The gardens presented a scene of breathtaking prosperity.
The roses his mother, Narcissa, had planted were in magnificent bloom.
White, red, yellow, and even delicate pink roses flourished in glorious abundance. The sight was peaceful and beautiful, exuding an intoxicating fragrance.
It was so achingly beautiful that it made him want to weep.
It stood in stark contrast to the Malfoy Manor he had inhabited at seventeen, when the Dark Lord's foul servants had shamelessly commandeered his home and left it in a filthy, degraded state.
That remained the most humiliating memory for the proud Malfoy line.
No noble pure-blood wizarding family should ever be subjected to such treatment!
A sudden surge of fury erupted in his chest. Those disgusting creatures must never again set foot in Malfoy Manor to trample upon the pride, dignity, and honor of his family!
Never!
His hands trembled as they gripped the windowsill, his mind flooded with unbearable memories of what his parents had endured.
His father, Lucius, had been forced to surrender his wand as precious to a wizard as life itself to the Dark Lord. He had been rendered defenseless, like an eagle with shattered wings, a target for slaughter.
Any wretched Death Eater, even the most junior member of the inner circle, could cast curses upon him and humiliate him at will.
His mother, Narcissa, who should have remained the most pampered lady of high society, had been reduced to a servant in her own manor.
She had lost her elegant and composed demeanor, her once-proud face marked by constant anxiety. The Dark Lord could torture her with a casual flick of his wand whenever his mood soured.
As for the Dark Lord himself he was a tyrant who had usurped everything! He had invaded their home and transformed the Malfoys' ancestral seat into something resembling Azkaban itself, even a murder scene. He had permitted the lowly and brutal werewolf Greyback to parade openly through Malfoy Manor, which had always prided itself on blood purity—this was nothing less than a slap across the face of the entire Malfoy line!
Thinking of this, Draco's complexion turned ashen.
His father must never have his wand stripped from him again, nor could he be sent to that nightmarish place called Azkaban. And he absolutely could not allow his eternally noble mother to suffer such degradation again, to grovel before lesser beings in the manor she held so dear.
He refused to be forced into attempting to murder Dumbledore again.
Draco slowly sank into a crouch, his hands unconsciously clutching at his hair.
Sixteen years old a devastating age.
At sixteen, he had harbored as much resentment toward that year as anyone could possibly contain.
It should have been the finest age for a boy, filled with light, flowers, applause, and perhaps even love. Instead, he had been coerced into planning an assassination attempt against the most powerful wizard of the century Albus Dumbledore himself!
A suicide mission. If he failed to kill Dumbledore, the Malfoy family would be annihilated. If he succeeded by some miracle, his soul would perish alongside his victim assuming a pitiful Death Eater could still lay claim to possessing a soul.
He had never wanted to become a murderer. Never! How could a proud Malfoy stain his noble hands with blood? He should have remained pristine and unashamed beneath the sunlight.
But his father had been imprisoned in Azkaban, and the Dark Lord had threatened him with his mother's safety and the future of the Malfoy family.
It was unconscionable that a being without an ounce of compassion would threaten a sixteen-year-old boy already reeling from catastrophic family upheaval.
This was the nature of a cruel, evil, unprincipled Dark Lord.
Draco had possessed nowhere to turn, no one to ask for help.
The Malfoys' supposed "old friends" had revealed their true nature: with the death of his grandfather, Abraxas, those ancient connections had crumbled to dust.
Money could not purchase loyalty, but instead attracted greedy avarice. These "friends" offered hypocritical sympathy while their eyes clearly conveyed expectation, hoping to claim their share when the Malfoy fortune inevitably collapsed.
As for their enemies, the Malfoy family had long positioned itself in opposition to Dumbledore. What unrealistic fantasies could he harbor about assistance from that quarter?
Should he have bowed before "Saint Potter"?
Begged Dumbledore—his intended victim—for help? How could those he had been taught to despise, who could not refrain from mocking him at every opportunity, possibly offer aid?
The Malfoys had always adhered to this pattern of thinking and maintained deep suspicion of Dumbledore and his allies.
Draco had never imagined, never dared to imagine, that Dumbledore in the final days of his life would still attempt to redeem his wretched soul.
Just as he had never conceived that the foolish Potter would turn back at the very precipice of life and death, returning on his flying broom to extend a helping hand.
It had been a kindness he had not encountered in far too long, a form of concern he had never experienced from the Dark Lord or any Death Eater.
The memory stirred something within him, causing unexpected moisture to gather in his eyes.
A profound sense of regret gradually filled his being.
Draco was forced to acknowledge one crucial truth: he should have sought their help. He should have asked Potter for assistance. He should have appealed to Dumbledore.
They might have helped him. They represented different ideologies, different beliefs, different interest groups—but they shared a common enemy: the Dark Lord. That single fact alone made cooperation possible.
The Dark Lord had long ceased to be someone Draco respected. During the year the Dark Lord had occupied Malfoy Manor, Draco had gradually discovered that he bore no resemblance to the elegant, noble, powerful leader his father had described—the one who supposedly sought to restore the glory of pure-blood wizards.
Instead, he was mercurial, vindictive, violent, and cruel. He murdered wizards indiscriminately, even those of pure blood. This frequently evoked in Draco an inexplicable sorrow for his own kind—despite his father's insistence that such emotions were shameful and cowardly.
Perhaps Draco Malfoy had always been a coward. Perhaps Lucius Malfoy had been too fanatical regarding the Dark Lord, too deeply invested, so obsessed with the inevitability of the Dark Lord's triumph that he could not accept the possibility of catastrophic loss.
But Draco had awakened from that fever dream. When he extracted himself from that madness and observed the Dark Lord with clear eyes, he realized the man was nothing more than an inhuman lunatic.
He recalled the expressions on the faces of other Death Eaters when they looked upon the Dark Lord: devoid of worship, how could there be genuine devotion?
Most of the Death Eaters excepting Bellatrix Lestrange were simply terrified.
Many had recognized something was fundamentally wrong, but they could no longer bear the consequences of abandoning their chosen path. They resolved to see it through to the bitter end, whether that meant death or an improbable better future.
Draco refused to walk that doomed path again. Aligning with Dumbledore and Potter represented the Malfoy family's only opportunity to escape the Dark Lord's oppression and potentially reverse their fortunes.
Potter... Though he was an idiot, at this moment Draco desperately hoped he truly was the prophesied savior, destined to achieve ultimate victory and vanquish the Dark Lord.
After all, Potter had escaped the Dark Lord multiple times already.
The first occasion had been at his birth, when he was merely a baby in swaddling clothes. The second time, he had dueled the Dark Lord in that cemetery, yet the Dark Lord still failed to kill him—his father had mentioned that some strange connection between their wands had rendered the spell ineffective. The third time, the Dark Lord had commandeered his father's wand and battled Potter in mid-air, yet only the wand was destroyed while Potter emerged unscathed.
Would there be a fourth time? And if so, could the Dark Lord possibly succeed?
There appeared to be something mysterious and singular about Potter that enabled him to resist the Dark Lord—though Draco had never discerned what precisely made him so exceptional.
In his estimation, while the foolish and arrogant Potter remained a prominent figure among their year, he had demonstrated no talent or ambition commensurate with matching, much less surpassing, the Dark Lord.
No one understood this better than Draco. He had observed Potter meticulously, as his father had instructed. The boy was disappointingly ordinary. Apart from that lightning-bolt scar on his forehead, he appeared indistinguishable from any other common boy.
Objectively speaking, he was neither particularly hopeless nor particularly outstanding.
He would live a respectable life during peaceful times, but he possessed none of the exceptional gifts and qualities necessary to rival the Dark Lord.
This was precisely why the Malfoys had aligned themselves almost immediately with the returning Dark Lord—because they perceived no possibility of Potter achieving victory.
Had they known then that the unremarkable Potter possessed some inexplicable power that made him impossible for even the Dark Lord to kill, they would have exercised far greater caution in their decision.