That would have been deeply cruel.
"Everyone, a moment please."
The bell rang, but Professor McGonagall held the class back. She adjusted her glasses and let her expression settle into something more serious than usual. "You are all aware of what happened last night. Yes, Grindelwald came here and challenged Dumbledore. He was repelled. The school has the means to keep you safe within these walls."
She paused.
"Outside them, however, I cannot make the same promise. His power exceeds what most of us imagined possible. With that in mind, I would strongly suggest that those of you without pressing reasons to leave consider spending the upcoming holiday here at the school. Wait until the situation becomes clearer before returning home. I want to be clear that this is a suggestion, not a rule. The decision is yours."
She gathered her materials and walked out.
"Tom, are we staying?" a classmate asked once the door had closed.
"No need." Tom shook his head. "Grindelwald is actually quite accommodating toward purebloods. Toward wizards in general, really. I looked into it. His old ambition was wizard supremacy over the world, not random slaughter. You don't build a following by murdering your own potential supporters. He's nothing like that small-time thug Voldemort."
He had not bothered to lower his voice, and a fair number of people around him caught every word. The name Voldemort drew the usual flinch, but the rest of what he said settled people considerably. Several students who had been genuinely torn over McGonagall's suggestion made up their minds on the spot. They were going home.
"Then let's go home." Daphne nodded. "The school beds are terrible. Nothing beats home."
"Agreed. Let's go." Tom took her hand and walked out of the classroom.
...
That afternoon, Fudge convened a meeting with dozens of Ministers for Magic from across the world. The agenda had exactly one item: capture Grindelwald.
The problems standing in the way of that goal were also exactly two: where was Grindelwald, and how many wizards would it actually take?
The answer to the second question, as more and more historical records were pulled from archives and circulated among the attendees, made the room go very quiet. A single nation's Auror force was clearly not going to be enough. Not remotely.
Dozens of countries hastily signed an emergency temporary accord, authorising Aurors from any signatory nation to cross borders and provide support the moment Grindelwald was confirmed to have appeared. Portkeys were distributed in bulk.
The joint declaration and its terms appeared in wizarding newspapers across the world the following morning. Alongside the text ran a photograph, the clearest one anyone had managed to capture: two streams of golden magic and one surge of blue, all three locked against Grindelwald simultaneously, lit in lurid detail by the light of the Fiendfyre. Colin Creevey had been in the right tower with his camera at the right moment, and that single photograph earned him more pocket money than he would otherwise have seen in seven years combined. Ron stared at it with the expression of a boy who had never wanted anything more than a camera.
After the attack, Grindelwald disappeared again. This was the part that gave every wizarding government its worst headaches. He moved like a natural disaster, no warning, no fixed location, no pattern to track. Nobody knew where he would surface next, or who might not survive it.
Dumbledore was the only person who could stop him. There was precisely one of those in the world.
In practice, however, the situation that had everyone else losing sleep was rather different inside the learning space. Grindelwald had been genuinely rattled by Tom's power-ranking system, which used him as the baseline unit of measurement.
"Why am I the benchmark? Why not Andros and Dumbledore? Even Voldemort would be better than this. Why does it have to be me?"
"Because if we used any of them as the baseline, you would come out below one. And that sounds like you don't belong in the same category at all. As for Voldemort, Rowena and I have never actually seen him fight. I have no frame of reference."
Grindelwald, unable to accept being one to Andros's one point six, went and challenged him to a duel. Not to prove he was stronger, just to close the gap to something more dignified. He got swept off his feet by a wave of unreasonable magical force for his trouble, and did not set foot in the learning space for several days afterward. Tom did not chase after him. He had his own work to get back to.
Over those same days, Tom noticed something that quietly interested him. Dumbledore's eyes had changed.
Eyes were the clearest surface a person's inner state could show. You could not read a person entirely through them, but a shift in condition never fully hid itself. Dumbledore's gaze had always been calm and inward, like still water over great depth. Now there was an edge to it, a sharpness and a vitality that had not been there before.
The catfish had entered the tank, and the sardines were swimming faster.
With Grindelwald here now, and Voldemort likely to follow in the years ahead, there was no longer any room for complacency, not even from Albus Dumbledore. Pressure, it turned out, had done what decades of peaceful tenure at Hogwarts had not. A man who had always trusted in his own ability had gone back to the beginning, back to the first principles of learning magic, and started climbing again.
On the first day of December, Hogwarts woke to a proper snowfall.
The young students came spilling out of the castle to throw snowballs at each other, and Tom contributed Megatron as the designated enemy boss for the battle. The Scottish Highlands had run dry this year, and this was the first real snow anyone could remember. The students threw themselves into it with the full force of weeks of accumulated stress.
A thousand miles south in Paris, the weather was bright and mild. But over that beautiful city, invisible to anyone walking its streets, the shadow of the Deathly Hallows had already begun to gather.
Rosier Manor.
Grindelwald stood with his hands clasped behind his back, dressed in a long black coat, facing several dozen of his closest acolytes. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and unhurried.
"The time has come. Those who once wronged us will pay what they owe. Those who betrayed us will receive what they deserve."
He let that sit for a moment.
"Once before, we began in Berlin and swept across the world. Then let us walk that road again."
"We depart from Berlin. Our destination is Warsaw."
He turned his gaze northward, and something behind his eyes settled into cold certainty.
"What do you all think," he said, "of calling this Operation White?"
-------------------------
Patreon Advance Chapters: patreon .com / ElvenKing20