The “Ring of Darkness” trembled violently inside the glass sphere.
The sphere was covered with several lines of patterns, a combination of Elder Futhark runes, Chinese oracle bone script characters used in divination practices, and symbols from the Japanese art of sealing.
I stopped in the middle of a run-down Muggle neighborhood in London.
I channeled more magic into the sphere.
The patterns glowed brighter yellow, and I tried to decipher the information from my created tracking artifact.
It was one result of my attempts to combine Western and Eastern schools of magical arts, to mitigate the weaknesses of both.
I wouldn’t say I’d created a new magical system surpassing both, but a few developments allowed me to earn my official title of Master of Ritualistics much earlier than others who spent decades on it.
One of the results of this “fusion” of practices was my pride and secret, one that could turn half of the current magical aristocracy against me.
The Resonance Sphere.
Its creation was inspired by my understanding of the Roman orthodox magical system.
If spoken incantations resonate with the traces left by past wizards, then wouldn’t there be an even stronger resonance between magic created by the same wizard?
Even if the spells or enchantments were different, they were created by the same wizard with their own unique magical “signature,” like a fingerprint.
Impossible to forge.
Incredibly difficult to replicate.
The Resonance Sphere’s principle was to detect this resonance between two “creations” of the same wizard.
The search was possible because the resonance intensified as the two objects approached each other.
Now for the million-Galleon question.
Could a renowned master Artificer and head of an ancient house not try to improve the magical defenses of his ancestral home?
I shifted my gaze to the empty space between numbers eleven and thirteen, from which the strongest resonance signal emanated.
Unless a masterpiece of Orian Black’s Artificing was lying around in a rubbish bin, I’d found the location of the Black family home.
I pulled my wand from its forearm holster.
Concealment.
Confusion.
“Repello Muggletum.”
A transparent wave of Muggle-Repelling Charms spread outward.
I made new wand movements.
Distraction.
Uselessness.
“Diversitas oculorum.”
A new wave of magic washed over the area, making it uninteresting and unnecessary to ordinary wizards.
I pulled a rune-covered stone from my pocket and anchored the spells to it, so I wouldn’t have to concentrate on maintaining them.
Next came more ritualistic tools: chalk made from limestone from the Dead Sea, several precious stones, and a couple of scrolls of parchment with pre-drawn runic arrays.
Tools I’d become all too familiar with during the Cataclysm for breaking into the defensive enchantments of manors, castles, estates, and homes.
It wasn’t the most pleasant job.
First, I did it with other wizards for supplies and resources for the survivors, taking books as an afterthought.
I didn’t even have time to sleep, let alone read.
Then came the forests of Poland and that small military town in Kaliningrad.
Kreczko and Grisha.
After that, I’d searched for the estates of ancient houses specifically for knowledge, largely ignoring the needs of my group.
Perhaps, if I hadn’t seen Maria in Prague after the nuclear strike, I would have sought a way to resurrect the dead.
If the boundary between the worlds of the dead and the living was so thin, then resurrection wasn’t a phantom dream.
Only…
would they even want to return to that world?
The only thing left in me after everything was hatred.
Hatred for the Inferi.
For the maddened magical creatures and ordinary animals that grew more like nightmares with each passing day.
For the bastards who, at the end of the world, decided to realize all their sick fantasies, raping anything that even vaguely resembled a woman, or finding orgasms in torturing the living.
When, after another foray, I saw a row of tents replaced by a horde of Inferi, with a couple of abominations among them (walking mountains of dead flesh from various creatures fused together), I only felt annoyance at the loss of a relatively safe place to sleep.
The only thing that mattered was knowledge.
Knowledge that would either restore the natural order, so that no one could ever disturb the peace of my loved ones, or send everything into oblivion.
Impossible?
Muggles thought magic was impossible.
Wizards thought what happened after 1998 was impossible.
With smooth, precise movements, I traced runic chains on the magically leveled cobblestones, stabilizing the space and determining its geometry.
In my left hand, I held the Resonance Sphere.
It allowed me to roughly determine the spatial coordinates of the estate, which was shifted into a spatial pocket.
Simply put, I was looking for the spatial layer where the estate resided.
You could talk about magical home defenses for hours.
The saying “my home is my castle” perfectly describes wizards’ attitudes toward their dwellings.
From the very beginning of magic’s history, wizards sought to protect their homes.
Walls strengthened to the hardness of stone.
A wall of fire or an impenetrable magical dome.
Early home, castle, or even city defenses followed the concept of “thicker walls and hit back harder.” By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as defensive charms began to lag behind offensive magic, the concept of “invisibility” grew popular.
The enemy can’t kill me if they can’t find me.
These words largely define the mindset of today’s magical world.
That’s when the arts of illusion, mentalism, and spatial magic flourished.
The enemy can’t enter your door if they can’t see it, if they forget where it was, or even its very existence.
And even if they blanket the area with spells, they’ll maybe only hit your porch with a fifth-category spell, because your house is shifted into a spatial pocket on a relatively close layer.
Or they’ll find the “anchor” connecting the spatial pocket to the ordinary world.
The pinnacle of this concept was the masterpiece of ritualistics now classified as the Fidelius Charm.
A charm that deceives the world itself, so that even masters of Occlumency can’t avoid it.
They don’t forget about the house, exactly.
They simply can’t think about it, because the world itself suppresses that paradox.
The paradox is that the world has been given the “setting” that a certain place simply doesn’t exist.
Yet there are people who have been in that house, seen it, or read its address in a book.
How could they, if according to the “setting,” that place doesn’t even exist in people’s minds?
Paradox.
And what does the world do with a paradox?
It gets rid of it in the “easiest” way: it makes people not remember the house.
Fortunately, the Black family estate wasn’t protected by the Fidelius.
So I didn’t need to find the Secret Keeper.
Or any living Black family members who could let me in.
A few minutes later, I could enter the abode of “Britain’s blackest family of wizards.”
White light flared from the runic circles under my feet, connected by lines, forming a hexagram above.
A distortion became visible in the air above the center.
I pulled my sword from its sheath, the same one I’d used to kill the Jotun chief, now serving as my ritualistic athame.
The blade, filled with my magic, entered the distortion like a key into a lock.
I turned it.
With a crack, the surrounding space warped.
A grim, Gothic-style house appeared before me, “pushing aside” the neighboring buildings.
Black smoke began to swirl around me, smelling of rotting human entrails.
But a piece of amber in my pocket, specially enchanted, crumbled to dust a moment later, neutralizing the curse the defensive charms had sent my way.
I sheathed my sword and reached out my hand to catch the parchment scroll with the pre-drawn runic circle I’d summoned with wandless, non-verbal magic.
I waved my hand, erasing the now-unneeded runic construct from the cobblestones, and unrolled the parchment on the ground, beginning to inscribe runes of connection, direction, and space into the existing “template.”
Flashes of light erupted around me from the house’s attacking charms colliding with my magical defenses: enchanted amulets and pre-cast spells.
I poured the precious stones, serving as reservoirs, onto the parchment and activated the now-filled “template.”
Red lightning shot upward from the glowing red runic array, reaching for the invisible, immaterial magical connections that linked the defensive charm complex to the external spatial charms holding the artificial spatial pocket.
The ones I’d just “hacked.”
A hum filled the air.
Almost simultaneously, every window facing the street shattered.
The building trembled for three seconds before falling silent, looking even more dilapidated.
That’s what happens when you send too much “voltage” through fully operational defensive charms.
Besides, who said breaking a charm complex had to be quiet and neat?
The main thing is that other wizards and the Ministry don’t notice.
As for Muggles, there are charms for that.
I picked up the empty reservoirs from the smoking parchment, which quickly burned away in a non-verbal Incendio.
Glass crunched under my feet as I approached the front door.
A couple of steps to the side.
A wand motion.
The locking spell hit the door.
With a whistle, a black bolt, with blue sparks of a familiar enchantment, flew from the depths of the house at chest height through the doorway.
“Death to Wizards.” Classic.
I entered the house.
“WHO DARES TO ENTER THE HOUSE OF THE ANCIENT AND NOBLE HOUSE OF BLACK…”
A smooth flick of my wand.
Silence.
Territory.
“Locus silentii.”
I never understood that tradition in some pureblood families, hanging moving portraits of their relatives near the front door.
Their constant screaming when a manor was broken into had annoyed me to no end in the past.
I sighed, shaking my head at the onslaught of curse scents hitting my nose, and spun my wand in my hand, sending a red spell over my shoulder.
The house-elf that had appeared behind me with a pop froze, paralyzed, its hand raised for a snap.
As always, behind me, and as always, trying to teleport the uninvited guest away.
Just like breaking into another manor that had somehow survived the Cataclysm’s start, in the early second millennium AD.
I ignored Walburga Black’s bulging eyes in the portrait and looked into the terrified, horror-filled eyes of the house-elf.
It was growing weaker and aging rapidly without a wizard’s personal magical infusion.
My mental probe hit powerful mental defenses.
So it was a family elf, not just one bound to a specific Black family member.
I levitated it in front of me and followed the scent of the defensive charms to the “heart” of the estate.
In other words, the runic array or stone circle upon which all the serious household charms were tied, redirecting energy from the natural magical source.
With a wave of my hand and a pulse of magic, I caused the two-meter-tall old clocks standing near an inconspicuous black door to collapse.
I could smell the poison from several meters away.
I opened the door with a simple Alohomora.
Stairs leading down into the darkness appeared before me.
I pulled a Cat’s Eye potion from my bag and downed the vial.
Inhale.
Exhale.
A thin film of magic covered my sclera, and the world turned black and white.
I descended the stairs at a steady pace, avoiding several mechanical traps thanks to my enhanced vision.
At least they’d been creative here.
Dust rose from the floor beneath my feet.
The terror of the floating house-elf in its ragged pillowcase increased with every step I took, reaching its peak when a massive iron door, without a lock but with obvious curses, appeared before us.
A shower of sparks flew from my hand, quickly dying out a few centimeters from the door.
The scent of the magic on the door became stronger after colliding with my magic.
Removing the curses without destruction would be tricky.
Time to see how much the Blacks trusted their family-bound house-elves.
With a distinct thud, the body of what was presumably Kreacher, judging by the surface thoughts I’d caught from the creature, slammed into the door, which swung open under its weight.
So, not dead and not dying.
They trusted him.
I calmly entered the sanctum sanctorum of a pureblood family.
The heart of the pureblood houses, the place where they value three things above all: Power, Knowledge, and the family nest, a controlled magical source where they can take shelter and tell the rest of the world to go to hell.
I surveyed the oval room.
In its center was a circle of stones, with an iron pillar in the middle.
I felt the magical defenses I’d disrupted rapidly repairing themselves.
I took a closer look at the stones, covered in Celtic script, and the obvious new addition, the iron pillar with Elder Futhark runes.
The previous head or heads had clearly tried to combine the old with the new.
Not bad.
But not impossible to adapt.
Three hours later, sitting in the drawing room, I admired the house that was now mine.
I’d repaired the last broken window with magic a few minutes ago.
In a mere three hours, I couldn’t fully rebuild the defensive charm complex, but adding myself to the list of owners wasn’t that difficult.
In the future, I’d have to overhaul the manor’s magical defenses.
For now, I could enjoy the fruits of my labor and the concept of “invisibility,” which often requires sacrificing “wall thickness.”
“Kreacher completed the orders of the disgusting, dishonorable stranger who treacherously invaded the house of the ancient and noble house of Black.”
The house-elf creaked, placing a cup of tea on the table.
He was now forced to obey every master of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.
I looked at the cup of suspicious tea I’d demanded he brew, then at the bald magical creature.
“Let him choke on my spit, the stranger.
The mistress will find a way to drive him out.”
I could sense his surface thoughts clearly.
He couldn’t harm me directly, but petty sabotage was no problem.
I’d have to put off my rest and hammer the code of a faithful servant into someone’s mind.
Developed by the Egyptian priests themselves.
With my eyes glowing blue from active Legilimency use, I stared at the house-elf, who was staring stubbornly at the floor.
“Look me in the eyes and listen to your new master’s command.”