Corvus sat in his study aboard the frigate and stared at a map he no longer cared about.
Europe was spread across the table under pins, circles, routes, and small marks in his own hand. The ministries were where they should be. The Bastion expanded, the Unit healed, intimidated, and recruited without needing him to stand over every shoulder, and Black Spire was monitoring and replacing key points as they saw fit.
That was the problem.
He had built something vast, and for the first time since awakening in this world, a part of him looked at it and measured waste.
The third task would be on the twenty-fourth of June. There were months until then. Hogwarts, the tournament, the ministries, the schools, the new order across the magical world, all of it had felt like a complete board only a short time ago.
Thanatos had changed that.
Once the Architect had spoken plainly about return, harvest, and reset, half the board had started looking like scaffolding around a project that belonged to someone else.
Corvus leaned back in the chair and let his gaze drift to the black boxes on the side table.
Juracán's blood had already been added to his repertoire. The lightning was quiet now, tamed and answering to him rather than testing him. He could silence the arcs completely or let them run over his hands and shoulders in narrow, bright lines that obeyed his will as neatly as any spell.
His eyes returned to the map, but he was no longer seeing it. His mind was in the halls of the temple beneath Abydos, the ritual craft of its priests, the way they had altered flesh, essence, and obedience with the ease of men trained to treat living beings as clay.
He could do that.
Perhaps not with their exact methods. He will add his desired traits.
He rose, moved to the side table, and opened the first box.
Vials sat there in ordered rows, the blood held in glass with the sort of self-importance only ancient power could manage.
Juracán, Thanatos, Hades, and others still unclassified.
Corvus picked one up, rolled it between two fingers, then set it back with care. His mind moved faster than his hands.
If Architects did not breed among themselves to keep power confined to the upper reaches of their own hierarchy, then the rest followed. Blood was not merely inheritance. It was rationed essence. A controlled method of creating a serving class that would never be allowed to rise high enough to become competition.
Half-bloods, he almost smiled at the correctness of the word.
He had no interest whatsoever in becoming a servant species. Which meant the answer could not be hiding. It would be construction.
He returned to the desk, cleared the map aside with one hand, and pulled fresh parchment toward himself. The quill moved at once.
The first lines were simple: Architect blood, philosopher's stones, soul pattern, flesh pattern, binding structure, and stability.
He paused and tapped the quill once against the margin.
The priests of Abydos had taken humans and altered them into things fit for function, into temple stock, servants, and enhanced vessels, with failures disposed of without sentiment. The process had been brutal, but brutality was not the point. The point had been control over the result.
So the question became narrower. Could he manipulate magicals the same way, not simply strengthen them or improve breeding lines, but push them into beings closer to Thanatos and use them as a renewable source of blood, essence, and perhaps even partial Architect patterning?
His eyes sharpened.
If he could examine the blood properly, compare it against soul structures, and identify what in an Architect was inherited, what was imposed by feeding, then maybe the process could be replicated or improved.
The philosopher's stones in Purgatory would solve the power problem. There were enough of them to work for a long time.
Corvus started another page.
He wrote Juracán first, then Hades, and finally Thanatos. These three he was sure of. If there were others, it would need to be confirmed.
Each would require separation, classification, and dissection of traits by domain resonance and by interaction with his own sacred blood.
The final page took longer. Thanatos's soul pattern mattered more than the others. Blood alone would only give him more raw force and more domain alignment, while soul pattern might teach him structure, how much of Thanatos was blood, how much was construction, and how much had been done to him by someone older and stronger.
Corvus put the quill down and stood motionless for a moment.
The easiest route remained the same as it had been five minutes earlier: convince Thanatos to cooperate.
That would save time, reduce uncertainty, and give him the cleanest access to an actual Architect's internal structure without reducing the subject to a battlefield first.
There were problems with that route.
Thanatos might be vain, isolated, and complacent, but he was not stupid. Cooperation would require either leverage, deception strong enough to hold under an Architect's scrutiny, or a framework in which the creature believed obedience to be aligned with its own interest.
None of those routes was impossible, and none of them was easy. The only alternative was the simpler one. Fight him, win, and then work with what remains.
Corvus moved to the windows of the study and looked out over the water.
The frigate cut through the sea in smooth silence.
He put one hand against the glass.
Imprisoning an Architect was the next problem. He was not sure he had the method yet, and yet was the important word.
If the method did not exist, he would make one.
He refused to build a world for years, reshape its governments, seize its fleets, alter its magical populations, and set half its future in motion only to hand it back to a line of ancient harvesters.
No.
If anything, that knowledge only made the theft feel more justified. He returned to the desk and began setting the work into ordered stages. Examine Juracán, Thanatos, Hades, and unknown blood samples. Continue consumption and consolidation. Model an imposed transformation structure using Abydos rituals adapted for magicians. Study Thanatos's soul pattern next week when replicating.
Only after that would he decide whether cooperation or war was the wiser route. He wrote until the pages became a stack.
When he stopped at last, the sky outside had shifted enough to prove time had passed. He did not care. He stacked the notes, sealed them with a private mark and ward, and moved them into a locked drawer.
The world had changed, and so would the plan.
--
Far away from Britain and the private concerns of one increasingly ambitious immortal, the merger of MACUSA moved toward its end with remarkable speed.
Most people inside the Woolworth Building saw only what they were meant to see: committees, votes, reassignments, archive movement, structural reform, and new alliances between old names that had once sworn never to share a corridor if pride could prevent it.
Ruben Goldstein saw more.
That had been both his gift and his profession for years.
He sat in a narrow side chamber off one of the larger congress halls with a cup of coffee gone lukewarm and a newspaper folded in his lap. The pose was calculated to look harmless. A bored pureblood waiting for someone slow, tedious, or wealthy enough to be worth enduring.
His mind moved in quick, clean touches. Ripping was for amateurs and DMLE brutes.
A passing department head gave him two figures hidden from the public budget. A noble delegate from Salem handed over, without ever knowing it, the name of the mistress he had in a townhouse upstate under his aunt's alias. A conclave secretary surrendered a scheduling conflict that would be worth money to exactly three people and ruinous to one.
Ruben gathered all of it and filed it away.
Information was a business like any other. The foolish part was giving it away for free.
Lately, however, his little trade had turned unpleasant.
Too many minds that should have remained easy to read were changing.
Not closing in the ordinary sense, not warded, not trained, but changing.
One day, a man would have an office full of ordinary thoughts, vanity, appetite, fear, debt, grudges, mediocre plans and hidden sins. Next, Ruben would reach again and find a vault even goblins would envy.
Cold walls, ordered responses, and nothing loose enough to steal.
At first, he had blamed training, a new discipline of Occlumency, effective enough to resist a natural Legilimens
Then coincidence, but now there were too many of them.
Too many leaders, too many department heads, and too many key figures within the Congress were suddenly developing minds like locked stone.
He understood what it meant.
Some organisation was pulling people out and putting others in their place, or changing them so completely that the difference no longer mattered.
That information alone was worth a fortune. Which led to the question that had been spoiling his business.
Sell it or keep breathing. He was still pondering, which in itself was unusual. Ruben Goldstein usually liked money well enough to decide quickly.
The old saying about the Abyss and gazes turned out to be more practical than poetic.
He realised how practical the moment the Bastion Guards formed a loose half circle around his chair.
They had approached without hurry and without noise. One by the door. Two within his peripheral vision. One behind him, close enough that Ruben did not need Legilimency to know he would lose before he finished standing if he chose the wrong movement.
He set the cup down very carefully.
A few people in the corridor noticed the formation, looked once, and then developed a deep personal interest in the opposite wall.
Ruben rose anyway, remaining seated while surrounded by men built like armoured verdicts felt undignified.
"Gentlemen." He gave them a thin, perfectly civil smile. "How may I help you?"
The leading guard lowered his shield by an inch, which in Bastion language counted as warmth.
"Mr Goldstein, the director of DMLE, would like to meet you. Please follow us."
Not a request then.
Ruben adjusted his robes, chose not to try his gift on any of them, and followed.
The ride upward through the building felt longer than it was, and he spent it doing the one sensible thing available by keeping his mind to himself.
Hector Santiago's office sat high enough in the Woolworth Building to remind visitors that magical government had inherited not only power but taste for altitude. The room was large, orderly, and expensive in a way meant to imply public service rather than personal appetite.
Santiago sat behind the desk.
Ruben knew that face, and he also knew the change in it.
The old Hector had possessed an ordinary lawman's mind, focused and ambitious, irritable in places, and touchy about sloppiness. The man behind the desk now looked the same and felt different.
Ruben stepped inside, and the door shut behind him.
Santiago lifted his eyes and locked his gaze with Ruben's.
The probes met in the middle at once, and Ruben did not force. He answered the touch with his own, quick and disciplined, just enough to show that he had noticed and would not embarrass himself by pretending otherwise.
Santiago leaned back slightly.
"So, Goldstein." One finger tapped the desk once. "Did you sell this information to anyone?"
Ruben held his gaze. "I am not suicidal."
That earned him the faintest trace of amusement.
"We would like to invite you somewhere special."
A black feather lifted off the desk and floated across the space between them.
Ruben took it because declining objects handed over by changed men in high offices seemed like a poor survival policy.
Santiago's eyes sharpened.
"I suggest you keep your mind to yourself for your upcoming meeting, Mr Goldstein."
He then turned his head a fraction and said something under his breath in a language Ruben did not know, though the rough sound of it struck him as older than Latin and harsher around the edges.
Then the room vanished.
Ruben had just enough time to think that selling the information might, in retrospect, have been the safer choice.