A/N: Hello, everyone. This story is inspired by a prompt I saw on Tumblr; I will put the text and the link to the original source of the idea in my profile. I thought it was a really interesting concept and I decided to roll with it. This is (unmistakably) an AU, in which I've made Tom Riddle's birth date the 31st of December, 1979, so that he'll go to Hogwarts with Harry's year of students.

If you're not fond of the villainization of Albus Dumbledore or of stories where Slytherins are the protagonists, this may not be to your taste. You have been warned.

Now that that's covered, on with the story. Here's the prologue. I hope you enjoy it. Please let me know your thoughts on it in a review if you get the chance.

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There is a chamber at Hogwarts whose door opens only to the contemporary Headmistress or Headmaster and their Deputy. It sits at the top of a small, unremarkable tower, out of the way of classes and dormitories, hidden in plain sight.

This is the room that houses the Book of Admittance and the Quill of Acceptance, the magical artifacts responsible for choosing future Hogwarts students, imbued with the magic of the Four Founders. The Book and the Quill sense the birth of magical children, whether Muggle-born, Half-blood, or Pure-blood, and once they are certain of a child's magical potential, the Quill inscribes their name in the Book so that when the time comes, the child will receive an invitation to attend the school.

Or so it was, for a millennium. However, in the middle of the 20th century, a certain wizard, fresh from his famous defeat of Gellert Grindelwald, became Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Albus Dumbledore was not quite the lauded hero that he made himself out to be. He was, however, a master at rewriting history and spreading distortions of fact through propaganda.

Gellert Grindelwald, although purported by Dumbledore to be a blood purist intent upon breaching the International Statute of Secrecy to establish the global dominion of the magical human population over the non-magical, had in reality been a Half-blood humanist looking to unite the magical and non-magical worlds for the purpose of mutual advancement. He had felt that the wizarding world was stagnating while the Muggle world flourished technologically in the face of great tragedy, between its wars and its diseases. Grindelwald, ever the idealist, had hoped that if brought about in the right way, a dissolution of the ISS would bring about an intellectual revolution that, through the melding together of Muggle technology and magic, would create a new set of hybrid technologies that could significantly reduce the suffering of the human race.

The man himself had been an ingenious inventor who, during his time at Durmstrang, began his own experiments with Muggle electrical technology and magic. Unfortunately, those same experiments saw him expelled in his sixth year by the traditionalist Headmaster of the time, as the elderly man and many of the staff and students viewed Grindelwald's efforts as an aberration of traditional magical values. Upon his expulsion, Grindelwald returned to Great Britain to live with his celebrated great-aunt, Bathilda Bagshot. He and Albus Dumbledore met for the first time over tea at the historian's residence in Godric's Hollow.

The two brilliant young men became instant friends, finding common interests in a passion for magical lore - specifically, for the lore surrounding the Deathly Hallows - as well as magical research and experimentation. The two spent many hours in magical libraries and bookshops, scrounging up anything and everything to do with the Hallows. Grindelwald was enthralled with the idea of harnessing the power of the Hallows to use in medicine, but Dumbledore was more interested in the power for himself, having even at that age, an extreme fear of death. They also spent a lot of time researching alchemy with Nicholas Flamel and other notable scholars of the day, performing a series of experiments with each dragon blood and Mermaid scales.

Dumbledore, however, adamantly refused to entertain Grindelwald's "perverse fascination" (as he later called it) with combining Muggle and magical means to achieve a desired end. Nonetheless, he encouraged Grindelwald to pursue his plans to breach the ISS. Dumbledore's motivations, though, were those he later associated with Grindelwald; instead of wishing to slowly integrate the Wizarding world into the Muggle world to create a hybrid society, Dumbledore wanted wizardkind to establish a system of government to control and even subjugate the Muggle population. He was irrevocably prejudiced against the Muggle world by his privileged, Pure-blood upbringing and the incident involving his younger sister, Ariana, being attacked by three Muggle boys in her youth. However, despite his strongly held convictions, Dumbledore was careful to kept his plans quiet, waiting to see how events played out. Infatuated with Grindelwald despite their differing viewpoints, he strove to earn the man's trust and approval through a romantic relationship. He remained convinced that as long as he could earn Grindelwald's love, he could convert the man to his worldview.

His plan failed utterly when put into practice. Grindelwald, who had been completely oblivious to his friend's feelings for him, tried his best to let him down gently, because although he was attracted to both men and women, Gellert Grindelwald had no inclination to enter into a non-platonic relationship with Albus Dumbledore. Despite his efforts to be kind and his sympathy for his friend's predicament, Grindelwald was unable to placate Dumbledore. The latter grew to resent the former, and resolved to work against the man who had rejected him. When Grindelwald caught wind of Dumbledore's scheming, the two had a massive fight that gradually escalated to lethal force. It culminated tragically in a wayward Killing Curse striking the angelic Ariana Dumbledore, who had been drawn outside the Dumbledore home by the bright lights in the adjacent field. Grindelwald had Apparated away on the spot, stricken by his involvement in the young girl's death. Dumbledore, convinced that the curse was Grindelwald's and not his own without any real evidence to that effect, now had even more reason to pit himself against Gellert Grindelwald.

While Grindelwald approached various parties to gain support for his cause, Dumbledore felt out those same connections in secret to see if there was any interest or potential for support for the creation of his conception of an ideal society. When it was clear that Grindelwald's ideas were receiving a more positive reaction than his own, Dumbledore had to re-evaluate his plans. Upon reflection, he decided that if his designs to breach the Statute were doomed to fail, than he would instead simply look to gain control of the magical community and keep it isolated from outside influence.

To accomplish this, he reasoned, he would need to do two things: eliminate Grindelwald and harness the power of the Deathly Hallows.

With his new goal in mind, Dumbledore turned on his once-friend, slandering him with the label of "Dark wizard", twisting the meaning of his motto, "For the Greater Good," and revealing secret plans of world domination to the Wizarding Press, allegedly spawned by Gellert Grindelwald himself. All those to whom Dumbledore had divulged his true intentions were killed by the wizard himself, who used their deaths as an opportunity to frame Grindelwald for murder. As a result, many previously sympathetic to Grindelwald's cause turned against him with the general public, and soon, he and his remaining supporters were being targeted left, right, and centre. Grindelwald had to abandon his plans and experiments and simply focus on survival.

Dumbledore capitalized on the fear and paranoia of the times to build Grindelwald up into a mythic figure in the public perception, to attribute to him a reputation of one of the Dark Lords of Old. He rallied his own group of supporters and used them to track down the Elder Wand under the pretense that it was the only weapon capable of killing Grindelwald. When he found out that Grindelwald had won the wand from the wandmaker Gregorovitch in a duel, Dumbledore knew that it was time to face his old friend and put an end to the entire affair.

In the spring of 1945, using a couple of Grindelwald's closest friends and supporters as bait, he lured his rival to Hogsmeade for their legendary duel.

Gellert Grindelwald used most of his energy early on in the confrontation, engaging not only Dumbledore in battle, but the three men who were holding his friends hostage for his foe. His diversion succeeded, and the couple had time to break their bonds and escape unnoticed; but ultimately, Grindelwald's sacrifice cost him his freedom. After an intense three-hour duel, Dumbledore managed to incapacitate Grindelwald with a simple double stunner, and with a devastating thud, the brilliant man fell to his defeat. Dumbledore had him imprisoned in Nurmengard, which was not actually a fortress that Grindelwald had constructed to hold his political enemies, as the victor claimed to all those who would believe it. In actuality, Nurmengard was an old Grindelwald family property in Germany, near the Polish border. And so, with vindictive satisfaction, Dumbledore trapped Grindelwald in his own home.

With the defeat of his greatest rival under his belt and the Elder Wand grasped in hand, Albus Dumbledore quickly ascended to power in Wizarding Britain. As the newly anointed hero of the wizarding world, he was appointed by an almost unanimous vote to the positions of the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot and Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards.

In Britain, from his High Seat in the Wizengamot, Albus Dumbledore restructured Wizarding Britain's legal and political systems over the course of several decades, demoting and even dismissing representatives from the Houses that disagreed with him and raising up those who stayed in his good graces. The Heads of all Houses eventually became known as Lords and Ladies and the position of "Chief Warlock" became that of "Overlord". On top of that, a new, regressive tax system was imposed on the magical populace and through it, an aristocracy was formed. It was comprised of all of the "Ancient" Houses of the Wizengamot - the wealthiest of those being, of course, the ones closest to Dumbledore. Muggle-borns having, as the name as suggests, no magical ancestry, were entirely excluded from the legal process, and even within the Ministry of Magic, could only find work in low-level or interning positions. Gradually, over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, a clear social hierarchy became established in Magical Britain, with old and mainly Pure-blooded families as the nobility, politically irrelevant or unconnected Half-bloods as the middle class, and Muggle-borns as the definitive lower and working class.

In the meantime, shortly after his duel with Grindelwald, Dumbledore was offered the position of Headmaster of Hogwarts and immediately accepted it, seizing what he saw as an opportunity to mold the minds of magical youth and gain control of the future of Wizarding Britain. While there, he grew to consider Muggle-born students a threat to the regime that he was painstakingly constructing (he was particularly fond of grumbling, "Muggles and their democracy," while alone in his study, sucking on sherbet lemons). He also viewed them as a threat to the Statute of Secrecy, which he had become committed to upholding for the sake of establishing his own power uninterrupted by external interference. Determined to do something about the student selection process, the politician-turned-Headmaster began to pay visits to the room at the top of that obscure tower during the summer holidays of 1966.

For weeks, he examined the magic behind the Quill of Acceptance and the Book of Admittance, as well as the layers of warding that surrounded them. After much study and many, many, failed attempts, Dumbledore finally managed to incorporate a layer of magic into the spellwork governing the two magical artifacts. He implemented a provision into the selection process that dictated that Muggle-born students would only be allowed to attend the school if their magical core exhibited what qualified, according to the potential scale created by the Department of Mysteries, as "middling power or lower." In doing this, he reasoned, he would ensure that the next generation of Hogwarts' Muggle-born witches and wizards were entirely mediocre and thus easily controlled. Satisfied with his handiwork, Dumbledore left the tower and did not return until much, much later on in his life.

And so, magical children were born from non-magical parents each year, and each year, the Quill stayed put, and Muggle-born after Muggle-born never received their Hogwarts letter. Sadly, in more than one case, these individuals ended up exhibiting bursts of accidental magic that landed them in asylums and mental institutions for the rest of their lives.

However, even while this occurred, the Founder's Magic detected the unfamiliar, unwelcome addition to its selection formulae and processes and, almost as if sentient, it began to slowly work to counteract Dumbledore's interference in the system.

13 years later, a singular, feminine cry rang out in a hospital room in London.

Hundreds of kilometres away in Scotland, an old, battered quill began to quiver in its inkpot, as if struggling against an invisible restraint. An hour went by and still, it continued to twitch, its feather protesting weakly as it was repeatedly forced from side to side. Another hour passed and the quill's movements grew stronger, more violent, as if it could sense its magical bonds growing weaker by the minute. It continued its vigorous efforts until, finally, at the three-hour mark, it sprang free from its constraints, and the book on the table beside it flew open with a shower of emerald sparks and a resounding thud.

Painstakingly, in its most elegant script, the Quill of Acceptance traced a single name onto the parchment of the page entitled "Invitations of 1991." It read:

Hermione Granger

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