Over the next six nights, Eric rewrote the leyline grid.
Not in sweeping, obvious changes — but in surgical edits, invisible to anyone who wasn't looking exactly at the right frequency.
Energy currents that once flowed in straight lines now curled into looping fractals. Pathways that appeared stable from one vantage point quietly rerouted themselves from another, feeding false coordinates to anyone trying to trace them. To the untrained eye, it looked like harmless static in the system. To the right kind of hunter, it looked like prey.
That was exactly the point.
He embedded subtle magical beacons — "false anomalies" — into select leyline nodes, making them pulse irregularly like distressed prey fish in deep water. To the average wizard, the pulses were meaningless. But to someone seeking high-value magical data, they would read as unshielded vault doors.
Cyrus, sketching the grid in his notebook without once looking down, described it best:
> "You're not hiding the meat. You're cooking it in the open, hoping the predators are hungry."
Regulus, sharpening his wand like a blade, muttered,
> "Baiting sharks."
Eric just called it phase one.
---
The Preparation
The Inner Circle worked in shifts. Lisette tuned the mirrors, aligning them to reflect more than light — bending magical signals themselves so they bounced directly into Salazar's workshop. Cyrus drew new diagrammatic wards that shifted shape every twelve seconds, ensuring their lair would be invisible on any known scrying spectrum.
Ailis monitored leyline flow from her station, her hands hovering above the mapping orb like a conductor. She could feel each current's subtle vibration — the hum of magic across oceans, through cities, under mountains. Every so often she'd flinch, sensing a change only she understood.
> "One of them's watching," she said on the fourth night.
Eric didn't need to ask who "them" was.
---
The Bait
On the seventh night, Eric gave the signal.
Three leyline clusters — one deep in the Russian tundra, one beneath the sands of Morocco, and one anchored to a volcanic island off Japan — lit up at once.
The "anomalies" weren't random. Each had been chosen for its geopolitical position: far enough from heavy wizarding traffic to avoid accidental discovery, yet close enough to draw interest from serious operators.
The moment the pulses began, Ailis's eyes went distant.
> "They're coming. More than one. Fast."
Eric felt the workshop hum around him, its ancient machinery vibrating like a predator scenting blood. He tightened the Nemesis gauntlet, each segment locking into place with a sound like a blade sheathing itself.
He didn't wait for them to knock.
He pulled them in.
---
The Convergence
The mirrors in Salazar's workshop flared one by one, each a vertical sheet of shifting light. Shapes formed in them — cloaked silhouettes that flickered in and out, their features distorted like oil on water.
They didn't arrive through Apparition or Portkey. They phased in, as if they were stepping sideways from one layer of reality into another.
The distortions began to peel away.
The hoods fell.
Three faces stared back at him.
Identical.
Not siblings. Not Polyjuice.
Copies.
Perfect magical-clone constructs, each carrying the same metallic-grey eyes — eyes that reflected nothing human.
---
The First Exchange
The central copy spoke, voice calm and without inflection:
> "You are clever. But cleverness is a candle. We are the sun."
Eric kept his expression unreadable. "And yet here you are — moths in my flame."
The figure tilted its head, as if assessing him in real time.
> "We were written before your species learned to bind magic to words. Before you learned to fear power you could not name."
The right-hand copy stepped forward, its movement eerily smooth.
> "You have touched something that belongs to us. You call it a throne. You think it yours. It is not."
Eric felt the glyphs carved into the workshop walls twitch faintly, like they were listening.
> "You're… code," he said slowly. "Not people."
The central copy smiled — or imitated the gesture.
> "Code given flesh. The first Architect. The original who built your throne's design… before Slytherin stole it."
---
The Weight of Truth
That stopped Eric cold for a fraction of a second.
Slytherin… a thief?
The workshop seemed to hum differently, as though the walls themselves were offended at the revelation.
The left copy leaned forward.
> "You've been building in our house, child. And now… we've come home."
Eric flexed his hand inside the Nemesis gauntlet. "Funny thing about coming home," he said. "Sometimes the locks have been changed."
The three copies moved simultaneously, their grey eyes flaring faint silver. Glyphs along the workshop walls began to move, detaching from the stone like insects peeling away from a hive. The symbols hung in the air, rewriting themselves mid-flight.
Cyrus's charcoal pen snapped in half.
> "They're rewriting the room," he whispered.
---
The Clash
Eric didn't wait.
He sent a pulse through the Nemesis gauntlet, chaining three spells at once — a binding hex, a mirror-shatter curse, and a memory fog. The gauntlet amplified them into a single, compressed burst, firing like a gunshot across the chamber.
The left copy caught it with one hand. Not blocked — caught. The spells dissolved into motes of light, absorbed into its palm.
> "Nice try," it said flatly.
Ailis slammed her palms onto the mapping orb, forcing a leyline surge through the workshop's base. The floor erupted in jagged spikes of green crystal, splitting the chamber into uneven terrain.
Regulus darted forward, moving in precise arcs to distract their attention. Lisette transmuted a chunk of crystal into molten silver mid-flight, forcing one of the copies to sidestep.
But the central copy never moved.
It just watched.
---
The Withdrawal
Then, without warning, all three copies stepped backward in unison.
The mirrors around them darkened until they reflected only Eric's face.
The central copy's voice echoed, though its mouth didn't move:
> "You have ten days. After that, the equation changes. And you will not survive the new variables."
The mirrors shattered into black dust.
The workshop fell silent.
---
The Aftermath
Eric stood there for a long moment, letting the echoes fade.
Regulus sheathed his wand. "Ten days," he said. "For what?"
Eric's gaze didn't leave the now-dark mirrors.
"For them to decide if they take this throne… or burn it."
No one spoke after that.
The only sound was the steady, patient hum of the leyline grid — his grid — still looping, still baiting, still ready.
Because if they were coming in ten days,
Eric intended to make sure the sun they spoke of would burn out before it rose.
---