Going with the Flow

"By teaching Harry Occlumency, how far do I need to take it?" Snape asked after a long silence.

"Report to Voldemort that you are going to teach Harry Occlumency," Dumbledore said. "Teach Harry to whatever extent he wants you to."

"Oh?" For the first time, a different expression appeared on Snape's ashen face—a mocking one. "So Voldemort is leading us now?"

"Ever since Tierra became a god, even I have found it difficult to guess what he is thinking." Dumbledore seemed to laugh at himself after saying this. "To be precise, I found it difficult to guess what he was thinking even before he became a god."

"Though he awakened his Seer's gift during his first Divination class in his third year, I have always suspected that he had awakened that gift long before he enrolled at Hogwarts," Dumbledore said. "Recently, I reviewed every memory I have involving Tierra."

"I realized that he knows far too much—so much that it has created a terrifying information gap," Dumbledore said. "Not merely the course of the future, not merely secret knowledge or powerful magic, but an intelligence and emotional intelligence far beyond his age, an excess of maturity, and an overly rich store of experience and common sense."

"Those things made him seem like a mass of fog from the very beginning," Dumbledore said. "That was why I initially treated him as Grindelwald's Artificial Life Form, or even as Grindelwald himself."

"You have seen the final result." Dumbledore shrugged. "In the end, I was utterly defeated."

"So who is he?" Snape asked.

"Who knows? In any case, he is certainly not Grindelwald's Artificial Life Form. If I had to say, he seems like some suspected heir of Grindelwald who appeared from nowhere," Dumbledore said. "In any case, he has already become a