Grindelwald hadn't finished speaking when a vibration rippled through the tower—the sign that Ophelia's rose-key was losing power and about to pull Julien back to Bavaria.
"Time's up, little Black," Grindelwald said, tucking the stone tablet away.
"Go on. Tell Ophelia her roses are still perfectly punctual. And if Dumbledore asks, tell him you saw an old man's delusions—nothing more."
"Remember, the roses are portals. You can come every day… if you choose to."
Julien felt the folds of space tearing open again. In that final instant before he vanished, Grindelwald's voice reached him, soft as a sigh:
"But remember this, Caelum Julien Black: the Stargate is not the destination. It is a mirror. What it reflects is not another world—it is whatever you most want to change about this one. When you are ready to face that answer, Nurmengard will always be open to you."
---
Light swallowed Julien whole.
When he stood once more in the rose garden, he found a single withered petal clutched in his palm. Elizabeth came running from a distance, her ice-gray eyes shining with unshed tears.
"Are you all right?"
He glanced up at the highest point of the castle—the Star Chamber—knowing Ophelia was watching from there. The old woman's plan had worked. The real purpose of inviting him had been achieved: she had let him meet Grindelwald.
"Where did you go?" Elizabeth grabbed his arm, voice tight with worry. "You disappeared for a full seven minutes. I thought—"
"Nurmengard," Julien said quietly, meeting her eyes. "I met Grindelwald."
He paused, choosing his words carefully.
"What—Nurmengard! You faced… you faced Gellert Grindelwald alone!"
"I'm fine. And he's not quite what the world thinks," Julien replied with a small smile, gently stroking her long hair. "He told us the seal on Azkaban is breaking down. The Dementors aren't guards—they're symptoms. And we need to repair it."
Elizabeth froze. Her fingers slowly released his arm and moved to the family crest on her chest—the withered rose entwined with stars.
"Grandmother knew?"
"She arranged for me to go," Julien nodded. "But she may not know everything he said. That part… is just for us."
"Us?"
He took her hand, feeling the same faint tremor they had shared before. In the depths of Starfall Cove they had made a promise. In the Chamber of Secrets they had fought together. Now Azkaban waited for their next choice.
"Together?" Julien asked.
Elizabeth Rosier drew a deep breath. Her ice-gray eyes flashed with the same thousand-year weariness and hope he had seen in Evan's ghost.
"Together."
---
The final weeks of summer turned into a strange, repeating cycle for Julien.
Each morning he woke in the thin mist surrounding Rosenkreuz Castle, then walked to the rose garden and touched the black rose named "Midnight Corridor"—the one Grindelwald himself had named, supposedly drawn from an ancient Germanic tribal poem. The folds of space would tear open and reassemble, flinging him to the top floor of Nurmengard.
"The essence of alchemy is not transforming matter," Grindelwald said during their first lesson, "but transforming relationships. The distance between lead and gold is smaller than the distance between love and hate, yet the latter is what we truly must cross."
Julien quickly learned that the old man history called a Dark Lord was a teacher of almost brutal strictness.
He tolerated no vague concepts, no "sort of" explanations.
When Julien tried to answer the question "Why can the Philosopher's Stone extend life?" with a standard line from Intermediate Alchemy Theory, Grindelwald simply fixed him with those silver-gray eyes until Julien himself realized how empty the answer was.
But Julien had an advantage no one else did.
When night fell and he returned to Bavaria, lying on the four-poster bed and staring at the ceiling, he would call out to Murphy in his mind.
"I need to understand the fourfold nature of matter—hot, dry, cold, wet—and their dynamic balance in alchemical matrices."
"Already generating," the black cat's tail flicked irritably. "Hermeticism and Elemental Topology… complete. And damn, your new teacher is a tough one, huh?"
The books generated by the Magical Resonance Library never disappointed. They weren't just piles of knowledge—they were precise answers tailored to his exact confusion, as if the library could sense the exact moment he had stumbled in Grindelwald's class.
The next day, when Grindelwald asked the same question again, Julien's reply drew the first flicker of genuine surprise from the old man.
"Hot and dry are forces of separation, cold and wet are forces of union. But this isn't a static classification—in the alchemical cycle they devour and give birth to each other. Like…" Julien paused, searching for the right metaphor, "like your relationship with Dumbledore."
As soon as the words left his mouth, Julien stuck his tongue out and sneaked a glance at Grindelwald.
The old man was silent for a long time. Outside the window the fjord was ebbing, exposing black rocks that looked like the spine of some enormous creature.
"Go on," Grindelwald said at last.
"You two were once allies of hot-and-dry or cold-and-wet, trying to separate the old world and create a new order. Then you became opposites—cold and hot, dry and wet—trying to unite yet tearing each other apart."
Julien chose his words carefully. "And now… you exist in a more complex cycle. Not enemies, not friends, but the 'transformation' phase of alchemy. Seemingly opposed, yet fundamentally one."
"Where did you learn to see things this way?" Grindelwald's voice was very soft.
"Guesswork. Observation." Julien naturally said nothing about the library. That was his secret—even in front of Grindelwald.
The old man rose and walked to the flowing wall, silent for a long moment.
"Dumbledore took forty years to understand what you grasped in fourteen days," he said finally. "Not the specific knowledge, but the underlying pattern."
"It's not because you're smarter—though you are smart. That's not the reason." Grindelwald turned, silver-gray eyes gleaming with assessment. "I think it's because you carry none of our baggage. You have nothing you must prove, and nothing you must deny."
---
By mid-August the lessons had entered their most dangerous phase.
"Azkaban," Grindelwald said, unfurling a map made of condensed memory—one he had drawn from the tower walls in a way Julien still didn't fully understand, "is not a prison. It is a bandage. A failed bandage."
On the map, Azkaban appeared as a solitary island, its outline twisting in a rhythmic pulse.
"A very long time ago," Grindelwald's finger traced the center of the island, "a group of ancient wizards—we and Dumbledore called them the 'Silent Ones,' because their names were never recorded—discovered the wound here. Older than Starfall Cove, deeper than Nurmengard. They built an alchemical device to seal it."
The image zoomed in, and Julien saw it—
A sundial, dozens of times larger than the drained one in the Rosier castle, carved from a black stone that seemed to drink in light.
The gnomon was not metal but a massive, spiraling bone-like structure—Julien didn't want to guess what creature it had come from.
The dial had no markings, only countless concentric circles, each rotating slowly in different directions.
"We called it the Sundial of Eternal Darkness," Grindelwald explained, "because it never points toward sunlight. It only points toward the depths of the wound."