Prologue
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“…On the cusp of January 1, 1963, as the British Wizarding World frayed at the edges with division and distrust, a baby was born to the House of Black. His arrival went unnoticed, a mere blip in the grand scheme of things. Yet, the events that would unfold around this child were nothing short of extraordinary. This is his story…”
— An excerpt from The Hidden Epics of the Wizarding World , written by ██████████
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Reality sundered. The midnight sky—vast, ancient, unknowable—cracked.
The heavens, that endless curtain between the seen and the unseen, ruptured—blinding and brutal. Splinters of something far older than stars peeled back, and through those jagged wounds, the impossible seeped through.
A chasm, yawning and monstrous, opened; a hunger so vast it felt personal, felt wrong, as though it sought to consume not just the sky but the meaning of the sky. Darkness—thick, obscene, more like an infection than a colour—spilled outward, swallowing the stars whole. The constellations, those timeless stories written in fire, were bled dry, their light smothered without a sound.
The silence was worse than the darkness.
It wasn’t emptiness. It was weight. A silence with shape; a crushing, devouring thing that filled every space where sound, breath, and thought should have been. There was no echo, because there was nothing left for sound to bounce from. No room for screams. No room for anything but... it.
Then—they came.
The eyes.
A thousand—no, a thousand thousand—eyes opened from the fractures where the sky had bled. But they were not eyes as mortals understood them. No soft orbs, no pupils, no whites. They broke geometry. Their shapes should not have been. They folded in ways the mind refused to follow—angles that bent back on themselves, curves that collided into corners, things that had no right to exist in the space that they occupied.
The eyes did not blink. Could not. There was no membrane, no motion—just the unbearable fact of being seen.
And yet—
They were... beautiful.
Horribly. Unbearably.
A beauty so profound and wrong it felt like standing on the edge of madness and wanting to jump. To fall into that awful, perfect symmetry and break apart from the inside out.
With unspoken curiosity, the eyes ŝ̵̟͒à̸͉͈w̶̭͕̆̔.
No… They ᴡɪᴛɴᴇꜱꜱᴇᴅ.
No…
They ｏｂｓｅｒｖｅｄ…
Everything was laid bare.
…And then, in a heartbeat too short to measure, they were gone. The eyes vanished—ripped from existence, or perhaps... reality from theirs.
The sky—the shattered, bleeding sky—healed. The wounds closed, knitted together by something that felt too final to be natural. No seams. No scars. Not even a whisper of the terror that had just been.
The stars returned, cold and bright, marching through their ancient dance as though they had never been stolen. The world below lay still. The wind, the trees, the night; all exactly as they were.
Nothing had changed.
Nothing at all.
Except—
...Except for the shape of the silence left behind.
And the knowing that something…
...Had seen. And left nothing behind to tell of it.
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Professor Albus Dumbledore stood alone in his expansive office, the very embodiment of someone who had seen it all and was yet surprised by the occasional bit of absurdity.
The room sprawled beneath a ceiling so high it had clearly been designed by someone who had never considered the problem of keeping a room warm in the winter, or—more likely—simply didn’t care. The stones were ancient, tired from centuries of holding everything together, their weariness a quiet reminder that time had flowed through these walls in ways most people could scarcely imagine.
Towering bookcases lined the walls, less like furniture and more like old friends standing guard—a little crooked, a little dusty, and absolutely stuffed to bursting. The books, arranged in what could charitably be called an ‘organic system,’ jostled for space. Some leaned heavily on their neighbours, as if exhausted from the weight of their own knowledge. A few, with pristine spines, practically glared down at their well-thumbed counterparts, smugly unread.
Candlelight hovered above, flickering like curious sprites. The flames cast a gentle warmth, though their restless shadows seemed to scurry and stretch with private mischief.
The fireplace, a grand old thing with a crackling heart, roared with more enthusiasm than elegance. It filled the room with a heat that felt personal, though the occasional snap of a log sent up a protest of sparks. Above it, the clock—ancient, and a little eccentric—tick-tocked with a rhythm more whimsical than precise, as if time itself had decided to be fashionably late.
Twelve strokes. Midnight.
The new year arrived not with fanfare, but with the soft certainty of a page turning. And Albus Dumbledore, being Albus Dumbledore, wasn’t exactly fussed about it. No confetti. No fireworks. No great revelry. Instead, the current Professor of Transfiguration—he who was, among other things, a master of his craft and occasionally a master of not giving away his thoughts—stood in front of a small table, looking at something that was either deeply intriguing or somewhat alarming, depending on who was asking.
In his hand, the Elder Wand tapped out a contemplative rhythm against a collection of silver instruments that looked, for all the world, like they had been cobbled together by someone with an extraordinary gift for invention and a complete disregard for practicality. These devices had once been marvels of magical and alchemical engineering, capable of measuring the unmeasurable, tracking the untrackable, and occasionally making tea in a pinch—though only if you didn’t mind it slightly over-steeped. Now, however, they resembled the tragic survivors of some unspeakable war fought exclusively between arcane gadgets.
Some had twisted into shapes that would have made even the most liberal geometer wince, while others sported shattered glass faces that could have been mistaken for particularly avant-garde attempts at stargazing. A few plucky ones still emitted the occasional puff of acrid black smoke, like the final, feeble protest of machinery that knew it had done its best but had, in the end, been utterly defeated. The smell hung in the air with all the grace of a kicked over cauldron, demanding attention and announcing with unmistakable certainty that something had gone terribly, irreparably wrong.
And yet, Albus’ focus, as it often was in moments of crisis, rested not on the clutter of small disasters but on a single device: a fragile-looking silver contraption with a cracked glass lens. A creation of his own, it had been designed to monitor the status of Gellert in Nurmengard. Now, broken and silent, it sat there as a riddle wrapped in shattered glass, offering no clues beyond the unavoidable certainty that whatever had caused its failure was neither trivial nor likely to improve with time.
For a moment, he feared something drastic had occurred—perhaps his once-friend and former lover had escaped. Yet, even that possibility shouldn’t have been enough to break the instrument.
With a soft sigh, the tall, thin, ageing wizard—his silvery hair and beard so long they could probably be tucked into his belt—turned to Fawkes, his phoenix companion. The immortal bird was perched serenely in his usual spot by the desk, unbothered by the fact that his evening plans had clearly been disrupted.
Albus offered a faint smile.
“It seems our evening has taken an unexpected turn, old friend,” he said, his voice low but warm. “Might I trouble you for a bit of travel?”
Fawkes raised his head slowly, trilled once, and then unfurled his red and gold wings, leaping into the air with the kind of flair that suggested he had every intention of doing it in style. The phoenix made one loop above Albus’ head—just to remind the room that he could, in fact, fly—and landed on the wizard’s shoulder.
“Thank you,” Albus whispered, his fingers brushing gently along the bird’s warm plumage. A flash of gentle fire engulfed them both, and in an instant, they vanished.
The return came barely an hour later. Another burst of flame, another flash of light. The room received them with the same soft hum of stone and fire, though now Albus’ expression had darkened.
Nurmengard had, as was to be expected, been utterly undisturbed. Gellert remained in his cell, appearing no worse for wear. Their brief conversation, however, had not been without its merits; Gellert mentioned something about a “Great Upheaval” in the future—an ominous phrase that rattled around in Albus’ mind.
The words stirred something deep in Albus’ memory: a grim reminder of Gellert’s past visions—visions that had once heralded a Global Wizarding War and one of the most devastating Muggle conflicts in recent history.
Divination, Albus had always believed, was best left to those who were born with an innate sense for it—or at least, to those who enjoyed being absolutely certain that they had some idea about the future. A true Seer. He, unfortunately, was not one of those people. For him, Divination had always been one part guesswork, one part magic, and three parts extremely vague descriptions that were far too easily misinterpreted.
But when Gellert, of all people, spoke of such things…
“I’ll have to give this more thought,” he muttered to himself. He turned to Fawkes, now perched again by the desk, and stroked the bird’s soft feathers. “Thank you once more, my friend.”
Later that morning, just when Albus had nearly convinced himself that perhaps it wasn’t such a terrible idea to spend the rest of the day with a cup of tea and a good book, an owl arrived. It carried a letter, bearing the kind of urgency that suggested it had been quite determined to deliver its message with all the seriousness of a particularly frantic postman. The note came from a Ministry contact and stated that, rather mysteriously, every single record in the Hall of Prophecy had shattered that night.
Every. Single. One.
The Ministry was, predictably, in uproar. And they wanted his assistance in investigating the abnormal event.
Albus lowered the parchment with a soft breath that felt suspiciously like a sigh. Trouble, it seemed, was already making itself at home.
The universe, he reflected dryly, never failed to find new and creative ways to be alarming.