The world called Dumbledore a mad old man, and he had never done much to correct the impression. But his appearance was not, in fact, mad. It was considered. The purple and silver robes, the silk-like fabrics embroidered with fine patterns, the pointed hats reserved for formal occasions, the silver beard maintained with the specific care of someone who understood that presentation was a form of communication.
Which made what Snape was looking at now genuinely alarming.
Dumbledore's eyes had sunk into their sockets. The skin around them had gone dark and papery. He had lost weight across a holiday, his face narrower than it had been in September, and the silver beard, which was normally a point of quiet vanity, was disordered in a way that suggested several days of inadequate attention. He was leaning back in his chair at the staff table with his eyes closed, not performing rest but actually requiring it.
Snape was not the only one who noticed. Half the students in the Great Hall had clocked it within the first minute. Most of the teaching staff had made the same calculation shortly after.
The immediate and nearly unanimous conclusion was Grindelwald. Obviously it was Grindelwald. While the school had been on holiday, the two of them had clashed somewhere out of public view, and Dumbledore had been quietly defending the wizarding world from something none of them would ever be allowed to know about. Being a symbol of the Light had its drawbacks, one of which was that every unexplained difficulty got attributed to you whether or not it fit.
In this case, they were not entirely wrong. Grindelwald was connected to this, in the way that most things were connected to Tom, which was at several removes through a chain of decisions that led back to him eventually.
The actual architects of Dumbledore's exhaustion were Nicolas and Newt. Or more precisely, two thousand Inferi.
Purifying an Inferius was not a simple procedure. Reversing the dark magical transformation, restoring something that had been pushed across the threshold back toward what it had been, was a fundamental alteration of the subject's nature. One or two was an evening's work. Two hundred was a significant undertaking. Two thousand was not something the wizarding world had precedent for, and the effect on even Dumbledore had been substantial. The Elder Wand had been working at sustained capacity for days, and it had taken everything with it.
He was not even half done.
At the funeral the previous day, when Nicolas had pulled Dumbledore aside, it had not been for a quiet conversation. It had been Nicolas applying polite but direct pressure for more speed, because Nicolas, under Tom's guidance, had successfully produced two new alchemical creatures in the past week and was currently running ahead of his materials supply. The man who had spent six centuries approaching alchemy with the patience of geological time was now the one chasing production.
Tom looked at Dumbledore across the hall with something that could charitably be called regret and made a private note to find him some good honey sweets.
Beside him, Snape's muttering was quiet enough that most people would not have caught it.
Tom did.
"Dumbledore... if you don't last until the Dark Lord returns..."
Tom nearly lost his composure entirely. He turned to Snape with an expression that took a moment to settle, then clapped him once on the shoulder with the gravity of a man imparting wisdom at a critical moment.
"Professor. The headmaster ails. We must encourage the capable."
It translated imperfectly from the original sentiment but Snape understood the direction of travel. He gave Tom a look of profound exasperation.
"Who said anything about wanting to be headmaster?"
His one desire, the thing that had kept him functional through everything, was watching Voldemort die. That was the complete list.
"That's exactly the point, though." Tom lowered his voice. "If you were headmaster, Dumbledore would be freed from all of this. And if Dumbledore were freed from all of this, he could dedicate himself entirely to dealing with the Dark Lord. Isn't that what you want?"
Snape went quiet.
The school absorbed enormous amounts of Dumbledore's attention. Harry Potter alone accounted for a disproportionate share. And the student beside Harry, the one currently making this argument, accounted for the rest.
If Snape were running the school... he did not want to finish the thought about Harry, but certain things were undeniable. And Dumbledore, freed from administration entirely, would be a different kind of threat to whatever Voldemort eventually returned as.
A small flame of something Snape did not immediately identify as ambition flickered to life somewhere in his chest.
He did not notice Tom leave. By the time he looked around, most of the students had returned to their seats, and he found himself walking toward his own with the purposeful stride of someone who has recently been given a thought they cannot put down.
Passing Lupin's chair on the way, Snape allowed himself a small aside. "Remus. Don't forget to come to me for your potion tomorrow."
Lupin, mid-conversation with Flitwick, turned with the untroubled warmth of someone who genuinely does not allow old wounds to govern present behaviour. "Thank you for the reminder, Severus. I won't forget."
Snape produced a noise of dismissal and moved on.
The welcome feast began, ran its course, and ended without notable incident, except that Filch had added two more items to the school's prohibited list, a development that the student body filed away without concern.
In the dormitories afterward, students settled into the rhythms of term. Homework to catch up on. Revision to begin. The examinations in two days providing sufficient motivation to keep most people reasonably focused.
Tom's idea was questionable in its ethics but undeniably effective as pedagogy. The students who had spent the past months in actual competitive preparation were measurably better prepared than their counterparts from previous years. They knew more, retained it better, and several of them had begun to take genuine pleasure in the knowing.