Lucius stood beside his desk. The diary sat on the same wood where his father, Abraxas Malfoy, had worked. The leather drank the light and kept its own counsel.
Corvus did not hurry. He leaned back, one ankle on a knee, and watched the blond lord study the diary. A faint smile tugged at his mouth, more a private joke than a kindness. He glanced from Lucius to the book and back again as if weighing sums only he could see.
"Why should I interfere, Lord Malfoy?" He tipped his chin toward the book. "You brought this into your house. You kept it close and made it known to your masked friends when it suited you."
Lucius swallowed. The movement creased the pale skin at his throat. His eyes fixed on the diary as if focus alone might still it. "If there is a remedy, name it." His voice thinned on the last word.
Corvus let the silence live. He reached out and brushed a finger along the journal's spine. Cold gathered on the air, a vault's breath. He withdrew his hand and settled again. Calm as a cat in a sun patch.
"At most," Corvus said, eyes on the fire, "you have three years. The artifact has already siphoned enough to count your bones. It will not stop. It eats the years you thought you owned." He turned his head and held Lucius with a level look. "After your untimely and unfortunate death I will attend the funeral. Afterwards, I will arrange for Narcissa to return to House Black. Your house will be vassalized to mine. In another generation the Malfoy line will be an entry in a ledger, a note under the Black crest, and everything you polished will sit under my key."
Blood fled Lucius' face, then surged back in a weak blush, then fled again. He moved to speak and could not find the shape of the words. His left hand sought the chair back and gripped until the knuckles paled.
"I will agree to whatever you want." He forced the sentence out in one breath. "Help me."
Corvus watched him, unblinking. The room ticked. Somewhere in the house a clock answered with a lower note. "Honestly, Lord Malfoy, it is not worth the trouble. Why should I bother?"
Lucius closed his eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out. Memory put a weight on his shoulders that had not been there a minute ago. His father had warned him in that dry voice that made every lesson sound like pure fact. Never join a dark lord. Support with gold if you must, but never join. The old man had died and left his son with a fortune and a line to protect. Lucius had thought himself clever. He had thought power loved him back.
He opened his eyes. "Is there nothing to convince you otherwise, my lord?"
Corvus shifted, not to get comfortable, only to own the space. "You know my position. As an heir and a lord, I look for every decent way to increase the wealth and power of my houses. I assume you understand the motive." He let the pause rest. "You wore a mask once. You pillaged and raped and killed in the right places. You used fear like a weight on the scales." His voice held no warmth. Simple fact.
Lucius flinched, not at the content, but at the ease. The young man might as well have been reading receipts.
"The future is simple," Corvus went on. "If I leave you to your choices, you will start to feel the effects within a year. You will thin and tire. Your hand will start to shake at breakfast. Your wards will misread your signature. Your temper will shorten. Within two years you will find yourself standing in a room unsure how you came there. Three years and stairs will take your breath. Your son will watch and do the sums in his own head. By the end you will sleep in a chair because the bed feels like a climb. Then the house will fall quiet. And as promised, I will attend the funeral."
The words landed like small stones in a bowl. One, then another, then another until the sound was only weight.
Lucius' mouth opened. Closed. Color rose high, then drained to the edges. His gaze flicked to the diary and back to Corvus, a trapped thing looking for the door it already knew was locked.
"If you want my help, Lord Malfoy." Corvus steepled his fingers. "Here are my terms." He counted them off with the same care a banker uses to count galleons.
"You will dissolve your marriage with Narcissa." He let the sentence sit. Not a threat, a condition. "You will appoint me as your proxy in the Chamber until Draco graduates." A brief pause. "You will leave this manor to cousin Narcissa. I would not have her feel homeless." He inclined his head as if offering civility at the end of a blade.
Lucius' breath went short. A flush broke across his cheek, then dropped out. A spot of sweat found his collar and hid there. "You would have me surrender my home."
"I would have you live." Corvus held his gaze. "In return I will sever the connection this artifact has established with you. As a gesture of goodwill, as we are relatives of a sort, I will extract and return what it has stolen. Your years will be yours again." He looked down at the diary. "Most of them."
"The Chamber." Lucius found his voice. "You ask for my vote."
"I ask for your chair." Corvus' tone stayed mild. "You may sit in it again when your son is ready to wear your name without a shadow over it."
Lucius looked at the fire. Sparks feathered up the flue and died. The crackle sounded like thin paper torn by a gloved hand. He tried to picture Narcissa walking these halls as mistress without him. She had been a Black before she became a Malfoy. She would not bend her head to pity. He knew that much. The idea of House Malfoy as a vassal under Black seal should have roused fury. He felt the pinch, faint, like a memory of anger left out in rain.
Lucius stared at the diary. The surface seemed to breathe with a shallow pulse like a frog in a jar. The sight put acid behind his teeth.
"My father told me to avoid men with causes," he said in a lower voice. "I should have listened."
"Yes. Abraxas Malfoy." Corvus let the name weigh the air. "Minister Black mentions him often, especially the time he offered to barter you for a deed in Diagon Alley. Truly inspiring." He rubbed the salt in with the faintest curl of a smile.
Corvus folded his hands and waited. Nonchalance settled on him like a good robe. "This is not charity. It is arithmetic. Accept, and your house survives under a new arrangement. Refuse, and your house becomes a story about bad decisions told over wine."
A long moment stretched. The clock in the corridor struck the quarter. Lucius blinked at the sound as if it had tapped his shoulder.
Corvus leaned forward at last. "What say you, Lucius Malfoy, do we have an accord?"
--
Albus Dumbledore floated in a cold light that smelled faintly of tin. Thought bled into thought. A corridor lengthened, then folded into a summer hillside, then broke into a candlelit dormitory where boys snored with the steadiness of old dogs. He tried to sort them. His shields rose by habit and met nothing. Ice where there should have been stone. His Occlumency lay in pieces.
He reached for the last fixed thing. Amelia's face. Steady jaw. Careful hand. A vial tipped second time. Two more drops struck his tongue. Bitter and clean as cut nettle. After that, the floor slid. Clocks without hands. Music that came from books. A staircase that returned to the same landing again and again.
This was not a cell in the DMLE. This was below. The Department of Mysteries lived under the Ministry like roots under a hill, and he was in one of its chambers. Time breathed wrong here. Each blink stretched. Each breath returned with a different weight.
Fool, he told himself. You told them to trust you with what they did not understand. You told them mercy was a better tool than iron. And then you used iron and called it mercy.
He tried to hold to one hour from one day. The night after Ariana died. The room washed away and became the shore of a lake where the air wore spring. No, not that. Back to the office where Fawkes perched and watched him write letters he had no right to sign. The quill scratched. The quill turned to a wand and burned blue. The wand turned to an infant with green eyes, asleep under a thin blanket.
This is a constructed drift, he thought. A tuned flood. They have me inside my own stream and they are drawing what they want strand by strand. He shaped the thought and let it sit like a stone in the current. The current bent around it. That told him enough. He was not guessing. He was correct.
His mouth tasted of copper. His hands shook when he looked at them, still when he looked away. There were no walls, only a sense of vaulted height like the echo in a great library. He spoke once to test the room and heard nothing. His voice chose not to disturb the runework.
You are in their house, old man. You did not plan well enough for this.
Across the hall of that strange light, a pool of silver changed shape like weather. Figures leaned over it. They moved with the quiet of people who never ask permission.
An Unspeakable lifted a length of memory free. The strand climbed from the surface in an even coil, bright as thread with starlight in it. The mask hid the face, but the tilt of the head read like thought. A second Unspeakable recorded the time and the event with a neat flick of a quill over a parchment. Fifty fourth extraction from Subject A.D. The quill made a dry whisper.
"Time chamber remains at fourteen to one." A third tapped the brass collar of a clock that had no hands and many humming rings. The sound crawled under the skin and set the hair on the arm to a soft stand.
It had been a day and a half since the arrest above. Down here, three weeks had passed for the mind walking its own corridors. Enough to tire a giant. Enough to pry loose the shelds he had set in his thoughts and labeled private.
The pool steadied, once more. A scene formed. Summer lay over Godric's Hollow like warm glass. Three young men arguing over a future they could not lift. One of them drew his wand with the brittle courage of genius gone wrong. The scene shifted after a blur, the girl shouted once and fell into silence. The memory hung on the air like smoke with a heavy guilt, then drew tight and sank.
"Ariana Dumbledore," the recorder wrote. The quill did not pause. "Sequence confirmed."
Another strand rose. Hogwarts. Years blurred to days. Letters signed. Votes counted. A talent for moving people along paths that looked like their own choosing. Muggleborn placements as tutors to purebloods without asking or informing families. Meetings with the Wizengamot where he smiled like a statue and left with what he wanted while his opponents grunded their teeth.
The Unspeakeables continued to log and moved on.
The next thread broke the surface with a dark gleam. London's cold against small chubby cheeks. A cradle left on a doorstep. A cat watched from a wall with wet whiskers.
"Potter's placement," the recorder marked. "Record the anmagus and inform the Minister and Bones."
On the far side of the pool a fourth Unspeakable recorded a diagnostic spell and it's results. The memory had a shadow, a shadow that showed an infant's face with something that did not belong. A hook in a scar. A thread that did not glow like the rest. the spell darkened and cooled with a hiss.
"Repeat that," the third ordered without tone. The hook brightened. The boy's eyes shifted left as if he felt it. The image broke and healed again in the space of a breath.
"Foreign soul matter," the third said at last. "Small. Anchored at the wound."
"Name the owner," the fourth said.
Different scenes came afterwards. A classroom that smelled of chalk and old wool. A boy with perfect penmanship and a smile that asked to be admired. The boy grew into a man who trimmed his name to please his own ear. Tom Marvolo Riddle. It did not take long for the Unspeakables to link the name to local dark lord.
"Horcrux," the ringer said. The word hung. "The scar is highly suspected. There might be more."
"Local Dark Lord is not a DoM concern unless non terminal. Persistence beyond ordinary mortality meets threshold." Added the fourth.
Albus was not aware of anything beyond his blurred thoughts. The pool showed him back to himself in neat cuts that hurt less than they should. He tried to be angry and found only a low patience that felt like winter. He had always liked puzzles. He had not considered that he might be reduced to one.
You meddled, the voice said. You called it love when you wanted control. You told yourself the pieces would thank you when they saw the picture. And here we are.
The Unspeakables raised their heads from the pool at the same time. The move felt like a single animal finding a scent. Decisions collected quickly in this place. They prized clean lines.
"Minister to be briefed," the recorder said. "DMLE to be supplied with certified extracts only. Riddle persistence to move to Primary." The chalk tapped the slate in a small period. "We take custody of the artefacts when located. Extraction protocols to be readied. Thanatology, Curse, and Time to assign teams."
No one argued. A mask turned toward Albus and held there for a slow count, as if measuring the distance between a legend and a case file. The pool dimmed.
Albus tried to fix the present. He set his mind on the moment of Amelia ordering the administration f the additional drops and failed. He set it on Harry's thin shoulders and the effort made his ribs ache. He looked for Fawkes and found only a scrap of music without a source. He laughed once, short and without humor.
Only one thing stood clear. They would strip him down to the boards. They would keep what the law needed and give the rest to their own locked drawers. They would turn to Riddle next, because death that refuses to sit still is their business.
He closed his eyes and counted again.