Amelia set her case down beside the altar.
For a moment, she did not speak. Her eyes remained on the carved Mithras, on the bull pinned beneath him, on the blade poised to strike.
"I remember my own initiation," she said at last. "It was before i got married to Castor. I stood in this chamber and heard Helios tell us what the bull meant."
Castor gave her a small nod.
"I remember thinking that tyranny belonged to the stories of old. That it was something a law-abiding society had outgrown. I had entered the Ministry. I believed that if we wrote just laws and enforced them fairly, no one could ever become a tyrant."
Her fingers rested on the leather case.
"I was wrong."
She looked toward the children.
"In the old stories, Zeus does not merely command. He takes. He pursues mortal women because he wants them, and believes his desire is enough. He punishes those who defy him. He destroys those who threaten his authority. He expects the world to accept his cruelty because he is king of the gods."
Her gaze returned to the relief.
"The lesson I was given was not that every god is evil, or that power itself is wicked. It was that no title, no strength, no claim of divine right can make tyranny just. Zeus's victims are not made less worthy of freedom because he is powerful."
She paused.
"And then Voldemort came."
The name seemed to darken the chamber.
"I served in the Ministry while his power grew. I saw people who knew what was happening convince themselves that speaking plainly would only make matters worse. Some feared losing their positions. Some feared becoming targets. Some told themselves that the danger would pass, or that it was someone else's responsibility to act."
Her voice remained composed, but the effort it cost her was beginning to show.
"Courage is not the absence of fear. I knew that even then. But I learned how much damage can be done when people in authority let fear make their decisions for them."
She looked at Cyrus.
"My family paid for that failure."
Cyrus's face tightened.
"Voldemort and his followers slaughtered my brother Edgar and his family. They killed people who had stood against them, and they left children without parents. My niece Susan was orphaned because of the war he made—and because the people who might have stopped him did not act with the courage the moment demanded."
Amelia took a breath. Her eyes had gone distant, as though she were seeing a memory rather than the stone chamber.
"I remember the McKinnons, too. A family wiped out because they opposed him. I remember what was said about the Longbottoms: Frank and Alice, tortured until they could no longer live as they had before. Their son grew up with parents who could not recognize him. Those were not battlefield deaths. They were deliberate acts meant to break people—to punish resistance, to make others afraid to resist."
The children listened in silence.
"Voldemort wanted the living to learn from the suffering of the dead," Amelia continued. "He wanted every family to think: If we stand against him, this may happen to us. And when the Ministry hesitated, when it denied the danger or chose its own comfort over the people it was meant to protect, it helped that fear spread."
Her expression hardened.
"That is the tyranny Mithras's story warns us about. A tyrant does not only hurt the people he attacks. He tries to make everyone else complicit in their own submission."
Cyrus spoke quietly. "Then Mithras teaches us to be brave."
"To be brave enough to act," Amelia answered. "And wise enough to understand what our actions are for. Courage is not simply charging at danger. It is refusing to abandon someone because helping them might cost you something. It is telling the truth when silence would be safer. It is choosing to change what you can, rather than accepting cruelty as inevitable."
She turned toward the carved god.
"That is why the story of Mithras matters to me. It says that tyranny is not sacred. That the powerful do not own the lives of the powerless. And that we are not condemned to let the world remain as we found it."
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then Amelia placed her hand on the case's clasp.
"I was afraid during my initiation," she said. "Not because I doubted the faith, but because I understood what the rite was asking me to face. I thought I had conquered that fear. Years later, I learned that fear does not vanish simply because you have named it."
She opened the case.
Inside lay a shallow, dark-lined compartment. Something stirred beneath its cover.
Amelia's fingers paused on the clasp.
"The sacrifice you are about to witness is not an ornament to the ceremony," she said. "Nor is it meant to frighten you for its own sake. The rite requires the death of a Dementor. Its essence is an indispensable part of the Thariac. Without it, this stage of initiation cannot be performed."
A coldness spilled into the sanctuary.
The lamp flames shrank. The air seemed to drain of warmth, and a thin mist curled over the stone floor. Something tall and hooded began to rise from the case, its robes hanging in ragged folds. Beneath the hood there was no face the children could make sense of—only a terrible, empty darkness.
A Dementor.
A sharp cry escaped one of the younger cousins. Another stumbled backward. George froze, his eyes wide. Julian's breath caught in his throat. The cold reached Mars like fingers closing around his ribs.
He felt it searching him, dragging at the edges of his mind. The chamber seemed to dim. The relief on the wall blurred; the faces around him became distant. Somewhere in the back of his thoughts, a grief he had buried long ago stirred like a thing waking beneath ice.
Amelia stood very still.
"This is what fear does when it is given a body," she said, her voice strained but controlled. "It feeds on despair. It makes you believe that nothing good has ever happened to you, and that nothing good ever can."
The Dementor floated higher.
Then Edmund stepped forward.
Clement, Castor, Hugh, and Helios moved with him. Each drew his wand—not in the familiar posture of a wizard preparing a spell, but held it upright, close to the chest, as though it were an emblem in a ceremony older than ordinary magic.
They spoke.
The words were not English. They were not Latin, nor any language Mars recognized. The sounds rolled through the sanctuary in a measured cadence, low and resonant, overlapping without confusion. The stone beneath their feet seemed to answer them.
The Dementor shuddered.
Its robes pulled inward, twisting as though an invisible force had seized them. The cold intensified for one terrible instant. The children pressed together, unable to look away.
Then the five men spoke a final phrase.
The Dementor convulsed.
A crack of sound split the chamber—not like a wand's report, but like ice breaking across a frozen lake. The creature folded in upon itself. Its hood collapsed, its limbs dissolved into smoke, and the darkness that had filled the room was torn apart by a flash of deep blue.
It died.
Where it had been, a viscous fluid spilled down through the air and struck a waiting vessel Helios had raised beneath it. The substance was a dark, almost luminous blue, thicker than blood and shining faintly in the lamplight.
The cold began to recede.
The cousins remained motionless.
"What was that?" Arthur whispered.
"A Dementor," Amelia said. She closed the empty case. "And its death was necessary. You were not brought here to watch a spectacle. The essence it yields is required for the Thariac. The rite cannot proceed without it."
"Why use something so horrible?" George asked, his voice thin.
"Because the Thariac is not an ordinary potion," Helios answered. "Its preparation is part of the mystery. The Dementor's essence must be obtained through the rite, not substituted with something convenient. You have witnessed the sacrifice that makes the next stage possible."
He carried the vessel to the altar. The blue substance trembled inside it, as if it had not yet settled.
"Dementor essence," he said. "Rare, dangerous, and not to be handled without preparation."
He brought forward a second vessel, a small flask of dark liquid, and poured a measured amount into the first. Then he added several drops from a narrow vial, murmuring words under his breath. The ingredients swirled together, turning from blue to a deep, iridescent shade that seemed to contain both darkness and light.
"What is it?" Adrian asked.
"The Thariac," Helios replied.
"Is it a potion?"
"It is a preparation used in our rite. Its making is known only to Mithras's priests."
He set the vessel on the altar.
"Today, you will take a little of it. You will not be asked to understand everything you experience. You will be asked to remain present, to observe, and to trust the guidance of those who stand with you."
Cyrus remained beside Castor, watching.
"You're not taking it?" Mars asked him.
"I have already undergone this part of the initiation," Cyrus said. "Today I'm here as a witness."
He sounded calm, but his eyes stayed fixed on the Thariac.
Amelia moved among the children who were to participate. She spoke to each in turn, checking that they were steady, that none had been injured by the cold, and that each understood they could speak if they felt unwell. Her manner was calm, but Mars noticed that her hand lingered on Cyrus's shoulder when she passed him.
When she reached Mars, she paused.
"Are you ready?"
Mars glanced at the vessel. "What should it feel like?"
"No two initiates experience it in exactly the same way," Amelia said. "Do not chase what you think you ought to see. Let the rite unfold."
Helios brought the Thariac to them.
One by one, the young cousins drank.
The taste was bitter at first, then strangely sweet, with a faint metallic sharpness at the back of the tongue. Mars felt warmth spread through his chest. The lamp-light grew brighter, then softer, then seemed to break apart into little points of colour.
The temple breathed.
That was the first thought that came to him. The walls expanded and contracted with a slow rhythm. The stars painted overhead began to drift, their silver trails bending into curves. The stone benches seemed to stretch away into the distance.
Someone laughed. Someone else whispered a name.
Mars tried to turn toward the sound, but the movement felt delayed, as if his body were separated from him by a thin sheet of glass.
Then the visions came.
He saw the orchard outside the temple, but the trees were impossibly tall, their branches reaching into a sky filled with unfamiliar constellations. He saw a wheel of stars turning above a black sea. He saw a sun rising behind mountains that had no shadows. He heard voices speaking in languages he had never learned, yet somehow understood.
The chamber's floor vanished beneath him.
Mars was standing in a vast darkness. The others were gone. He could not see the altar, the benches, or the temple walls. Only the relief remained, floating before him, brighter than it had been in the waking world.
The carved Mithras moved.
At first, the motion was subtle: the god's cloak stirred, the angle of his head changed. Then the entire relief seemed to peel away from the stone. The bull bucked beneath him, its hooves striking sparks against the darkness.
Mithras rose.
He kicked the bull aside.
The animal's great body rolled away into the void, and the god stood alone. In his hand, he held a star.
It was not a carved star, nor a point of light like those painted on the ceiling. It was a brilliant, many-rayed thing, burning with a deep, clear radiance. Its light spread outward, filling the darkness, washing the temple in blue-white brilliance.
Mars could not move.
The god turned toward him.
And the world stopped.
The stars froze. The light hung motionless. Even Mars's breath seemed suspended.
Mithras looked directly at him.
Then the god spoke.
"Ohtani Kyosuke…"
The voice was not loud. It did not need to be. It came from everywhere at once—from the star, from the stone, from the silence between one heartbeat and the next.
"Ohayo gozaimasu."
Mars's blood ran cold.
No one in this world knew that name.
No one was supposed to.
He stared at Mithras, unable to speak, while the star in the god's hand shone brighter still.