“Here are the newspaper clippings and books you requested.”
“Thank you.”
I placed six Knuts on the table.
They quickly disappeared into the sleeve of one of the librarian’s assistants.
I walked over to the reading tables.
I was currently in “Haus der Bücher,” or “House of Books,” one of the few public libraries in magical Europe.
You wouldn’t find books with fifth-category spells or professional tomes with the secrets of high magic here.
But you could find literature for beginning Artificers and Arithmancers, as well as numerous autobiographies of famous wizards and newspaper archives stretching back at least through the entire twentieth century.
While my hired informant was searching for the approximate location of the Jotuns, I decided to look into something I’d learned about yesterday during my meeting with Alvia Braun at the café.
Gellert Grindelwald.
More specifically, his wand, which had somehow ended up with the English Dark Lord.
Honestly, I hadn’t been that interested in the Lich’s wand before.
Undoubtedly, it was one of the most powerful wands I’d ever seen.
But that hadn’t stopped me from breaking it with a magically accelerated falling stone from a wall breach.
Unfortunately, my distraction had allowed that ghoul to pierce my magical shield and tear my left arm apart.
But then the stone slab had pinned his right arm, with the wand still in his grip, to the ground.
A modified Confringo had then ripped his body to pieces.
That’s why I’d been so surprised to see the strange cloak intact when everything else had been destroyed or incinerated.
Add to that the last memory before I died: the feeling of crumpling fabric under my body…
In short, I was very interested in that cloak.
But finding information about it was like searching for a needle in a haystack, if not worse.
How could I find a cloak that looked exactly like hundreds of other enchanted cloaks?
Magical folk love silver.
Search by properties?
What properties?
I’d already searched for cloaks and mantles that aided in soul transference.
The only results were myths and legends where the credit for soul transference went to gods or other creatures, not objects.
Search by defensive properties?
Hah.
Every second cloak seller would be screaming that their specially enchanted protective cloaks were the best in the world.
So I’d hit a dead end.
Information about the Dark Lord himself wasn’t much better.
I knew quite a bit about the Death Eaters; I’d killed many of them myself and even captured one alive.
Unfortunately, that bastard was a complete lunatic who’d turned himself into an undead creature.
Even under torture, I couldn’t extract anything important from him.
So, while I knew a lot about his “underlings,” I knew practically nothing about Voldemort himself.
At some point, a mysterious Heir of Slytherin appeared, one who’d had a different surname until a certain point.
Several influential aristocrats immediately supported him.
Already being called Lord Voldemort, he first led the Order of Walpurgis Knights, which was reorganized into the Order of the Death Eaters in 1950.
They promoted the usual policy of increasing the rights of pureblood wizards while simultaneously curtailing the rights of other, less pureblood wizards.
This policy was blocked by other wizards who saw similarities to Grindelwald’s ideas.
And by Albus Dumbledore, who was at the height of his fame after defeating Grindelwald.
Then the head of the newly reorganized order vanished, only to reappear in 1970.
And then the “fun” began.
Members of the Wizengamot who opposed the order’s policies, known among the populace as Death Eaters, began turning up dead in their homes, sometimes not even having made it out of their lavatories.
Known Muggle-borns were slowly fired from their jobs by their aristocratic bosses, as at least seventy percent of the industry was owned by magical aristocrats.
Shops owned by Muggle-borns or half-bloods who’d decided to go into business began burning down one by one.
Over eleven years, through escalating terror and fear, the Order of the Death Eaters held all of Britain in its grip.
They no longer hesitated to engage in open battles with Ministry Auror squads.
One incident stood out in particular.
A distress signal from the security detail of a high-ranking Ministry official’s family had been answered by four Auror Stars.
An Auror Star was a tight-knit group of five combat Aurors who’d undergone far more rigorous training than their regular counterparts, who mostly handled patrols and minor cases.
A well-prepared Star could take down a dragon, wrestle a giant into submission, or run a pack of werewolves through a forest.
Even a master wizard couldn’t easily escape them, let alone defeat them.
So twenty wizards, armed with numerous artifacts and fortified by magical stimulants, arrived.
And they were met by one Voldemort.
Minutes later, an illusion of a green skull with a snake emerging from its eye sockets hung in the sky.
The street and the dead department head’s house were littered with human body parts and puddles of blood.
From that moment on, the Heir of Slytherin had fully cemented his position as the new Dark Lord.
Everyone expected the Ministry to fall any day.
A few skirmishes between Albus Dumbledore and the Dark Lord seemed like they could end in the latter’s victory.
The Dark Lord appeared more and more powerful in the eyes of the common man.
Then came October 31, 1981.
The day the entire magical world, Britain included, collectively froze in shock.
The news: the Great and Terrible Dark Lord had been defeated by a one-year-old child from the Potter family.
At first, no one believed it.
But when Ministry workers arrived at the empty house and, despite strong magical interference, were able to reconstruct the sequence of events using spells, they saw it.
A vague figure in a dark robe hurling an Avada Kedavra at a one-year-old child.
Then a flash of light…
In short, British wizards were so stunned and relieved that day that some almost had orgasms.
A few even began literally praying to Harry Potter, believing him to be a child blessed by magic itself.
As for the Dark Lord himself…
he died under mysterious circumstances and then, also mysteriously, returned.
If you believed Potter’s account in the newspapers, Voldemort had been resurrected during the final task of the Triwizard Tournament.
According to Potter, who appeared before the judges with the Triwizard Cup in one hand and a dead fellow student in the other, the Dark Lord had returned.
After that, the news from Britain became increasingly contradictory, until it stopped altogether when the island sealed itself off.
So, plenty of information about Voldemort, but nothing truly important.
How did he resurrect?
How did he get defeated by a one-year-old?
How was he connected to that thing in the arch?
Did he create the necro-virus, or was it someone else?
What was that cloak he wore?
And a new question: why did two Dark Lords of the twentieth century have the same wand?
Sighing, I flipped through a Bulgarian newspaper whose editorial office, if I remembered correctly, was about to close.
It reported on a Durmstrang student’s expulsion for illegal practice of the Dark Arts. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
The moving photograph showed a golden-haired blond with obvious heterochromia, looking at others with thinly veiled superiority.
Grindelwald must have changed his image later, if he was strutting around in the thirties with a shock of ashen hair.
I stopped looking at him and focused on the text, hoping to find information about this wizard’s wand.
I didn’t know the core of the magical focus that two Dark Lords shared, but the wood, by its appearance and structure, looked like elder.
Though that might not be the case, as some decoctions used in wand-making could change the color and even the structure of the wood.
The printed lines of Bulgarian text didn’t share the information I needed.
Already knowing this would be another pointless article, of which I’d read many in the past few hours, I turned the page.
On the other side was the end of the article.
I looked at the photograph of a wall with writing on it, with several teachers trying to erase it.
“Wizards must take their rightful place in the world.”
But it wasn’t the slogan that interested me.
It was the strange symbol above the words.
A triangle with a circle inscribed inside and a vertical line running through the middle.
Where had I seen that before?
I quickly flipped through the pages of the books and newspapers I’d taken from the library.
Not there.
I stood up, waved my hand to cast protective charms on my belongings, and walked toward the bookshelves.
I raised my hand and ran it along the spines, trying to remember which book I’d seen the symbol in.
Some poorly informed wizards believed that the memory of Occlumency masters was eidetic.
That was both true and false.
The memory of those who practiced Occlumency did improve, and the amount of processed information increased exponentially.
But increasing “working memory” didn’t mean a wizard could immediately tell you if they’d seen a butterfly on July 31st, twenty-five years ago.
Those who reached the heights of Occlumency eventually learned a particular “trick.” It was easy to stumble upon if you’d ever studied Muggle medicine or seen a talking ghost.
Most Muggles knew that memory was stored in the head, more specifically in the brain.
But then how could a ghost or a living portrait remember their past life?
The answer was as simple as it was perplexing.
Magic.
That ever-changing, yet constant, force full of contradictions.
Anyone who claimed to understand all the laws of magic could be called a fool or a liar.
This force can change and make things unchanging, destroy and create, take and preserve.
Masters of Occlumency themselves could be walking libraries and Pensieves.
They could store all their memories within their magical power.
The challenge was retrieving a specific memory from that power if you couldn’t even remember what it was about.
I closed my eyes.
Memories of dozens of libraries I’d visited flashed through my mind.
The wide, oval library in Prague, illuminated by sunlight streaming through the tall, vertical stained-glass windows, with such comfortable chairs for visitors.
The darkened library with upside-down bookshelves in a Ukrainian aristocratic manor, whose owners had held the title of princes since the time of the Russian Empire.
I remembered having to fight off Alghouls who’d made a nest there.
The small, snow-covered school library, books rotting from moisture, where I’d climbed through a broken window to take shelter during my wanderings across the seemingly endless expanses of Russia.
I’d found the bastard who’d given the order to drop the atomic bomb on Prague.
He’d considered the breakup of Czechoslovakia and the improvement of relations between the newly formed Czech Republic and the West a “betrayal of communist ideals.” Later, fearing the rapidly spreading necro-virus in Europe, he’d screamed long and hard under the Cruciatus.
The small library with scrolls covered in Chinese characters, belonging to a clan in the Forbidden City.
The masters of Eastern mystical arts hadn’t been saved by their isolationist policies, their world-renowned barriers and seals, or their famed pride and arrogance.
Another abandoned library of a dead wizard’s family, where one of the books tried to bite off my fingers…
Found it.
I opened my eyes and walked toward the central aisle, which would lead me to the right shelves.
My eyes scanned the floating signs.
Runes.
Transfiguration.
Arithmancy.
History.
Household Charms.
Magical Law…
Fiction.
I quickly turned down the right aisle.
A slightly plump witch, choosing a romance novel, looked at me and gasped.
Then, rummaging through her bag, she charged toward me like a battering ram, nearly knocking over a distracted visitor.
“Excuse me, but are you Gilderoy Lockhart?”
“For twenty-one years now, I’ve been known as Gilderoy Lockhart, my lady.”
I put on Lockhart’s smile and cheerfully replied to the slightly flustered witch.
Whatever anyone said, Lockhart was a handsome man who could charm many women without any magic.
“Could you sign this for me?”
She held out a book with a red cover, showing a wizard in a purple robe next to a vampire with a stupid expression.
Lockhart’s first book, “Voyages with Vampires.”
That Russian Dark Hunter, whose memory of this story Lockhart had “borrowed,” knew his curses.
Making a starving vampire crave cabbage instead of blood was a real torment for those bloodsuckers.
I took the book and flipped to the last page.
The enchanted quill was already in my hand.
“What would you like me to write?”
“I don’t know.
It’s for my daughter.
She’s twelve, and she admires you so much after reading your book.”
“Oh, then I know exactly what to write.”
I told the nervous witch, writing in a beautiful script:
“For the girl with the most caring mother in the world.”
I handed the book back and said:
“Here.
And as a favor in return, could you tell me where I can find ‘Tales and Legends of the Magical Families of Europe’?”
The woman, smiling happily, pointed in the right direction.
“Over there, on the left shelf.
I borrowed it a few years ago to read to my daughter at night.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you.”
I said goodbye to the woman and walked toward the indicated shelf.
Before me were dozens of children’s books, many of which I’d read as a child. This story is hosted at g.com.
My eyes scanned the shelves until I found a familiar binding.
I reached out my hand.
Accio.
“Tales and Legends of the Magical Families of Europe” flew into my open palm.
I opened the book and quickly flipped through the pages until I found the symbol.
That triangle with the circle and the vertical line.
Underneath it was the story of the three brothers of the infamous Peverell family.
Six hours later.
“What the hell?”
With a headache, I stared at the stacks of books I’d read, trying to process the fact that three artifacts from a fairy tale could potentially cause the end of the world.
Though maybe it wasn’t that, and it was just that arch.
But that didn’t change the similarities with the Lich’s words.
He’d called himself the Master of Death and had possessed the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Invisibility Cloak.
But if the cloak only makes a person invisible to Death, how did I end up in Lockhart’s body?
Did I die, but the cloak “sheltered” my soul, preventing it from being pulled across the threshold, and it somehow possessed a British wizard’s body in another world, one who only shared my name and desire to be the best?
As for where these artifacts, which turned out to be real, actually were…
I could only guess about the Elder Wand.
The “unbeatable” wand, like a hot potato, had been passed among wizards.
The first documented owner was Emeric the Evil, a not-so-nice sorcerer who roamed the skies of southern England on his dragon in the early Middle Ages.
Then he was killed by another future owner, Egbert the Egregious.
History is silent on who killed him.
The stupidest part is that Ignotus Peverell, one of the three brothers in the story, had perfectly documented birth and death dates.
He lived from July 12, 1214, to May 18, 1291.
That means he was born in the early thirteenth century.
Meanwhile, Emeric the Evil was flying around on his dragon, terrorizing the peasants of southern England, a good two hundred years before that.
Either this isn’t that Ignotus, or someone’s pulling my leg.
The last documented owner of the “Elder Wand” was an eighteenth-century French duelist named Loxias.
He was a wizard with a remarkably ugly face, who killed Barnabas Deverell, the previous owner, another French duelist with an equally hideous face.
Who killed Loxias is unknown.
According to historical chronicles, everyone wanted to kill him, even his own mother.
Well, no one likes ugly people.
Everyone loves handsome guys like me.
“Oh, damn it.”
I put my elbows on the table and began massaging my temples with my index fingers.
A useless and “parasitic” action that somehow seemed to ease the headache.
This body still wasn’t ready for the Occlumency workload I’d had in the past.
And constantly wearing Lockhart’s mental mask had its consequences.
I looked at the Bulgarian newspaper, still open on the table.
The young Grindelwald in the photograph stared back at me with the same thinly veiled superiority.
The most famous wizard of the twentieth century.
The Dark Lord whose revolutionary ideas plunged the entire magical world into chaos.
The owner of the Elder Wand, whose whereabouts had been unknown for a century.
If you followed the logic of the wand’s succession, its current owner should be Albus Dumbledore.
He’d defeated Grindelwald in a duel.
Though he’d gone against “tradition” by imprisoning Gellert instead of killing him.
A truly “merciful” decision.
Locking Grindelwald in a prison he’d personally enchanted, forcing him to watch everything he and his followers had built crumble like a sandcastle.
To hear how his followers were being killed by enraged Russian wizards or thrown into the very prison he’d been so proud of.
True “mercy.”
As for the eccentric Headmaster of Hogwarts, Voldemort could easily have taken his wand in my past-future.
The question was where he’d gotten the Resurrection Stone and the Cloak.
The only known users of these artifacts in history were the Peverell brothers.
Their whereabouts for all those centuries were unknown.
Maybe Voldemort spent those twenty years, from 1950 to 1970, searching for them?
His appearance had changed slightly after those years.
Maybe delving into ancient burial grounds had made him so ugly?
I’d have to keep that in mind.
My reputation as one of the most handsome men alive must not be tarnished!
“Shit!”
“Excuse me, sir.”
I put on a smile and turned to the librarian’s assistant, whom I’d already subconsciously checked for danger with subtle spells, ignoring him once I’d determined he wasn’t a threat.
“Yes?”
“The library closes in ten minutes.”
“Oh, I’ll put the books back right away.”
“No need.
I can do that myself.”
“Thank you.”
A couple of Sickles found their way into the young man’s sleeve.
Most of the books I’d needed had been found and brought to me by him, and good work should be rewarded.
It was quite possible that Michel Klein, one of the many library assistants, an unambitious and diligent wizard, might be useful to me in the future.
Fate loves to throw curveballs.
Who knows that better than me?
Heh.
I walked calmly down the stairs toward the library entrance.
Maybe I’d have dinner at “Visiting the Chancellor” tonight.
Their beer was mediocre, but the Berlin-style knuckle was divine.
Though in this body, with its normal taste buds not ruined by potion toxins, any properly cooked meal would taste divine.
That made the beer’s awfulness even more remarkable.
Whoosh.
A blindingly white polar owl, glowing in the setting sun, flew toward me.
It circled me once, as if confirming I was the right person, then dropped an envelope into my hands with a birdlike grace and flew off.
The envelope hovered over my palm until I’d checked it for any “surprises” or “gifts” with magic, then I took it.
It was sealed with a stylized snowflake.
“And what does the ancient and noble House Vinter want from such a humble and handsome man as myself?”