After devouring the soul shard of Mictlantecuhtli, Corvus returned to the tome with a steadier mind and a deeper well of memory to draw from.
The strange runic alphabet had nearly given way under his hands. Only a few undeciphered signs still resisted him now, and they no longer resisted like a wall, more like a lock that had already lost most of its teeth.
He sat alone in the study aboard the frigate while the vessel held position high above Hogwarts under layers of concealment. The castle lay far below, hidden by cloud and distance, while the frigate remained invisible.
The tome lay open across his desk.
He had spent days with it, and not merely reading. He had worked through it the way a surgeon worked, section by section, until the structure beneath it finally showed itself.
Decipherment stopped being guesswork once enough anchors existed. At that point, it became recurrence, elimination, syntax, and pressure applied in the right order. Corvus had more than enough knowledge to force the issue. Over the years, he had replicated from professors across Europe and the United States, not only from linguists but from philologists, epigraphers, cryptographers, historians of religion, archaeologists, palaeographers, grammarians, and the sort of obsessive specialists who would spend twenty years pursuing a single suffix across four dead languages and still call the result a modest paper. Some of them would have described such knowledge as interdisciplinary brilliance.
He used all that knowledge and experience like a scalpel.
First came recurrence. A sign that repeated in ritual entries likely marked an office, an invocation, a tool, or a title. A sign that clustered beside names but changed endings indicated grammar rather than identity. Position mattered; if the same unknown sign repeatedly followed a solved sign for movement or possession, then the unknown sign often narrowed into tense, direction, or case. Known Mayan and Aztec runes gave him anchor points. The memories of the Elder gave him context. A repeated cluster beside diagrams of portals and descriptions of travel no longer remained mysterious when he had already watched the same process unfold in the shard's memory.
A few symbols were phonetic.
Most were not.
The script mixed sound, meaning, office, and magical function in a way that would have made half the professors he replicated ecstatic and the other half homicidal. Some signs carried conceptual weight rather than literal vocabulary. Some acted more like keys that altered the reading of the sign beside them. Once he realised that, the remaining difficulty ceased to be language alone and became logic expressed through script.
It was enough.
The tome yielded. Not fully, but enough.
And now that it had, Corvus understood how the elders, or rather the Architects as they called themselves, chose worlds.
They did not hunt for precious metals or gems.
They did not cross the dark between stars for diamond, platinum, or the glittering vanities by which the races they created or altered took wealth and called themselves successful.
Those things existed everywhere.
The universe was full of them. Asteroids of iron, belts rich in platinum group metals, bodies dense with carbon arranged into crystals by pressure and age. Gold and diamonds were common at scale. Any dead world broken the right way could produce abundance enough to make a dragon look underambitious. A piece of wood was more precious and exceptional when compared. Much more.
These were the ornaments of dead planets.
The Architects wanted something else.
Earth had not called to them because of its mountains or buried veins of metal. Earth called to them because of its plant life first. The tome made that plain once Corvus finally solved the correct cluster. Vegetation was the initial signature. Dense biological growth. Layered energy circulation. Photosynthetic abundance. The green surface of a world announced something far more precious than mineral content. It announced a biosphere capable of feeding complexity.
That was one of the triggers.
That was how the Architects focused.
From vegetation came confirmation of water, cycles, metabolism, atmosphere, weather systems, and all the narrow miracles required to sustain things that could grow, breed, suffer, and die.
Gold and diamonds could not do that. Platinum could not do that. A tree could, a simple blade of grass, a forest could. A swamp could. Moss on rock in the correct climate could begin the chain.
That was why they called themselves Architects, not because they built cities, but because they built ecosystems and then harvested what those ecosystems eventually produced.
Corvus leaned back and considered Earth through that lens.
Humans like to call themselves rulers of the planet. It was a charming vanity, especially from a species that could survive only in a thin band between vacuum and molten death.
Earth's radius was roughly six thousand three hundred and seventy-one kilometres. If one took the portion where human life or complex surface life could exist with any reliability, the number became embarrassing very quickly. Even being generous and treating the habitable shell as roughly twenty-five kilometres thick, including the lower atmosphere, oceans, and the shallowest survivable crustal regions, the available living band amounted to only about one point two per cent of the planet's total volume.
Barely over one per cent. Yet, we call ourselves the rulers of it.
For the species that talked most loudly about dominion. For humans specifically, the truly comfortable fraction was smaller still.
The rest of the planet was pressure, poison, vacuum, freezing altitude, crushing ocean, or stone hot enough to erase even the memory.
That was the scale the Architects thought in.
Life did not occupy a world. It infested a narrow layer of it, and that narrow layer was the only thing in the cosmos that mattered to them.
Because life could be harvested, processed, concentrated, and most importantly, it could be converted.
The philosopher's stones in the obsidian box were not miraculous by the standards of the Architects. They were outputs. Condensed life force rendered stable. Thousands of living things were reduced to a substance dense enough to be used as magical energy cores. The Flamels had used philosopher's stones as life extenders. The Architects had used them as reserves, tools, reagents, and, if the diary entries were read correctly, sometimes as something no more exalted than portable fuel.
Corvus glanced toward the locked compartment where the box from the Brazilian chamber had been placed after their return to Grimmauld Place. Over three dozen stones. Enough life force in one chest to rewrite ordinary morality several times over.
The discovery shocked him less than its simplicity.
He had been born in a world where this one existed as fiction written by an author and consumed as entertainment. If the Potterverse were real, then the question ceased being whether imagination hid truth and became which truths had hidden themselves under imagination.
What else was out there?
How many worlds held their own elder ruins, their own mythologies, their own underworlds built from ritual engineering and time?
He returned to the memories of Mictlantecuhtli, not the crude ones, the hunts, the sacrificial chambers, or the endless practical violence by which the elder had filled Mictlan. He focused on the portals.
Each time the Architect opened one, the memory carried the same structure. First came the location already known. Then came the recognition of the signature. Then the route cut through the in between. It was not blind travel. It was not exploratory, stumbling through darkness. The Architects knew where to look because they knew what life felt like when viewed at the correct scale. Vegetation, biological cycling, and accumulated vitality formed a readable signature. Gather enough of those in one place and a world announced itself.
The days passed like that.
Study, decipherment, memory review, calculation, and, in the spaces between, life aboard the frigate.
He was not alone in those stretches.
Elizaveta remained with him often enough that the elves had long since stopped murmuring surprise when they found Russian shawls, open books, and unfinished tea in corners of his private rooms. She gave him space when he needed it, interrupted when silence stopped being useful, and occasionally dragged him out of the study under the argument that a man with his power should not forget how meals worked.
Fleur visited whenever circumstances and propriety allowed.
She still arrived with the composure of a champion and left with the private glow of a girl who had not yet entirely processed that she was engaged. The contrast amused Elizaveta and pleased Corvus more than he admitted aloud. Fleur was growing easier in their presence. Less ceremonial. Less careful with every syllable. She asked sharper questions now.
One evening, she sat by the great window of the upper drawing room while the concealed frigate held position above the cloud cover. The pendant at her throat glowed warmly in the lamplight. She asked him whether ancient civilisations had understood themselves better than the modern ones.
Corvus thought about it for a moment.
"They understood violence better."
Fleur folded her hands in her lap. "How so?"
Elizaveta, stretched along the sofa with a book in hand, looked up first.
"No. Understanding violence is easy. Refusing it is civilisation. The first humanoid who, instead of throwing a rock, used a rude gesture could be considered the father of all known civilisations."
Fleur went quiet after that in the way she did when she planned to keep thinking long after the conversation had ended.
Corvus noticed such things.
That too pleased him.
--
Far from the frigate and the school, Narcissa and Bellatrix Black stood before a house in one of the magical settlements.
The settlement itself was proper from a distance. Though both sisters were used to a bit more luxury.
Rows of houses with controlled gardens. Order had settled in these settlements the way it settled everywhere under Black administration. Even modest houses stood with a certain forced dignity because disorder now invited attention nobody wanted.
Andromeda Tonks's house looked like the others.
Bellatrix was still murmuring about dismemberment and murder. Her fury had not cooled since reading Corvus's letter.
Andromeda, in her blazing idiocy, had stood before Arcturus and declared that she was not a member of House Black.
To his face.
Arcturus, in response, had cut her off from the House magic and cast her out.
The consequences of that reached farther than anger.
Without House Black, Andromeda no longer carried that line in any meaningful magical sense. The Black core had gone. The family trait would thin with follows. Even Nymphadora, who has inherited the metamorphmagus gift securely through that line, stood at risk of losing part of what she was. Andy, by pure magical logic, could scarcely be called half-blood any longer. Only her father's line remained anchored.
Bellatrix wanted Ted Tonks in pieces for his part in it.
Narcissa had prevented that outcome by bringing something more useful than anger.
She had come prepared.
A case of potions rested in the hand of one of the accompanying guards. Purging draughts and stabilising tonics are designed to clear. Corvus had also sent a Nestborn mind healer and kept him waiting. If the mind behind this household had been bent by bad influences, magical exhaustion, or slower poisons, Narcissa intended to know.
Bellatrix looked at the door as though it had personally insulted her.
"I still think dismemberment would have solved the husband problem more efficiently."
Narcissa adjusted one glove and kept her gaze on the house. "Your efficiency lacks texture while also creating records in DMLE."
"My efficiency has results."
"It also has paperwork."
Bellatrix huffed through her nose but did not argue further.
Narcissa stepped forward and knocked with gentle precision.
They waited.
No answer came at once; Bellatrix's patience thinned visibly.
Then steps sounded inside, slow and heavy. The latch shifted, and the door opened.
Narcissa had expected many possibilities. This was not among them.
The thing standing in the doorway was difficult to process quickly as either a human or a witch. It had the vague arrangement of both. Flesh swelled around the shape of a face that should once have been young, broad, and lively. The body had gone far past softness into something heavy and misshapen. Bellatrix actually blinked; Narcissa did not.
She stared and, for one extraordinary second, found herself wondering how a witch could physically reach such a state without potion abuse, metabolic sabotage, or determined commitment.
From somewhere deeper inside the house, a familiar voice called out.
"Nymphadora, who is it?"