The pressure campaign began to pay where it mattered first.
Local papers had done their work. Replaced officials had done more. By the time the first formal vote cleared the committee, the Muggle governments could pretend the choice had been theirs all along.
The Faroe Islands were selected first.
The allocation centred on Vatnesunes Lake and covered a little over six square miles of land.
Walls came first, dark stone pushed up out of the soil in long, straight lines, climbing until the border stood obvious even from the nearest roads. The watching crowd on the Muggle side took a step back as the last section locked into place with a dull, heavy sound that travelled through the ground.
Then the houses began.
Corvus had sent Nestborn crews for the work. They moved with the same efficient quiet that made Bastion Guards and members of the Unit unsettling.
Streets formed in clean runs. Foundations appeared where there had been only flattened ground the day before. Timber frames rose and were enclosed before mundane eyes could properly track which motion had done the work. Slate roofs settled into place as if they had always been waiting for the walls beneath them. Windows fitted themselves and doors aligned. Ironwork anchored. Water channels were rerouted and then hidden neatly under cobbled lanes.
By the third day, the skeleton of a town already stood where nothing had stood before.
By the fifth, it had become difficult to remember the old shape of the land.
The Nestborns had done the arithmetic early and revised it twice once the lakes, roads, civic buildings, and security grounds were marked properly. The result was eight hundred detached houses, each with room enough for a small garden behind, plus communal greens, market squares, service lanes, and the first blocks reserved for shops and public halls.
No one called it a village after the third morning. It was the beginning of a city.
Vatnesunes Lake and nearby Bessavatn were given over to merfolk brought in from several locations. They arrived through apparition.
The Muggles watched the transformation of the land and aquatic creatures in open disbelief.
People came with cameras first, then notebooks, then children on their shoulders. They stood behind the outer control line and watched stone walls, freshly built streets, and armed patrols with a fascinated restraint.
Bastion Guards held the perimeter. Unit detachments patrolled the inner routes and the settlement gates. The arrangement was deliberate. Together, they displayed enough power to convince both Muggles and Magicals to behave.
The foolish ones still came.
One local councillor arrived on the second day with three aides, two journalists, and a slippery smile. He was stopped at the outer line by a Bastion Guard whose shield stayed lowered and whose expression suggested polite words were a renewable resource but not an infinite one.
"We have clearance to inspect," the councillor began, waving a folder.
The guard did not look at the folder. "No, you do not."
The councillor's smile twitched. "The papers were signed yesterday."
"Yes."
"And this is public land."
"It was."
That answer killed the exchange faster than any threat could have.
The journalists wrote it down at once.
By the end of the week, those same papers were also writing about healing.
The first requests had come in quietly. A grandmother with a joint that had not worked properly in twelve years. A fisherman with one eye cloudy from an old injury. A child brought by both parents and three layers of hesitation. Then the line started forming every morning, whether the settlement gates were ready or not.
A small stone building went up near the outer approach on the sixth day. Four treatment rooms, two waiting areas, one records desk, and one side entrance for cases that did not need to become public theatre. By sunset, a sign hung over the door in two languages. Healing Office.
The next day, the queue stretched past the road markers before breakfast.
The Faroe Islands were only the beginning. Muggles all around the globe started to invite magical settlements before the first one was officially done with construction.
--
Far from the first official settlement of mana users and the growing line of people waiting to be healed, the man who had arranged most of it stood in his private laboratories and looked down at a child who could kill a mouse by breathing near it.
The infant who had taken Thanatos's blood had gone back into the accelerated time array after the first days of direct observation. The elves and the caregivers were especially instructed to stay away and avoid standing next to the infant. Corvus had not abandoned the trial. He had merely moved it to a place where time could be forced to work for him.
The result had matured quickly, and the decay aura had intensified.
It no longer sat around the child as a fine grey haze alone. It now pulsed in slow expansions that reached outward from the skin, touched whatever entered the radius, and drew vitality inward with obscene efficiency. Plants yellowed first. Small animals followed. The child, meanwhile, slept, fed, and grew with a steadier increase in vitality than its untreated control should have allowed.
Corvus stood outside the warded glass and watched the aura touch a suspended vine sample. Green darkened to brown. Veins in the leaf turned black, then the whole thing folded inward and fell apart into dull matter within minutes.
The infant's pulse strengthened at the same moment.
He noted the increase and let the child continue inside the time array. Whether the aura could be controlled in later childhood was the real question now. An uncontrolled feeding field would make the subject useful only in very specific circumstances. Control would make it an asset.
The infant who digested from the second vial of blood had developed in a different direction.
Its body had begun phasing in and out of visibility with irregular intervals. Not full disappearance yet, but enough that a caregiver had once turned away from the cradle for a second and turned back to find nothing, an Accio, and one very irritated baby returning to sight halfway through a scream.
That alone would have been interesting enough.
The shadows around the child had also begun taking shape.
It was not intelligence or animation in the full sense, but it did suggest intention. The corners of the cradle darkened when the infant slept. A shape like a hand had once appeared on the wall and then flattened itself into ordinary shadow the moment Corvus looked straight at it. Twice, the floor beneath the cradle had given a low subterranean tremor that no one else in the laboratory could feel until the glass instruments started to tremble on their trays.
These were Hades' powers, and the conclusion no longer required guesswork.
It was the third infant that held his interest and curiosity longest.
All of the infants were Nestborns, and that already meant more than ordinary breeding stock. They were the best of the best forced into repeatable structure, generation after generation, with magical potency and desirable traits pushed upward by design rather than left to chance. Corvus did not waste good bloodlines on sentiment.
The third child had taken three drops from one of the unknown elder samples.
At first, the change looked simple, merely increased magical activity, but that alone was not enough to satisfy him.
So he repeated the trial with two other infants from the same grade of line, each fed a carefully reduced measure from the same source.
The effect repeated, and the trait that determined magical potency began to expand in all three. Not metaphorically or in some vague and decorative way. The actual trait pattern in their aura widened, deepened, and held more charge.
Corvus checked it with his spells, by runic measure, by diagnostic charms, and then once again by comparative reading against the first two to make sure.
The answer remained clear. It was increasing magical capacity, which alone would have justified months of work, and then the infants started disappearing.
The first time, a nurse thought she had blinked too long. The second time, the ward room recorded a disruption without registering any form of apparition. By the third, Corvus stopped pretending coincidence deserved the dignity of further patience. Even his wards could not stop them.
That mattered more than the vanishings themselves.
Children do strange things with accidental magic. This was something else.
The infants vanished only at night and always returned in the same pattern, found outside, in gardens, under moonlight, and looking to the night sky in silence as if listening to something.
Corvus found the first one himself in the inner gardens of the Nest, perched in wet grass beneath a silver line of moonlight with its eyes fixed on the sky and no interest whatsoever in the guards surrounding it.
There was only one name the blood could belong to, and it was none other than Hekate.
In the imported Muggle text, Hekate had been described as a three-faced elder, young in the morning, mature by midday, old by evening, her whole existence bound to shifting age, hidden ways, thresholds, and the kind of liminal spaces Muggles preferred to mistake for myth. Yet, it fit too neatly to ignore. Disappearance without apparition. A movement through boundaries his wards had not been built to stop because they were designed against magicals.
He wrote the name on the vial himself.
-
While Corvus worked through infant trials, decay auras, and the biological arrogance of ancient species, Ruben Goldstein was still waiting.
Four full days had passed.
By the morning of the fifth, he had nearly convinced himself that these masked people considered slow psychological pressure a form of hospitality.
The room remained comfortable, the tea remained excellent, and the food remained better than it should have been. None of that improved the basic fact that he was not free to leave and that every corridor walk ended with a polite masked figure appearing before he had a chance to discover anything truly interesting.
Umbra Prima finally arrived just after breakfast.
Ruben was at the desk pretending to read and actually writing down every useful detail he had observed in the house, including the number of shifts, footsteps in the east corridor, how often the windows changed view, and the possible position of the wards based on the pressure he felt when he approached the west stair.
He folded the paper once and set it under the book the moment the door opened.
Umbra Prima stepped in with the same controlled ease as before.
"Mr Goldstein."
Ruben leaned back in the chair. "Please tell me this is either freedom or a better class of captivity."
"Your meeting will begin in two hours."
Ruben studied the mask. "And in those two hours, am I permitted to panic privately, or would that count as rude?"
"That depends on the quality of the panic."
That answer improved the morning. Ruben could not even object to that with integrity.
When exactly two hours had passed, Umbra Prima returned.
There was no flourish or escort announced by marching boots, only the door opening and the same calm figure stepping inside as if time itself had been booked for the meeting and had arrived punctually.
"With your permission, Mr Goldstein."
Ruben rose. "I assume refusal at this stage would be symbolic."
"Very."
Umbra Prima placed one hand on Ruben's shoulder, and the world vanished.
When his eyes opened again, he stood under a clear sky with metal beneath his feet and clouds all around the platform as if the world had ended one layer below him.
Ruben did not move for a full breath.
The ship beneath him was shaped like one of the No-Maj vessels he had seen in papers. The deck stretched out in hard, clean lines of dark metal and charmed surfaces. At the far end, he saw some dragons lazily watching the clouds. The railings held no rust. The tower structure rose with the severe efficiency of military design, yet the whole vessel felt wrong in a way that made his instincts stand up.
The fact that it was flying arrived late and hit hard.
The clouds were below them.
Ruben turned slowly and looked over the edge.
Nothing but white depth and a strip of blue so far down that his stomach objected before his reason properly caught up.
It was a No-Maj warship in the sky.
Umbra Prima gestured toward the access door and started leading the way below deck.
Ruben followed, staying on the open platform and staring like a farm boy at his first city would have been undignified.
Still, awe had already lodged itself somewhere under his ribs.