Cassian didn't remember falling asleep.
He only remembered losing the world.
And then —
Grey.
Endless, soft, weightless grey. Not cold. Not warm. Just… there. A fog without air, without wind, without gravity.
He blinked and realized blinking didn't matter here — his eyes were only ideas of eyes.
Somewhere in that weightless haze, a flicker of movement caught his attention.
A shape.A silhouette.
Her.
Shya moved ahead of him in a slow, drifting way, like she was walking underwater. Her hair floated behind her like strands of dark ink, and the fog parted around her in delicate spirals — not because she pushed it away, but because it chose to get out of her path.
Cassian tried to speak.
Nothing came out.His voice didn't exist here yet.
So he followed.
Not running — he couldn't run in this place.Just drifting, pulled forward without his permission.
Shya never turned.Never looked back.But the fog around her pulsed softly every time he drew closer, like it recognized he belonged near her.
The closer he got, the more something white began to form around her — faint outlines of walls, the suggestion of sharp geometry, cold stone, frozen light.
A city, but not a human one.
A city that existed long before human words.White, endless, rearranging in soft clicks of marble.
And she moved through it like the city was breathing with her.
Cassian reached toward her silhouette —
But the fog swallowed his hand before it got close.
She glided around a corner of unreality.
He followed.
And the dream dissolved into grey.
Roman's world felt different.
Where Cassian drifted toward cold geometry, Roman sank into warmth.
The grey around him shimmered — soft pale green, gold flecks, like sunlight through leaves. When he breathed (or thought he did), the fog quivered, as if responding.
Then he saw it.
Her.
Talora walked ahead of him, but she didn't walk like people do.Her feet didn't touch anything.Every step she made created a ripple — a bloom of green that spread into the mist, forming temporary meadows that dissolved the moment she passed.
Roman tried to call her name.
Silence.
But vines of soft golden light curled toward his shape, as if curious about him. As if he was familiar to them.
Talora's silhouette glowed brighter the closer he drifted. Hair like strands of light. A dress made of something between water and air. Everything around her growing, gently, rhythmically.
And just at the edge of visibility — behind her — Roman saw the first faint outline of something huge:
A tree. A mountain. A palace grown from emerald roots.
It flickered and disappeared the moment he tried to focus.
Talora didn't look back.
She just kept walking, deeper into the glow.
Roman followed, because every part of him knew:"Where she goes, I go."
He lifted a hand — not to touch her. Just to reach.
The fog swallowed it before it got close.
Talora drifted farther, her glow becoming a warm eclipse in the distance.
And the dream dissolved into green.
AURORA STAG — LIGHT
In the far north, the wind didn't howl.
It whispered.
A low, silver murmur threaded through the pines, brushing snow from their branches as if coaxing them awake. The sky above the Sámi plateau burned with impossible color—green and rose and blue braided like the strands of an ancient crown.
Charlie Weasley stood very still, breath frosting in front of him.
The Sámi shaman beside him raised her staff, carved with antlers and starlight. Her eyes were half-closed, listening to something the wind hadn't said out loud yet.
"He is near," she whispered.
No hoofbeats.
No breath.
No movement.
But the snow tilted, almost imperceptibly, as if weight walked across it without disturbing its surface.
Charlie swallowed. "Where—"
"Not where," the shaman murmured. "When."
The auroras bent.
Not down.
Not aside.
Toward them.
And from the heart of that bending light stepped a creature made of winter and dawn.
The Aurora Stag.
Its antlers unfurled like constellations caught in ivory. Each breath glowed softly, melting the snow beneath its hooves only for frost to reclaim it the next second.
Charlie whispered, "Bloody hell."
The Stag turned its head.
Not to Charlie.
To the shaman.
Its eyes—silver, bottomless, reflecting whole skies—met hers. And the whole plateau stilled, as if listening to their conversation before it began.
Then—
a pulse.
A warm beat of gold shimmer, felt even in the bones.
Talora's creation-thread rippling across the world like sunlight touching distant water.
The Stag's antlers flickered—briefly lined in green-gold, like they'd remembered a forest that hadn't grown yet.
The shaman inhaled sharply. She had never seen the children, but she had heard how Dumbledore spoke of them: not as prodigies, but as fault-lines.
"He feels them," she said quietly. "The one of growth. The one of endings."
Charlie's jaw tightened. "He knows they're just girls?"
"They are not," the shaman said. "Not to him. They are… pillars that have not finished forming."
The Stag exhaled, recognition resonating through the air.
The shaman stepped forward and bowed deeply. "Aurora-Kuru. We come in peace. We seek a fragment of your light, to keep what is waking from tearing the sky."
The Stag flicked one ear.
The air tightened.
The light dimmed.
"He allows us near only if we mean no violence to what is awakening," the shaman said softly—words not her own, but placed into her mouth by something older than language.
Charlie bowed too, suddenly sober. "We're here to help them hold. Not to shackle."
The Stag turned fully to face them.
And very slowly—
very gently—
lowered its head.
A tiny drop of condensed aurora slid from one antler, falling through the freezing air. It hit the snow and didn't sink—hovering just above the surface, humming softly.
A gift.
A recognition.
A promise.
The ground glowed where its light brushed the frost.
The shaman cupped her hands. The aurora-drop drifted up into her waiting palms, heavy as a vow.
For the girl of growth, the Stag's presence murmured in the bones. So she remembers the sky is not hers to consume, only to share.
Before either human could breathe, the lights in the sky shifted again—
And the plateau went back to being only snow, and wind, and color.
The Stag was gone.
STRIX PRIME — DARK
In the Carpathians, nothing glowed.
The sky was charcoal.
The monastery was a jagged shadow against the snow, half-consumed by frost, half by centuries.
Inside the broken bell tower, something watched.
Krafft approached alone, breath forming perfect circles of vapor. He carried no lantern. Light offended the creature he sought.
Behind him, even Grindelwald's chosen acolytes dared not follow.
Krafft stepped across the threshold.
The wind died.
Silence thickened into a second skin.
A low croak echoed overhead—not a bird. Something older. Something hungering.
He didn't look up.
Looking up meant death.
Instead, he whispered:
"I come in recognition of Shya Gill. The unshaped pillar of endings."
The temperature dropped ten degrees.
A shadow peeled itself from the rafters.
It didn't fly.
It descended, unfolding like a nightmare being poured from the ceiling.
Huge eyes—black, fathomless, eating moonlight whole—opened above him.
The Strix Prime.
Its wings were made of absence.
Its talons were thin lines of hunger.
Its body was feathers and void stitched together.
It circled him once without sound.
Krafft didn't tremble.
He didn't break.
He only exposed his throat.
A show of submission to a higher predator.
The Strix leaned close enough that its breath froze along his jaw.
Then it whispered—
Not in words.
In memory.
A memory not his:
Dark rivers.
Cracked skies.
The outline of a cold, white city that did not exist on any map.
A girl on stone, unconscious, but vast—her soul like a black sun turning inward.
Not a weapon.
A principle.
A thing the universe had never meant to give bones.
Recognition.
Wariness.
Acceptance.
Krafft's knees almost buckled. He had never seen her. But now he knew the scale of the lie they called "children."
A single black feather fell.
Silent.
Lethal.
A sliver of void that had learned restraint.
Krafft caught it without bleeding.
The Strix dissolved back into darkness, satisfied with his fear and his honesty.
ELDER DRYAD — LIGHT
In the Black Forest, the trees were listening.
Xenophilius lowered his lantern.
Bill Weasley signaled quiet with two fingers.
A German green-witch walked ahead of them, palm resting briefly against each trunk as if greeting old friends.
The forest pulsed once.
Branches bent in unison.
Leaves shivered.
And the earth split open with a sound like sighing.
From within, vines uncoiled—gold-green, shimmering—and wove themselves into the shape of a woman taller than any oak.
The Elder Dryad.
Her hair was moss threaded with moonstone.
Her skin glowed like saplit bark.
When she exhaled, mushrooms bloomed in rings around their feet.
Bill stepped forward carefully. "We seek—"
The Dryad raised a single finger.
Silence swallowed the clearing.
Her eyes—liquid emerald—turned away from them, toward the distant pulse only she could feel:
Talora's emerald world blooming far beyond mortal sight.
A growth-principle trying to wear a human name.
The Dryad's expression shifted—
not fear,
not awe,
something closer to professional concern.
Then she faced them.
"Truth," she said simply.
The green-witch answered first, throat tight.
"I was told they are still only students," she whispered. "But when I feel the roots, I know that is a lie. Whatever is waking… is older than my craft."
Bill swallowed.
"I've never felt small until I felt her waking," he admitted. "I don't know her. I've never spoken to her. But—whatever she is, Hogwarts could only ever have been a… courtesy."
Xenophilius trembled, but his voice was steady.
"Creation frightens me," he said. "But I still choose it over emptiness."
The Dryad listened.
She placed one hand upon her chest—her bark-like form swelling as if with sap and sunlight—and released a single glowing leaf.
An essence.
Verdant. Sacred.
A tutor for a girl who would one day grow forests with a thought.
The forest dimmed with exhaustion as the leaf drifted down.
The green-witch caught it with reverent hands.
"For the one of blooming," the Dryad's presence rustled through their bones. "So she remembers that growth without end is strangling, not kindness."
Then the earth closed again.
The trees went back to pretending to be ordinary.
WENDIGO SHADE — DARK
Northern Canada was dead quiet.
Not winter-quiet.
Death-quiet.
Celeste Carrow stepped across the frozen lake, boots crunching softly. Her breath fogged and immediately crystallized.
Nagel muttered runes behind her.
Abernathy lit a single blue flame to mark their path—a shard of color in a world that had stopped believing in it.
A shadow crawled beneath the ice.
Slow.
Hungry.
Ancient.
The Wendigo Shade.
Not the creature of human myth.
Not the cannibal spirit hunters feared in stories.
No—
This was the first winter's hunger.
The hunger that existed before life knew how to grow.
The shadow beneath the ice spread, stretching, rising.
Celeste inhaled only once.
Then she knelt.
The lake exploded upward in a pillar of frost.
A figure rose—tall, skeletal, hollow-eyed, dripping long icicles like shattered ribs.
It smelled of starvation.
Of entropy.
Of the end of warmth.
It towered over her.
Abernathy whispered, "Carrow—don't—"
She didn't move.
"I am not afraid of emptiness," she whispered.
"I know what it feels like."
Her voice did not tremble.
The Wendigo tilted its head.
Under the ice, a thousand trapped air bubbles seemed to still, listening.
"They tell me she is becoming something that should never have had a shape," Celeste said softly. "That when she empties something, there may be nothing left to refill."
The air thinned further.
"They're wrong about one thing," she added.
Oh? the cold pressed against her thoughts.
Celeste met the hollow gaze.
"She's still a girl," Celeste said quietly. "And girls can be taught."
The Wendigo's skull twitched.
A small flicker of something like respect moved behind the emptiness.
The ice cracked beneath her knees.
And very slowly—
very gently—
it pressed one clawed finger to her sternum.
Not piercing.
Marking.
A small shard of ice—clear as truth—formed there.
A gift.
An acknowledgment.
The essence of hunger without cruelty.
Of erasure that could be steered into mercy instead of oblivion.
The shard loosened, falling into her hands.
The Wendigo dissolved back into the frozen lake, satisfied.
CHAMBER INTERLUDE
Lights flicker in the Chamber.
Gold glows on one side.
Black gleams on the other.
Talora's breath warms.
Shya's breath chills.
The runes shiver.
A pulse echoes across the world.
The creatures feel it.
The humans feel it.
And deep within the infinite gray fog…
Two girls continue walking.
Two boys keep following.
Shapes—antlers, wings, claws, ribs of ice—trail behind them like loyal shadows learning new rules.
ALICANTO — LIGHT
In the Atacama, the night did not feel empty.
It felt… hollowed.
The sky was a black bowl full of stars. The ground was bone-dry, split in plates of stone and salt, thin lines of dull gold running through it like veins that had forgotten how to cool.
Arthur Weasley stopped at the rim of a shallow basin.
Amelia Bones stood at his right, shoulders square.
The Japanese envoy at his left, robes dusted white.
The Egyptian wardmaker knelt, pressing her hand to the ground.
The veins brightened beneath her palm.
Not much.
Just enough to prove they were listening.
She spoke in a language older than any Ministry. The words tasted of furnaces and swallowed suns.
"We call the eater of hidden ore. The one who walks on veins instead of roads. We come without pick or forge. We bring no hunger but the world's."
The sand in the center of the basin shifted.
Light thickened.
Gold detached from rock in a slow, deliberate rise, gathering itself into feathers, talons, a hooked beak.
The Alicanto perched on a jut of stone.
Not large. Not small.
Exactly big enough to carry the weight of every mine that had ever collapsed.
Its body was hammered metal and raw ore. Some feathers shone; some were dull, scarred with old tool-marks that had never touched it.
Its eyes were dark.
They moved once across the four humans and then stilled—as if something far away had stepped into the room.
A warm, distant pulse rolled through the desert.
Talora's thread.
Creation stirring in the Chamber, brushing the desert like the promise of morning.
The Alicanto's feathers shivered with recognition.
The envoy bowed, hands empty.
"There are two girls," she said softly, in careful Spanish. "One who pulls life into being. One who pulls endings close. They are… not meant to be shaped. But they are, now. We ask you to lend them weight that is not theirs. So they do not spend the world like coin."
The Egyptian wardmaker added, in the desert tongue:
"You sit on the scale," she murmured. "You know when a mountain must stand. Help us hold this one."
The Alicanto watched.
For a heartbeat, the basin was stone and sand and four human hearts beating too fast.
For the next, the bird saw the Chamber:
Runes burning on wet walls. Two slabs. Two girls asleep on them, power leaking into circles that were not yet full. Two boys slumped nearby, not knowing they were anchors. A pattern of magic that looked less like a ritual and more like an emergency brace.
Gold flared along the veins.
When the desert came back into focus, the Alicanto lifted its wing.
One feather came loose.
It fell slowly, like metal remembering gravity.
No blood. Just light. Drops of molten glow slid from the barbs and turned to dust before they hit the ground.
The envoy cupped her hands.
The feather settled in her palms, heavy and small and complete.
A gift.
A weight.
A promise that gold, this time, would hold instead of corrupt.
The Alicanto dipped its head once.
Then it stepped backward into the rock and vanished, turning back into nothing more than a pattern of ore under a very old desert.
The basin dimmed.
The feather did not.
NUCKELAVEE SOVEREIGN — DARK
On the Icelandic shore, the sea forgot how to breathe.
Waves rolled toward the black rocks—
And stopped.
Wind clawed at cloaks and then died, cut clean.
MacDuff stood a few paces back from the waterline, jaw tense.
Nagel's hands were raw from carving rune-lines into wet sand; the symbols glowed cold and steady in a wide ring.
Celeste Carrow watched the horizon, eyes bright against the grey.
Grindelwald stepped until his boots were almost in the thinning surf.
He lowered his hands.
He spoke a name that was not meant for human throats.
The sound scraped along their nerves and left the taste of stagnant marsh behind.
The ocean flinched.
Water drew away from the shore as if something underneath had inhaled. Rock gleamed wet and slick, barnacles exposed, a long trench carved into stone revealed like a scar.
From its deepest point, something rose.
Hooves first—long, yellowed, dripping foul water. Then the body: a horse's frame, skin stretched thin over pulsing muscle, patches peeled away to raw, red shine. Fused to its back, where a rider should have sat, a second torso grew out of bone and sinew—human-shaped, flayed, ribs like a prison around a chest that did not need to breathe.
Eyes burned in a skull with no skin.
They were the color of old sickness.
Chains of weed and bone dragged from the limbs, clacking softly.
Every breath the Nuckelavee Sovereign exhaled came out as a hiss of air that turned the grass at the cliff's edge grey.
You wake famine, a thought slid through their minds, cold and slick. You wake pest and rot. Is your world not thin enough already?
Grindelwald inclined his head.
Respect. Not fear.
"There is something coming that will leave you nothing to ruin," he said.
Those ugly eyes narrowed.
Empty words.
He didn't argue.
He opened.
Not his memories. The shape of the Chamber, the pressure of its runes, spilled outward like a tide of meaning.
The Sovereign saw:
Stone soaked with basilisk death and phoenix ash. Forty circles etched into the walls; most hollow. Two girls on ancient stone, breath too deep for human lungs. Two boys slumped nearby, lines of invisible force already wrapped around their wrists and ribs.
Magic pushing outward.
Magic dragging inward.
Not weapons.
Pillars.
A world balanced on two breaths it was never meant to rest on.
The image snapped away.
Sea-salt cold rushed back in.
They are thin vessels, the Nuckelavee decided. Overfilled. Sloppy.
Its lipless mouth peeled wider.
They care.
The word came out like a complaint.
Celeste did not look away from the skull-face, the exposed muscle, the breath that killed grass.
"They will try to spare others," she said. "Even when that means breaking themselves first. Breaks spill."
The Sovereign's attention slid to her.
You know the taste of emptiness.
"I know what it does to people," she said simply.
Silence.
Then its arm lifted.
At the tip of one long finger, something formed—a bead of liquid so dark it warped the air. The runes under Nagel's boots flared.
He threw sigils into the space between finger and ground.
The drop fell.
It hit the net of light and did not burst.
Lines of rune-fire bent, screamed soundlessly, held.
The bead hung there, eating at the edges, a tiny, perfect seed of plagues and bad harvests and years people didn't write about.
One sovereign rot, the Nuckelavee said. Call my true-name with it when the girl of endings spreads too fast. I will show her how to prune instead of erase.
"And if she refuses?" MacDuff asked.
Wet bone creaked as the skull tilted.
Then she and I will discuss what refuses me.
The bead shrank as Nagel tightened the sigils, compressing it until it was the size of a seed, still wrong, still heavy.
Grindelwald flicked his wand.
Glass folded around the bead, a narrow vial forming out of nothing.
He corked it.
"I do not ask you to be kind," he said quietly. "Only precise."
The Nuckelavee's shoulders rolled.
I do not do it for your children, it said. Oblivion insults my craft. I protect my work.
It stepped back.
The sea ran forward, hungry to cover it.
Waves slammed into the carved trench, erased the scar, smoothed themselves flat.
Wind returned in a single, violent gust.
Celeste exhaled—finally.
Nagel stared at the small vial, throat working.
Four humans stood on a cold beach, holding a seed of plague that had just agreed not to end everything.
CALADRIUS — LIGHT
In the high Andes, dawn arrived in pieces.
Black sky softened to indigo.
Indigo to grey.
Grey to a thin, hesitant gold that brushed broken stone and old walls.
Arthur, Amelia, the Japanese envoy and the Egyptian wardmaker climbed the last worn steps of a ruined fortress carved into the cliff.
No wards.
No lanterns.
The air tasted thin and clean, like it would notice every word they chose to speak.
They stepped into a roofless courtyard open to the sky.
A cracked fountain stood at its center, dry and full of dust.
The Japanese envoy murmured, "He likes places where illness once gathered. Where it was watched honestly."
Amelia's hand tightened around her wand, then released.
"We do this without magic," she said. "If it refuses us, it refuses us."
They waited.
First, only their own breathing and the slow sound of waking mountains.
Then—a flutter.
Soft. Light.
A white shape dropped from the ledge of a broken wall.
The Caladrius landed on the fountain's rim.
Its feathers glowed faintly, not with light but with health turned visible. Its beak was sharp, its eyes clear. When it looked at them, it felt like being measured against a temperature that did not lie.
The bird hopped once.
As it did, a pulse rolled through the stone.
Talora's warmth, distant and huge, brushed the courtyard like a future spring pressed against winter.
The Caladrius tilted its head, listening.
Then it looked back at the humans.
"Two children are becoming too much," the Egyptian wardmaker said quietly. "One will hold life until it suffocates. One will hold death until it floods. We need something in the bindings that remembers disease can warn as well as kill."
The Japanese envoy added, "You have always known the line. You take sickness, or you turn away and let truth fall."
The Caladrius hopped closer to the edge.
It spread its wings.
Light—not bright, but precise—touched each of them in turn.
Arthur flinched as it skimmed his chest, tasting every old cold and panic and bruise.
Amelia stood straighter as it pressed at the tired, worn places behind her eyes.
The wardmaker's rings hummed.
The envoy's shoulders loosened, as if something had decided she had told enough truths to be allowed one more request.
The bird seemed satisfied.
It reached down and nipped at its own breast.
A single drop of pale-gold light formed on its beak.
It fell toward the dry fountain and did not hit the stone.
It floated, suspended, a tiny sun for patients who hadn't arrived yet.
For the girl of growth, a voice brushed the back of their thoughts. So she remembers that not every hurt is hers to heal. Some must pass through. Some must be left. Or all bodies break.
The drop condensed into a small, luminous seed.
The Egyptian wardmaker cupped it.
The Caladrius took one last look at the sky.
Then it beat its wings once and rose, white against the new blue, until it vanished.
The fortress was just a ruin again.
The courtyard still smelled faintly of hospitals that had once been honest.
CŴN ANNWN — DARK
In a Welsh valley that did not always exist, there was no sky.
There was only mist.
It hung in bands between hills, pale and silver, muffling sound, swallowing edges.
Grindelwald walked alone at first.
Vinda Rosier and Flavio Zabini waited at the ridge behind him, wands unlit. No one else had come down.
The grass here was short and black at the tips, as if it had burned in moonlight once and never quite recovered.
There was no lake.
No forest.
Just an old, low barrow at the valley's center, stones sagging around a dark doorway that nothing living used.
Grindelwald stopped a few paces from it.
He did not knock.
He breathed out.
"I call the Hounds of Annwn," he said. "Not as master. As messenger. Death has work to do."
The valley exhaled back.
Fog thickened.
The doorway widened.
They didn't see them at first.
They heard them.
Not barking. Not howling.
Breathing.
Many lungs, in perfect unison. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale—
Shapes formed in the mist.
Large.
Wolfish.
Wrong.
The Cŵn Annwn padded out of the barrow one by one, paws leaving no mark on the damp ground.
Their coats were shadow-white, edges blurring. Their eyes burned a wild, silent red, not angry—just utterly certain of their purpose.
They circled him once, then sat.
A ring of patient endings.
You stink of thresholds, one thought brushed his mind. It sounded like stone lids sliding off tombs. You have opened many doors you had no right to touch.
Grindelwald accepted that.
"There is a girl who will hold the door to endings in her hands," he said. "She is not ready. She is too soft and too sharp all at once. If she flings it open, there will be nothing left to shepherd. No paths. No after. Just… blank."
The pack's hackles rippled, almost imperceptibly.
No roads, another thought said. No last walks. No choices. Waste.
They did not like waste.
He let the image of the Chamber come again.
This time, the hounds saw Shya most clearly.
The thin line of her mouth. The tired set to her shoulders even asleep. The way her magic reached instinctively for edges and exits and didn't yet know how to differentiate between mercy and erasure.
They saw Cassian curled near her, a boy who would follow her into endings if someone didn't draw new lines.
They saw not a weapon, but a necessary principle forced into a child's chest.
The Cŵn Annwn stared.
We walk endings, they said. Not annihilation.
One of them rose.
It stepped closer until its breath fogged the front of his robes.
Its teeth opened.
One small thing dropped to the ground.
A single fang.
Silver-white at the root, iron-black at the tip, etched with lines that pulsed slow as heartbeat.
For the girl of endings, the pack said together, the sound not quite words. So she remembers that every death is a road, not a wall. So she learns to close doors without erasing the lands behind them.
The fang lay between his boots, humming softly with the memory of every soul that had ever been walked, not dragged, across.
Grindelwald bent, picked it up.
It did not cut.
It simply weighed.
When he straightened, the valley was empty.
The barrow was just a mound again.
The mist looked ordinary.
Far up the slope, Vinda and Zabini exhaled as one, shoulders slackening.
They had watched no dogs appear.
They had watched their leader hold something now glowing faintly in his hand.
It was enough.
Deep under Hogwarts, the Chamber listened.
Four new threads slipped into its circles:
Gold ore-light.
Sovereign plague-seed.
Pale healing-sun.
A fang from roads that end properly.
The runes drank them in.
On Talora's side, several sigils brightened—warmth becoming less wild, more defined, like a forest learning where to stop.
On Shya's side, cold steadied—no longer endless fall, but a sharper, narrower drop that knew it was meant to be a line, not a pit.
Cassian's fingers twitched toward Shya's hand.
Roman's chest rose a fraction deeper beside Talora's warmth.
Above them, somewhere beyond stone and time, desert birds, winter demons, white healers and death-hounds all turned their heads at the same moment—
Feeling the threads tighten around two beings the universe had never intended to wear faces.
The world did not get safer.
It got… less fragile.
In the infinite grey fog, two girls kept walking.
Two boys kept following.
The distance between them stayed the same.
Something behind them—antlers, wings, claws, paws—walked too.