As the years passed, and we entered the twentieth century, Albus came to work with us at the Apothecary on Diagon Alley. Together, we were partners. He struggled through his mistakes and failed more times than not, but he trusted me and was impressed by my knowledge. Through our explorations into alchemy, Albus surprised us all when he secretly worked in Bloodcraft and tapped into the power of dragon's blood, publishing his findings on their practical uses in an underground pamphlet that spread like Fiendfyre through the wizarding world. And for the first time, it was my protégé who earned the respect of the Ministry of Magic and was showered with awards. We couldn't have been prouder. Albus Dumbledore, known to us as Wulfric Flamel, was our greatest achievement. He had finally become the wizard I knew he could be, which was of great importance — for his biggest challenge was on the horizon.

While Albus was accepting his fate as a true guardian of both wizard and Muggle kind, his former ally, Gellert Grindelwald, was fulfilling his promise to develop a new wizarding order. Under the runic symbol of the Deathly Hallows, he created an army of followers called the Fondatori, who began a rebellion in his effort to create a new purity of blood.

Now known as Grindelwald the Many, Gellert channeled his talents for architecture and built monuments to his own beliefs. They reined destruction on the world of wizards, controlling magic and slaughtering anyone who opposed them. When people refused to join his cause, they were destroyed, which included the slaughter of many pure-blood families.

I was ill-equipped to battle them on my own. The legion of followers was growing so rapidly that many of us failed to know how to defend ourselves. In the year 1930, an apprentice of mine by the name of Horace Slughorn brought it upon himself to gather many of the merchants on Diagon Alley who were brave enough to keep their shops open to support Hogwarts. Together, as heroes in their own right, they joined forces to combat the growing threat. With Perenelle and Albus at their side, they called themselves the Dark Force Defense League and asked me to stand as its leader. Our sole mission was to stop the rise of Grindelwald the Many, and we masked our identities in order to do so effectively.

Under the constant threat of the Fondatori, nearly all of Hogwarts school was abandoned. Chaos reigned across Europe and the Americas, and losing the primary shelter for magical children had an immediate effect on the community at large. The Dark Force Defense League saw it as a necessity to return hope and stability to the wizarding world and moved quickly to fill every vacancy at the school ourselves. With the return of a full staff of teachers, came a resurgence of confidence in education, and we celebrated our small, but important victory. We had saved Hogwarts.

Of course, the transition from shopowner to professor did not come without its challenges. Our new Charms teacher, Argyle Gregorovitch, left his post when a student by the name of Tom Riddle terrified him in a way he was unable to confess. I struggled to know how best to teach History of Magic, Slughorn cared more about his popularity among the students than his Potions lessons, and Dumbledore felt underutilized in Transfiguration. It was difficult for us to remain at the school when so much suffering was taking place beyond the safety of the castle.

But it had become the headquarters of the Dark Force Defense League and as we occasionally slipped away to banish vampires to Albania and combat hordes of trolls, we took careful steps in developing our plan to rid the world of Gellert Grindelwald, including the recruitment of a few extraordinary students. And we would have done superbly, had I not utterly failed them.