Prologue.
1945
"That is enough, Gellert. I would not prolong your suffering. Let us be done with this abhorrent affair."
Lightning flashed in the stormy evening sky, and for a beat, illumination shone the true breadth of the battlefield. From horizon to horizon, the Rhine ran red with blood. The earth buckled and broken, offering vast, misshapen charnel pits as testament to the cost of war. Dancing amidst the gore were the last of the German Fae, mad pixies all too eager to pluck at the dead and nurse off of the stolen flesh. They gorged and gorged, and still hungered for more power.
In the midst of the chaos walked Albus Dumbledore. But for a few thin scratches and the way his left arm hung loosely at his side, his stance reflected his skills with wand and otherwise this day. Even now the fingers of his left hand twitched, sparing the necessity to give voice to his intent and offer any further fuel to the elder wand. The land rose up to offer him a winding path through the Stygian sea straight to his battered opponent.
"Lay down your crippled wand and admit your own surrender."
Displaced pixies hissed as he passed, making feeble motions to slit at his ankles. Albus spared them no further mind; the entourage at his back would handle the wayward sprites. And they did. A pack of great black Grims' stalked forward. A chorus of stark and frigid growls rippled at the air, and straining wings turned hard in mid-leap, throwing the bloated, heavy sprites down into the very pools which they robbed from so gleefully until the last had vanished to a murky demise.
The few English muggleborn infantry to survive hunkered together far behind their commander's pace. Confronted by their own mortality, the Obliviation's soon to come would offer some measure of solace to the shell-shocked soldiers.
When Albus had narrowed the gap to within fifty feet, Gellert Grindelwald rose tall and proud from behind the ruins of his stone cottage.
"Surrender? You would dare order my surrender?" Despite the assortment of reflected-curses which had bled his emerald robes to tattered sanguine, leaving the flesh underneath little better, his voice remained the same now as five years previous, full of scorn, betrayal, and cold rage.
"I will see you in hell before I give you that pleasure, Albus."
Gellert's mangled left hand placed the stump of his wand against his heart and he began to chant in the language of his youth. A stolen ritual, forbidden even to the masters of Durmstrang, a song of defiance in the face of Pyrrhic loss.
And for the first time since the elder wand was plucked from his hands in their home in Berlin, Gellert felt elation at the shock racing over his ex-conspirator's expression.
"Gellert, no!" Both wand and hand acted in concert.
But it was not enough.
Too late to cease the black magic at work.
The broken wand core ignited with a wave of purple flames, and the Hellfire Lullaby raced outward to immolate all that Gellert was with the cries of the tortured damned. I have lost, and so shall you, Gellert thought with proud defiance. His last moments were of uttermost agony entrenched in unyielding determination. Flesh, bone, and soul beneath evaporated, until nothing remained for which Albus could mourn, nor ever hope to redeem with time and patience.
Then the Lullaby quieted and was gone. The very air itself seemed hollower where Gellert Grindelwald had made his final stand. Starkly empty.
Albus bowed his head and shut his eyes as the storm he had been weathering within rose to a bitter summit.
"Is this how you truly felt all these years?" He exhaled sharply. There should have come relief, then. The muggles had won their Second Great War. The English Ministry would soon come to clean and hide this disaster.
Yet all that Albus felt now was heartbreak and regret. There was no denying that the lost man had chosen his end ahead of time. Not even the most vile acts of necromancy they had researched together could restore what that ritual eroded.
Why could you not have accepted trial, Gellert? Why could you not reciprocate the love I thought we shared?
But his sorrows would have to wait, and on this particular front what followed was hardly anymore pleasing.
Albus raised his head as the lightning flashed again. And there in the space where Gellert had once occupied now stood a formless shadow with the faintest hints of sunset orange aglow. He knew it at once, and he knew what it desired of him in exchange for the services bartered for before the dawn broke such a long time ago.
"You have won, Albus Brian Dumbledore. Now yield me your next name," the ethereal Fae demanded.
The grief at Gellert's utter destruction cloyed inside of his heart, his mind, yet underneath a smouldering fury now arose out of an ire plaguing him all day. Albus' pained expression blazed with his frustrations, and his voice was heavy as he answered.
"I would be a fool to compensate you so richly in exchange for the paltry assistance this day, Titania. Is this the extent of your passion? Your compliance of duty?"
"You would break our bargain, wizard?" the shadow countered dryly.
"I would argue before many councils of this world that what we have done this day is a bargain. Your subjects broke the oaths. You were bound to right any transgression upon the mortal realm, and in response you provided the least in that endeavor! I have done all that I could with the little Avalon promised, and the loss of life far outweighs your effort and my own very best."
"But I did provide, Albus Brian Dumbledore. I have." The thing he named Titania hissed, "Mab will weigh my choices, and Oberon judge. What say you?"
"Call upon your better halves and the days in wait will eclipse the hours already lost for this cause." Albus shook his head once. "I deny you now; when this river we call the Rhine runs pure again, then and only then shall I be sated that your word is true of intent."
The glow darkened to a chilling aura of blue and green. "You would cheat us, wizard." The Grims nearby growled, leaching what little warmth the battlegrounds held away. "We have honored the terms. Give us your name!"
Albus closed his eyes and the powers at work on the back of his mind, sustaining the anti-Disapparition and Portkey charms spread over the vicinity fell at last.
"Then call out the other lord and lady as this Summer erodes to Autumn. I shall await you in the Eternal Courts."
He spun on the spot and was gone then, leaving the shadow to shriek incoherently as the sky flashed white once more.
1981.
Sifting through the wreckage of the Potter Foyer, a now graying Albus Dumbledore turned aside the shattered furniture and found the first of several corpses.
He breathed a sigh.
With a brush of his hand, the vacant stare of the late James Potter slid closed. The English Minister for Magic lifted the body from the debris and laid it gently aside.
The Death Eaters arrayed around James' last stance were more difficult to ascribe names to, and for a moment he granted his deceased student a nod of appreciation.
Certainly he did not go quietly into the good night.
With less care, for impartiality meant little under the rooftop of a home haunted by the Dark Mark, Albus extracted the men and women and sent them out the burst down door to await in the cold October snow for the Aurors.
Carrying onward and up the stairs then, it was little great surprise to find Lily Evans-Potter also felled within the battered and burned hallway leading to the back of the house. A brilliant witch and understudy, with a handful of broken phials and Fae-dust marks to prove she had used everything at her disposal in the defense of herself and her son. Albus' lifted Lily the same as her husband and sent her down to rest beside James'.
Another warm light snuffed out before her time was due.
Entering the bedroom straight ahead, the scene in question answered his final doubts. A sooty robe left crumpled upon the floor before a gently rocking crib, and a cracked wand that was neither James' nor Lily's.
Albus stepped around the spot where the Dark Lord had fallen and stared down at the child marked with a still oozing wound over one eye. The same faint residue of Fae-dust clung to his brow and dotted his blanket.
I had hoped for a better outcome when this day inevitably came, Harry Potter. We have much to prepare you for.
Looking to his left as something shifted in the shadows, Albus found the familiar haunting gaze of a Grim watching him, and in the shattered mirror nearby that shapeless figure he should never have spoken to eighty years ago.
"I have honored my bargain, Albus Wulfric Brian Dumbledore." The Fae mused, "Soon I shall hear your final name from your own lips. You cannot deny my claim."
"Names change with time, Mab, as you are well aware. I shall offer you the end when that time is right." The Minister gestured toward the crib. "Our present bargain remains unfulfilled so long as the boy is harmed. Treat him."
The figure in the mirror shivered with well known icy outrage. They had always argued to the razor's edge, and it was the wizard who had emerged victorious more often than not. "And when will I return the boy to your care?"
"... on his eleventh birthday."
The mirror cracked into a thousand pieces. Much more and the power at work would reduce it to nothing more than a fine powder on the floor. "You are a fool, wizard!"
So I have rarely been called directly to my face. Yet he held his tongue and waited.
And for a timeless figure forced to share its own persona with two other Fae, Mab hissed and answered him sooner than might be expected.
"I will not foster the boy without my due, Albus Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. He shall be another ward of Erised."
"A wise and insightful caretaker, Your Highness."
"Ariana would say otherwise."
The old pain of her parting comment drew a twinge across his otherwise studious expression, and they both understood that she had won the final word.
The Grim sat up then and padded toward where Harry Potter slept. The great beast dipped its muzzle down to catch obsidian teeth in the front of the infant's shirt, snorting a breath of cool frost as Harry stirred for a moment and then dozed again, before retreating into the shadows as if it and the child had never been present but for those marks upon the blanket.
Farewell, Harry Potter. We shall meet again when this world is ready to see the Dark Lord vanquished in whole.
Prologue End.