Corvus read the Belfast file twice. It had given him the shape. Names, streets, safe houses and cash routes that ran through sacred respectable hands, some even reaching to the Vatican.
"They can hold grudges for a long time," he murmured.
Thirty years of slow murder wrapped in slogans and funerals. It was not complicated. It was organised and protected.
He closed the folder on the chart table in his study of the frigate. Umbra perched on a rail above the table, head tilted, black eyes reflecting the runes that hovered over the parchment.
Three Shadows stood at attention in the corner. They did not speak. They did not fidget. Their faces looked ordinary enough to pass in any crowd. Their eyes held zeal. Black Spire had sent over three dozens of Shadow operators to him.
Corvus tapped one point on the map with a finger. The nearest Shadow inclined his head once.
Corvus's voice stayed even. "I want the problem dissolved. No martyrs nor any public theatre. Remove and replace the masterminds. Weapon and explosive suppliers make sure they get recorded while talking about the cow they have been milking for over thirty years. I want their connection to the people of Ireland be destroyed by their hands. No other way will solve the issue. Leave their slogans to rot without hands to print and mouths to shout them."
He turned the file slightly and let it slide across the table. "Bring me proof and make sure there is no collateral. More than enough people have already perished for the ambitions of others."
The Shadows moved. After a couple of steps, they turned invisible.
An Unspeakable at the far end of the table lifted his eyes from a ledger. "If you cut too cleanly, they will call it foreign intervention."
Corvus reached for his teacup, took a sip, and set it down. "They will call it whatever keeps them breathing. Their words will not change the outcome."
The Unspeakable did not argue; he simply nodded and brought the next file.
-
By the time the polls closed, Major's victory looked like a clerical error that refused to correct itself. Labour's people had already begun celebrating, and then the numbers came in, ugly and wrong. Constituencies that should have turned red held blue. Belfast stayed quieter than it had any right to be on a tense night. The usual warnings did not arrive. The usual violence did not announce itself.
-
Far from Britain, a television carried the results into the private chambers of a frigate lying south of Athens. Corvus sat with Elizaveta close beside him on the bench, their shoulders brushing. The steady thrum of the ship's engines resonated through the hull.
Umbra swept in and alighted at Corvus's left. The raven stretched out its leg, the parchment tied fast against the dark feathers.
Corvus read it once.
Elizaveta's gaze stayed on his face, calm and attentive. Her hand rested on his thigh, fingers spread, a quiet claim.
Corvus set the parchment down. "It is done."
Elizaveta's mouth tightened. There was the acceptance of her beloved's actions and their consequences. "Major holds."
Corvus gave a small nod.
The tinny voice on the telly shifted into the strained rhythm of a presenter trying not to sound shocked. Corvus listened for a minute, then turned it off.
Elizaveta leaned in and pressed a brief kiss under his jaw. The contact pulled him out of the numbers and back into the room.
"You got what you wanted," she noted.
Corvus's eyes returned to the map of the Aegean. "It is for the greater good of the country."
The policies followed within days. The shift was not dramatic in the speeches. It was in the paperwork. The quiet changes that made a country move one small step at a time. For the people of the realm, everything looked the same until the changes piled up enough that they started to notice them.
Education moved first.
Corvus watched the drafts arrive through channels that did not exist on any organisational chart. New modules. Adjusted history lines. A careful return to the heritage language that made room for the old stories without calling them fairy tales. British kings and battles framed with the quiet implication that certain miracles had always belonged to the island, even when the textbooks pretended otherwise.
He wanted Muggles to get used to Magicals as part of their history, not as invaders that appeared out of smoke. Miracle workers, healers and strong leaders. People who had always been there, just off the edge of the official photograph.
The soldiers of the Unit carried the hard face. They were the men and women who were able to tap into this new power. The healers of the Unit carried the soft face of the same hand.
They did not hide what they were; it was challenging due to their height and perfection.
In Liverpool, the A and E doors swung open, and a senior nurse looked up from her desk as if she had heard a bell that did not exist. Two men in military uniforms entered first, shoulders squared, scanning the room. The waiting area fell silent by itself, not because anyone had asked, but because that was what people did when authority figures walked in. Soldiers of the Unit have that effect wherever they show up.
Two healers followed.
They wore simple robes, a silver badge pinned at their chest that marked them as officials of the Alliance, not a consultant and not a volunteer. The badge meant nothing to the average person. It meant everything in the room as they already heard about the Healers.
The nurse stepped out from behind the desk and held her posture like she was back in front of her manager. "You are the Unit." She asked the first two. Upon receiving a nod, she turned to the healers. "You two must be the Healers. Welcome." There was a silent reverence in her eyes. The same expression was on most of the waiting patients.
One of the healers inclined his head, polite and exact. "Thank you. We will need a cubicle and your most critical cases first."
A junior doctor approached, stethoscope still hanging, eyes wide with the kind of disbelief that turned into hope. "Is this real. Are you really going to do it here?"
The healer's gaze settled on him, calm. "If you want miracles to reach the ones in need, you do them where the suffering is."
The doctor swallowed and nodded too fast. The waiting patients started to move towards the healers.
The nurse turned to the Soldiers. She was not sure she wanted them to secure the cubicle. The healers were tall and huge as well, but they were healers, not killers. She called for the security.
In truth, there was no difference between the soldiers and the healers of the Nestborns. They were all having the same training. The difference in perception was coming from a uniform and weapons instead of a simple robe and a pin.
A police officer approached the waiting people. "Please keep calm and orderly."
A man in the waiting area started to protest, then saw the look on the unit man's face and decided his throat had better things to do.
After the staff arranged the place for the healers to work, they moved the first patient in on a gurney, a factory worker with his hand wrapped in blood-soaked gauze. His wife walked beside him, cheeks wet, eyes fixed on the healer as if she was afraid he might vanish if she blinked.
The healer stepped to the bedside and pulled the gauze away with careful fingers. The hand looked ruined. Bone protrusion. Skin split. The patient's face contorted when air touched the wound.
The healer's palm covered the wrist, firm, anchoring. "Breathe."
The man tried. His breath hitched.
The healer's eyes did not leave the injury. "You can swear if it helps. I will not report you to your mother."
A rough laugh escaped the patient, half pain and half relief.
The nurse stood at the bedside with a clipboard and forgot to write.
A low hum filled the cubicle, like a note held just under hearing. The bleeding stopped first. The edges of the torn skin drew together with a slow certainty. Swelling retreated in a visible wave. The bones shifted under the surface and set themselves with soft clicks that made the nurse flinch.
The patient stared, mouth open.
His wife's hands flew to her lips. "Oh my God."
The healer's gaze flicked up, mild warning. "If you want to thank someone, thank your husband for keeping his hand attached long enough for me to be useful."
The woman's eyes filled again. She gripped her husband's shoulder and bent to press her forehead against his. Her voice shook. "You can feel it. Tell me you can feel it."
The man flexed his fingers once, then again, then looked at his hand as if it belonged to someone else. "I can feel everything."
The healer stepped back and cleaned his hands with a soft Scourgify. The Unit soldier murmured an Evenesco towards the bloodied gauze to vanish.
The healer turned to the patient.
"Do not lift anything heavy for a week. If you ignore me, it will still heal, but you will earn my disappointment."
The patient blinked. "I don't know how to thank you."
The healer's mouth turned, almost a smile. "Help someone in need or plant a tree in the name of Dagda."
This was on purpose. Corvus especially ordered the Unit to promote the Celtic Gods.
The junior doctor found his voice. "How do we follow up. Blood work. Imaging."
"There is no further course to pursue. I believe supplements to strengthen the blood will suffice. Beyond that, he is restored," the healer answered.
In Manchester, a healer in grey robes stood at the foot of a child's bed while the parents sat on either side, hands linked, eyes raw from nights without sleep. The consultant hovered near the doorway, cautious, respectful, unsure where to stand.
The healer placed a hand on the child's chest and closed his eyes for one breath. The girl's breathing eased as if a tight band had been cut. Colour returned to her lips in slow increments.
The mother's shoulders shook. She leaned forward until her forehead touched the mattress. "Please."
The healer's hand stayed steady. "I am not taking payment. Do not bargain with me."
The father forced himself upright. His voice came out hoarse. "What do you want then?"
The healer opened his eyes. "I want you to remember who helped your daughter. When people tell you we are monsters, you will have a face to put against that lie."
The consultant stepped closer, careful. "Should I document this as an intervention by the Unit Healers?"
The healer's gaze moved to him. "Yes. Use the words. If your board complains, send them to complain to us. They will learn what a polite refusal looks like."
The unit men waited outside the wards, not part of the tenderness, but never absent. Nurses offered them tea. They accepted with soft smiles. Families thanked them, because fear and gratitude often held hands.
People learned to accept help from Magicals while looking them in the eye.
The Alliance learned to accept authority with a soft hand and a hard one, delivered by the same arm.
Corvus kept the programme running with one eye while he kept the Aegean under the other.
The frigate moved south and east, always hidden, always close enough to strike and far enough to vanish. Elizaveta stayed on board and treated the ship like a temporary home. She trained in the mornings with the Nestborn women, then returned to the deck and read Ministry reports as if politics were a language she had always spoken.
Corvus spent his days in the water.
Crete came under the keel as a dark line on the horizon. The sea around it tasted different, heavier and colder. Currents pushed against each other like old arguments.
Corvus stood at the stern and rolled his shoulders once. Magic rose. Phase. Flight. Extreme Speed and Agility. He dropped into the sea without a splash and let the ship become a shadow above.
The descent began.
The first hundred metres still held light, diluted and blue. Fish moved in loose clouds. A plimpy drifted past, round as a joke, its silver belly catching the last of the sun. It regarded Corvus with a dull friendliness, then waddled away through the water with lazy strokes of its fins. He shifted to his Basilisk form again.
Deeper, the life sharpened.
Grindylows clung to rock and weed, long-fingered and greenish, eyes bright with hunger. One detached and tried to rush him. Corvus did not bother with it. His tail swept once, a controlled flick, and the creature spun away into silt.
Sea serpents appeared in the distance, long bodies rolling through dark water like old ropes. They did not come close. Something in Corvus's presence told them that curiosity had a price.
He did not stop.
The magic thickened as he went. It was foreign, a pressure, a taste on the tongue that did not belong in salt water. His scales prickled with it.
Stone shapes emerged after a while.
Columns first. Broken. Half buried. Then the streets, paved in pale stone that should have cracked under centuries of weight. They remained intact, softened only by algae and time.
It was an old Greek city, drowned and preserved, but the lines were wrong for a purely Muggle ruin. The angles were too clean. The symmetry felt intentional in a way that made his mind tug toward ritual arrays.
Statues rose out of the seabed.
A man with a trident. Broad shoulders. A fish tail curled beneath him. The face was worn by water, yet the expression still carried command.
Nereus.
Around him stood smaller figures, mermaids with arms raised, hair carved in waves, bodies angled as if they were dancing or pleading. Nereids. The repetition was too specific to be decoration.
Corvus slowed.
Merfolk watched from behind toppled pillars. Their eyes shone in the darkness, reflecting the orbs of light he was sending from time to time. Light that did not reach these depths.
The merfolk held their spears steady. Their posture was not hostile. It was wary.
He sent a small orb of light forward. The glow moved through water in a steady line, bright enough to paint the stones, soft enough not to announce him like a beacon.
The merfolk did not attack. They shifted back into the shadows and followed at a distance, keeping their own territory and their own dignity.
Corvus pushed on, deeper into the Hellenic trench south-west of Crete.
Light vanished entirely.
The sea became a black weight that pressed from every side. Sound reduced to his own movement, the slow drag of water over scale, the distant clicks of creatures navigating by instincts older than any civilisation.
He released another set of orbs. Then another. He sent them in different directions, a slow spread, like scouts.
One orb drifted for a minute, then disappeared.
Not faded.
Cut off.
Corvus turned.
He followed the path in darkness until the pressure changed again. His scales tingled. The taste of magic thickened until it became almost sweet.
Then he saw it.
A dome.
It rose from the seabed like a second horizon, a smooth curve of light that did not glare but remained visible in the dark as if the water itself had been taught to remember it. The surface shimmered with runes that shifted when he looked directly at them, refusing easy comprehension.
Inside the dome sat a city.
Streets ran in clean lines, paved in pale stone that glowed with its own steady luminance. Buildings rose in layered terraces, carved from coral-like architecture and grown from it like living tissue. Spires curved upward, not sharp or aggressive; they had the soft elegance of the sea. Built for water pressure and for beauty.
Corvus pressed closer until his snout nearly touched the dome.
The barrier did not feel like a warding meant to keep air in. It was blocking the magical waves.
Bubbles rose along inner canals, trapped and guided into vents. Lanterns floated above walkways, light contained in glass spheres that drifted like obedient fish. The glow revealed movement.
People.
Not human. Not fully.
Tall figures moved through the streets with the ease of a species that never had to learn to walk. Their skin caught the lantern light in muted colours. Their hair streamed like seagrass. Some wore jewellery of pearl and silver that sat against collarbones and wrists. Others carried tools that looked like tridents refined into instruments.
Children swam along, laughing without sound reaching the dome. Their tails slapped on stone, and the vibration carried faintly through the barrier. A pair of adults turned their heads at the same time, eyes focusing outward.
They had noticed him.
Corvus held still.
Behind him, the merfolk in the ruins stopped as well, as if a line had been crossed that belonged to someone else.
Corvus's gaze tracked the city's patterns. The dome. The vents. The way the lanterns floated in ordered paths. The way the streets curved toward a central structure that rose like a temple.
He had found what he was searching for.