This pitiful testimony to my damnable, accursed insights are the last words I, Albus Dumbledore, shall set down; for after tonight I will be no more. He is coming for me, but shall find my chambers empty, I having cast myself onto the indifferent flagstones of the courtyard beneath my tower window.

I mean only to impart certain things appealing to me as facts, leaving those that come after to construe them as they will. For what can truly be said about the thing I saw that night, flopping and limping out of sight across the east quadrangle? And what use is it to speak of the singular odour that steals upon my chambers not long after my evening meal of cheese and cabbage soup; or the accursed demon piping that accompanies it? Whispers among the servants speak of an old man's failing constitution, of the lassitude of age; and though I sit for hours, drug-crazed, palsied, grey-bearded and balding, I know their explanations are as worthless as those crude hereditary folk-tales that circulate amongst the more degenerate communities.

My colleague, Snape, also denies the reality of everything I have witnessed. He maintains I am encumbered with a nervous strain, overworked and in need of a vacation, and keenly offers to assume the burden of my duties until I am fit to return.

Perhaps I am overworked. Wretched indeed is the soul who, looking back, sees only lone, long hours spent in vast and Cyclopean halls, cluttered with maddening rows of abhorrent Grimoires. When my peers were united in ponderous folly on the Quidditch pitch, instead, there was I in the twilit vaults beneath the library, turning the worm-gnawed pages of tomes far better left unopened, learning things far better left unlearnt: of the end times, when the oceans shall boil and rise, drowning Man's feeble endeavors in preparation for the coming of the Old Ones.

My fate is near. I hear it. Something is stirring in the hall outside. My God, the four-eyed child! He shall not have me! I am hurling myself out of the window as I write!

Ross Field