The Ministry was in disarray, with Minister Fudge trying to maintain his position despite widespread criticism of how he'd handled Voldemort's return and the subsequent war. Various factions were competing for influence and power in the post-Voldemort landscape, and not all of those factions had good intentions.
Most concerning was the movement that had started calling itself "The Restoration." Adrian had been following their activities through the Daily Prophet and through more detailed information provided by occasional letters from Dumbledore and others at Hogwarts.
The Restoration claimed to be a cultural preservation group focused on maintaining traditional wizarding values and practices, but their actual goals were clearly supremacist—they wanted to roll back rights for Muggle-borns, restrict access to positions of authority for half-bloods and those they deemed insufficiently "pure," and generally return wizarding society to a more hierarchical and discriminatory state.
What made The Restoration particularly dangerous, in Adrian's assessment, was that they'd learned from Voldemort's mistakes.
They weren't staging terrorist attacks or openly embracing dark magic. Instead, they were working through legal and political channels, positioning themselves as respectable concerned citizens rather than violent extremists.
They held gatherings and published manifestos and lobbied the Ministry and the Wizengamot, all while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy that made them harder to dismiss or combat than Voldemort's more straightforward violence had been.
In some ways, Adrian thought, this made them more insidious.
He'd spent a good portion of the summer reading their published materials, which he found deeply unpleasant. They were skilled propagandists, he would give them that. Every document was made to sound reasonable on its surface, the most inflammatory ideas were buried beneath layers of rhetoric about heritage and stability and the proper order of things.
And Adrian knew, though it hadn't been stated explicitly in any public forum, that he was one of their primary targets.
The articles in the Prophet hadn't named him directly—that would be too obvious but the pattern was clear.
The Restoration frequently referenced the dangers of allowing "creature-sympathizers" and "half-bloods with radical views" into positions of authority over children.
They questioned whether people who supported dangerous magical creatures like Werewolves and challenged traditional hierarchies could be trusted to maintain proper wizarding values. They proposed that Hogwarts' hiring practices needed greater Ministry oversight to ensure that only "appropriate role models" were teaching the next generation.
All of this was coded language, but everyone who followed wizarding politics knew exactly who they were talking about.
Adrian had defeated Voldemort, making him celebrated, but he was also a half-blood who publicly worked with dangerous magical creatures and supported their rights.
To some, he was a hero who had saved wizarding Britain from a dark lord. To others, particularly those aligned with The Restoration's ideology, he was an example of everything wrong with modern wizarding society—a half-blood who had gained fame through defeating Voldemort and was now influencing pure-blood children at Hogwarts with "dangerous" ideas about dangerous magical creatures.
The irony wasn't lost on him. The same people who had benefited from his willingness to face Voldemort now wanted him quietly removed from any position where he might influence their children.
They would celebrate his victory in one breath and question his fitness in the next, as if the two things could be separated so neatly.
Dumbledore had talked to Adrian in his letters that the upcoming school year would likely be more politically challenging than the previous one.
The Ministry was under pressure from The Restoration and their sympathizers to take action regarding Hogwarts' staffing, and Adrian's position was particularly vulnerable. There was talk of new regulations, review boards, standards of evaluation that could be used to remove teachers who didn't fit certain criteria.
'Criteria that are not about teaching ability,' Adrian thought, 'and everyone knows it.'
He had spent much of the summer thinking about how to navigate these challenges. Part of him wanted to simply ignore the politics and focus on teaching, but he recognized that wasn't realistic.
Whether he liked it or not, his position at Hogwarts had become symbolic of larger debates about who got to participate fully in wizarding society. If he were forced out through political pressure, it would embolden The Restoration and make things harder for everyone else they targeted.
But engaging with the politics meant making himself a more visible target. It meant spending energy on battles that distracted from his actual work of teaching students and caring for magical creatures and his plants.
He stood at the edge of the plantation's highest terrace, looking out over the grounds spread before him in the warm late-summer light, and tried to find the clarity that the view usually gave him.
Below, the greenhouses caught the sun and threw back long green shadows. The paddocks and meadows and groves stretched out in beauty, alive with the quiet work of creatures and plants going about their days with complete indifference to Ministry politics.
"Master is thinking too much," Dobby observed, appearing at Adrian's elbow with the soft pop of Apparition. "Master's face gets all wrinkly when Master thinks too much about complicated things."
Adrian laughed despite his heavy thoughts.
It was impossible not to—Dobby had a talent for puncturing solemnity that he had never quite managed to outgrow. "You're probably right. I should finish preparing for the journey rather than standing here worrying about things I can't control yet."
"Dobby," Adrian said teasingly, "you know, you are invaluable and I would be completely lost without you."
"Yes," Dobby agreed, with great satisfaction. "Master would be very thin and very wrinkly."
Adrian laughed at this shaking his head.
He spent the next hour completing his final preparations for returning to Hogwarts. His trunk was already mostly packed, received a few last-minute additions.
The enchanted suitcase that served as his portable portal to the plantation was carefully secured and disguised, as it always was when he traveled.
Anyone examining it would see only an ordinary, if slightly worn, piece of luggage. The enchantments that concealed its true nature were some of the most complex he'd ever worked with, layered and interlocking, and he checked them each time before departing as a matter of habit.
Adrian made one final circuit of the plantation, saying goodbye to various creatures and checking that everything was in order.
The Kneazles that had taken up residence near Greenhouse Two wound around his legs affectionately, purring and demanding attention—all six of them, including the newest and smallest, a tawny kitten who had been born in early June and had already developed a formidable opinion of her own importance.
He crouched to scratch her behind the ears and she accepted this as her due, blinking her large eyes at him slowly.
The Bowtruckles in the grove of trees near the eastern boundary chittered at him in their twig-like voices, waving their tiny wooden hands.
The eldest of them, a wrinkled creature who had lived in the oldest oak for longer than Adrian had been alive, descended to the lowest branch and looked at him with an expression of such distinguished displeasure as if the whole business of leaving was a personal insult—that Adrian had to suppress another smile.
"I'll be back before the leaves turn," he promised, and the Bowtruckle made a sound that might have been appeased acknowledgment, or might have been dismissal. With Bowtruckles it was often hard to tell.
Even the Hippogriffs in the northern paddock, usually standoffish, approached the fence and looked at him with their fierce amber eyes before the largest, stepped forward and bowed her great head.
He bowed back, carefully and completely, and she accepted his greeting licking him properly before stepping back to rejoin the others.
"Dobby will take excellent care of everyone," Adrian reminded himself as much as the creatures. "And I'll be back before anyone has time to miss me too much."
Finally, with the sun climbing higher toward midday, Adrian returned to the Tree of Wisdom for a final moment before departure.
"I'll be back soon," Adrian said softly.
He stood there a moment longer, breathing slowly, watching a shaft of sunlight move across the roots.
Then he picked up his responsibilities again and turned to go.
Adrian shouldered his trunk, picked up the enchanted suitcase, and walked to the edge of the plantation where the portal connection to his quarters at Hogwarts was located.
The path was familiar enough that his feet knew it without his having to think, snaking past the last of the greenhouses.
With a final glance back at the Tree and the grounds spread out beneath its branches, he activated the portal and stepped through.
The transition was instantaneous and slightly disorienting, as portal travel always was.
One moment he stood in the warm sunlight of the plantation's late-summer afternoon, and the next he was in the considerably dimmer interior of a small storage room in Hogwarts that served as the portal's anchor point.
The smell changed immediately and completely: gone was the green, layered richness of the plantation, replaced by Hogwarts' blend of stone dust, aged wood, and the faint trace of magic that filled the castle's walls.
Adrian stood still for a moment, letting himself adjust, to the dimness, to the enclosed space, to the shift in temperature and atmosphere. He'd always found it useful not to rush the transition.
Portal travel moved the body instantaneously, but the mind needed a beat to catch up.
Then he steadied himself, adjusted the trunk on his shoulder, and opened the storage room door to step into the familiar corridors of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
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