Harry Potter And The Betrayal

Chapter 57: The Power Struggle



"Every time someone has recognized what the discrimination of muggle-borns is doing to our world and tried to get legislation enacted to relax or remove those restrictions, the pure bloods step in and block it."

Dumbledore shook his head over the sheer stupidity of it. "As for what is causing the magic levels to decline among our students instead of increasing, besides inbreeding, all we have are guesses. All accidental magic is wandless and while usually driven by emotion, it is quite powerful. It might be how our students are taught, the wands themselves, or maybe a combination of both. We are forcing their ability to do wandless magic to follow a path of specific words and gestures to work and for the power they use to flow through the wands instead of flowing the way it wanted to. This probably causes their wandless magical ability to weaken from lack of use if not completely atrophy."

"While all of this is indeed cause for concern," McGonagall put in, "that still doesn't explain why Mr. Potter is so important."

"There are several reasons." Dumbledore told her. "The first being that as the Destroyer of Voldemort, he has a lot of clout and though he doesn't like the idea he is in a position to make changes and even have abolished those laws that prevent the muggle-borns from being able to make any real contributions in our world so they will stay. Not to mention it would be nice to see him get married and settle down with a nice young witch"

"And possibly father some magically powerful children?"

"Yes there is that." Dumbledore agreed, as if the idea only just now occurred to him, but McGonagall wasn't fooled.

"Any other reasons?"

"Just one other, if at some point we can convince him to become a teacher at Hogwarts, he might be able to help our first years begin to harness their wandless magic, which might lead to them getting more powerful magically when they reach magical maturity. Otherwise, according to the best guesses made by those who have been studying this and also taking into account all the powerful wizarding families that were lost during the times of Grindelwald and Voldemort, we have maybe two hundred years before the only thing being born in the wizarding world will be squibs." Dumbledore's expression was grim as he said this.

"So once again we need to get Mr. Potter to become the wizarding world's salvation without telling him why." McGonagall concluded tartly.

"I'm afraid so," Dumbledore agreed. "If he knew that the existence of our entire race hinged on him remaining here, given his current level of anger, he would run far and fast and that would be the end of wizardkind."

...

A large sealed envelope suddenly dropping onto the table in front of him startled Harry. He looked up and saw a grey eagle owl just settling on to the table in front of him. He offered the owl some of his bacon as he carefully turned the envelope over.

The front of the envelope just had: Harry Potter written on it and the handwriting looked familiar and the envelope seemed to be stuffed full. However given that he hadn't been expecting anything, Harry did several detection spells on it looking for hexes, traps, or any other nasty surprises. He remembered very clearly the booby-trapped letters that Granger had received during their fourth year after Skeeter's article had come out about her and suspected the angry Gryffindors might have decided to try and do the same thing to him. Since the spells detected nothing dangerous, Harry slit the envelope open with a nearby knife and poured the contents on the table.

There were a number of cut out articles and a small note. A quick glance at the note reminded Harry of the request he'd made to Alex after Fudge's attempt to award him the Order of Merlin a few weeks ago. He's asked him to send him copies of any articles that came out about Minister's attempt to give him that award and its fallout, since he didn't want to have to track down each story/paper personally. He'd been curious to know if any of the reporters would report what happened accurately or if they would they put their own personal spin on it. If he were to judge by the glares of his fellow students over the past few days, then some of the reporters had put their own personal spin on it, or else they didn't like hearing the truth about themselves.

He expected Rita Skeeter to run her own personal smear campaign, especially after he outed her as an animagus. He was willing to bet that she was going to find it much harder to get into places she shouldn't be, given that anti-animagi wards had probably been put up all over the Ministry and anywhere else that someone wanted to keep her out of. He wondered if she would manage to stay out of prison.

The article on top appeared to be the whole front page of the Daily Prophet and the headline on it said: Boy-Who-Lived Accuses Minster And Ministry Of Corruption! And in a smaller headline: Fudge accused of Knowing about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's return for over a year before announcing it to the public! Actually, Harry reflected, as he skimmed the article, I accused the whole wizarding world of being corrupt, not just the idiot Fudge. They got the second part right though.

....

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