The Senate Chamber of GAIA had been built to make governments feel larger than they were.
It failed more often these days.
The hall still carried the old habits of modern states, trying to look eternal. Stone, flags, tiered seating, polished desks, translation wards, security details, and the usual deliberate architecture of power. Yet the mood in the room had shifted beyond what furniture could repair. Too many crises had arrived too quickly. Too many things once filed under impossible had become scheduling matters for Mana Users before the mundane side finished arguing over definitions.
Today, the chamber was full because panic had become formal enough to require minutes.
Representatives from the Muggle governments sat in their assigned places and waited for explanation, policy, compromise, reassurance, or at least a lie polished enough to survive the afternoon. Many of them wore grave expressions with real effort.
Some of them were not what they appeared to be.
Black Spire had already taken enough governments over from the inside that several men and women in the room were now only performing the roles of ministers, advisors, and liaison officers. Their records remained. Their offices remained. Their signatures remained. The minds behind them had changed.
Ruben Goldstein took the stage with a folder in one hand and no visible haste.
He had once made a living selling truths in fragments. Now he stood beneath the GAIA seal as the formal representative of magical interests to the mundane coalition both here and in the UN, which was a more respectable form of the same profession if one ignored the scale and the consequences.
He set the folder down, glanced once over the chamber, and let his gift move lightly over the nearest minds.
Worry, denial and fear came first. Resentment was the second thing on the minds of No-Majs.
Three men were already composing speeches they imagined sounded stronger than they did. One woman near the fourth tier had spent the last ten minutes trying not to think the phrase lunar fortress in a tone that would qualify as prayer. Two replaced officials watched him with the professionally empty calm of those who already knew what this session was meant to produce.
Ruben approved of efficiency.
He began without theatre.
"The anomaly currently causing panic among the mundane world," he said, and waited only long enough for a few jaws to tighten at the word choice, "is an expedition to establish a settlement on the far side of the moon by Mana Users."
That sentence entered the chamber like a blade laid flat on a table.
It did not shock anyone, as the room had expected something absurd. It shocked them because absurdity had now been delivered in procedural language.
A French delegate started writing at once. The American contingent leaned into one another without whispering. A German minister rubbed two fingers against the bridge of his nose with the expression of a man revising his entire decade in one unpleasant instant.
From the British side, John Major sat very still.
The last official meetings he had with the Magicals had been with Lady Rosier and Lord Grindelwald. His mind went to the meeting at Stonehenge. Arcturus Black had been there, so had Gellert Grindelwald. Corvus Black had been there as well, and of the three, he was the youngest one Major remembered most sharply. Their next meeting was unofficial.
The memory still reached him in flashes.
A gun in his own hand. A wizard without a wand. The cold realisation that the movement had been political theatre performed for an audience of one, because if Corvus Black had wished him dead, he would be. There was nothing he wanted to remember, except the quality of the embarrassment from that meeting.
Major rose when Ruben finished the opening explanation.
"Mr Goldstein."
His voice held well enough, though his left hand remained flatter on the desk than comfort required. "What are the current capabilities of the Mana Users. Will they share their findings? What is the purpose of a settlement on the moon? And lastly, what will we, the mundane side, gain from this expedition?"
The last question was the honest one.
Ruben looked at him and let his gift do the rest. He folded both hands before him.
"Prime Minister, the capabilities of Mana Users are above the imagination of the mundane side because we are operating on a different scale." He let that sit before continuing. "I believe your previous meetings gave you an approximate understanding."
That jab hit its mark.
Ruben went on before anyone else could interrupt.
"The results of the expedition will remain private. They have nothing to do with the mundane side. The settlement itself will be military in nature and exclusively for Mana Users."
A low current moved through the chamber.
Major's mouth tightened. "And what do we gain?"
Ruben did not pretend to misunderstand him.
"I will personally forward your question to the gentleman you met in your office." That earned the reaction he expected. Corvus was never named casually in these rooms unless someone had forgotten fear or rank. Ruben had no such disability. "We do not intend to share the settlement's logistics, protections, or functions. You are, however, welcome to continue your own efforts to reach the moon. If your people arrive there and wish to have tea with the personnel, I imagine a civil reception can be discussed."
That line bought him silence for two heartbeats.
Then the room reacted badly.
A representative from Italy half rose and demanded to know whether that was mockery. A Canadian delegate asked what civil reception meant in military terms. The American side wanted clarification on the exclusive territorial claim. Two Scandinavian ministers started speaking over one another and stopped only when the translation wards lagged a second under the load.
The wizard responsible for those wards smirked silently.
Ruben waited until the noise went down before he continued.
"We are sharing Earth." His tone sharpened by only a degree. It was enough. "Its history shows what happens when the power balance favours the mundane side. I think Mana Users have been notably more civilised and diplomatic in managing this relationship than the mundane world ever was when it held sole advantage."
That settled the chamber into a quieter sort of anger.
No one could say the line was false without dragging history in behind them, and history had never been polite company.
Major inclined his head after a long second.
The motion was awkward. So was the thanks that followed. He gave both because open refusal would only advertise impotence to the rest of the chamber, and Britain had already been made to swallow enough public correction for one season.
Ruben returned the nod with perfect diplomatic restraint and stepped back from the lectern.
The questions did not stop, but the real shape of the session had already been fixed.
The Mana Users had gone to the moon.
And the mundane side would be allowed the dignity of watching itself realise that fact in committee.
--
Far from the senate chamber, Corvus stood on the moon.
He had released over fifty light orbs first and let them drift above the chosen basin in measured patterns. They spread out over the dead ground and gave him what the sun could not at this angle, a controlled field of silver white illumination over cratered dust, broken ridges, and the long shallow scar of the site he had selected.
From the throne room, the moon had looked cold.
From its surface, it looked finished.
Vacuum pressed around him beyond the layered protections. The black above held no softness at all. The ground underfoot was powder over old stone, dry enough to remember nothing and sharp enough to punish careless landing. A strong Bubble Head Charm encircled his head. A far heavier shield charm covered the rest of his body in multiple layers, built not merely to stop impact, but to keep vacuum, radiation, and the hostile temperature range from making an issue of his biology.
He teleported out of Arx Obscura and arrived on the surface cleanly.
For a moment, he stood still.
No wind. No organic smell. No atmospheric pressure in the familiar sense. Only the muted awareness of his own protections, the moon's weaker gravity, and the cold, severe fact of standing beyond Earth on ground no magical had ever claimed before him.
Corvus let his awareness spill outward.
He widened the radius in stages, measuring terrain, depth, fracture lines, mineral resistance, and the exact size of the area he meant to force into new purpose. When he judged the spread sufficient, he raised one hand and used telekinesis to begin etching the runic array.
He cut the runes into the moon's surface.
Lines opened across the ground in long, controlled arcs. Runes carved over a radius of roughly four hundred miles, linked in layers so that the highest point of the resulting shield would rise just over three miles while the deeper anchors bit downward as well. He was not building a dome perched on dead rock. He was building a sealed environmental bubble rooted into the lunar body itself, similar to the Nereid settlement before, only on a far larger and more complex scale.
The array completed its outer circle first. Then the inner pressure channels. Then the atmospheric regulation lines. Then the shielding veins meant to hold back vacuum, manage heat transfer, bleed radiation, and let his people survive to turn a foothold into a settlement.
Corvus fed mana into it.
The arrays answered slowly at first.
A pale shielding bubble started to appear over the basin, thin and uncertain for the first few minutes, then stronger as the array bit more deeply into place. The curvature climbed. The higher surfaces touched each other and blended. The deeper anchors stabilised. The whole structure thickened until it no longer looked like a fragile trick of light and started to resemble what it was meant to become.
A habitable world in a dead satellite.
It took more than two hours to complete.
Corvus remained where he was throughout, drawing and feeding, correcting where he was not satisfied, strengthening where the pressure differential required more from the runes than initial modelling had predicted. When the final line settled, the bubble held. The vacuum stayed outside. Internal pressure stabilised. The temperature began its long correction toward something life could negotiate with rather than merely survive through charms.
He sent the mental confirmation for the first wave.
Bastion Guards arrived first, followed by researchers, engineers, enchanters, herbologists, and the rest of the selected personnel. Each apparition line landed inside the bubble, each figure straightened, saluted, and then moved the moment Corvus gave the order.
It needed foundations.
The Bastion Guards immediately spread out to secure the perimeter ring around him. Corvus watched them and wondered whether they expected an attack even here.
Tall walls of dark stone started rising around the settlement boundary under combined magical effort, not because the moon currently contained enemies worth fearing, but because a settlement without a perimeter was a camp.
Engineers flattened the first sections of ground and marked structural lines. The outer buildings rose in stages, basic walls first, then the broader connected forms that would later become barracks, storage, laboratories, command rooms, and habitation blocks.
Enchanters knelt over fresh stone and began marking water lines and runes to keep it flowing into the bedrock. Herbologists moved toward the prepared test soil, fed mana into it, and started the humiliating first struggle of convincing plants that the moon was a place where roots should continue their argument with existence. Researchers collected stone and atmospheric readings, boxed the former and sent the first samples back to Arx Obscura through controlled return points.
The settlement took shape under his direct supervision.
-
Corvus watched the perimeter walls rise higher, turned his head toward the far end of the growing enclosure, and asked the engineering team to build a mansion for him there.
Then he teleported back to the throne room.
Elizaveta and Fleur looked up as he reappeared.
Below them, through the charmed surfaces of the throne room, the first magical settlement beyond Earth had already begun taking shape.