The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part Two

The Mansion on the Hill

"I haven't been fully honest with you, Regulus."

Regulus cursed under his breath. How was it that he was such a bloody idiot? He could just imagine Sirius if he knew how stupid Regulus had been, all the trollish things he would have to say on the subject.

"Always gotta throw yourself into rubbish before you think on it, isn't that right, little brother?"

"Couldn't just ask a few questions before getting involved, you little dolt!"

"You stupid, fucking sodcake! So busy wanting to play the bleedin' hero that you go and tangle yourself up real good with the enemy -- AGAIN."

"Didn't you just get our of serving a one dark lord and now you're right back in the palms of another one? You're such a twatwaffle."

Regulus shook his head miserably as he walked along a roadway, quiet and overgrown with unkept fields of waist-high reeds and marsh. The road cut through the middle of all that, leading out of the small town of Little Hangleton, jutting its way up a long and sloping hill, toward a large mansion that loomed up from the mostly natural surroundings. Little Hangleton seemed a place virtually untouched by time, as though it had grown up, suspected the industrial revolution was a sham, and said nah nevermind, and simply stayed old fashioned and run down because that bested the alternate choice of becoming a real city - like it's elder sister, Greater Hangleton, just nine miles down a freeway crammed with muggle cars.

The mansion on the hill was perhaps the saddest bit of it, too, because it sat there on the crest overlooking the city, a part of it yet also apart from it, with a couple broken windows winking down on things. The windows were jarring like a person smiling with broken teeth.

Regulus came to a little foot bridge that went over a small creek, and that creek was the line where the unkept grasses ended and pristinely manicured grounds began. Sure it was winter and therefore the full majesty of the lawns was obscured by still melting snow, but it just had the air of a well groomed place. Bushes were carefully pruned and the walk way shoveled neatly.

He stopped midway across the bridge and stared up at the mansion.

"How do you mean you haven't been fully honest with me?" Regulus had asked, and Cadmus had looked ashamed. "Cadmus???"

"I know a bit more about Tom Riddle than I've yet divulged."

Cadmus then had shared his story, and it kept ruminating in Regulus's mind .

"The stone was handed down through Peverell bloodlines - my line handed the stone through the Gaunt family... By the late 19th century, the Gaunts had broken apart - most of them moved to America to escape dark ancestry... They had ties to Ilvermorny's founding, as you found, and the line mostly died off there in Massachusetts. Consequently, the Resurrection Stone was thought to be somewhere in America, perhaps at Ilvermorny itself, or perhaps kept in a vault guarded by MACUSA... Grindelwald had gone in the 20s to New York, seeking out the Stone. There had been a prophecy, years before, given to Albus Dumbledore by the Blind Seer, that the Stone would be found in the home of an obscurial."

"The prophecy was given to Dumbledore? Is that what they dueled about?"

"Oh this was decades before the duel, boy," Cadmus said. "No, at the time when Dumbledore was given the prophecy, he and Grindelwald were friends, still in school at Hogwarts, even."

"What?" Regulus was incredulous. "Friends?"

Cadmus chuckled, "The things I could tell you, boy."

"But Dumbledore and Grindelwald as friends --" Regulus looked appalled at the thought.

Cadmus replied, "More than that, boy. Far more than that."