Corvus sat alone at the long table in his private office, the one that looked like a study and behaved like a command room; it was not so private after all. He sighed. Grimmauld Place was the only place he had to himself alone nowadays. The walls carried maps, and each parchment had wards inked along its edges. Each pin had a reason. The larger world moved on, with headlines of the Unit healers visiting local hospitals to heal people. Every day, another chunk of prejudice was getting cut off. Muggles were coming around, loving the idea of superpowered people. There were some who were trying to point out that these people were using Magic, but they were getting ridiculed and silenced by the governments.
Corvus' world moved on names, routes, and replacement schedules.
Shadows of the Black Spire was working on impersonating given targets. Behavioural patterns, speech patterns and memories.
The door on his right opened after a soft knock. A tall witch in plain Nest robes stepped in and stopped at the carpet line. Her posture stayed formal.
Corvus did not look up. "Report."
She placed a folder on the edge of his desk.
"First trials of Shadows are completed, my lord. Twelve finished the first rotation. Nine completed full replacement drills without losing accent. Three failed on habit loops."
Corvus finally raised his gaze. "Which habits?"
"Two smoked. One touched his wedding band every time he lied."
Corvus let a small breath out through his nose.
"People hide behind tiny rituals," he murmured. "Teach them to impersonate these rituals too."
The witch nodded once, already filing it away.
He opened the folder. Mugshots stared back at him. Ministers, generals, bankers, clergy, editors. With the Black Spire, the need to let his people rise step by step was over.
Corvus turned a page and stopped.
Sir Colin McColl's photograph was staring back at him. He tapped the photo.
The witch watched his expression and kept her distance.
"The Muggle side remains messy," She pointed at the head of MI6
"It is a habit of all humans," Corvus replied. His finger pressed the photo, and the ink on the slate above his desk shifted again.
"Train multiple Shadows to infiltrate and replace him and some of his key underlings," he ordered.
"Never forget why we are doing this. It is to prevent another ICW from convincing frightened Muggles to swing at shadows."
The witch lowered her chin. "Understood."
Corvus closed the folder and held another to the witch. "Send this to Sigibert. He will choose which targets are important enough for me to move my people. I want the Spire be ready in another six months."
She took the folder, bowed slightly and left.
Now that intelligence is nearly ready, he turned his focus to Internal security.
The name was already formed in his mind.
BLACK BASTION
A crest drawn in plain lines, a black tower inside a shield.
The Aurors are local forces. Each country had their own. Each by their own Ministries. None was central enough to secure a new empire.
He moved his palm over the slate. Words formed under his hand.
Mandate: Protect Mater Magica Aeterna from within.
Method: Nestborn Magicals. To be bred with additional traits to serve their purposes.
Corvus kept writing.
Traits:
Wampus legilimency.
Troll strength.
Graphorn resistance.
They will be resistant enough to fight for hours, and loyal enough not to question his orders.
He took an empty parchment and started to write. The underwater and above-water branches will start the breeding line.
Umbra cawed and flew to his desk. He tied the letter and asked the bird to go to Rookwood.
The development of both worlds was going as planned.
Corvus stared at the Pond where Medusa was sleeping. then to the buildings visible through his window. Nurseries, Laboratories and Offices. He can now focus on more important topics.
Like the Codex and other artefacts of the Elders.
He created a copy of the Codex based on the memories he replicated from the Flamels. It sat inside a case of blackwood with runes burned along its spine. He opened it with a touch, wards peeling away like polite curtains.
Abraham the Mage
He had written the name without flourish, but it carried weight. Not because he was a Mage nor of the religions built on his myth, though he wondered what the clergy would do to justify that.
Corvus turned a page and found the line again. The Island where the Sun Pyramid was located. Seat of the Elders. Better known to the world as Atlantis.
A place of stone and glass, built on a seam where magic rose from the earth like breath. The Codex called it a seat for the council of the Elders.
He read the next translation of Flamels again.
The twins tore at each other. The Sun Pyramid broke. Earth had rejected them. They took without giving. In the end, the sea took the island.
Corvus closed his eyes and pictured it without embellishment.
A pyramid not made for worship but for control. Arrays built through the natural leylines, metals that did not exist even in modern times, channels meant to anchor forces too large for a single body. Two rulers, born into the same line, raised into the same knowledge, both convinced they were the rightful hands to harvest the planet and its people.
A fight between individuals of such power will not be a duel. It would be a natural disaster.
The Codex did not name the twins, only marked them with symbols: one with a golden tiara, the other with a silver crown. Corvus traced the symbols with his fingertip.
He turned the page. Abraham had written about other elders as well.
Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea and Father of the Nereids, was one of them.
The margin held a second note.
Truth and tides. He remembers what the surface forgets.
That line made Corvus still. Truth and tides.
He let the copy of the Codex lie open and drew a map of the Mediterranean. The paper spread itself across the desk, coastlines forming in ink. Greece sat there like a thorn, old stone and older seats for the Olympian line.
The Aegean Sea was full of creatures that the Muggles thought were myths.
Merpeople, for one. Not the lake folk that Hogwarts students whispered about, but the deep ones, the ones that did not trade with humans, magical or not, and did not tolerate nets. Selkies along colder coasts, wards on the surface, sharp minds underneath. Sirens, not singers for sailors' romances, but hunters that used sound as a lure and a blade. Kelpies that shaped themselves to drown the curious and stupid.
And then the Nereids.
Fifty, the stories said. Daughters of Nereus. Not fish-tailed villagers. Not half beasts. The Codex described them as maidens of the sea, humanoid, dangerous, and capable of choosing their form.
If they existed, they would not be living in the shallows. They would be deep and might be guarding something. Corvus tapped the map where the Aegean broke into islands.
Greece and the west of Turkey. He will search every corner of the sea. If what Abraham wrote was even half true, there should be something there.
He did not need anyone for this outing.
--
The first copy of the GAIA minutes reached every capital with the same stamp, the same list of signatures, and the same sentence at the top.
John Major read it twice in the car, then handed it back to Rimington without looking up. Her pencil moved over the margins, quick ticks beside the paragraphs that used to take them half a year to argue about.
Norway's representative had not asked for permission. He had walked into the council, put a folder on the table, and spoken like a man who was tired of oil being treated like a religion.
Oscillating Water Columns, Solar Panels and Grid storage. New transmission lines and factories repurposed for fabrication.
He had watched the room and let them find their own courage. By the time he finished, half the table was already calculating what they could announce at home.
Now the announcements came in a steady rhythm.
A press secretary in Rome tried to make it sound gradual and responsible. A minister in Ankara skipped the theatrics and listed dates. Berlin promised factories and jobs. Moscow promised power and independence. Lisbon promised sea farms and steel.
The markets did their usual dance, first fear, then greed.
The funding followed.
Budgets that once died in the cracks between departments moved from proposal to approval in a week. In London, Major watched his chancellor sign a line that should have made him pause, then watched him sign the next line without pausing at all.
The rules had changed. GAIA did not ask countries to trust each other. It made them depend on the same plan.
At a shipyard on the North Sea, welders worked under portable floodlights while a Norwegian engineer stood over a blueprint with a British admiral and a German procurement officer. No one joked about it being a naval project that would never see an enemy. They spoke in tonnage, stress loads, and maintenance cycles. A wave device was still a device, and devices failed in salt and winter.
A crane lifted the first curved segment into place. Below, a foreman barked at his team to keep things clear. The metal settled with a dull thud that carried through the dock. The engineer ran a glove along the seam, checked the alignment, then pointed at a section that needed to be redone.
In Portugal, a small line that used to build fishing equipment was refitted to press panel frames. The first run of solar panels came out ugly, then less ugly, then clean enough to ship. In Spain, a coastal research unit strapped sensors to buoys and sent them into rough water to see what snapped first.
Every time something snapped, the next version arrived faster.
Corvus read the reports in his own silence. He did not attend the meetings of GAIA. His influence sat in the gaps between signatures, in the quiet advice that reached the right desk at the right hour.
He watched a map on his wall change colour as projects moved from planning to construction. The dots multiplied along coasts, then spread inland as grids were upgraded. He tracked it the same way he tracked anything that mattered. Inputs, outputs and weak points.
What he did was to send enchanters to the facilities to make sure they would withstand.
The planet would not care who took credit.
It would care about pressure easing.
He felt that in small ways, the same way he had felt the earth recoil when he pushed certain rituals too far. Less strain. Cleaner air around the places they had rebuilt. A gradual loosening in the tension that sat under everything, like the world had been holding its breath for centuries.
-
While governments poured money into turbines and panels, other people read the news and heard a different message.
Magic was not a rumour anymore. Mana was not a trick of the camera. The Unit existed, and the Unit was not asking for permission.
In a stone building that had survived three wars and several renovations, a dozen men sat in a room that still carried old symbols in its ceiling beams. The city above them had cafés and tourists and clean sidewalks. Down here, the air was cold, and the faces were older than they should have been.
One of them placed a newspaper on the table. The headline was about energy. The photo below it was not. A blurred figure in black, too large to be normal, standing beside soldiers who looked small by comparison.
The man's finger pressed the paper hard enough to leave a crease.
Another opened a worn leather case and set it down. Inside were relics that did not belong in a museum catalogue. A blade with an inscription. A rosary with metal beads. A strip of cloth stained dark from age.
They did not argue about theology. They argued about opportunity.
One voice tried to push for restraint. It was ignored.
A third man brought out a list of names and places. He did not read them aloud. He slid the list across to the man at the head of the table.
A younger man shifted on his chair, eager, stupid with it.
"You want us to move against the Unit?"
The head of the table let the silence answer first. Then he nodded. They are abominations, mockeries of our beliefs! Not human, not natural, nothing but corruption incarnate. We must rise, as our forebears rose, to scour this plague from the world. It was our hands that cast judgment in ages past, our flames that purged their heresy upon the stake. And it is our sacred burden now. Ours alone, to deliver Humanity from the festering evil of witches and wizards!" he thundered.
Outside, a bell rang on the hour. The sound filtered down through the stone and made the candle flames tremble.
Up above, the world was building machines to pull power from sea and sun.
Down below, the old orders were sharpening their beliefs into tools.
Corvus sent another team of healers to hospitals and streets the next morning. Perception of the Muggles towards Magic was changing, and he wanted them not only to accept but to adore the Magicals.
He did not need to guess what would come.
They always came.