The Sigil
POV: Draco Malfoy
By the time he returned to the office, the corridors had thinned to silence.
Even the parchment had quieted. The enchanted message scrolls that normally drifted from desk to desk now sat idle, stilled by the late hour. The Auror wing, at dusk, was all half-shadow and echo—like the bones of something that had once needed too many voices to function and had finally forgotten why.
Draco closed the door behind him with a click. No wards. No privacy charms. Just the quiet that came when no one expected you to be working anymore.
He dropped the Rosier file onto his desk and stood over it for a long moment, unmoving. The scent from the house still clung faintly to the fibers of his coat—bitter, chemical, wrong. Not strong enough to name, but sharp enough to remember.
He opened the file.
Hermione’s voice surfaced immediately, as if summoned by the scrape of parchment.
What is it?
Nothing useful.
The lie had come easily. That’s what disturbed him most. Not the ease of deception, but the instinct that made it necessary.
He flipped past the core assessment, past the Ministry sweep documentation and the sanitized images of Elspeth Rosier’s corpse in situ. His hand stilled on the floorplan.
The hearth was marked with a red outline. Nothing flagged.
He reached for a clean scroll from the drawer and set it beside the file. With a muttered charm, he hovered his wand just over the diagram and whispered the glyph-copying incantation, low and clipped. The mark—the half-carved sigil beneath the hearth—replicated onto the parchment with slow, shivering ink.
It didn’t belong there. But it didn’t not belong either. The lines weren’t symmetrical. The curve of the arc was incomplete. But the pattern was unmistakable, if you’d grown up in a house that catalogued that kind of silence.
Blood-bound excision. Not in the traditional sense. Not ceremonial. Private. Hasty. The kind of mark carved in places no one was meant to find.
Draco stared at it.
His first instinct was to destroy it. But that would be too obvious. And too late. He folded the parchment once, then twice more, and sealed it with a tap of his wand—not a Ministry seal, but a null-glyph, the kind meant to hide rather than preserve.
He slipped it into the hidden lining of his coat. The pocket there wasn’t on any inventory. He looked around the office then, reflexively. It was empty. Of course it was. But the instinct to check was not.
This case was no longer theoretical.
And whatever it was, it had seen him first.
He didn’t use the front gate.
The estate sat quiet beneath a moonless sky, its perimeter humming with layered wards—centuries of ancestral paranoia preserved in runes and iron. Draco stepped through the secondary threshold behind the stables, where the enchantments were older and looser, designed for discretion rather than defense. They allowed him in without protest. Of course they did. The house still knew his name.
Wiltshire had gone colder since the war. Or perhaps it simply felt that way when no one was home.
Malfoy Manor loomed ahead, all pale stone and precision, its windows unlit. The path to the west wing was overgrown at the edges, but the gravel still crunched beneath his boots with a familiar cadence. He didn't light his wand. The dark didn’t matter here.
He entered through a side door and bypassed the grand staircase, turning left into the west wing where the air was denser, untouched by domestic staff or seasonal spells. The walls here bore no portraits. Only rows of unbroken silence.
The study door resisted, just slightly, before admitting him.
Inside, the room was exactly as it had been before the war.
Dust veiled the surfaces in fine, grey lace. The shelves were tall and black-lacquered, crowded with volumes bound in dragonhide, iron-spined ledgers, grimoires with no titles. A fireplace loomed on the far wall, empty and cold, its mantle carved with a crest that had once meant something worth defending.
Draco moved to the far shelf without hesitation. The tome he needed was not hidden, only inconvenient. Most of the family had forgotten it existed. He had not.
Obscura Sanguis: Rituals of Lineage and Loss.
The binding resisted his touch at first—an old enchantment meant to deter the curious, not the committed. He pressed his palm to the spine until it unlocked with a soft click, the cover yawning open like a throat. He flipped past the opening diagrams—bloodline seals, hereditary knots, name-binding circles—until the ink began to brown, and the margins grew crowded with notations in crabbed Latin and brittle French. Then he found it.
A single sigil, drawn without ornamentation. Jagged, incomplete. Asymmetrical by design.
His eyes traced the lines.
Excision Mark: Squib Nullification Rite.
The accompanying description was brief. Brutal in its efficiency.
Used to erase non-magical offspring from ancestral records. Ritualistically severs magical recognition of a blood-relative by unbinding lineage threads. Often performed in private. No witnesses required. Legal until 1893. Not banned, just forgotten.
Draco stared at the page.
He did not need to cross-reference. He had seen this before—burned into the baseboard of a bedroom that had been emptied overnight. A shape carved in haste. A curve left unfinished.
His jaw tightened. This was no longer academic. He reached for a parchment slip from the desk and sketched the mark from memory. It matched. Almost exactly.
A chill curled low in his chest. Not fear. Not yet. Validation.
He closed the book with deliberate quiet and slid it back into place. The lock re-engaged with a soft click, and the dust resettled without resistance.
The study was silent again, but the air, changed.
He was eight the last time he stood outside that door.
The corridor had felt longer then. The windows darker, the house larger in the way that all grand things feel endless to children. But the silence—that had already been the same. Dense. Purposeful. Like someone had pressed their finger against the pulse of the room and asked it not to move.
The door to Isidora’s bedroom had been shut. Locked with more than magic.
He remembered standing just close enough to hear the voices inside. His mother’s, low and composed. A man’s, unfamiliar and clipped—Ministry dialect, sharp consonants, words that didn’t belong in bedrooms: registry… revocation… bloodline breach.
He hadn’t understood the words, but he’d understood the tone. Something irreversible was being done.
He’d waited until the door opened.
The room had already been cleared. No toys. No books. The bed stripped of its linens. A single scorch mark remained above the headboard—nothing large, just a dark curve burned into the wood like someone had started drawing and lost the will to finish.
He had stared at it.
Narcissa hadn’t spoken to him. Just rested a hand on his shoulder and guided him back down the hall.
Isidora had not been named again.
Not once.
She had been loud, his cousin. Always just a little too loud for the Manor—her laugh unrefined, her hair forever falling out of plaits. She’d taught him how to draw constellations on the ceiling with a cheap spark quill, trailing smoky lines between glow-charms and pretending they were stars.
She called it our own sky. He hadn’t realized, then, that she needed one.
Draco had asked once—only once—where she’d gone. Narcissa had answered without pause: She wasn’t meant for this world.
That had been the end of it. No funeral. No photograph. No empty chair at holidays. Just a sudden, systemic absence.
Now, standing in the study’s hollow quiet, he pressed a hand to his chest. Not over his heart. Lower. Where the breath always caught before it reached the surface.
The sigil from the Rosier house had been carved just below the hearthstone—where heat should live. Where warmth should be passed down.
He looked at the bookshelf again, at the spine of Obscura Sanguis , already dusted over, as if nothing had stirred it. He didn’t reopen it. There was no need.
The thing had already been named.
Morning arrived too quickly. Or perhaps it hadn’t arrived at all—just slipped sideways into being, the way time did when you hadn’t slept and had no plans to.
Draco stepped into the Auror Office with the residue of the sigil still pressed behind his eyes.
He moved on instinct—ward check at the door, silent nod to the perimeter file assistant, a glance at the case board to confirm that nothing had shifted. The room was in motion, but none of it touched him.
Hermione was already there.
She stood beside the central desk, bent over a ledger thick with names. Rosier’s known associates, organized by bloodline tier, political affiliation, and—he assumed—whatever secret metric the Department of Mysteries used to measure relevance. She looked up when he entered. Her eyes moved over him—not lingering, not cold. Just noting something.
She didn’t ask.
He said nothing.
There was a kind of truce in that.
He crossed to his desk, slipped the sealed parchment from last night into the second drawer, and pressed the lock glyph with his thumb. It vanished beneath a shimmer of protective ink.
A file snapped shut behind him.
“Malfoy. Granger.” Selwyn’s voice came from the doorway, dry and final.
They both turned.
He held a single slip of parchment in his hand, no folder, no seal. That alone told Draco what kind of report it was.
“New body,” Selwyn said. “Apparent poisoning. You’re both going.”
Draco’s jaw clicked once. “Where?”
“Thornbridge.” Selwyn didn’t look up from the parchment. “A name you’ll recognize.”
The name landed like flint against stone. Draco didn’t flinch. But he felt the edges of something older stirring just beneath the surface.
Selwyn handed the slip to Hermione without ceremony. “Site secured. You’ve got twenty minutes.” Then he turned and disappeared down the corridor.
Hermione read the address once, then looked at Draco. Her expression didn’t shift. But something in her posture did—an almost-imperceptible recalibration, like a blade adjusting to weight.
Draco straightened. There was no room for the sigil now. No room for the girl who’d once taught him to map stars onto the ceiling.
Just another house. Another dead name. Another door someone had opened for the wrong person.
He grabbed his coat.
The rain hadn’t stopped. It came down in a fine, persistent veil that blurred the edges of the Thornbridge estate into something half-erased. Ivy strangled the wrought iron fencing, and the path to the front door had turned to muck, stone swallowed by earth. No visible wards. No alarm charms.
Draco knew better.
The house had the feel of wealth left to rot—too much space, too little care. A familiar kind of decay. He stepped over the threshold and into the study without waiting for the field team to clear the rest of the property. It didn’t matter.
They were already too late.
Rowan Thornbridge was sprawled on the floor, one arm twisted unnaturally beneath him, the other extended toward a tipped decanter that had emptied into the carpet. The liquid was viscous, dark amber, already soaking into the fibers like a wound that wouldn’t clot. His lips were blue. Eyes open. No struggle. Just collapse.
The room smelled of wet oak and burnt sugar, undercut by something metallic and sweet that didn’t belong.
Hermione knelt first. Her wand never left her sleeve. She didn’t need it.
“Bitterroot. Mistletoe oil. Mercury compound,” she said, not quite aloud. “Modified for delayed absorption. Designed to mimic circulatory hex failure.”
Draco didn’t answer. He moved past her, slow, careful.
The carpet had been nudged just off center—displaced in the final moments, or perhaps before that. He crouched and pulled it back.
The sigil was waiting. Not half-formed this time. Not rushed. Carved with intention. Into oak this time, not floorboard. Deeper. Burned along the edges. A symbol with weight now, as though the killer no longer cared about concealment.
Draco stared at it, jaw clenched.
He didn’t need to compare it to the one beneath the Rosier hearth. It wasn’t just the same mark. It was the same hand.
Behind him, Hermione rose. Her voice was softer now, but not gentle.
“You’ve seen it again, haven’t you?”
Draco didn’t answer.
The house was too quiet, except for the rain.
He stayed where he was, the sigil burned into the floor at his feet, the shape of it already branded behind his eyes. There would be another one. He knew that now.
Rain tapping against the leaded glass.
The outline of a body cooling in the center of the room.
Draco Malfoy, unmoving—facing a symbol that once lived in a bedroom no one spoke of, and now would not stay buried.