XV

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March 15th, 1957


Albus--


So you've got yourself a baby Dark Lord on the fair Isles of Alba? Then it would seem you should beware the Ides of March.

I wonder--will you go after Voldemort now, as a vigilante, in the good ten years or so before the officials will have any idea what's going on, or will you play it safe, bide your time, and watch the first deaths? Either way I'm sure that inflamed conscience of yours will suffer. Give it a sherbet lemon and spare us.

The boy has a lot of power and little imagination. You and I, at least, never lacked in the latter department. Part of why we were magnificent.

The more I read these Muggle books of yours, the more I am bewildered. All this time they spend on their cultural conceits, their literature and arts, their social niceties, their limited, supposedly scientific ways of understanding the world without magic. I suppose it is what people do when they do not have magic? Yet without magic, what is the point of it? A wizard with a violin can alter reality itself, but a Muggle with the same is limited to simply affecting the emotions of his fellow-kind. And two Muggles arguing over commas change nothing, but two wizards revising a spell structure can change the world.

Is this your lesson, Albus, when you sent me these books? To teach me to pity them in their small worlds? How ineffective they are?

My heart was untangled with--It--in my hand. Without It now, without the surety of magic--

How?

How does one live?

The landscape out my window has changed in twelve years, though how much I cannot say. My thoughts slip and slide away from me. One would think they would have nowhere to go, with shield charms thick as goblin steel through my walls. You always used to say you'd get a Pensieve one day--

My Nurmengard will not break me, Albus, and neither shall you. Go, deal with your whippersnapper of a Dark Lord. I'm just a rotting--am I really an old man now? I suppose I am. Well, in my day we had to go up hill both ways in the snow to conquer countries.


Crochetily yours,


Gellert

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