Malfoy nodded and skimmed through the copy of the Daily Prophet of two days ago. The front page held a brief article about a fight that had broken out at a wizarding pub in Cardiff. Apparently, a group of young pureblood wizards and witches, mostly fresh out of Hogwarts, had engaged a group of Muggleborn in a fight that had some semi-serious results-a few of the combatants ending up in the hospital. It reeked of people getting drunk and stupid, Malfoy thought to himself, and he voiced that thought.
"On the surface," Orion agreed, reclaiming his newspaper. "Yet this is not the first, nor will it be the last of this sort of occurrence. There is something brewing, and I do not like it. It does not bode well for us."
Malfoy knew that the elder wizard was taking the matter very seriously. Though he couldn't quite put his finger on what was causing the head of one of the most powerful family in the British wizarding world so much concern, he ventured a guess anyway. "You mentioned you don't like their excuses. Are they blaming Muggleborn again?"
Orion Black nodded gravely. "They are," he confirmed.
"That's not the only thing that's concerning you, though," Malfoy noted. "This is only a series of small disturbances. Nothing dramatic about it."
"Except that all of the youth who were apprehended said nearly the exact same thing in their defense."
So that was the sticking point. Malfoy picked up on it as soon as the words had left Black's mouth. "You think someone is organizing them? What would be the point?"
The elder wizard's mouth twisted in a wry smile. "Matters are escalating. It was fine as long as they feared the Muggleborn. That fear turned to anger, and someone has managed to turn that anger into hate."
"So… what do you think is happening? I can't see someone inciting a riot against Muggles and Muggleborn at this time, not so soon after what happened thirty years ago." Malfoy shuddered at the memories. Back then, the general wizarding populace had no concept of airplanes and bombs and missiles and guns, so when the sky had thundered with the roar of engines overhead, when the heavens had lit up with fire from duelling air forces, when it had begun raining explosive shells, they hadn't known what to do. And they had paid a bitter price for that ignorance.
"Youngsters forget… especially those things they have never experienced, themselves," Black said gravely. "There have been incidents not reported in the paper. Of violence against Muggles."
Malfoy knew that the Black family had its sources, and by now he knew to trust those sources. "The Ministry covered them up?"
Black nodded slowly. "There have been a small number of deaths linked to a group of wizards that have thus far remained anonymous. None have been caught."
"You're afraid of a war between Muggles and the wizarding world," Malfoy deducted, appalled at himself for not making the connection sooner. His counterpart's silence confirmed his suspicions. "What would be the point?"
"Is there ever a point in hatred?" Orion Black asked in return. "The youth who have not seen the horrors of war, and only known the discomfort of their own lives, they have always been quick to place the blame on someone else. Something is feeding on it."
"I see. And if they continue, if tensions between us and Muggleborn and Muggles escalate…"
"It could lead to the destruction of our world," Black finished for him.
And it truly could, Malfoy knew that the Black patriarch wasn't exaggerating. After the war, the wizarding world had begun investing a lot more time in catching up with what went on in the Muggle world, and they had come to a sobering conclusion: Muggle weapons were potentially far more powerful than they had believed could ever be made, so powerful that some of their weapons could not be guarded against with spells. When the Ministry had first been introduced to guns after the war by their liaison with the British government, the aurors had scoffed at the thought of something so small and light being a threat to them.
That had lasted only until they found out that no one could react fast enough to put up a defensive spell to protect themselves from a bullet flying at them at several thousand feet a second. And even if they could, the speed of the bullet was such that the energy behind it was much more than they had ever anticipated. It all boiled down to basic physics: the kinetic energy a shield had to absorb to protect a wizard scaled with the square of the velocity, something Muggle arms made great use of.
It became even worse then it came to the bombs that had laid waste to much of the wizarding world, without the Germans ever knowing about it. A single five-hundred pound bomb, it was calculated, could deliver a million times the energy a simple Protego shield had the ability to absorb. If they wanted to protect a circle just twenty yards in diameter, the required shield spell would need to be ninety-four million times more powerful than the shield spell taught at Hogwarts - something that was beyond the capability of any wizard, even Merlin himself.
And the worst thing? It didn't stop there. Muggles were always advancing this wondrous thing they called technology, that allowed them to devise bigger bombs that caused yet more destruction. Missiles, that could deliver those bombs from hundreds of miles away, at speeds that no wizard could react to. But the most frightening thing had been when it was revealed that Muggles had mastered the power of the atom, creating radiation that no shield spell known to the wizarding world could protect against.
Right now, Muggles held the ultimate weapons. And while he didn't particularly like them, Romulus Malfoy was a smart enough man to realize when the other party held the trump card - and he gave the Muggles his grudging respect for that.
"We are blind," Black said suddenly. "We can see the symptoms, but finding and understanding the source of this unpleasantness is beyond us. We need someone who can jump into the water and navigate the currents for us. We need someone to watch our youth and tell us what is wrong.
"I see," Malfoy hummed to himself as he thought it over. "Someone young… someone the children would respond to, talk to. Maybe even someone this… other force would try to approach, try to recruit."
"We would have to be absolutely sure of his loyalty, intelligence, and prowess," Black said, adding qualifications.
Malfoy arched an eyebrow. "You already seem to have someone in mind. Someone we could turn to."
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