Chapter 63

Harry stepped through the door of the owlery and looked around for a suitable delivery owl. In his hand was a w sealed envelope which contained a letter that was addressed to Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy, Draco's parents. The letter was a request for them to come to Hogwarts in order to discuss their son's recent behaviour and the actions that were being taken against him as a result.

Harry was not looking forward to that inevitable meeting.

Hedwig flew down from the rafters and landed on his shoulder.

"Hey, girl," he said in greeting, lifting a hand up to stroke her feathers.

Hedwig clicked her beak in an affectionate manner before looking at the letter in his hand expectantly.

"Sorry, Hedwig," Harry said "but this letter is for the Malfoy's. There's no way I'm sending you anywhere near their mansion. I've only just got you back."

Hedwig bobbed her head as though in acceptance of his reasoning and Harry made his way over to one of the school owls that were there for everyone to use. He called down a tawny owl and attached the letter to the band on its leg before reaching into his pocket and pulling out an owl treat for the bird.

"Don't hang about one you get to your destination," he told the owl "this letter contains bad news for the receiver and they are likely to throw a tantrum so you should get in and get out as quickly as you can, ok?"

The tawny owl hooted contentedly before spreading its splendid wings and taking flight.

Harry, with Hedwig still on his shoulder, made his way over to one of the tall windows and watched the bird disappear towards the sun that was setting in the distance.

He pulled out his wand and used a cleaning spell to get rid of the owl dropping that coated the window ledge before leaning against it.

Really this was the first time in a long time that he had been able to just stop and think.

For some reason his mind drifted back to that day in the Ministry when his whole world had begun to change.

It was the day that shattered an illusion, the day that he had realised Albus Dumbledore was not the man that the myth made him out to be.

When faced with the loss of power over the simple matter of telling the truth, Dumbledore had quickly backtracked, withdrawing his statements and apologising to any inconvenience caused. He had then gone on to blame Harry for the whole debacle, making it appear as though Dumbledore had been sucked into a wild story that Harry, in a moment of madness, had made up.

Worse, he had kept all this from Harry by placing him in isolation and cutting him off from all contact with the magical world.

Harry had been hurt by this betrayal but at the same time it had awoken something within him, something that had refused to take the fall, something that refused to be strung from the (metaphorical) hangman's noose so that others could play their little political games.

No one had been more surprised than Harry himself by the words that had left his mouth in that courtroom when he changed the focus of the blame from himself right back onto Dumbledore. Even more surprising had been the spiel he had delivered in the Minister's office straight after. He had spun a tale in which he was little more than a marionette whose strings were being mercilessly pulled by the grand puppet-master Dumbledore.

At the time he'd had no idea where all these notions were coming from but in the time since he had been rapidly coming to realise that much of it was true.

Dumbledore did have his own plans and schemes that he expected everyone to just go along with. There had been potions in Harry's system designed to keep him loyal and pliable to Dumbledore and his plans. He had been left mysteriously ignorant of his family's legacy, books about his family's history were missing, and money had been stolen from his vault at Gringotts Wizarding Bank.

Whatever there was that was wrong in Harry's life, the finger of blame always seemed, almost unerringly, to point to Albus Dumbledore.

But Harry was breaking free of that now, and if there was one thing that Albus Dumbledore did not like it was someone breaking free.

Harry could think of no better example of this than what had taken place in the Hospital Wing of Hogwarts shortly after the tragic events of the third task.

At the time Harry had been quite cross with the Minister for not accepting that Voldemort had returned to life, but now, with the potions out of his system, Harry was free to look at the situation from other angles. Yes, it had been a mistake on the Minister's part to bring that Dementor with him, but nothing that Dumbledore or any of the others had done that evening had helped their case in the slightest.

Dumbledore had heard Barty Crouch Jr. confess to his crimes before his death, but at no point had he offered to allow the Minister to see his memory of that confession. Dumbledore just insisted that he had heard what he had heard and clearly wished for the Minister to just take him at his word.

When that had not worked, Dumbledore had tried the intimidation approach. His aura had flared to give off a sense of power and then continued to talk in a way that, without evidence, would sound absolutely ludicrous.

Looking back, to his own immense annoyance, Harry had then joined in on the game, shouting at the Minister, practically screaming the names of the people he had seen in the graveyard following Voldemort's rebirth. Harry had, of course, been telling the truth, but the Minister had been correct when he had pointed out that every name he gave was of someone who had previously been acquitted of being a Death Eater, and that Harry could have gotten those names out of any book that related to the end of the first war with Voldemort.

And still no actual evidence had been provided, just Harry shouting and Dumbledore "insisting."

Then Dumbledore had further compounded the situation by making a series of demands that, to most witches and wizards, the Minister included, sounded utterly ridiculous. Things like sending envoys to the werewolf and giant colonies or removing the Dementors from Azkaban.

Snape and McGonagall had also gotten in on the act and in the end the Minister had left thinking them all insane. Looking back it seemed to Harry that the whole thing had been conducted with an extremely heavy-handed approach that was designed to intimidate the Minister into doing exactly what Dumbledore wanted.

Everything at Hogwarts was about what Dumbledore wanted.

To Harry it seemed that Hogwarts was nothing but a playground in which Dumbledore could test his theories and carry out one social experiment after another, often risking not only the education of the students but their very lives as well.

There was that whole debacle with the philosopher's stone in his first year. Take a rare and valuable object with life-giving properties that is coveted by one of the most feared Dark Wizards in history and place inside a school full of kids. Harry had to wonder what was going through Dumbledore's head when he thought of that little doozie. He doubted that student safety had even slipped into his mind, given that the first trap had been a three-headed dog that was blocked off from the student population by a verbal warning and a door that was so heavily enchanted that a spell from "The Standard Book of Spells: Grade 1" could open it with ease.

Then there was his second year. Based on the information available to him, Dumbledore would have had to have been a complete moron to not work out where the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets was. Moaning Myrtle had been killed right in front of said entrance, after all, and had haunted that place ever since. Either Dumbledore was a complete idiot who had never asked her ghost what had killed her, or he had known but simple decided to not do anything about it. Yes, it would have required a parselmouth to open the entrance to the chamber but Dumbledore still could have blocked it off. Hell, he could have blocked the whole bathroom off just to have done with it. But he hadn't. Nor, it seemed, had he bothered to work out that the creature in the chamber was a basilisk. That it belonged to Salazar Slytherin should have pointed to it being a snake and one conversation with myrtle should have confirmed said snake to have been a basilisk. But again, Dumbledore had failed to do this.

Then there was Harry's third year at the castle. Harry shook his head. There was so much about that year and the events that led up to it all that did not make the slightest bit of sense that Harry decided to not think about it and move on.

On to fourth year. Quite what Dumbledore was thinking when he decided to bring that stupid Tri-Wizard Tournament back was quite beyond Harry. The whole barbaric practice should have been left to fester away in the dark depths of time, only to be read out in some old history book or another, not resurrected in any way, shape or form, even if it was all under the pretence of increasing international magical co-operation

Harry shook his head ruefully. Yes, Dumbledore liked to play his own tricks and was so used to not being questioned about his actions that when it inevitably happened he barely knew how to cope, having instead to rely on intimidation rather than being able to debate.

Then again, he was surrounded by yes men all the time. Harry could think of no better example of this than after his name had been drawn from within the Goblet of Fire. While grateful that both Dumbledore and McGonagall had believed him when he said that he didn't put his name into the Goblet of Fire, when others refused to believe him, McGonagall's argument had been "Professor Dumbledore believes him, so that should be good enough for everybody."

Given that the "everybody" in question had been two other Hogwarts teachers, the true champion of Hogwarts, the headmasters of two other prominent schools and their champions and two leading Ministry officials who had largely orchestrated the revival of the tournament, Harry really had to wonder about McGonagall. The term "staunch ally" didn't really cover her loyalty to Dumbledore and her blindness to his faults.

Harry wondered if she too should be scanned for loyalty potions or spells.

.

.

.

Here I am publishing a daily chapter if you want the complete novel subscribe to my Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/Fernandodavid/shop