HP/LOTM: Visionary - 417

Chapter 417: The Wandering Black Dog – A Chance Meeting, A Vigilante Duo

"Ugh!" Ethan jerked upright and hit the ground hard.

He had just offended a certain dragon and been force-fed knowledge in the most literal sense. If not for the personal terminal embedded in him, helping to organise the flood of information, his brain would probably have been fried by now.

"So this is what you have been fighting all this time…" Ethan said, still shaken as he glanced down at the ground.

"More or less. You know the situation now. Thanks to that bloke, I am stuck in Avalon and cannot act directly on the surface," Aiden said, sitting cross-legged, leaning back on his hands and stretching lazily.

"And what about me? Am I really supposed to do what Grindelwald said and… ‘strive unceasingly to save my fellow witches and wizards’?" Ethan’s cheeks reddened. Even for a terminally dramatic teenager, saying it out loud was mortifying.

"Of course not. Once Grindelwald has seen your parents safely away, you just wander around the British Region and do whatever you want," Aiden said with a smile.

Ethan was the single most unpredictable wizard he had ever met. Forcing him into a rigid script would probably ruin everything. Better to let him improvise. Hell’s power had been a freebie anyway.

"Right, I am off. The rest is up to you," Aiden said, getting to his feet and giving Ethan a wave before vanishing from the Hazy Realm.

"Wait, you never told me how to get out of here!" Ethan shouted.

The empty Hazy Realm gave him no reply. He had been left behind.

......

A few days later, a large black dog padded through a shadowed alley in London.

His old friend Lupin was finally with his niece. Watching the down-and-out werewolf find someone he loved at last genuinely made Sirius happy, though he could not tell if that happiness was because he was an exceptional godfather or because he liked seeing Moony taken care of.

To protect the little family they had built, Sirius did not want Lupin dragged back into the war with Voldemort. So one night, while the house slept, he slipped away alone and set off to look for his godson.

He tried Grimmauld Place first, but the area was crawling with unfamiliar faces, all wrapped in the reek of Dark magic.

Thinking of the information Harry had passed along, Sirius remembered Snape’s betrayal and quietly concluded that Snape must have broken the secret, causing the Fidelius Charm on Number Twelve to fail.

"Bloody Snivellus," Sirius growled as a dog, a low whine in his throat, then slunk away.

Back on the streets of London, he felt something like relief stealing over him. Did that mean he really was some kind of degenerate? The thought circled his mind, absurd and unsettling.

He shook it off. Instead of hitching a ride on a car to the countryside as he had planned, he decided to head for King’s Cross, stake out the Hogwarts Express, and see if he could sneak into Hogwarts to contact other Order members.

Just as he lifted a paw to move on, he ran into something. A figure in a grey cloak stepped into his line of sight.

"Great. Aiden said once I wore this cloak, most people would… oh. It is a dog," the boy in front of him said, sounding pleasantly clueless. It was Ethan.

After Grindelwald’s people had escorted his parents away, Ethan had followed Aiden’s advice and come to London, intending to survey wizarding living conditions in Diagon Alley.

To understand what wizards were facing, he had to dissect things from both the Muggle and wizard sides. London was the obvious first stop.

With the help of Aiden’s peculiar tool, Ethan could lurk in the blind spots of people’s perception, quietly recording the misery of British wizards while planning to publish a book that would call more people to resist this warped regime.

Today, though, the tool had failed him, and a black dog had bowled straight into him.

"Wait. A black dog… you are Sirius Black. Aiden told me about you!" Ethan blurted.

Sirius transformed at once, grabbed Ethan, and yanked him into a side alley. Desperate for news of his comrades, he fired questions like curses.

"You are Aiden’s roommate. Can you reach them? What about the Order? How is everyone?…"

"Hey, slow down. I do not know how they are. I only slipped back after my parents were taken to safety," Ethan said, shaking his head.

“You are Muggle-born? It is this dangerous, and you came back? What were you thinking?” Sirius said.

Instinct pushed him to drag the boy off to hide at the old Black house, but then he remembered that Grimmauld Place had already fallen, and his shoulders slumped again.

“I don’t really know either. Someone suddenly gave me a purpose and a great power, and took care of everything I was afraid of. So I came back to see if I could save some people who are going through what I did,” Ethan said.

His eyes were utterly clear. They seemed to reflect the other man’s heart right back at him.

"Good lad," Sirius said, clapping him hard on the shoulder. Ethan’s words burned away his own confusion. So what if he had been separated from his comrades? The Order had been founded to protect wizards in the first place.

"Come on then. We do it together," he said.

He turned back into the big black dog. Man and dog set off side by side.

The next week was a waking nightmare for the Death Eaters. Two wizards with superb concealment stalked them across the country.

The pair’s hit-and-run attacks threw the Death Eaters’ hunts into chaos. Many who went out to seize Muggle-borns never made it back to the Ministry. The Death Eaters stationed in the British Region lived in a constant state of panic.

At the same time, far away in Egypt, Edmund received a message from an unknown sender. Every Converted wizard in the country was mobilised and massed at the Nile’s mouth in Cairo, presenting a clear posture of readiness to cross the Mediterranean and march into Europe.

Tom found herself running ragged. She had to appear personally in Spain, Italy, France, and beyond to calm the tempers of restless Dark wizards. Everywhere she turned, she could smell a coming storm.

She responded by ordering an even more ruthless hunt for Muggle-borns, declaring that all Muggle-borns were animals rather than humans and trying to ignite an even larger massacre.

Her actions only intensified the current of resistance in the Sea of Collective Subconscious and forced the British Death Eaters to launch fresh waves of raids. They found themselves blocked at both ends, trapped between orders from above and the vigilantes in the field.

Night fell. Man and dog sat in a little copse on the outskirts of London, eating meat and sharing a bottle.

"Ha, Ethan, you should have seen it. That bloke I hit today wet himself on the spot," Sirius said, boasting of his exploits.

"Please. That is nothing. I got nine Muggle-borns out today," Ethan shot back. "And I was the one covering the rear on the way out."

"Only because you have that thing," Sirius grumbled, turning away in envy.

"I just do not know when this is going to end," Ethan said with a sigh.

He had been working on his A Brief Analysis of Muggle and Wizard Social Conflicts for a long time now. All it lacked was a chance to see the light of day.

"Soon. Soon," Sirius said, lifting his head to look at the night sky.