Protection: The Sword and the Shield

The Darkness Tries

[December 31, 1993]

...Flint Manor, Upper Flagley

Ulysses Flint sat in front of his fireplace with a glass of muggle scotch in his hands. He was combating many emotions within himself but the most prevalent was anger and humiliation. The only thing keeping him in check was a thankfulness that he still had the ability to be angry and humiliated. He knew why that was but it did not make him feel any better. His thankfulness just made him feel shame.

Nothing had worked out as it should. In the summer after the upheaval in the Wizengamot and the election of Amelia Bones, He, Alvin Nott and Abraham Rosier had created a triumvirate. The newly elevated Lord Flint had felt so important that the other two Lords had included him. One of them was the head of a Prima Potentia family and Flint had entertained thoughts of becoming a vassal house of the Notts.

He knew that It was not popular to do in the darker families, but the light side families were not only re-linking themselves but gaining power by doing it and Ulysses definitely saw the advantages of tying himself to one of the four most politically powerful Houses in Britain. He thought the triumvirate was to be a test. The stated goal was to combat the Potters, but Flint knew that if they succeeded his House would be rewarded.

It had failed completely and spectacularly at the very onset. The Potter group had found out and their retaliation had been swift. It amazed and terrified him that the Potter group had destroyed them so brutally and so efficiently. And he knew he had only avoided a similarly brutal fate because his own "first strike" was not planned to happen till the upcoming semester of the school year. He had already cancelled the planned attack on the Amazons taking seriously the "warning' attack on his own son. The boy would live but both he and his father would not soon forget the fall.

He did not know how the Potters had decided on their "punishments" but the death of Abraham Rosier and the usurpation of the House of Nott was two reactions none of the three men of the triumvirate had even contemplated. He guessed that the fact that the Notts were a Prima Potentia family may have saved Alvin's life where Lord Rosier was deemed to be expendable. He wasn't sure witch fate was worse.

He took a shaky breath, they had been absolutely sure that the Potters did not even know of their existence, but that had been a mistake. He still did not know how they found out and that scared him even more. He kept telling himself that Nott or Rosier let something slip, but Potter and his advisors and friends had been regularly using magics that were thought lost and he couldn't help wondering if they had rediscovered scrying or some other form of advanced divination magic.

The Flint family head took another large swallow of his drink and let the heat calm his frazzled nerves. The hows and whys were irrelevant, what mattered was that the House of Potter had completely destroyed the Nott and Rosier families changing the nature of the two Houses, probably forever. And they had done it in a way that would make Salazar Slytherin, himself, tip a wand to them.

Flint did not want that to happen to his family and was struggling with that against the duty he thought he had to his world to save it from the muggle influence that infected Potter and his cohorts. "I can't let this stand" he thought, desperately trying to project a confidence in his mind that really did not exist. "We just have to be more careful. Take more time to plot and to plan," he continued in his restless mind. He took another long drink from his glass. He was never meant to be a leader, but they were quickly running out of them, so he would have to step up.

He wrote a letter, inviting someone he knew to be like minded. He would begin to recruit, one person at a time and not allow them to join until he was absolutely sure of them and their ability to keep their mouth shut. The people in their community who were bothered by the rapid changes happening were well known. They existed on both sides of the light/dark divide and none of them had ever openly served the Dark Lord, though many agreed with his aims, if not his methods.