The first recording was supposed to be a spark, controlled and useful.
It became a fire.
In Italy, the footage ran on breakfast television, then returned at lunch, then appeared again in the evening with panels of men who looked like they had never lifted anything heavier than a pen. They argued about miracles while sipping wine and pretending they were not frightened.
A week later, the word miracle started losing its sacred weight. It slid out of sermons and into cafés. People put it beside electricity and antibiotics and asked why it had ever been locked behind fear.
Outside a hospital in Rome, an amateur reporter sat on a folding chair with a cheap microphone and a camera on a tripod. The sun baked the pavement. Cars honked in irritation. The reporter did not move. He had learned the healer's route.
A Unit car arrived without a siren.
The reporter jumped up so fast his chair tipped over. He hurried into the path of a tall Unit member and forced a smile that looked more like a grimace.
"Just one question."
The Unit member did not stop. His gaze slid over the tripod and then over the crowd that had gathered at the gates.
A woman stepped forward with a scarf wrapped around her hair. "Please. My brother. He has pain."
The Unit member raised a hand, palm down. The crowd quieted.
The reporter swallowed. He tried again. "People want to know if you can do other things. Not only heal. Something more symbolic. Like changing water into wine."
The Unit member's eyes did not roll, but the mood of it existed. He conjured a glass. He filled it with water and let the reporter take a sip.
He touched the rim.
The water turned red. The smell changed, sharp and fruity.
A woman in the crowd crossed herself and whispered a prayer.
The reporter stared at the glass as if it might bite him. "So it is real."
The Unit member took the glass back. The wine turned to water again with a second touch. "It is real. It is also not for entertainment."
The reporter nodded too hard, then stepped aside like a chastised child.
Inside the hospital, the healer moved through the corridor with staff parting around him. They did not pretend he was a consultant. They did not pretend this was a pilot programme.
The pattern repeated across the Alliance.
A soft hand and a hard one. The Unit at the edge, keeping order and showing power from time to time. The healers inside, doing the work and speaking the old names as they had never been abandoned.
Across the Atlantic, MACUSA watched the effect with open hunger.
They did not have wizards like the behemoths of the Unit. What they have however, was Magic, Aurors and Healers. They created their own shape and called it The Division.
The first Division teams arrived in Boston and Chicago with the same script and a different accent. They went to hospitals, then to slums, then to encampments where the homeless lived under concrete and weather and indifference. Cameras followed. Volunteers cried on cue. The Division did not hide. They wore badges and let people film the 'miracles'.
A MACUSA envoy stepped through the correct channels and then through the channels that existed only in practice. The request reached Mater Magica Aeterna.
An invitation, polite and cautious.
A proposal to establish and coordinate diplomatic relations between two sides of the pond.
Arcturus received it with pleasure. Gellert was reluctant. His time with MACUSA was not a pleasant one. Especially Seraphina Picquery, the President of the Magical Congress at that time there. He could slaughter the bloodline out of sheer spite, yet he said nothing to oppose the diplomatic envoy, as he was pretty sure Corvus would want the connection with MACUSA, which was the ruling body for both South and North America, to be a necessary one.
-
Across Southeast Asia and into the Middle East, local magical governments tried to mirror the Alliance approach.
In one city, a healer stepped into a slum clinic with an Auror escort and raised a hand to quiet the crowd. An old man pushed forward with a child in his arms.
The healer touched the child's forehead.
The child's fever broke.
Then the shouting began.
Men surged, faces contorted, voices spitting religious terms like curses. A stone flew. It struck the healer's shoulder and bounced off a shield charm that the crowd did not see. Another stone hit an Auror in the jaw and cracked his lip.
A boy screamed. Someone dragged him back. A woman fell and did not rise.
The chaos killed two locals before the Aurors and the Healer apparated.
It was a disaster. It was also a spark.
-
A spark, someone in Rome had been waiting for.
A crowd gathered outside an orphanage with signs and cheap printed pamphlets. Two men carried planks and nailed them to a cross big enough to be seen from the street. They poured fuel, dragged it upright and lit it.
Smoke rose into the evening.
A woman with a loud voice waved a poster with scripture printed in block letters. She shouted lines as if the words themselves were weapons.
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
Another voice answered with a different verse.
"There shall not be found among you a witch."
A man near the back held up another poster, more blunt.
"A man or woman that hath a familiar spirit shall be put to death."
The crowd roared.
Children watched from orphanage windows, faces pressed to glass.
Police arrived late and looked uncertain about which part of the scene required authority. The cross burned. The verses remained.
-
In South Asia, the reaction took a different path.
It did not become quiet. It became competitive.
Local healers stepped forward and performed openly, tying their work to stories people already loved. They did not try to explain the 'miracles'. They claimed them as inheritance.
In India, a group of witches and wizards stood on the bank of the Ganges at dawn with a group of officials and a line of cameras. The river stank of sewage and plastic. A shame carried for decades.
The group raised their wands.
A broad sweep.
Plastic lifted from the water in a slow spiral, clumping together as if the river itself had finally had enough. Bags, bottles, wrappers, all rising into the air in a controlled stream. They vanished the mass in pulses, each one leaving the water clearer.
A priest at the edge of the crowd folded his hands and bowed. "Ganga accepts."
The healer's mouth tightened. "Then keep it clean."
In China, a team repaired a collapsed bridge in a rural province while villagers watched with their hands over their mouths. Stone reformed, timber strengthened, iron straightened. A woman stepped forward and offered tea with both hands like she was greeting a visiting official. Some kids started to dream about being selected and turning into young masters. It was the curse within, and no curse breaker could lift or break it.
A healer accepted it and drank, refusing would have been rude to the not-so-jade-skinned and not so beautiful.
Yet the attempt reached its intended motive. The videos went everywhere.
People compared Rome's burning cross to the Ganges clearing, and they began to ask the question Corvus wanted them to ask.
Why would anyone hate a power that healed and cleaned and rebuilt?
The answer came in fragments. Fear, control, old institutions defending their monopoly on hope.
Resistance weakened day by day. Mana Users were not only sought after, but some governments officially requested their aid through GAIA.
Segregation between Magical and Mundane sharpened while the fear was diminishing.
--
Far from the surface arguments, the city under the dome remained calm, ancient, and watchful.
He floated in the water with the true cloak wrapped around his shoulders. He watched lantern routes. He watched patrol patterns. He watched the way the merfolk of this place moved through their daily life.
He used Memory Mapping in measured doses.
Each touch gave him a little more, not only of minds but of language.
The speech in the city carried the rhythm of Mycenaean Greek, old enough to sound like stone carved into syllables. It should have died millennia ago. Here, it lived.
The city itself looked like a deliberate answer to Plato's descriptions, reshaped by a species that refused to drown.
Concentric canals ran around the centre like a target. Bridges crossed them at regular intervals. Outer walls rose in bands of pale stone and darker stone, with metal panels set into them that caught the lantern light in a reddish glow. Orichalcum, not gold. Gold appeared in thin detailing. Orichalcum formed the bones of power.
Houses sat in ordered terraces, built from white stone that looked like marble, roofs curved to shed pressure and to guide water flow. Doorways carried carved motifs of tridents, shells, and spirals that marked region and lineage.
Markets operated on stone plazas. They traded pearls, coral craft, dried sea plant bundles, and metalwork that could not have been forged by normal heat. Children moved through the stalls with a confidence that came from being born into safety. Adults watched them with the quiet pride of a people who believed themselves chosen.
They were.
They called themselves descendants of Nereus and the Nereids. It was not a metaphor to them. It was genealogy.
On the fourth day, Corvus chose a target.
A young male returned to his home at the edge of one ring, carrying a bundle of tools and a small net bag with shell pieces. He looked like a craftsman. His shoulders carried muscle. His upper body looked almost human. If he would not consider the fish tail.
Corvus stayed above him, cloak hidden against the lantern shadows.
Memory Mapping brushed the mind.
Corvus took what he needed. Recent paths. The local's name, face and manners.
Then Corvus changed.
Metamorphmagus was the ability he used. Bone shifted. Skin tone altered. Hair lengthened and changed colour. The weight distribution was adjusted so his body would move like theirs. He did not have long. If anyone looked too closely, they would notice the wrongness.
He slipped out of the craftsman's home.
-
The central temple drew him in the way a lighthouse drew ships.
It was the most magnificent building in the dome. White marble surfaces shone under lantern light. Gold and silver ran in lines along columns and cornices, but the precious work, the work treated as sacred, was orichalcum. The metal did not glitter. It glowed, deep and red, as if it held heat that never cooled.
He swam between columns wide enough to hide a ship's mast.
The moment he crossed the threshold, the Mana fluctuations changed.
It did not feel like wandwork or ritual arrays. It felt foreign, structured by a different species and a different history.
Corvus kept his face neutral and his movement respectful.
Inside, the temple opened into a vast hall. A raised platform dominated the centre. Ten thrones sat there, arranged in a shallow arc. Orichalcum formed every surface, carved with sea motifs and old runes that moved when his eyes tried to lock on them.
Only two thrones were occupied.
Eight sat empty.
The empty ones still received worship.
Merfolk lined the hall in silent ranks. A queue moved forward with slow patience, each person waiting to reach the front rows. They bowed toward the thrones, even the empty ones, then withdrew without turning their backs.
Corvus joined the flow.
He approached one of the occupied thrones and saw the Nereid.
Shock hit first.
Her lower body was scaled and powerful, more reptilian than fish, the tail broad and strong. Her upper body looked carved rather than grown. Turquoise hair flowed around her head in a slow halo. Her eyes matched it, large and clear, and her face held a delicate cherub quality that made looking at her feel like an indulgence.
Underwater physics did the rest. Weight meant less. Cloth meant nothing. Her upper body carried no covering, no ornament beyond a thin band of metal at her throat.
Corvus felt the tug of appreciation. He pushed past it with some difficulty.
The real distraction was not the beauty of her.
His Replication came with an array of skills and traits.
- Immortality
- Sacred Blood
- Water Manipulation
- Shape Shifting
- Extreme Strength
- Extreme Durability
There were other traits as well, such as Underwater Breathing, Darkvision, Pressure and Cold Resistance and Water Meld.
What sat on that throne was a mythical creature, in every meaning of the word. It was a fact embedded in blood. Sacred blood, thick with old foreign power. Water manipulation woven into muscle memory. Shape shifting held as naturally as breathing. Strength beyond human limits. Durability that treated pressure and cold like weather.
He replicated Immortality without thinking much. He has already replicated Longevity from other species like Vampires, but outright Immortality was not something he could put off.
Magic caught on his skin like a new layer, fitting into him with a sharp click that made his bones ache for a heartbeat.
Then he reached with Memory Mapping.
The Nereid flinched.
Her gaze sharpened, and the hall's stillness shifted by a fraction.
Corvus was not surprised. Prenelle had noticed the skill the moment he activated it, so it was natural for the Nereid. Still, he pressed.
The mapping finished after some moments.
He let the flow of worshippers carry him away. He bowed once, as the locals did, then moved with the crowd toward the exit.
Behind him, the Nereid's attention cut through the hall. Her eyes were scanning faces with a cold, searching focus.
Corvus did not hurry until the temple walls were way behind him. Outside, he disappeared into the streets.
He activated Extreme Speed, Agility, Phase and Flight rose together while still under his cloak. He moved upward through the dome and into the sea beyond, cutting through darkness.
It was time to digest what he had gained.