Grindelwald and Dumbledore sat together at a café's outdoor table, watching the bakery across the street while they waited for Skyl to get off work.
"Your student doesn't like me very much," Grindelwald said softly. The old Dark Lord was tired now—old, and worn down—and he carried an almost monk-like calm.
"Skyl has always been like that. He's an outsider, a traveler far from home. People like that tend to favor the good and stay wary of the wicked. Please don't provoke him." Dumbledore looked at Grindelwald intently. "I've seen his magic. It isn't something any ordinary person can withstand."
"He's truly as formidable as you claim," Grindelwald sighed, shaking his head, "and yet he's over there doing 'magic tricks' for customers. What a waste. I can't even see ambition in his eyes."
Dumbledore chuckled, reclining comfortably, lifting his sweet coffee for a sip. "That's exactly what I like most about him."
"With a headmaster as unambitious as you," Grindelwald said with a light laugh, "the best you'll ever raise are lambs. How about letting me be headmaster next year?"
"I'm not old enough to retire," Dumbledore refused without hesitation.
They waited until four o'clock at last. Skyl clocked out, changed clothes, and came over to greet them. Then he led them into the bakery's storage room. Behind a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner, he pulled out an utterly ordinary wooden door—like something out of Monsters, Inc., a door that could open anywhere. On the other side was bright sunshine and the clear air of Winterhold.
Seeing a portal hidden in a bakery storeroom corner made Grindelwald's heart jump with that same first-time wonder he'd felt when he'd first encountered magic. A doorway to another world, tucked away inside a little shop off the street—it really was unexpected.
"Mr. Grindelwald, you're not a member of the Tower of Tomes," Skyl said evenly. "So stay close to Professor Dumbledore. If you get lost in another world, we don't do rescues."
Grindelwald had already heard about the Tower of Tomes' initiation trials from Dumbledore. For a learned spellcaster, it was apparently as simple as submitting an original piece of magical theory—practically effortless.
"I'd like to apply," Grindelwald said at once. "I'm willing to accept any evaluation."
"Go see Mage Maryon," Skyl replied. "She handles Tower of Tomes admission in full."
Skyl dumped the two centenarian wizards on the other side and didn't bother with them after that. A few days later, he heard from Brelyna that Grindelwald had taken the Trial of Courage: he'd gone to assist the Dragonborn against Skyrim's vampires. After that, he accepted a Vampire Lord's Embrace and became a vampire himself. Fortunately, he didn't defect—he infiltrated the enemy instead, coordinating from within until the vampire clan in Skyrim was wiped out.
Grindelwald passed the trial and kept his vampiric bloodline.
A Vampire Lord's transformed vampire had almost no weaknesses. Sunlight and silver couldn't truly harm them—at worst, it caused discomfort. They could also control their thirst for blood. Even if the body shifted into a deathless state, its senses remained keen; it could still enjoy life, and it gained an almost endless lifespan.
In the Elder Scrolls world, the earliest vampires were said to have been created through Molag Bal—so in a sense, they were also tied to a Daedric Prince.
For members of the Tower of Tomes, what they truly wanted was the High Tower King's favor, becoming disciples as soon as possible—at which point they, too, could become eternal beings. There was no need to envy vampires. And truly powerful spellcasters had hundreds of ways to extend their lives. Compared to the next-door cyberpunk kind of world where everyone is constantly grinding and cutting throats just to buy more time, immortality in a fantasy world was practically the default setting.
After becoming a vampire, Grindelwald looked years younger—elegant and magnetic enough to remind Skyl of Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal. Funnily enough, that actor really had played Grindelwald too.
The old man who'd once been so skinny he looked like a walking skeleton—two weeks later—had lost that monkish stillness entirely. Now he carried a brazen, unapologetic wickedness. Standing beside the white-haired Dumbledore, the two of them gave off a strange May-December power-couple vibe.
They planned to spend the summer in Winterhold, studying and exchanging magic from other worlds. The Tower of Tomes held far too many books; Grindelwald sighed that even with a vampire's lifespan, he still couldn't finish reading them all before death.
All of July, Skyl waited for the new world to open.
He waited until the end of the month.
He stepped through the portal and immediately took in the surroundings: a vast desert under blazing sun, a clear sky with only a few wisps of cloud.
"Hey! Guy who just walked out of that door!" someone called in English, weakly shouting, "Help me out—I'm Tony Stark, and just so you know, I'm also a billionaire. Come save me and I'll pay you a whole lot of money."
Skyl looked toward the voice.
Huh. There really was a person half-buried in the sand.
And with manners that bad, he sounded like an American alright.
Tony Stark. Iron Man.
The moment Skyl saw him, he knew he'd landed in the Marvel universe.
He opened Mora's Book. Between the pages, a huge mouth lined with sharp teeth sprouted—speaking in a fawning tone.
"Great Sovereign, this universe is lively beyond measure. I can already smell the scent of hidden mysteries. Let me unfold the Grand Symphony once more! I'll gather all knowledge into your vault!"
Ever since Skyl had used Mora's Book as a vessel for the Grand Symphony once, the "big brother" had become obedient to the point of shamelessness. For a demon-god of knowledge, nothing mattered more than acquiring secrets—there was no humiliation too great, not even groveling.
Skyl knew Mora wanted to recover strength by feeding on mysteries, hoping to slip free of Skyl's control. But Apocrypha had already been annexed by the Tower of Tomes. If Mora wanted power again, it would have to carve out a new dimensional space on its own—and do it without Skyl noticing.
Skyl closed Mora's Book casually, as if he meant to leave it off to the side.
"Sovereign? Sovereign? Hey—Skyl, say something." An eyeball bulged out from the cover, glaring at him. A mouth formed too, chattering nonstop.
A bolt of lightning struck it, sizzling smoke into the air.
"Ow—Skyl, don't push me too far!"
Skyl conjured a paper shredder. "Keep talking and I'll turn you into confetti."
"Sovereign, I was wrong."
"Then shut up."
A zipper sealed the mouth on the cover, and the eyeball obediently shut.
Half-buried in the sand, Tony stared for a long moment, then muttered, "Okay. I'm hallucinating. Now even books talk."
Skyl glanced at the scattered wreckage around them: pieces of the crude, first-generation Iron Man suit. Tony Stark had escaped a terrorist hideout with that junk—cobbled together in a makeshift workshop with basic tools. Whatever else you said about him, his engineering skill deserved respect.
"[Reparo]." Skyl flicked his hand.
The shattered suit reassembled.
Tony, sand up to his waist, grinned like an idiot. "Hallucinations. All fake."
Skyl glanced at him. "Get yourself out. You're not buried that deep."
Tony clenched his jaw and yanked himself free of the desert… only to see that the strange man had already examined the suit's structure and was walking away.
The restored armor lay atop a dune, pristine as a newly forged blade—no scorch marks, no dents, no blood.
Tony hesitated—then abandoned the suit and chased after Skyl.
"Hey, buddy—pal—sir." The American tried three different forms of address and still couldn't get Skyl to stop. So he ran ahead, moved in front of him, and walked backward. "I just watched you step out of a door out of nowhere."
"Billionaire," Skyl said with a smile, never slowing, "ready to hand your savior a huge pile of money?"
"You're a wizard, right?" Tony said. "I heard you say the magic word. Harry Potter." He instantly decided Skyl's nickname.
"Don't call me that." Skyl blinked. "Harry's my underclassman."
"Whoa. So Hogwarts is real." Tony's tone was dramatic, but he clearly didn't believe a word of it. "Then why didn't I get an owl letter?"
"Because you're a Muggle," Skyl said, giving him a genuinely baffled look. "You didn't seriously think you were a wizard, did you?"
Tony's face soured. "Then Hogwarts forgot to send mine." He followed in silence for a bit, then complained again. "Hey, man, where are you even going? If you're a wizard, can you conjure me some food?"
"I foresaw a strange god drawing near," Skyl replied, handing him a piece of bread—his own work meal. "So I'm going to meet it."
"A wizard meeting a god." Tony huffed between bites. "Yeah, okay. Now you're just stacking nonsense on nonsense."
He chewed while panting, filthy and reeking, arms and legs aching and numb. He used bad jokes like fuel, because he was running out of everything else. He was close to passing out—no exaggeration. His eyelids kept drooping. He imagined being found by a rescue team, then sleeping like the dead, drinking a glass of ice water, and devouring a dripping double cheeseburger.
Somewhere inside that haze, the desert sky slowly dimmed.
A purple firmament spread overhead. Stars and nebulae glittered. The moon loomed huge, like a wheel.
The dusty path underfoot vanished, replaced at some point by a dark, obsidian road. The sun seemed to have fallen away beyond the horizon in every direction. The wizard ahead of him suddenly stopped.
"What? Did we walk to the end of the world?"
"We're here, billionaire," Skyl said.
Tony looked around.
There was no wind in the air. No sound at all.
The starfield above felt both familiar and wrong. He could see the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross at the same time—either the sky was fake, or the curvature of spacetime here was so extreme that starlight bent into impossible shapes.
Tony Stark glanced back.
The desert they'd come from was impossibly far away, as if it were a light-year behind them. It felt like he'd crawled into the barrel of a god's telescope, looking out at the universe from somewhere outside it.
And an absurd possibility rose in his mind:
He had slipped out of reality's dimension.
In that ultimate stillness—
the cosmic embodiment, Eternity, descended.
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