Days passed while Corvus worked through the tome and the shroud. He did not waste them. He replicated Void Cloak first, then Dimensional Passage.
The two additions settled into his system differently from Shadow Tendrils and Soul Drain. Those had felt violent in their usefulness, direct tools built to strike, pin and consume. The new skills were ...stranger. They did not simply add force. They altered his relationship with space itself.
Void Cloak revealed its nature the first time Corvus tested it in Grimmauld Place.
He stood in the ritual room with the shroud contained at the centre of layered wards. His own arrays ringed the space in careful sequence, each one anchored to the next so a single failure would not collapse the whole system. The room had become less a chamber and more a machine made from stone, rune work, and caution.
Corvus closed his eyes and activated the new skill.
The world shifted, not visually at first, then his understanding of weight changed.
The room lost its certainty. Stone remained beneath his feet, yet it no longer pressed against reality in the same way. Sounds of his wards dulled, light thinned. The air itself seemed to move half a step away from him.
Corvus opened his eyes and saw the ritual room through a distortion that was neither mist nor shadow. He still stood where he had been standing, yet he was also elsewhere, placed across the boundary of something that ordinary life only sensed in funerals, graveyards, the moments before old houses went quiet forever and the ritual of Samhain.
He moved one step forward and passed through the edge of his own ward line. The Shroud was still reaching for him.
That confirmed the first practical truth. Void Cloak was not a concealment charm in the common sense. It was not like the Cloak of Invisibility. It was not merely light bending around him. The skill moved him into an adjacent state of existence. He became akin to a ghost, but not passive, dead or bound. He stood with one foot inside the living world and one beyond the veil.
He started to move and noticed the weitlesness, floating was the way to move in this state. He phased his hand through the stone wall beside him.
The sensation was wrong and useful.
The wall was there. It had presence. He could feel its shape without meeting resistance. His hand passed through it as though the stone and his body had temporarily ceased to agree on which of them belonged to the same layer of reality.
Then he felt a pressure. Not from the room or the shroud.
From a deeper place within the other side.
A consciousness locked onto him with immediate clarity.
It did not feel like a soul. Corvus knew souls too well now to mistake them for something greater. This was more than a dead thing wandering behind the veil. It was aware in a directed way. Waiting, perhaps. Watching, certainly.
The pressure it exerted was not overwhelming, but it was real. He endured it without strain and stood still long enough to judge its nature. No attack came, no approach followed. It remained beyond the threshold, fixed on him with an interest that made the back of his mind sharpen.
Corvus withdrew from Void Cloak and returned fully to the ritual room.
The pressure vanished at once. His mind became occupied with questions.
Something existed behind the veil. Something that had recognised him as soon as he stepped there. Whether it had recognised the skills of the shroud, the accumulated death around his soul, or simply the act of crossing itself, he could not yet tell.
He decided to focus on it after consuming the shard.
Dimensional Passage came after a week.
He tested it in a lower chamber of Grimmauld Place, where the wards could tolerate spatial strain without tearing anything vital. The first attempt opened as memory had promised.
A portal formed, not from light or raw force, but from folded absence shaped into an entry. The air before him parted in an oval seam edged with dark shimmer. Beyond it was not the destination itself.
It was a passage, literally a passage.
Corvus stepped through.
The sensation differed entirely from his own spatial mastery. Spatial mastery moved him by collapsing the problem. Here and there became one decision, and the body obeyed. Dimensional Passage did something else. It acknowledged two different locations in space and time, carved a route through something in between, and made that route briefly usable.
Corvus moved through a place that he could not name. It was not simply a darkness or void.
Not a corridor in any ordinary sense.
Yet it had depth. It had direction. It had the same faint wrongness he had felt when the elders opened portals in Mictlantecuhtli's memories. The passage existed outside the simple geometry of the world, which meant travel through it was not merely relocation. It was a transit through another layer of reality.
He stepped out in the destination chamber and immediately understood why the elders had valued it.
This was how they had entered the world. They formed a circle, opened a way, and crossed from wherever they had been into here.
The memory attached to Dimensional Passage confirmed more than mechanics.
Corvus processed the memories of Mictlantecuhtli using the skill repeatedly across centuries. The elder opened gates into chambers full of ritual stone, into battlefields where souls were still warm, and into dimensions not meant for mortal maps. He walked through Mictlan as though it were an annex to his own estate.
That was the part that mattered most.
Mictlan.
The underworld of the Aztecs existed as a dimensional holding place saturated with death, layered with old rites and fed by generations of belief and slaughter. Souls waited there in numbers so large that counting them ceased to be a useful activity. They gathered in quiet masses, old and patient and trapped in a system created long before their grandchildren forgot their names.
Corvus processed that memory carefully. Thousands upon thousands of souls. It was Mictlantecuhtli's reservoir.
A future problem and a future opportunity in equal measure.
He returned again and again to the tome after each absorption cycle.
The strange runic alphabet slowly yielded ground.
It was not a grimoire as he first guessed. That much became clear with time.
The tome was a diary.
An elder's record written in a language shared among beings who had crossed worlds and treated planets like projects. Some of the signs aligned with Mayan, Aztec or other runic structures. Others were older, foreign, and only became partially legible when paired against the memories carried by the shroud's skills.
With each replicated ability, Corvus recognised more symbols.
Still not all.
Enough to follow the shape.
The diary began with their arrival. It tracked the first steps the elders took in this world, the first magical species they created into its ecosystems, the way those additions altered the balance of life and the slow awakening of the planet's own consciousness. The world had not started aware in the way it later became. Awareness grew as magical races started to die and their souls returned to the place shaping them.
That detail alone justified every hour spent deciphering the script.
He read of experiments, of species introduction, of ritual seeding across continents, and of the arrogance common to ancient beings.
There were still symbols he could not penetrate. Passages remained opaque where the grammar shifted into forms he had no memory key for. But enough had opened that the darkness around the elders felt smaller now.
The philosopher's stones and the obsidian box of red vials were already back in Grimmauld Place by the time he finished his second week with the tome. He had scanned the cavern repeatedly to ensure nothing else remained hidden in the walls, the throne base, or the pedestals themselves. Only when he moved the throne, the pedestals and even the drawings and was certain the chamber had yielded all immediate value, did he collapse it.
Stone folded.
The hidden place ceased to be recoverable without reconstruction.
He returned to the frigate and ordered the vessel back to Britain.
He informed Elizaveta of the destination and of his coming absence. She did not object. She knew what it meant when he prepared himself in that particular way.
From the frigate, he went directly to Grimmauld Place.
The ritual room waited.
The Shroud of Mictlan sensed him before he entered the room. The shadowy tendrils within the containment stirred with visible eagerness, brushing at the boundaries of the prison as though a fragment of the elder's own soul recognised the man approaching and wanted the rest of the distance closed immediately.
Corvus ignored the enthusiasm.
He layered wards around the chamber, the strongest he could produce while maintaining structural control. Containment wards. Soul wards. Spatial locks. Interference barriers. Fail shut arrays. He wanted every path in and out of the room defined by his decision and nothing else.
Only when that was finished did he begin etching the devouring array.
The pattern spread across the stone floor in nested circles, lines crossing at angles designed to direct force inward and hold it there. Corvus checked every segment twice.
Only after that did he step into the position where the conductor should begin the chant.
He stood over the array in complete stillness.
The shard waited.
--
Back at Hogwarts, time moved in a very different rhythm.
The castle had become disciplined in its tension. Excitement no longer spilt into chaos the way it might have in earlier years. Too many eyes watched. Too much prestige was attached to every corridor and every conversation.
The champions trained.
The Quidditch teams drilled in organised blocks and argued over formation theory at meals as though nationhood itself depended on keeper positioning. Potioneering teams sorted ingredients, revised theory, and glared at one another with the particular hostility only academic competition could justify. Students submitted their names for the duelling tournament in increasing numbers.
The expected names appeared. Blacks, Rosiers, and Durmstrang contenders with surnames that no one outside their own countrymen pronounced correctly.
A quiet student from the silent House of Primus whose quite alone, had made him interesting.
Several Beauxbatons applicants wore elegance and ambition with equal seriousness.
The side tournaments had developed their own gravity. That surprised some of the older staff, but not Vinda, who had expected exactly this. The duelling bracket in particular gained attention quickly. After the fall of the ICW, there was no formal underage channel left for young witches and wizards to prove themselves publicly. This would become one.
-
Fleur noticed the shift every morning.
Students walked more quickly now, though not carelessly. Study groups formed and dissolved by rank and utility. Even the lazy became slightly less lazy when watched by foreign rivals. The first task approached with the inevitability of lightning in stormy weather.
Her own excitement took a different shape from the other champions.
Viktor Krum focused like a professional athlete and treated the event as another field to conquer. Altair Black moved through preparation with the unnerving calm common to Nestborn children who had been built and educated in an environment where pressure was simply the weather of existence.
Fleur tried to act equally composed.
Usually, she succeeded.
Then she would reach up and touch the pendant at her throat, remember the line of his smile when he told her it would protect her, and her thoughts would move away from tasks, scores, and judges toward a much simpler question.
Would he come?
She had asked him, even though he had not promised, and she was hopeful.
For any ordinary man, that would have been enough to count as uncertainty. For Corvus Black, it meant something more practical. He might be present. He might be in another country. He might be in another dimension, deciphering elder script or devouring a fragment of something ancient and catastrophic.
Fleur did not know the details. She simply understood that he was busy and Elizaveta was with him. Jealousy rose in her heart again; it was the same whenever she thought of that detail.
It did not stop the hope.
On the evening before another training session, she stood by the window of her room and watched mist settle over the grounds. The castle was quiet enough that she could hear distant footsteps.
Her fingers rose to the pendant again.
It remained warm.
She smiled before she meant to.
If he came, she wanted him to see her win.
If he did not, she would win anyway.