Dumbledore had summoned Severus to consult him. Had he sensed something prematurely?

Bryan’s expression had settled into something grave and heavy. The invisible weight he radiated pressed upon the room around him and the members of the Order of the Phoenix gathered in the kitchen glanced at him in sidelong intervals, with a mixture of awe and unease, watching him think.

‘No.

Whether Dumbledore had sensed something was not the crux of the matter.

The crux was this: what change had come over Voldemort?’

“That power…”

Bryan’s gaze—heavy as a mountain range, carrying the accumulated gravity of foresight, fell upon Severus with the full force of his attention.

“What kind of power was it?”

Severus did not answer immediately. He drew a slow, controlled breath, as though steadying himself before stepping onto uneven ground. His face had gone slightly pale. He reached back into the memory of his arrival at Malfoy Manor—the foreboding that had crept over him like cold water rising, and the revulsion that had risen unconsciously in his chest.

“Something profoundly evil.”

His voice was careful and stripped of its usual edge, as though even the act of describing it required a kind of restraint.

“It was as though it were siphoning the life from everything around it. Constantly. Without pause.”

A sharp intake of breath hissed through the room. Several people flinched in their seats. Even the flames of the candelabra on the table flickered as though disturbed by the joint tremor that passed through the gathered bodies.

“It sounds to me—”

Mundungus had gone a peculiar greyish color beneath his usual ruddiness. He was shaking visibly, his ugly yellowed teeth were chattering together at intervals he seemed unable to control, and his eyes darted from face to face around the table as though searching for someone who looked sufficiently unconcerned to offer him comfort.

“—like opposing You-Know-Who would be particularly unwise.”

“If you’re frightened, go back to your petty thieving!”

Moody snarled at Mundungus with full volcanic force. The deep scars carved across his battle-scarred face twisted with contempt.

“You coward. While you’re at it, why don’t you tell everyone how many silver spoons you managed to pocket tonight?!”

“I—I didn’t—”

Mundungus’s face flushed scarlet from neck to forehead in an instant. He clamped both hands reflexively over his sleeves and stammered his denial, all the while casting nervous glances toward Sirius and Bryan.

But neither Sirius nor Bryan had any attention to spare for Mundungus’s petty habits.

“Are you covering for Voldemort?”

Sirius scowled across the table at Severus, his grey eyes narrowed to sharp, suspicious points.

“Why can’t you say it plainly?”

Severus’s lips parted—his instinct was to strike back—but in the end, he reined himself in. He spoke softly, addressing the room as a whole.

“I am bound by certain magical constraints on their side. I cannot reveal too much.”

Several people nodded in understanding. Others let their skepticism show, if only briefly.

Bryan remained silent throughout this exchange.

There was no question in his mind. The power Severus had described—he had encountered it before.

On his journey to the Isle of Avalon, he had witnessed it firsthand, seen what it left behind in the places it had touched: a dark and voracious force that withered all living things as a killing frost withers a garden—completely, indiscriminately, and without the decency of leaving even ruins.

The isle had once been vibrant, full of life, singing with the accumulated magic of generations. Under the slow, relentless erosion of that power, it had become a wasteland of grey stone and silence.

If not for the path that Gryffindor had carved through it—even approaching the temple at the island’s heart would have cost him dearly.

And that power—even Merlin had been unable to dispel it.

The legendary wizard, whose name had become synonymous with the very concept of magical mastery, had only been able to uproot the temple, transplanting it from the isle of Azkaban to Avalon itself.

Then, drawing upon the unwavering courage sealed within King Arthur’s Sword—together with his own unfathomable magical reserves, powers that no wizard born since had come close to matching—he had barely managed to contain that force. To prevent it from spreading its corruption across the entire world.

Bryan had clashed with it, briefly, once.

In all honesty, he had been no match for it.

Even after two years of rapid and relentless advancement in his own magical power—he could not say otherwise.

It was a force of a higher order. A different dimension of existence.

The root of that deathly power lay in the Twin Serpent Staff.

When, on the eve of last year’s Quidditch World Cup Final, he had learned that Cliodna had aligned herself with Voldemort, he had felt a deep and immediate dread settle over him.

Whatever her reason for doing it, the Twin Serpent Staff acknowledged Voldemort. And once a wand of that nature bent its full power to a wizard’s will, there would be nothing left in the world capable of checking him.

Yet over the past year, Voldemort’s behavior had, in all its visible aspects, remained within the realm of the comprehensible.

This had led Bryan to one conclusion, arrived at by process of elimination: Voldemort had not managed to master the Twin Serpent Staff.

Even today, that remained true.

If Voldemort had truly gained dominion over the Staff—if that ancient and desolating power had submitted fully to his command—he would not have shown such restraint. Not with that power behind him.

The political manipulations and hiding, the careful rebuilding of his inner circle, the patience in the face of provocation—none of it would have made any sense. He would have marched directly on Hogwarts, consequences be damned, bend or break, live or die. That was the only rational course such a man would take when holding something that made rationality itself irrelevant.

The Staff recognized Voldemort, yet withheld its power from him. This contradiction had puzzled Bryan for a long time, before a plausible explanation finally surfaced.

Perhaps there was a bargain between them.

Perhaps, if Voldemort wished to draw upon the Staff’s power—truly draw upon it, rather than merely carry it—he was required first to fulfill certain conditions. To accomplish something specific on the Staff’s behalf, in exchange for what it held.

And for now, Voldemort had clearly not yet met that condition.

Following this line of reasoning, what conditions the Twin Serpent Staff might demand was no great mystery to Bryan.

And that was precisely the future Bryan had long been bracing himself to face.

Why else would Merlin and the Four Founders have left him so many signs and messages across the gulf of centuries? Why scatter those breadcrumbs through time if not to guide someone to a door they knew would eventually have to be opened?

Once such a crisis came to pass, it would no longer be an internal affair of the British wizarding world—a quarrel between factions, a power struggle with a familiar shape and familiar stakes.

It would touch the whole of the magical world, every corner of it, and the Muggle world along with it, rippling through every boundary until there was no safe distance left.

Only by uniting all forces could such a crisis be met.

As for why Dumbledore had thrown this particular question to him—it likely had something to do with Cliodna.

With his deep reserves of magical knowledge, accumulated across more than a century of study, Dumbledore may well have uncovered certain secrets of the druidic tradition from the age before memory.

“There is no need to be overly alarmed.”

Bryan surfaced from his thoughts. Seeing the worry still written across every face in the room, he smiled with easy composure.

“As you know, Cliodna’s power belongs to the secret-witch tradition. Voldemort may have drawn certain insights from her. But for now, at least, it remains insufficient to overturn his disadvantage when he faces both myself and Headmaster Dumbledore at once.”

The calm that Bryan projected drew visible relief from the younger Order members—Bill, Tonks, and others—who let out quiet breaths.

But some of the more seasoned among them—those who knew Bryan well enough to read the silences between his words—understood in their hearts that things were likely not so simple.

“But that Cliodna…”

Mundungus, suitably chastened after Moody’s dressing-down and apparently not chastened enough to hold his tongue completely, hunched further into his seat and ventured carefully:

“That dark witch isn’t someone any of us could handle, either. If we ran into her—it’d be a death sentence.”

“You sniveling coward!”

Moody erupted again with fury.

“No one is forcing you to be here, Mundungus!”

Sirius gave Mundungus a look of cold, flat contempt.

“I’m only pointing out that we shouldn’t ignore reality,” Mundungus mumbled, aggrieved, pulling his collar up around his ears as though it could shield him from the weight of everyone’s exasperation.

“The bulk of Cliodna’s power is housed within her wand,” Bryan said, his tone remaining entirely mild. “And that wand is currently secured in my office at Hogwarts. So even if you were to encounter her in the field, there is considerably less to fear than you might imagine.”

He paused as a thought surfaced and began turning in his expression. “On that note—”

He turned toward Severus.

“Did you see her?”

“She appears to be under house arrest.”

Severus shook his head slightly, his voice was flat and subdued.

“Lucius mentioned she had displeased the Dark Lord over something. He was not specific about the nature of the offense.”

‘House arrest.’

Bryan shook his head slowly, his expression remained unreadable.

“About Harry—”

Sirius leaned forward with urgency that had been waiting all evening for its opening.

“Is there any progress on your end, Bryan? To be honest, the rest of us are completely in the dark. We can’t even figure out what kind of trouble Harry has been dragged into, let alone how to help him out of it. Every time I try to find a thread to pull, it leads nowhere.”

It was the question that had been sitting in the room all evening and the one the rest of the Order had been circling without quite approaching directly.

But Bryan could not share much with them.

This was not a matter of trust, nor of the secrecy that governed sensitive intelligence—he would not have hesitated to trust these people with something simply because it was dangerous or classified.

It was a matter of where each of them stood, and what each of them could be expected to do with what they knew. These good, brave people had gathered under the banner of the Order to oppose Voldemort, to resist the darkest and most obvious evil currently threatening their world—but when it came to the Ministry of Magic, their loyalties did not necessarily align with his.

“There is no need to worry, Sirius.”

Bryan drew a slow breath, measuring it, preparing to bring the meeting to its close.

“Harry will not become a sacrifice on the altar of the Ministry’s sordid political ambitions. Rest easy, and wait.”

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