A vivid dream and lived experience are nearly indistinguishable from one another. You could argue, in a sense, that a dream is simply a story that happens in another world. There was even a legendary figure, famously long-suffering, who had achieved enlightenment through exactly that means.
Tom brought the idea to Rowena, who approved of it immediately. "A genuinely original angle," she said. "Dreams also have extraordinary expansive properties. A single night of dreaming can carry a person through what feels like half a lifetime. The difficulty of weaving a dream is lower than that of fabricating memory directly, but it is still far from simple."
Tom smiled to himself. Difficulty was relative.
In the time since the messaging platform had reached over twenty percent adoption, he had accumulated five hundred achievement points and earned one mid-tier draw from the system. The reward had turned out to be directly relevant.
[Jade Dream's Dream Seeds: Consume a seed to construct a dream. Nourishes spiritual energy. Strengthens life force.]
The reward was a pouch of Dream Seeds. He counted them carefully. Fifty in total. An alchemical creature had no need of spiritual energy or life force, which meant as long as he built a stable and reliable dream sequence, he could implant it repeatedly without having to rebuild from scratch each time.
The remainder he intended to keep for personal use and to share with Daphne and the others. Astoria in particular was the one who needed them most, given how badly she could use anything that strengthened her life energy.
He described the seeds' properties to Rowena, and even she, who had long since stopped being surprised by anything Tom produced, made an impressed sound and asked to borrow a few for study. Naturally, she meant within the learning space, where they existed only as projections. No actual seeds would be spent.
As for a test subject for the dream experiments, Tom had originally planned to volunteer himself. Ariana beat him to it, raising her hand with enthusiasm before he could open his mouth. Her reasoning was, admittedly, quite sound: she loved learning, and if she could study inside a dream she would save time and not sacrifice any sleep in the process.
Tom suspected she was mostly just looking for an excuse to be lazy. Learn in dreams. Spend the waking hours watching films.
But lazy or not, Tom would not have said a word regardless. She could approach it however made her happiest. He was not counting on Ariana going out into the world someday to fight on his behalf.
"How did it feel? How much did you retain?"
After another round of dream calibration, Tom woke Ariana and asked her to report back. She thought carefully for a while and recounted a reasonable amount, though the content came out in fragments and pieces. Tom's brow stayed furrowed through most of it.
Ariana drew her neck back slightly. "Am I too slow, Tom? Have I disappointed you?"
Tom came back to himself and shook his head with a reassuring smile. "It isn't you. Human memory of dreams is inherently imprecise. It functions without conscious intention, so retaining less than usual is entirely normal. I'm just thinking about how to accelerate the dream cycle. There are still some details in the construction that need refining."
Building a sufficiently realistic dream was harder than it sounded. Any place where the internal logic stumbled, or the transitions moved too abruptly, produced a blurring effect in the memory, softening details that should have been sharp.
As December deepened, Tom became a quieter presence at Hogwarts. Each day he retreated into the work, layering and enriching the dream architecture, building something more coherent and seamless than what he had before. The castle itself had grown calmer under the pressure of imminent examinations, untouched by the storms gathering beyond its walls, storms that had already rolled across half the European continent.
Grindelwald had not pushed further territorially. But his pull on his followers was generating its own momentum. Every day brought more wizards making their way to Berlin by whatever means they could manage, some descendants of his old acolytes, others simply people who had found his philosophy and wanted to stand beneath his banner.
The surrounding Ministries were not going to let this continue unchallenged. The borders of Germany and Poland became the new front line. Skirmishes erupted daily. German Ministry forces and Grindelwald's acolytes on one side, Aurors from half a dozen nations on the other, arresting, detaining, holding.
Grindelwald himself had no interest in killing anyone, but he had every interest in making examples. He descended on the border conflicts without mercy, crushing the opposition one-sided and thoroughly, leaving behind a trail of shattered wands and wizards who were physically broken but alive to talk about it. He wounded without killing, violated without destroying, and then released his victims to go home and tell everyone what they had experienced.
Terror spreads best through the mouths of survivors. Grindelwald understood this instinctively.
What he did not seem to account for was the number of young Aurors who had heard exactly those stories and decided that this was their opportunity for glory. Bold, ambitious, and comprehensively underestimating what they were walking into, they came seeking to be the one who stood against Grindelwald and made their name. There were more of them than anyone would have expected.
They were cured of the impulse fairly thoroughly.
Dumbledore had initially intended to wait, to observe, to hold back until Grindelwald's overreach produced a genuine opening and then strike. But the situation was deteriorating faster than a careful strategy could accommodate. Other Ministries were beginning to buckle, and the messages arriving at Hogwarts had moved from polite requests to something closer to desperate appeals. Waiting was no longer viable.
And so, with his students buried in their examinations, Dumbledore quietly left the school and positioned himself at the German-French border, directly in Grindelwald's path.
Grindelwald looked up at the sudden appearance and frowned. Without ceremony, he dropped the Auror he had been in the middle of dealing with, letting the unconscious man hit the ground.
"I'm not in the mood to fight today. If you want to talk, follow me."
He did not wait for an answer. He Apparated.
The location happened to be the Vosges Mountains. Grindelwald knew perfectly well that Fleur's grandmother's Veela clan had their settlement somewhere in this region, and if the fighting spread into their territory and reached Polana, he genuinely could not predict what Tom would do to him in retaliation.
So even with the itch of unfinished business where Dumbledore was concerned, today was simply not the day.
Dumbledore did not deliberate long. The moment Grindelwald vanished, he followed the residual trail of the Apparition and used it to pull himself along in the same direction. Seconds later, both men found themselves inside a coffee house in Lyon.