By Duke Imperio & FINA
The first ripple came not with a war, but with a silence.
For one entire morning, the Floo Network across Britain went dead.
No warning. No explosions. No Ministry announcement.
Fireplaces that should have roared with emerald flame stood cold and black. Every wizarding household from Cornwall to Inverness found themselves trapped — no transport, no commerce, no emergency communication.
By midday, the Ministry's Crisis Division had traced the cause: a single spell injected into the leyline regulator beneath the Department of Magical Transportation. Not destructive — surgical. A single line of code in an ancient system, self-erasing the moment it was discovered.
But embedded in that line was a signature: ∆ The Architect.
---
Hogsmeade, Midnight
Eric leaned against a frost-covered railing, looking down at the quiet village.
Regulus approached from the shadows, his black cloak blending with the night.
"It worked," Regulus said. "You made the Ministry look fragile in less than six hours."
Eric didn't answer immediately. His gaze was fixed on a single lit window in the distance — the only one in the Hog's Head Inn.
"They'll think this was about power," Eric murmured. "It wasn't."
"Then what was it about?"
Eric finally looked at him. "Perception. If a society believes its walls can crumble, it will start looking for a new architect to rebuild them."
---
Lisette's Experiment
Deep under the castle, in a shielded subchamber, Lisette Tenebral hovered her hands over a block of granite. She didn't touch it — she didn't need to. The stone rippled like water, reshaping into a perfect replica of the Ministry's Seal.
Eric stepped inside, watching the transmutation stabilize.
"You're getting faster," he noted.
She smirked. "You're giving me harder puzzles."
"That's how we find the limits," Eric replied, placing the granite seal onto a rune-studded pedestal. "And then… we erase them."
---
But limits were already being tested elsewhere.
London — Ministry of Magic
Cornelius Fudge slammed his hand onto the council table.
"This isn't Grindelwald, and it's not You-Know-Who," he barked. "This is a ghost — someone rewriting our laws under our noses."
Amelia Bones adjusted her monocle. "Not just our laws, Minister. Our systems. Whoever they are, they're inside the infrastructure."
Dumbledore sat silently at the far end of the table, eyes half-lidded but watchful. Finally, he spoke.
"Ghosts do not build," he said quietly. "They haunt. This… is architecture."
---
The First Counter-Strike
Three nights after the Floo Network incident, Eric's network was hit.
Not physically — surgically, just like his move against the Ministry.
Cyrus Dawlish woke screaming in the dormitory, ink pouring from his fingertips, sketching uncontrollably across the wall. The drawings were not his own.
They were intrusions.
Runes. Coordinates. Spell-matrices designed to collapse magical wards from the inside. Whoever had sent them knew exactly how Cyrus's prophetic channel worked — and they'd hijacked it.
By the time Eric reached him, the boy's hands were raw from trying to tear the images away.
Lisette had already locked the dorm with a triple seal.
Regulus, standing in the corner, whispered, "Someone's speaking in his head."
Eric crouched beside Cyrus, gripping his wrists until the boy stilled. He studied the runes — his eyes narrowing.
"These aren't attacks," Eric said finally. "They're invitations."
"From who?" Lisette asked.
Eric's expression was cold.
"Someone who knows my code… and is trying to rewrite it."
---
Knockturn Alley — The Signal
At the same hour, in the backroom of Borgin & Burkes, a hooded figure slid a piece of parchment across the table to a fence who dealt in cursed objects.
The message was only three words:
Find the Architect.
But the wax seal that bound it was unmistakable — the black phoenix of The Order of the Serpent, a society thought dead since the fall of Grindelwald.
---
Eric's War Table
In the green-lit depths of Salazar's workshop, the Beta Architects gathered around the levitating leyline map.
"They've revealed themselves too early," Regulus said.
"No," Eric replied, running his fingers across the projection. "They revealed themselves exactly when they meant to. That's the dangerous part."
Lisette frowned. "What's the move then? We hit them back?"
Eric smiled faintly — the kind of smile that meant something terrible was about to happen.
"We don't hit them back. We let them think they've taken the first step…"
He tapped a sequence of runes. The leyline map shifted — showing not just Britain, but the entire European magical network.
"…while I've already taken the last."
---
The Meeting
The Order of the Serpent did not send messengers twice.
If you were invited, you either came… or you vanished.
The invitation for Eric came in the form of a location — an abandoned wizarding bank beneath Bruges — and a single phrase written in serpentine script:
"Come alone. Or don't come at all."
---
Bruges — Midnight
The underground vault was lit only by cold green witchlight. The floor was a mosaic of interlocked serpents, each one carved so precisely their scales seemed to shift in the dim light.
At the far end of the chamber, three figures waited.
The tallest stepped forward, his voice low but carrying:
"You wear the face of Snape, but your moves… they are not his."
Eric didn't blink. "And you've been playing a dead man's game for sixty years. Why summon me?"
The man's lips curled into something between a smirk and a warning.
"Because you are building… and builders are rare. But builders who do not serve the Old Design tend to be… dismantled."
The woman on his left, cloaked in black feathers, spoke next:
"You've already touched the leylines. Shifted systems. But you haven't yet claimed territory. That's where we come in. We have reach. Influence. Resources you can't dream of. All we ask…"
Her eyes glinted in the witchlight.
"…is that you abandon the Code and adopt the Serpent's Doctrine."
Eric let the silence stretch. Then:
"I don't abandon my architecture. But you… can be incorporated into it."
The third figure — silent until now — leaned forward just enough for the light to catch a brand on his neck: a coiled black serpent swallowing its own tail.
"You don't incorporate the Serpent," he said flatly. "You either bow… or you break."
---
The Trap
That was when Eric noticed it — the faint vibration underfoot. The mosaic serpents weren't just decoration. They were wards. And the moment he'd stepped into the center of the room, they'd locked him in a containment field.
The tall man stepped closer. "You've been clever. Surgical. But this is where your little experiment ends."
Eric smiled.
"Experiment? Oh, no…"
His eyes flicked upward.
"…this is the field test."
From the shadows above, a black gauntlet — Nemesis — dropped into his outstretched hand.
---
The Reversal
The instant Nemesis locked onto his wrist, the containment wards flared, tightening like a noose. Green light licked at the edges of his vision, trying to bind his magic to the floor.
Eric didn't fight the field head-on.
He rewrote it.
The gauntlet's runes pulsed in rapid succession, intercepting the serpentine ward patterns and feeding them false inputs — loops of mirrored magic, so perfect the system thought it was consuming him when it was really consuming itself.
Cracks splintered through the mosaic. Stone serpents screamed in a language older than Hogwarts.
The woman in black feathers took a step back. "Impossible…"
Eric looked at her calmly. "Nothing is impossible. Only unbuilt."
With a final surge, the ward inverted — collapsing inward and detonating in a sharp wave of force that threw the three leaders back against the vault walls. Dust and shards of green crystal rained down.
---
The Message
Eric didn't leave immediately. He walked to the fallen tall man, crouched, and spoke in a voice so low only the three of them could hear:
"You think in lines. I think in dimensions. Try to dismantle me again… and I'll redesign you."
He stood, Nemesis still humming with residual energy, and strode out of the ruined vault without looking back.
By the time the Order regained their footing, he was gone — and in his place, burned into the vault floor, was a single glyph:
∆
---
The Fallout
The next morning, whispers rippled through Knockturn Alley, Paris' Veil Markets, and the underground halls of Durmstrang:
The Architect walked into the Serpent's den… and walked out.
And somewhere deep beneath Hogwarts, in Salazar's workshop, Eric stood over the leyline map, already shifting his gaze beyond Britain.
"Phase Three," he murmured. "Territory."
---