The worn door groaned and admitted a figure who seemed to change the proportions of the shabby room. Albus Dumbledore filled the doorway, his flamboyant robes a splash of impossible color against drab walls; his presence shrank the room while making it feel suddenly significant. Icharus looked up from his cot: a boy shaped by wary hope and deeper, carved-in pain.
"Icharus Rodrigus?" Dumbledore's voice smoothed the dust motes in the air. "I am Albus Dumbledore. I bring an invitation you have been waiting for, though you may not have known it." He unfolded the existence of a hidden world—blood that hummed with magic, emotions that bent the impossible—and explained that Hogwarts sheltered children like him. His twinkling eyes softened with practical concern. "Given your circumstances, my boy, the school can offer assistance—"
"I've managed, Professor," Icharus cut in, pride masking need. "I saved a little from odd jobs." The lie fit him: independent, not a burden.
At Gringotts, Griphook counted Icharus's meager pounds with frosty patience and tucked two hundred galleons into a leather pouch. Icharus then produced the heavy, inexplicable pouch the System had given him. Another two hundred, pristine and unmarked, slid across the counter. Four hundred in his moleskin felt like a promise.
Their shopping threaded through contrasts and private motives. At Madam Malkin's he bought the standard kit—robes, hat, dragon-hide gloves, a winter cloak—but with a deft, practiced motion he slipped a spare set of plain black dress robes into his bag: useful for rituals where no one asked questions. Madam Malkin, watching the quiet efficiency, judged him Slytherin.
Flourish and Blotts was temptation. He ordered the required textbooks, but his eyes lingered on darker spines—Magick Moste Evile, The Secrets of the Darkest Art. He tucked those titles into a secret curriculum for later.
Over a sundae at Fortescue's, drowned in honey at Dumbledore's request, the old wizard became storyteller. "True power, my boy," he said, "often lies not in what is celebrated, but in what has been deliberately forgotten." He pressed a slim history into Icharus's hands and spoke of lost relics: Ravenclaw's Diadem, Hufflepuff's Cup, the Deathly Hallows. Then, more quietly, the Peverells—older still—and a ring called the Veil of Mnemosyne. "It simply…vanished from history," Dumbledore said. The sentence clicked like a key.
Ollivander's held its breath as wand after wand slid away. At last a fourteen-inch ebony shaft, a Thestral tail-hair core, accepted him. A cold, clear shock ran up his arm. Ollivander's voice dropped to a whisper: ebony for those who walk shadowed paths; Thestral hair for those who have seen Death. "A wand for true Seers," he breathed. Dumbledore's gaze, less kindly now, turned speculative.
After a cauldron, scales and potion ingredients, fifty galleons left his pouch. The moment Dumbledore's reassuring presence vanished down an alley, Icharus's meekness fell aside. He drew two hundred galleons from his System reserve—bringing his total to three hundred fifty—and sent an owl for the forbidden books he craved.
Knockturn Alley took the rest. A volatile Compound Potion: sixty. A secondhand blackthorn wand: thirty. A single-use kerchief to spoof Thief's Downfall: a staggering one hundred. A silver ring humming with an Imperius charge: another one hundred. Sixty galleons remained. The plan had become a do-or-die gambit.
The heist became a tight symphony of controlled chaos. Polyjuice and Disillusionment made him a ghost; the Imperius-bound goblin moved at his will. The kerchief flared at the waterfall, shielding them, then crumbled to ash in his pocket—its death a psychic stab.
In the Potter vault he moved with predatory grace. A silent command sent his goblin to strike Griphook down. Behind a frozen Harry he pressed a knife to the boy's throat. "A toll for your legacy," he hissed, taking a lock of hair and a shallow cut, filling two vials with bright blood. The goblin returned with a heavy tome and a dull ring. Space dictated choice: the ring and two hundred galleons. He promised the book later.
When his skin met the metal it flowed, reshaping onto his finger—dragon and phoenix guarding a central Pegasus. A profound silence dropped over his mind: the Veil of Mnemosyne belonged to him.
His final commands were lances of will: release the dragon, wreak chaos, die ensuring it. He shoved a stunned Harry toward Hagrid and gave the order that set the Ironbelly free.
Fire and bedlam covered his exit. He slipped into a grimy London alley as Gringotts burned and the System chimed like a hymn.
[Task 001: The Catalyst of Carnal Hunger — COMPLETE.][Reward: Awakening of Primal Drives — ADMINISTERING.]
Fire surged through him. Senses sharpened; the air seemed thicker with possibility. He counted his haul—sixty of his own, two hundred taken: two hundred sixty—and smiled.
Against cold brick, the Mnemosyne ring a chilly counterpoint to the inferno inside, he allowed triumph to settle. The first audacious step was done.
He took a menial post at the Leaky Cauldron for five galleons a week to launder coins and gather rumor. The wizarding world buzzed: Gringotts opened inquiries, the Ministry—eager to avoid panic—muffled the truth, and the Daily Prophet stoked outrage until the goblins offered Potter ten thousand galleons in compensation. Icharus read the news in dim light and felt a sharp, bitter spike—he had done the work; another reaped the reward.
He buried that anger in books—One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi first—knowing Potions under Snape would be both shield and ladder. The histories he found were darker than tales: the Great Magical Rupture, new clans, leviathans, cults crushed by Bagnold's forces with Dumbledore at the fore. Under Fudge's softer rule, small evils slithered unchecked.
Where others saw peril, he saw a path. The System whispered possibilities. With cold clarity he vowed one thing above all: find the Deathly Hallows. If the Peverell tale hinted at a Master of Death, it was a vacancy—and he intended to take the title.