The Marauders: Year Three | #Wattys2016

Numengard

Numengard

Dumbledore was in his tower office late that afternoon, still chuckling to himself about James's outburst in the Great Hall at lunch, pouring a wax seal on a letter he was about to send to the Minister for Magic, when Fawkes soared through the window. The phoenix had been gone for several days - something that he did often, so that Dumbledore had thought nothing of the phoenix's absence. He smiled merrily at the bird as he landed on the perch by the window with a flutter of fiery feathers. "Hullo Fawkes," Dumbledore greeted him, "Welcome back. I do say, you've missed a most splendid --" he paused, having looked up at the bird. Fawks clutched a scroll in his beak, a weathered and tattered scroll with curled edges and spots from rain. That message had been carried a great way, which meant it could only be from one person.

Dumbledore stood swiftly and walked across the room, stretching out his palm for the scroll and Fawkes dropped the parchment into Dumbledore's hand, his eye glinting in the reflection of the fire place's brilliant, dancing flame. "Thank you, Fawkes," the headmaster said, and he held the scroll in both his hands as though he were carrying the most precious thing in all the world. And in a way, to him, it was.

He brought it back to the desk, his hands shaking as he turned the scroll over to find the seal, marked with an untidy "G" in the wax. So he was right about who it was from, then. It had been ages since he'd last received a scroll bearing that mark, and the memories that G raised up within him were strong and he paused, staring at it, his mind crossing over thoughts of "what might have been, if only" before he finally slid his thumbnail beneath the seal and cracked it open. Dumbledore's heart was in his throat as he unraveled the scroll across his desk.

Albus -
I know I have been told not to send you any more letters with Fawkes, and I have largely obeyed your request. However, tonight is an exception as I write to tell you of a curious happening, which I believe you shall find most interesting, and altogether more important than our old fight...

The letter went on to tell the following story:

Nearly two thousand miles away, a wicked storm was blowing in the valley of the mountains outside of Numengard. The thick black clouds churned and wrapped about the peaks, filtering among the trees, sending rain hard as bullets to the ground. High in a tower peak, in a castle prison that seemed made from the stone of the mountain itself, and overlooking the dark mass of the Black Sea, crouched a man. He was greying with boredom and of age, staring down at the road below. Suddenly, the man shifted for the first time in hours. He was leaning forward to squint down at the road leading up to the prison... Improbable as it seemed with the raging weather outside, there were people were coming up the road, determined and clutching their robes as they fought their way through the dark and the rain.

Only the worst sort of people risked their lives to meet in a storm such as this one, the man thought. He should know - he himself had held many a meeting under the disguise of horrid and unpredictable weather.

He crawled his way across the room, dragging the heavy chains that secured him to the wall, to crouch beside the cell bars that held him in, pressing his face tight against them, listening carefully to the echo that travelled it's way up the stairs. There were two visitors, he had seen two figures on the walkway, but he heard the voice of only one - it was low and unpleasant, the sort of voice that belonged to privileged aristocrats and people who had never seen the more sullied sides of life. The man in the cell sneered, already hating the visitor, whoever he was. Most of the words they were saying were lost in the echoing and the groans and cries of other prisoners in their cells, but there were a few words that made it to his ears - among them, the words our arrangement.