The sea was calm in a way that made sailors nervous.
Corvus stood at the starboard rail with his coat open, wind dragging at the fabric and at the tail of his pale hair where it had been tied back for the deck. The frigate moved with a steady, measured hum. Steel, wards, and enchanted engines all kept their own rhythm, and the deck officers kept theirs. Nobody rushed when he was present. Nobody talked too loudly. Even the ones who were brave enough to grin did it with their eyes down and their hands busy.
Umbra circled overhead, a smear of shadow against the morning light. A gull tried to take the same airspace and veered away as if it had been warned.
Elizaveta joined him after a while. Boots on metal, a pause at his shoulder, then her hand found the lower edge of his ribs through his shirt. A check, not affection. She liked the habit of reminding herself he was there. They stood in a comfortable silence.
When they returned to his study, his desk greeted them with the parchment bundle waiting under a paperweight shaped like a carved raven.
Corvus flipped the top report with one finger.
The magical world was changing without him standing in the room.
It had been changing for months, but now it had the sour smell of early crisis, the kind that starts with whispers and ends with a clash.
Unit patrols had become a story of their own. A clerk in Cardiff settlement had written a complaint about Bastion's presence and vanished from his desk chair, only to return with a limp and a polite smile that did not reach his eyes. Local DMLE commanders kept doing the same calculation. They had their badges, their laws, and their chain of command. The Bastion had size, silence, and a loyalty that did not bend to a ministry stamp.
Corvus did not need to be on scene for his reputation to do the work. It moved ahead of him like a shadow cast by a fire.
Elizaveta leaned in enough to read the header seals, then drew back. Her expression did not soften.
The younger generation was worse for the ministries. Teenagers and new graduates watched footage of healers and Unit members standing in a riot line without flinching. They watched order being enforced with the kind of certainty their own Aurors had never offered them. They did not see the internal meetings, the oaths, the sealed rooms. They saw results.
Idol was the word the newspapers all over the Magical World used when they wanted to pretend it was harmless.
Authority was what it actually became. Corvus' shadow became more influential than governments. Saying his name in disdain in the hearing range of members of the Unit or the Black Bastion was enough for a beating and a kind 're-education.' Doing it out of hearing range was no different. Rumours about ghosts being spies for him was laready circulating.
A new note sat clipped to the bundle. Black Bastion internal. Ink darker than normal. The hand belonged to a man who had learned to write like a soldier.
Corvus scanned it, then let it fall back to the table.
Local DMLE forces still avoided conflict. That part was predictable. Nobody sane wanted to clash with people who cast without wands and without words, then dragged a problem into a basement and returned it with a new personality and a gratitude problem.
Elizaveta watched his face, waiting for the part where irritation would show. Nothing did.
"You built a fear they cannot control," her voice stayed low, flat, a private observation delivered like a weather report.
Corvus kept his gaze on the sea. "They could try control if they stopped pretending they own it."
Her fingers tightened slightly against his side. "They like pretending."
He let out a quiet breath that might have passed for amusement if someone else had dared it. "So do children."
The mundane world had its own version of panic.
Selection tents were everywhere now. Parks. Stadium car parks. Converted school halls. Lines that wrapped around blocks. Families arrived early, took photos, and posted them like pilgrims. In some cities, people stood between Unit members and their own police, hands up, faces set, the kind of loyalty that did not ask for pay.
Governments had learned from the examples written in blood and ash. Libya had been a lesson. Africa had been a lesson. Persia had been a lesson. Afghanistan had been erased like a name scratched off a stone. The latest assassinations made the message simple. This was not a game. The ones still in suits and uniforms understood reality. Their problem was not knowing. Their problem was acting.
Every time a cabinet floated a new department to counter mana users, something happened. A minister changed his mind after a break, smile too wide, voice too calm. Funding vanished from a budget line as if it had never been approved. A senior official died in his sleep with a report unfinished on the desk and no cause anyone could name.
With no Muggleborns, the mundanes had no bridge. No low-level leaks from children who went home for the holidays. No quiet acquaintances. No civilian gossip that could be turned into intelligence. Nil. Nulam.
Their only connection was the official visits and the staged press appearances. That kept them blind, and blind people get jumpy.
Elizaveta shifted her weight and looked out of the window. The frigate's wake cut a hard line behind them.
"Mundanes make poor choices under pressure," she noted.
Corvus turned the next page of the report and found a list of incidents. Protest lines broken with force. A government that tried to arrest a Unit detachment and lost three men to spells that left no burns and no bruises. A general whose heart stopped during a speech.
He set the parchment down.
"They are on edge," Corvus replied. "Edges are where blades live."
Her hand slid away, and she stepped back half a pace. The gesture made room, and it was a courtesy she did not offer lightly.
A Bastion Guard knocked and entered upon his command. The towering giant of a man approached with a respectful distance, posture straight, eyes flicking to Corvus's face with fanatic zeal bordering on faith. The man held a sealed tube with a black wax stamp.
Corvus took it and broke the seal with his thumb. The wax crumbled like dried blood.
Greece. The Aegean. Coordinates, rune marks, and a short note report from a Shadow living with the Merfolk clan. Beneath it, a second hand had written the same name twice. Corvus especially sent the Shadows to the region to locate the Immortal.
Herpo the Foul.
Corvus rolled the parchment back into the tube.
Elizaveta watched him set it down. "We are close."
The sea breeze carried salt and engine heat. Beneath it, something else lingered. A faint taste of old magic. Not the bright churn of a ritual circle, more like the residue left in stone after centuries of stubborn presence.
Corvus let his senses open a fraction more. This was the closest location where the Skull Portkey would have taken him.
He moved from the rail with no hurry. The crew cleared a lane without being told.
Below deck, the frigate's corridors narrowed, steel ribs and ward lines humming underfoot. Corvus passed through the armoury, past the sealed crate marked with the Bastion seal, and into the small ritual room the ship carried for emergencies.
A basin sat in the centre, water in it so still it looked like black glass.
Elizaveta followed and shut the door behind them.
Corvus set two fingers into the basin. The surface did not ripple. It accepted.
Spatial mastery folded, not like a dramatic tear in the world, but like stepping through a door you had always owned. The frigate vanished behind him.
Stone replaced steel.
Cold replaced warmth.
The air stank.
Herpo's cave was not underwater. It was a wound in the cliff face above a hidden inlet, far enough from any fishermen's path and tucked behind a shelf of rock that made the entrance invisible from the sea. Corvus smelled stagnant water, fish rot, old smoke, and the sour bite of human waste that had never met soap.
A trickle of fresh water ran from a crack in the ceiling, but it was not spring water. It had the clean taste of Augmenti.
Corvus let invisibility, flight and phase move him forward.
A figure hunched by a small fire pit, naked to the waist despite the chill, skin greyed by age and neglect. The man's hair hung in oily ropes. His beard was a matted curtain. A fish lay half gutted on a flat stone beside him.
Herpo did not notice Corvus' arrival. His eyes flicked toward the cave wall as if watching something only he could see.
Corvus stood still long enough to see what the historical figure was doing. The old wizard's aura was a fracture, like stained glass broken and held together by spite. Chaos, strife and discord clung to him as traits.
Corvus reached for Replication.
The system responded in the quiet way it always did, a cold acknowledgement without praise.
Broken by Discord.
The rest assembled behind it in Corvus's mind as if someone had laid out a drawer of tools. Black, Death and Dark Magic at Diamond. Rituals, Soul and Magical Theory at Platinum. Enchanting and Temporal Magic at gold. Spatial, Life, Alchemy and Psychic at silver.
Underwhelming, compared to what Corvus had pulled from Abydos and what Perenelle Flamel had. Still, useful not as a source of power but as an indicator.
Herpo lifted the fish and bit into it raw.
Corvus watched the motion without flinching. "Herpo the Foul."
The name tasted like a curse.
Herpo's head turned slowly. His eyes were bloodshot, pupils uneven, and the gaze did not land cleanly. It jittered, then caught, then slid away again.
"Another one," Herpo's voice came out thick, as if it had forgotten what speech felt like. "Another hunter. Another young god."
Corvus stepped closer. The smell intensified. He kept his face neutral.
"You lived long enough to become a warning story," Corvus replied. "That is the closest thing to an achievement you have left."
Herpo's mouth worked. A laugh tried to form and broke into a cough.
Corvus let Psychic Mastery uncoil.
Herpo's aura shivered. His eyes widened, then his shoulders sagged as invisible hands pinned him in place.
He pushed more. Herpo's mind was like a broken realm made of shards.
The mind he entered was a ruined library. Memories stacked without order, pages torn out, ink smeared. Every thought sat on top of another thought, discord on discord, and beneath it all a thread of hunger so old it had worn grooves.
Corvus followed the thread.
Immortality.
It began like most downfalls begin, with ambition and the certainty that rules were for lesser minds. Herpo's experiments flashed past in jagged fragments, basilisks bred in pits, creatures with too many limbs, venom distilled into syringes, servants screaming behind locked doors. Ancient Greek myths were not stories in his mind. They were catalogues.
The search for the golden apple of immortality had been a fixation. Gaia's gift to Hera. A promise dressed as fruit.
Herpo had hunted for it across islands and ruins, stealing maps, murdering Muggles and Magicals, torturing priestesses, breaking wards that were older than wizarding Europe's idea of civilisation.
Then the moment of triumph.
A golden apple in his hands, heavy, warm, its surface too perfect.
With every bite came a shift. With every bite came Discord. Came Strive and Chaos.
It was not the gift of Gaia. It was Elder Eris' artefact. The apple had not offered immortality as a blessing. It had offered it as a cruel joke. Herpo bit into it in the memory, and Corvus felt the taste, sharp metal and sweetness, then the sensation of something entering the mind like a splinter that refused to stop growing.
A small act of conflict, a whispered insult, a nudge of suspicion. Each one expanded. Every relationship turned. Every thought tried to fight the thought beside it.
Herpo got his Immortality. A shattered mind, stain of an Elder's essence. Corvus pulled back a fraction and watched the old wizard's face twitch in real time, as if the memory had been re tasted. He let the old wizard free of his telekinetic hold.
"You wanted immortality," Corvus noted. "You got it. You paid with coherence."
Herpo's fingers scraped at his own forearm until blood welled. The motion did not seem to satisfy him.
"You," Herpo rasped, "you carry too much. Too many threads. It will tear you. It tears everyone."
Corvus kept the psychic pressure steady, then tightened it with a calm cruelty that made the cave feel smaller.
"I do not tear," Corvus replied. "I cut."
Herpo's pupils pinched. A whimper tried to form. Pride killed it.
Corvus looked down at the filthy stone, at the raw fish, at the man who had once been a name that frightened schoolchildren. Compared to Perenelle, this was pathetic. Compared to Gonzalo, it was still pathetic. Yet the trait mattered.
Broken by Discord.
Corvus's mind stayed clinical. Such a figure was not welcome in his world. Not as an ally, not as a loose end, not as a story that could be used. He let the thought settle and watched Herpo feel it.
The old wizard's eyes sharpened for a heartbeat, clarity punching through the discord like a nail. Fear arrived. Real fear.
"You came to take," Herpo managed. Corvus simply tilted his head.