Prelude to a Hunt

Prelude to the Hunt

The depression had struck fast, and it had struck hard. Impoverished both by the economics of war and the economics of loss, the German people, Muggle and wizard alike, struggled to make ends meet. Hope was as hard to come by as food or work, if not harder. People were too busy trying to survive, to rebuild, to care about some nameless (What is my name? Why don't I know that?) orphan who looked as if he'd die from a stiff wind.

But he didn't die.

He drifted instead. At age eleven, he watched a Muggle (What is a Muggle? Where have I heard that?) rise to power, playing off of the hopes and fears of the people around him, giving them someone to blame, an enemy to unite against. Throughout the following years, he would watch as the Muggle invaded other lands and placed undesirables in camps, where they were enslaved, tortured, and killed by the millions.

When he was seventeen, he was captured, but he was not put into a camp like the others.

He was taken somewhere worse.

A few Muggles know that the mad dictator called Hitler had something of an obsession with the "occult". They know he researched many artifacts, and conspiracy theorists love to claim that he may have found some.

The whole wizarding community, of course, knows better.

Hitler was the very kind of Muggle that many in the wizarding world fear and hate. He knew about magic, and the existence of the wizarding community, and was determined to claim what he saw as their power for his own.

Many wizards fled Germany, and the lands Hitler later invaded, and those who stayed behind hid. As a result, Hitler found few wizards to use in his twisted experiments.

Then, on a cold day in 1939, one of Hitler's men saw a young man -- homeless, by the look of him -- start a fire with a flick of his fingers. The nameless young man was immediately taken to the Hölle Schloß -- the Hell Castle.

In the span of four years, the "experts" on staff there had managed to break and brainwash the nameless young wizard and set him loose on the world.

For some reason, they named their scarred, brainwashed pet Grindelwald.

In all his hundred years of life, Albus Dumbledore had never seen a sorrier sight.

In fact, he'd left his job as an Auror and become a teacher specifically so he'd never have to encounter such a sight. But this new, unknown Dark wizard had Europe in an uproar, and so he'd been politely asked to (once again) save the day.

So here he was, skipping his Transfiguration class to chase some powerful young upstart halfway across Germany.

And he'd found him.

The wizard was surprisingly young, for one so feared by the wizarding world. He looked to be in his early twenties at most, although the scars he bore and the haunted, almost feral light in his eyes made him look older. He stood at the edge of a ravine, hunched over, watching Dumbledore with wary eyes.

"Grindelwald . . ." Dumbledore began, wand already in hand.

Before he could continue, the young wizard interrupted.

"Not my name," whispered the so-called Grindelwald, voice hoarse from disuse, his German slow and choppy.

"What?"

"Not my name."

The light in the young wizard's eyes took on an almost desperate quality. A nagging suspicion entered Dumbledore's mind.

"What is your name, then?"

Grindelwald paused, running one scarred hand through unkempt, rust-red hair. "Not remember. Need to know! Need to find it!"

"You need to stop."

Pale, sea-green eyes peered up at Dumbledore curiously. "Stop? Stop what?"

Does he really not know? "You have to stop the killing . . . and the burning."

Grindelwald blinked, as if Dumbledore's last statement hadn't fully registered. Dumbledore waited for an explosion, of power or temper, or another childlike question.

Grindelwald shook his head, bowing as if under a great weight. "I cannot."

The words were clear, so different from the childlike statements before that Dumbledore thought he'd heard wrong.

Then Grindelwald looked at him.

The feral light was still there, but struggling through it was a faint trace of sanity.

"Pardon me . . ."

"I CANNOT STOP! You understand nothing, wizard. I live only as long as I am useful to them, and then they will kill me."

Dumbledore sighed. "Then I will have to stop you." He raised his wand.

Before Dumbledore could even start an incantation, the forest around him began burning. Grindelwald, standing in the middle of the flames, remained unharmed.

A pyrokinetic? "Mortis sopor," whispered Dumbledore, flicking his wand in Grindelwald's direction.

The faint blue light hit the younger wizard squarely in the chest, knocking him into the ravine below.

Instantly, the fire went out. Dumbledore cautiously approached the edge, glancing down, wand at the ready.

Grindelwald was gone.

He should have landed in the shallow stream below, but there was no trace of the young wizard, who should have been under a deathlike sleep. Dumbledore turned back to the clearing, only to nearly fall off of the ridge himself.

A strong, too-long hand gripped Dumbledore's arm, preventing him from falling after Grindelwald. "Calm down, little one. He's gone. The node will release him, in time, but he will not be a threat again."

"How can you be sure of that?"

The pale-eyed man chuckled. "Albus, I am a Fool. My intuition is the only thing I can be sure of."

With that, the man vanished, leaving Dumbledore alone in the forest. He looked around with a sigh.

"Guess it's time to go back," he said, and Disapparated.

Inside the Node, a young wizard slept, unaware of how the raging elements of the universe played about him.

In his dream, one long, vivid dream, he began to regain what he'd lost . . .