When Cassian appeared in Greece, the dread hit him before anything else did. The temple had surfaced again. After six years there it was again, half-emerged from the hillside like it had been waiting for him specifically.
Six years ago, he and Bathsheda had come here on Ji's request. A quiet check, Ji had said. Just have a look, he'd said. They'd spent two days here before everything went sideways, and now the place that had started it all was staring back at him.
"Master Rosier."
Leontis walked toward him from the site entrance. The man looked older although still with a killer stache. He'd always been serious, but this was different. This was the face of someone who'd had a bad few weeks and expected worse ahead.
Cassian grinned at him anyway. "Leontis."
Leontis didn't smile back, but he gave a solemn nod that was as close to warmth as he probably got these days. He turned and gestured toward the wide stretch of people assembled along the treeline to the right. There were dozens of them. Hit-Wizards, curse-breakers, rune specialists. Proper kit.
"We're all ready for your command, Master Cassian," Leontis said. "We've received direct orders to follow all of your instructions."
Cassian raised an eyebrow.
Last time he'd been here, the locals had practically laughed him off. He and Bathsheda had warned them not to touch anything, had tried to explain what the site was capable of, and been met with polite nods that meant absolutely nothing. Then someone had poked something they shouldn't have and the whole situation had collapsed around them faster than anyone wanted to admit. He'd spent half that trip arguing with people who'd been excavating things their whole careers and weren't about to be told otherwise by two visiting professors from Britain.
Now they were standing in a line waiting for his word.
He looked at them, then back at Leontis. It seemed someone had given them a proper briefing this time. Nicolas had wiped their memories of the real events. As far as Leontis remembered, an earthquake had buried the site not long after their initial survey, and it had stayed buried until now. The two days Cassian and Bathsheda had spent here before things went wrong existed in Leontis's head as a fairly unremarkable working visit that ended with geological bad luck.
He didn't say any of that to Leontis. There wasn't a version of that conversation that ended well.
"All right," he said. "Let's go have a look at it."
Leontis walked him to the entrance without much ceremony, which Cassian appreciated. The assembled crew stayed back at a respectful distance, which he appreciated even more.
The closer he got, the more the site pressed on him. Not physically. More like the air had a memory of its own and wasn't particularly happy to see him again.
He crouched at the threshold. The runes were still there. Faint, worn down by six years of soil pressing against them, but intact. He could see Bathsheda's hand in the work immediately. He'd watched her carve variations of those same structures dozens of times since.
Six years ago, standing in roughly this same spot, he'd understood maybe a third of what Bathsheda had carved here. He'd recognised the structural framework, the general intent of the layering, but the finer grammar of it had been mostly beyond him. Runes hadn't been his subject. He could read the broad strokes and miss everything that mattered.
He'd spent years sitting across from Bathsheda while she worked, asking questions she sometimes answered and sometimes deflected depending on how patient she was feeling. He'd read her papers, argued with her about application theory, and somewhere along the way absorbed enough to follow the actual logic of what she built rather than just the surface of it. And then there was the cheat.
Between those two things, he could read this now. Properly read it. He stopped at a section near the corner of the entrance arch. Yrsa's runes. Most runic traditions had a kind of visible logic to them, a structure you could trace once you knew the grammar. Yrsa's didn't read like that. It coiled back on itself, layered meaning over meaning in a way that looked almost decorative until you understood that every ornamental curve was load-bearing. Strip one element and the whole thing shifted.
He straightened and walked through the entrance, reading the full sequence. The containment lattice was intact. The ward anchors at the base of the arch were holding. The deeper binding, the one that sat underneath all the surface structure and did the actual work of keeping the interior sealed, was still active.
He stepped back with a frown. If Marauder had done this, if he was the one who'd dragged the temple back up out of the ground, then he'd managed to undo Nicolas's concealment without touching what Bathsheda had put here. Whether that was because he couldn't break it or because he hadn't tried yet, Cassian couldn't say for certain. But the runes were whole. The seals were holding. Nothing had been forced.
That was interesting.
Leontis appeared at his shoulder. "Is something wrong with them?"
"No," Cassian said.
Whatever Marauder wanted from this place, he hadn't managed to get inside. Or he'd chosen not to try, which was a different problem entirely.
Was it even worth sealing the place again?
Last time, the wards had been worn down to almost nothing. Thousands of years of soil and pressure had ground them thin before anyone ever showed up. An overeager Greek team with more credentials than patience had done the rest. But this time the runes were intact. Bathsheda's work held. So Marauder surfaced the temple and then... what? Stood outside and looked at it?
That didn't make any sense.
If Marauder couldn't break the wards or had chosen not to, then he hadn't come here for what was inside. He'd come here to be seen coming here. To pull attention south while something else moved.
The Yucatan site.
Cassian's stomach dropped a little at that. Had Marauder surfaced this place as a distraction? Pull the Keepers, pull the curse-breakers, pull Cassian himself down to Greece while the real move happened somewhere else entirely?
Bathsheda was there. What if she encountered Marauder?
He pushed that aside. If something had happened to her, he'd have felt it.
But the Veil.
Marauder's actual goal had always been the Veil. Then the temples might have been scenery from the start. Smoke. Greece surfaced, everyone scrambles south. Yucatan stirs, someone else scrambles west. And meanwhile Marauder walks through a door nobody's watching.
If he was right about the creature, if the thing that had been split apart millennia ago by that artefact, then the Veil breaking would reunite whatever had been kept separate, body from soul, and whatever the temples had been built to contain...
He wasn't confident the temples would hold through that. He wasn't confident anything would.
A cluster of the Greek team had broken from the treeline and were talking in whispers behind him, clearly not intending to be overheard and equally clearly not trying that hard. A woman in crimson robes stood at the centre of it, arms folded. He recognised her. Jenna. She'd been here six years ago, younger then, more reckless too.
"Why are we waiting on a foreign historian?" she said. "This is a Greek site. We've been excavating for three weeks."
Someone beside her murmured agreement.
"He walked the entrance for ten minutes and didn't touch anything. What exactly is he contributing?"
Leontis, standing a few feet apart with his hands clasped behind his back, turned to face them. "Enough."
The murmuring cut off.
"You've had your orders," Leontis said. "They came directly from the Ministry. Master Rosier has full authority on this site. If he tells you to stand back, you stand back. If he tells you to move, you move." He looked at Jenna specifically. "That's not a discussion."
Jenna's jaw tightened, but she didn't push it.
Cassian had half-listened to the whole exchange and mostly ignored it. Six years ago he might have turned around and said something. Now, he had bigger worries.
Two figures were coming down the hillside from the east.
Edevane came first, her veil catching the wind. Ayda followed with his beard braided. He was muttering at the terrain. He did that everywhere.
He squinted at Cassian. "How is it, kid?"
"Good to see you too," Cassian said with a grin.
He looked at Edevane.
"Charming as always," he said.
She rolled her eyes.
"You've read it?" Ayda asked without looking up.
"Yeah." Cassian crossed his arms. "The runes are holding."
Edevane turned from the arch. "So it stays."
"That's what I'm thinking." Cassian shrugged. "No point reburying it. Better to keep it open, ward the exterior properly, and put people on it."
Ayda straightened. "You want it guarded."
"Yeah. Put a proper watch on it." Cassian glanced toward the assembled team along the treeline. "Leontis has the people."
Ayda scuffed the dirt near the base of the arch with his boot. "You're not staying."
"I need to get back to Britain." Cassian glanced toward the hillside, then back. "Something's sitting wrong with me about the whole thing."
Ayda gave him a look. "You think this was a distraction."
"I think it might've been," Cassian said. "The timing's a bit too neat. Greece surfaces right when we're already watching three other things move. Either Marauder wanted us looking south, or he's testing which sites we prioritise."
"Either way, we're here now," Edevane said.
"Exactly. So you take the site. I'll head back." He looked between them. "You've both worked with the rune structure before. You know what to look for."
Ayda tugged at his beard. "We'll set a proper watch rotation. Three shifts."
Edevane gave a nod. "I'll draft the exterior ward scheme tonight."
"Don't let anyone poke at the interior binding," Cassian said. "No matter what, no matter who says so. Even if you see me crying about it."
"We weren't planning to," Edevane said dryly.
"Good." He stepped back from the arch. "I'll be in contact."
He turned toward Leontis.
"Leontis."
The man walked over.
"Edevane and Ayda are taking the lead from here. Give them full access and keep your team at the perimeter unless they say otherwise." Cassian glanced briefly at the site. "And nobody goes inside. I don't care who asks."
Leontis nodded. "Understood."
***
The Department of Mysteries was quieter than usual. A few Unspeakables moved past without acknowledging Cassian when he appeared, which was standard. The corridor leading to the Veil chamber had two guards stationed at the far end who clocked him the moment he turned the corner.
He was halfway down the hall when a voice stopped him.
"Cassian."
He looked up.
Nicolas stood in the doorway to one of the side rooms. Perenelle was beside him. Coriolanus leaned against the wall with his arms folded. Sabine stood near the window, hands clasped. Goshawk and Bagshot sat in the corner with a cup of tea. Dumbledore was closest to the door.
Cassian stared at the assembly.
"You're supposed to be in Greece," Nicolas said.
Everyone in the room was watching him, hands on their wands.
"The temple surfaced," Cassian said. "I left Edevane and Ayda in charge."
"Why did you come back?" Goshawk asked.
"I wanted to see the Veil," Cassian said.
Perenelle's eyes sharpened. Coriolanus straightened off the wall. Bagshot set her cup down.
"Why?" Nicolas asked.
Cassian didn't have a clean answer that wouldn't sound insane, so he settled for the honest one. "I think I'll understand something when I see it."
"Or you're not you," Goshawk said flatly.
Cassian turned to her. "I said the same thing in Greece. If even I showed up asking for something suspicious, the right response is to be alert." He spread his hands. "So. Be alert."
They were thorough. He stood in the middle of the room and let them run through it. Goshawk cast the detection charm twice. Bagshot did a Polyjuice trace from three angles. Perenelle used something Cassian didn't recognise that left a faint cold tingle down his spine.
Nothing came back.
Cassian pointed at the ceiling and flicked his wand. "Lumos Noctis."
The room went dark. Cassian let it hold for a few seconds, then cancelled it.
Then he raised his wand again. The tree came out slowly, white light threading upward from the floor, branches filling the room, leaves settling in the air above their heads.
He looked at Nicolas.
Nicolas looked at Perenelle.
"All right," she said.
Nicolas and Perenelle walked him out of the side room and down the corridor. Nobody else came. The chamber was circular, high-ceilinged, with stone tiers dropping down toward the centre like an amphitheatre that had seen better centuries. The light was dim and sourceless. It came from everywhere and nowhere.
The Veil hung at the bottom.
It didn't look like much. A stone arch, weathered and ancient, with a tattered curtain hanging from it that drifted faintly even though there wasn't any wind. The fabric was thin enough to see through, almost, but not quite. Like gauze over a window at night.
Something pulled at him. That was the only word for it. It was more like remembering a word you'd been trying to think of all day, a tug at the back of the mind that said here.
He'd walked into cursed temples, into rooms full of things that wanted him dead, into a chamber with a Djinn that thought highly of itself, and his instincts had always been practical about those. This was different. This wasn't his survival instinct talking. This was something else, deeper.
He started walking down the stone steps.
Perenelle caught his arm.
"Be careful," she said. "Anyone who passes through it dies."
"I know." He glanced at her. "I'm not planning to step through it."
She held his gaze for a moment, then let go.
He walked the rest of the way down alone.
The Veil was bigger up close. The arch rose several feet above his head. The closer he got the more he could hear it. A whisper. Not words exactly, more like the sound of words being spoken in a room on the other side of a thick wall. He couldn't make any of it out. He stood there listening and felt the pull again, stronger now, sitting just behind his sternum.
He lifted his hand.
Perenelle said something from above. Nicolas put a hand on her arm.
Cassian touched the edge of the arch.
The stone was cold under his fingers. Ancient cold, the kind that went right down to the bone. The whispering sharpened immediately.
His vision shifted. The chamber was gone. The stone, the dim sourceless light, Nicolas and Perenelle watching from above, all of it had stepped back to somewhere behind him.
He was standing in a place that wasn't quite a place.
A woman was there.
He couldn't see her properly, but he could hear her.
Her voice was soft and unhurried, and it went straight through him.
He knew that voice. He didn't know where or how, but he knew that voice.
She spoke again and this time he caught something.
Remember.
(Check Here)
A commenter and a lurker walk into a bar.
The commenter says, "Great place."
The lurker becomes a regular and never speaks to staff.
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