The young Slytherin witches and wizards had been on the verge of losing their minds.
Through their various group chats, they had pieced together that the voice that had bellowed at Dumbledore belonged to Grindelwald himself, and that a battle of earth-shaking proportions was unfolding right outside the castle walls.
The Gryffindor and Ravenclaw towers had windows facing the right direction, and with the elevation advantage, even if the details were too distant to make out clearly, they could at least take in the full sweep of the battlefield. Slytherin and Hufflepuff, however, were buried in entirely the wrong part of the castle. They could not see a thing. The sound of the explosions could not even reach them.
They had no choice but to rely on secondhand accounts trickling in through their chat channels, and this was the moment Slytherin's famously poor standing with the other houses came back to haunt them. They simply did not have many friends outside their own common room. In the end, it was Daphne getting Hermione on a video call that finally got them any kind of visual, however limited and shaky.
The moment Tom walked in, the questions descended on him all at once.
"Tom, did Grindelwald lose?"
"Were those fire meteors Fiendfyre? The books say Fiendfyre can't be controlled!"
"Who was the person that came charging in later?"
"Was it you who stopped the Fiendfyre? I saw you raise your wand!"
Tom raised both hands and cut through the noise before it could get any louder. "Everyone stop talking. Listen to me."
The common room went quiet. Every face turned toward him with wide, expectant eyes.
"I can't answer seventeen questions at once," Tom said, "so I'll cover the parts you actually care about. First, yes, that was Grindelwald. Second, he's already gone, and Professor Dumbledore had the upper hand throughout the fight. Third, I only stepped in to stop the Fiendfyre, and spent the rest of the time watching from the sidelines like everyone else. Fourth, the person who came later wishes to remain anonymous, and I am not going to tell you who it was."
He paused for a moment, then added, "And stop catastrophising. Right now, this castle is the safest place in Britain, and arguably the world. If Dumbledore cannot protect you here, then you might as well find a nice corner somewhere and wait for the end. Now go. All of you. You're blocking the corridor."
He waved the crowd apart with the confidence of someone who fully expected it to work, and it did. The crowd broke up, and Daphne and Astoria came forward from the back, both of their faces creased with worry.
The Greengrass sisters both felt Tom had taken far too great a risk tonight by standing anywhere near a fight between those two. What if something had gone wrong?
Any other time, both of them trusted his ability completely. But in the shadow of Grindelwald and Dumbledore, calm judgement had been harder to hold onto. It took Tom a fair while to talk them down. When it was finally over, he was mildly surprised to find that the more stubborn of the two had been Astoria, of all people. Daphne, for all her usual fire, had calmed under his attention rather easily.
And even then it was not finished. The group chat had effectively exploded overnight, and Tom retreated to his dormitory and worked through it call by call, video message by video message, until the clock had pushed past midnight and his three dormitory roommates, barely able to keep their eyes open, were finally allowed back into the room to sleep.
"Tom," Zabini announced from the doorway, "next time you can just hit us with a Stunning Spell and save everyone the trouble."
He was asleep before he finished the sentence.
Tom stared at him for a long moment.
That was rather thoughtful of him, actually. These roommates of his were getting wiser by the day.
He set aside the chat book and stepped into the learning space, calling Grindelwald in with him. It was time to break down the fight properly.
Two Kings of the Age and one immortal legend had all taken the field tonight. Dumbledore needed to be dissected thoroughly.
Grindelwald pressed his wand to his temple, and thin silver threads began to draw out like silk from a spool. Rowena Ravenclaw turned the pages in her book, and blue light settled over the floating threads, giving them a dim, luminous glow. Then the light expanded outward and filled the surrounding space, building itself into a full three-dimensional projection.
A single spell, and it functioned better than a Pensieve, enlarged and visible to everyone at once.
Tom looked up at Rowena immediately. "Teach me that."
"Of course." She smiled. "Come to the meditation room later. It's not complicated. You'll have it in no time."
"I want to learn it too," Ariana said, raising her hand from where she sat, determined to be included.
"You will," Rowena said serenely, patting her on the head. "In ten years or so. If you can still remember you asked."
Ariana stared at her.
Tom nearly laughed out loud. He finally understood why Helena and Rowena had historically not gotten along. If you were her daughter and anything less than extraordinary, a mother this relentlessly direct about it would have driven you to despair.
"Right, let's watch the duel first," Tom said, stepping in before anything further could unfold. The threads had already begun to move.
This time they were experiencing the fight from Grindelwald's perspective, and the difference was immediate. From inside the viewpoint rather than watching from the side, everything was sharper, more immediate, more raw.
For the first time, Tom felt what it was actually like to face Dumbledore as an opponent. You could not predict what he would cast. You could not even predict what spells you already knew would look like once they passed through his hands. He took the ordinary and made it into something unrecognisable.
Every time Dumbledore raised his wand, it was its own small psychological assault on whoever stood across from him. And that was only the technical dimension. In terms of pure, absolute magical power, Dumbledore was like an ocean, impossible to gauge, with no visible floor.
What the projection made clear was that Dumbledore and Grindelwald had arrived at the level of a King of the Age through entirely different roads.
Grindelwald was cutting, overwhelming, relentless. His preference was to bury his opponent under sheer offensive force. Dark Arts or ordinary magic, it did not matter much to him; he had little interest in elaborate variation or clever technique. What he preferred was the weight of the sky pressing down.
Dumbledore was something else entirely. His talent had developed evenly across every discipline, and he had ground each of them down to a razor's edge. He had no weak points. But the absence of weak points did not mean any one area was merely adequate. Each individual discipline was itself a strength. He did not have a worst subject; he simply had subjects he was extraordinary in, and subjects he was even more extraordinary in.
The biggest advantage, as it turned out, was Transfiguration.
In the span of a few short minutes, Tom counted more instances of magical transformation than he could easily track, and not the straightforward kind either. These were second-stage transformations: Dumbledore would cast a spell, let it take effect, and then transfigure the result mid-motion into something else entirely before the opponent could react.
Tom had never once thought to push his craft in that direction. Watching Grindelwald be forced out of attack and into defence repeatedly made it abundantly clear why it worked so well.
"Hmph." Grindelwald pinched his chin and shook his head with obvious dissatisfaction. "I pulled back there. I should not have defended. I should have cut straight through his centre."
Tom's eyebrow twitched.
Old man, is that you? Giving post-match tactical commentary?
Andros shook his head. "Grindelwald. You were afraid of him. You held back during your casting. You were not fully open."
"It wasn't fear." Grindelwald rejected the assessment firmly. "I lost to him once before. I know his power exceeds mine. I chose the more measured approach to compensate."
"You lost on a psychological level before the duel even began," Andros told him plainly. "Even when you position yourself as the challenger, you cannot go in already expecting to lose. The moment you do, you cannot draw out your own full strength."
Grindelwald considered this and gave a slow nod. "I will keep that in mind. Now that I have a proper read on Dumbledore's limits, the uncertainty won't weigh on me the same way next time."
It was a reasonable point. Many powerful people were not actually afraid of enemies stronger than themselves. What they feared was the unknown, because the unknown was beyond their control. Now that Grindelwald had felt the full weight of what Dumbledore could bring, that particular source of hesitation was gone.
"Next time?" Tom turned a look on him that was somewhere between dry and warning. "Old man, behave yourself. Some of us are trying to get through school in peace. Stop using Hogwarts as a venue. If you want to fight him, lure Dumbledore out somewhere else."
Grindelwald shrugged with an expression of elaborate innocence. "Your Headmaster treats Hogwarts like a shell to hide in. You want him to come out? Short of challenging something he genuinely cannot ignore, there is no other way. Is there any family left you'd like to have wiped out?"
Tom thought about it briefly and shook his head.
He was, by nature, someone who got along with people. He was simply too well-liked. There was nothing he could do about that.
The two of them stopped their side conversation, because the memory playback had passed the halfway point and reached the section where Grindelwald began using words as weapons against the two Dumbledores, pressing them into fully unleashing their power.
Frustratingly, the recorded memory could not fully capture the Elder Wand's true output. You could only infer it from how visibly Grindelwald was beginning to struggle.
"Dumbledore is a genuinely excellent wizard," Rowena said with open admiration. "He has mastered that wand, that wilful, restless thing, and brought it entirely under the direction of his will. Grindelwald, your fine control over magic is still one degree below his. That is where the gap lives."
What followed entered Rowena's territory entirely. She walked them through the specifics of Grindelwald's weaknesses with the systematic precision of someone who had spent a lifetime studying magical theory at its highest level. Tom listened without letting his concentration slip for a single moment. The others were the same.
Opportunities to hear a legendary witch break down an elite-level duel did not come along often. Especially where Grindelwald was concerned, Tom found himself carving each observation into memory as though marking it in stone.
A fight that had lasted only a few minutes took nearly three hours to fully analyse. Afterward, Grindelwald and Andros retreated to the meditation room to absorb everything they had discussed, and Tom followed Rowena out to the garden cottage.
Rowena had put together a rough hierarchy using Grindelwald as the baseline reference point.
Taking the Grindelwald of his prime, at the height of his years possessing the Elder Wand, as a value of one, the present-day Grindelwald was still approximately one, perhaps a fraction above at one point one. Dumbledore, at the peak of what he had shown tonight, was somewhere between one point two and one point three, which meant he held the decisive advantage, yet Grindelwald had still been able to leave the moment he chose to. There was simply no stopping someone at that level who had made up their mind to go.
At the top sat Andros. Rowena placed his baseline at one point four, and noted that he was a born fighter in the purest sense, the kind whose power climbed further the deeper he was drawn into a fight. At full expression during a genuine duel, he could reach one point six. Her own confrontation with him had been exactly that kind of situation. He had gone somewhere beyond himself entirely.
"I think," Tom said slowly, turning things over, "we also have to factor in the physical dimension. Dumbledore can't sustain high-intensity combat for very long anymore. If tonight's fight had been dragged out, Grindelwald could theoretically have stayed alive long enough to exhaust him into a real opening."
"That depends on what Dumbledore chooses to do about it," Rowena said, pouring tea for him. "If he can let go of the restraints he has imposed on himself and allow himself to touch certain areas of the Dark Arts, the physical limitation could be addressed almost immediately."
"That's true," Tom said, nodding.
Dumbledore was, in many ways, a deeply complicated contradiction of a man. His life had bent and broken and reformed itself so many times that even those closest to him could not claim to fully understand him, and Tom suspected he did not entirely understand himself either.
The fact that he had spoken so easily in his youth about the greater good, that he and Grindelwald had once been genuinely aligned in their thinking, was evidence enough that the young Albus Dumbledore had believed in wizarding supremacy and harboured the ambition to announce himself to the world.
Building relationships with Nicolas Flamel and other respected elder wizards had been part of that, the calculated networking of someone who became a celebrated rising star before he was old enough to have earned it through time alone.
But Hogwarts had become something else for Dumbledore. A cage, perhaps, that he had built and then willingly stepped inside. He kept himself there, restraining every impulse, refusing to touch the Dark Arts, refusing to reach for power, all because he did not trust himself with it. He was afraid that if he stopped holding himself back, his ambition would escape its leash, and the damage he might cause would eclipse anything a Dark Lord could dream of.
Would Grindelwald's return be what finally broke Dumbledore's vow to himself?
The thought caught Tom's interest in a way he had not expected. His eyes lit with a particular quality of curiosity, and the power of time stirred within him as he reached forward, rifling through fragments of what was yet to come.
A moment passed.
The light in his eyes dimmed. He shook his head with a small, reluctant sigh.
Still not far enough. He could not yet see that far ahead.