Shawn had looked into prophecies before. After all, even someone as formidable as Dumbledore believed in them.
Prophecies were strange things.
If you refused to believe in them, so many of them came true anyway.
If you believed in them, life felt rather pointless, as though everything had already been arranged. It was like shackling yourself and worrying over nothing.
Shawn was no philosopher and had never wanted to dwell on such things, but matters involving prophecies kept cropping up around him.
Especially Grindelwald, that "prophecy cheat," who had most likely approached him deliberately because of a prophecy.
His arrival in particular had shifted the world's originally predetermined course. The more contact people had with him, the more their fates changed.
So, as the person at the center of it all, Shawn himself did not know whether he should believe in prophecies.
Shawn thought for a while, but did not immediately begin studying and translating the newly revealed ancient Hebrew in the Book of Abraham to see sooner whether the illustration on the third page had anything to do with him.
He both anticipated and longed for that.
After wrestling with himself for a while, Shawn took some stationery from a drawer and began writing to Grindelwald.
[Dear Pailier Rouge, I hope you are well.
Last time, you asked whether someone in a position of power should be utterly rational, like a cold-blooded machine weighing advantages and disadvantages, to achieve anything worthwhile.
I thought about it for a long time and ultimately concluded that human thought is composed of complex emotions. If someone is nothing but cold-blooded, they can only live like a stone. Can such a person still be called human?
Recently, I have learned a great deal from an excellent teacher. I am gradually learning how to best