Corvus closed the door with a quiet click and locked it. The corridor noise faded. Inside, there was only lamplight and the soft rasp of fabric as Lizaveta shifted on the settee.
She wore her hair in braids again. He noticed because she always did it when she wanted to look composed. It never worked. The moment he came close, her breath changed, and her composure went to pieces.
She lifted her chin in the way she had learned from Grigori's court. It lasted three heartbeats.
Corvus took her hand, not the way he did in public, palm down and formal. This was private. His thumb traced the inside of her wrist where the pulse gave everything away. Her fingers curled around his, warm and sure.
"You locked the door," she noted.
"People generally knock," he replied. "Some old folk, however, might forget to do so when the said door is of a room where we are alone."
A small smile tugged at her mouth. "My grandfather will not do that."
"Consider this a bet," he said, lifting one finger. After a second, the second finger joined, and the third and fourth followed. On the fifth, the door would have opened if not for the lock.
Grigori and Arcturus ' voices came over. "I told you he was up to no good, locking my Lizaveta like that."
"I will have you recall those words, Grigori, or so help me I'll declare a blood feud after exactly one year."
"You are a cheating bastard, Arcturus. You will have as many new members in house Black as you want. I will not accept such cheap feud."
"I will increase the taxes on everything from your half frozen country." Countered Arcturus.
Just as Corvus and Elizaveta were about to go to the door to calm the two stubborn goats, Vinda's voice reached them.
"You two! I told you to leave them alone. I forbid you to declare blood feud on each other for the next two hundred years."
Her next words were for the lovebirds. "Corvus, continue to your lesson. I will deal with these idiots."
Elizaveta scooted closer, shoulder brushing his. The contact was deliberate. A claim, a comfort, both at once. Corvus let himself sit back into it. He had been surrounded by old wolves, hungry discussions, and plans that made the air taste stale. This was simpler.
Lizaveta's hand slid to his collar, straightening it as if he had arrived rumpled from a ballroom instead of a laboratory.
"You smell like parchment," she murmured.
"And you smell like heaven," he answered, then leaned in and took her mouth in a slow kiss. He let her set the pace.
She always started carefully and ended boldly. It amused him every time.
Her fingers tightened at his collar. Her other hand found the line of his jaw, the touch feather light, like she was confirming he was real.
Corvus broke the kiss to breathe. He stayed close enough that her lashes brushed his cheek when she blinked.
"I missed you," she admitted. The words came out quiet, like she did not want them to carry beyond the walls.
"I know." He slid his hand behind her neck, thumb at the base of her braid. "You looked at the door three times during dinner."
Her eyes widened, half offended, half caught. "You watched me."
He kissed her again, shorter this time, then pressed his forehead to hers. "Of course I watched you."
The heat rose in her cheeks exactly as he expected. She tried to hide it by looking away. Corvus caught her chin and turned her back.
"Stay with me."
Lizaveta held his gaze. The sharpness she inherited from her grandfather surfaced for a moment.
"Is this a lesson," she asked, "or are you trying to distract me first?"
"A bit of both."
She huffed a laugh and leaned into him again. "You are insufferable."
"I have been told."
He let the silence stretch. Not empty with boredom. The kind that carried trust.
Corvus shifted, drawing her fully against his side. She folded into him without hesitation. Her head found his shoulder like it belonged there.
When her breathing steadied, he spoke again.
"Lizaveta."
She hummed in response.
"I am going to ask you for something," he said. "You can refuse."
Her face lifted. "You have never asked like that before."
"That is why I am asking like that now."
Her mouth parted as if she had a sharp reply ready. She swallowed it and waited.
"I need you to build a section in your mind palace." He watched her reaction closely, not as a predator. As a craftsman. "A clean room. Shelves. Drawers. A place for what I am about to give you. Not scattered through the rest."
Lizaveta's brows drew together. "You want to put memories in me."
"Corvus cleared his throat to distract his dirty mind from a reply that would earn him a slap.
"Knowledge, and into your mind," he corrected for both of their sakes.
"And you want me to open my mind."
"Yes."
She did not flinch. That, more than anything, was what caught him.
Corvus lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles. "If you are not comfortable, we stop. If anything feels wrong, we stop. You pull back, and I do not chase."
Lizaveta stared at him, then leaned in and kissed the corner of his mouth.
"I trust you, Corvus."
It was simple and pure.
He felt something in his chest shift, not soft, not weak, but present. The kind of feeling he would normally file away and ignore because it got in the way.
Corvus smiled, a genuine and warm smile, then kissed her forehead.
"This moment is going to be a core Patronus memory, my little wolf."
The blush came fast. She tried to scowl at the nickname and failed spectacularly. He kissed the tip of her nose. Then her mouth again, slower, savouring the small sound she made when she gave in.
"Show me," he murmured against her lips. "The door."
Lizaveta drew back and sat straighter. She closed her eyes. Her hands rested on her knees as if she were back in a formal lesson.
Corvus watched her breathing and the way she set her jaw. She was nervous, but she did not retreat.
A faint threat of Legilimency brushed her mind; she not only allowed entry but guided him to the new sector in her mind palace.
Lizaveta's throat bobbed. Then she nodded once.
Her mind was bright. Ordered. Not calm, but strong. A young woman raised among politics, trained to hold her posture even when her stomach twisted.
He stepped into the new room she had built. Simple stone, shelves that waited empty, a single table in the middle. A carved wolf head above the door, watching.
"Good work," he murmured aloud, and saw her lips curve slightly even with her eyes closed.
Corvus began to pour.
A controlled stream of knowledge and experience.
He started with foundations. The rules that made everything else possible. How to hold intent without strangling it. How to shape magic without letting emotion smear it. The first year methods, then the second, then the third. He moved steadily, pausing when her mind tightened, easing when her breathing hitched.
He did not dump a list of subjects into her like throwing books at a table. He stacked them. He showed how one supported the next.
There were moments when her fingers twitched, as if her body wanted to practice a wand movement. Corvus anchored her with a quiet touch to her wrist.
"Stay here," he instructed.
She obeyed.
Minutes turned to an hour, then two. Time blurred in the work.
He fed her the feel of clean transfiguration lines, the way a potion smelled when it was about to turn, the difference between a charm that obeyed and one that pretended. He gave her duelling footwork that saved knees and kept hips loose. He gave her the dead calm of dark arts discipline, the part Vinda demanded, the part Lizaveta craved because she hated feeling uncertain.
Her brow creased at one point. He slowed.
"What is it?" he asked softly.
Her lips moved. "It is a lot."
"It is," he agreed. "You are holding."
"I can hold more."
Corvus let the stream continue, but he watched for strain. He would not break her mind to prove a point.
When the shelves in her new room were full to the line he had set, he stopped. He withdrew cleanly.
The moment he left her mind space, he put her under a sleeping charm.
"You did great, Lizaveta," he murmured to himself. He sat still for a moment, listening to her breathing.
Then he lifted her.
She was too light, a petite wolf in his arctic tundra of a heart. considering the bite in her personality. Corvus carried her to the bed and pulled the cover up to her shoulders.
He stood there and watched her for a long moment. Her face in sleep looked more serene.
Care settled over him, quiet and undeniable.
Corvus reached out, caressed her jawline, then her cheek once, and then withdrew.
He turned toward the door.
As he stepped away from her bed, the fondness slipped from his expression. The warmth left his eyes. What remained was focus.
He opened the door and left, already thinking about the next experiment.
--
Corvus shut the door of his private lab with a twist of his wrist. The wards bit, recognised him, and settled. The Nest belonged to him in practice, but this one was his in truth. His personal heaven and hell of his test subjects.
Control of the time array waited in the centre of the floor, a circle of runic plates sunk into stone, each plate had the runes etched with a high precision CNC machine. The air above it looked wrong. Shimmering like the world had been stretched and stitched back together with a careless hand.
The ratio of this room was different. One to thirty. The only one in the Nest and impossible according to the Unspeakables.
He let his senses flare, just enough to taste what had changed since he left it yesterday evening. Magic moved faster here, but not cleaner. It always left residue, the way smoke clung to stone even after the fire was gone.
Fourteen stretchers lined the far wall, each one metal, each one bolted to the floor. Straps crossed throats, wrists, ankles. Not for restraint. For placement. He had learned quickly that the body did not like being told that time would run backwards, and it fought in ugly ways.
A rack of vials stood on a steel table beside the stretchers, labelled in his hand, neat and sharp. The rest of the room belonged to two worlds that hated each other. Glass coils and copper condensers sat beside centrifuges and balances. A potions rig that would have made Horatio Greengrass weep with envy rose from a bench of black marble, lit by steady blue flames. Above it, an array of Muggle lamps cast hard white light that refused to flatter anything.
Corvus walked along the line without rushing. He moved like a man checking a weapon.
Subject Temporal Magic Seventy seven lay under the light, face slack under stasis, lashes resting against information that no longer matched the file in his hand. He did not call her by her name. Once they entered his laboratory as test subjects, their life was already forfeit.
TM77.
He reached for the tag tied to her wrist. He cast multiple diagnostic charms to check her health. She was holding well; the changes did not go haywire like the seventy six before her.
He remembered what she had looked like when Kreacher picked her from a prison. A human Trafficker.
Late fifties, skin like old parchment, hair dyed too dark, eyes too sharp for someone in chains. She had spat the first time she saw him. A Muggle in a cage still tried to pretend the cage was an argument. That move cost her; she learned to stay put when not addressed and answer truthfully when asked. Such smart beings humans were when treated right...
Now she lay there in her twenties, the kind of face that could have fooled a judge and a camera. The scars that mattered were not on the skin. The procedure was not pain free afrterall. He would check those later...
Corvus turned his head and looked down the row.
The failures were gone. The ash had been swept, the floor cleaned, the metal scrubbed until it shone. He still saw them when he looked, because the room remembered.
The first attempts had been crude.
He had thought he could cover the whole body with a single temporal attempt, then pull the flow back the way one pulls a curtain. He had been wrong. Time did not slide neatly over flesh. It snagged on points, tore at weak seams. A liver went young while the lungs collapsed into wet rot. A hand smoothed into youth while the throat turned grey and shrank around the airway. He corrected every mistake. Scum by scum, the filth lying in stasis was the last example.
When the seams split, the smell came first. Entropy had one way before his experiments. Now, though, the body was trying to decide which decade it belonged to.
These Temporal experiments had taught him much. The first of them was that he stopped using people as fuel. He moved to the far table where a stack of notes waited, weighed down by a brass weight shaped like a raven. The top page held a series of small notes and numbers next to them. Chickens, rabbits, plants. He tapped the page once, then looked at the page behind it. Equations and runic matrices shared space, neither one conceding the wall.
He had used objects, then animals, then plants, and each step had stripped another layer of ignorance from the unknown.
By the third batch, he stopped feeding the spell with blood and started feeding it his own mana.
His raw magic.
He had watched his core dip like a reservoir being drained. He forced the flow to slow down. He was not sacrificing his magic; he was using it to control and manage the process.
He returned to TM77 and leaned close to her face. He willed a small and bright orb of light to appear above her eyes and monitored her iris. The pupil reacted under the stasis, a tiny reflex caught in amber.
He walked to the rack of vials and selected a thin one marked with a red line. Not a potion or a toxin. A stabilising infusion built from Flamel's memories and his own modifications, the kind of thing that would empty half of St Mungo's.
He pressed the vial to the injector, watched the clear fluid disappear into her vein, and held the stasis steady while her body tried to decide whether it was twenty or sixty.
After a minute, the tension in the small muscles around her jaw eased.
Corvus allowed himself one small breath that was close to satisfaction.
TM77 held.
He moved to the shelf where he kept his personal ledger. It was bound in dragon hide, not for drama, but because nowhere was safe enough for the kind of spells he wrote in it. He opened to a page filled with codes and dates and tiny corrections.
He wrote one line.
TM77 is stable under stasis. Further observation required.
He closed the ledger and turned his gaze to the remaining thirteen. He has replicated eight diamond level crafts from the immortal couple.
Alchemy.
Temporal Magic
Transmutation.
Soul.
Transformation.
Biological manipulation.
Chemical manipulation.
Aura manipulation.
He did not recite them like a child counting sweets. He felt their edges, the way each craft tried to pull his mind into its own grammar.
He had spent the first week with Nicholas learning how an immortal thought in steps, how the man held a method in his mind like a blade and refused to let it wobble. He had spent the next weeks watching Perenelle work without moving her face, hands clean while her magic did the ugly part.
He understood why Nicholas had survived. Perenelle was the reason. She was a walking disaster ready to be unleashed. The most dangerous individual he has met.
He also understood what the Codex meant.
Not a book. It was way more than that. It was a record.
A set of instructions left behind by things that were not human, not wizard, not anything that belonged to this world in the way a child belonged to a mother.
Underlings, the Codex had called them, in a memory that tasted like arrogance, but it was not. It was the simple and naked truth.
Corvus stood at the bench of the CNC machine and began drawing the next runic plate, fingers moving with the speed of habit. He slid a silver stylus into a groove and drew a line that linked two runes that should not have been linked. He was quite sure the array, when finished, was going to accept it.
His gaze moved to the corner of the room where a map of Europe hung. Beside it, another map, older, hand drawn, with borders that did not match any ministry record. He had marked four points with black ink.
Portugal.
Greece.
China.
India.
Other immortals.
Other relics.
Other pieces of the Codex or other relics that could be considered a Codex.
He stood up and stared at the screen of the CNC machine. The sharpness returned to his eyes. The cold focus that came before a hunt was seeping in.
If the Elders had left more, he would find it. If they had left people behind to guard it, he would find them too.
He turned back to the bench and started the machine, already thinking about how to make the world give up its secrets.