Chapter 1

September 16:

Today it finally began! After all these years of talking-and nothing but talking-we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with Lord Voldemort, and it is no longer a war of words. I cannot sleep, so I will try writing down some of the thoughts which are flying through my head. It is not safe to talk here. The walls are quite thin, and the neighbors might wonder at a late-night conference. Besides, Ron and Snape are already asleep. Only Hermione and I are still awake, and she's just staring at the ceiling.

I am really uptight. l am so jittery I can barely sit still. And I'm exhausted. I've been up since 5:30 this morning, when Ron phoned to warn that the arrests had begun, and it's after midnight now. I've been keyed up and on the move all day.

But at the same time I'm exhilarated. We have finally acted! How long we will be able to continue defying Lord Voldemort, no one knows. Maybe it will all end tomorrow, but we must not think about that. Now that we have begun, we must continue with the plan we have been developing so carefully ever since the Wand Raids two years ago.

What a blow that was to us! And how it shamed us! All that brave talk by patriots, "The ministry will never take my wand away," and then nothing but meek submission when it happened.

On the other hand, maybe we should be heartened by the fact that there were still so many of us who had wands then, nearly 18 months after the Malfoy Act had outlawed all private ownership of wands longer than three centimeters in the Wizard World. It was only because so many of us defied the law and hid our weapons instead of turning them in that the government wasn't able to act more harshly against us after the Wand Raids.

I'll never forget that terrible day: November 9, three years ago. They burst through the painting at five in the morning. I was completely unsuspecting as I got up to see who it was.

I watched in horror as four Death Eaters came pushing into the dormitory before I could stop them. One was carrying a baseball bat, and two had long sacrificial daggers thrust into their belts. The one with the bat shoved me back into a corner and stood guard over me with his bat raised in a threatening position while the other three began ransacking the dormitory.

My first thought was that they were robbers. Robberies of this sort had become all too common since the Malfoy Act, with groups of Dementors forcing their way into Wizard homes to rob and rape, knowing that even if their victims had wands they probably would not dare use them.

Then the one who was guarding me flashed some kind of badge and informed me that he and his accomplices were "special deputies" for the Ministry of Magic Wizard Relations Council. They were searching for illegal wands, he said.

I couldn't believe it. It just couldn't be happening. Then I saw that they were wearing strips of green unicorn hair talismans tied around their left arms. As they dumped the contents of drawers on the floor and pulled luggage from the trunks, they were ignoring things that robbers wouldn't have passed up: my brand-new Nimbus 8000, my invisibility cloak, Neville's new platinum Remembrall. They were looking for wands!

Right after the Malfoy Act was passed, all of us in the Order had cached our wands where they weren't likelyto be found. Those in my unit had carefully wrapped our wands, sealed them with a Conundrius charm, and spent all of one tediousweekend burying the drum in the forbidden forest.

But I had kept one wand out of the cache. I had hidden my backup wand inside my bedpost. By pulling out two loosened nails and removing one board from the bed, I could get to my wand in about two minutes flat if I ever needed it. I had timed myself.

But a Dementor would never uncover it. And these inexperienced Death Eaters couldn't find it in a million years. After the three who were conducting the search had looked in all the obvious places, they began slitting the mattresses. We protested vigorously at this and I briefly considered trying to put up a fight.

About that time there was a commotion out in the common room. Another group of searchers had found a wand hidden under one of the girls' beds . She had been handcuffed and was being forcibly escorted toward the stairs. She was clad only in her underwear, and was complaining loudly.

Another man walked into my apartment. He was a Death Auror. He also wore a talisman, and he carried dusty bag and magicboard.

The Death Eaters greeted him deferentially and reported the negative result of their search: "No wands here, Mr. Tepper."

Tepper ran his finger down the list of names on his magicboard until he came to mine. He frowned. "This is a bad one," he said. "This is Harry freaking Potter."

Tepper opened the bag and took out a small, black object about the size of a house elf which was attached by a long cord to a graven rod in the bag. He began moving the black object in long sweeps back and forth over the walls, while the bag emitted a dull, rumbling noise. The rumble rose in pitch as the gadget approached one of the torches on the wall, but Tepper convinced himself that the change was caused by the magical interference of the torch. He continued his methodical sweep.

As he swept over the left side of the painting the rumble jumped to a piercing shriek. Tepper grunted excitedly, and one of the Death Eaters went out and came back a few seconds later with a sledge hammer and a pry bar. It took the Death Eater substantially less than two minutes after that to find my wand.

I was bound with a binding charm without further ado and led outside. Ron and Hermione began to protest, but I used our secret blinking signal to tell them to keep quiet. I was led outside to wait next to the girl.

Mr Tepper and some of his "deputies" had more searches to carry out, but three large Dementors were left to guard us in front of the now badly ripped painting of the Fat Lady. Both of us were forced to sit on the cold stone floor for more than an hour until an enslaved dragon finally came for us, which turned out to be Norbert.

As the other Gryffindors left for class, they eyed us curiously. We were shivering, and the girl was weeping uncontrollably.

Cho Chang stopped to ask what it was all about. One of our guards brusquely explained that we were both under arrest for possessing illegal wands. Cho stared at us and shook her head disapprovingly.

Then the Dementor pointed to me and said: "And that one's a racist." I looked up with a start. What was he talking about? Cho spat and moved on.

Ernie MacMillan, who used to belong to the Order and was one of the most outspoken of the "they'll-never-get-my-wand" people before the Malfoy Act, walked by quickly with his eyes averted. His bed had been searched too, but MacMillan was clean. He had been practically the first man in town to turn his wand over to the Ministry after the passage of the Malfoy Act made him liable to ten years imprisonment at Azkaban if he kept them.

That was the penalty the two of us on the floor were facing. It didn't work out that way, though. The reason it didn't is that the raids which were carried out all over the country that day netted a lot more fish than Lord Voldemort had counted on: more than 80,000 wizards were arrested.

At first the Daily Prophet tried hard to work up enough public sentiment against us so that the arrests would stick. The fact that there weren't enough cells in Azkaban to hold us all could be remedied by herding us into barbed-wire enclosures outdoors until new prison facilities could be readied, the newspapers suggested. In freezing weather!

I still remember the Prophet headline the next day: "Fascist-Racist Conspiracy Smashed, Illegal Wands Seized." But not even the brainwashed Wizarding public could fully accept the idea that nearly a hundred thousand of their fellow wizards had been engaged in a secret, armed conspiracy. However, I was still confused about these allegations of racism.

As more and more details of the raids leaked out, public restlessness grew. One of the details which bothered people was that the raiders had, for the most part, exempted Death Eater homes from the searches. The explanation given at first for this was that since "racists" were the ones primarily suspected of harboring wands, there was relatively little need to search Death Eater homes.

The peculiar logic of this explanation broke down when it turned out that a number of persons who could hardly be considered either "racists" or "fascists" had been caught up in the raids. Among them were two prominent Quidditch players who had earlier been in the forefront of the antiwand crusade, four Death Eater Wizengamut members (they lived in Wizard neighborhoods), and an embarrassingly large number of Ministry officials.

The list of persons to be raided, it turned out, had been compiled primarily from wands sales records which all wand dealers had been required to keep. If a person had turned a wand in to the police after the Malfoy Act was passed, his name was marked off the list. If he hadn't it stayed on, and he was raided on November 9.

In addition, certain categories of Wizards were raided whether they had ever purchased a firearm from a dealer or not. All the members of the Order were raided.

The Ministry's list of suspects was so large that a number of "responsible" civilian groups were deputized to assist in the raids. I guess Voldemort thought that most of the people on the list had either sold their wands privately before the Malfoy Act, or had disposed of them in some other way. Probably they were expecting only about a quarter as many people to be arrested as actually were.

Anyway, the whole thing soon became so embarrassing and so unwieldy that most of the arrestees were turned loose again within a week. The group I was with-some 600 of us-was held for three days in a muggle gymnasium in Yorkshire before being released. During those three days we were fed only four times, and we got virtually no sleep.

But the Ministry did get mug shots, aura-prints, and personal data from everyone. When we were released we were told that we were still technically under arrest and could expect to be picked up again for prosecution at any time.

The Prophet kept yelling for prosecutions for awhile, but the issue was gradually allowed to die. Actually, the Death Eaters had bungled the affair rather badly.

For a few days we were all more frightened and glad to be free than anything else. A lot of people in the Order dropped out right then and there. They didn't want to take any more chances.

Others stayed in but used the Wand Raids as an excuse for inactivity. Now that the patriotic element in the population had been disarmed, they argued, we were all at the mercy of Lord Voldemort and had to be much more careful. They wanted us to cease all public recruiting activities and "go underground."

As it turned out, what they really had in mind was for the Order to restrict itself henceforth to "safe" activities, such activities to consist principally in complaining-better yet, whispering-to one another about how bad things were.

The more militant members, on the other hand, were for digging up our wand caches and unleashing a program of magical terror against Lord Voldemort immediately, carrying out executions of Ministry officials, Death Eaters, Dementors, and other Wizard-traitors. The time was ripe for such action, they felt, because in the wake of the Wand Raids we could win public sympathy for such a campaign against tyranny.

It is hard to say now whether the militants were right. Personally, I think they were wrong-although I counted myself as one of them at the time. We could certainly have killed a number of the creatures responsible for our people's ills, but I believe we would have lost in the long run.

For one thing, the Order just wasn't well disciplined enough for waging terror against Lord Voldemort. There were too many cowards and blabbermouths among us. Informers, fools, weaklings, and irresponsible jerks would have been our undoing.

For a second thing, I am sure now that we were overoptimistic in our judgment of the mood of the public. What we mistook as general resentment against Lord Voldemort's abrogation of civil rights during the Wand Raids was more a passing wave of uneasiness resulting from all the commotion involved in the mass arrests. Remarkably, nobody seemed to remember how he had obtained power in the first place.

As soon as the public had been reassured by the Daily Prophet that they were in no danger, that the government was cracking down only on the "racists, fascists, and other anti-social elements" who had kept illegal wands, most relaxed again and went back to their day jobs and Quidditch games.

As we began to realize this, we were more discouraged than ever. We had based all our plans-in fact, the whole rationale of the Order-on the assumption that Wizards were inherently opposed to tyranny, and that when Lord Voldemort became oppressive enough they could be led to overthrow him. We had badly underestimated the degree to which materialism had corrupted our fellow citizens, as well as the extent to which their feelings could be manipulated by the Ministry.

As long as the government is able to keep the economy somehow gasping and wheezing along, the people can be conditioned to accept any outrage. Despite the continuing inflation and the gradually declining standard of living, most Wizards are still able to keep their bellies full today, and we must simply face the fact that that's the only thing which counts with most of them.

Discouraged and uncertain as we were, though, we began laying new plans for the future. First, we decided to maintain our program of public recruiting. In fact, we intensified it and deliberately made our propaganda as provocative as possible. The purpose was not only to attract new members with a militant disposition, but at the same time to purge the Order of the fainthearts and hobbyists-the "talkers."

We also tightened up on discipline. Anyone who missed a scheduled meeting twice in a row was expelled. Anyone who failed to carry out a work assignment was tortured. Anyone who violated our rule against loose talk about Order matters was exterminated. Hermione, especially, was always quick to remind us that "loose lips sink ships."

We had made up our minds to have an Order that would be ready the next time Lord Voldemort provided an opportunity to strike. The shame of our failure to act, indeed, our inability to act, after Wand Raids tormented us and drove us without mercy. It was probably the single most important factor in steeling our wills to whip the Order into fighting trim, despite all obstacles.

Another thing that helped-at least, with me-was the constant threat of rearrest and prosecution. Even if I had wanted to give it all up and join the Quidditch-and-office crowd, I couldn't. I could make no plans for a "normal," civilian future, never knowing when I might be prosecuted under the Malfoy Act.

So I, and I know this also applies to Ron and Snape and Hermione, threw myself without reservation into work for the Order and made only plans for the future of the Order. My private life had ceased to matter.

Whether the Order actually is ready, I guess we'll find out soon enough. So far, so good, though. Our plan for avoiding another mass roundup seems to have worked.

Early last year we began putting a number of new members, unknown to the Death Aurors, into the Ministry and various quasi-official organizations, such as the Ministry of Magic Wizard Relations Council. They served as our early-warning network and otherwise kept us generally informed of Lord Voldemort's plans against us.

We were surprised at the ease with which we were able to set up and operate this network.

Omigod! It's 4:00 AM. Got to get some sleep!