Severus Snape

To those who took the Dark Lord's mark long ago; to those who have recently taken the Dark Lord's mark, to those who have been told they are in contention for the Dark Lord's mark; to Sarah Yaxley, Jason Montague, Lana Sandoval-Pennifold, Ned Pennifold, Ptolemy Baddock, Hydra Lestrange, Seamus Finnigan, Padma Patil; to those who have dreamed of being elevated in the Dark Lord's estimation or wished for the honour of receiving the Dark Lord's mark: look around you. Look closely. It is not too late. It is never too late.

The Dark Lord tells you, when you are marked, that you are his. That you have been chosen. That once you are sworn to him, there is no other choice, and you must do as he says or your life is forfeit. I write to you as living proof that is not the case.

Lily and James Potter died because of a prophecy that someone overheard and brought to the Dark Lord's attention: that as long as Harry Potter lived, the Dark Lord could not be defeated. In service to that prophecy, the Dark Lord killed Lily and James Potter, adopted Harry Potter, named him Harry Marvolo, and raised him as his heir. The prophecy the Dark Lord's actions were based on was a mishearing. I know that, because I too heard the prophecy as it was being delivered. I heard the full version, however, while the one who brought it to the Dark Lord's attention only heard a portion.

I will not tell you the true prophecy; prophecy is a slippery thing, and is best kept among those who have a need to know. I will tell you that the prophecy states that Harry Potter is fated to be the one to defeat the Dark Lord. You have heard Harry vow that he will do so; prophecy agrees that he is able — fated — to succeed.

When I heard the prophecy — when the Dark Lord's mishearing of the prophecy caused him to murder someone who had once been a very dear friend, someone my choices had driven me away from but for whom I had never stopped caring — I realised my mistake in swearing to the Dark Lord's service, and I went to Albus Dumbledore and pledged my life and my honour in service to the Order of the Phoenix. For a year, I served as Dumbledore's spy in the Dark Lord's ranks, working to undermine his efforts at every opportunity, while he worked to perfect his control over the magical community and over Britain itself, while he worked to eliminate all traces of the prophecy he was allowing to guide his actions. A year later, I misspoke in the Dark Lord's presence and caused him to realise I, too, had heard the prophecy; he sent me to Azkaban to buy my silence and keep me from spreading the truth of what prophecy states will come to be.

To this day, the Dark Lord believes I went into Azkaban as his faithful servant, and only turned away from that service due to the indignity of being imprisoned for twelve years. That is as far from the truth as it is possible to be. I realised the truth of the Dark Lord's failures years and years ago, and ever since, I have followed the dictates of my conscience — belated though they might be, and that is a failure for which I continue to atone — in seeking to bring about his downfall.

Those of you who follow him now have undoubtedly had a moment like that moment I had, a moment where you looked at what you were being ordered to do and thought: this is not right. You will undoubtedly have another, and another, and another, as the Dark Lord grows more desperate and tightens his control over the few people who have not seen his irrationality for what it truly is, the last gasp of a madman whom Fate Itself says must be defeated.

Listen to those thoughts. Listen to your conscience. Even if yours is as stunted and warped as mine once was, it is not too late to do the right thing. Listen to the part of you that notices the divide between the rhetoric and the reality. Listen to the part of you that shows you the rotten wood underneath the gilt of the Dark Lord's glorious rhetoric. Listen.

Listen, and make the right choices.

Do you ever feel old?

I realised last night, watching Harry desperately trying to bludgeon the world into making sense and failing, that he is very nearly the age I was when I took the Mark. It was the summer after my seventh year, just before I started my apprenticeship. (I was the youngest Master in the Guild in nearly a century; have I ever told you that? Though in a just world, Miss Granger could easily challenge my record. I find myself tempted to lure Horace out of retirement to sit as second Master for her examinations, unofficial though they might be. But I digress.)

Lily's son. How proud of him I was, for him to be able to claim that connection at long last.

We must think of something for him to do, and soon. He will not tolerate idleness long.

Alice: I do not wish to raise hopes unnecessarily amongst the wider audience of the Order, but as you asked us to keep you informed, I am cautiously pleased to announce that Mr Hembly (his name to the best of our ability to ascertain it) was treated yesterday with our version of the second Sleeper potion. We have observed noticeable change in his vitals and his (lack of) responses. It is too early to say for certain, but I have a strong belief we have indeed found the missing step in the protocol.

It will take at least another day — perhaps up to three — for the second layer of the potion to take full effect, after which we will test our antidote. I am, to an uncharacteristic degree, optimistic about our chances of success.

(Although I must caution you against too much celebration: the ingredients for our antidote candidate are both expensive and difficult to obtain, and the brewing process is long, exhausting, and exacting. Should the candidate prove successful, there are certain economies of scale we may gain from larger batches of production, but to begin mass manufacture we will require the services of anyone in the Order who is capable of excellence at the bench, with additional assistance from those who are less skilled at the cauldron to participate in ingredient preparation. In order to brew past several hundred doses, we will also need to do significant negotiation with those in France who might be sympathetic to our cause for certain of the ingredients. But I am attempting to save the practicality for after we ascertain success.)

Miss Granger: before I forget again, I have an assignment for you. While we wait for Mr Hembly's vitals to indicate his tissues have achieved full saturation, and while I work with the sample of werewolf blood Madam Pomfrey has obtained for us, I would like for you to spend some attention in ensuring the details of your work on the Sleeper project is up to date in your journeywoman's notebooks. (While your documentation has been of invariably high quality thus far, this is an excellent opportunity to review your notes and elabourate on those things that may have fallen by the wayside in the heat of discovery.) Your contributions to the project have been indispensable; your notebooks ought reflect that fact. I fully expect your work on this project will some day form the backbone of your Mastery: look to expanding your notebooks with an eye towards rebutting in advance those who will look to minimise your accomplishments, while matters are still fresh in your mind.

As you may have seen, Rookwood has just written to me. He apparently believes it is just after my induction and I am slacking on my duties to participate in potions development — apparently there is an "anti-Fidelius" potion in the works, though from what he said it does not sound as though there has been much progress.

I shall attempt to get as much information as possible out of him until someone inevitably realises what he has done.

I am a member of the Order of the Phoenix.

When I was eighteen years old, I joined Voldemort and his cause, seduced by pretty promises and stirring rhetoric. I realised quickly that stirring rhetoric was as false as the man who espoused it. Tom Riddle, better known as Voldemort, does not care about wizarding culture; he does not care about pureblood heritage. He is a halfblooded wizard who has seized power through deception and held it through his own atrocity and through tempting his followers to layer further atrocity atop his, and his hatred and persecution of Muggles and Muggleborn wizards is due to nothing but a desire for revenge upon those in his past he believes to have slighted him.

Those who hold power will call these the words of a traitor and a convict, but like so many others, my twelve years in Azkaban were for nothing more than possessing knowledge that was inconvenient for Riddle's plans, not as punishment for any of the crimes I committed while under his aegis. Azkaban is full of men and women guilty of no harsher crime than threatening the equilibrium or the image of Riddle's soi-disant utopia. The streets of New London are full of men and women guilty of crime after crime that will never be prosecuted.

You know this. In your heart of hearts, you know this is not the utopia you were promised, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself of the beauty of the Emperor's new clothes. You know you have been sold lies, and have paid far too dear a price for them. You know that no matter your rôle, your labour — your belief — is being used to prop up the paper tiger of the Protectorate; you may believe you love your country, but your country does not love you. It cannot. The Protectorate, like its ruler, has no heart to offer you, only fear and famine. The Protectorate takes the honest honour of its citizens and spends that coin on atrocity with the greatest of glee. The Protectorate endures because Riddle is able to persuade others — both those who rejoice in cruelty and those who are simply trying to live their lives — of the rightness of his orders, and because he and his followers have established very high penalties indeed for dissent.

I say to those of you who follow him, whether you have been inducted into his mysteries or simply are willing to follow him in exchange for what few scraps of power he will let out of his hands: You are being used. Your actions do nothing more than lend legitimacy to a corrupt and bankrupt régime. You may seek power; you receive powerlessness. You may seek fortune; you receive fear. You may seek advancement; you receive atrocity. The Protectorate has no future. It cannot endure. All its shining promise is nothing more than gilt painted over rotting wood.

I will not condemn you for your belief: we are made to want a cause, a nation, a purpose. But no matter what you have done, no matter what mistakes you have made, no matter how closely you feel you are tied to the rise and fall of Tom Riddle's failed state, it is never too late to make a different decision, as I made a different decision, as so many others have. Free yourself now, before you too are a victim of Riddle's paranoia.

Riddle has sworn some seventy Death Eaters since his rise to power began. Thirty of us are dead or fled. How many of those thirty were killed by Riddle himself because he knew he had lost our allegiance? What did Dominic Selwyn know, to make him willing to sacrifice his life in the hopes of ending Riddle's? How many of the remaining would flee, if they felt they could?

It occurs to me that — having now had several days for the reality of matters to sink in — you might be in need, or at least in want, of someone with whom to speak about your recent paradigm shift. I cannot pretend to be adept at matters of emotional comfort, but having lost Hogwarts myself, I can at least offer a listening ear and freedom from inane platitudes.

Alternately, if you would simply prefer distraction: Miss Granger and I are at yet another impasse with the progress of the Sleeper antidote. I think best aloud; were you to sit and listen to me explain our efforts so far, it might prompt a breakthrough. (It does not matter what your level of skill in Potions is; we are well past the point where even a talented specialist could contribute. Explaining it to someone else, however, may force me to realise something I have not yet tried.)

I regret to inform you that Miss Granger and I have finished testing the last of the candidate antidotes on our guests, and none of them have been successful. The only piece of fortunate news is that although our attempts were unsuccessful, they were likewise not fatal: they simply had no effect.

Miss Granger: at this point you are likely as frustrated as I. I propose we take several weeks to catch up with the workhorse brewing that has been neglected lately, and return to the task in the new year in the hopes a rest will produce a breakthrough. If you or I have that breakthrough before the schedule calls for it, we can return to our work, but I believe we are at the point where we are not seeing the forest for the trees. I will finish my bench notes by tomorrow; kindly do the same with yours by the end of the week while your observations are still fresh in your mind.

I regret to inform that as of a few minutes ago, Miss Meadows has lost her struggle with the curse she was fighting.

Poppy had one final idea to try: a treatment that would cleanse Miss Meadows' system at the micro-level in the hopes it would clear out the curse. We had saved it for the last item on the list, as it would, by its nature, remove the protection offered by Cinnabaris vitalis, which had been what kept Miss Meadows alive through the evening. It was an all or nothing attempt, and although she did gain several lucid and pain-free hours out of it, I am sorry to say that the curse rebounded with a vengeance.

Poppy did at least endeavour to make her passing as peaceful as possible. Her last wishes were threefold: that we celebrate her life rather than mourning her death, that when we have won our struggle we should endow a scholarship at Hogwarts for a promising Muggleborn student in her name, and that — and here I quote — we "give them hell for me". I assured her we would do all three.

I am sorry. We did all that we could.

She did provide me with as many personal impressions as possible, to facilitate the development of a counter-curse, even though by that point it was obvious it would not be in time for her. Of note: she said she was unusually magically fatigued last night, and indeed had to be side-alonged back to Sherwood. We agreed that — comparing the progression of the curse to that of previous victims — the time from onset of symptoms to death has been shortened, but to compensate, the time between application of curse and onset of symptoms has been extended and an extra component had been added to disrupt the target's magic. (Likely to incapacitate someone magically upon the field of battle, rather than physically.) If any of you are in a battle and feel unusually fatigued afterwards, do not chalk it up to simple exhaustion: have yourself checked as soon as possible. I do not know that more time to attack the problem would have helped, and we will of course never know, but when dealing with an unknown curse like this, more time is always better.

I have spoken to Alice about the Sleepers, and she has agreed to allow me to set up at Moddey. I could use your assistance in choosing and transporting the patients. Tomorrow, or Saturday — soonest begun is soonest done.

After realising I was not the only one plagued this evening by an outpouring of sentimentality, I went looking for the source to satisfy myself we were not under malicious attack.

Those of you who were at today's ceremony, or who have spent significant time at Grimmauld Place, may wish to Finite themselves, or cast a Contradfectus. One of the floral arrangements — the one with lilies, snapdragons, and osmanthus, brought here afterwards because the osmanthus is both difficult to find and quite useful in a range of potions — was charmed to elicit fond memories.

It is, however, a benign charm, and ought wear off sometime in the next day or so, should you wish to allow it to run its course; I mention it only because I am likely not the only one who found its effects disconcerting. I almost wish I hadn't dispelled