The letter arrived just after dusk.
Alden noticed it immediately—not because of urgency, but because it existed at all.
Crix had set it down beside the hearth, a single envelope lying alone on the polished stone where stacks should have been. No crest marked the wax. No return address. The parchment itself was slightly creased, as though it had been handled too many times before finally being sent.
Alden stopped where he stood.
For a moment, he did not move.
Crix hovered nearby, hands folded, eyes fixed on the envelope as though it might vanish again if left unattended. "This one… came through the outer wards, Head Master," the elf said softly. "Cleanly. No interference."
Alden crossed the room and picked it up.
It was lighter than he expected.
Theo's handwriting was unmistakable the moment he broke the seal—tight, careful, the letters pressed just hard enough to suggest restraint rather than confidence. Alden read the first line, and the room seemed to narrow around him.
I don't know if you're alive.
The words sat there, stark and unsoftened, as though Theo had run out of patience for pleasantries. Alden read them again, slower this time.
I don't know if you're alive, and I don't know how much longer I can keep pretending that not knowing is acceptable.
Alden lowered himself into the nearest chair without realizing he had done so.
Theo did not apologize for the bluntness. He did not try to cushion it. Instead, the letter pressed forward, urgent and increasingly unguarded.
Theo wrote of silence—how no one had seen Alden since the night he left Hogwarts. No confirmations. No denials. No official statements beyond the suspension meant nothing without context. Letters sent and never returned. Owls that came back empty, or not at all.
Rumors, Theo explained, had filled the vacuum left behind.
Azkaban, whispered by older students who spoke as though the word itself were a verdict.
Exile—foreign, permanent, unnamed.
Detention in the dungeons.
Death.
Theo admitted, in one short, shaky line, that for a while he had believed all of them in turn.
Hogwarts, he wrote, had not recovered from the duel. The castle felt watched now, measured. Rules layered over rules, inspections bleeding into lessons, authority replacing competence. Umbridge's presence had become constant, ambient—no longer shocking, just inescapable.
Slytherin had fractured.
Without Alden, there was no center to absorb pressure. Ambition had turned inward. Students circled each other cautiously, alliances forming and collapsing within days. Power plays replaced unity. Draco—Theo hesitated here, the handwriting tightening—had been drawn into something he could not control, and everyone pretended not to see it.
Daphne had withdrawn entirely.
"She doesn't speak about you," Theo wrote. "Which I think is worse."
The castle itself felt wrong, Theo said. Not broken—rotting. Slowly. Methodically. As though something essential had been removed and replaced with procedure.
"I thought once you were gone," Theo admitted, "things would calm down. I was wrong. They didn't. They got worse."
The letter grew less structured after that. Lines slanted. Margins narrowed. Theo wrote about waiting—about counting days, then weeks, then losing track altogether. About wondering whether Alden had chosen silence, or whether silence had been chosen for him.
"I don't know which is worse," Theo wrote. "That you might not want to hear from us, or that you never had the choice."
Alden closed his eyes briefly.
Theo ended where he had begun—with uncertainty.
"If this reaches you," the letter read, "then something has finally broken through whatever's been holding everything else back."
There was no signature flourish. No attempt at reassurance. Just a final, quiet plea, written smaller than the rest.
Please write back. Even if it's only to tell me you're alive.
Alden lowered the letter slowly, his grip tightening at the edges of the parchment.
Across the room, Crix watched him closely.
"This is the first, sir," the elf said again, gently. "None has come before it. I would have known."
Alden nodded once.
"They didn't want me contacted," he said aloud, more to himself than to Crix.
The house-elf's ears twitched. "Sir?"
Alden glanced at him, expression composed, certain. "Someone didn't want letters getting through. Not to me. Not from Hogwarts."
Crix's brow furrowed. "Who would wish such a thing?"
Alden did not hesitate.
"Umbridge," he said simply.
The name sat between them, unadorned.
Crix nodded at once, as though the answer had been obvious. "Yes," he said. "You are probably right, young master."
Alden looked back down at Theo's handwriting, at the careful way he had tried to make sense of a world that no longer behaved as promised.
Theo hadn't started with ideals.
He had started with rot.
And somewhere in the months of watching Hogwarts decay—watching truth punished and authority rewarded—Theo had reached a conclusion Alden recognized immediately.
Not rebellion.
Necessity.
Alden gathered the pages together and held them there for a moment, thoughtful.
The system had proven itself incapable of fairness without him present.
And that, Alden knew now, was not a coincidence.
It was designed.
Another page slipped free as Alden folded the letter back into itself.
It drifted down more slowly than the others, thinner still, the parchment creased at the edges as though it had been unfolded and refolded too many times to count. Theo's handwriting covered it entirely—no margins left untouched, lines slightly uneven, the pressure inconsistent.
This one had been rewritten.
Alden lifted it carefully.
Theo did not begin with a greeting.
He began with a confession.
He wrote that he hadn't meant to start thinking this way. That it had come on gradually, without intent, born not of ambition but of repetition. Watching the same outcomes play out again and again until denial became dishonest.
Theo wrote about Alden first.
About the duel.
About how Alden had told the truth, had stood where the Ministry wanted obedience, and had been punished for it. Not corrected. Not questioned. Removed. Theo admitted that watching it happen had changed something fundamental in him.
"They didn't try to understand you," Theo wrote. "They tried to contain you."
From there, Theo turned inward.
He wrote about Slytherin—about growing up in a house that preached power as inheritance, authority as entitlement. About realizing, too late, that bloodlines were a shortcut people hid behind when they did not wish to be measured. Those titles replaced competence. That fear rewarded mediocrity because mediocrity was predictable.
He described the vacuum Alden's absence had created.
How quickly students had scrambled to fill it. How alliances formed around proximity to authority rather than merit. How ambition without structure became cruelty. Theo wrote that he had expected unity.
"There was none," he admitted. "Only positioning."
Draco appeared again—not condemned, not excused. Theo wrote of watching Draco trade judgment for approval, convincing himself that damage could be limited from inside a system designed to consume anyone who entered it.
Daphne, too. Theo's handwriting tightened here.
"They decided she was easier to blame than to listen to," he wrote. "So she stopped offering them the chance."
Theo returned, finally, to Hogwarts itself.
To Umbridge.
The way authority now flows downward without resistance. How teachers paused mid-sentence. How rules multiplied without purpose. How intelligence was treated as disruption, and excellence as a threat unless it came wrapped in tradition.
"I used to think the system was broken," Theo wrote. "Now I think it's working exactly as intended."
Only then did Theo write the sentence.
Magic judged by merit, not blood.
It stood alone in the center of the page, underlined once—not for emphasis, but for clarity.
Theo explained himself carefully.
He did not argue that bloodlines were meaningless—only that they were insufficient. That inherited potential meant nothing without discipline, innovation, and responsibility. That power should be earned, reviewed, and justified by contribution rather than ancestry.
He wrote that intelligence should guide authority—not charisma, not fear, not history.
And most importantly, Theo wrote that he still believed reform was possible.
From within.
He believed structures could be rebuilt. That fairness could be engineered. Those systems could reward excellence without needing to destroy what came before.
Theo was not angry.
The tone of the letter made that clear.
He was precise. Measured. Early.
He ended quietly, the handwriting smaller now, steadier.
"I don't know if you'll agree," Theo wrote. "I don't even know if you'll read this."
Then:
"I just needed you to know I still believe in you."
And finally:
"And that I don't think you were wrong."
Alden lowered the page slowly.
The library was silent around him, dawn light now fully present at the windows, pale and cold and honest.
Theo's words did not contradict anything Alden had learned.
They aligned.
Theo had arrived at his conclusion by watching injustice repeat itself.
Alden had arrived at his by understanding why it was inevitable.
The sentence echoed in Alden's mind again, unchanged.
Magic judged by merit, not blood.
He exhaled.
Theo believed the system could be reformed.
Alden believed something else entirely.
Then we will make it happen, Alden thought.
The same words.
A different meaning.
And for the first time, Alden understood that ideology, once born, did not need permission to grow.
Alden read the sentence again.
Magic judged by merit, not blood.
He didn't move at first. Didn't react. Just let the words settle where they wanted to settle, testing them the way he tested spells—looking for distortion, imbalance, weakness.
They held.
Slowly, deliberately, Alden pushed his chair back and stood.
The library came alive around him, not with noise, but with relevance. His gaze swept the room—at the journals stacked by date and hand, at Mathius's copied passages pinned beside his parents' annotations, at his own notebook lying open where he had left it hours earlier.
He crossed the room and pulled a journal free at random.
Not random at all.
Mathius first.
He flipped pages quickly now, eyes scanning for phrases he had already memorized.
Merit is clarity made visible.
Blood predicts capacity, not legitimacy.
Mathical systems collapse when authority is inherited rather than demonstrated.
Alden exhaled sharply and set it aside, reaching instead for his father's journal, thumbing through to the section he had marked the night before.
There it was.
Power stabilizes when measured by outcome rather than origin.
Fear enforces hierarchy. Hierarchy enforces stagnation.
His hand tightened on the page.
He pulled his own notebook closer, flipping through dense pages of rewritten theory, cross-referenced experiments, conclusions drawn and redrawn until they held under scrutiny.
Theo's sentence did not stand alone.
It sat perfectly inside a structure Alden had already built.
Theo had arrived there by watching injustice unfold—by seeing Alden punished not for wrongdoing, but for being correct too quickly, too publicly, too decisively.
Alden had arrived there by understanding why that punishment had been inevitable.
The system could not tolerate velocity.
Could not tolerate clarity.
Could not tolerate power that did not ask permission.
Alden returned to Theo's letter, rereading the paragraph around the sentence now, seeing what he had missed before.
Theo believed reform was possible.
Those structures could be corrected.
That intelligence could guide authority without dismantling it.
Alden closed his eyes.
Theo was not naïve.
He was simply early.
The sentence echoed again in Alden's mind, unchanged.
Magic judged by merit, not blood.
And the response formed immediately, unbidden, precise.
Then we will make it happen.
The same words.
A different meaning.
Theo meant process.
Alden meant inevitability.
He did not reach for parchment.
Did not dip his quill.
Not because he didn't care—because he did. Because Theo was right. Because Theo deserved honesty.
And because Alden understood something now that made delay not only acceptable, but necessary.
Words, once sent, could not be recalled.
Ideas, once shared, could not be contained.
Alden gathered the journals back into careful order, stacking Mathius beside his parents beside his own notes, aligning them not by chronology, but by logic.
The structure was complete.
He folded Theo's letter and placed it inside his coat, close to his chest, not as something unanswered, but as something acknowledged.
He would write back.
Just not yet.
Because Alden Dreyse no longer needed to ask whether the world could change.
He was beginning to understand how it would be forced to.
It was long past midnight when Alden finally reached for it.
The journal was thinner than the others. Older. The leather cover was worn smooth in places where fingers had lingered too long, as though the act of holding it had once required courage.
He knew what it was before he opened it.
That knowledge had kept it closed.
Alden sat at the long table in the library, the rest of the manor asleep around him. The fire had burned low, leaving only a dull, breathing glow. Snow pressed softly against the windows, pale and soundless, turning the night into something suspended—waiting.
He opened the journal.
There was no title. No sigils. No theoretical framing.
Just handwriting. Familiar. Careful.
If you are reading this, Alden, then we are already gone.
He inhaled sharply, the breath catching before he could stop it.
The words did not rush him. They did not plead. They simply existed, heavy and certain.
We do not know when you will find this, or how much you will already understand. But if you have read this far, then you have learned the truth—about us, about what we did, about what we became.
Alden's fingers tightened at the edge of the page.
They did not pretend ignorance.
We assume you have read Mathius. We assume you have seen the philosophy that shaped us before it consumed us.
The next lines were slower. More deliberate. Written by hands that knew there would be no chance to clarify.
We crossed lines that should never be crossed. We used people as variables. We justified cruelty with curiosity. At some point, the question stopped being "Should we?" and became "What happens if we don't?"
The fire shifted. A log collapsed inward, sending a brief scatter of sparks up the chimney.
Alden did not look away.
That is how it begins, Alden. Not with evil. With urgency.
The quill strokes deepened here, pressing harder into the page.
We became what we feared because we believed the outcome mattered more than the cost.
There was no attempt to soften it.
No reframing.
Just truth.
If you despise us for that, you are right to.
Alden swallowed. His vision blurred—not with tears yet, but with the pressure of holding them back.
The page turned beneath his fingers, almost against his will.
This work was never meant for you.
His chest tightened.
You were never meant to inherit it. The journals, the theories, the conclusions—none of it was for you. It was something we told ourselves we were doing for the future, but the truth is simpler and uglier: we did it because we were afraid to stop.
The writing wavered slightly here. Just enough to be noticed.
You were always meant to be more important than the answers.
Alden's breath stuttered.
If you choose to destroy everything we left behind, you should. If you walk away from it and never look back, you should. If you hate us—truly hate us—we accept that.
The words that followed were smaller. Quieter.
But you must never believe that you were part of this.
Alden lowered his head, staring at the grain of the table beneath the journal.
You were not our legacy.
The page trembled as he turned it.
You were our son.
Silence pressed in from every side. The manor creaked softly, as though adjusting itself around the weight of the moment.
The final paragraph was written in a different hand. The same words, but shaped by another person's grief.
No matter what you become, Alden—good, terrible, feared, or forgotten—you were always more important than the world we tried to fix.
His throat closed.
We are proud of you. Not for what you might do. But for who you are.
The ink was darker here, as if rewritten more than once.
We will not ask you to forgive us. We will not ask you to continue. We will not ask you to understand.
The last line was simple. Devastating in its restraint.
We love you. Always.
Alden closed the journal.
For a long time, he did not move.
The fire burned lower. Snow continued to fall. Somewhere deep in the manor, wood settled with a quiet, sympathetic sound.
When his hands finally rose to his face, the tears came without ceremony—silent, steady, unashamed.
This was not absolution.
This was not permission.
It was worse.
It was a responsibility, stripped of justification.
Alden remained there until the fire went out completely, the journal resting beneath his hands like something fragile and finished.
When he finally stood, he did not take the journal with him.
Some things, once read, no longer need to be carried.
But as he turned away from the table, one truth stayed with him—unmovable, irrevocable:
Whatever he became from this point forward would be his.
And they would live with it.
So would he.
It arrived on the morning of March twenty-fifth.
Alden noticed the owl before he noticed the letter.
That, in itself, should have warned him.
He had grown used to the quiet by then—the absence of wingbeats, the way the manor no longer reacted to the world beyond its wards. For months, nothing had crossed that threshold carrying his name. No parchment. No ink. No proof that Hogwarts, or anyone in it, still remembered he existed.
The owl circled once, uncertain, then landed on the stone balustrade outside the library window. It was not one of his family's birds. Not Crix's either. Its feathers were clean, Ministry-regulated brown, its posture stiff with training.
Official.
Alden rose slowly from his desk.
He had been awake all night again. There were ink smudges on his fingers, a thin ache behind his eyes from sustained focus. The fire had gone out hours ago, replaced by the pale, almost apologetic light of early spring pushing through frost-rimmed glass.
He opened the window and took the letter.
The seal broke cleanly.
HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRYHeadmaster's Office
The parchment was thick. Neutral. Perfectly measured.
Dear Mr. Dreyse,
This letter is to inform you that your suspension from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has been formally concluded.
Alden read more carefully now.
Following review, you are permitted to return to Hogwarts grounds on April 1st to resume your studies. Your presence is expectedfory the evening meal.
No apology.
No explanation.
Just procedure.
We trust that this period has provided sufficient opportunity for reflection.
He let out a slow breath he hadn't realized he was holding.
For a moment, the library seemed to tilt—not violently, not dramatically—but just enough to suggest that something had shifted.
April 1st.
His eyes traced the date again, as if it might change.
He sat down.
For months, his days had been constructed deliberately, almost ritualistically. Wake before dawn. Occlumency first—hours spent behind mental walls he had built, dismantled, and rebuilt stronger. He had learned to quiet thought not by suppression, but by organization. Memory folded into memory. Emotion acknowledged, then set aside.
The results had been… effective.
He could enter his own mind now without turbulence. Without echoes.
He believed—honestly believed—that he had mastered restraint.
After that, magic.
Charms stripped down to intent. Transfiguration practiced without incantation, then with it again, just to confirm precision. Defensive work is done alone, layered, and recursive. No theatrics. No excess. Everything measured.
He had not cast a curse in weeks.
He had not raised his voice in months.
Potions simmered in the background of his days—complex, subtle brews meant for clarity, focus, resistance. He read herbology texts not as coursework, but as system—cause and effect, growth under pressure.
He had finished the fifth-year curriculum before Christmas.
By February, he was refining it.
By March, he was correcting it.
And now—
A letter.
A Hogwarts letter.
Alden stared at the parchment again, and something in his chest loosened.
Dumbledore remembered me.
The thought came quietly. Not triumphantly. Almost shy.
The system corrected itself.
He could go back.
He could show them.
Show them that he had learned what this was meant to teach him. That he was not what they feared. That control was possible without cruelty. That power did not have to fracture into violence.
He folded the letter carefully and slid it into the inside pocket of his coat, where Theo's letter had once lived, and where the final journal had rested for a time before he was ready to set it down.
Crix appeared in the doorway, expression unreadable as ever.
"Mail, young master?"
Alden nodded.
"Yes," he said. Then, after a pause, added, quieter, "I'm going back."
Crix inclined his head.
"I see."
Alden looked out the window again. The snow was receding now, leaving the ground raw and damp, the world between seasons.
April 1st.
He allowed himself something he had not permitted in months.
Hope.
That was what made it cruel.
Not the letter.
Not the date.
But the fact that, in that moment, Alden Dreyse believed—completely, sincerely—that the world had remembered how to be fair.