He watched himself from the outside. Or rather, he watched a version of himself, a memory made manifest and given weight and dimension. The boy beneath the machine didn't look up. Didn't acknowledge his presence. He simply worked, collecting lint, keeping his hands clear of the moving parts, doing what needed to be done to survive another shift.
"You decided something here," the Iris-thing said quietly, standing beside him. "Before Hogwarts. Before magic. Before any of it."
Rowan knew what it was going to say. He'd written it down, years ago, in his journal. Change requires power. Power requires knowledge, resources, and position. Currently possess minimal knowledge, some resources, no position. Must acquire all three.
"You decided that the only way to survive was to be useful," it continued. "To be worth keeping around. To make yourself indispensable, so that no one would ever have a reason to discard you the way the mill discards a boy who loses his fingers."
The boy beneath the machine kept working. His face, when Rowan caught a glimpse of it, was perfectly blank. The careful, controlled neutrality of someone who had learned that feeling things was a luxury he couldn't afford.
"And that's what you taught yourself," the Iris-thing said. "To survive, yes. To succeed. To plan. To optimize. To treat every relationship as a variable in an equation, because caring about people made you vulnerable, and vulnerability was the thing that got boys like you killed."
The scene held for a long time. The machines thundered. The boy collected lint. And Rowan stood and watched and felt something crack open inside his chest that had nothing to do with the fungus and nothing to do with his magical core.
The grief of it. The loneliness of both lives.
The mill scene faded slowly, like a photograph left too long in sunlight. When it was gone, Rowan stood in an open space with no walls, no ceiling, no floor he could see. Just light. That warm, painful, inexorable light. In every direction.
The Iris-thing was gone. In its place stood nothing. No figure, no manifestation, no mirror. Just the open space, and the light, and the silence, and Rowan standing in the middle of it with his hands at his sides and his chest aching and the full, unfiltered weight of everything he'd spent years not feeling pressing down on him from all directions at once.
This was the heart of it. The truth itself, with nothing to fight it with.
The light intensified. Almost gentle in its insistence. It was asking something of him. Asking.
Feel it.
He let it go.
It was quieter than he'd expected, and stranger. No moment of sudden release, no theatrical breaking of chains. He simply stopped holding. Stopped bracing against the pressure of his own locked-away self. Stopped treating his emotions as threats to be neutralized. For the first time in his memory, he let them exist.
The loneliness. The grief. The guilt of every relationship he'd treated as a transaction. The fear. The real fear, the one underneath the composure. That he was fundamentally unworthy of the people who cared about him. That he didn't deserve the Flamels' kindness, or Iris's friendship, or the way Edmund brought him gifts.
The fear that if any of them truly saw him. Saw the calculating, strategic, lonely boy underneath all the competence. They would leave.
He felt all of it. Every piece, every sharp edge, every uncomfortable truth. He held none of it at arm's length. He let it wash through him the way the enhanced magic was washing through his core, moving through and settling where it needed to settle.
The light in the open space began to change. Warmer. Less intense. The pressure eased, degree by degree, and the space around him shifted. Walls appearing again, softly. Wood, perhaps. The kind of architecture you'd find in a home rather than a fortress.
And the walls held.
The things he'd locked away were no longer locked. They were simply there, acknowledged, present, part of the structure rather than hidden beneath it. The palace was larger for it. More rooms, more space, the hidden architecture that had built itself without his permission finally visible and integrated.
Rowan stood in the middle of it and breathed.
The magic settled. The warmth receded to a low, steady pulse. His own heartbeat, amplified, vast, the new shape of his core finding its contours. He could feel the edges of it now, the way you can feel the walls of a room in the dark. It was enormous. Far larger than he'd imagined possible. Larger than anything a twelve-year-old's core should be, by any measure he'd ever encountered.
The palace steadied around him. The light faded to something comfortable. Ambient, present, illuminating without demanding attention. Rowan looked at the walls, at the rooms, at the shape of his own mind laid out before him in all its complexity, and felt something he hadn't felt here before.
He felt at home.
The world came back all at once.