Scrimgeour caught the dismissal in Dumbledore's tone and did not push his luck. Fudge was waiting for a report, and that gave him a convenient reason to leave.
The Aurors departed as briskly as they had arrived. Dumbledore led the remaining group back through the castle toward his office, and the walk was a quiet one. Every corridor junction and common room entrance had a professor standing guard at it, because without that precaution, no Head of House would have dared leave their students unattended.
"Are they gone?"
"Must be. Dumbledore needs to get back and calm everyone down. He won't give chase either, not when this could easily have been one of Grindelwald's traps."
Not long after the group disappeared inside, a pair of figures slipped out from the undergrowth halfway up the hillside and emerged blinking into the open air.
Gilderoy Lockhart and Bellatrix stared at each other without speaking.
"Are we still going in?" Lockhart asked, his voice scraped thin.
Whether to call them unlucky or remarkably hard to kill was genuinely difficult to decide.
For the past several months, the two of them had been lying low in the ancestral home of the Lestrange family, recovering their strength and scheming over how to murder Harry Potter and Tom Riddle. The lead the Ministry had supposedly received about their whereabouts had been a deliberate red herring planted by Bellatrix herself, designed to pull the Ministry's attention toward Hogwarts and its surrounding area and keep it pinned there, burning resources on a chase with nothing at the end of it.
A comfortable few months of decent meals and rest had done both of them visible good. Then they had stolen a newspaper from a wizarding household on their way here and read that the Dementors had been pulled from the school. Bellatrix had decided immediately that this was the moment Hogwarts would be at its most unguarded, the perfect window for a strike.
They had crept carefully through Hogsmeade, searching for a hidden passage that would get them inside the grounds, and then Grindelwald had happened. If the battlefield had shifted even slightly in their direction, they would have been caught directly in it.
Running was not an option. Moving at all meant risking detection. So they had been forced to crouch in the bushes and watch two of the most powerful dark wizards in living memory tear the landscape apart from close range, both of them nearly fainting from the ambient magical discharge, praying the entire time that a stray curse would not find them by accident.
"Still want to go in?" Bellatrix was unhinged, but she was not suicidal. Right now a single look from Dumbledore would be enough to make her drop her wand and bolt. And after everything that had just happened, there was no question the castle would be crawling with professors running patrols.
"Then what do we do?" Lockhart asked.
Seeing that Bellatrix was not in a hurry to get herself killed, Lockhart quietly let out a breath he had been holding for some time. He had never had any genuine faith in taking revenge through his own power. He had simply not been able to talk Bellatrix out of this plan, and so here he was.
"We go to the Dark Lord." Bellatrix drew a slow breath and got to her feet, but she had been crouching for so long that her legs gave out the moment she stood, and she nearly went face-first into the dirt, catching herself on a nearby sapling just in time. "Only the Dark Lord is the true Dark wizard of this age. Grindelwald is nothing but a failure, a man Dumbledore already beat once. The Dark Lord is in Albania. We go there. We help him recover his strength, and then we let him deal with Potter and Riddle himself."
"Let's go, then. Sooner the better. This place is dangerous." Lockhart was already edging away from the hillside.
Bellatrix looked at him with undisguised contempt. She had never been able to stand that cowardly streak in him. But she grabbed him by the shoulder all the same, and with a crack of displaced air, they were gone.
...
The Headmaster's office.
Dumbledore was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, the picture of exhaustion.
"Professor," Tom said, mildly bewildered, "I don't think I'm actually needed here."
He had not quite worked out why he had been brought along.
"Mr. Riddle." Dumbledore opened his eyes. "What is your assessment of what happened tonight?"
"In what sense?"
"Grindelwald. His power. His character."
"Do you really need to ask?" Aberforth cut in, the bitterness in his voice barely contained. "He's a bastard. A villain. A plague on the world. He's the kind of man who should never have existed."
In the learning space, Grindelwald was nodding along cheerfully.
He supposed he had gone a bit easy on Aberforth today. Next time, he would make sure the man was too busy suffering to manage a speech.
"He's strong," Tom said. "Strong enough that I couldn't beat him. Not yet."
Dumbledore smiled, and it reached his eyes. "The future belongs to you, Tom. Who knows, perhaps it really will be you who puts an end to Grindelwald's reign of terror and brings him to justice."
Tom kept his expression carefully neutral.
That was, objectively speaking, not going to happen. Grindelwald had been let out by Tom. The idea of then turning around and locking him back up again was a bit much.
"Thank you for stopping that Fiendfyre tonight," Dumbledore said, rallying himself. "Slytherin will receive one hundred points for it. I would also ask that when you return, you do your best to settle the other students. The castle is safe. There is nothing for anyone to be afraid of."
"Understood, Professor. I'll head back now."
Tom gave a small nod, left some herbs in Fawkes's dish, and made his way out of the Headmaster's office. The professor guarding the entrance to the Slytherin common room turned out to be Professor Sinistra from Astronomy, and she nearly jumped out of her robes when Tom appeared, having assumed he must have slipped out without permission.
In fact, he had never come back in the first place. Tom offered a brief explanation, and when Sinistra heard that Grindelwald had already left, the relief that passed over her face was profound.
None of these professors had ever faced anything like tonight. They could not have imagined, any of them, that Hogwarts with Dumbledore standing guard could ever be the place someone chose to attack. Even during Voldemort's worst years, nothing like this had occurred. Yet here they were.
It truly was, as people said, that the fiercer the fire, the more extraordinary the things it tempered.
The moment Tom stepped into the Slytherin common room, nearly every student present converged on him at once.