It is a large book, bound in the pocked leather of a hippogriff. It contains a thousand blank pages, each of them as pristine as the day they emerged from the press. It still smelled of its mother hemp. This is the journal of Headmaster Knox Tremayne Greyfriar.
And on the penultimate page, just before the end paper and back cover, was it's only entry. The last and only entry in his journal.
June 5, 2008
The secret is out. I have been in clandestine correspondence with Meredith Ballentyne who now lives in Nottingham. I cannot deny that she has paid a part in the decision I have made. I cannot deny that she has campaigned relentlessly for it. But the whole truth is to do with more than my wife.
The whole truth is to do with what young men do when their heads are not filled with anything. When a wizard's brain lacks passions, lacks fresh thoughts, lacks resistance and some pain - then young witches and wizards become mindless. And myself in particular - a mender of murderers.
And now, as an old man, a vessel of penance.
These many years of study and these more recent years of sacrifice cannot all be weighed against the madness and self-murder of Kyle Gibson (although his measure is heavy and well-earned), but even without him I have not yet repaid my sins. I have tutored the sons and daughters whose families were slain because I did not allow Antonin Dolohov to bleed to death on my sofa. Because I administered a counter-poison to Augustus Rookwood. Because I carefully removed the shard from the spin of Rabastan Lestrange and mended his vertebrae. I've turned all of my efforts to molding active, deciding new minds who would not bear the weakness of young Knox Greyfiar, to protecting the brains and bodies of the children of fallen Aurors, fallen muggles - a generation raised in war.
But perhaps all that is left for me is Argentina. Perhaps there in the Andes with my wife I can make my penance by disappearing.
And so the only entry worth entering in this journal is my last.
Greyfriar: My One and Only Entry