Narcissa Malfoy apparated into Diagon Alley with a loud cracking sound. Only years and years of training in comportment kept her from frowning sadly at the sight. What had once been a busy bustling street filled with shoppers was now nearly deserted. The once thriving shops were closed with their shutters down. Nowhere was the disaster that Voldemort's rule was proving to be more apparent than in Diagon Alley.
As long as they stayed home, stuck inside their manors the purebloods could perhaps convince themselves that nothing had changed. That things were in fact much, much better now that the Dark Lord ruled Britain but all it took was one visit to Diagon Alley for the cold stark reality to smack them in the face with all the finesse of a heavy, wet dead fish.
The economy was...well there wasn't much of an economy any more. More and more businesses went bankrupt every day. They had clung on for dear life as long as they could; swallowing the assurances of the Ministry that things were going to get better any day, but there was only so long that a business could continue to stay open once a majority of its workers and customers disappear.
As she continued down the street towards Gringotts, Narcissa wished that things were different. If only…if only someone, anyone had stood up to the Dark Lord. If only someone had been able to oppose him. But no, no one had. Dumbledore, along with his cronies, was holed up at Hogwarts. The castle was no longer a school. No, it had reverted to the purpose for which it had been originally designed. It was once again a fortress.
Scrimgeour had proven to be as useless as Fudge and now he, and the few members of the original Ministry that had followed him, was in Hogwarts as well, begging for the scraps from Dumbledore's table.
Pathetic, the whole lot of them were absolutely pathetic.
Voldemort had tried of course. He had mustered his forces and attacked Hogwarts soon after he gained control of the Ministry. They had laid siege for months. Then there had been a few skirmishes. Both sides had lost people, although the attackers had of course lost a lot more as tends to happen to forces attacking a superbly fortified position.
A few Ravenclaws had done some projections. They had claimed that if the losses exceeded a certain number then not only would they no longer have the forces to hold Britain but in the worst case scenario the magical population of Great Britain would soon drop under sustainable numbers.
That had certainly thrown a large bucket of icy cold water on the fight. The calculations had even shocked Voldemort. Oh, he had ranted, raved, and thrown crucios around as they were going out of style but in the end, he could not gainsay the cold, hard, brutal facts. Attacking Hogwarts would have to wait.
They had been in a sort of cold war with the remnants of Dumbledore's forces ever since. Both sides were reluctant to engage the other. The best that Voldemort could manage was to ensure that Dumbledore stayed at Hogwarts.
The Death Eaters were not even allowed to relieve their frustrations on the muggles. The Death Eaters did not have the strength to oppose the ICW and the ICW - while the ICW did not care who was ruling Britain, they did care about the Statute of Secrecy. They had made it very clear that they would deal with any violations with swift and decisive action.
While the ICW would never bother if the occasional wizard took advantage of a muggle, a wizarding government doing it or failing to police their own citizens - That was another matter all together. After all, what the ICW did to the last wizarding Government that had openly taken large-scale action against the muggles was not something anyone wanted to see repeated. The wizards of the once great city of Tunguska could testify to that. If there had been anything left of them or the once proud city they lived in. Which there wasn't.
There wasn't even much point in stealing from muggles any longer. In the past, unscrupulous wizards had always been able to pick up a spare bit of change by stunning and looting an unsuspecting muggle. Now the goblins had stopped exchanging pounds for galleons. With the disappearance of the muggleborns not only had all trading with the muggles stopped but the goblins, who by ministry decree and treaty had been long forbidden from direct interaction with the muggle world, had also lost all their intermediaries. Who else would have willingly worked with muggles?
Muggleborns had also been the prime reason that the currency exchange even existed. They were the only ones who would ever need to convert galleons to pounds after all, to change the money they earned in the Magical world to a currency they could spend in the muggle world. Once it was clear that no one was converting from galleons to pounds any longer, the goblins had swiftly shut down their pound to galleon currency exchange counters.
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