Archive of Our Own ^beta

Night draped the world in hush, wrapping the granite spires of Nurmengard in velvet dark. The wind outside howled, brushing icy fingers across the stone balcony where the castle’s master often stood to watch the world. But tonight, Gellert Grindelwald remained within, standing alone before the great northern window. Thin iron bars crossed the panes diagonally, forming a lattice of geometry and restraint, but not confinement. The glass held back the wind, not his razor sharp gaze.

Through it, the world stretched into shadow: snow-covered mountain ridges, a black forest sprawling below, and a distant horizon veiled in mist. His reflection stared faintly back at him in the darkened glass, overlaid by distant stars and the pale glow of moonlight.

With a flick of his hand, the violin case resting against the far wall behind him clicked open. The violin and bow rose silently into the air and floated toward him. He caught them in a fluid motion without glancing, as if the gesture had been part of his being.

His fingers curled around the neck, almost tender in their certainty. He turned the instrument slightly out of ritual, inspecting it with a manner close to reverence, like reacquainting himself with a lover’s face. His thumb brushed the grain of the wood, polished by years of use, and the corner of his mouth twitched in a smile that was almost fond.

Allegro

Still, the violin was not his only voice. There were other times when he sat at the piano.

A grand one waited below, positioned like a monument in the heart of Nurmengard’s entrance hall, polished obsidian black, solemn and elegant, its keys untouched by dust.

He had played it, often enough. When the occasion called for gravity and diplomacy. When silence needed breaking. When charm was a weapon, and civility, a practiced mask.

The piano offered structure. Elegance, order, restraint. It anchored a room with cold magnificence. Regal. Disciplined. It commanded with stillness.

But the piano had always felt like society’s instrument. Predictable, public, performative. It gave too easily. Its voice demanded a throne and two obedient hands. It could command a room, but not the horizon.

Grindelwald understood its power. But the piano was for the world.

The violin was for him.

It resisted. It demanded finesse and pain. Less an instrument, more a companion. One that yielded only to precision and devotion. It was made for those who could coax beauty from defiance.

It was exactly the way he preferred. 

And when he played, something in him loosened. He became the tension of the bow. He became the risk of every note.

Once, long ago, in a small, ancient village, he had often played it in a quiet drawing room, where summer light slanted through lace curtains and dust swirled like gold. Across from him, an auburn-haired boy with bright blue eyes sketched in pencil, pausing now and then in contemplative silence.

They had believed, then, that they could remake the world together. That music had ended with the summer: two cruel months that curdled into deafening silence and bitter betrayal. But the echo never quite left his hands.

The violin moved with him — whether played standing, walking, or even beside a battlefield. It required motion. Partnership. Trust. The bow was his wand; the strings, his incantations. And the music, his magic.

It followed him — from war camps to rallies, from candlelit strategy chambers to starlit towers. Not stationed like the piano. It lived in his hand, as mobile and alive as thought itself.

That was the violin’s gift: freedom.

And Grindelwald had never tolerated chains.

Even in music, he chose command. The violin offered intimacy through instinct, not just intellect or technique. He could whisper or wail through its strings. Each stroke demanded mastery: pressure, breath, control. The violin exacted everything from him: spine, fingers, pulse, soul. There was no room for error. No forgiveness in the wood.

And Gellert Grindelwald did not forgive weakness or imprecision. Especially not in himself.

Now, as he drew the violin up beneath his chin, he took a deep breath, that familiar curve settling into place. The bow found its mark, poised with the stillness of a blade before the strike.

Silence, a beat longer than expected. Not hesitation, but control made absolute.

Then, he played. The notes slid into being, soft and wandering at first. This was not performance. It was confession.

His mismatched eyes slipped half-shut, fingers moving almost without thought. The melody carved a spiral through the air, strange and mournful, vibrating against the stone as he allowed himself to be consumed by the controlled passion.

Then it began: the trembling shift behind his eyes. The stir of second sight.

It was not always so for most Seers. More often than not, they were slaves to their visions, dragged into them without warning, unable to choose the moment, the subject, or the clarity. Chaos masquerading as revelation.

Yet Grindelwald… He had learned another way. Not always reliable, but attainable, often enough to command, enough to matter.

Through the violin, through its demands of precision, of instinct, of surrender, he could sometimes reach through the veil. Not merely to glimpse the future, but to summon it. To tempt it forth with each stroke of the bow, each vibrating string. To call it like a hawk to his wrist.

It did not satisfy him to serve as a passive oracle. Where others saw prophecy as inescapable doom, he saw a weapon. The Sight, to him, was no longer merely a gift. It had become a skill. One carved from discipline and fire. A blade honed, not inherited.

And tonight, as his bow danced across the strings, it came sharp.

A white stone citadel rose from blackened ruins. Flags bearing his Alliance symbol fluttered in windless air. Wizards stood proud, unmasked, unhidden, and he — Gellert Grindelwald — stood before them, architect of their liberation.

The violin swelled with the vision, each note more vivid than the last. His fingers did not falter.

Another image, unbidden, bloomed: a young dark-haired wizard, trembling, eyes wide with fury and shame. Shadows poured from him, thick and writhing, devouring a street, a city square, an entire cathedral reduced to bone and smoke. Screams twisted into silence. The Obscurus, unleashed. Not fragile, but cataclysmic. Beautiful, in the way wild storms are beautiful: untouchable, unknowable, unstoppable.

Grindelwald’s lips curled into a satisfied smile. He played through it, bow slicing deeper.

A third vision flashed: a hilltop, empty but for him. Wind scraped across the grass in low, restless waves. Above, the sky churned like water held too long in tension. He stood alone, still as stone, waiting. The air was thick with something unspoken. Not fear, not doubt. Certainty. The kind that comes before a storm.

The vision tore itself away.

The bow stilled. The last note hovered, trembling in the air like breath before a blow. He lowered the violin, eyes fluttering open, gazing out the vast window. His reflection looked back at him, pale, unreadable, framed by the black diagonal bars, like a sigil pressed into the glass.

He knew that hilltop. He had seen that vision before. Not once, but many times. He could vividly recall the feeling of anticipation in the vision, the hush, the slow turning of the sky before something irreversible. It always came the same way: the solitude, the silence, the impending sense of inevitability.

It was the same silence that followed him when he left Godric’s Hollow behind.

Once, and only once, he had believed the weight of vision could be shared. That the boy who once sketched at his side, spirit bright as phoenix flame and mind forged in the same brilliance as his, might stand beside him. That they would walk the path of their Greater Good together, not divide it. 

But that had been an illusion. Flawed. Fleeting. Best forgotten. For clarity, like mastery, demanded severance. And Grindelwald had long ceased to believe in shared burdens. 

Empires were not built by committees, nor revolutions led by consensus. The world did not require a chorus. It needed a conductor. And he had accepted, with the ice-blood certainty of a visionary who had scorched his bridges for revolution fire, that the burden would be his alone. Not because he sought martyrdom, but because no one else had the spine, the clarity, or the cruelty to bear it. His past, or even his present, was incidental. Only men of the future were ever capable of making history, after all. 

Grindelwald turned from the window, not with the calm of ritual fulfilled, but with a restlessness he did not bother to conceal. The violin and bow lifted from his hand, directed by his skillful wandless magic, returning smoothly to their case.

The future crept close, not as revelation, but as reminder.

But Gellert Grindelwald was no servant to fate. He had never bowed to prophecy. He used it, as he used all things, to shape the world, not surrender to it. 

This would be no different. As the echoes faded, his aristocratic features hardened with a steely edge, shrewd mismatched eyes blazing with a fire of calculated resolve. The future resisted him, as the violin had, but he had mastered both. The violin was not his escape. It was his crucible, where every note burned away weakness, every phrase reminded him that greatness required isolation. 

Grindelwald did not look back at the violin. 
The note had faded, but the vision remained. 

And he would make the world hear it, whether it was ready or not.