"They may be trying to eat the constraints," Perenelle said. "Whatever's holding that site shut. Whatever we locked away."
"To free it," Nicolas added.
Cassian went very still.
Greece.
Remembering the thing buried in Greece, Cassian's gut twisted. Back then, they'd caught it rousing. Just rousing. That was the only reason they'd managed to lock it down, because it hadn't fully woken yet, like it was only the half. Still blinking through ten thousand years of sleep.
Even then, it had nearly levelled them. If Bathsheda's runes hadn't taken, if the Old Masters hadn't lent their weight, it would've shredded them to pieces. They'd have died before they could say 'containment.'
He was sure of it.
And now Nicolas said the Crawlers were heading that way.
If they got into that site, if they tore through the bindings, fed on the runes, scraped the chains back to dust, if that thing opened its eyes properly...
End of the world. No doubt about it.
Cassian's jaw clenched. He stared at the map. "Been thinking. Crawlers eat memory. You wiped yours for the same reason. What if they're not just heading there to eat the bindings. What if they're trying to eat the memory of it."
Nicolas stopped.
Perenelle's head turned to him fully.
"I've never thought that," Nicolas said quietly.
No one spoke for a second.
They'd all assumed the Crawlers were simply destructive, predators chewing through wards, spells, history. Evil, because the damage was real.
But Cassian heard the same name when he clashed with the leading Crawler. Was it a worship or hatred, he had no idea. He only knew he heard the creature's name.
And yet the Crown of Evil didn't wake despite being remembered. Right?
Perenelle and Nicolas shook their heads.
"We can't interpret it," Perenelle said. "Not without remembering the creature. And we buried those memories for a reason."
Cassian didn't argue. "Yeah."
Nicolas rested his elbows on the table. "We've finished the foot-path. For now, the Night Crawlers can't get through."
He looked over the map again, fingers drumming. "All we can do is trust the old ones who sealed it in the first place. They must've had reasons."
Cassian watched the projection turn. The arrow still hovered over Greece.
Nicolas flicked a hand, and the map folded itself back down. The light dimmed.
"Until they make a move," he said, "we hold."
***
Cassian and Bathsheda spent most of the Christmas break holed up in Flamel Manor, tucked into that bizarre little valley. Most of their days were split between digging through the Flamels' library, endless rows of leather-bound nightmares they were, and pitching questions across the study table until one of them got smug. Nicolas called it "healthy debate." Perenelle muttered something about "spirited warfare" and brought snacks.
The garden out back had magic stitched into the roots. Cassian spent hours watching how the hedges re-knitted themselves when you weren't looking. The bluebells flirted with him. One of the vines tried to bite Bathsheda's ankle in jealousy.
Gabrielle lurked underfoot more often than not, switching between adorable and unbearable depending on who had sweets. She stuck to Bathsheda like a barnacle, and antagonised Cassian with the commitment of a champion. Fleur, when not off sending letters to Goshawk or buried in a translation, made time to check in. She left the day after Christmas to continue her apprenticeship.
Armand and Apolline left too, pulled back by Ministry schedules and family obligations. Vivienne stayed behind, as always. She'd served the Flamels for decades. She called it honour.
When the break was coming to an end, Cassian and Bathsheda packed up, said their goodbyes, and took a quiet detour on the way back.
St Mungo's was easy to find. But the room they stepped into might as well have been cut from another world.
Alice and Frank Longbottom's new room. It smelled faintly of disinfecting charms and old potions. Alice sat by the window, hands folded, gaze drifting somewhere above the skyline. Frank was sitting on his bed, staring at nothing.
Cassian watched them for a moment, jaw clenched. The wards around this room were tighter than most Gringotts vaults. Layer after layer, charms stacked to the ceiling. No one touched them. No one got near without clearance. Dumbledore had made sure of that. The Order had reinforced it. Some of the Aurors took shifts just to stand outside, faces grim and quiet.
Since during the ritual the two were basically vegetables, and vegetables couldn't hate, Voldemort had hesitated. The ritual required the blood of the enemy, forcibly taken. Frank and Alice fit that, on paper. But their bodies didn't carry hate anymore.
So he said he'd heal them. Let them remember. Let them hate. Then finish the ritual properly. Cassian didn't wait to see how. He didn't have time to stall the escape. Even if he had, he wasn't going to stand by and let Voldemort gain full power cleanly.
And most of all, he knew damn well healing, in Voldemort's dictionary, meant something else entirely. Gods knew what he would've done to make them feel again. What he would've twisted, dug up, burned through to reach hate.
So, Cassian escaped. Took the window while it was open.
And left Voldemort one step short.
Perhaps that was why Dumbledore couldn't heal them. He wasn't weaker than Voldemort, was he? But he refused the price.
Voldemort would've torn at whatever was left inside them, yanked their awareness up for a heartbeat, squeezed hate out of it, and let it drop again. One second of clarity. One second of terror. Enough to finish a ritual. Enough to break them for good.
Dumbledore wouldn't do that.
Cassian sat down opposite the Longbottoms and let out a slow breath.
"Alright," He muttered, more to himself than anyone else. "Let's try this the slow way."
He rested his hands on his knees, shutting his eyes.
Honestly, Cassian hadn't believed in souls for a long while. Not before magic, anyway. But then you wake up in another body with a second life crammed in your head and suddenly your old world view looks a bit useless.
Add in ghosts, cursed objects that screamed, and summers spent hunting those screaming artifacts, each one carrying a piece of a very bald, very noseless Dark Lord, and his view of the world slowly began to shift.
He took a few slow breaths. What he was about to do wasn't dangerous on its own, but if handled poorly, it could injure him or the host. The Druids called this Soul Conversation. Naff name, but apt. Old magic that tapped into resonance between things. Animals, trees, sometimes people. Anything with a pulse and a presence, really. They used it to speak to what couldn't speak back. Or what spoke in ways most didn't understand.
The spell itself was simple. Letting your own noise settle until there was space for something else to speak. He'd learned it last summer, somewhere deep under a forest that had forgotten it was part of Britain. It had been buried in an underground cave, by an earthquake or a landslide, he wasn't sure. The marks suggested a massive shift of earth. Unless, of course, the land itself had crept upward to hide it. That seemed just as possible.
What he'd seen over the summer had opened his eyes to things he once would have ignored, things he could no longer pretend impossible.
Cassian dropped a hand to the edge of the bed. The Druids had never thought the world was quiet. They thought humans were closing themselves to it. To them, Earth breathed. Literally. A slow pulse that ran through stone, soil, water. The great tree that connected every inch of this beautiful planet they called home. Roots everywhere. Under forests, under cities, under oceans. One system, branching and folding back into itself. Life passing messages the way blood passes oxygen.
In his old life, science had already proven half of it. Forests wired together by roots and fungi, trees passing warnings, sharing food, leaning on each other when one was sick. Mycelium networks running for miles, quiet and busy as nerves. Animals tuned in whether humans noticed or not.
Same with people. Cells talking. Nerves firing. Signals running faster than thought.
Same system. Different scale.
Everything connected. You just had to stop shouting long enough to hear it.
He imagined the sensation trickling down from his fingertip, through the bed. He pushed a little deeper. His focus slipped past the skin, the bones, the echo of magic long since collapsed in on itself. What came next was harder, something inside him pulling against it, instinct flinching back from how empty it felt in there.
Still, he pressed on. The further he reached, the colder it got. A house with all its windows open and nothing inside. As he focused, he began to see the damage, plain and unmistakable. And the more he saw, the angrier he felt. Nerve endings were a mess, burned out, charred from the inside. He leaned closer. Wave after wave of trauma rolled through him, pain layered atop itself, old wounds never allowed to fade, only buried beneath newer ones.
Dozens of Cruciatus hits, maybe more. Cassian frowned.
He shifted, reached again. For something, anything beneath it.
The first thing he felt was absence. Hollow, like something had been scraped out.
He moved carefully. Finding no surges. Past memory. Past magic... he felt a faint pressure. Buried deep.
Cassian narrowed in.
There. A thread. Faint as breath. He latched on.
Whatever was left wasn't a soul in any full sense. It was a shell.
Cassian blinked hard. Pulled back.
That... wasn't right.
He stepped over to Alice.
Same quiet. Same overload scars in the nerves, only worse. Her channels were tangled, collapsed in places. There were echoes where memory used to be.
He reached for one.
It spun him. Hard. Pulled him sideways through fragments, shadows of voices, faces, none holding still. Her mind was stuck mid-collapse. He couldn't grab anything real. Everything slipped.
Whatever they'd done to the Longbottoms, it had been for pain. Careful, patient ruin.
He pulled back, shaking.
Bathsheda caught him before his knees buckled, hands on his shoulders.
"Easy," she said.
Cassian dragged in air like he'd surfaced from deep water. Seeing even a slice of it had gutted him from within. His hands were shaking from the pain.
She waited until his breathing steadied.
"What did you find?" she asked.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared at the floor. "I don't know." He took another breath. "But it looks like Alice and Frank hid themselves. Deep."
She frowned, but waited for him to explain.
"There's a shell down there," he went on. "Magical. Not something done to them. Something they did, probably. I didn't push it. Not without knowing what I was poking."
Bathsheda's eyes narrowed slightly. "You think they cut themselves out of their bodies."
He nodded. "Yeah."
He grabbed his wrist to stop the shaking.
"The pain was too much," Cassian said. "Cruciatus hurts your soul, body, magic, everything... Makes sure you feel every second." He swallowed. "At some point, instinct kicks in. Same as any creature pushed past what it can take."
She folded her arms, listening.
"Plenty of examples," he said. "Lizards drop their tails when grabbed. Because survival beats wholeness." He rubbed his palm against his trouser leg. "Octopuses will shut down whole limbs under stress. Deer freeze so hard their heart rate drops to nothing. Humans dissociate. Minds step sideways when the body can't cope."
He looked back toward the beds.
"This is that. Taken further. They coudln't run physically, so they ran inward. Pulled whatever was left of themselves away from the pain and locked it somewhere safe." His jaw tightened. "Like hibernation, but for the soul."
Bathsheda exhaled slowly. "So they're still there."
"Yes," he said. "Just... buried."
She rested her forehead briefly against his shoulder, grounding them both.
"If someone forces their way in..." she began.
"They'll kill what's left," Cassian cut in. "Or worse, drag it back too fast. That shell's a bunker. Cannot be opened casually."
He straightened, a little steadier now. "If they come back, it has to be on their terms. Slow. Familiar. No ripping things open because it makes us feel better."
Bathsheda nodded. "Then we don't touch it."
"Not yet."
He glanced back at Alice and Frank, still and quiet in their beds.
"They survived torture by disappearing," he said. "I'm not about to punish them for that."
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