Mizar did end up wearing the pin to the Slug Club party but made sure to not let Magnolia prod too deep.
Now he had work to do.
The book sat like a weight in his arms. Dust and Oath: On the Breaking of Bound Threads was bound in faded slate leather, stamped with curling silver sigils that flickered when touched. Aasim Jalil's name was etched down the spine in handwriting that looked too deliberate to be natural.
He had retreated to the library.
He read for hours.
The pages weren't laid out like a modern textbook. Jalil's writing was dense, arcane, and at times unhinged—like a man scribbling secrets he didn't want found, but needed remembered. Some pages were diagrams: circular arrangements of runes wrapped in layers of intent and blood oath. Others were fragmented memories—Jalil describing curses laid by ancient kings to ensure no heir ever ruled with peace, or wards placed on tombs that turned those who disturbed them into smoke.
His uncle Marwan had acquired it through one of his less-than-legal connections. It reeked of cold ink and very old blood. Lydia had whispered it was the last book her father ever used before retiring from fieldwork. That alone had made Mizar commit to memory every footnote.
Near the end of the book, the margins grew darker. Tighter. As though Jalil's sanity had been winding down, page by page.
The chapter he suspected had the answers he needed was boxed in red ink.
Chrono-Intervention and Legacy Curses: Systems That Refuse to Heal.
He turned the page.
"Some curses do not afflict the body. They afflict continuity.
Legacy curses tied to space and role—particularly positions of power—do not simply harm the person holding the post. They poison the system itself. These are temporal infections: not meant to kill in an instant, but to bleed slowly through decades until ruin is tradition."
Mizar breathed out slowly. His thumb pressed hard into the paper's edge.
There, buried halfway through the chapter, was the theoretical basis:
"When a curse is placed on a title or office—especially when infused with emotional intent—it nests itself in the very expectation of succession. Every new occupant inherits not the duties, but the rot. This is known as a Legacy Knot, and the most dangerous of these are bound by time loops."
He didn't need it spelled out.
This was it.
The curse—Tom Riddle's curse—the reason why no Defense Against the Dark Arts professor had lasted more than a year since Dumbledore became Headmaster after Dippet and Riddle came back to ask for the position.
A Chrono-Legacy Knot of Denial and Spite.
Woven, he wrote, not into the person, but into the seat itself.
"To curse a place, a position or an object, is to curse memory. To make misfortune the law. The spell repeats, not just in effect, but in design. That is the horror of Chrono-Legacy magic—it becomes a system, not a spell."
Mizar's stomach turned cold.
Jalil described three known examples. One in Athens, where every Curse-Breaker of their national equivalent of Gringotts went mad within eighteen months. Another in Oslo—Ministry archivists who spontaneously lost their long-term memory, generation after generation.
"If a curse such as this is cast at the moment of personal defeat, shame, or dismissal, it may remain tethered to the caster's life force."
Mizar sat up straighter.
"In such cases, the most viable solution is the destruction of the caster. The curse, tied to their will and vitality, will unravel upon their death."
Mizar groaned, dropping the quill. His head thudded softly against the back of the chair.
Brilliant. He didn't even know how to track down Voldemort. He knew he was gathering people in Britain but for all he knew—the man was splitting his time between England and Albania.
Aasim Jalil, at least, anticipated his reader's frustration. Because the next passage hit harder:
"In some cases, the caster's identity is lost—or worse, protected by a concealment tether. These legacy curses become perennial. Sustained not by a spell, but by a story the world keeps repeating. A wound it refuses to forget."
Mizar's breath fogged faintly in the cold of the turret, but his blood was too warm with urgency to feel it.
His eyes scanned the next paragraph, half-dreading what it might demand of him.
"There are two ways to unmake a legacy curse without destroying the caster: narrative rupture or magical contradiction."
He underlined the phrase twice.
"Narrative rupture requires rewriting the conditions the curse assumes will persist. These assumptions include succession, repetition, failure, and isolation. As long as those patterns are allowed to continue, so will the curse."
He jotted a note beside it:
The curse expects them to fail.
He read on.
"Chrono-Legacy curses thrive on certainty. They are loops spun from inevitability: someone fails, leaves, or dies. Another takes the role. The system swallows them. The expectation fulfills itself."
To break such a curse, one must do what the curse was built never to accommodate: continuity."
Mizar blinked.
Continuity.
Of course. The curse expected a revolving door. What if someone simply… stayed?
The book offered an example from a wizarding Canadian bank—one where the post of manager had been cursed for centuries, until one woman refused to resign even after a near-fatal attack. She stayed. Returned each term. Bled, healed, and remained.
After her seventh year in the position, the curse cracked.
"When the narrative changes, the curse begins to unravel. The world cannot sustain a loop that no longer spins."
He jotted more notes. Continuity is contradiction.
Stay long enough=Rewrite the outcome.
Then a grim thought followed.
They hadn't had a professor last in years. No one made it past a year. People either left, were harmed, or were removed. It wasn't just expectation—it was design. The curse would push harder the longer someone remained.
Mizar tapped the quill against the parchment.
"Someone would have to know. Expect it. Fight it," he murmured.
He kept reading.
"For cases where narrative rupture is not viable—where the caster's curse adapts or feeds on resistance—there remains a second method: magical contradiction. This requires the introduction of a force or sacrifice that cannot coexist with the curse's root logic.
What opposes cruelty? What opposes isolation?
"Unselfish, freely given protection."
The words chilled him.
"The sacrifice must come from outside the system—non-human, non-professional, or unaffiliated. Something that is immune to the expected cycle."
Mizar flipped the page. A list had been inked in careful hand:
• A willingly bound creature of old blood
• A memory-preserved echo from before the curse
• A ward laid by an uncorrupted magical line
• A life oath cast by one who has never lied
And beneath that, in darker ink:
"The binding must be done beneath the same stars that bore the curse. The cycle begins in a year. It must end in a year."
Mizar's thoughts spun.
Someone could stay. Refuse to be removed. Or—
They could bind protection to the role itself. A guardian. An entity that belonged outside human failure. Something like…
He closed the book slowly, mind racing.
A centaur. A thestral. A unicorn, even. Something old, immune to ambition, not subject to dismissal or scandal or time.
The spell had to be done in the castle. Near the classroom, maybe in the foundations.
And it had to be done by someone who understood why it needed to be broken.
Not for ambition.
Not even for legacy.
But to stop the harm repeating.
The curse wasn't just killing professors.
It was training students to expect failure from anyone who tried to teach them how to defend themselves.
And that was the real wound.
The book snapped shut with a soft thud, and dust bloomed in the shaft of pale light slanting through the high library windows.
Mizar stared at the sigil on the cover, then down at his notes, his eyes darting across the ink like something was chasing him through the lines.
"A willingly bound creature of old blood."
"Unaffiliated. Immune to succession, reputation, or power."
It couldn't be human. It couldn't even be a magical being who wanted something in return.
It had to be older than pride. Older than ambition.
Mizar's breath left him in a cold puff.
"A unicorn," he whispered.
He stood quickly, parchment spilling from his lap, then caught himself—just barely—before sprinting out of the library like an unhinged first-year. He gathered the notes with sharp fingers, stuffed everything into his satchel, and bolted down the aisle between shelves, the echo of his boots clipped and urgent on the stone floor.
He'd been in the forest before. Years ago. Once with Hagrid. Once on his own, when the moon was wrong and his hands wouldn't stop shaking. He knew the difference between silence and stillness out there. He knew how to move without being noticed.
But this wasn't just wandering into danger.
This was a plan.
Almost.
He checked the light from the nearest window. The sun had started to slide. There were maybe an hour—maybe less—before students started pouring back from Hogsmeade with cold noses and hot drinks, flooding the halls and staircases and common rooms with noise.
Perfect.
If he was going to find a unicorn and speak to it—ask it, honestly—he'd need solitude. He'd need clarity. And he'd need to be fast.
Mizar took the back stairs down to the ground floor, ducked through a staff corridor, and slipped out through the narrow herbology wing exit before Filch could spot him. His dragonhide satchel bumped against his side. His wand was already in hand.
The path sloped down toward the edge of the Forbidden Forest, dark branches etched sharp against the glowing sky. The wind was cold, tugging at his robes, but the adrenaline running under his skin burned hotter than anything the air could steal.
The curse expects failure, he thought. So give it hope instead.
He reached the tree line.
Paused.
The last time someone had gone into these woods on a hunch, they'd almost died.
But this wasn't a hunch.
This was knowledge. Ancient. Earned. Paid for in blood and memory.
Mizar stepped into the shadows beneath the trees, quiet as a secret.
He would find a unicorn.
And if it let him—if it agreed—he could bind it.
Not to himself.
But to the classroom.
To the post.
To the cursed space where no one had lasted more than a year.
If a creature of pure magic, one that repelled corruption and thrived in stillness, could anchor the room…
The curse would buckle. The cycle would break.
Because no rot could thrive where a unicorn chose to stand.
Mizar stood just beyond the greenhouses, half-shadowed by a crumbling stone arch that framed the forest in the distance like the edge of an old painting.
He raised his wand.
The sensation was immediate—like a trickle of cold water being poured slowly down the back of his neck. His skin rippled, shimmered, and vanished. Not gone, not truly, but cloaked in something delicate and precise.
Disillusioned.
His breath still clouded faintly in the air, but his figure was gone—blurred into the world around him like glass that remembered how to lie.
Mizar tucked his wand back into his sleeve and moved. Quietly. Deliberately.
He followed the tree line down the slope, keeping to the dips and shadows where the half-melted snow hadn't fully caught the light. Every now and then, he paused—listening. Not for footsteps behind him, but for absence ahead. The way birds quieted when they sensed something larger moving beneath the underbrush.
His boots crunched lightly over fallen leaves. A low branch grazed the side of his head, snagging in his hair before he slipped past. The forest pressed in around him slowly, like a breath he was entering.
This wasn't the same part they used in Care of Magical Creatures lessons with Kettleburn. This was further in—older, less traveled, where even Hagrid's bootprints faded. Where the wind didn't whistle so much as hum.
Mizar wasn't foolish enough to believe he could command a unicorn. But if Jalil's theory was right—if the presence of something incorruptible, willingly tied to the cursed space, could offer temporal resistance—then it wasn't about power.
It was about permission.
And purity.
He passed three bowtruckles fighting over a rotten log. Avoided a cluster of puffball mushrooms that hissed when disturbed. Somewhere far behind him, a flock of crows broke into sudden flight—but he didn't turn. The further he walked, the more the castle's presence felt like something imagined. Forgotten.
Snow fell occasionally, in soft, weightless flecks that caught in his hair and melted into his collar.
The unicorns weren't coming.
Not yet.
Mizar slowed his pace. Let the forest press in. He remembered something Kettleburn had once said during a lesson on nonverbal creatures: "They don't listen to your magic. They listen to your silences."
So he waited.
He found a flat stretch of moss and sat cross-legged, breath fogging in the cold air. The runes he'd written in the Room of Requirement were folded in his pocket. The offering parchment—an oath of mutual consent, not ownership—was ready.
But it couldn't be forced.
Unicorns weren't drawn to need. They were drawn to stillness. Intention. Purity, Jalil had written, though even he seemed to resent the word. Not moral purity. Temporal. An absence of contamination. A clean stitch in the fabric of continuity.
Mizar wasn't sure he had that in him. But he had time.
And patience.
So he sat.
The wind thinned. The trees grew taller around him. Once, he thought he saw something—silver movement just past a veil of hawthorn—but it vanished like mist.
It was nearly dusk when it finally happened.
He'd stopped hoping. His limbs ached from stillness, the forest cold had crept into his bones, and his mind had started circling the same questions—What if it doesn't work? What if it was a mistake? What if I'm wrong?
Then a sound. Soft. Barely there.
Not hoofbeats. Not at first.
Breath.
That was the only word for it. Something in the trees had exhaled—and the air around him grew clearer.
He looked up.
The unicorn was not close. Not yet. It stood at the edge of the clearing—a mature one, tall and silver-pale, horn glinting faintly in the fading light. Its mane stirred without wind.
Mizar didn't move.
The creature looked at him.
Long and steady.
Then, carefully, it stepped forward.
One hoof, then another, pressing silently into the moss.
Mizar reached into his coat, barely breathing, and withdrew the parchment. He laid it on the ground in front of him without a word. Then bowed his head—not deeply, not dramatically. Just enough to say: I am not above you. I am asking.
The unicorn halted three feet away.
Its horn dipped once. Then again.
It stepped forward, slowly, and touched the edge of the parchment with the very tip of its horn.
The ink flared—not bright, but honest. A soft gold-white light that etched itself into the runes and bled outward in an expanding ring, like a seal sinking into wax.
Consent.
The unicorn looked up. Its eyes were dark and clear and older than any wand.
Then it turned, and without a sound, walked back into the forest.
The light in the parchment faded—but the runes had changed. Anchored now. Accepted.
Mizar sat there for a long moment, unmoving.
It had worked.
He didn't know how long the binding would hold—Jalil had been deliberately vague about duration. It wasn't a permanent fix. Not yet.
But it was a beginning.
A stitch.
Something new anchored to a cursed system.
And for the first time in years, the curse might have met something it couldn't digest.
The last light of day filtered through the canopy as Mizar stood, brushing moss from his robes.
The unicorn was gone.
But the air around him felt different. Like something had lifted. Or turned.
He tucked the parchment back into his coat, murmured a warming charm over his fingers, and began the walk back to the castle.
The first students would be returning from Hogsmeade soon.
He would need to slip in unnoticed.
But something in the forest had seen him—and answered.
The castle itself seemed to hold its breath.
Mizar's steps were quiet, purposeful. The Disillusionment Charm still clung faintly to him, a thin veil that blurred his form against the flickering torchlight.
He reached the door to the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom.
It was a simple oak door, aged but sturdy, with faint scratches along the edges—the marks of decades of restless hands.
He pushed it open.
Inside, the air was cooler, tinged with old magic and dust.
The room was empty.
Perfect.
Mizar crossed to the center of the chamber, pulling the folded parchment from his coat pocket.
The runes now glowed faintly—alive, anchored by the unicorn's willing touch.
He spread the parchment flat on the worn wooden floor.
Taking a deep breath, he drew his wand.
No flick, no flourish.
Just a deliberate, steady line of magic, tracing the edges of the paper in a slow, glowing thread.
He spoke the incantation from Jalil's book, voice low and clear.
"Aeterna nexum dissolvo. Legatum liberatum."
The runes flared, then pulsed—like a heartbeat.
The room shifted. The shadows lengthened and recoiled as if pulled by unseen threads.
Mizar's heart hammered.
The legacy curse, woven through time and expectation, was responding.
He pressed on.
With his free hand, he drew a circle of salt around the parchment.
Jalil's text had warned that such curses needed a simultaneous severing of the past and a binding to something pure, willing, and outside the temporal loop.
The unicorn's oath had provided that pure anchor.
Now it was the human's turn.
Mizar knelt, placing his palm flat on the parchment.
His blood warmed under his skin.
He whispered another phrase, this one improvised from the text's fragmented margins:
"Tempus retrocedere non potest. Sed nexus rumpi potest."
Time cannot be reversed. Nevertheless, bonds can be broken.
The parchment's glow deepened, spreading along the salt ring.
A pressure built in the room, thick and almost unbearable.
Mizar's vision blurred.
He forced himself to stay still, steady.
Then—light.
A sharp crack, like a thunderclap trapped in a jar.
The runes shattered.
The air snapped clean.
Mizar staggered back.
Silence followed.
For a moment, the room felt normal.
No weight.
No rot.
No knot of dark expectation pressing down.
He dared to smile.
It was done.
The curse on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position was broken.