Sunlight poured down like a golden waterfall, stretching Ian's shadow long behind him.
He stood at the very edge of the spatial rift, close enough to touch the thick, tar-like darkness swirling within it. The whispering voices of black-robed wizards drifted from its depths.
Fear was already beginning to take root among them.
And who could blame them?
After all, Ian had mentioned the Raven again. Clearly, these people were terrified of it. They reacted almost as if they were having an allergic response to the word "Raven."
"The Raven… you want to know about the Raven."
Zeus lifted his hood. A mix of wariness and memory shimmered in his deep blue eyes. His bony fingers gripped his bone staff tightly; the eagle-head ornament glinted coldly in the sun.
"The Titans created us for the sole purpose of dealing with the Raven."
"The arrogant Titans also had their fears. And that fear was the Raven. They created us to confront the source of that fear."
"They created you to fight the Raven?" Ian frowned slightly, surprised.
"Yes, the Raven is an ancient god, far older than the Titans. According to legend, at the end of the world, it will descend and harvest the souls of all living things. Including Death. Including everything."
Zeus's voice grew heavy. Like his people, he spoke with fear. It was precisely because of this fear that he did not respond aggressively to Ian.
In truth...
Zeus had always been short-tempered. However, being short-tempered didn't mean being stupid. He knew when he could afford to lose his temper and when he absolutely could not.
"Including Death?"
Ian suspected that they were actually referring to a Death God. In their current linguistic system, however, the word "god" was still used exclusively for the Titans.
And, of course, beings older than the Titans, like the Raven.
"Correct," Zeus continued. "The Titans feared this legend. They refused to accept annihilation as their destiny, so they created a force capable of countering the Raven. That force was us... the wizards."
His tone dipped lower.
Ian was genuinely startled. These people already knew they were wizards, and the earliest wizards really did become the gods of the future.
More importantly...
The word "wizard" had apparently been invented this early.
These people knew they were wizards.
"They're using you to fight the Raven. But as far as I know, magic can't harm the Raven, right?" Ian continued, finding the story contradictory.
He knew the Raven was absolutely immune to magic. How could the Titans possibly expect wizards to fight it?
"You're right." Zeus gave a cold laugh. "Magic truly cannot harm it. But the Titans never intended for us to fight the Raven with magic in the first place. They wanted us to use magic to create something capable of fighting the Raven."
His aged face was especially deep in shadow. Ian heard this and immediately thought of the fallen floating city and the metal behemoths.
A glimmer of understanding flickered in his eyes.
"And why is that?" He asked knowingly.
"Research. They wanted us to think on their behalf," Zeus said in a dropped voice. "The Titans gave us magic so we could study and develop a power capable of opposing the Raven: alchemy."
As expected.
The old man's explanation matched Ian's suspicions. Ian fell silent, once again recalling the fallen metal behemoths and the wreckage of the floating sky city.
Most likely, those metal giants were what the Titans had hoped the wizards would manufacture to fight the Raven. Yet, even for someone like Ian, who had picked up the Raven's corpse, such machines were utterly useless.
Perhaps...
'Did the Titans and even these ancient wizards, the future gods not actually understand the Raven very well?'
A faint trace of confusion stirred in Ian's mind.
"Yes, alchemy," Zeus continued with a nod. "They had heard in an ancient prophecy that the Raven told a shadow-like being that the only thing that could oppose it was the 'True Creator,' whose whereabouts were unknown. The power the True Creator wielded was alchemy."
Another prophecy.
It seemed the Titans' knowledge of the Raven came entirely from prophecies like this one. Ian's expression instantly turned strange.
The "True Creator" was the Raven itself, these Titans had been played for fools.
He couldn't help but rub his forehead.
"So you were created just to study how to use alchemy to defeat the Raven?"
Ian sorted through the information he'd gathered. It all felt familiar. The "True Creator" was simply the Raven. In a way, the Raven wasn't lying.
This was just his talent for twisting words.
Ian was speechless for a moment.
His thoughts were spinning rapidly.
Meanwhile, Zeus didn't notice Ian's subtle change in expression and continued:
"The Titans firmly believed that alchemy could oppose the Raven. They forced us to study day and night, forging weapons and building machines."
Those words... clearly stirred painful memories among the black-robed wizards behind him.
Zeus's voice grew tinged with bitterness.
"The Titans treated us as slaves."
Then his tone shifted, gaining a faint satisfaction.
"The floating city, the metal behemoths, those were weapons we forged with alchemy. The Titans gave us magic so we could study alchemy in their place, those lazy creatures."
"But what they didn't know was that within alchemy, we found freedom. We found a way to imprison them. Their arrogance, born of immortality, made them completely blind to our plans."
Zeus allowed himself a proud smile.
"And then? Did you overthrow them?" Ian pressed further.
"Then?" Zeus's gaze deepened.
"It wasn't just about overthrowing them."
A flash of ruthlessness crossed his eyes.
"Cronos, the arrogant king of the Titans, imprisoned us inside the belly of Mount Olympus. His brothers stood beside the furnaces, whips in hand, forcing us to forge weapons meant to 'slay gods.' How ironic... They themselves were gods yet sought weapons capable of killing an even older god."
Zeus's voice dripped with contempt.
Ian listened quietly as sunlight cast a sharp shadow beneath him.
"We endured for centuries." Zeus's voice grew increasingly fierce. "Until Prometheus... the smartest among us... discovered the Titans' weakness."
"He discovered what alchemy could truly give us."
"So."
We united. At the moment the Titans trusted us most, we rebelled. They treated us as slaves, yet they gave us the very power that doomed them."
We ended their rule. We imprisoned them. We repurposed the unfinished 'god-slaying weapons' that they forced us to forge and built our home."
"Then we did to them what they did to us." Zeus didn't elaborate, but his meaning was clear.
They enslaved the Titans and likely far more harshly than the Titans had ever treated them.
The Titans had all been turned into "energy reserves" for these ancient wizards. This made a certain kind of sense, as the floating city was originally built for the Titans.
Their power could naturally fuel the operation of the sky-city.
Ian was still stunned by this rewritten history.
He took a moment to reorganize his thoughts.
To be frank, what Zeus described was essentially the Greek myth of the Olympians overthrowing the Titans. It was just magically edited so that the Titans enslaved Zeus and the other gods, granting them overly powerful magic. However, the Titans were betrayed, overthrown, and imprisoned by their own creations.
Then, using the weapons the Titans forced them to forge and the leftover materials, these wizards built their new home: the sky-city that recently crashed.
Of course...
Even though the Titans were gone, the legend they left behind remained. Their fear of the Raven, a being even the creators of these people dreaded, was passed on to their successors.
Once Ian pieced it together, he finally understood why these people feared him so much. Sure enough, barely after Ian finished organizing the information, Zeus confirmed Ian's guess with his own actions.
"Even after they were gone, we remembered the prophecy—the Raven will one day destroy everything. So we never slacked. We studied alchemy more diligently than ever.
All to face the calamity the Raven will bring."
Some among us mastered illusion-like magics. Others mastered fate magic. With all these magics combined, we would conduct a simulation every so often.
"But without exception, we failed. Just like this time. No, in this simulation, we lost even more disastrously." Zeus's voice dimmed with despair.
"..."
Ian had guessed at some of the reasons, but he hadn't expected this. That their fear of the Raven was something they themselves had constructed and deepened through repeated simulated failures. Each failure tightened the weight already pressing on their hearts.
"So, you've never actually seen the Raven? Not even the Titans?" Ian recalled how unimpressed the Titans had been when they saw his Animagus form.
If they had really been that terrified, they would've run faster than these black-robed wizards.
After all, long legs run faster.
A colossal Titan could cover in one step what a human would need many strides to cross.
"They were exactly like that."
Zeus's expression was filled with disdain for the Titans.
"The Titan who made that prophecy was banished by the so-called Titan King. So none of the Titans had ever actually seen the Raven."
"Pathetic creatures. The one who sounded the alarm was persecuted. The prophet was exiled by the other Titans to an unknown location long before our uprising."
They believed his prophecy would destabilize their rule."
Zeus's expression became more mocking.
"And with that, they lost the only one among them who truly had wisdom. They didn't even understand what kind of being the Raven was. They only knew the name 'Raven.' They didn't even know it was a bird."
He said "bird" in a faint, dismissive tone, clearly belittling the Raven.
Zeus was deliberate.
He was using this moment to observe Ian's expression.
However, Ian showed no emotional reaction at all.
It was the raven being insulted. What did that have to do with Ian?
"You're right." Ian nodded thoughtfully. "So the Titans both feared the Raven and knew nothing about it. Truly foolish."
Zeus stared intently at Ian as if searching for a flaw. But Ian's face remained as calm as still water. Still, Zeus remained on guard.
After all, this person could genuinely transform into the Raven.
If there was corruption from the corpse, it meant that Ian already carried part of the Raven within him. He didn't know when he might be completely assimilated.
By then, disaster would inevitably strike again.
"You say you are not the Raven," Zeus said, suddenly shifting his tone. "But you indeed bring destruction."
He gestured to the ruins behind Ian.
Ian felt a twinge of embarrassment.
However, he was confident because he wasn't the one who started this.
"Destruction is the end of the old." Ian said calmly, his conscience completely untroubled. "Only after the end can there be a new beginning."
He had no intention of helping these people rebuild the sky city.
Not to mention whether he had the time.
Even more importantly, he really didn't want to.
Naturally, he shifted the responsibility away and offered a faint, perfunctory comfort.
He tried to explain the logic of "out with the old, in with the new" to these ancient wizards. But this lesson, which would become popular in later generations, clearly could not be understood by these wizards.
They were not so easily fooled.
"But our lives are just beginning, and we don't have many years," Zeus said, looking at him. His eyes showed caution and anger, yet he did not lash out. He merely stated coldly, "I have told you all I know. We do not wish to have further dealings with you. Now, allow me to take my people away."
Ian shook his head. "No, I'm the one leaving. But before I go, I have one question: Have you ever used that material to forge a Bronze Gate?"
"I still need to return to my own era. I am not lying—I truly come from the future."
His primary goal was to return to Hogwarts and continue his studies.
The air suddenly stiffened. At least, that's how Ian felt it should be.
After all, this was extremely important to him.
"Bronze Gate?" Zeus frowned.
The black-robed wizards around him began murmuring among themselves.
"You don't know?" Ian noticed their confusion.
"The Titans control the power of time, the strongest power." Zeus said slowly. "But they never truly reached the future. No one can create a gate to the future."
"Hmm?" Ian's expression was skeptical.
"Really?"
He still found it hard to believe.
"Yes." Zeus looked him in the eye, then shook his head firmly. "We have never forged such a gate. Perhaps the Titans did, though. Maybe it exists somewhere in Titan history.
"Of course, it may not exist at all. It is not a creation of our era. But, if you insist on searching for it, you can go to the Titans' original homeland."
As he spoke, Zeus handed Ian a shell, with directions marked on it.
Ian said nothing.
He knew that this was Zeus trying to quickly get rid of him… the plague-bringer.
Not out of kindness.
God only knew what might lie in the Titans' homeland.
(End of Chapter)
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