The rooftop garden was old magic.
You could feel it in the air — not the heavy, imposing presence of cursed places or the humming energy of enchanted ones, but something subtler. An older touch. Moss crept up through cracks in the stone tiles, and tiny blue flowers bloomed under moonlight, blooming only when no one was looking. The garden hadn't been tended in decades. It tended itself.
Caelum arrived just before midnight, stepping into the clearing with no sound but the rustle of his cloak. The air was cold, sharp with night chill and memory. He scanned the surroundings once. Nothing.
And then—
A flicker. Not Apparition — no flash, no pop. Just… a person where there hadn't been one.
She stood near the arch of twisted iron and wood, cloaked, face partially veiled. Older than him, sharp-eyed, with hands that had clearly seen spellwork far beyond schooling. Not young, not old. Just… tired.
"I wasn't sure you'd come," she said, voice clear but cautious.
"I wasn't sure you were real," Caelum replied, stepping forward into the soft glow of moonlight. "But I figured, if you were fake, at least I'd know what trap I was walking into."
A small smirk twitched at the edge of her mouth. "Smart."
He didn't reply. Just waited.
She took that as permission. "I know you've been watching the Blacks. Probably noticed the strange contacts, the odd behavior. The delivery tomorrow isn't just any parcel — it's a lockbox. Ancient make. High-security enchantments layered into it, pre-Grindelwald era. The kind of thing designed to store things people want forgotten."
"Like?" Caelum asked, though he had ideas.
She tilted her head. "Ever heard of whispering contracts?"
His brow furrowed. He had — in passing, in the back of a forbidden tome once scanned during a reckless night of system-guided reading. Supposedly ancient pacts forged not with quills, but with breath and soul, sealed by intent and unspoken oaths. Dangerous things. The kind of magic that didn't belong in the modern age.
"I have," he said cautiously. "Those are myths. Mostly."
"They are," she agreed. "Which makes it all the more troubling that someone's trying to collect the pieces to make one real."
Silence. Not the awkward kind. The heavy kind.
Caelum broke it first. "You're not part of the Ministry. And you're not a rebel."
She gave a slow nod. "Call me... independent. The kind of person who keeps her nose where it doesn't belong until the fire starts."
"Why help me?"
Another pause.
"Because you're not entangled yet. You're not compromised. I checked."
He raised an eyebrow. "And what if I am?"
"Then I've already wasted too much time." She reached into her cloak and withdrew something — a small leather-bound folder, aged and bound in dragonhide. "This was copied from a private vault under Gringotts. Don't ask how. Inside are records — names, meetings, trade routes. Some legitimate, most not. They've been moving things. Not just objects. People. Living ones. Off the record. Between families."
Caelum took the folder but didn't open it yet. "What do you want from me?"
"I want you to look into it." Her tone hardened slightly. "I can't move openly anymore. The moment I try, I'm flagged. Watched. But you? You have an identity they trust. A role that gives you room. Use it."
"You think someone in the Black family is tied to these contracts."
She didn't respond immediately. Just met his eyes. That said enough.
After a long pause, Caelum finally opened the folder.
Names. Many of them redacted — initials only. Transactions written in code. But there were notes in the margins. Reconstructed paths, theories. One name circled repeatedly, always reappearing in different places, under different covers:
Cassian Black.
He frowned. "I've seen the name, but only on old reports."
"Check deeper. He's not a front. He's a keystone. You'll find the thread that ties it all together runs through him."
Caelum closed the folder. "And what happens when I pull that thread?"
The woman didn't smile. "It'll either unravel the lie... or pull you under."
She turned without another word and walked toward the edge of the rooftop.
This time, she didn't vanish. She simply stepped away and let the shadows swallow her.
Caelum remained a while longer, listening to the silence. The whispering contracts, the sealed lockbox, the record of unspoken trades — all of it pointed toward something larger. This wasn't just an old family with old secrets.
It was something alive.
Moving.
Watching.
And he'd just stepped onto the board.
---
Caelum didn't sleep that night.
He spent the hours until dawn skimming every page of the leather-bound folder. The writing was coded but methodical, with a mind behind it that understood both paranoia and precision. Half of the records were already burned — either scrubbed from existence or never properly recorded to begin with.
But Cassian Black's name kept surfacing — not in bold, not in official documentation, but always in proximity to shadowed deals, cursed items, hidden vaults in off-grid locations.
It was subtle. But not invisible.
He had the thread.
Now it was time to follow it.
—
Cassian Black was elusive by nature. That much became clear by the end of the first day.
The man lived alone in a warded manor north of Wiltshire. The family called it Harrowend, but Caelum suspected the Ministry's official records wouldn't even acknowledge its existence. Its protections weren't just physical — they were psychological. Passersby forgot the road existed. Muggles turned around for no reason. Even magical folk got headaches the closer they approached.
But Caelum wasn't just any magical folk. The Role Player System, and the synchronization he'd clawed his way toward over the summer, allowed him to bypass certain illusions through aetheric threading — seeing where magic bent light and thought. It wasn't perfect, but it let him approach the edge of the estate without becoming disoriented.
He didn't try to breach it. That would be suicide — magical or otherwise.
Instead, he did what any careful tracker would do: he watched.
From a distance.
—
The first sighting came after five hours.
Cassian Black exited the estate just before dusk, wearing elegant robes too clean for a man in hiding. His gait was smooth, almost unhurried. No guards, no escort. Just him. A man walking down a stone path that supposedly didn't exist.
Caelum followed.
Not close. Just enough to pick up on the route — winding down a hidden road toward a river-crossing, then into a glade that shimmered faintly under the weight of concealment charms. Cassian cast a spell before entering — something heavy, but ancient. Not a curse. A seal.
The glade didn't open for him.
It… folded.
As if it were never there in the first place.
Caelum didn't follow inside. He marked the spot, then withdrew — casting a time-freeze illusion in his mind to remember every detail of the sequence. The river's flow. The trees nearby. The feel of the soil.
He would come back with a plan.
—
That night, he returned to a safehouse in Edinburgh — one of the fallback properties created for his fabricated identity as Professor Caelan Thorne.
He began organizing the details.
A glade warded by memory-shifting charms. A sealing spell based on soul resonance. A manor designed to repel thought. A lockbox scheduled for delivery to a hidden vault.
Everything circled the same axis.
Cassian wasn't just hiding old secrets.
He was preparing for something.
Caelum narrowed his eyes at the parchment spread before him. Notes filled the margins. Spell theories. Behavioral analysis. Even a rudimentary psychological profile.
Cassian was the type who never acted unless every piece was in place.
Which meant—
Someone, somewhere, was putting the board together.
Caelum's quill hovered over the final line he'd written earlier:
> "The thread leads here. If I pull it too hard, it snaps. If I don't… someone else pulls it instead."
He pressed the quill down again, this time writing slower.
> "Begin contingency planning. Surveillance is no longer enough."
Then a knock came.
Three, precise.
No one should have known about this place.
Caelum didn't move right away. Just stood. Quiet. Hands empty.
Another knock — same rhythm.
Then a voice, hushed and familiar.
"Don't hex me. It's Remus."
He opened the door with his wand half-raised.
Remus Lupin looked worse than usual — windblown, damp with rain, and holding a sealed envelope under one arm.
"Shouldn't be here," Caelum muttered, stepping aside only after casting a proximity ward.
"I know." Remus stepped in, brushing rain off his coat. "But this couldn't wait."
Caelum eyed the envelope. "Dumbledore?"
"Not directly. Ministry's been sniffing around the Blacks lately. Something about property movement and unregistered wards. Someone's scared they're hiding something, and Dumbledore wants you to know… they might accelerate whatever they're doing."
Caelum's jaw tightened. "Then time just shortened."
"I told him that's not a good sign."
"It never is," Caelum said quietly.
He took the envelope and opened it. Inside was a photograph — moving, of course — showing Cassian shaking hands with a hooded figure outside the Ministry Archives. The angle was blurry. The person couldn't be identified.
But Cassian?
He was smiling.
That was the most dangerous part.
People like him only smiled when the trap was already sprung.
—
Caelum stared out the window as Remus left an hour later. The street was quiet again. Fog rolled in over the rooftops.
The folder sat closed beside the photograph. The glade's image burned in his memory.
Something was coming.
Something the world wasn't ready to see.
And Caelum… had just stepped one foot into its shadow.
---
Caelum's fingers hovered above the sigils etched into the table.
They glowed faintly in the candlelight — not active, but resonating, as if sensing the decision that hung over them. Aether channels carved with surgical precision. Stabilization glyphs braided into the wood grain. One mistake here, and the entire casting could rupture.
He had no intention of rushing.
The glade Cassian entered wasn't a simple concealment charm layered over an abandoned patch of earth. No, this was designed — a folded space, rooted in primal architecture. Old magic. Possibly pre-Ministry. The kind of structure you didn't find… unless someone wanted you to.
But Cassian hadn't wanted to be found.
Which meant Caelum had seen something he wasn't meant to.
And that demanded preparation.
He reached for the bone charm he'd been crafting over the last two days. It looked unassuming — a thin disc of aged rune-bone looped with silver thread — but its real value was in what it masked. The artifact would cloak his magical signature just long enough to enter the glade undetected… or so he hoped. This wasn't a guarantee. It was a calculated risk.
And Caelum didn't like gambles.
Still, standing still wasn't an option.
He rolled his shoulders back and slid the charm into a pouch beneath his coat.
---
The trek back to the glade was quiet. Too quiet.
He'd chosen an off-path Apparition point nearly three kilometers from the location — far enough to avoid magical detection nets, close enough to cross on foot. The wind whispered through the trees as he moved, his boots leaving barely a trace. Each step was deliberate. Every sound, measured.
The spot was exactly as he remembered it.
Unchanged.
Which was impossible.
Wild magic, especially magic this old, usually pulsed. Grew. Shifted.
But here… nothing moved.
It was like walking into a painting.
Even the birds didn't fly too close.
Caelum circled the glade twice — once clockwise, once counter-clockwise — mapping the invisible lines of resistance. His Aether Sense caught the distortions: slight bends in pressure, the way light felt heavier around certain trees. He extended his hand, not forward, but sideways — drawing a line in the air with a thread of pure mana.
The line caught.
Not on bark. Not on mist.
On something else.
A fold.
He inhaled. Focused.
Then stepped through.
—
It was like passing through a wall of water.
No splash. No sting.
Just a sudden shift — one world replaced by another.
The air inside the glade was thicker, damp with age. The trees were older here, bark gray and gnarled, like stone petrified into wood. The grass glowed faintly underfoot, and Caelum noticed symbols etched into the roots — runes, yes, but not any language he recognized.
He didn't move forward immediately.
Instead, he crouched.
The ground bore marks: boot prints, five days old, undisturbed. Cassian's, most likely. No other footprints. No signs of a return.
Good.
That gave him time.
He followed the path — such as it was — to the heart of the glade. A stone dais rested there, barely a meter across, with spiraling glyphs carved into its surface. In the center stood a pedestal.
Empty.
Not recently, though.
Caelum traced his fingers over the grooves. Dust patterns suggested something had once rested there — roughly the size of a book. Maybe a tablet. It had been lifted carefully, not torn. No rush. Whoever took it had time.
He frowned. If Cassian was transporting objects in and out of this place, then it wasn't just a safehouse.
It was a gate.
Possibly more.
He activated the bone charm again — only briefly — and cast a wide-range sweep of the aether around him.
The result was… disquieting.
The aether wasn't just dormant here.
It was bound.
Forced into stillness. Folded over itself. Anchored to something deep beneath the glade's surface.
As if the entire space was anchoring something.
Or protecting it.
He looked toward the pedestal again, then toward the trees.
There were no animals here.
No insects.
Even the wind had stopped.
Caelum felt a chill rise across the back of his neck. Not from fear — from instinct. The kind of instinct that came when a spellcaster knew they'd stumbled somewhere they shouldn't have.
It was time to leave.
But not without a mark.
He pulled a sliver of void-ink chalk from his pocket and knelt beside the pedestal. In slow, practiced movements, he drew a trace sigil around its base — not to break the magic, but to record it. Aether Memory Glyph. Passive. Undetectable unless someone already knew what to look for.
Once he returned to the safehouse, he'd reconstruct the magic pattern in full.
Then… maybe… he'd understand what was sealed here.
—
Caelum stepped back through the fold just as the moon crested above the tree line.
The moment he crossed into the normal world, he felt the difference.
Noise returned.
Wind whistled.
Leaves rustled.
He closed the charm and stashed it away.
Then, he vanished.
—
He Apparated back to the safehouse with a cold focus, landing clean in the reinforced entry circle.
Everything looked the same… except the owl waiting by the window.
A message.
He frowned, approaching the bird slowly.
Its feathers were dark grey. No seal on its leg. But the note it held was tight, deliberate.
He untied it and unrolled the parchment.
One sentence:
> "You shouldn't have gone in alone."
No signature. No crest. Just that line.
Caelum stared at the parchment for a long moment.
Then he folded it carefully.
And set it aflame.
The shadows outside the window seemed to watch him a little more closely now.
-----------------------
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my patreon at
"https://www.patreon.com/Amon0_0"
Or Just search Amon_The_Error in your patreon and you can find the advance chapters there