“Welcome to the den of this sweet tooth and little brat.
It’s a bit messy, but that’s the visitors’ problem.”
Romen Torchvik said cheerfully, opening the door to a small apartment in one of Berlin’s residential districts.
Despite his relaxed face and cheerful voice, I could feel his tension and his readiness to go to great lengths for his adopted sister.
I quickly scanned the entryway with scattered men’s and women’s shoes, feeling the weak masking charms placed on the apartment.
Weak charms, but they didn’t require personal power or a magical source; they drew enough energy from the surrounding magical background.
“Nio, I brought a guest.
So no shooting from the gun right away.
Better poison him personally with your home-brewed tea.
He’s British, so he won’t turn down tea.”
A fragile, fair-haired girl of about fifteen looked out from the doorway leading to the kitchen, judging by the smells.
She glared at Romen with her green eyes, which turned red a second later when she looked at me.
Her long, wheat-colored hair became short and changed to a burgundy color.
Wariness showed in her gaze.
A Metamorphmagus who clearly didn’t control her abilities.
Or couldn’t.
I inhaled.
The girl smelled of chestnuts, morning freshness, and an old curse.
“I know the smell in this den isn’t great, but sniffing the air so demonstratively was rude at the very least.”
With a thwack, a slipper hit Romen Torchvik in the face.
The girl, who had nearly fallen from the sudden movement of her throw, straightened up and, putting her hands on her hips, frowned at the redhead.
“What?
The truth isn’t offensive!”
Her irises, now yellow, looked at the second slipper lying forlornly on the floor.
“Fine, fine.
They are offensive.
And as an apology for offending the Great Mistress of the Den, I brought your favorite ice cream, which I fought tooth and nail for from greedy and despicable villains.”
Her eyes, now blue, appraised the red-haired man, while her hair fell like a purple wave down her back.
“Five kilograms.
Vanilla and strawberry.”
Her irises turned chestnut and narrowed with satisfaction.
“I need to examine the girl, and possibly today I can remove the curse and fix the internal defect it caused.”
I spoke in a calm, indifferent voice.
I saw no point in using Lockhart’s mask for them.
One was already, in fact, my servant, as he already bore a seal of obedience I’d placed after viewing the memories of the resourceful thief (who hadn’t noticed it yet).
The other wouldn’t abandon the first.
Niropolitian looked at me with wide eyes.
I noticed how, for a moment, the girl’s skin seemed to melt and become wrinkled like an old woman’s, but the next moment it returned to normal.
“This isn’t just to gawk at and touch a young female body, is it?
Because if so, I’ll file a police report for harassment of Nio!”
Romen said, trying to hide his nervousness and tension behind his jabs.
He was much more nervous now than when he’d woken up in the basement.
So I hadn’t been wrong in my analysis of his personality.
“She doesn’t need to take her clothes off.
While I examine her, prepare a clean space five by five meters and a place for a cauldron with a Potioneer’s field table.”
After staring at me for a few seconds, the man, holding his bowler hat with his fingers, made a caricatured bow.
“Your wish is my command, my lord.”
Testing my patience and boundaries.
I turned my gaze to Niropolitian, ignoring the brief glance exchanged between the girl and the man.
I walked around the girl and entered the kitchen.
My eyes immediately fell on the mountain of unwashed dishes in the sink.
I lingered on the table with sliced bread, sausage, butter, and other sandwich enthusiast products.
I pointed to the chair with my hand.
“Sit down.”
Watching me with a suspicious look, Niropolitian carefully sat on the edge of the chair.
I began tracing patterns with my cherry wand, reciting a healing diagnostic spell for the body’s magical shell.
Unlike most ordinary spells with two or three words, this one consisted of several sentences, a modified recitative-charm that had come to European magic from the Far East.
In the middle of a sentence, I heard a strange, cracked whisper speaking along with me for a fraction of a second, then I heard only my own voice.
Unexpected.
Usually, wizards can’t hear the resonance so clearly.
Actually, hearing it so well is something only seers and shamans can do, as they most often interact with the astral plane and practice magical arts.
In any case, it wasn’t important right now.
I felt a magical connection form between me and the girl, allowing me to see everything, as it were, from the “inside.” Not exactly see, though.
To put it crudely and without details, my spell connected to the girl’s nerves, both physical and spiritual, which connect body and soul, then began to process all the received signals into digestible information for me.
I may be a cool Legilimens and Occlumens, but trying to decipher ALL the body’s signals on my own would only cause a stroke.
I lowered my wand after receiving and analyzing the information.
“Your Metamorphmagus gift awakened when you were ten?”
I clarified with the girl, although I already knew from Romen’s memories.
Without changing her suspicious look, she nodded.
“Did you notice before that you grew faster than other children?”
The girl tilted her head, her hair now green, and shrugged.
“Fine.
We’ll figure that out later.”
“Figure what out?”
Romen asked, having already finished carrying out my orders and watching my actions for the past five minutes.
“Niropolitian has been under the ‘Curse of Time’ for the last six years.”
Frowning, Torchvik raised a finger.
“Hey, wait.
All the previous Healers I brought told me in one voice that Nio’s curse was a very strong variant of the ‘Veil of Old Age.’ Because of the curse, her Metamorphmagus gift is constantly active, which is why she doesn’t look like a hundred-year-old woman.
But it’s the constant activity of the gift that prevents the curse from being lifted.
Plus, the constant activity of the gift led to her severe exhaustion, which recently left her bedridden.
Or is the ‘Veil of Old Age’ and the ‘Curse of Time’ just different names for the same curse?”
I picked up my suitcase, which I’d brought with me, and walked toward the room where the redhead was supposed to clear me a space.
“They were wrong.
They confused cause and effect. Find the original chapter at g.com.
The ‘Veil of Old Age’ changes the body’s appearance like Polyjuice Potion, but doesn’t affect cellular aging.
The ‘Curse of Time’ directly accelerates the body’s aging, consuming the host’s magic and life to fuel itself.
If it weren’t for her Metamorphmagus gift, which allowed her to increase her cell division limit, she should have died at thirteen, looking forty.”
I surveyed the empty room, which now had only bare floor and one window facing the street.
I set the suitcase on the floor and opened it.
“If you hadn’t given her Raffar the White’s Elixir, which you got from vampires, Niropolitian would have died this January.”
“Just don’t remind me that my brain was roughly deflowered by the consciousness of a handsome blond.”
“The Elixir gave her three extra years.”
Torchvik fell silent.
Niropolitian, who had followed them, took his hand and smiled.
I turned away from them and, with a summoning charm, pulled the cauldron with its tripod and a rectangular box from my suitcase.
I touched the box with my wand, making it unfold into a Potioneer’s field table with vials and ingredients secured in compartments.
If anyone else tried to open it, the green cloud that would emerge would “open” their path to the afterlife.
“Don’t disturb me for the next two hours while I prepare to remove the curse from the girl.”
“Okay.”
Romen nodded seriously.
“And…”
Niropolitian and Romen, who had turned to leave, looked back at me questioningly.
“…prepare something for me to eat.”
“Oh, you’re starting to look like a living person.
I was beginning to think you were like that Terminator from the movie, only a magical version, with nothing but the mission to complete.”
My eye twitched in irritation.
“Confringo!
Haha.
Bombarda!
Why are you defending yourselves?
We’re all just living dead.
We just need to destroy our bodies and find peace.
Haha.
It’s so simple.”
Fire rose over several tents set up by refugees fleeing from central Europe to Russia, escaping the hordes of undead that sometimes numbered in the millions.
“Septimus, snap out of it.
We’re all alive.
Our blood is hot, and our hearts are beating.
We’re not dead yet.”
A shield of Protego appeared in the path of the fiery whip.
The laughing wizard waved his wand again, from which a fiery whip extended.
“Lies.
Vampires have beating hearts too.
And we, like them, don’t live; we just exist.
I haven’t tasted food or water in a year, and I always feel cold.
Besides, I can’t get it up for women.
So we’re just corpses.
Haha.
Though we are better-looking.”
“Septimus…”
“We’re like those dead things, following only one goal.
They want to eat us, and we want to stop them.
But inside, we’re all dead.
Like those damned robots from the Muggle movies that disguised themselves as people.”
“Then go to your damned dead and robots.
Stop attacking us.”
“No.
The dead must rest.
Like my brothers under Paris.
In flames.
Fiend…”
“Reducto.”
A transparent beam of the curse pierced the madman’s chest, leaving an empty hole in his torso.
The laughing wizard’s arms began to lower.
“…fyre.
Oh, the dead can feel…
pain too.”
The body fell to the ground.
I waved my wand, extinguishing the weak flame of the unfinished fifth-category spell.
No regret, no grief, no anger.
Only fatigue, and an all-consuming hatred.
“Get out.”
Something in my tone made the two of them quickly disappear from the room.
I took out a flask that, thanks to space-enlargement charms, contained more than fifty liters of spring water, and poured it over the cauldron, letting it fill.
From the rune-covered stone under the cauldron, flames rose.
“I am a living person.”
Not a corpse.
I could taste that pork knuckle I’d eaten at the café, that awful magical beer that cost three Knuts a glass.
I could feel the rough pages of books holding the tragic history of the Elder Wand’s former owners.
I could feel the warmth of Maria’s skin when she lay wounded on the train floor.
“I’m not a corpse.”
I suppressed the emotions this redheaded thief had somehow managed to stir up with Occlumency.
I took a red juniper berry, also known as “heather,” from one of the table’s compartments and dropped it into the boiling water.
Next, I poured the squeezed juice of lunar lotus from a vial.
The water became more viscous and turned reddish, and the scent of juniper filled the air, indicating the dissolution of the berry under the lotus juice’s effect.
The rock crystal wand in my hand, through which I channeled my magic, began to stir the brewing potion, accelerating the dissolution of the berry and distributing the lotus juice throughout the cauldron.
I stirred steadily for fifteen minutes until the potion turned ruby red.
I carefully placed the crystal wand on its designated tray.
I opened another table compartment and lingered on the seven-flower root, still in my possession after my “deals” with that Sharp Hoods member.
I pulled the root from its wrapping and began to chop it with a silver knife, then poured the powder from the board into the brewing potion.
Easy come, easy go.
I magically reduced the flame from the magical spirit lamp and left the cauldron to infuse for an hour.
I turned and surveyed the room’s floor more critically.
I’d have to adjust it with spells for the future ritual circle.
But getting competent subordinates always required significant investment.
Romen Torchvik was nervous.
More nervous than ever before.
Even when he’d had to kill a man for the first time during a robbery in his early days as a professional thief and smuggler.
Despite all his cynicism, egoism, and indifference to others’ fates and feelings, he had one vulnerable weakness in the criminal world: a close person.
Niropolitian.
A little girl who had once secretly sheltered a young man, hunted by one of Berlin’s largest gangs, for a few hours in her home during the difficult post-war years.
A girl who, at ten, awakened an uncontrollable Metamorphmagus gift and became mute overnight.
Her devout Muggle parents saw it as a “sign of the devil.” A homeless girl, soon found on the streets by a leader of one of the city’s most prominent gangs, who for some reason decided to remember the principle of “equivalent exchange.” At least, that’s what he told himself.
Romen Torchvik never understood at what point in his life he’d become ready to do anything for his adopted sister.
But that wasn’t important.
What mattered was the ritual to heal Niropolitian, which was about to happen before his eyes.
In his bedroom, which he’d emptied of everything (even the bed, which he’d somehow, without Transfiguration, squeezed into a small closet) at the Briton’s request, a ritual circle was drawn on the modified, leveled floor.
The number and complexity of the symbols and lines nearly made the redhead dizzy.
It screamed of High Magic.
And now, on this circle stood a nervous girl with constantly changing features and hair, to whom the golden-haired wizard handed a vial of red potion with golden sparks glinting inside.
“You just need to drink this and stand still.
I’ll do the rest.”
The Briton said in an emotionless voice.
His face, for the entire day, had been an expressionless mask.
But on the moving photographs Romen had seen to learn more about the man who’d nearly burned him, the Albion native practically radiated his smile, a smile that made the thief grit his teeth.
The girl obediently took the vial and downed its contents, grimacing slightly at the taste.
Taking the empty vial back, Gilderoy Lockhart nodded, then suddenly spread his arms wide, never leaving the circle.
And he began to speak.
*”^^$$°✓°^=[≈}=¢ ^$$”*
Torchvik clapped his hands over his ears from the pain.
The words the wizard was reciting weren’t in Latin.
Romen wouldn’t even call it a language.
Rather, a sequence of scraping, rattling sounds of clashing metal pieces, which somehow formed the roar of an avalanche in his head, then the crash of stormy sea waves.
An invisible pressure emanated from the wizard’s figure, and the ritual circle glowed blue.
Niropolitian, frightened, reflexively took a step back, then froze, her hypnotized gaze fixed forward.
*”€^¢¢^°^°°¢°°¢=^¢®”*
“What are you doing?!”
The redheaded man’s eyes practically popped out of his head as the wizard firmly gripped the girl’s forehead with one hand.
The blue light rising from the circle, blatantly ignoring the many centuries of Muggle study of light, bent and reached toward the girl’s figure.
Under the pressure of the rising blue light, gray lines appeared on the girl’s body, enveloping her like nerves.
A stream of magic, visually like shimmering desert heat, flowed from the stone-faced wizard into the floor.
The thin gray lines began to burn away under pressure, while the thick ones began to be pulled toward the head.
After three long minutes, all the remaining gray lines, compressed into a ball, were under the wizard’s hand gripping the girl’s forehead, whose body was no longer visible behind the blue light.
*”$$^¢€©€c◯©^^”*
Lockhart brought an empty vial to the girl’s forehead, which he’d been holding in his right hand the whole time.
Then he removed his left hand from her forehead.
The ball of gray lines, like a champagne cork, flew into the vial.
A crack of burning forest fire echoed in his head, and the vial in the wizard’s hand shattered into pieces, quickly burning up in the blue flame.
Niropolitian’s blue figure flared up, and Torchvik, cursing, began rubbing his eyes.
When he finally came to his senses, he saw Niropolitian, her hair now long and colored like her favorite ice cream.
Brown, pink, and a little white in the form of several white streaks among the pink locks.
Green eyes met chestnut and pale pink ones.
After a full minute of silence, her appearance didn’t change.
Torchvik swallowed nervously.
“Is the curse lifted?”
“Yes.
Niropolitian can now live at least a hundred years if no one kills her earlier.
She can gain conscious control over her Metamorphmagus gift, inherited from ancestors who weren’t averse to sleeping with shape-shifters.
In a week, she can start studying magic.
And, she should be able to talk now.”
Feeling an unprecedented excitement, Romen stared at the girl.
She hesitated for a moment, then opened and closed her mouth a couple of times silently.
She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them and looked straight at Torchvik.
And she spoke…
“Romen.”
…in a deep male baritone, the voice of the main character from a spy action movie she’d watched with Torchvik.
The redhead’s green eyes widened in shock.
“WHAT DID YOU DO?!”
“You wanted her to speak.”
“But not with the voice of Agent 007!
Fix her right now!
Fix her!”
The redheaded man almost howled, trying to grab the blond by his robe, but an invisible magical shield stopped him.
“Niropolitian couldn’t speak for more than five years because her vocal cords were constantly changing.
So it’s no surprise she first spoke in a voice that wasn’t hers, one she might have forgotten.
A little training of her gift should fix it.”
Gilderoy Lockhart said, looking over Romen Torchvik’s shoulder at the slyly smiling girl.