The siege had ended, but Hogwarts did not return to peace.
The staircases still groaned as though exhausted from battle. Classrooms whispered to themselves when empty. Doors opened into the wrong corridors, showing glimpses of other ages before snapping shut. The professors tried to explain it away with phrases like "temporal instability" and "latent castle enchantments," but the students whispered something else:
The castle was haunted.
Not by ghosts, but by ideas.
Eric Dillan sat in silence at the long worktable inside Salazar's hidden workshop. Crystals hummed faintly around him, carrying fragments of stored memory. The Inner Circle stood nearby, each in their own uneasy posture. Regulus Black leaned against the wall, arms folded tight. Lisette fiddled with her hands, transmuting coins to glass, glass to coins again, like a nervous tic. Ailis traced invisible diagrams in the air, her eyes vacant as though still listening to the ley currents. And Cyrus Dawlish… he was seated on the floor, chalk in his hand, scratching fractals across stone like a man possessed.
The storm had passed. But it had left something behind.
Eric finally spoke. His voice was calm, almost conversational—yet it cut the silence like a blade.
"They weren't trying to break the castle," he said. "They were trying to break me."
Regulus frowned. "Those… avatars, or whatever they were—copies of you—why not just strike? Why play games with shadows?"
Eric's gaze didn't leave the glowing glyphs etched into the throne. "Because they weren't attacks. They were equations. Predictive models. They're trying to simulate me—run versions of my mind until they find a weakness. The Originals don't duel. They compute."
Lisette swallowed hard. "Then if they finish their model…"
"They'll know every move I could ever make." Eric's smile was cold, almost amused. "Which means I have to become something they cannot solve."
---
The Counter-Equation
He rose and began pacing, one hand brushing along the crystal archive. Each shard flickered as though it recognized him.
"The Architect's Code was never meant to be finished," Eric said. "It's modular, flexible. A framework. But now I need something more."
He stopped, turning toward them, and in his eyes there was fire.
"I need to build a paradox."
The words sank into the chamber like lead.
"A paradox?" Ailis asked carefully.
"Yes." Eric drew a rune in the air with his fingertip—one that twisted into itself, impossible to follow. "If they want to model me, I'll give them infinite recursion. If they want to predict me, I'll give them outcomes that contradict themselves. My thoughts will be coded in lies woven into truth. I will be an equation that cannot converge."
Regulus narrowed his eyes. "And us?"
"You," Eric said softly, "will be variables within it."
---
Transformation of the Inner Circle
That night marked a change.
Lisette stopped sleeping. She began working in the workshop for hours, transmuting objects into unstable states—coins into half-glass, mirrors into liquids, fire into metal for a heartbeat before it snapped back. She was creating what Eric called decoy signatures: magical echoes designed to mimic him, confuse trackers, force the Originals to waste computation on false leads.
Cyrus changed too. Since the siege, his drawings had grown more complex, less controlled. Fractals. Spirals. Infinite branching trees. His ink now moved before his hand touched the parchment, sketching forms that looked like cracks in reality itself. One night, Eric found him standing before the wall, his hands black with ink, and on the stone was a phrase written over and over in looping scrawl:
"The Source is watching. The Source is watching. The Source is watching."
Ailis abandoned caution. Instead of stabilizing ley currents, she began deliberately destabilizing them, weaving collapse patterns that could be triggered at will. Small tests—candles that flickered into ash, puddles that boiled into steam—but each one fed into her notes: weapons of implosion.
And Regulus… he grew watchful. He saw the changes in the others, how Eric's influence was mutating them. He did not speak against it—not yet—but his silence carried weight.
The Inner Circle was no longer a group of students. They were becoming variables in a living equation.
---
The Field Test
Weeks later, Eric chose to test the Counter-Equation. Not in Hogwarts, but in the chaos of Knockturn Alley.
The night was cold, fog settling in narrow streets lined with shuttered shops. Eric walked alone, Nemesis gauntlet concealed beneath his cloak. His presence stirred whispers—The Architect's letters had reached even here.
From the shadows emerged three Ministry enforcers in dark coats, wands drawn. Their leader, a hawk-nosed witch, spoke with the clipped tone of official authority.
"Severus Snape," she said. "You are to come with us for questioning."
Eric didn't answer. His eyes studied them as if they were numbers on a board.
"Now," she pressed, stepping closer.
He smiled faintly. "You've already made a mistake."
Before they could react, he whispered a string of syllables—not Latin, not Parseltongue, but recursive logic coded into sound. Nemesis flared. The air rippled.
To the enforcers, the world twisted. Their wands felt heavier, then lighter, then not there at all. Their memories fractured: in one moment they had Eric cornered, in the next they were certain he had never been there. Each saw different versions of him—tall, short, cloaked, unarmed—none aligned.
They stumbled back, confused, eyes wide with terror.
"Report this," Eric said calmly, his voice echoing as though from several directions at once. "Tell your masters you found nothing. Because nothing is what I allowed you to see."
When the fog cleared, he was gone.
---
The Omen
Back in the workshop, the Inner Circle gathered around Cyrus. He had collapsed during the test, his body trembling, ink spilling from his hands like blood.
On the floor, drawn in frantic strokes, was a map of Hogwarts. But the castle was wrong—fractured, warped, hallways twisting into spirals. And across it, scrawled in thick black lines, one word repeated again and again:
SACRIFICE.
A chill swept the chamber.
Lisette whispered, "What does it mean?"
Eric stared at the word for a long time, then looked at each of them in turn. His face was calm, but his eyes were sharp as razors.
"It means the Counter-Equation will not be complete without loss," he said softly. "To break their system, we'll have to erase parts of ourselves. Memory. Identity. Perhaps more."
Ailis's voice trembled. "Erase?"
"Better we choose what to give," Eric replied, "than let them take what they want."
The crystals around the throne flickered, as if echoing his words.
For a moment, none of them spoke. The silence was heavy, suffocating. Each of them felt it—the path they had chosen was no longer just rebellion, no longer just vision. It was sacrifice, written into the foundation of their work.
Eric placed his hand on Nemesis, the gauntlet pulsing faintly like a living thing.
"The Originals are writing me," he said. "But I am rewriting myself. And if the price is pieces of who we are…"
He looked down at Cyrus's trembling hand, still clutching the chalk.
"…then we will pay it. Because this world will not belong to them. It will belong to us."
---
Closing Scene
Later that night, Eric stood alone at the top of the Astronomy Tower once more. The leyline orb pulsed beneath his feet, maps stretching across continents in shimmering light. London. Tokyo. The Arctic Circle. But now, amidst the patterns, new variables glimmered—chaos seeds from the Counter-Equation.
The stars overhead seemed to flicker unnaturally, as though the sky itself struggled to decide which version of reality to display.
Eric raised his hand, and the world stuttered for a heartbeat.
A paradox was born.
And far beyond the castle, in places no human eye could see, the Originals paused. For the first time, their calculations returned only error.
---