Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!
This is just a short interlude for anyone wondering about this plotline; there will be a regular chapter posted later.
Interlude: Prince of Cats
June 1st, 1996
Dear Harry:
I wanted you to know that I am committed to your cause. Fully, deeply, absolutely. I will not act against your principles, because they are mine as well. My uncle tended to think that ends justify the means—or, at least, that the ends of Light wizards justified their means. I will never make that mistake.
You have taught me more than you'll ever know. When you met me, I was little more than a disaffected rebel from everything my uncle taught me and believed in. Oh, I had reasons for my rebellion—I thought. But if someone had sat me down and forced me to look at those reasons, I would have found little more than childish sulking. You were the one who taught me to bring the grains of truth under that sulking to light.
I slowly came to realize, gazing at my uncle and my brother and pondering the reasons why they would not swear you allegiance as unconditionally as I did, that I despised them, and not just for their treatment of me. All they could do was look backwards. My uncle often spoke as if my mother were still alive. He valued her memory more than he valued his living nephews, unless those nephews complied in every respect with what he expected of Alba's sons, not themselves. And Pharos adapted himself to what my uncle thought he should be. Every bit of his own independence, his own spark, was crushed out of him long ago. That is the reason the Starrise family is faltering now, and why the power among the northern Light families has passed to Gloryflower. He is Alba's son still, not Augustus's heir, and certainly not a leader in his own right.
But I have looked at my own principles, and now I believe in what you say because it makes sense to me, not because it will annoy my brother. My uncle had doomed himself, according to those principles. The past needs to be seen in balance with the present and the future. The dead cannot control or compel the living unless the living allow them to do so. Behavior restricting the free will of others is repugnant because it acts, ultimately, against the free will of all. And the Light is wider than the narrow, inflexible image my uncle created of it.
I say to you now: Thank you for bringing me home. Thank you for showing me that I was not wrong in Declaring myself for the Light. And thank you for giving me a real reason to despise those who live like Augustus Starrise.
It is partly out of gratitude that I will bring the linchpin to you, but far, far more because it is a continuation of those principles we both share.
Yours in the Light,
Tybalt Starrise.