only severed the connection with Grindelwald, but it would not disable the restraining magic, so Felix's words were highly credible.
"Okay, I roughly understand." Professor McGonagall was slowly coming to terms with this reality, she had been thankful for a while before that the school had been safe and sound this year, but she hadn't expected the darkness to rise up and she herself had spent a year working with the dark wizard Grindelwald without noticing, she had even snitched on him to Dumbledore ...
"So no one knows where Grindelwald is now?"
"I failed to find him in Nurmengard Castle, but," Felix hesitated, remembering the handwriting he had seen on the wall, and shook his head, "he will not be content with hiding. I am rather concerned about another problem-"
"What problem?" Professor McGonagall asked, rubbing her forehead in pain.
Felix slammed two boxes of letters on her desk, "We should sort these out and place them in separate boxes, frankly, there are a bit too many and there are only two of us to do it, we can't look for help."
"Why do we need to get help?" Professor McGonagall gave him a cross look and put on her boxed glasses, seemingly prepared to do the job left behind by the previous headmaster even before she officially became headmistress.
A slight unnerving feeling crept into Felix's mind.
He wondered if these letters would still come in handy since Grindelwald had probably guessed about Dumbledore's death. The question is, would he break the illusion of Dumbledore still being alive? This question had been swirling in his mind since he had come out of Nurmengard Castle, on account of which he had done one thing - nearly a fifth of the letters in the box had been addressed to Grindelwald, and Felix had kept that part of the letter.
They worked on it for the rest of the day until noon.
Grindelwald was nowhere to be found, hiding in some corner, probably nursing his body; Felix had seen how weak Dumbledore had been after the transfer of the charm, and Grindelwald certainly could not be intact, and there is a question mark about how much of his strength he even had left at the moment.
If it had happened to him, Felix would have found a picturesque place to recuperate his body in secret. In a few years' time, he believed his strength would be more mature and time would be on his side.
"Oh yes, Voldemort died last night, he had previously survived by virtue of certain dark magic of the most evil kind and had to be locked up in private. But that all came to an end last night, he's dead for good and forever."
In between the work, Felix made another big announcement in waves.
...
In the hospital wing, Felix said pretty much the same thing to Harry.
Harry still felt gagged after learning that Dumbledore's body had been properly buried, and the thought of Headmaster Dumbledore lying alone in a coffin, with even his death itself being kept a secret from outsiders, made his heart twinge.
"He deserves a big funeral, not a silent burial in some corner." Harry said as he stared at the white sheet on the hospital bed where a stain had been left. He thought of Regulus Black, now everyone knew Regulus had fought alone against the darkness, but how long would it take before anyone knew of the sacrifice Dumbledore had made?
"What is happening now is what Dumbledore wanted to see." Felix said as he lowered his eyes.
After a while, they talked about other topics.
"Professor Hap - you're saying that Bag, Grindelwald regained his consciousness during the transfer? How did he do that?" Harry asked in surprise.
"I'll remember to ask about that the next time I see him." Felix said, trailing his chin with considerable confusion as well, and stared at Valen as she put together a pile of sweets to make a smiley face. Harry stared blankly at the pattern listlessly as he had a flash of clarity and recalled Neville's sneakoscope.
Although he and Hermione couldn't find a problem, perhaps the Professor could find something suspicious in it?
He told the professor his suspicions, to which he got a mediocre response.
"The sneakoscope is broken, there's no doubt about that, only a few out of a dozen rune circuits are correct, and the thing is, all it takes is one mistake for the sneakoscope as a whole to fail to work, it can't even give a warning ..." Felix said, and his voice slowed down.
"Professor? Did you think of something?" Harry asked, holding his breath.
"If so, then that's a clever thought." Felix murmured, his eyes brightening as he thought of a possibility - in fact, there is a better way, but it is not remotely as bright as this - exploiting the blind spots of the human mind.
The sneakoscope in Neville's hand might have done a trick.
It wasn't meant to warn Neville, the hair that had been put inside the sneakoscope which belonged to Grindelwald is the key, the hair together with the few tattered rune circuits helped another sneakoscope to active.
Felix has introduced seven different kinds of sneakoscope during his classes, one of which will issue a warning when it gets close to the owner of the hair. This type of spotting sneakoscope can usually only be used as a prank toy, but there are times when it could also come in handy.
For example, when Sirius was a fugitive, Felix created three spotting sneakoscope with his hair hidden in them to keep him away from the castle.
Perhaps Grindelwald did the exact opposite. One of the two sneakoscope would give a warning when they moved away and beyond a certain distance. Felix did a quick mental simulation and felt he could do exactly that.
Thinking deeper, the warning might not necessarily have to be a sound, it could be a vibration or some kind of strong stimulus. So when Grindelwald was forced to move beyond a certain distance from Neville (and in fact from Hogwarts castle), the sneakoscope would automatically start to function.
The above was only a fleeting guess on Felix's part; he was not sure how far Grindelwald's understanding of ancient runes might have reached. Grindelwald had never demonstrated his proficiency in the field of ancient runes, but he had looked through many ancient runes journals, and occasionally took the opportunity to chat with Felix about their contents, but none of it involved any kind of technical expertise in the field.
If Grindelwald had thought of this idea since then, he had quite a scary mind.
Grindelwald could certainly have just taken another student's hair and created a sneakoscope, which might have been more discreet, but there is a chance that Dumbledore or Felix might have thought of that aspect and conducted a targeted examination.
Grindelwald, with limited information, chose the most conservative and what he thought to be the safest option.
As it turned out, he succeeded. Felix checked his office, the items he carried with him, and the magic that might be attached to his skin, but overlooked the possibility that he might have swallowed a sneakoscope. As for the truth which even Felix did not know: his stunning spell was indeed strong enough that it would have been an open question whether the sneakoscope alone could awaken Grindelwald from his coma, or at least certainly more later than Grindelwald himself had estimated, but the few Stinging Jinx from the International Confederation of Wizarding Law Enforcement Team weakened the effectiveness of the stunning spell ...
It was a combination of these reasons that made Grindelwald wake up almost as soon as he got on the wagon. But he was still bound by the spells of the Law Enforcement team members, unable to move his body, except for the sneakoscope in his stomach that pulsed every so often, he afterward felt the whole thing when Dumbledore and Felix transferred the secret key of the charm.
"Professor? Professor Hap?"
"Oh, something crossed my mind that I can't be sure of at the moment - any more questions?" Felix asked in return.
"Well - I was going to ask: why didn't Professor Dumbledore transfer the charm sooner, or postpone fixing the trouble I was in?" Harry asked, " That way Grindelwald might not have got away with it."
"He didn't tell me about it straight out, so I'll have to guess." Felix said softly, "I presume that Dumbledore had a hard time using magic for the last part of his life and that the transfer of the charm affected him greatly - you know that magic can flow between a wizard's body and soul, right?"
Harry shook his head in bewilderment, having never heard of it at all. He was tempted to remind the professor that he isn't Hermione.
"Then you know now," Felix said lightly, "Dumbledore has studied the soul extremely profoundly with the help of the Resurrection Stone as a medium, and was able to actively incorporate most of his magic into his own soul." Just like the night when he had seen Dumbledore use his own soul to illuminate Hogwarts castle.
"Why did he do that?" Harry asked, swallowing hard, feeling that what he perceived as magic is completely different from what the professor is talking about.
"Probably to do an experiment, I suspect it's not the first time he's been to that whole in-between 'life and death' thing you speak of." Felix said calmly, "Don't ask me, I can't come up with anything to prove it, but I'm pretty much on the same page as Dumbledore when it comes to solving the problem of the soul fragment in your body, which is to maximize the success rate, preferably to make it foolproof."
"Success rate?" Harry mumbled repeating with his head down.
"Exactly." Felix said, "We had envisaged possibilities such as having Voldemort ingest your blood and resurrect him, Dumbledore thought that this would allow the protective charm flowing through you that belonged to Lily to appear on Voldemort as well, well - the power of the charm might then be greatly enhanced, after all, your relationship is similar to that of half-brothers ..."
"But that didn't happen, did it?" Goosebumps rose inside Harry, and he blurted out hastily, "Voldemort used someone else's blood to come back to life."
"Indeed. I think we have put too much pressure on him, and he couldn't afford to wait." Felix nodded and said, "But even if that did happen, it would have created more uncertainty. The bond between you is already unusually strong, and if you add in a shared protection charm, outsiders won't even be able to figure it out ... Harry, Dumbledore wants you alive, in the safest way he can think of."
Felix left a disoriented Harry to leave. He had asked Madam Pomfrey and there was nothing wrong with Harry's health, and he would be discharged in the afternoon.
As Felix left the hospital wing, he happened to run into students who had come to visit Harry, and he called Neville aside and managed to borrow the broken sneakoscope, which Neville had indeed brought with him. "What's wrong with it, Professor?" Neville asked in a quiet voice.
Felix looked at him and shook his head, not voicing the suspicion in his mind, and offered a different excuse: "The people from the International Confederation of Wizards need it for evidence, I'll take it first and return it if they don't need it."
In the crowd, Ron and Hermione wore worried expressions, there couldn't really be a problem with that sneakoscope, right? Ron shot a wink at Hermione and broke away from the group to walk over, "Oh Professor Hap, I have a question ..."
...
Felix was in no hurry to leave the school and search the world for Grindelwald. In less than a week, this school year would be over, and then he could free up his hands and try to see if he could obtain Grindelwald's whereabouts from the mouths of some of the Acolytes. He was in no hurry these days and assumed that Grindelwald wouldn't jump out any time soon either.
But things didn't go as he expected.
In the evening, Amelia Bones appeared in a hurry with the bad news that Grindelwald had escaped from Nurmengard Castle - which of course, a fact Felix already knew - but the news in the German-language newspaper she held in her hand really surprised him.
A firebird, suspected to be a Patronus clad in Grindelwald's trademark blue flames, had broken into the German Gringotts Bank, burned through an underground vault before the goblin guards could react, and then swaggered away.
Felix stared at the moving image captured by who knows who: the phoenix-like firebird breaking free of magic chains and holding something in its beak.
"Is that - a wand?"
"The owner of that underground vault has been identified as an Acolyte, though he died decades ago. When the Gringotts and the local Aurors questioned the members of his family, none of them knew of the existence of such a facility, which implies that it is a secret vault. And the wand-"
"The first wand Grindelwald ever used?" Felix asked in a deep voice.
Grindelwald certainly hadn't cast spells with his bare hands before he had acquired the Elder Wand, but when he became famous, and when he fought in a public duel in 1945, it had always been the Elder Wand that he had shown to the public, and no one seemed aware of where the wand from his student days had gone.
"That's what I thought." Ms. Bones said with a strained smile.
Felix's expression turned serious as he looked further ahead, getting his wand is not a big deal, what really caught his attention is the fact that Grindelwald can't seem to wait even a few days.
--------------
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