Son of Magic

Chapter 10

28th November, 1941

Evil Dark Lord Lair,

Somewhere Undetectable,

Germany

Distracted blue eyes were peering out of a third-floor window located in the comfortably decorated master bedroom of a quaint-looking house, their unfocused gaze watching without truly seeing the storm raging outside the warm, red-bricked home.

The house itself looked and felt distinctly wizarding, what with the moving portraits lining the walls, the self-steering cauldron on top of the kitchen stove, and the unusual use of candles instead of the revolutionary light bulbs. Yes, it was a wizarding home, undoubtedly, but it also reeked of mundanity. It was definitely not a home one would suspect of housing a dangerous Dark Lord.

But housing a Dark Lord it was. Specifically, the Dark Lord Gellert Grindelwald.

Obviously, this normal looking house wasn't his base of operations. He had more lavish manors to utilise for those specific purposes.

This unnervingly cosy and positively ordinary house was simply Gridelwald's humble, childhood abode. No person alive knew of its existence, not even his most trusted of followers. No, this one place he'd kept all to himself, rightfully unwilling to share the only location where he was able to enjoy any semblance of peace and quiet. It was the one place he went to when he needed to think without any interruptions, the place he retreated to when the world around him ceased making sense.

And at that moment the world had most assuredly ceased making sense.

Lord Grindelwald wasn't the sort of individual that was easily stunned; neither was it typical for him to be rendered to a confused state of mind that verged on bewilderment, nor was he the sort to be easily intrigued, for that matter. But astonishingly enough, Grindelwald was left surprisingly stunned, thoroughly confused, and undeniably intrigued by one Hadrian James Peverell.

His name and the news of the boy's existence had been enough to attract his undivided attention, irksomely distracting him from all his pressing plans that he'd spent many months meticulously constructing into perfection.

But in light of the events he'd witnessed the previous day, his name hardly bore any significance to Grindlewald anymore. The creature the name belonged to, on the other hand, was doubtlessly the most exquisite thing he'd ever had the pleasure of laying his eyes on.

There was no one word to describe how he felt after the events that had taken place at Hogsmeade. In the span of no more than an hour, the Peverell boy had managed to invoke in him a multitude of forgotten emotions, and not all of them were necessarily the pleasant sort.

He'd single-handedly upended his entire world with his sheer, inexplicable brilliance.

The attack hadn't gone as he'd expected, to say the least.

When he'd first received news of the Hogwarts transfer student, witnessed to be wearing the Peverell Lordship ring, he'd felt the ground being ripped from beneath his feet.

It had been a peculiar sensation, feeling himself drop into a never-ending fall, and yet at the same time being consciously aware of the fact that his body stood rigidly unmoving in front of one of his Generals.

The next few moments, while trying to regain some of his composure, he'd gone through several different emotions so quickly that he'd felt himself getting ill. He'd felt irritation and incredulity, which then swiftly escalated to fury for a scant few seconds before turning into explosive excitement, then quickly back to incredulity, which then contorted into more rage intermingled with hope, want, outrage, shame, scepticism, suspicion, which then all settled into a prolonged, dumbfound sort of shock.