magician_king | IC INBOX for The Last Voyages

"Well, he's not wrong about that all being terrible."

Allows Quentin, making a face into the glass, and stepping away to go sit down cross legged on the floor, starting with all that splintered wood.

"But if magic and muggle live in full sight of one another, they historically end up vying for dominance. Wizards controlling the normal people, or regular citizens panicking so much about the freaks living among them, refusing to solve all the evils of the world with the wave of a wand- that they try anything to get power over them and end up committing atrocities- or wizards fighting back and controlling the freaked out regular citizens because they obviously can't be trusted and end up enslaving them and, wait for it, committing atrocities."

Credence carefully clears a space so he can sit down close by. Coldwater helps himself to his lap.

"It doesn't have to be like that again. It won't be like that. We won't let it happen that way."

"What was he trying to do with you when he was Graves? Totally separate from you forgiving him- talk me through his goal, method, anticipated accomplishment."

They need to operate from the data they have.

"He was trying to find the Obscurial. He said he'd had a vision - that there was someone very close to my mother and I who was very powerful."

He scritches behind his cat's ear, gets a pleased meow.

"He thought he was looking for a child. He said that if I found him, or her, he would bring me into the wizarding world."

"But that ended with you practically dying."

Points out Quentin, looking up from a chair leg and wincing.

"Okay, I'm beating around the bush and it's getting dumb. I just- I knew Luna, as you know, and I know Dumbledore stories of the wizardly archetype variety, and maybe it's a case of history being written by the victors, but in at least one timeline out there- Grindelwald doesn't come out looking so great. But one thing we sure as hell know from life on the barge is that multiple timelines do exist, so. Maybe you're the difference?"

He ended up practically dying because he got mad and destroyed a good chunk of Manhattan and probably killed some people in the process, but Quentin knows that, so it's semantics.

"...What do you know about what he does in the future? My future."

"Not a lot, except that he gets referred to a lot as a Dark Lord."

He says, with a grimace.

Credence frowns.

"Did he stop the war from happening?"

He must know that much.

"Definitely not."

He says, and finishes assembling the chair he's been working on. This is going to be slow, slow going.

"But he couldn't anyways unless he literally went back across time and space and undid the formation of, like, Germany as a whole, or- well." Gathering his thoughts. "This is a crazy story and it spans about a hundred years of history, but I could tell you how it goes. If you've got the time. And since you're interested in sociopolitical applications of magic. If you want to stop World War Two and that's your thing now then Jesus, shouldn't you know about Gavrilo Princip?"

Okay, yeah;

"Hand me what's left of the duvet and buckle up, we're going back to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1913."

Credence isn't quite as easily swept along by Quentin's momentum as he used to be, but the habit is still there, and he just gathers up the shreds of fabric and holds them out.

"...Okay."

"The country was under Austro-Hungarian rule, and was pretty deeply resistant to what they saw as the invasion of Slavic conquerors. Then, the arch-duke Franz Ferdinand decided not just to come to visit one of the major cities, but to come on the anniversary of an important battle. Historian guess that there were between six and twenty active assassination plots to try to kill him for daring to throw this in the faces of the noble Serbian etcetera etcetera."

Says Quentin, running fingertips over the turn stitches.

"Our boy Gavrilo was- seventeenish, I think, and part of a terrorist group called the Black Hand, who lined the duke's parade route with a lot of those assassins. He wasn't really expected to be in on the action, but he had a gun with him and was stationed in the crowds. But it was one of his co-conspirators who rushed the duke's car with a handgrenade. He missed- it detonated, and injured about thirty people, but no one in the duke's car, and the whole parade was cancelled. Everyone from the crowd on that part of the route scattered, since it was a pretty bloody scene, and the duke's car whipped away. He had to decide what to do was to go to the city hall and make a speech yelling at the local police for their sloppy control of the city, since many of them were resistant to Slavic rule too. But his driver misunderstood, and instead of that, turned them back onto the parade route, down near where Gavrilo was still waiting hopefully."

Clearing his throat, reaching for another shred.

"Everyone else was basically gone home, because of the bombing, but Princip was there just on the off chance- and it probably still would have come to nothing except that the driver was told his mistake, and parked the car in order to put it in reverse. Princip stepped off the sidewalk and killed him- the duke and his wife, and pushed over the very first domino."

Credence opens his mouth to ask what this has to do with a whole different war, but figures Quentin is getting there.

"That started the Great War?"

"In the same way that a match starts the fuse to a barrel of dynamite. The diplomatic communities in the world before that had been carefully constructing a series of alliances. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, which was protected by Russia which saw itself as the guardian of that part of Eastern Europe.

Germany freaked out as a result, and this part is weird- but there was this complex dynamic at the time where everyone was extremely concerned about the amount of time it would take everyone else to mobilize. Like specifically if Russia needed thirty days to get to a battle front and Germany needed fifteen, it had to preemptively move in order to get to the strategic positions in question. Whether or not it would eventually have been pulled into the conflict no one is super sure- but what is sure is that the guy in charge of Germany at the time wasn't very smart. It was a Kaiser something or other, and he was a hereditary ruler, and one of the bad ones- and one who'd fired a lot of his really good diplomats recently. So he- I think it's Kaiser Wilhelm, panicked.

It didn't help that Germany and Russia had this huge military complex going on between them at the time, where they'd been pouring funding and money and bodies into ship building and tank building and gun building and kind of flexing their muscles at each other. If you want to understand that conflict you have to go back as far as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic war. But yeah- there was this new emphasis on how fast can you take all your farmers and get them into uniforms and get them able to shoot and get them to the front lines, and Germany, seeing that Russia was mobilizing, decided it was going to declare war on Russia first because they were these huge historical enemies.

So France is allied with Russia and is drawn in, and Germany immediately attacks France, but in doing so has to march through Belgium. Germany kind of thought they had a war here they could win, taking on France and Russia, but England at this point was like "a step too far! My God, Belgium?" and jumped in, and I honest to god don't even remember how the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria jumped on board, but it was all the same kind of thing. These are old colonial powers who've been in bed for years, exchanging promises of protection for territory in Africa and Asia, and royal families that are all intermarried and full of likes and dislikes and petty grievances and weird rivalries. To people living in the world it seemed like it happened practically overnight, but you can trace the pieces of it back a hundred years, to the time where the great revolutionary sweeps across the planet made it advantageous and not threatening to arm and train your peasantry. Old feudal lords would never be do it because they'd be killed by the rioting townspeople, but as society moved towards more of a social contract suddenly it was appropriate for the first time that everyone be a soldier; it changed the whole world."

Credence absorbs this as best he can. He was a kid when the Great War was being fought, and it barely registered with Mary Lou except as yet more evidence of humanity's wickedness.

"And...Germany lost, right?"

He knows he has practically nothing to contribute to this conversation, but he at least remembers some of the propaganda.

"Yes, and was subject to a series of strictures and sanctions to control it from ever doing anything that reckless ever again. It was deemed to be responsible for all the harm done to Europe, and it was going to be made to pay. The Kaiser fell, and by- well, by right about now, in your time, a seething and humiliated country was being taken over my an extremely charismatic fascist with a foreign policy emphasizing all kinds of terrible stuff."

He says, shaking his head side to side.

"But it was a lot more than that too. There was stuff going on in Italy at the same time, there was Japan and their invasion of China. I don't want to spoil the future for you- but I told you about the last one just so you could like. Have a sense of the powder-keg the situation was, and the momentum these events had."

Credence is very much going to the library to spoil his future after this conversation. The wizarding world teaches history, right? Would it have books from his future, if there's nobody here who postdates him?

(There's a faint, distorted memory of being someone who was very well read, who knew about this - )

"So you think magic would just be more powder," he says, quietly.

"I think the depth of control of the world you would have to seize to stop the avalanche towards war would be tantamount to enslaving the human race."

Is his first point.

"And I think even if you decided to try for their own good, you'd run very quickly into the wizards on the enemy's side. You think there's no magic in Germany? We've got a little writing, magicians do, about the things we did to one another during World War One. Imagine the Obscurus tearing the bodies of men apart in their trenches."

Credence cringes, partly at the mental image but also because:

"I...I think Grindelwald is Austrian?"

So 'the other side' might not be the one Quentin's thinking of.

"Okay well we need to get you some books, my dude."

Says Quentin, who has said this to him before but seriously.

"That is not a side you want to be in. That is the side that loses, and what we find out after they lose redefines how we term 'atrocity' and also results in the first international courts and the idea of war crimes and a whole bunch of legislation about ethics around human research subjects, and just utter horror. You make sure he's not them, okay?"

Credence looks a little wide-eyed, tensing in a way that makes Coldwater mewl with concern.

"...Okay."

He wants this not to be true. He wants, desperately, not to have been that badly taken in.

"I mean, just because he's Austrian doesn't automatically make him terrible. But we're going to pre-arm you with a list of screening questions and a healthy skepticism, and a couple of totally good enactable plans that can go either way depending on what the hell he's up to."

Oh, and-

"You know Steve Rogers, right?"

"I...a little?"

Most people he knows 'a little' are not people he has good relationships with.

"He fought in that war. Talk to him."

Says Quentin, who does not think personal conflict should disrupt intellectual pursuits.

"...Would he want to?"

'Forthcoming' is not a trait he encounters much in the few veterans he's met.

"Mm, I mean. He'll have had better days, but if he understands what you're dealing with I bet money he'd support you anyway. Want me to make an introduction?"

He doesn't mind; he likes Steve.

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