The letter from Nymeria arrived while Harry was halfway through breakfast, carried by a cheerful tawny owl that accepted a piece of toast before departing. Catherine patiently watched him read it, looking perfectly like she was not intensely curious about the contents.
“Good news?” she asked.
“She’s settled for now. They attended another social gathering yesterday.” Harry folded the letter carefully. He’d already read the important parts twice. “She says the mood is shifting after Prague. Even the ones who were firmly on the fence are uncomfortable.”
“As they should be,” Henry said from behind the Prophet, his voice flat. “Fifty-three dead according to the updated count. And the Confederation is still debating the appropriate diplomatic response.”
“They’ll debate until Grindelwald is standing on the Ministry steps,” William said. He didn’t say it with heat. Just the tired certainty of a man who’d watched politics fail people too many times.
Harry set the letter down beside his plate. The bond was quiet this morning, which meant Nymeria was occupied with something that required her full attention. He’d learned to read the distance between them like weather, warm and present when she was relaxed, thin and stretched when she was performing for the Blacks. This morning it sat at a steady hum. She was fine. Just busy.
He tried not to dwell on how much he hated that he had to interpret her state through the bond rather than just asking her.
Three letters in the past two weeks, two proper visits, and one brief conversation through the floo that Perseus had almost certainly monitored. It wasn’t enough. But it was what they had, and Harry had decided some time ago that complaining about things that needed to happen was a spectacular waste of energy.
Besides, Newt Scamander’s letter still sat on his bedside table, and that was a problem he actually could do something about.
-Break-
Newt lived in what Harry could only describe as an organised disaster. The Chelsea townhouse had books stacked against the skirting boards, rolls of parchment covering most of the dining table, and at least two pairs of muddy boots by the front door that hadn’t been there when Harry arrived. The sitting room smelled of something earthy and faintly herbal, and a large diagram of Western Europe was pinned to the wall with creature movements marked in red ink.
Newt himself was perched at the edge of the sofa, elbows on his knees, turning a piece of marked parchment over in his hands. He’d stood to shake Harry’s hand when the house elf announced him, and he still had the slightly startled quality of a person unaccustomed to guests.
“Mr. Peverell. Good of you to come.” He gestured vaguely at the armchair. “Sit down, please. I’ll have tea sent in. Or would you prefer—“
“Tea is fine.” Harry settled into the armchair and looked properly at the map on the wall. The red marks clustered heavily through Germany and Austria, thinning out toward France, with a smattering across the British Isles that seemed almost incidental by comparison. “You’ve been tracking this for a while.”
“Since February, really. Though some of the earlier incidents I’ve since identified going back to last autumn.” Newt joined him in looking at the map. He had the focused, slightly distracted energy of someone whose mind was moving faster than his mouth could keep up with. “A colleague in Hungary first alerted me. Szabolcs, he studies Occamy migration patterns. He noticed that the populations in the Carpathian region were moving in entirely the wrong direction for the season, and not just moving, converging. Travelling toward each other rather than away.”
“Why is that unusual?”
“Occamies are territorial. They don’t congregate. Finding two within five miles of each other during migration is remarkable. Finding thirty in the same valley is, well.” Newt tapped one of the red marks on the map. “That’s when Szabolcs wrote to me. I went out in March to see for myself.”
“What did you find?”
Newt finally sat back down, that piece of parchment still in his hand. “Frightened creatures, Mr. Peverell. All of them. Moving away from something, not toward something. What looked like convergence was actually flight, and the valley they’d gathered in was the end of the road. Backed against a mountain range with nowhere left to go.”
Harry looked at the map again, reading the geography of those red marks differently now. “They’re moving away from Grindelwald’s operations.”
“That’s my conclusion, yes.” Newt said it matter-of-factly, without the hesitation most people had when connecting anything to Grindelwald by name. “Though I couldn’t prove it in March. Now I’m rather more confident.” He set the parchment down on the table between them. Harry leaned forward to look at it. A sketch, meticulous and annotated, of something that resembled a magical circle with text around the edges. “This was found near a site in the Burgenland. A farm where a family of Augureys had been nesting for over a century. They left overnight. Left their eggs, which Augureys never do. When the muggle authorities investigated the smell a week later, the farm was burnt out.”
“And this diagram?”
“Carved into a stone in the field. Hidden under three inches of topsoil, which is why the Austrian Ministry missed it.” Newt’s expression was carefully neutral. “I have a contact there. Magizoology division. She let me examine the site.”
Harry studied the diagram. He didn’t recognise the specific arrangement, but the language around the edges was old. Old Gaelic mixed with something else, Ogham script perhaps, or an older variation. The kind of thing you found in pre-Roman texts if you knew where to look. “This is a binding circle.”
“A corruption circle, technically. The distinction matters.” Newt looked almost pleased to have someone engage with the detail, the fact that it was a Hogwarts student possessing such knowledge not even registering with him. “Standard binding magic contains. This variant feeds. Whatever passes through it or nests within its range has its innate magic drawn out and redirected.” He paused. “I’ve seen something similar used on Bowtruckles in controlled research conditions. Very distressing for the creature. The magic becomes unstable, aggressive. It doesn’t behave the way it should.”
“And you think Grindelwald is using these to do what, exactly?”
A knock at the door, and the house elf reappeared with tea. Newt waited until the tray was set down and the elf had gone before he answered.
“Harvesting, possibly. Magic extracted from living creatures is an older practice than most modern wizards realize. The Aztec traditions had a variant. There are pre-Christian Gaelic texts that describe something similar.” Newt poured the tea without thinking about it. “But the scale here is entirely different from anything historical. Whatever Grindelwald is drawing from these circles, it’s not incidental. It’s systematic.”
Harry accepted his cup and held it without drinking. The implication settled into place and he realized he should have seen it earlier. Grindelwald had broken out of MACUSA custody six months ago. The American aurors had described the escape as impossible, a man moving through solid walls, disappearing from a sealed cell without triggering a single ward.
“He’s augmenting himself,” Harry said.
“That’s my current working theory.” Newt watched him carefully. “You arrived at that quickly.”
“The MACUSA escape. No wizard should have been able to do what he did without help or without some significant advantage they hadn’t accounted for.” Harry set his cup down. “They designed that cell for him specifically. Used his own magic signature to calibrate the containment. He would have needed something fundamentally different to get through it.”
“Yes.” Newt looked at the map again. “The first British incidents appeared in May. Dartmoor, initially. Then the Lake District. The patterns are different here, more spread out, and the creatures affected are different, Kneazles, Nifflers, one reported case of a Hippogriff herd abandoning their territory entirely.”
“What’s in the Lake District?”
“That’s what I want to investigate.” Newt got to his feet restlessly. He had been sitting still longer than was natural for him. “Dumbledore suggested I reach out to you. He was rather vague about why, which is characteristic of him, but he mentioned your name specifically.”
Harry had been expecting that. Dumbledore had been watching him all year with the careful attention of a man who suspected he was missing something important. It was deeply uncomfortable, being assessed by someone whose intelligence Harry respected enormously, in a context where he couldn’t explain half of what he knew. But it also showed that Dumbledore suspected him, perhaps not in a negative sense, but suspect him he did. And by extension, Nymeria too.
“I have some background in old magic,” Harry said. It was accurate, if incomplete. “And I’m useful in the field.”
“Can you identify a corruption circle if you find one?”
“After seeing your sketch, probably yes.”
Newt considered this for a moment, then nodded once. “Good enough. I’m planning a field investigation in three days. The Lake District site, then possibly a secondary location in the Scottish Borders if we have time. I’d like you along, if you’re willing.” He paused. “I should warn you that field work with me tends to involve more creature contact than most people are comfortable with.”
“I can manage creatures.”
“The Runespoor population in the Borders is particularly skittish this year. And I’ll need someone who can maintain a calm magical signature around them, otherwise they won’t let us near enough to examine them.” Newt said this as if it were an entirely ordinary thing to require of a person. “Most people find Runespoors alarming.”
“Three-headed snakes.”
“They’re actually quite communicative once they trust you.” He must have read something in Harry’s expression because he added, “If you’re uncomfortable, I won’t press.”
Harry thought about it for approximately two seconds. He’d had a basilisk try to kill him at twelve. “I’ll be fine with the Runespoors,” he said, smiling.
-Break-
The letter to Nymeria was harder to write than he’d expected, not because of what he had to say but because of what he couldn’t. He sat at the desk in his room at Potter Manor and wrote three drafts before he found the version that managed to be both informative and frustrating in equal measure.
The Scamander meeting was productive. I’m joining him for a field investigation in the Lake District. Three days, possibly four. He’s confirmed my suspicion about the connection between creature disturbances and Grindelwald’s operations, I’ll tell you the details properly when we can actually speak.
The bond won’t reach from that distance. It barely reaches you in London and the Lake District is another hundred miles north. So if you try and get silence, it’s not something wrong. I’ll write when I’m back.
I know you hate this. I hate it too. But you’re learning things there that we need, and I’m learning things here. We’re both useful where we are.
Get some rest. Stop letting Cassiopeia live rent-free in your head. She’s not worth the energy.
I’ll be back in four days at most. Then I want a proper conversation and none of the half-information we’ve been managing.
He sealed it and sent it before he could second-guess the tone. Too direct, maybe. But they’d never done well with performances for each other, and he wasn’t about to start now.
Charlus knocked on his open door an hour later. “Dinner’s in twenty minutes. Grandmother is making the lamb thing.” He leaned against the doorframe. “You alright? You’ve had that look all afternoon.”
“Thinking about Grindelwald’s operations.”
“Right.” Charlus was quiet for a moment. “I heard what you told Father about the Lake District investigation. He wants to discuss it after dinner.”
“I expected that.” Henry Potter had been increasingly attentive to Harry’s movements since the Newt meeting, not in a suspicious way, more in the way of a man who was repositioning his understanding of a situation. Harry didn’t mind. Henry was sharp and his instincts were generally good.
“He’s worried,” Charlus said. “Not about you specifically. About what it means if Grindelwald is conducting magical experiments in Britain. The Ministry’s still pretending it’s a continental problem.”
“It’s not going to stay continental.”
“I know that. You know that. Father knows that.” Charlus pushed off the doorframe. “Most of the Wizengamot is still arguing about whether to send a strongly-worded letter to Vienna.”
Harry followed him downstairs. The lamb was extraordinary, as Catherine’s cooking always was, and he ate enough to satisfy her and make mental notes about what she’d used for seasoning because he was reasonably certain she was using a preservation charm on the herbs that he wanted to examine later.
Henry waited until Catherine and Charlus were engaged in a detailed argument about whether the new Quidditch regulations were an improvement before he turned to Harry.
“Tell me about Scamander.”
“He’s been tracking creature movements across Europe since February. The patterns match Grindelwald’s operational areas with a consistency that isn’t coincidence.” Harry kept his voice low. “He’s found physical evidence at several sites. Ritual circles designed to extract and redirect magical energy from living creatures.”
Henry’s expression didn’t change, but something in it settled, as if it was something he had already suspected. “What’s the purpose?”
“Power augmentation, I think. Grindelwald used something similar to escape MACUSA custody. The standard magical signature monitoring wouldn’t have flagged it because the power source wasn’t his own.”
“He’s hiding his capabilities.”
“More than that. He’s expanding them.” Harry turned his cup slowly in his hands. “Standard magical ability has limits. Training, natural talent, and raw power, they all factor in but there’s a ceiling. These extraction circles are a way around the ceiling.”
Henry was quiet for a moment. “How bad?”
“Bad enough that Scamander thinks the British incidents are reconnaissance. Someone mapping viable extraction sites.” Harry met his eyes. “The Lake District is significant. It has one of the densest populations of magical creatures in Britain. If someone’s been setting up circles there, we need to know what they’ve taken from it already.”
“And if we find active circles?”
“Then we disrupt them and document everything. Scamander’s contacts include people at the ICW. If we have physical evidence with British locations, it becomes harder for the Ministry to pretend this isn’t happening here.”
Henry nodded slowly. He picked up his wine glass and put it down again. “Be careful. Grindelwald’s people don’t leave evidence unless they want it found.”
“I know.” Harry had thought about that too. He wasn’t going into the Lake District unprepared.
-Break-
Three days later, Harry arrived at the Penrith station and found Newt already there, his battered case at his feet, talking to a dark-haired woman in MACUSA-style robes who looked up when Harry approached. It looked like she’d been briefed on his existence and was reserving judgement.
“Harry Peverell,” Newt said, “this is Tina Goldstein. She’s, well.” He seemed to reconsider several different endings to that sentence. “She works for MACUSA. She’s been very helpful.”
“His fiancée,” Tina said crisply, shaking Harry’s hand with a firm grip. She looked like someone who’d spent years making first impressions on skeptical colleagues. “Newt is bad at saying that part. I’m a former Auror. Currently consulting on Grindelwald-related matters for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement here and MACUSA both.” She glanced at Newt. “You told him about the prison break?”
“I was about to.”
“I knew about the break,” Harry said. “Not the details.”
Tina turned back to him. There was nothing unfriendly in her manner, just the professional directness. “Six months ago, we had Grindelwald in the most secure cell ever built by MACUSA. Designed specifically for him. Wards calibrated to his precise magical signature, which he’d had no opportunity to alter in the four years he was detained.” She paused. “He walked through a solid wall at three in the morning. No warning. No alarm triggered. The morning shift found an empty cell and a message burned into the floor.”
“What did it say?”
“’Thank you for the rest.’” Her expression was controlled, but Harry caught the edge underneath it. She’d been there. Or someone she cared about had been there. “We still don’t know exactly how he did it. But the timeline matches what Newt’s been tracking. The first creature disturbances in Europe appeared in the months before his escape. We think the extraction was already happening when he was imprisoned.”
“Someone was running the circles on his behalf while he was detained. Then transferring the gathered power to him somehow.”
Tina looked at him steadily. “Newt said you were quick.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense with the timeline.” Harry glanced around. “Do we know who was running them?”
“We have three suspects. All of them European, all connected to his core circle before his capture.” She pulled a folded sheet of parchment from her coat and offered it to him. Three photographs, names underneath. Harry looked at each face carefully. None of them meant anything to him from his own timeline, which could mean they’d died before the 1990s or simply that their names had never crossed his path. “The most likely candidate is this one.” She tapped the third photograph. A woman in her forties, dark eyes, and a composed expression on her face, showing no tension. “Frieda Albrecht. She was Grindelwald’s personal research assistant in the early days of the movement. She disappeared from known records eighteen months ago.”
“Gone to ground.”
“Or to Britain.” Tina folded the parchment away. “We’ve been monitoring entry points. Nothing confirmed. But the Lake District evidence fits her known methods.”
Harry absorbed the information. “You’ve been here a while.”
“Three weeks. Newt is better at finding things in the field than I am. I’m better at knowing what they mean and who to tell.” She looked at her fiancé, and something in her expression changed, softened just enough to be visible. “We’re more useful together.”
Newt, who had been examining his case latches with focus and trying to seem busy while the conversation happened around him, looked up at that. He smiled, slightly awkward and entirely genuine, and Tina’s professional expression became a bit warmer for just a moment before snapping back.
“Shall we?” Newt said. “The creature survey starts at the northern shore. I want to reach the Kneazle den before late afternoon, they get territorial after dark.”
-Break-
The Lake District was not the grim, overcast terrain Harry had half expected. It was late summer, and the fells rolled in long curves of green and brown, the lakes catching the light in ways that made him understand why people wrote poetry about this place. He’d been here before, in his own time, but as a child on a Dursley holiday where he’d been left in the car, so this was functionally a first visit.
Newt moved through it with an ease, having mapped this territory thoroughly. He consulted his notes occasionally, stopped to examine patches of ground or particular plants, and twice crouched to look at tracks that Harry couldn’t initially see at all.
“Bowtruckle migration,” Newt said, pointing at a faint trail through the undergrowth. “They’ve been heading southeast. That’s the wrong direction entirely. There’s no suitable woodland that way.”
“Running from something in the northwest.”
“Yes.” He stood and looked north. “The creature density in this region should be extraordinary. It’s a protected magical habitat, registered with the Ministry, which means regular warding and no interference from Muggle development. The Kneazles, Nifflers, Porlocks down near the water, the Diricawl colony on the eastern fell.”
“And now they’re leaving.”
“The Kneazle population is down by a third since I surveyed in April. The Porlocks have completely abandoned the southern shore.” Newt’s voice remained even, but there was something underneath it that Harry recognised. Not quite anger. Something quieter and harder than anger. “These creatures have lived here for centuries in some cases. Their habits are part of what defines this ecosystem. For them to leave means whatever they’re fleeing is serious.”
Tina had taken a separate path to check the secondary location Newt had marked, leaving them to cover the northern circuit. They walked in relative silence for a stretch, Newt cataloguing what he observed and Harry watching the landscape with the particular attention he’d developed over years of needing to notice things before they became threats.
“Dumbledore trusts you,” Newt said, not quite as a question.
“He seems to.” Harry paused. “He doesn’t fully understand me. That’s different from trust.”
“He said you had unusual perspective on Grindelwald.”
Harry weighed what to say. Newt was not the kind of person who would appreciate evasion for its own sake. He was also, Harry had concluded over the past two days, someone whose instincts were reliable and whose discretion was solid. “I believe Grindelwald will escalate beyond anything most people currently think is possible. The Prague massacre wasn’t an aberration. It was a demonstration.”
“A statement of intent.”
“A proof of concept. He wanted to show that he can do this anywhere, that resistance costs people their lives, and that the Confederation will still not act.” Harry looked at the fell ahead of them. “He’s right about the Confederation. They won’t act until it’s too late.”
“So what will stop him?”
“Someone with enough power and the willingness to use it.” Harry didn’t elaborate on who he thought that someone was. “And people who understand what he’s actually doing before he’s finished doing it. Which is where you come in.”
Newt was quiet for a moment. “Most people don’t take magizoology seriously as an intelligence resource.”
“Most people are wrong.” Harry glanced at him. “Creatures don’t lie. They don’t have political agendas. If they’re behaving the way yours have been behaving, it’s because something is genuinely wrong. That’s more reliable than half the information the Ministry gets from official channels.”
Something in Newt’s expression shifted. Not quite surprise. Something more like recognition.
“Your friend,” he said. “Nymeria Black. She’s in London this summer?”
“With the Blacks, yes.” Harry looked ahead again.
“Dumbledore mentioned her too. Not by name. He said you were connected to someone managing what he called a difficult situation.” He said it carefully, not prying. Just acknowledging. “That must be complicated.”
“It is.” Harry left it there.
Newt seemed to understand that was the end of the subject because he pointed ahead and said, “There’s the den site.”
The Kneazle den was a cluster of low rocks backed by a natural windbreak, the kind of spot that would have been full of nesting creatures in the spring. It was empty now. Not recently empty. The bedding material had been disturbed weeks ago, scattered by something that had come through in a hurry.
Newt knelt and pressed his hand flat to the earth. He had his eyes closed, which was an unusual thing to do in the field, but Harry waited.
“The magic here is wrong,” Newt said quietly. “Can you feel it?”
Harry tried. He’d always had a reasonable sensitivity to ambient magic, better than most, probably because of the Hallows and the Death connection that had shaped him since childhood. He focused, pushed past the normal background noise of a magically saturated landscape, and yes, there it was. Something underneath. A frequency that didn’t belong, like a bass note played in the wrong key.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s suppressed somehow. Or redirected.”
“Redirected.” Newt stood. “That’s the right word. It’s not gone, it’s been rerouted.” He began moving south, his eyes on the ground. “The circle will be somewhere near the center of whatever area this affects. Circles work on a radius.”
They found it twenty minutes later, at the base of a low outcropping, exactly as the Burgenland example had been. Buried. Newt produced a pair of articulated digging implements from somewhere inside his coat and uncovered the top surface.
It was larger than the sketch had suggested. About four feet across, carved into a flat piece of grey slate that had probably been placed deliberately, the lines were too precise to be a natural feature. The same combination of old Gaelic and Ogham lettering around the edge, but the central design was different from Scamander’s sketch. More complex. More recent.
“Shit,” Harry said quietly.
“My assessment as well.” Newt photographed it, or attempted to, his camera producing two failed shots before he got a usable one. “The one in Austria was a first-generation design. This is refined. Someone’s iterated on the original.”
“They’ve been practicing.”
“Or learning. These things take time to master.” He crouched to look more closely at the lettering. “The Latin here suggests a British caster. Or someone trained in the British tradition. The phrasing is different from Austrian Ogham practice.”
“Frieda Albrecht trained where?”
“Leipzig originally. But her later work was in Britain. She spent three years at the Department of Mysteries in the early twenties.” Newt looked up. “Which would have given her access to pre-Roman texts not publicly available. That collection includes several manuscripts on energy manipulation. I’ve tried to access them myself, without success.”
Harry mentally filed this. Whoever had placed this circle had training that required access to restricted materials. That narrowed the field considerably, even if it didn’t conclusively point to Albrecht.
He pulled out his wand and spent ten minutes carefully examining the magical signature of the circle. Tina had mentioned that Grindelwald’s signature hadn’t been in the MACUSA escape, which was the whole point of the extraction method. But a practitioner leaving something behind in the field was different from a prisoner managing a controlled transfer. There might be traces.
There were. Faint, layered under the dominant signature of the circle’s magic itself, but there. A secondary pattern that he associated, after a moment, with the formal magic of the old European traditions. German or Austrian by style. Disciplined, slightly rigid.
“There’s a practitioner signature,” Harry said. “I can’t identify it specifically, but the style is central European.”
“Consistent with Albrecht.” Newt photographed the circle from three more angles. “We should document this and move on. If there are circles here, there will be more. Probably to the northwest, if the creatures are running southeast.”
They marked the location on Newt’s map and covered the circle again. Not disrupting it yet. Disruption could wait until they’d found all of them.
They met Tina at the pre-arranged point on the south shore an hour before sunset. She’d found two more sites, one completely extracted and dormant, one active and still drawing.
“The active one is concerning,” she said. She’d changed into walking clothes at some point, trading the MACUSA robes for something more practical, and there was mud on her boots that she hadn’t bothered removing. “It’s a larger radius than the others. Whatever it’s pulling from, it’s significant.”
“What’s in that area?” Harry asked Newt.
Newt unfolded his field notes. “The Diricawl colony. There’s also a Graphorn pair that’s been in residence on the eastern fell for thirty years. And—“ He stopped.
“What?” Tina asked.
“There’s a Runespoor nest.” He looked up. “I didn’t know there was one this far north. They’re mostly southern. If it’s been caught in the extraction radius...”
“We need to see it,” Harry said.
Newt nodded, already folding his notes away. They moved.
-Break-
The Runespoor was dying.
Not quickly. Not obviously. But when they found it, coiled at the base of a stone wall in the shadow of the eastern fell with all three heads pointed in different directions and none of them moving, Harry knew.
Newt was beside it in seconds, his hands moving carefully, having handled injured creatures hundreds of times. The Runespoor was enormous, easily twelve feet, the orange and black banding bright against the grey stone. The three heads should have been a constant argument. Left head planning, middle head dreaming, right head criticizing. That was how Runespoors worked. He’d read it in his third-year and had never had occasion to see it proved until now.
What he saw instead was three heads in the same position, lying flat, eyes glazed.
“The synchronisation,” Harry said.
“Yes.” Newt spoke quietly, not to Harry but to the creature, a low murmuring that wasn’t quite words. The Runespoor’s middle head lifted slightly, registered him, and sank again. “The extraction is targeting the magical core directly. In a Runespoor, that creates conflict between the three personalities. They can’t maintain separate function without it.” He pressed a hand gently to the creature’s flank and looked at Harry. “Can you feel the mark?”
“Mark?”
“There should be a mark somewhere. The later-stage circles leave a mark on the creatures caught in the radius. A residue.” Newt’s jaw was tight. “I’ve seen it twice before. It confirms active extraction rather than just passive disruption.”
Harry moved to the far end of the creature, where the right head lay still. The head would have been level with his shoulder if it had been raised. He checked the scales carefully, starting from the neck and working toward where the body began.
He found it on the right. A patch where the normal bright orange had gone muddy, brownish, the scales slightly raised. He pressed his fingers to it and felt nothing at first. Then, very faintly, that same wrong frequency he’d felt near the den site, pulled into the creature’s skin somehow. Branded.
“Here,” he said.
Tina moved in to look, her expression controlled but her eyes sharp. “Same as the one in Romania. Newt, this is the third creature you’ve found with a direct mark.”
“The circles don’t just redirect ambient magic,” Harry said slowly, working through it. “They anchor. In the landscape and in the creatures themselves.”
“Which means even if we disrupt the circles, the connection remains.” Newt sat back on his heels, looking at the Runespoor with an expression Harry had last seen on Lupin when he’d explained what the prophecy meant. “I don’t know if the creature can recover.”
“Will it survive if we disrupt the circle?”
“I don’t know.” He was honest about it. “The extraction is weakening the magical core. Disrupting the circle removes the drain, but the damage to the core may be irreversible at this stage.” He looked at Harry. “This is what they’re doing. Not just taking magic from the landscape. Taking it from living things. Creatures with enough innate magical capacity to be useful sources.”
“And the ones that run before the circle reaches them,” Tina said, “those are the lucky ones.”
Harry looked at the Runespoor. The middle head lifted again, slightly higher this time, and all three eyes focused on him with the cloudy attention of something that knew it was being watched but couldn’t quite manage alarm. He thought, absurdly, about what Newt had said in the sitting room. That they were actually quite communicative once they trusted you.
“Can you hear me?” he asked. Not expecting anything. Just asking, because not asking felt wrong.
All three heads moved. Not much. Just enough.
Harry crouched. He’d never done this deliberately, had always thought of Parseltongue as something that happened when it needed to rather than something he could turn on. But he tried, felt for the frequency of it the way he’d felt for the wrong note in the landscape earlier, and spoke.
The sound surprised him. He hadn’t used it since the original timeline, and the language felt different now, not rusty exactly, more like a limb that had healed wrong and then healed right again.
The right head turned fully to face him. The left followed. The middle head rose.
Newt went very still.
The Runespoor didn’t speak so much as convey. The impressions were layered, contradictory because three heads meant three perspectives, but underneath the contradiction was a unified message. Pain. Pulling. Something taking what belongs inside. And beneath that, faint but clear: wrong direction. Wrong direction from the northwest.
“There’s something else,” Harry said, back in English. “Another site. Northwest of here.”
Tina looked at the map. “That’s the open fell. No registered habitat. We didn’t survey it.”
“There’s something there that the Runespoor is trying to get away from. Something worse than the circle.”
“How do you know what the Runespoor said?” Newt asked. His voice was very careful.
“I’m a Parselmouth.” Harry met his eyes. “I should probably have mentioned that.”
Newt looked at him for a long moment, a fascinated look on his face. Then he asked, “Can you ask it how long? How long the pulling has been happening?”
Harry turned back to the Runespoor and tried again. The answer came through the middle head primarily, the dreaming head, the one that tracked time in a way the others didn’t. Weeks. The left head corrected: longer. Since before summer began.
“Since before May,” Harry said. “The circle here predates the other sites.”
“The first site,” Tina said. “The original. This is where they started in Britain.”
Newt was already repacking his equipment, his movements quick. “We need to document everything here and then survey that northwest fell tonight. Before anything else moves.” He looked at the Runespoor again. “I’ll come back for her. I can’t do anything useful for the core damage in the field, but I know someone who’s studied this specific type of injury. If she’s willing to be moved, I’ll take her back to London.”
Harry stayed with the Runespoor while Newt spoke quickly with Tina about the survey plan. The right head had settled again, all three finally in the same position. The middle head was watching him with diminishing attention, the glazed quality returning.
He pressed his hand briefly to the marked patch of scales, not doing anything useful, just acknowledging. The wrong frequency pulsed once under his fingers, steady and cold, like a heartbeat that didn’t belong.
“We’ll find who did this,” Harry said. He was talking to the Runespoor, which was possibly the most unusual conversation he’d had in this timeline, which was saying something. “And we’ll stop it.”
The middle head didn’t respond. But the left head turned one eye toward him, and something in its expression looked almost, improbably, like relief.
-Break-
The northwest fell was empty of creatures. That in itself was the answer.
A landscape this rich, this naturally saturated with magical fauna, didn’t go quiet by accident. They walked half a mile of open fell in the last of the evening light and didn’t see a single Niffler track, a single Bowtruckle trail, nothing except grass and stone and the particular silence of a place that had been vacated in a hurry.
“They all left,” Tina said quietly.
“Some time ago.” Newt was looking at the ground. “The tracks are days old at least. Whatever is here, the creatures knew about it before the circle we found reached full draw.”
They found the center by triangulation. Newt knew how to calculate it from creature track patterns, which Harry filed away as genuinely useful information. The site was at the top of a low ridge, exposed to the sky on three sides, marked by nothing visible. Just grass, and underneath the grass, when they cleared it, not stone but compacted earth with something pressed into it.
Not carved. Burned.
The same circle design, but rendered in ash. And around the ash, in the surviving grass, a ring of dead plants that formed a perfect geometric pattern.
“This isn’t extraction,” Newt said. He was crouching over it, his wand out. “This is—“ He stopped and looked at Harry. “Do you know what a summoning anchor is?”
“Drawing something toward a specific point.”
“Drawing something to a specific point and holding it there until it can be removed.” Newt’s voice was completely level. “This is different from the other circles. The others drain. This one calls.”
“Calls what?”
“Something that needs to be called rather than simply extracted.” He photographed it, then turned to Tina. “This is why the creatures cleared the area. They sensed the intended use.”
“What was it intended to catch?” Harry asked.
Tina was very still. She knew, Harry realized. She’d seen something like this before.
“In MACUSA,” she said, “before we understood what Grindelwald was doing, we had three reports from witnesses who described him pulling something visible from captured Aurors. Not an Unforgivable. Not any known curse.” She paused. “The witnesses said it looked like something being drawn out. Like whatever the person fundamentally was, the magical self underneath the ordinary personality. The core.”
“He didn’t just drain the creatures,” Harry said. “He took what they had. And then he used it to go after people.”
“The extraction circles were practice,” Tina said. “And possibly stockpiling. But this...” She looked at the burned anchor. “Someone was waiting for something specific to pass through this area. Something worth catching.”
Harry looked at the dead circle of plants, at the ash visible through the parted grass, and thought about the Runespoor’s message. Wrong direction. Away from this. Something at the northwest.
Whatever had been here, it was gone. Whether they’d moved it, completed their work with it, or simply decided to go somewhere else before anyone found it, Harry couldn’t say.
But it had been here. It was real. And it was connected to Grindelwald’s operations in a way that was beginning to take a shape Harry could almost see.
“We need to get this information to Dumbledore,” he said.
“Agreed.” Newt was photographing the anchor site from every angle, efficient and thorough. “I’ll prepare a full report for my Ministry contacts and for MACUSA. Tina’s communication channels are faster than the standard diplomatic route.”
“And the Runespoor?”
“I’ll come back for her tomorrow morning with the right equipment.” Newt stood, finally, and looked at the dark fell around them. “This is larger than I thought, Mr. Peverell.”
“Harry.”
“Harry.” He accepted this with a slight nod. “When I wrote to you, I thought I was investigating creature welfare violations connected to Grindelwald’s operations. I was not expecting a systematic program.” He put his camera away. “Someone is building something. Not just taking power. Constructing something that requires specific materials gathered in a specific way.”
“What makes you say specific materials?”
“The Runespoor was caught in the radius. But the Graphorn pair wasn’t. The Graphorn habitat overlaps the extraction circle significantly. They should have been affected. They weren’t.” Newt looked north. “Either they left before the circle activated, which the tracks don’t support, or the circle was calibrated to ignore Graphorns and focus on Runespoors specifically.”
“A species-specific extraction.”
“Which implies the practitioner knows exactly what they need and doesn’t waste energy on anything else.” He paused. “A Runespoor’s magical signature is unique. The tripartite structure, three functional magical cores in a single organism, it’s theoretically very useful if you’re trying to do something that requires stable multi-directional magic. Something complex enough to need more than one source.”
Harry stood there in the last of the daylight and turned that over.
Stable multi-directional magic. Complex enough to need multiple sources. An anchor circle that called rather than drained. A practitioner working systematically through Britain’s most magically dense habitats.
Grindelwald was still looking for something specific in Britain. Not just drawing power. Searching. And the anchor site suggested he’d known, or suspected, where to look.
“Newt,” Harry said. “What’s in the British wizarding heritage that isn’t available anywhere else in Europe? Something ancient. Pre-Roman, or older.”
Newt thought about this seriously, which Harry appreciated. He didn’t dismiss it as an odd question. “The Peverell legacy, obviously. The Deathly Hallows connections, but those are fables, so we don’t need to bother with them.” He ticked off on his fingers, and Harry held his thoughts close to his chest. “The Founders’ magical residue at Hogwarts. The Arthurian binding in certain landscape features, Glastonbury, Tintagel. And the original Merlin texts, the complete versions, which haven’t been publicly available since the fourteenth century but are believed to exist in Ministry archives.”
“Merlin texts.”
“They’re theoretical at this point. Possibly mythical like the Hallows.” But something in Newt’s expression said he didn’t think they were. “Merlin’s work on magical transmission was centuries ahead of anything that came after. If someone found those texts and could actually apply them...”
Harry thought of a man who walked through solid walls in a sealed cell. Who gathered power from living creatures and redirected it toward specific goals. Who had been, by all accounts, a genuinely extraordinary wizard before any of this started, and who had spent years accumulating something that the best minds at MACUSA couldn’t account for.
“He’s not just getting stronger,” Harry said. “He’s trying to access something that hasn’t been accessible in centuries. And he needs a specific kind of power to do it.”
“The kind only found in Britain,” Tina said. She’d been listening without interrupting, fitting pieces together. “Which is why the British operations matter more than the continental ones. More than just recruiting families or establishing influence.”
“He needs to be here,” Harry said. “He’ll come here eventually. Not just for the politics. For what’s here.”
They stood on the dark fell with the wind moving through the grass and no creatures anywhere nearby, and the silence was different now. Less like absence and more like waiting.
TBC.