Amber Dreams

"Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise."
-Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College

In the Department of Mysteries, there is a room of prophecies, captured in glass like flies in amber. That simile is apt - some are harmless, and are petty sooths that repeat themselves every few decades, part of history's pattern. And others contain biting creatures that drive their subjects to disease or to death or to madness. And the last are the greatest prophecies, and these contain not flies or midges or waspish annoyances, but bees, that emerge and take their subjects like flowers, and take their dreams and their fears and ferment them in the knowledge of their destiny. But the honey that results can only be as sweet as the flowers the great prophecies visit, and that is why the great men keep them locked away in the deep chambers beneath London, where idle, childish eyes cannot be tempted into selfish destinies, but wait until they are men, and rounded in their expectations and their nature good and mighty.

This is a story about two men, and the prophecy that concerned them, and the result of their knowledge of who they might one day be. The story of their formative years is in the past now, but they are still amongst us, and their times are marked not by their actions but by the ones who came after them and were in their turn driven to greatness in their own particular ways.

This, then, is the prophecy.

G.M. to N.P.B.

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore or Geoffrey Sebastian Ollivander

On the last day of the last month, there will be a child born,

Unto a queen, and unto a king,

And one shall be chosen, and one shall be left.

The first will not be marked, but he will fight the marker,

And the second will be the lesser, but he will tend the choosers,

Uniting the marked and the one who marks,

And that is his role, and he shall count himself blessed,

For upon the great the heavier burdens fall.

One shall be chosen by the python,

And only one will fight the snake,

And only one will know the secrets,

And only one will lies forsake.

Each day of each year, we Unspeakables work in our subterranean chambers, and we decipher the prophecies and make notes on endless parchments, and time after time after endless, endless time we realise that what this man here does with his life, and what this woman dreams of, and what this little item in the very back of the newspaper tells us far exceed our petty predictions. We are more than guardians of the future, we are guardians of the past and we annotate the present. Time, like a maiden, walks through the long grass of the future, and we desperately run to keep up, trying to pre-empt her with our little divinations and our observations of where she has gone before.

Whilst time runs, we cannot rest, because we are insufferably driven to follow her wherever she wills. That is our nature, but it tires me, and so I will sit awhile, and write of what has gone before, and hope that time will not evade me whilst I sit and recollect my memories.

Once, there were two boys, and they were born on New Year's Eve. You have heard the prophecy that concerns them, and now you shall hear their story.