Here We Go

chapter 17

Chapter 17: Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead

The story will probably wind up with this chapter, the wicked witch of the west has shown her hand so this is a nice tidy spot to deal with her and close it off..... which leads me to a warning.
T

he way her machinations are exposed so that she can be dealt with once and for all will be an extremely nasty, desperate plot to bring down Arthur and the rest of them by framing them all for trying to cover up disgusting acts against a young girl by Arthur's sons, because their control of Magical Britain is accepted and embraced by people because they are held up to be everything that is good and true. We also have the sordid tale of Albus Dumbledore's foul tastes and actions. I will tag the beginning and end of the descriptions of these so people can skip them if they don't want to read that sort of thing.
Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale. There will probably be changes in the first hour or so as I find things that didn't come out the way I wanted.
Very few of the other students had heard anything about most of the students of the Corvus group completing their NEWTs within 2-4 years, getting some of the best results in Hogwarts' history.... Not that it would have made any difference if they had, because they wouldn't have believed it, because they could never accept that anyone could be that far ahead of them, oh they accepted that Potter's magic was freakishly powerful and advanced for his age, but that was put down to the fact that he'd used those old laws to steal that magic when he was stripping magic from witches and wizards (which, strangely enough, was probably the closest to the truth of all the stories being spread about him because knowledge of spells like the flame whip did come from Dumbledore and others when he was stripping their magic from them). Whatever the others knew, they had less than twenty NEWTs left between them to be completed, and most of them were Hagrid, Arabella and Jean's. For the most part the Corvus students were concentrating on their Masteries, because the rest of them were doing at least two or three Masteries.
For most of the students at Hogwarts, they were going into a normal year. They had to work much harder under Professor McGonagall's regime than they had under Dumbledore's, but the majority of them were prepared to admit that they were learning much more, and much faster to boot. The ICW's Education Authority was keeping a close eye on Hogwarts now because of all the changes that had been implemented, so they were confident that the results they were seeing were true and accurate. The fact was that, in the last two years, Hogwarts had gone from being regarded as a joke by the rest of the world to gaining considerable respect for how well its students were performing. At the end of the first year under McGonagall, the improvement in the students' results had been quite noticeable, but after two years of effort and encouragement, Hogwarts' regular students' names were appearing on the ICW's best results lists again for the first time in over fifty years! By anyone's standards, that was incredible.
The students all knew what happened to Professor Jones from the Daily Prophet articles, but very few of them were at all upset about his demise because he'd been much like Snape, one of the leading masters in his field, but unable or unwilling to teach it well. Professor McGonagall was still teaching the NEWT level classes for Transfiguration, but forewarned by the family discussions she'd added an extra Transfiguration Master to the ones she she was hiring to teach the lower years before Jones' trial (the classes were both getting bigger and being split up according to ability, as per the practices in the non-magical schools, so they needed extra teachers to meet the demand). There was one benefit accruing from the old bastard's demise though, because hearing about the way Jones died in Azkaban scared Selwyn so much that he was desperately trying to avoid trouble and convince them that he really was worth keeping on as a teacher. He was still creepy, but the students were getting all sorts of useful gems of information out of him now.
When Aberforth Dumbledore was told that his brother had died, his only reaction was... "This round's on the house people, 'cause the old goat fukr's dead!"
Of course, not everyone was happy with the way things were going, and the witch who had been certain that she'd have Magical Britain in the palm of her hand by now was at once both furious and perplexed.... Furious because those Wizards Council people had upset all her plans when they overturned the established order in Magical Britain, and perplexed because she couldn't for the life of her work out how they'd done this.
She realised that she should seen the writing on the wall when Amelia Bones suddenly pulled Pettigrew and Black out of thin air for their trials, and Potter had showed up much the same way, demonstrating a frightening depth of knowledge of the Wizarding world for a boy who Dumbledore had assured her knew absolutely nothing about their world because he was hidden away in the Muggle world under the boot of rabid magic hating Muggles who kept him bruised, bloodied, half starved and totally downtrodden, treating him worse than any house elf and locking him in a dank, dark cupboard if he wasn't working, but that supposedly ignorant, beaten and starved boy had displayed considerable poise and knowledge in the Wizengamot chamber, along with both the Potter Head of House and Black Heir's rings.... WHY had she listened to that old fool Dumbledore?
First unpleasant section begins.
After all, that was hardly the first time he'd been so wrong, he'd confessed his earlier mistakes.... or more to the point.... crimes to her when he was seeking her cooperation after the Potters had been killed. He'd admitted how he'd created Voldemort when he tried to mould an orphaned Half-Blood (if you could call him that, seeing as his mother was barely Magical) child who showed promise into a better, more malleable version of Grindelwald, the lover who'd rejected him, and they saw how well that turned out, didn't they? Maybe Riddle wouldn't have turned out the way he had if he didn't have Dumbledore forcing him to have sex with him from the time he first came to Hogwarts, but she was willing to bet the old man's manipulations would have created a monster anyway.
The old fool had tried again with that peacock Lockhart, but at least he had been a willing party in having sex with just about anyone if he got something out of it, even at a shockingly young age, but there was no way that Lockhart could have ever become another Grindelwald or Riddle as he was a decidedly mediocre wizard as well as a self serving idiot.... hmmm, from what she heard Abbott's daughter was much like Lockhart in many ways, perhaps they could make use of that?.... Dumbledore was so stupid, compelling the hat to put Lockhart into Ravenclaw instead of Slytherin in the hope that if he was in a different house he wouldn't turn out dark like Tom? Hmmph! It wasn't being a Slytherin that had made Riddle dark, it was what the old man was doing to him!
First unpleasant section ends.
Interestingly enough, it wasn't Lockhart who had been the target of Dumbledore's machinations that time though, no, he'd had his sights set on James Potter, reasoning that his mistake had been trying to turn a Half-Blood orphan from the Muggle world into a leader of the Magical world. He hadn't needed to compel the hat to get Potter into Gryffindor, the Potter hero complex almost guaranteed that that was where he'd go, but he had stacked the deck to try and ensure that his champion turned out the way he wanted, not Black, Dumbledore had been as shocked as anyone when he was sorted into Gryffindor, but back in the early Sixties he'd pointed Fenrir Greyback at Lyall Lupin and his family because he knew about Greyback's obsession with turning children.
Dumbledore had seen what his little plaything was getting up to back then and realised that he'd need to be able to liaise with the werewolves in the foreseeable future, so he'd laid the groundwork to have a group of werewolves on tap who were loyal to him. Of all the children who he'd arranged to be turned in the Sixties though, only Lupin had survived long enough to go to Hogwarts, but the Lupins were oh so grateful to the great Albus Dumbledore for being so magnanimous as to allow poor, cursed little Remus to attend his school..... Fools!
Remus Lupin was a quiet, studious and brilliant boy, so Dumbledore had had to compel the hat to make it put him into Gryffindor instead of Ravenclaw where he belonged, as he was to be the first of James Potter's chosen companions, to help steer him in the direction Dumbledore wanted, though it seemed that Potter had influenced Lupin more than the other way around.
Another thing that Dumbledore had tried to use to excuse his failure to see the way Riddle was turning out was the fact that he didn't have any way to know what he was doing and saying most of the time, so he'd planned to plant a spy right beside Potter to be his eyes and ears. He had any number of unimaginative but faithful followers at the time, but only one had a son the right age to be placed as a spy on Potter, so by default Peter Pettigrew became Potter's second companion. Pettigrew had none of the courage, chivalry, intelligence, interest in work or loyalty needed to be a Gryffindor, Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff, he only had greed and ambition, but having him in Slytherin wouldn't do at all, he had to be one of Potter's dorm mates so he could keep an eye on him, so the hat was compelled to put him into Gryffindor too. (Dumbledore had obviously been planning the same thing with Ronald Weasley for the son, but the son apparently saw through the ploy and took steps to stop them.)
Bagnold snorted as she remembered Dumbledore spewing vitriol about Lily Evans, the one who had he blamed for derailing his plans to turn Potter into his selfless soldier to bring down Riddle (much as he'd tried with the son actually, in fact the parallels between Harry Potter and his father were astounding.... as the son had also found a Muggleborn witch much like Lily Evans in Hermione Granger, and together they'd thwarted Dumbledore's plans to turn him into his sacrifice, though it appeared that the son and his witch had done a rather better job of throwing off Dumbledore's yoke than his parents had, perhaps because his earlier upbringing had been more like Riddle's than his father's thanks to Dumbledore). By rights, a brilliant young witch like Evans should have been in Ravenclaw, but the hat either recognised her fire and need to fight injustice as being a stronger driver than her brilliance, or Dumbledore's interference had confused it about who it was who had to be placed in Gryffindor instead of Ravenclaw, because she went into Gryffindor and Potter was drawn to her like a moth to the flame..... Even forcing conflicts between Potter and her best friend Snape to turn her against him had failed because of Snape's inherent arrogance and character flaws coming out when he joined the would be (and actual) Death Eaters in his house. After Snape had destroyed whatever trust and connection there was between them, Lily Evans had began to see that perhaps James Potter wasn't so bad, though apparently the werewolf had become a friend of hers and was putting a good word in for Potter as well.
She laughed again at the memory of Dumbledore's blindness to the ways of others, as just because he couldn't stand being around women (possibly because they curtailed his available preening time), he'd decided that putting Potter and Evans together as Head Boy and Head Girl would be the way to force them apart, when it had of course had the opposite effect and resulted in what most had described as one of the happiest couples they'd ever seen.....
Potter and Evans had married and conceived a child (combining the best traits of both of them to create a truly formidable wizard), then Dumbledore had interviewed that drunken sot Trelawney for a teaching job (in his brother's pub for some reason) and somehow managed to prod her into making the only true prophecy she'd ever made in her life. Allowing Snape to hang around in an attempt to turn him to the 'right' (IE: his) path, even though he knew full well that he was spying for Riddle meant that Snape heard the first half of the prophecy before Dumbledore's brother caught him listening at the door and ran him off. Snape went straight to Riddle to tell him what he'd heard with Dumbledore's blessing, as Dumbledore paid the prophecy no mind until Alice Longbottom and Lily Potter both had babies 'as the seventh month dies'. When he heard that, Dumbledore suddenly decided that they were the children of the prophecy, so they had to die if he was to defeat Riddle.
She was surprised that people as strong willed as Potter and Evans had succumbed to his compulsions as easily as they did, but Dumbledore had been a master of mind magics for nearly a century by then..... the fact was he managed to get them to leave the protection of the Potter Estate and 'hide' in a cottage in Godric's Hollow that he set the so-called protections on, even managing to convince them to change the secret keeper from Black to Pettigrew, who'd happily taken Riddle's mark when Dumbledore sent him to spy on his protégé. He'd also managed to convince the Longbottoms to allow him to set the fidelius over Longbottom Manor, with him as the secret keeper.
Dumbledore 'accidentally' left a note on his desk with the secret for Longbottom Manor while Snape was in his office and told him that the rat was in fact the secret keeper for the Potter's cottage in Godric's Hollow. Of course, Snape's jealousy and anger at Potter and conviction that Lily Evans had betrayed him made it a simple matter to get him to convince Riddle to target the Potters first so after being punished for not telling Riddle that he was the Potters' secret keeper, the rat had told him the secret and led him to their cottage.
That was where their plans went wrong though, because while James and Lily Potter died as planned, the infant had somehow survived and Riddle was destroyed when he apparently tried to kill the child. From what Dumbledore determined, when Riddle tried to curse the child as he had its mother he was somehow struck by a blast of energy which incinerated him. The rat had come running when he heard his master screaming in agony as he burnt up, arriving to see his master turning into a pile of ash, the rat had panicked at that, so he grabbed Riddle's wand and whatever valuables he could find in the cottage then ran for his life.
Bagnold shook her head as she remembered that Dumbledore's only emotion as he recounted this story was anger at the fact that it hadn't gone as he had planned. The moment the monitoring instruments showed that James and Lily Potter had died but their child hadn't, he'd hastily summoned Hagrid, casting a compulsion over him to fight off anyone who tried to take the infant from him and and sent him to the cottage to retrieve the child. He told her that while Pettigrew was still ransacking the cottage when he sent Hagrid there, he had been prepared to risk losing a loyal servant like Hagrid because he was desperate to get that child before Black did.
As it was, Hagrid had had to take the floo to Godric's Hollow and then run to the cottage from there, so Black had beaten him to the cottage.... this was another thing that Dumbledore hadn't understood at the time but it was explained in Black's testimony under Veritaserum at his trial, apparently the Fates had decided that Potter and Black truly were brothers in all but blood, because they had the type of sibling bond that was normally only found in twins, so that Black had felt James Potter dying.
The Potters had forced Pettigrew to share the secret to the cottage with Black so he'd apparated to the nearest point he could, but while he saw Pettigrew scampering away in his rat form when he arrived, determining whether Lily and Harry had survived was more important than dealing with the rat at that moment so he'd run into the cottage. Finding James dead down stairs as expected he paused only for a moment to grieve for his brother before rushing upstairs, to find Lily's body near a pile of ash spilling out of a wizard's robes, but his crying godson was apparently alive and well. He knew that James and Lily would demand that looking after Harry be his first priority, before he did anything about their husks or wreaking retribution on the rat for his betrayal, so he was leaving the cottage with Harry to take him to Frank and Alice when Hagrid came lumbering up the road from the centre of the village.
It was probably his overwhelming grief over his friends' deaths and rage at the rat's betrayal which made Black fail to stop and ask how Dumbledore had known to send Hagrid to collect Harry, or how he'd gotten there so quickly, but his ability to think rationally at that moment had been too compromised for him to do more any more than decide that Harry would be safe at Hogwarts so he could go after the rat before the trail went cold with a clear conscience. Therefore he handed the infant over to Hagrid with the admonition to keep him safe and requested that James and Lily's bodies be seen to properly before he took off after the rat.
That had of course not gone well, because with Dumbledore's help the rat had been able to best the mad with grief Black when he confronted him, and by then Dumbledore had managed to ensure that Fudge was convinced that getting rid of any evidence of Black's innocence would be well rewarded. She remembered that Dumbledore's arguments to send Black straight to Azkaban without a trial had been quite convincing... not that it had taken any great effort to get Crouch to agree of course, because he was a rabid dog with a one track mind.
After that, as Dumbledore had Snape send that Lestrange psychopath to Longbottom Manor with her husband, bother in law and Crouch's son to deal with the Longbottoms and the other child of prophecy, framing it as avenging their master worked for that.... but that hadn't gone to plan either as the young Lord and Lady Longbottom were both Aurors and they'd managed to hold them off long enough for the Dowager Longbottom to escape with the Heir. With two to one odds, the four strongest Death Eaters had managed to overcome the Longbottoms, but then that mad witch had decided to try and torture them to death, so they were still there when the Aurors that the Dowager called got there and caught them red handed. They'd tortured the Longbottoms into an insensible state, but they still lived when their rescuers arrived, at least Dumbledore had managed to make sure that they were kept in that state until Potter and Black returned to their world and rescued them.
The old fool hadn't appreciated it one bit when he discovered that she'd allowed Malfoy, Nott, Parkinson and the other Inner Circle Death Eaters who controlled the money for Riddle to buy their way out of Azkaban and go free after Riddle disappeared, but she had plans, expensive plans. Those Death Eaters were the only ones who had the sort of money she needed at the end of the war, so large piles of galleons and oaths to not oppose her bought them a ticket to walk free as pillars of society.
Looking back, she'd been a fool to take Dumbledore at his word and she'd certainly been paying for that mistake recently, but what was she to do now? In little more than two years those thrice damned Wizards Council people had somehow managed to regain all the power that their families had held seven or eight hundred years ago, before the Wizengamot was created. She'd been aware that the original Wizards Council laws still took precedence over the Wizengamot's laws, but she'd never considered that all those lines which were believed to have gone extinct centuries ago could suddenly return to Magical Britain to wrench control of the Wizengamot and Ministry out of her grasp just as she was making her move to step back in....
She'd heard all those fools whispering that this was the Fates at work, bringing their chosen ones back to restore the magical world to its former glory, she even had a traitorous voice saying the same thing in the back of her own head, but she would not allow this! She'd relinquished control of Magical Britain three years ago because Dumbledore warned her that terrible times were coming and her image would most probably suffer if she was seen to be the one who took Magical Britain there, but stepping down had allowed these bastards to return and usurp her rightful place... no more, she was going to take Magical Britain back!
It was a good thing that Dumbledore was gone actually, he had become more of a hindrance than a help and it would be much easier to cast doubt on those confessions they wrung from him if they couldn't trot him out and prove that they were true.... But how in the seven hells could she discredit them enough to wrest control from them?... She suddenly lit up with a truly evil smile of triumph as she remembered what she'd been thinking about Lockhart, yes, if she framed this properly that should be quite enough to discredit them, in fact if she played her cards right she could get them hounded out of Magical Britain, after they'd forfeited everything they owned to her Ministry of course! The biggest irritant was the fact that she'd have to wait until the witch came home for the Christmas break to set the plan in play, because they couldn't afford to raise any suspicions.
Second unpleasant section begins.
She never thought that she'd be hinging her plans on a brainless little slut who had been doing her best to wear out men two or three times her age before she turned fourteen, before she was a teenager actually, but those..... talents... were exactly what she needed now, well those talents and an arcane blood adoption ritual that was made forbidden centuries ago because it was more suited to line theft than anything else. She'd always had a passion for the dark arts, so much so that it had taken her a while to convince the hat to put her in Ravenclaw rather than Slytherin, but then what true Slytherin would ever allow themselves to be placed there and therefore proclaim their intentions? She snorted as she remembered that that was exactly what Dumbledore had done, so he'd had to alter the school records to cover it up after he became Headmaster.
The delicious little ritual she remembered required a pregnant witch, the blood of a key male of the intended line and a magical child's sacrifice, but the result was the witch being pregnant with a child in line to inherit the intended line, and this was how she would discredit the lot of them, she just needed enough blood from one of the Heads of House or their sons and they could create enough 'evidence' to convince everyone that an unforgivable crime had been committed against a defenceless fourteen year old witch, and that the rest of the Wizards Council Alliance had abused their power to try and cover it up. Once the story got about, other girls and young women could be prepared to 'prove' that these practices were actually widespread and more of them had been involved.
With any normal girl this would be a difficult, if not impossible ask, but too many stories were going around among the men and boys of her followers' houses about Miss Smith's (Hannah Abbott had reverted to her mother's maiden name) activities for them all to be lies, especially when they were corroborating each other's accounts of instances where she took on more than one at a time. They were of course going to have to create and provide her with memories which matched the story they were going to tell, how she had become pregnant as a result of being brutally raped by one or more of the men of the Wizards Council Alliance, but Millicent was well aware that due to the nature of the alleged crimes, this girl's memories would be carefully examined by experts, she was also aware that the slightest slip up could cause the whole house of cards to come crashing down.
They could not afford to make the girl give any sort of magical oath to hide any information, because if the oath were discovered it would be all but announcing that this was a fabrication.... For that reason she could not let the girl see her face or hear her name being connected to this business in any way, so she instructed the girl's guardians in what they needed to get young Hannah to agree to do. What she didn't realise though was that young Hannah Smith was an extremely nosy and sneaky little witch, so she'd followed her guardians when they were summoned to a secret meeting and unbeknownst to them or Madam Bagnold, she had seen and heard the entire discussion.
When they came to her to try and convince her of the need to do this, to have wild and rough sex with a number of men until she was pregnant, so that they could switch the baby's blood with another's in order to use the physical evidence to support the story that she'd been brutally raped and became pregnant as a result of that to bring down their opponents, she used the knowledge of how high the stakes were to force them to give her unbreakable vows to ensure that she'd receive suitable reward for doing this, a significant fortune in her name that was untouchable by anyone else, and the assurance that she'd become the wife and lady of the young and attractive scion of a rich noble family who'd caught her eye... she had had her eye on Cedric Diggory, because like many girls at Hogwarts she'd had a crush on him since she started there, but his idiot father had ruined everything by disgracing the family and being all but thrown out of Magical Britain so she'd had to select a more appropriate husband.
Once the requisite agreements had all been locked in, she dove into the task with great enthusiasm, and eventually, after nearly five months of having wild sex at every opportunity with everyone from boys her age to men over three times her age, which often left her bruised, battered and bleeding but quite satisfied (in the Muggle world she would have been diagnosed as a sex addict with masochistic tendencies, but the Magical world just thought that she was as twisted as Bellatrix Lestrange), she was pregnant. They waited just long enough to ensure that the pregnancy was viable before they performed the blood switching ritual, using George Weasley's blood because he was the only one that they'd managed to get enough blood for the ritual from. Once that was done, they removed her memories of the agreement she'd made and all the sex she'd been having in the previous months (keeping a copy of them at her insistence so that she could go back and view them at her pleasure), inserting in their place fabricated memories of her being gang raped by the Weasley brothers, Harry Potter, Neville Longbottom, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin which were in turn partially removed to make it look like they'd been corrupted when someone tried to remove the evidence of who had raped her, as the fabricated memories would not hold up as proof if they could be questioned.
Given the fact that Amelia Bones was now Amelia Weasley and she and Arthur Weasley were connected to all of the other players by blood and/or political alliances, getting the so-called rapists arrested and showing 'proof' that the Director of Foreign and Domestic Liaisons, Director of Magical Law Enforcement and Minister for Magic had all been involved in trying to cover up their crimes to protect the rapists should be enough to bring them all down, especially when that 'proof' included reports of other witches with similar physical evidence of violent sexual activity who had been allegedly been raped by the same wizards in the past and had their memories altered or removed to cover it up.
Second unpleasant section ends.
When Hannah Smith was taken to St Mungo's, at first it looked as though Bagnold's plan was going to work, because all the physical evidence appeared to support the story that she'd been brutally raped by a number of men, and that the perpetrators had attempted to cover up their crime by wiping the memory of the act. Seeing the faces revealed in the fragments of memories that apparently remained from the event was shocking, but every one of them willingly submitted to coming in for questioning under Veritaserum and having their memories examined for any trace of this alleged crime when it was common knowledge that they had properties all over the world and had the means to travel to them from just about anywhere, which made the Aurors stop and think.
These wizards had some of the most solid reputations of anyone in Magical Britain or Europe, it was commonly known that the majority of witches in Magical Britain would have willingly had sex with any of them (more than a few of the Aurors had had disturbingly frank discussions with their wives, partners and daughters about the fact that they'd have had Sirius/Remus/Harry/Neville/Fred or George in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it) and they were among the richest and most powerful wizards in Magical Britain, so the idea that they'd risk everything to gang rape a young witch who wasn't particularly attractive, apparently had a reputation for being a 'doorknob' (everyone has a turn) in Hogwarts and beyond and who they'd already punished quite effectively by destroying and eradicating her family was extremely questionable.
Quite aside from that, many of the older Aurors had worked with Duke Black, Minister Longbottom and Countess Longbottom before they had their troubles and they were sure that they would never be involved in raping a young witch or helping cover a crime of that nature up, and for that matter to all evidence, Duke Potter was something of a saint.... No, the more they thought about it, the more convinced they were that this rape story and all the other so-called evidence that was suddenly coming out of the woodwork was more than a little suspicious.
They used the excuse that in the initial rush to treat Miss Smith, the required processes hadn't been followed so the memories taken from her hadn't been properly certified to have her brought back in, and the Mind Healer made sure she got copies of everything in the girl's head this time. The Mind Healer believed herself to be a mature, open minded witch who was inured to the ways of the world, but she was shocked by what she found buried deep in this young girl's memories about what she'd found to be great fun. The fact that the half removed 'memories' of the rape weren't as violent as other activities where she'd clearly been a willing and eager participant was seen as proof that she was part of this plot to frame the most prominent members of the Wizards Council Alliance, but the 'smoking gun', as the Muggles say, was her memory of watching ex-Minister Bagnold instructing the girl's guardians on what they needed to get her to agree to do.
The memory of the ex-Minister detailing exactly what the girl had to agree to and do, and what they'd then do to change her pregnancy and physical evidence into evidence against the Wizards Council people to bring them down was what they didn't have before now, definitive proof that Millicent Bagnold was the one who had been behind the majority of the plots against them over the past two years. But it was the fact that Bagnold quite clearly stated that she was the one who had to perform the blood switching ritual because she didn't trust anyone else to do it properly, and that ritual required a magical child to be sacrificed which had her sentenced to be put through the Veil of Death, because that ritual had been done, the child's remains were found on her estate and she hadn't prepared anyone to take the fall for this because she'd never considered the possibility that it could come out. This memory also gave the DMLE what it needed to search the estates of everyone else involved until they found the memories that Hannah had insisted on keeping, which in turn ensured that her guardians and most of the wizards she'd had sex with went to Azkaban for a long time, it also resulted in the Noble House of Bagnold and another fourteen of the traditional Pureblood houses being eradicated and their titles, holdings and belongings being claimed by members of the Wizards Council Alliance. Over ninety percent of the Wizengamot was made up of the Alliance and the Neutral Houses after that.
What to do to Hannah Smith was a quandary, she was clearly a danger to Magical Britain, the wizards in particular, but she was still only fourteen and she hadn't exactly done anything that justified Azkaban or the Veil of Death. When Harry stood and suggested an alternative that would remove her as a threat to Magical Britain, but most likely wouldn't cause any great hardship to her, the vast majority of the Wizengamot was shocked and horrified, but as they gave it careful consideration, one by one the members voted for his suggestion. It was interesting to note that the witches in the chamber acquiesced first, but after a while enough votes had been cast to be accepted as a quorum and it passed with a strong majority after the Wizards Council votes were cast (they held off until it was clear that the remainder of the Wizengamot agreed with the measure).
That was why Hannah Smith was stripped of her magic and had all memories of the Magical world removed before being placed with a Squib family in the Mundane (they were starting to adopt that less derogatory term used elsewhere) world to be re-educated so that she could become part of that world. Hannah had been a mediocre witch, and she would have had to be memory wiped and totally reprogrammed to be a part of the Magical world without presenting a constant threat to anyone she decided had crossed her. There were no guarantees that she could have been changed enough to stop being a threat, and many of the Wizengamot were unhappy with the idea that she escaped punishment after willingly being part of something so disgusting as this and the other plots against the Wizards Council Houses, that was why Harry's suggestion was accepted once the Wizengamot members managed to get past their ingrained horror at the idea of a witch or wizard losing their magic.
This way, even if the reprogramming slipped, she would not be as much of a danger to others without her magic, and she could go back to her old ways without causing rifts between the houses of Magical Britain. She could probably have a relatively happy life, doing what she enjoyed doing without realising or missing what she had lost, with the biggest risk being that she was more likely to become a teenaged mother.
After they'd agreed that her punishment was appropriate, other members of the Wizengamot proposed and seconded that the punishment for the wizards formerly known as Earnest Macmillan, Zacharias Smith, Anthony Goldstein, Blaise Zambini and Theodore Nott and the witches formerly known as Pansy Parkinson and Marietta Edgecombe be the same, and the vote for this passed. They had all been actively involved in the plots over the last two to three years, but the Wizengamot had been unwilling to sentence them to Azkaban because of their youth. This solution offered by Duke Potter though effectively removed the threat that they posed to Magical Britain, while allowing the possibility of their magical blood being returned to Magical Britain when they had children, which was for the good of Magical Britain.
To anyone who bothered looking, Magical Britain was going through a period of major change. After being under the control of the Pureblood bigots for at least half a millennium, many of them were now leaving Britain, in search of new homes that would be more conducive to their own beliefs. In the space of less than two years the Ministry had gone from an institution where you needed to be a Pureblood if you wanted any worthwhile job and Muggleborns were almost non-existent to one where the only Purebloods left were the ones who were actually qualified for the positions they held, and if they were going for a job, they had to prove that they were more qualified than anyone of other backgrounds to get it over them. The position of werewolves (or rather ex-werewolves) had changed even more, because where they were likely to be killed by any Aurors they may run into two or three years ago, their enhanced speed, strength, senses and the like now made them the preferred candidates for Aurors, in fact 'ordinary' witches and wizards had to be pretty special to be considered over the ex-weres. These changes were happening at Hogwarts too, because the classes were swelling as ex-were children were coming to Hogwarts for the first time.
Some of the 'normal' students weren't happy about this, because the ex-weres were eager to learn and make up for the time they'd missed, so they were working much harder and making the other students work harder or fall behind (as one of the first changes that had been implemented when Minerva took over was that students could progress at whatever pace they were comfortable with, if they picked up the subjects notably faster than the majority of the students in their class, they could skip ahead to the next year, if they were notably slower to pick up subjects, they were generally held back or put back a year, gone were the days when the class was kept at the pace of the lowest common denominator, which was generally the children of the traditional Purebred families who had been playing in a shallow gene pool for too long).
The ex-were children also had the same advantages as the ex-were adults, so it was difficult for 'normal' witches and wizards to keep up with them, and as Harry, Hermione and the others had been taught, a witch or wizard's magical strength and endurance is linked to their physical strength and endurance, so the ex-were's were generally magically stronger than most of the other witches or wizards as well. (This was creating a problem in their society that they hadn't considered at first, because some witches or wizards were now hunting down werewolves in hope that that they would be turned in order to gain the ex-weres' benefits once they were cured. Of course they didn't consider the fact that they may not survive either being turned or their first transformations, or that they may not be able to shake the call of the wolf or being under the thrall of the pack alpha. They were working to find a solution to this problem before it became too big.)
It was generally accepted that Magical Britain was entering a new golden age.... They had lost most of the traditional 'Pureblood' Houses and many witches and wizards had lost their lives or their magic in their struggle to retain what they called 'the old ways', but they were like the phoenix, they had been forged in the fire of change and came out stronger. The remaining traditional Pureblood houses still complained that the original ways of Magical Britain had been abandoned, failing to see the irony that what they were complaining about was the fact that the original guiding families had returned to reinstate the original ways by wiping out the hypocritical 'Pureblood' nonsense that they'd been forcing on everyone else for centuries, ever since they wrested control of Magical Britain out of the hands of those who'd been guiding it from the early days of the Druids.
Everyone else seemed to be quickly coming around to the idea of a society that was embracing both Magical and Mundane ideas, that the mark of a person wasn't whether their parents could trace their magical heritage back through several generations without a break, it was how they behaved and what they could do, magically or otherwise. The biggest shock was that a 'person' was no longer defined as a witch or wizard under the new laws, because goblins, elves and centaurs were recognised as having equal rights under the law, as were Mundane, or Non-Magical people. This particular change came out of Frank, Amelia and Arthur officially working with Her Majesty's representatives, because the Wizengamot was forced to formally acknowledge that Magical Britain was part of her Majesty's realm, and that the overarching laws of Great Britain applied in Magical Britain.
One of the results of these new laws was that there were goblin and elf businesses opening up in Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade (mostly in properties owned by the Houses of Potter and Black, but most people didn't realise that) because the laws prohibiting them from owning and operating businesses had been repealed. Another was that house elves were officially free beings who had to be paid for their service (as slavery was illegal in Britain), the agreed pay was generally just a token amount to serve the letter of the law but a lot of families who had been relying on elves for centuries objected to the changes. The ones who left Magical Britain because of that got a nasty shock because they were prevented from removing 'their' elves from Britain, and they found that most of the rest of the Magical world had similar laws anyway as they'd historically been interfacing with the Mundane world more than Magical Britain did.
There was no question that the rest of the Magical world generally saw the changes in Magical Britain as a good thing, as families and businesses that had abandoned Magical Britain centuries ago were now returning to help it regain its former glory.
When things began to quieten down, the family had a movie night in the cinema that Harry had had built at Potter Manor. When they watched the original Wizard of Oz, the Magically raised ones who had been there when Millicent Bagnold was put through the Veil of Death for sacrificing a magical child in the forbidden blood switching ritual finally recognised what Harry was humming as she went through the Veil, still screaming threats and imprecations..... and they had to agree that Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead was quite appropriate for that moment!
I can't really see much point drawing this one out any further, so this is a good placeto finish it, thanks for reading.