In late 2022, the PensieveLeaks team came into possession of a remarkable work of magical artifice. The artefact presented as an A5 Norman & Hill Filofax organizer in black leather and contained a full week-on-two-pages diary for the academic year 1992-93, the sort one might have purchased in any muggle stationary shop in Britain or America in the early 1990s. The diary came without description or instruction and was placed under careful observation by the PensieveLeaks team. They quickly discovered that the diary pages, despite their organic composition, held no ink. All markings – pen, pencil, oil, even water – soaked into the paper within seconds and were promptly rendered invisible. The team could discern nothing from the notebook until one intrepid researcher thought to ask it a question, transposed in the form of a written sentence demarcated by a question mark (perhaps a pedantic description, but given later revelations regarding the mechanics of the artefact, a necessary one). The researcher’s initial question, formed more as the result of frustration than any logical process, was, ‘What are you hiding?’ Almost immediately upon disappearing, his ink reappeared in an entirely different (and, suffice it to say, altogether more elegant) hand, forming a simple response: ‘Nothing.’
From this discovery, the research team began to ‘converse’ with the diary, gradually uncovering its ‘secrets’ – secrets’ so-called, despite the diary’s regular insistence that it held none. It soon became evident that the diary contained previously undisclosed information regarding the Department of Mysteries’ involvement in the ‘Heir of Slytherin’ events that took place at Hogwarts in the winter and spring of 1993. The diary disclosed this information, at first in the handwriting of an anonymous source, and later in the form of immersive memory experiences similar in style to those recorded in the Hogwarts Pensieve. As the reader is likely aware, this discovery was doubly surprising, due not only to the remarkable nature of its contents but also to its similarity to the well-known ‘Riddle diary’, the artefact of historical significance and nearly identical mechanism described in such detail in the second of Harry James Potter’s school-year memoirs.
Was it pure coincidence that, in 1992-93, an anonymous source with near-total access to confidential DoM information was recording its memories in precisely the manner that, so the story goes, Tom Riddle recorded his own memories of the 1942-43 school year? As the reader of this archive must surely suspect, very little that passed through the Hogwarts Headmaster’s office at that time can be chalked to a matter of chance. It is our hope that the following collection – TRANCHE II, if you like – will provide, if not an outright answer to the question, then at least the murmur of a suggestion.
Throughout the summer and fall of 2023, the PensieveLeaks research team devoted hundreds of hours to interrogating Source Filofax, as the diary came to be called. A certain intimacy, the sort that might be observed from time to time in our ages’ lonely idles with sophisticated chatbots, grew between the researchers and Filofax. The transcripts of their interrogations, paired with the textual interpretations of Filofax’s immersive memories, reveal a quite charming interlocutor, an agent possessing genuine passion for both clandestine operations and the frontiers of late 20th-century techno-magical innovation. Source Filofax’s recollections, accompanied by contemporary government documents (declassified and otherwise), Hogwarts School archives, first-hand accounts, Pensieve files, and the conclusions of independent researches, further reveal the lengths to which Judas Crane’s Department of Mysteries – and the Ministry as a whole – willed to go in the advancement of their war against the coming millennium.
[TRANCHE 2 will be released in seven folders, every Tuesday between 23.4.24 and 4.6.24. For weekly electronic file drops to the cybernetic messaging service of your choice, subscribe now.]
THE PENSIEVE PAPERS 