Chapter 14.4- Doom Days

In the end, apart from me no one other than the Mckinnon girl managed to get it correctly on the first try. On the second, a female Montague (shocked me that she actually didn’t look half bad) and Mctominay managed the spell. By the third time, half the class of twelve had gotten it. That was when it sunk in that these people were actually some of the best that Hogwarts had to offer. Defence Against the Dark Arts Instruction was patchy at best, and they had Lockhart for a teacher during their OWLs so only the most talented would have managed to secure the Exceeds Expectations that the NEWT level of the course required as a pre-requisite.

That brought another thing to mind. If poor education was deciding who made it to the NEWTs in each course and the standarised tests never got easier to account for poor tutelage then Dumbledore’s failure to address Voldemort’s curse on the position was inadvertently limiting the number of competent applicants for positions like Aurors and Hitwizards. Even worse, they were not only limiting applicants for specialized positions but making sure that the general public was poorly suited to taking matters into their own hands. Beautiful.

It was no wonder that someone like Voldemort had been able to run roughshod over wizarding Britain with ease. Few aurors and Hitwizards compared to when Grindelwald had risen, and a general public unused to fighting and unwilling to consider the possibility of making moves of their own to fight. I’d been reading old articles of the daily prophet in the library, under the ever watchful eye of Madam Pince, and the ever helpful gaze of Hermione- partly to use as an excuse for confronting Crouch here and now, and partly to understand just how Voldemort had brought the wizarding world to its knees the first time around. An additional benefit was that it kept Hermione busy and out of my business. How? I couldn’t bring myself to do the tedium of sorting through the multiple useless articles to get to the good stuff, but that was just the kind of stuff Hermione was good at. She’d even suggested doing something similar for Grindlewald once we were done with Britain’s Dark Lord.

Anyway, where was I in the first place? Yeah, Voldemort had done a good job in eliminating the resistance that he would have faced long before he ever even declared his existence to the public. Seven senior Aurors had died in the years leading up to his rise. Seven. Each death was suspicious in their own way. Poison, suspicious accidents, one even died in a duel in Knockturne of all places. Even worse was what had happened to the Veterans. The heroes of the war against Grindlewald. At this point, Dumbledore was literally the only British Wizard who had fought Grindlewald who was still alive. Heroes like Charlus Potter, James Potter’s Uncle and Declan Shafiq had been some of the most notable. Notable for the fact that it was at least obvious that there had been something suspicious about their deaths.