A/N: I feel the need to warn everyone that this is another mega chapter. It's the second longest in the story, and near the end, it's going to feel like it drags a bit. Unfortunately, its crucial for laying out more of the plot. Please bear with me—or rather, bear with Harry, as he goes a-sleuthing.
"There's a Gulf War vet, dying a slow, cold death
And the government says, "We don't know the source of his sickness"
But don't believe what they say, because your government is lying
They've done it before and don't you know they'll do it again"
"Die for the Government" – Anti-Flag
Harry Potter had never put much stock in birthdays.
There had been the first he ever remembered enjoying, at eleven, and during his tenure at Hogwarts, his friends and their family had gone out of their way to observe the day with something special.
Since the end of the war, they'd been decidedly more low-key, and that was how the wizard liked them. Before he and Ginny had had children, it had usually been a gathering at the Burrow, and since, given their busy schedules, things had changed a little bit.
His joy since becoming a husband and father rested in a day he always resolved to take off, a homemade breakfast, courtesy of his wife, and snuggles in bed until the mid-afternoon, with all of the members of the Potter family.
The year before, he and a Ginny had taken James and Albus to the same zoo he'd visited as a child of ten with Dudley, and he'd bought himself a lemon ice, just as a kindly zoo patron had done for him all those years ago. Ginny and James had shared an enormous banana split between them.
Being a man grown, with money he could do with as he pleased, soothed a deep part of his heart. Choosing to spend that money on his wife and sons was the greatest pleasure he could conceive of on his special day. He had planned the family excursion with relish: a day trip to Blackpool Sands in Dartmouth.
They would save considerable time by apparating, thus the family didn't have to wake at an ungodly hour. It was also a Tuesday, which meant that, with the possible exception of those on an extended holiday, the beach would likely not be well attended.
He had instructed Ginny to have the boys' bags packed, and her own swim-number that she'd worn to Ibiza. And after scarfing down a large breakfast of poached eggs over toast, mulberry jam tartelettes, thick and crispy strips of back bacon, fried mushrooms and tomatoes, washed down with half a pot of coffee that he'd lightened with golden cream that had been given to them by Molly, freshly skimmed from a morning milking of the family's dairy cow, he and the family were ready to depart.
The boys hadn't any clue as to where they were going, but they wriggled their small noses after Ginny had daubed on zinc-oxide. Their noses were like little white triangles in the middle of their faces, and their mother had additionally swiped on dual stripes under their eyes where most of their freckles had begun to develop.
"Mumma, nooo," Albus whined, scraping at it with futility.
"You stop that, young man," she scolded, pulling his water-repellant shorts into place. "You're all ready to go, Harry?"
Harry was running about, grabbing last minute items that it was possible they'd want: a couple of plastic spades and castle-moulds he'd picked up at a muggle toy store, collapsible chairs that he shrunk to fit into their beach bag, a family-sized bag of crisps and a mesh bag of apples. "Almost, Gin. Did we get the paper this morning?"
"I paid the owl, but I hadn't looked at it, I was too busy," she told him, "It's on the table in the kitchen,"
Harry ran down to the basement and snatched the paper up, shoving it under one arm-pit. He'd read it when they got to the beach. Preferably in a chair shaded by their umbrella, with sand up his shins and shellacked into his leg hair.
Getting situated took a while, and they spent the first few hours playing in the surf, constructing a sand-castle that was modeled after Hogwarts, complete with a Quidditch pitch that looked near enough real until Albus stomped through it, and spending as much time together as they conceivably could until both Harry and Ginny had to return to work the next morning.
Harry didn't get around to the paper until the two boys were napping on a beach towel laid out underneath the shade provided by their umbrella. He pulled it from the canvas bag he'd packed, along with a bottle of Coke that he'd charmed to stay cold, and shook it out between his hands as he lodged the bottle beside him in the sand where he could reach it with his right arm.
Five Years Free: The Wizarding World Celebrates Half a Decade of Remus and Dobby's Laws
There's much still to be done, but liberation has never tasted so sweet for the Wizarding Lycan and Hob-Fae communities.
Opinion by Dennis Creevey
It probably isn't difficult for most to imagine, or perhaps to remember, what they felt the morning of May 3rd, 1998. One day after the second falling of Lord Voldemort, to the allied forces that united against him on Hogwarts' hallowed and ancient grounds. Anyone who is one of my regular readers will know how I spent the next day: mourning an older brother who died, as so many did, far too young. I've written extensively about Colin in the past, but this piece isn't written for him, though he is never far from my thoughts.
In the days leading up to the ultimate battle a lesser-known hero of the resistance died in action. A descendant of the ancient and respectable Malfoy line of Hob-Fae: a House-Elf called Dobby. Dobby's liberation came early for the Fae: he was perhaps only fifty. Not at all old for a House-Elf. It was delivered by way of a hastily tossed item, discarded by his master, the late Lord Lucius Malfoy, who had thrown him a sock by sheer accident.
According to those who were witness to the event, Dobby's joy was incandescent. His servitude was at an end: no longer would the Elf be required to iron his fingers or slam his ears in the oven door. Dobby was a Free Elf. Free until his life was ended in the days leading up to the final battle. Struck by a dagger as he put himself in the line of fire to save a group of witches and wizards escaping the master he had once been obliged to serve.
On May 3rd, who was mourning Dobby?
Perhaps several minutes before or after my brother lost his life, a Lycan by the name of Remus Lupin fought back-to-back with his Auror wife: Nymphadora Tonks. The pair were recent parents to their first child, a son. Both bravely risked their lives to join the fight, perhaps knowing that, should the tides of war turn against them, there was no place in society for a Lycan and his son. A boy whose father was not allowed to work to provide for himself and his mother.
Remus' life in the years leading up to the war was pockmarked by inconsistent employment and a series of crushing disappointments, including the indignity that came with losing his position at Hogwarts after the well-known Death Eater Severus Snape (the very same who would go on to kill beloved Headmaster Albus Dumbledore and who led a reign of terror at the school that traumatized hundreds of children) revealed the secret of his lycanthropy to the school at large in an act that many have attested was inspired by nothing more than spite.
Both Remus and his young bride lost their lives within seconds of one another. Their infant son a mere month old.
Who was left to mourn the Lupins?
It took a shamefully long time for either of these brave fighters to recieve their justice. When they did, it was with the added indignity of only posthumous recognition. It was not enough. Is not enough. With the passing of Remus' Law and Dobby's Law on July 31st, 2002, this very paper fêted the new legislation as the final flourish for efforts on behalf of Lycans and Hob Fae throughout the country.
What more could they want, after all? What else could be done for a population that now had full recognition and protection in the eyes of our laws?
These spineless kinds of questions were met with brave opposition from Lycan and Hob Fae brethren alike: after so many years of penury and enslavement nothing less than concentrated efforts to enrich and embolden the lives of those who had suffered the greatest could possibly suffice.
Updates to the suite of legislation were slow to come, but followed year by year, spearheaded by the Post-War Minister for Magic, Barnam Aethelfromm.
His election following interim Minister Kingsley Shacklebolt's short years at the helm took the Wizarding world by storm. A reform candidate who spent years living in his mother's native Crimea who was returning to his father's ancestral homeland with promises of unity, justice, prosperity, and equanimity after years of tumultuous political upheaval. Minister Aethelfromm sailed to a decisive victory in the weeks after Minister Shacklebolt's unfortunate and untimely passing, overcoming Shacklebolt's incumbent undersecretary Percival Weasley who was favoured to win.
Minister Aethelfromm went to work immediately drafting the legislation which would become the famed Remus' and Dobby's Laws, pushing through the landmark suite of bills in two short years. From there... (cont. on pg 6 of Current Events).
Harry swore, earning a glower from his wife who was lounging to his left, and flipped through to the page he'd been referred to, discarding the rest of the paper in his haste.
Page six was covered from top to bottom in information about the laws, detailing their salient points at inception through to the reforms that had been instituted in the following five years, and additionally spelled out the results of the 2006 Wizengamot legislative sessions which had resulted in the adoption of the Informal Instance of Ill-Will slips and authorisation for the tax auditing the Aurory had been tasked with.
Harry blanched. He'd been an early champion of the two initial laws, having thrown his not inconsiderable political clout behind the campaign for their adoption. They'd been ratified on his birthday, and his attendance at the signings had been the talk of the papers for a week. For the most part, he had eschewed media coverage in the years following the war but had made a special exception to right the wrongs he'd seen that had led to the continued mistreatment of werewolves and house-elves in the magical world.
He skimmed the section detailing the past year's session, not familiar with ten or more of the updated laws. They'd not been widely discussed.
The newest of these was called Colin's Law, and the byline underneath its header explained to the reader that it was an attempt on the part of the Ministry to do for muggleborns what had been done for the "Lycans and Hob-Fae."
The wizard frowned and picked up the pop from his side without looking. He took a swig and nearly choked from the sand that had gathered near the rim of the glass bottle.
Spitting grit from his tongue, and eventually wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his open shirt, he kept his eyes moving over the particulars of the law.
Colin's Law was far broader in scope than either Remus' or Dobby's Laws had been when initially ratified. It already resembled the broad adjustments that had taken five years to be instituted for its predecessors, and its gargantuan footprint seemed to affect not only muggleborn members of society, but purebloods too.
It was of some note that half-bloods were largely left alone, neither helped nor hindered by the changes being made.
Harry's eyes scanned the bullet points quickly.
Incentivized hiring for Muggle-Heritage Peoples. (Hereafter referred to as MUHP).
Specialised trainings offered free-of-charge for industries looking to increase MUHP engagement.
Protections under the law against incendiary or intolerant speech against MUHP.
Harry paused, his green eyes narrowed. That was the law against which Hermione had run afoul. There was no mention of what constituted 'incendiary or intolerant speech' nor did it explain in what way it might have to be phrased to be construed as being 'against' Muggle-Heritage Peoples.
He as the Deputy of the Department had still yet to be briefed on the new training that Aurors like Gerald had been referencing as they filled out ream after ream of lime-green paperwork.
Where in the past the bulk of their work had been taken up with material crimes of theft or different forms of violence, now Harry felt that most of his days were beholden to either the green I3W forms or the carnelian-coloured tax reports.
Harry had about had his fill of those. He'd now been on record at least three separate times requesting that either a separate department handle them, as they fell outside of the purview of handling actual crimes, or that an investigatory department for the purposes of tax auditing be created for that express purpose.
He'd been ignored. As he left the office he was handed yet another folder with another list of names.
Reparative tax status for MUMP, capping income tax at a fair 8% of total yearly gross earnings.
Harry blanched. That was like a slap in the face. He now had it on good authority that those he'd been auditing had been shaken down for not paying their fair share of 30%.
He himself was usually taxed at 15%.
"Gin," he whispered, looking over at his wife. She had the brim of her straw hat pulled down to shade her face from the sun's rays, and her hands rested, palm-up, on the arms of the lounge chair, perhaps in an attempt to sun the undersides.
"Mmm?"
"Off-hand, do you know how much you're paying in income tax?" he asked, rubbing at the stubble growing on his cheek as he frowned down at the paper.
He and Ginny kept separate accounts and rarely discussed their finances. He shared the Black vault and his ancestral Potter vault with her—most household expenses and things purchased for the boys were bought out of this shared vault—but their earnings were sent into each their own personal vaults where they could spend freely as they liked.
Ginny shimmied in her seat. From where Harry could see beneath the hat it looked like her face was creasing in thought.
"I dunno. Too damn much, probably."
"You don't remember the figure? Is it like fifteen?"
She shook her head. "More than that."
Harry scowled. "Something like thirty?"
"That sounds about right," she said with a shrug. "I don't look too closely at the paperwork anymore, we have enough,"
"We do," Harry agreed. "I was just curious."
Estate Tax for non-MUMP families, graduating 20% for each consecutive generation without conscientious coupling, and capped at 80% of total estate value.
There was that phrase again. Conscientious coupling... And this wasn't from Dennis' column, but was now incorporated into the letter of the law. What on earth did it entail? Marriage of a pureblood to a half-blood? Or only to muggleborns? Or was it perhaps necessary for intermarriage with muggles themselves?
And if that were the case, how was that possible if the idea was that producing half-blooded children was surely a recipe for sowing hatred against muggles? Given the Statute of Secrecy, and the full-throated defense of maintaining it, should purebloods encourage their children to marry unwitting muggles for the sole purpose of preserving ownership over their estates?
It seemed a morass of contradictions and competing aims. Though Harry granted that it did seem that the motives were pure. He could understand wanting to advance the aims of unity, but the methods being invoked didn't seem to actually serve that purpose...
There were three or four more bullet points that Harry scarcely could pay attention to. His mind was too distracted by his ruminations regarding the preceding provisions.
He came back to Dennis' column, where it picked up the thread from page one:
(cont. from front page)... additional adjustments were made to minimum salary requirements for Lycan and Hob-Fae employees, including guaranteed time off for each, with up to two-weeks a month available in the case of accommodating Lycan transformations. On behalf of our Lycan citizenry it was recognized as important that sentencing for transmission related crimes would benefit from abridgement or full-on abolition.
It is, after all, born of a deep well-spring of bigotry and hatred to consider that lycanthropy itself ought to be criminalised. Though deeply uncomfortable for most people to admit, this author believes it important to attest that by criminalising transmission, we criminalise the very state of being a Lycan. The newer iterations of Remus' Law which proscribed new sentencing guidelines was a soothing balm to an infected, painful wound for the Lycan community at large.
Newer protections for Hob-Fae included automatic manumission from delinquent families whose heads had not paid out their salaries (from date of birth) to the present moment, and levied damages against the former "employers," (read: owners), to be paid until such a time that the debt was paid in full, with the additional stricture that those who were found to be in willful contempt of Dobby's Law would spend minimum amounts of time in Azkaban.
To date, some two-hundred witches and wizards have been sentenced in accordance with the law and more than fifty arrests made for non-payment.
The ultimate aim of each law is to achieve "Parity of Payment" in all instances. Setting mandatory minimum salaries for jobs in sectors that are more frequently employing either Lycan or Hob-Fae such as Hospitality, Food Preparation, Shopkeeping and the like has gotten the quaffle flying in such a direction that full PoP should be attainable within the next decade, bringing the earning potential of any given Lycan or Hob-Fae in-line with the average post-apprentice or Master-level earners.
It is impossible to say whether these measures will be enough to undo the generations of demoralising and crippling financial castration that these groups have been subject to, but it's certainly a good starting point.
It is this author's hope that the future for Lycans, Hob-Fae, and Muggle-Heritage Peoples (to see more on efforts on behalf of MUMP, be sure to consult the spread in Current Events for details on the new Colin's Law that went into effect in September of 2006) will be a bright one. A luminous and dignified procession toward harmonious and utterly uniform treatment by the previously impenetrable magical-elite.
We will have a seat at that table. We will live to see that day. If you are wise, you will welcome us, arms open. However, welcome or not: we'll be there.
Harry folded the paper and set it by his drink. He stared off across the cresting waves, lost in thought as the sound of the tide and the gulls provided an incongruously soothing counter-point to his mounting concerns.
For the rest of the afternoon he made sure to fling his boys into the surf. To cover them in sand. He chased and cavorted and generally did all the things he thought a father ought to do for his two young children, but his heart wasn't in it. Sun-down came and the family dined out at a muggle burger joint that abutted the beach. It was enough to distract the Auror for an hour or more, but ultimately, his questions and concerns followed him into the office the next morning.
Though the middle of the week, it was also the beginning of the month. August was, like the year before, sweltering.
Harry's beginning of month tasks were primarily administrative in nature. They were annoying, and possibly beneath his position, but he had a certain degree of orderliness that he preferred to maintain. As such, it didn't occur to him to delegate the tasks to lower Aurors or new-hires.
On a more personal level, following up on the paperwork filed by those in the field had the added benefit of keeping him abreast of the crimes which didn't make the beat. Rather than following up on the records once a month he was in the habit of doing it weekly whenever possible. He'd accrued a large number of his under-the-table photograph record by being well-informed on each crime. If the report was filed the night before, or even the day of, he often had time to apparate out to the scene of the crime in order to surreptitiously take photographs before the clean-up crew arrived.
He usually didn't manage to beat the obliviators, but there had been so many attacks in recent months that the team tasked with removing remains and setting the houses back to rights were sometimes days behind, leaving grisly scenes to rest for up to a week at a time.
Harry shuddered. Those were obviously the worst. In the winter, the haunting desolation of a decimated family was made all the more sinister by the literal chill in the air. Sometimes if the Auror in charge forgot to ward the house behind him, the freezing temperatures would leave blood-sickles or icy blood-puddles forming. The summer was worse, however. Over the span of several days without attention, the putrefaction attracted flies and created a stench that would put any given slaughterhouse to shame.
He only had one family to attend to that morning.
What was awful was that one felt lucky. It was only one. Only one instead of the four or even five he sometimes visited.
'Merlin,' he thought. 'If that isn't telling,'
He checked the paperwork for the address. It was some unpronounceable village in the Welsh countryside.
Apparition would be out of the question, he decided. He'd not been anywhere near there for reference, so his first order of business was acquiring an official portkey from the Aurory's internal transportation dispatch.
At the desk, he was handed a cracked frisbee that he was told would take him to Llanfihangel y Creuddyn. The Auror shoved it inside his robe and departed for the apparition point within the main lobby. It was mostly out of common courtesy.
Upon activating the portkey, Harry found himself in an idyllic setting. He was down a dirt road from a tiny collection of stone cottages. Given the rusting farm equipment he supposed that at least some of the cottages belonged to muggles, but as he approached he stopped short and stood gawping up at the sky.
It was day-time, which helped to mask the appearance of the glittering green image that hung suspended above one of the houses, but Harry had seen it enough times before to know the Dark Mark when he set his eyes on it.
It had been years since he'd last seen one in person. There had been reports, sure. And he'd shown up to most of them well after the Mark had dissipated on its own. The fact that it was still visible suggested that the attack had occurred only the evening before.
It was nearly directly above him when he paused for another glance. A frown creased the wizard's brow. There was something decidedly strange about the mark. He turned tail and backtracked a distance of 500 or so meters, plodding out into a field that had been left to lie fallow, squinting once more against the sunlight.
Odd. Yes.
The snake that hung from the mouth of the skull was a cobra.
The last time Harry had seen the Dark Mark in the sky the snake certainly hadn't worn a hood.
Every time he'd seen the Mark cast during the war (and in the years leading up to it), it had been consistently the same. Down to the last scale if he'd had to guess, though he'd not counted them himself.
Even the skull looked differently shaped. He was no artist, and knew he couldn't precisely tell someone how it was different: but it was as if it were modeled after a different skull.
Was this the same Mark? Substantively, yes. There was a skull with a snake curling from it's gaping mandible. The image imprinted in the sky in swirling green eddies of malevolent magic.
Specifically, however, it was a different kettle of fish.
'A different basket of snakes,' Harry mused, irreverently.
The skull was shaped differently: perhaps the eye sockets. Perhaps the expression? If possible, this new Dark Mark seemed more sinister. As if someone had manipulated the features to register as more menacing. It glared down where the old skull had seemed expressionless. The snake was a cobra, where before it had been smooth (perhaps a constrictor? Harry couldn't be certain), and seemed longer, twisting out and forward like a scoping tongue. The snake he remembered from nearly a decade earlier had hung like a hangman's noose.
Was this evidence of a new organization or was it simply a poorly cast Morsmordre?
He wracked his brains. The recent Marks he had to compare it to were all sitting in a file folder back at Grimmauld Place. There were also copies of the photos that he'd stored in his muggle safety-deposit box at his bank branch in London, a precaution he'd taken in the off chance that he should lose custody of his original copies in some capacity.
He didn't care for the paranoia he was becoming reacquainted with, but whatever sense he had left from the war had seemed to reawaken. It nudged him to be vigilant. To watch. To wait. To record what he saw, collate the notes, parse the results.
In accordance with his instinct, he withdrew a small disposable camera from the pocket of his robes and pointed it at the sky, lining his eye up with the view-finder and taking four photos, positioning himself several meters to the left and right in order to attempt different angles. He wasn't certain it would work, or that it would show up in the photograph, but it was worth a try.
Having photographed the Mark as well as he thought possible, Harry trudged down toward the cottage over which it hung, swatting at flies in the field as they swarmed him.
He could feel sweat beading up under his hair and sliding down the back of his neck. His cooling charms were evidently not equal to the task of combatting the early August swelter, and the sun beat down upon his head, causing his black hair to plaster to his skull as he perspired.
There was nothing for it, really. As he approached the domicile, observing the door which lay, off its hinges, in the first few feet of the entryway, he removed his robes and shrunk them, stuffing them into the back pocket of his trousers.
A quick homenum revelio showed that nothing, or rather, no one, living was remaining on the property. He entered, exercising caution. His boots crunched loudly though the dried thatch before the threshold.
"Magical Law Enforcement! If anyone's in there, show yourselves!" He yelled, rapping his knuckles on the doorframe.
Nothing but silence greeted his pronouncement. The stillness of the house was eerie. Broken, overturned furniture lay in pieces on the well-worn wood floor, and the near absolute stillness was interrupted only by the lazily meandering dust motes that floated through the sun-strewn room.
The bodies had been removed by the first team to come by, the wards to repel muggles set in the early hours of the morning before the local constabulary could inconvenience the investigation. By the looks of things, this was a lone magical household in an otherwise entirely muggle area.
Harry glanced around and located a light switch, flipping it on. In the corner there was a television, the glass front having been smashed to bits, and a shelf full of stereo equipment. If he were to take a guess, he'd say that the house belonged to either a muggleborn, or a family of mixed magic.
A glance at the casefile he'd brought told him that it had been a half-blooded wizard, married to a muggle woman. Middle-aged. Cadoc Clough and his wife, Marian. A low-to-mid-level Ministry adjunct clerk in the Department of Novel Spell Registration and a local chapter chairwoman of Plaid Cymru. Both dispatched, presumably, with an Avada Kedavra, likely after having been tortured.
Well... the ample amount of blood festooned on every visible surface would seem to put paid to that prognosis. Or if it had been torture, it was far more gruesome and invasive than a run-of-the-mill Cruciatus Curse. The place looked like a charnel house.
Harry frowned. It wasn't exactly outside the realm of possibilities for the Death Eaters to be harassing and executing those practicing miscegenation between the magical and muggle... but their numbers had to be so low now that it seemed beyond the scope of credulity for them to be picking just any old wizard and his muggle bride, particularly with such violence. Even under Voldemort the attacks had been far more intentional—targeting strategic enemies and threats—and hadn't seemed to revel in the same level of depravity.
It was impossible to tell whether the Death Eaters had a new leader, or if they were operating in loose bands. If it was the former, the leader was possibly practicing differently from Voldemort—targeting just anyone as long as it was convenient or as long as the opportunity presented itself. If it was the latter, then indiscriminate violence was certainly possible, whether to send a message or even out of petty revenge...
On the other hand, that discounted entirely that there was some particular reason to target the Cloughs. Harry wasn't entirely ready to let go of that as a motivating factor in the attack.
He searched the house thoroughly, finding nothing interesting except a pile of pamphlets espousing Plaid Cymru party slogans. They were arranged neatly. It didn't seem that the wife's political action was of any consequence.
It took him a moment to realise that there was a soft humming that interrupted the stillness of the atmosphere. He might have thought it was one of Snape's muffliato spells, except, he'd heard it before. It was distinctly un-magical. Electrical, in fact. In the corner sat a tall, cream tower and beside it, a squat computer monitor. The humming was being emitted by a black box, lit up with green lights, and which sat at the apex of a complex arrangement of differently-coloured cables.
Harry hadn't paid much attention to computers. He'd remembered being warned against Dudley's under threat of physical correction. Yet, he'd observed the larger boy playing. Dudley had taken a sort of perverse pleasure in forcing Harry to watch as he used his toys and gadgets, perhaps out of a desire to stoke the smaller boy's jealousy.
From what he understood, limited though his understanding was, the tower was on, and the monitor off.
The Auror pressed the single, large button that was on the front of the screen, listening to the click-hisss-bwonngg sound produced by the tubes warming as they were electrified. The image on the screen flickered to life, faint at first, then becoming clearer after a few moments.
Harry pulled the chair out and sat before the monitor, squinting at the images and text coming into focus before his eyes. He poked experimentally at the mouse, learning how to track it with his eyes and move it with his hand as he'd seen Dudley do years before.
The screen seemed to be displaying an expanse of tabulated conversation, organized into a rudimentary table of sorts. At the bottom, if Harry clicked out letters on the keyboard before him, text appeared in the white box, and his assumption was that if he were to press the 'Add comment' key that appeared beneath the white box that the page would update with his input. Above the box there was a bolded bit of text, reading: CaddySwyn51.
The wizard quickly scanned the page. It looked very similar to the site that Hermione had been looking at when she'd been researching in the library. On the left were small thumbnail-sized images above more bolded names, presumably of people adding their commentary, and in the right column was the meat of the conversation. Near the top, in what Harry remembered as being the address bar, from when he'd observed Dudley typing in the URLs to naughty web-sites (which he'd blamed Harry for, of course), it read: mttps;wwww{wizchat,mag/~whatsthebuzz.
Wiz-chat: The World-Wide Wizarding Web's Integrated Conversational Tool
Create an account to get started chatting about all matters magical (or mundane).
Harry's face, if he could have seen it himself, would have likely reminded the man of a plimpy. His jaw had dropped in mute stupefaction.
Internet. For wizards.
But then... hadn't he seen weird advertisements popping up here and there? Anonymous adverts taken out in the Prophet? Fliers affixed with permanent sticking charms to poles and storefronts in Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade?
He wasn't one to frequently read the paper. Usually, he only picked up the rag when he had nothing better to do (such as lounging on the beach). He'd clearly been too preoccupied. Now that he thought hard on the matter, it was possible that he remembered Arthur mentioning on one of his rambling discourses about muggle technology that there were murmurings regarding a Wizarding Web... Harry had mostly tuned the man out, having been too concerned with his own worries about the world.
It took a few moments of gawking before his brain began stringing together the disparate pieces of jigsaw he'd spent nearly six months collecting.
Hermione. Hermione played a game of magic, that could only have been inspired by a person who had intimate knowledge of the wizarding world. A game created by Games of the Magi, which owned the building housing both Eileen and Severus Snape. None of this was new, nor was the understanding that Snape himself was responsible for creating Galdrvale. The man had said as much himself.
The towers filling the bottom levels of Snape's building had still seemed suspect, however. If Snape was merely the writer for Games of the Magi, why would they allow him to maintain the servers himself? Why would he have insisted upon it if he hadn't had bigger plans in mind for the behemoth computer arrays?
As a sort of experiment, Harry clicked a link in the toolbar that appeared on the left half of the screen, opening a new browser window.
The World-Wide Wizarding Web Directory
A Guide to the Ministry of Magic
A Guide to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
A Guide to Your Rights as a Magical Citizen
A Guide to Muggle Magic: Creating and Submitting a Webpage to be Hosted
A Beginner's Guide to Magical Flora and Fauna, Including their Most Basic Uses
Wiz-Chat: A Platform for Magical Discussion
Point-me: The Magical Search Engine
(Webmaster & Host: The Scribe)
Definitely Snape, then. Harry hadn't forgotten the conversation from a month earlier between Snape and Hermione's father, nor the dour man's unlikely predilection for assuming pretentious monikers.
Harry snorted and shook his head.
It must have been a Slytherin thing, he decided.
He poked around the site for a bit but found nothing more than basic information. In truth the operation was extremely bare-bones. Though he didn't know what he should have expected, Snape was only one man after all, and he had other responsibilities.
After five minutes of checking out the page on civil liberties (an interesting addition, he considered, given that Snape himself would have been put to death should he ever decide to show his face amongst the living), he closed the window and scrolled to the top of the forum page that had been open when he'd turned the monitor on. The thread wasn't terribly long.
Something Reeks in the Spells Registration Department
Cadoc, or CaddySwyn51, had been the progenitor of the thread.
Hi all. I was wondering if anyone else has got wind of the patent for a magical containment spell that was registered perhaps five years ago on behalf of Oonagh Musgrave? I came across the petition for registration at the bottom of a file that'd been on my desk for at least that long (maybe longer. No comment), and thought it odd that it seemed to have been stamped for approval by a superior of mine before his retirement. He's been gone some two years now, or thereabouts. I don't want to say too much, but I'm a clerk in the department, and it was concerning to me that the containment spell was never filed properly.
I don't exactly want to open myself up for litigation here (but then I suppose it's unlikely that the boss is hanging about Wiz-chat, eh lads?) but it's a spell of incredible importance for Defense. I'm not Curse Breaker or anything, but I got decent marks in DADA, even if it was almost forty years ago—a spell like this certainly would have been of note for apprehending and locking down inferi. Can you imagine how many that could have saved had we had that spell during You-Know-Who's first reign? Easily hundreds, if not a thousand or more.
It didn't seem like something that ought to be so important anymore—I mean, I've not heard of any inferi attacks since YKW was offed in 98, but it was approved and then never officially recorded. When I took the oversight to my new head he acted like he was offended at first (which, why would I have been accusing him of anything? He wasn't even a part of the department back then?) and then told me to shut my gob or lose my job. That didn't sit right with me, no siree, it did not. I don't claim to be the bravest gentleman—I was no Gryffindor or anything—but this isn't the first time I've brought an oversight to him. In the past it was all "Attaboy! There's that eagle eye. Expect a fifteen galleon bonus on your next pay slip." This is the first time he ever took offense or threatened me.
Am I over-reacting or is that weird?
SorcererOfSwindon : Bruv, it's weird
ChocolateFrogGrog: Elaborate.
CaddySwyn51: I mean, I thought so too, but I thought I might've been overreacting
SorcererOfSwindon: My cousin works for a specialty cleaning outfit—MLE brings them in to take out the trash that's too nasty for them to lift their wands for. He told me in the past few years there have been like near to a hundred werewolf house-invasions and murders. So many that his employees (he has like fifteen house-elves he works with) don't even bother to give him a head's up when they're called in for a werewolf cleanup—but sometimes his foreelf comes to him and has told him that it's not actually from werewolves. That it couldn't be.
GoWimbourne: None of them are from wolves?
SorcererOfSwindon: No, like, I mean plenty of them *are*. But every once in a while, it's something worse
ChocolateFrogGrog: Don't be a berk, tell us what it is. This isn't story time down at the pub
SorcererOfSwindon: Tell me: do werewolves usually leave bloody pulp and limbs strewn about? What does *that* I wonder...
CaddySwyn51: Don't werewolves usually... clean up?
GoWimbourne: If they have enough time, yeah. They prefer to chow down
SorcererOfSwindon: exactly
ChocolateFrogGrog: So there was a mess to clean up. So what? Isn't that your cousin's whole job or whatever?
SorcererOfSwindon: No spell *pulls* arms and legs off dipshite. Werewolves aren't known to leave a huge mess behind, particularly the oh-so-tasty entrails. They don't dismantle corpses until they're a pile of pulp. You know what do do that? Inferi. And someone's holding the chain
ChocolateFrogGrog: You're fucking full of it—we'd have read about that in the Prophet if it were happening
SorcererOfSwindon: Most of the werewolf attacks aren't being reported in the prophet either. The same cousin saved most of his elves from pickpocket gangs: did you hear about the problem with thievery in Diagon Alley? No? Then piss off. Shit's happening
GoWimbourne: I had a sack of sickles lifted off me last week. Luckily it was before I stopped in at Gringotts for a refill
The sound of shattering pottery interrupted Harry's reading. His head whipped around on his shoulders, looking back behind him. Another homenum revelio yielded no results.
The Auror felt goosepimples raising along the back of his neck, and the perspiration that had originally been caused only by the heat of the day turned into the cold, clammy flush of fear.
He desperately wanted to ignore the rising tide of anxiety that suffused him but knew better than to mistrust his instincts. They'd saved his hide too many times over the years to be entirely without solid foundations.
There came another crash, seemingly from the kitchen.
'Merlin, please be a cat,' he prayed, gripping his wand tightly in front of him.
He nudged the half-open door to the bedroom with his foot, not wishing to poke his body around it just in case. It opened into the main room of the tiny house. There was movement in the kitchen. He spied the door to the larder, which he'd forgotten to investigate, had been opened, and in front of it languished a stooped, emaciated figure, which seemed to be aimlessly maneuvering its limbs in a haphazard fashion.
Harry's foot crunched on the glass of a photograph that had fallen to the floor as he crept forward. At the sound of the crack there was a violent start from the thing that had been exploring the kitchen. It raised a thin face in Harry's direction, sightless, clouded-over eyes somehow registered his presence and a low droning groan issued from the thing's slack-jawed mouth.
It might have been human, once upon a time. Now, clumps of hair hung in patchy splotches here-and-there on its head, and more than half of the teeth had fallen from its rotten gums. The tongue was black, or perhaps missing entirely, it was hard to be sure. All over the body, the skin was mottled from where the blood had pooled unevenly, and much of the flesh had rotted or fallen away.
As Harry's eyes took in the horror of the thing's appearance, his nose at last registered the ghastly smell. If possible, the scent offended more than the sight.
How on earth had he missed that? Though he did suppose the smell of the fresh carnage that had only recently been cleaned from the premises may have obscured the whiff of decay. The house, when he had entered it, wasn't far from what he supposed a slaughterhouse might have smelled like, including the disheartening aroma of one who had either defecated on himself, or who had had his entrails torn from his torso.
Impossibly, it seemed that the sightless eyes had focused on him, and the inferius shuffled forward, it's mouth gawping in some cruel parody of speech. "Auuughhhaahh..."
Harry swallowed and raised his wand. This was just one... one was easy enough to handle. A large arc of his arm delimited the space before him with a magical shielding charm, and then he executed a sharp jab.
"Calidissimus Ignitionem," he snarled. Where the tip of his holly wand pointed, at the feet of the shuffling wretch which was now banging its limbs against the spell which held him within its field, flames so hot that they burned blue erupted, causing the aging linoleum flooring to bend, warp, and melt. The broken ceramics the inferius had been standing in blackened from the heat and it shrieked in displeasure as the flesh that remained on its legs began to shrivel away from the scorching bone.
Harry watched it with grim satisfaction.
The former human flailed and fell to his knees, throwing out its wasted arms to catch itself as it crumpled into the fire. As it knelt its hair caught and turned the entire corpse into a bright cyan conflagration.
It took far longer than one might have expected. Anywhere from five to ten minutes for the magical fire to finish turning the rancid flesh into a charcoal husk. Enough time for Harry to study the inferius closely.
His jaw wobbled a bit with emotion. He had known this man.
He had escorted him into sentencing less than a year earlier, and from there into the execution chamber. A shaking, crying, wretch. Begging for his muggle mother. Harvey Jergins.
Words from a conversation he'd had not even a full year before filtered through his consciousness.
"And how soon after...?"
"Immediately, 'Mi. As always. We escort them into the room, the executioners take over from there. Small mercy, I don't have to dispose of the remains afterwards."
"But then what happens to them? Did they give him back to his mother at least?"
"I don't know that—"
He had an uncomfortable feeling that he now had his answer. Harvey's Dark Mark, the same one which had condemned him to death, had still been prominently visible on his left forearm before it had shriveled into nothingness.
Harry canceled the spell and doused the fire before he dismantled his shield charm. There was nothing more than ashes left, and a hole in the floor where the fire had begun to burn through the wooden sub-flooring into the cellar. A shiny pool of what must have been metal lay where Harvey's neck had been. Harry had seen it before it had melted. A steel choke-collar. Not unlike the kind he'd seen on some muggle's dogs.
Harvey had been dispatched to kill the Cloughs, and he had a decent idea of who'd held his lead.
Since one inferius wasn't too much of a challenge for a wizard who knew his way around a wand, it was likely that Harvey hadn't been the only one deployed into the home. The fact that he'd been left behind—likely by accident—indicated that his handler had had his hands full. Usually inferi were used in greater numbers as their true strength lay in their ability to swarm and overwhelm their opponents.
Harry stalked out of the house and glanced around, checking that no-one was about before he disapparated, spinning from the tall grass of the Welsh field that abutted the cottage into the well-maintained, but crab-grass strewn lawn that comprised the Ministry's potter's field.
There weren't many headstones. Most of the graves were marked with large boulders. Many were grown over with the weedy grass that had overtaken the lawn. The exception were some of the graves of the richer purebloods. The Malfoys, for example, had managed to demand that they at least have marked graves, even in spite of the fact that they had been executed for war crimes and sedition. If Harry remembered correctly, Lucius had begged for his wife and son's chance to have their deaths acknowledged. He surrendered all of their remaining estate funds for the privilege, irrespective of the fact that they would have been seized anyway.
Harry wasn't sure what had led the Ministry to take pity on him and accede to his request, but in the end, the Wizengamot had granted that small mercy to the disgraced family, and the three graves, all in a row, had been marked. The final resting place of an ancient, ennobled family.
The Auror stopped before the white marble plinths. They were modest by Malfoy standards. Under different circumstances, the three would have been interred in the mausoleum that sat on the estate grounds. The resting place of the Malfoy family since they had come over with the Normans.
It wasn't as if Harry had any sense of lost love for the family, but he still thought it a waste. Even if he felt like he could condemn Lucius and Narcissa, he felt a spot of pity for Draco. A child as much as he himself was, drawn into a conflict far greater than himself from an age at which no child should be meant to choose between death and dishonour. In the end, ultimately, the young man had been responsible for his own choices, it was true. Yet, Harry almost couldn't fault the wizard for taking the course he had.
He wasn't sure whether capital punishment was appropriate for the crimes committed by Lucius and Narcissa. Perhaps it was. He'd certainly chosen an occupation in which he became a party to the process... but what he was absolutely sure of was that it didn't merit the fate that he was now beginning to suspect the three had actually suffered.
With this in mind, Harry backed up several paces and cast a wide silencing charm.
He needn't have bothered. No one ever visited the sad plot. There weren't even any fresh graves...
The Auror narrowed his eyes. Not nearly enough fresh graves. There should have been at least two from the start of the summer... but there wasn't newly turned dirt anywhere to be seen. His resolve strengthened.
Whipping out his wand, he thrust it at the middle grave, Narcissa's, and fired off a powerful blasting hex. The ground before him cratered, dirt flying at least twenty meters in every direction. The gouge he'd left in the ground was deep. At leasteight feet. Wide enough that it should have taken out bits of Lucius and Draco's caskets on either side of Narcissa's own.
He'd disturbed nothing and no one. The ground was empty. There hadn't even been decoy coffins buried beneath the earth. It was completely untouched.
His wand arm shook and he swallowed. He'd not wanted to believe it could be so. There was nothing there...
The next twenty minutes Harry spent desecrating graves at random, finding nary a body to blast. Not a single one.
This was bad. This was so far beyond the pale...
'And I offered them up... hundreds. I gave them hundreds.'
His stomach felt like it was trying to crawl up his esophagus and after a moment of fighting it down, the Auror ran to the side of the field and began retching into the grass.
'An army of dead Death Eaters... And my fucking name on the paperwork...'
All of the hearings he'd attended began to flash before his eyes. Barely fifteen minutes in length each. He had brought the men and women in, shackles around their wrists and ankles, and they'd sat in the chair, magical chains creeping around their shoulders and torsos. That particular indignity never lasted long, however, as their sentences had been handed down swiftly, and Harry would escort them to the barren, nine foot by nine foot chamber in the bowels of Blackhall where he left them to their fates, the anonymous hooded spectre of the executioner nodding once in his direction as he warded them in together.
He'd never questioned where the bodies went. Hadn't wanted to. The easy answer was that they were brought here, but in truth, he knew that he'd never seen one being carried out of the Ministry, under a shroud or otherwise. Harry now began to suspect that they were all still there, in some dank lower chamber...
Wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his robe, he rose on unsteady feet, stumbling a bit to the left when the blood rushed too quickly to his head.
To think that yesterday he'd been lounging in the sun, enjoying a frigid Coke and watching his boys splash their way through the surf...
It couldn't stand. He wouldn't let it. Harry's eyes glowed an incandescent bottle-green in the mid-day sun.
The man strode from his place near the edge of the lot and executed a tight spin, popping directly into his study. He wouldn't be going back into the office that day. Perhaps he wouldn't go in tomorrow either.
His hands shook as he threw open the drawers of the writing desk, gathering a stack of parchment, a quill, and ink.
Hermione would be proud at least. It had been since sixth year that he'd sat and tried to write anything. He found that while the words were initially slow to come to mind, after the first five minutes they began to pour from him, rapidly filling the page with his unpracticed hand. Paragraph after paragraph of damning, righteous rage.
The shadows around the study grew longer and longer until he was eventually forced to conjure light for himself, not wishing to bother with candles or a fire. He had heard Ginny come in, settle the boys, call him for dinner, and eventually put their children to bed herself. All of it passed in the periphery of his awareness as he was consumed with his task.
At a quarter to midnight, he signed his name to the cover letter he'd fashioned, stuffing first the short note and then the longer, folded parchment he'd laboured over for hours into a large, muggle manila envelope.
Not wanting to waste time, Harry crept to the attic in an attempt not to rouse his sleeping wife and children. He called for the family owl, a robust barn owl that James had named GusGus. Though both Harry and Ginny had tried to rename the owl, the stubborn thing had accepted the name immediately and responded to nothing else. He flew down to his master from where he'd perched in the rafters.
"GusGus, this needs to make it to Ottery St. Catchpole tonight. Care of Xenophilius Lovegood, okay?" Harry murmured, tying the heavy envelope to one of the owl's legs. "If you're back by breakfast I'll have a whole banger for you,"
At this the owl swiveled its head to peer at his owner, blinking his yellow eyes slowly. He hooted and cocked his head to the side, as if to ask: "Really?"
"I promise." Harry chuckled, holding three fingers aloft as he'd seen Dudley do years before, "Scout's honour."
Of course Dudley had been a poor scout, but Vernon had forced him into attending meetings nonetheless, and Aunt Petunia had doted over her son in his smart green uniform, offering him extra pudding whenever he correctly recited the Scout's Promise.
GusGus clicked his beak at him, as if challenging his owner over the fact that he'd never been a scout in truth.
"Just go—piss off, I told you there'll be sausage in it for you, and my word should be good enough," Harry hissed, tossing the bird aloft out the window from where he'd perched on his right forearm.
GusGus disappeared into the night.
GusGus reappeared the next morning. Ten hours later. Three hours after the Potters had risen for their breakfast, and far later than Harry had anticipated. In his claws was clasped a special edition of the Quibbler, which normally released to news-stands at five in the morning.
Harry received it at the kitchen table. He'd skived off work for the first time he could remember, not even bothering to tell anyone where he'd be.
Paradise Lost, Or Perhaps Never Found: Our World on the Precipice of a Great Fall
It is perhaps too early to celebrate the new State of Affairs. At least without carefully accounting for the consequences of our advances.
Opinion by Harry J. Potter
I am probably the last person on Earth who would wish to look a gift horse in the mouth. The words: "If the ship is still sailing, it isn't sinking," could easily have described my general outlook on the way things have been since the fateful night in '98 that I'm sure I don't have to remind anyone about.
A quip like that is hardly accurate, of course. Leaks appear.
A ship with a leak in its hull may not sink after a few gallons of water, but as one of my professors once informed me: the dose makes the poison.
It is my belief that we are reaching a threshold of toxicity that may well prove fatal to our functioning. A ratio of water within to water without that will ultimately sink our ship. Worse yet, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, it seems that there is some form of collective resistance to acknowledging simple facts that should bear weight on policy decisions.
Five years ago I was an early advocate for both Remus' and Dobby's Laws. It is not in my nature to go about name-dropping, so the readers of this column will have to forgive me: I'm afraid I will be doing an awful lot of it. Remus Lupin and Dobby the house-elf were my friends. Dear friends. I mourned them nine years ago, and I mourn them to this day. They were gone too soon, as so many others were.
Before Remus John Lupin was my Professor and before I could ever call him my friend, he was a dear friend of my father's. As I understand it, this began as soon as they started at Hogwarts, and even as my father and godfather, the late Sirius Black, realised that their friend was "different," they did not forsake him. (For the sake of transparency I should also note that the late Peter Pettigrew, a known Death Eater and traitor was also one of their quartet). Far from inspiring hatred in the hearts of the three other boys, they made a decision. An illegal decision, in truth, but nonetheless, their support for their friend was such that they undertook the dangerous and advanced animagus transformation at fifteen years old in order to accompany Remus on his monthly transformations.
I didn't have the pleasure of meeting Remus until my third year (at least as far as I remember, though I suspect I knew him when I was too young to know it), and, as was accurately reported by Dennis Creevey in his article for the Prophet on the 31st of July, Professor Lupin was outed as a werewolf by Professor Severus Snape. (Though the reporting was accurate, I would quibble with some of Dennis' portrayal of both the events which precipitated Remus' departure and Severus Snape's true motivations and character. That will have to wait for a different column I'm afraid, as it falls outside of the scope of what I've set out to say).
Remus and I would meet again working for the Order of the Phoenix. Properly, I should say he worked for the Order and I was under the Order's care, though it matters little now. I knew the man as a kind, patient, gentle sort with a good sense of humour and capable of great love and tenderness. Both for his friends, and for his eventual bride, Nymphadora Tonks.
Remus' lycanthropy was not a defining point of his character. He was never vindictive, never cruel or bitter. He had suffered greatly for his unwitting transformations, first as a student at Hogwarts who was forced to endure nights away from his housemates in the Shrieking Shack, and then as a man when he was chased from employment, not managing to keep a proper job well into his late thirties and up to his untimely demise. None of this was Remus' fault. He had been attacked by the well-known werewolf Fenrir Greyback as a small child, well before his life had properly started. It was by the grace of the late Albus Dumbledore alone that he was offered an education.
I still feel strongly that werewolves should be welcome at Hogwarts. Their inclusion was the greatest motivator for Remus' Law. Werewolf children, having been attacked either accidentally by other children, or by irresponsible adults, should not have to live out their lives in ignorance and penury. It was with great pleasure that I saw the law signed into effect five years ago. Not only did it offer a place for them to learn, and additional safety guidelines such as free administration of Wolfsbane potion with grant monies requisitioned through St. Mungos care of the MHS, it showed them that there shouldn't be a reason why they couldn't reach their full potential as young witches and wizards. Having lycanthropy didn't or shouldn't have necessitated a life on the run, at the mercy of an abusive alpha. It shouldn't have meant vying for status for the men and a life as a harem-member for women. The law was supposed to ensure educational rights and to protect employment rights.
From what I saw in the initial year after its adoption, it did just that. There was 100% enrollment of eligible werewolf children at Hogwarts and 80% employment for werewolf adults, up from less than 20% in previous years.
I'm sure the additions to the law in more recent years have sought only to improve upon that record. After all, following so many years of mistreatment, did we not owe their community more? Additional paid leave? Tax deductions? Freedom from litigation, particularly in the event of transmission?
Let's look at the numbers.
Where the initial result of opening Hogwarts up to enrollment saw full matriculation, in the years since werewolf children have been ceasing to enroll and ceasing to graduate. 75% of the original students enrolled under the program went on to graduate, 40% of them are now employed. This ought to be celebrated, no doubt. You, as the reader, might ask where the others ended up?
I'm afraid that as an Auror I have some bleak answers for you.
In the years since the decriminalisation of lycanthropic transmission (particularly intentional transmission, granted it can be hard to prove intent), werewolf attacks have quadrupled since 2002 and are growing at an exponential rate. The cause of death for homicides attributable to werewolf maulings now accounts for 40% of homicides that the Department of Magical Law Enforcement investigates, and the majority of those being killed are older: parents and custodial grandparents. The number of youths with lycanthropy are ballooning past what should be expected if it were all a consequence of accidents or sheer chance, particularly given the free availability of Wolfsbane potion for anyone in need. There are at least two-hundred more young werewolves today than there were five years ago, when in the past, the average conversion rate was perhaps 3-5 (but often less) per year, and not primarily children.
If the law was working as intended, the availability of potion combined with educational and employment opportunities should lead to werewolves becoming better integrated into society, fewer or falling numbers of transmissions, and eventual extinction of lycanthropy as a public health concern, but the fact of the matter is that the size and number of packs has grown from one or two in the entire British Isles to five or more, and of greater size. Many of their newer members are made up of minors who have either left Hogwarts, or who were abducted directly following transmission. That this is being caused by anything less or other than targeted transmission strains at the bounds of credulity.
Worse yet, the defenders of the new provisions for those stricken with lycanthropy like to assert that attempts to stop transmission of this painful and deadly disease is nothing more and nothing less than outright bigotry against the werewolf community.
Remus would not have agreed. Remus would have wanted a cure, and baring that, would have wished his suffering on no one, not even an enemy. Unfortunately, the cure for lycanthropy is no-where near an imminent reality. With that in mind, in the case of lycanthropy: prevention is the cure.
It is my fear that now, given the large numbers of infected youths, we as a society would have to reapply ourselves to rehabilitation before we could make the kinds of strides we did five years ago toward eradicating transmission.
Not only that, but lycanthropy is not the only blight advancing on our citizens. If we're not busy worrying about securing our homes during every full-moon, then we're made to worry about securing our pocket books whenever we step out the door or walk in our own districts.
Petty thievery is not new, of course, but the slight of hand employed by a human thief, or the forceful accio that makes it easy to trace the culprit in a spate of petty larcenies is nothing when compared to the ease with which we are being robbed by disaffected, homeless house-elves.
I have the utmost respect for house-elves. Dobby was brave, loyal, and fierce. He stood up to his own family and disobeyed direct orders issued from his own master, the heir of his ancestral house from which he derived his powers, in order to do what he felt was right. For a hob this is tantamount to cutting off a limb. House-elves, or all manner of hob, really, are created of the well-spring of need and magic which undergirds longstanding magical households. Once here, it is possible for them to propagate as corporeal creatures do, however they are closer to poltergeists in how the progenitors of house-elf lines originally manifested.
Dobby was a Malfoy elf, and his allegiance was to the House of Malfoy. I never asked him, and didn't understand at the time, but I suspect that his decision to cross the late Lucius Malfoy was borne of the more recent generations of Malfoys disgracing of their own house. Even after he'd been dismissed by his master Dobby was able to come and go from the premises freely. In the interim he served the students of Hogwarts, including his former master's son.
There are two other elves I can think of who, after having either been cast aside or having no one whom they respected to serve, went mad: Winky, of House Crouch, and Kreacher, of House Black (who was our own house-elf until his untimely passing in 2001).
It is perhaps not something that anyone from a non-pureblooded background would have intimate knowledge of. The cast-off elves were generally scorned by their elvish brethren, and I can attest that in my youth I always assumed it was out of a sort of simple narrow-mindedness on the part of the elves that remained in thrall to their houses.
Presuming their ignorance was an act of ignorance in and of itself on my part. The elves were well aware of the consequences of being stripped away from the Houses that they served, irrespective of who had inherited the estate proper.
The rampant thievery in our Wizarding districts is nothing less than a consequence of the poor policy proposals that began with Dobby's Law and were progressively worsened under each new iteration. House-elves do not need pay. The original format of Dobby's Law allowed a house-elf to seek manumission or solicit pay should he or she desire it, and with the full legal rights to do so. I still believe this was a defensible provision. To force elves to accept pay, however, or to force households which rely on a symbiotic relationship with their elves to pay what is impossible to afford, has brought to bear downstream effects which we are witnessing now.
The elves—desperate for food, desperate for work which no one can afford to employ them in, desperate for families—are being promised all of these things, under the table, by criminal elements that are exploiting them for their unique and untraceable magic. Like the character Fagin from the muggle novel Oliver Twist, these witches and wizards are scooping up orphaned elves by the dozen and putting them to work all over the British Isles: parting the unsuspecting from their hard-earned galleons and beloved belongings.
Once the report comes across my desk there is close to nothing I can do about such thefts. It is a pervasive, known problem which has a solution which we've decided is unpalatable and backwards: allow the elves to go home. It seems we are willing to sacrifice the elves' wellbeing at the altar of our own sense of propriety and bonhomie. If only we had the humility to admit that our own sensibilities are far from the most sensible, or sensitive, option.
I find it unfortunate that I should have to come to castigate laws that are named after dearly departed friends. Laws that, in their infancy and most basic form I supported and helped to draft. It is difficult enough to speak for those hurting whom I do not know: the faceless werewolves and house-elves who are suffering from our good intentions. Now we come to the part of the article I will enjoy writing the least.
As I apologized for earlier, it is necessary for me to name drop. While I prefer to act as if I've never had my face in the paper and as if my name is not common, household knowledge: we all know that's not the truth. Anyone who knows of me or the war knows the names Ronald Weasley (whom I now am happy to call my brother-in-law), and Hermione Granger (whom I consider my sister in all but blood or marriage). Because of the actions of the Wizengamot in advancing Colin's Law, both have suffered material and spiritual damage, and while I care for them dearly on a personal level, it concerns me a great deal that they are not alone in their suffering.
In my capacity as an Auror I have been made to execute nearly one hundred search warrants and tax audits in the past year under the legal auspices of Colin's Law. The relevant provision changes the margins for businesses run by pureblooded proprietors and requires each to give a detailed account to a Ministry representative on an annual basis. Given that there is no appropriate enforcing body that was granted authority over the audits, it has fallen to my department. At a time when we are overrun with werewolf attacks, petty and grand larceny, and a number of suspicious attacks which cannot (due to the time of the month and the manner in which they've been carried out) be attributed to the increase in werewolf activity, we've been required to go knocking on doors of well-respected businesses in order to shake them down for detailed reports on their personal accounting.
Or that's what the directive was on paper. In truth, the field that seems to be of the most interest to the higher-ups is whether or not these proprietors have Dark Marks. We are to check back once a year. If it seems suspect to you that there is the presumptive expectation that, because they are pureblooded they must also espouse ideals of pureblooded superiority, then we are in agreement. Given that they seem to recognise that they have been put on notice, I think it is also worth saying that a reasonable person wouldn't expect them to go and receive a Mark while under such intense scrutiny.
My brother-in-law's bakery, L'Orange Boulanger ran afoul of the accounting provision. He and his wife, Hannah, an Abbot, had been doing their best to calculate their own withholdings, not realising that by opening their second location in Diagon Alley that their bracket had changed from 30% to 50%. It's possible that if they can't work out a solution, their second location will have to be shuttered. Growth under such circumstances simply doesn't make financial sense, as their margin for profit was far lower than the Ministry had calculated would be sufficient when drafting the legislation. Another brother-in-law, George Weasley, proprietor of Weasley Wizard Wheezes, narrowly avoided a similar fate. His audit came around the same time that he was considering expanding to the former Zonko's site in Hogsmeade, and he managed to nullify the pending sale for the premises before the title changed hands.
If that sounds like a personal bugaboo, it is. What's not personal, but which hurts as if it is, were the faces of the thirty to forty others that I watched fall in dismay as I explained the law to them, and watched them desperately try to figure out whether they would be able to provide for their families.
These are cottage industries. None of them were found to be discriminating in hiring, beyond displaying a slight preference for employing family. Given that family could be trained from birth for certain duties related to such crafts as cauldron forging or wandmaking, that shouldn't come as any surprise.
There's no immediate solution for training up large scores of muggleborn witches and wizards in these old arts. While incentives have been offered by the Ministry, it's difficult to force interest in magical crafts that require far longer than a standard 3-4 year apprenticeship to master. As an example, one is not considered a master wandmaker for at least fifteen years. In the muggle world there is a saying that if one wishes to train a knight at the sword, one must start with his father. If one wishes to train an excellent archer on the longbow, one must begin with his grandfather. This seems to be the case in many cottage industries, and furthermore, doesn't touch on the issue of whether or not it is right and good for the Ministry to be demanding closely-held family and industry secrets be made public for the sake of leveling the playing field.
It is good to have Pottages open to offer cauldron sales to the public in exchange for a fair price in gold. It is not the case that their protected knowledge of the proper alloy ratios should be subject to seizure and made public domain.
Lastly, it's questionable as to whether any of these changes actually benefit muggleborns or half-bloods as they are purported to do. My dear friend Hermione Granger earned some of the top NEWT scores in the twentieth century, attended a muggle university in Australia, and brought her expertise in geriatric care back to our world, focusing primarily on providing care for aging witches and wizards suffering with Luenfeldter's Disease. Her work for the Wizarding Outreach to the Elderly Department was not exactly what one might call "high-profile," but it was important and meaningful. Not only did she earn her position in the department and work hard for her clients, she was dependable, kind, and fair-minded.
Hermione was forced out of her work for the WOE Department this past January. An informant had filed an Informal Instance of Ill-Will (known interdepartmentally as an I3W) report against her. The I3W is a direct creation of Colin's Law. Specifically, the provision for "protections under the law against incendiary or intolerant speech against Muggle-Heritage Peoples."
Beyond the fact that for Hermione to be speaking ill of muggleborns would mean she would have been disparaging her own parentage, and irrespective of the knowledge that she harbours no bigotry in her heart against any witch, wizard, or muggle for the accident of their origin: her words were misconstrued and used against her. A vicious application of hear-say. The Auror who reported the indiscretion to the Ministry was not present during the conversation in question and refused to listen to sense when he was given the context of her remarks.
I know because I was the one who accidentally mentioned her words in passing. They were neither incendiary nor intolerant. They were told to a friend in privacy without her ever considering that they might enter the public record. Given that the I3W is "informal," there is no actual charge or crime which may be challenged by a wizard or witch who finds one on his or her record. Even so, Hermione found out the hard way that she is now considered unemployable by any and all magical businesses that are required to report on their personnel to the Ministry (which, after Colin's law was ratified, is now all licensed businesses).
Because of a law that purports to be for the betterment of Muggle-Heritage Peoples, one of the top-performing muggleborns that has matriculated from Hogwarts in the past quarter-century was made to stock shelves in a muggle supermarket for months, having been found unfit for employment in the magical world.
These truths are not welcome in the chambers of Blackhall. They are buried in reports which never see the light of day within my own department. Our most venerated source of news in the wizarding world—The Daily Prophet—has willfully deigned not to cover or publish anything that would acknowledge the realities that our citizens face daily; this is the condescension with which so many in power greet our concerns and anxieties.
This column has gone on long enough, I fear, yet allow me to end with a quote from an essay penned by the muggle writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
"So has the circle closed? So is there indeed no way out? So the only thing left to do is wait inertly: What if something just happens by itself?
But it will never come unstuck by itself, if we all, every day, continue to acknowledge, glorify, and strengthen it, if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point.
From lies.
When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: "I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!" But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.
And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!"**
(Excerpt from "Live Not by Lies," by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1974).
Harry Potter smiled a thin smile. It wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough. But it was a start. He ran an absent finger over the scar, faint though it was, that still was visible on the back of his hand.
I must not tell lies.
In the end, for his trouble, GusGus got two whole bangers.
"You've gotta die, gotta die, gotta die for your government
Die for your country, that's shit"
"Die for the Government" (reprise)– Anti-Flag
A/N: I realize that Harry's article was incredibly long. Thank you for bearing with him and the story. I promise it was important for plot reasons. Thanks again for reading and reviewing! You're all wonderful
** Solzhenitsyn , A. I. (1974, February 12). Live Not by Lies. The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center. Retrieved June 24, 2022, fro (period) solzhenitsyncenter (period) o r g (back-slash) live-not-by-lies