Together they grew up, shared firsts, learned of life and love, belief and power. Together they made decisions that would forever alter the shape of their lives and of the world that changed so readily around them. Their friendships were of the purest kind, formed in the glow of childlike naïveté, meshed by the spark of youthful idealism, and fused by death and betrayal and war, all while they were still too young, too inexperienced, to have more than the whisper of an idea of what could bring such atrocities to pass. They were honour bound to stand by one another to death and beyond, to defend each other's lives and wishes with all their power, to guard each other's secrets as though no thought of them had ever brushed their minds. But how solid is friendship when preserving it means losing everything you have ever stood for, and how binding is honour when it threatens to facilitate the destruction of the very ones it professes to protect?
This is the tale of the generation who grew and found their spirits as the First Voldemort War grew and tried to lose their lives. This is the saga of their everlasting friendships, and how they stood, fell, and mutated in the face of the greatest horrors the world could remember. Never let this story be forgotten, for it is in forgetting the purely human hearts, the deeply rooted loves and fears and sorrows that lie at the shadowy centre of every grand history, that we condemn ourselves to repeat them, the good and the wicked and the purely indefinable, in all their confusion, all their pain, all their pettiness and their vast and tragic glory.
If you dream sincerely of being a stirring hero of future legend, go now, be about your business, and live your life as best you can, for this is how true heroes come to be – yes, and true villains, and true cowards, and all those who lend the story to the history that moulds itself around them. But if you aspire rather to be the bard, who hangs back, and observes, and just occasionally moves to ensure that the same story is never told twice, the same play never set upon the stage, that lives are never in quite the same way ripped from their moorings and flung apart to drift on a barren, desolate sea – then gather 'round, and learn what happens when loves and ideals, needs and hates, fears and friendships clash. For this is the great war which underlies all the shining clashes that prance across the pages of history. This is how tragedy wedges its way into lives and begins to sprout…