Dragging a full-grown man through a tunnel on all fours was obviously exhausting, and Ariana was visibly running out of steam. Iain, for once, did not rush her. He waited with surprising patience, perfectly considerate while she caught her breath.
In his current state, he had no idea what tired even meant. He had never experienced it.
"How have you been feeling lately?" Iain asked, picking up their conversation again.
"Much better, thanks to Lord Iain's help." Ariana rested for a moment, and when she answered, her voice sounded lighter than before. "I hardly have those terrible spells anymore."
The gratitude in her tone was entirely genuine.
"That's great. Proof that Lord Iain works miracles. Definitely a legendary healer." Iain nodded, pleased for his friend, though that did not stop him from collecting on the favor.
"You should learn to cook better, then make food for me. If I eat it on Lord Iain's behalf, that means Lord Iain ate it too, and he'll be extremely grateful."
At the moment, Iain was starving. He felt like he could polish off a dragon.
"My cooking isn't very good," Ariana admitted, embarrassed. Then she hurried to add, "But I can learn from my mother."
"Good, good. As long as you don't learn from my magic skeleton." The memory still clearly haunted him.
Heaven only knew what the skeleton had been trying to feed him these past few days.
"What about you, Mr. Corpse?" Ariana asked in return, while the two of them hoisted the blond young man up together and shoved him toward the opening above.
"Oh, I've been all right. In the outside world, my steward settled me in an abandoned old house, where I didn't run into any ghostly women, but I did face the seduction of an evil dark witch."
"Of course, you know my will is harder than steel, so even though she offered to buy the whole British Empire for me, I, pure and spotless as a white lily, remained unmoved."
"Humiliated, the dark witch unleashed her dragon of destruction, Deathwing, to steal both my love and my life. But in the end, I still defeated her with wisdom and strength."
"She dropped to her knees and begged me to spare her. In my great mercy, I merely ordered her never to come out and plague the world again. After that, I abandoned fame and fortune and retired to Hogsmeade."
"Now I mostly just make mushroom soup every day."
Using all the flourish of a talented novelist, Iain recounted his recent adventures with only the lightest touch of embellishment.
He was not exactly changing the facts. He was just showing off.
Ariana was quiet for a moment. "Mr. Corpse, have you already been to Hogwarts? Every time I came to see you, you were still lying in your bed."
She sounded genuinely confused.
"The one lying in the coffin is my spirit," Iain declared with the confidence of a man reciting Newton's laws. "The one going to Hogwarts is my real body."
Ariana, as usual, did not understand any of that.
But she did not press him.
Together they shoved the blond young man out through the opening, and then Ariana grabbed the slick dirt wall and climbed it like a gecko, using all four limbs. In just a few quick motions, she was at the top.
"?????"
Iain stared upward in utter shock.
"Spider-Girl!"
From below, he gazed up at the girl's movement, which went beyond human capability and, frankly, beyond zombie standards too. His dark, hollow eyes were full of awe.
Ariana leaned over the edge and offered him a hand. "Mr. Corpse, have you met my brother? I told him about you and asked him to look after you."
Iain did not take the hand. He believed that if Ariana could climb up, then so could he. A real man could never admit weakness in any category.
"How could I have met a succubus hiding in somebody else's head?"
"Once we get to the spirit world, have him trade contact information with me. I might be the one protecting him. The land Hogwarts stands on has belonged to me since ancient times."
"The entire Western Hemisphere is my god-granted territory."
Iain pressed himself against the dirt wall, hands and feet braced, and began wriggling upward like an earthworm trying to climb a tree.
To his credit, it did work.
He inched upward bit by bit.
Unfortunately, he still did not make it out.
It was not that Iain lacked the ability. The problem was that just as he managed to climb high enough for his hand to nearly touch the edge, some bizarre music suddenly burst into his ears.
"What in the world is that shrieking?"
In the next instant, his vision blurred, and when his mind snapped back into focus, he was sitting bolt upright on the floor of the cabin in the real world.
"What just happened?"
The sudden shift had caught Iain completely off guard. The time had not been up, and yet he had still been forced back to reality. That had never happened before.
"Did the mushroom soup interfere with my mental realm?" In the silence around him, Iain stared at the crooked wand still clutched in his hand, the one that belonged to the blond young man, and could not make sense of it.
"Still, at least my power to turn imagination into reality is still working." He looked from the wand to the pendant Ariana had given him resting against his chest.
Whatever else had happened, one thing was clear.
From the gifts of his own mind, he had gained a second wand.
"Now I need to find it a new spirit."
Since something new now occupied his thoughts, Iain's single-core mental processor did not spend too much time dwelling on why he had returned early.
…
1899
Godric's Hollow
Inside the upstairs bedroom of the Dumbledore house—
"Where did Mr. Corpse go?"
Ariana was baffled. One second he had been right in front of her, and the next he had vanished. She looked down into the tunnel, but there was no sign of him at all.
"Where did Mr. Corpse run off to?"
Just as Ariana was struggling to make sense of what had happened, a low, weak voice suddenly came from behind her.
"Don't bother looking. If I'm right, the seal on the underground chamber has dragged him back into his prison."
Ariana whipped around.
She saw that the blond young man had woken up at some point and was now leaning against the wall, his back pressed to the stone. One hand clutched his left side, the other covered the swelling lumps on the back of his head.
His breathing was uneven. Every breath made his brows tighten, but he kept it under control, refusing to let any cough escape.
"Mr. Grindelwald! You're alive!"
The girl sounded honestly delighted.
Young Gellert Grindelwald twitched at the corner of his mouth.
"Were you hoping I wasn't?"
His expression was painfully stiff.
Ariana shook her head so hard she looked like a bobblehead.
"No, of course not. It's just that Mr. Corpse hit you so hard, I was worried—"
"Your friend," Grindelwald cut in. "Or rather, the being that granted you its favor. He is no corpse."
Perhaps he had been awake much longer than either of them realized.
And during that time, he had done a great deal of thinking.
"Huh?"
Ariana's eyes were full of confusion.
Grindelwald did not wait for her questions. He lifted his gaze to the moon outside the window, half-covered in cloud, and spoke softly, almost as if to himself.
"Do you know why I came here in the first place? I came chasing a legend. The three Peverell brothers once lived here."
This was a secret Grindelwald had never shared with a third party before. Now he revealed it to the girl in a voice weakened by injury and thick with complicated meaning.
Ariana blinked.
"I've read The Tales of Beedle the Bard. What does that have to do with Mr. Corpse?"
She sounded utterly lost.
At that, Grindelwald smiled.
"A story is only a story. It is not the real history."
There was blood at the corner of his mouth, a faint stain on his teeth, but his eyes were burning bright—the kind of feverish light a man gets after wandering in the dark for years and finally spotting fire.
"I think, in the true history, your ancestors—the Peverell brothers—may not have gained Death's relics by tricking him."
Grindelwald lowered his voice even further, so low it felt like he was revealing a secret no one alive was meant to hear. The intensity in his eyes only deepened.
After a long pause, he finished the thought.
"They tricked him, and imprisoned… Death itself."
Gellert Grindelwald spoke aloud the possibility—only a possibility—that he had just glimpsed.