"What about Gollum? Where did he go?"
Altair looked around. The notebook had appeared in his hands the moment it was drawn. Gollum hadn't. He had no idea where the System had put him.
If it had dropped him somewhere in the Muggle world, the consequences weren't hard to imagine. A humanoid creature, hairless and hollow-eyed, mentally fractured, wandering around muttering "My Precious!" to himself.
The thought alone made his scalp prickle.
"Sméagol has not yet been deployed. Host may freely choose a location for placement. It may only be placed within the wizarding world."
"Please note: Sméagol's storage period is one month. Once the character summon refreshes, Sméagol will automatically be placed somewhere within the range surrounding the Host."
Altair exhaled.
He thought it over. Gollum wasn't particularly useful to him. Hobbits had little magical ability to begin with, and Gollum was insane on top of that. Keeping him close would just mean watching him constantly, and he'd spend every waking moment trying to get the Ring back.
"Place Gollum in Azkaban."
"Ding!"
"Sméagol has been successfully placed in Azkaban!"
Altair nodded, satisfied. Then another thought surfaced.
Tomorrow was Harry Potter's birthday.
If he had placed Gollum in front of Harry at midnight tonight... Harry squeezes his eyes shut, makes a wish, opens them, and finds two massive glowing eyes inches from his face.
"My Precious!"
The image was genuinely funny.
"What a pity. Harry Potter isn't in the wizarding world right now."
Altair shook his head, smiled, and let it go. He reached into his System space and pulled out the notebook.
The ancient spells had been unreadable before. Now, with the Necromancer ability unlocked, the text arranged itself into something clear and immediate, like a language he'd always known.
...
Far away, in the North Sea, a lonely island sat in freezing water. On its cliff stood a black castle. Azkaban, infamous throughout the wizarding world, its walls perpetually circled by Dementors drifting through the grey air like smoke that couldn't quite disperse.
On the third floor, inside one of the cells, a creature appeared.
No larger than a house-elf, crouched low, with eyes that glowed yellow-green in the dark. Nearly bald. A face that looked like something had gone wrong with it a very long time ago and never been corrected.
"Where is this?"
Gollum turned slowly, examining the unfamiliar walls.
"It's a trick!" A second voice came from the same mouth, lower and darker. "It's Baggins's trick! He's a thief! A vile, filthy thief! He stole our Precious! My Precious!"
"Yes, Precious!"
"My Precious!"
His eyes brightened to green. He spun in place, spat on the floor.
"It must be Baggins! He found some Elves to work magic and locked us up here!"
A figure stepped out of the shadows in the corner. Tangled hair, filthy robes, and eyes that caught the dim light with an intensity that didn't quite belong to a sane person. She looked at Gollum the way a naturalist might look at something pulled from deep water.
"How... fascinating. Hahahahaha."
Her voice had the quality of something dragged. Even Gollum felt it.
"A house-elf? No..."
She moved closer, head tilting, eyes locked on him.
"What exactly are you? A goblin? Or some human twisted by a curse? Who is Baggins? What treasure did he steal? And how did you get in here?"
Gollum backed up until cold stone pressed against his spine. He snatched a sharp fragment of rock from the floor and bared his teeth.
"Mine! It was my Precious!"
"Your Precious? Hahahahaha."
Bellatrix laughed. Then her wand was out, pointed at him, her smile pulling wider.
"Crucio!"
Gollum's screams tore through the corridors of Azkaban, winding between the stones with Bellatrix's laughter.
...
The person responsible for all of this was sitting comfortably in his room at Shelby Manor, reading.
"Lesser Undead Creation!"
"Summon Skeletal Warrior!"
A dim ghostly light passed through the room. Then a skeleton stood before him, nearly two meters tall, bones dense and thick, gripping a rusted iron sword in one hand and a wooden shield in the other. Dark green ghost-fire burned in the empty eye sockets. It didn't move. It just stood there, waiting.
"Not bad."
This wasn't the fragile, rattling kind. Whatever this had been in life, it had been built for violence.
Altair directed it across the room, testing its movement. Fast. Strong. One of these could handle four or five Muggles without difficulty, and while the sword looked like it belonged in a scrap heap, it was still sharp. The tetanus alone was a meaningful threat.
He cancelled the spell. The skeleton vanished with a crack.
Saruman's notebook covered a lot of ground. Necromancy was only part of it. But the Necromancer ability had made those sections feel like memory rather than study. He'd barely read through Lesser Undead Creation and already cast it wandlessly on the first attempt. The upper limits of the ability extended well beyond that: zombies, liches, death knights, bone dragons. All of it readable, all of it graspable in principle. The only barrier was raw magical power, which he didn't yet have enough of.
The rest of the notebook was different territory: holy magic, nature magic, elemental magic. He flipped through some of it. The comprehension wasn't quite as immediate as it had been with the necromantic arts, but it wasn't far off. Given proper study, mastery felt close.
"As expected of the One Ring." He paused. "No. As expected of Sauron. Necromancy was always his."
Altair checked the time, put the notebook away, and went downstairs for dinner.