The faint candlelight flickered atop the melted wax, its reddish flame eating away at the darkness and cutting the night into fragmented patterns of light and shadow.
William lay wrapped in his blanket, facing the wall, quietly asleep.
"Aren't you going back to your room?" Dawn asked, tilting his head.
Harris was laying out a makeshift bed on the floor while watching Dawn warily. He answered firmly, "I'm sleeping here tonight!"
"…Fine."
Dawn gave a small tug at the corner of his mouth and shrugged indifferently.
He dragged a table into the center of the room, facing William's bed, downed a bottle of invigorating potion, and prepared to spend the night reading.
Even though he had caught a glimpse of Anubis's shadow in the bookstore, this curse was clearly more closely tied to dreams.
Just in case, Dawn decided to cut his sleep time down as much as possible.
He opened the book with its dim, yellowed pages and studied the text in the candlelight. For a moment, he felt as though it had been a long time since he'd sat down quietly to read.
He had just read [Egyptian Language Translation: English Edition] the previous night, yet the feeling now was entirely different.
He spaced out briefly, then forced himself to focus on the book again.
The first case on the opening page described a curse known as the Thirst Curse.
[In 1824, a team of curse-breakers discovered a hidden chamber paved with yellow sand behind the Queen's Burial Chamber in the Pyramid of Khufu.]
[Inside, they unearthed a two-meter-tall statue of Set, cast entirely in gold.]
[Undoubtedly, it was an object of tremendous value.]
[But after moving the statue, the curse attached itself to the curse-breakers and was carried out of the pyramid with them.]
[From the early hours of that very night, everyone who had entered that chamber began to display the same symptoms—they became severely dehydrated.]
[The first to die was a forty-year-old wizard. After finishing work, he went to a bar and drank himself into oblivion, missing his body's warning signs.]
[By the time the Ministry of Magic realized what was happening, identified the curse, and assembled curse-breakers for treatment, he had already died in his sleep, his body transformed into a shriveled, mummified corpse.]
[For the survivors, the first treatment prescribed by healers was massive rehydration.]
[They made the curse-breakers drink large amounts of pure water without pause. When that failed, they submerged them completely in water for twenty-four hours.]
[Unfortunately, all they retrieved were more corpses—those same people died of thirst while immersed in water.]
[In the end, when the ten-person team had been reduced to only two survivors, the healers, prompted by clues from the statue of Set, tried burying the curse-breakers beneath the sand.]
[Only then was the curse finally lifted.]
Dawn rubbed the rough surface of the paper.
Set, one of the nine principal gods of Egypt, ruled over the desert. He was often depicted with a jackal's head, rectangular ears, and a long, curved snout.
Since Anubis had appeared in his dreams, Dawn had grown sensitive to any mention of other Egyptian deities.
He began to suspect that his own curse and the Thirst Curse were of the same kind—both tied to divine forces.
But if the Thirst Curse required burial in sand to appease Set, would that mean his curse could only be broken by a death-related ritual involving Anubis?
Dawn clicked his tongue softly and turned the page.
He had to admit, although Egypt had little habitable land, the number of curses here was overwhelming.
Beyond the curse Harris had mentioned—the one where blood turned into worms—there were others as well: aging dust, interrogating heads that demanded exact answers, and doors that killed at a touch.
The more Dawn read, the worse his mood became.
He realized that the wizarding world's methods for treating curses were almost entirely symptom-based.
Dehydration was treated with water. Blood loss was treated with blood replenishment. If bones disappeared, they used copious amounts of Skele-Gro.
Even when a cure was achieved, it often happened by accident, like with the Thirst Curse. There were almost no treatments that targeted the curse itself.
And in most cases, the best outcome was to keep the cursed individual barely alive.
For example, the curse brought on by drinking unicorn blood. It made the drinker's blood corrosive and their flesh rot away. The treatment listed in the book consisted of just one line: bloodletting and regular doses of healing potions.
Dawn had to admit, finding a way to truly cure his own curse might be extremely difficult, especially since he hadn't even experienced any symptoms yet.
He turned his head slightly and glanced at Harris, who lay frowning in his bed, half-asleep or pretending to be. After a moment, Dawn looked away again.
He had no intention of pinning his hopes entirely on the elusive and dangerous scarab beetle.
He narrowed his eyes. He wanted to find his own way out.
First, he needed to understand what a curse truly was.
Judging by its persistent effects, Dawn believed curses were closely tied to natural magic.
Rather than classifying curses as dark magic, perhaps it was more accurate to place them under ritual magic.
Whether it was entering a hidden chamber in a pyramid, drinking unicorn blood, or accepting the position of Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts, all of these actions seemed to fulfill ritualistic conditions that triggered the effects of natural magic.
But then another question arose.
To Dawn, a complete curse consisted of two parts: the establishment of the curse and its triggering.
The triggering part was obvious.
But when a wizard created a curse, how exactly did they get natural magic to respond to the ritual they set?
Dawn puzzled over this and couldn't find an answer.
He had to admit, part of him wanted to talk to Tom Riddle.
In matters of curses, Voldemort's knowledge likely surpassed even Dumbledore's.
But whatever the case, Dawn was certain of one thing:
A curse was a kind of magic.
And like all magic, it had to function through changes in patterns.
He recalled the markings he had observed within himself after dreaming of Anubis.
Because the curse had not yet caused any real harm to him, he hadn't noticed any changes in those markings.
But that didn't prove the curse hadn't altered anything—because those patterns didn't exist only on a wizard's body.
If the concentration of natural magic in the environment were high enough, Dawn believed he would see dense, floating magical patterns all around the world.
Perhaps, before the curse affected him directly, it had already altered certain properties of the world around him.
Dawn stared into the empty space in front of him, his pupils unfocused.
Unfortunately, even though magic could cling to objects, it dispersed quickly when released, making it difficult to observe the world's patterns clearly.
Finding the specific alteration in that tangled web would be even harder.
Frustrated, Dawn rubbed his temples. When he lifted his head, through the hazy candlelight, he saw the peaceful face of the sleeping boy.
A thought he had set aside earlier rose again.
If he couldn't solve the curse quickly, perhaps he could try another approach.
What if he simply endured it?
Dawn stroked his chin.
If a phoenix—creatures known for their rebirth—were afflicted with his curse, would it die?
He thought not.
Throughout thousands of years of magical history, there had never been a single recorded case of a phoenix dying.
They were described in every account as immortal magical beings.
So, if before the curse could harm him, he managed to reshape the patterns within himself and harness natural magic to gain the phoenix's regenerative ability, wouldn't that also count as a way to break the curse?
Dawn's eyes grew thoughtful.
It would be difficult, but compared to chasing after the mythical scarab, this path seemed far more tangible.
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