The first signs were whispers.
Not voices carried on the air, not ghosts muttering from forgotten corridors, but whispers stitched into silence itself.
The Inner Circle noticed it before anyone else. Candles flickered in the common rooms with no draft to sway them. Parchments erased themselves mid-sentence. Sometimes a word in a book twisted into something foreign, as though reality had briefly mistaken English for another tongue.
At first, Eric thought it was residue from the Paradox Engine's expansion. But the whispers grew louder.
Lisette was the first to complain.
"It's like the walls are humming," she muttered in the Map Room one evening, staring at a quill that had frozen halfway across her notes. The ink hovered in the air like black glass. "Not in sound. In… vibration. Like my bones are vibrating wrong."
Cyrus drew what he saw instead: pages of spiraling lines, jagged breaks in architecture, faces without mouths. His hands shook with each sketch, yet he couldn't stop drawing.
Regulus remained quiet, but his eyes were sharper, flicking toward empty corners, doors that had been closed seconds earlier now ajar, shadows that bent the wrong way under torchlight.
And Ailis—her connection to magical currents made her feel it most. "It's like the ley lines are… fighting themselves. Imagine two rivers colliding, not blending. It's pulling everything apart."
Eric listened to them all, and though he didn't show it, a truth settled like ice in his chest:
The Paradox wasn't a ripple.
It was a fracture.
---
The First Break
It came during breakfast.
Hogwarts was half-asleep, students yawning over pumpkin juice and buttered rolls, when the ceiling above the Great Hall cracked—not stone, but the sky itself.
The enchanted illusion tore like paper. For three breaths, everyone saw nothing but white static, as if the concept of "sky" had been deleted. Then, just as suddenly, it reset, showing sunny clouds again.
The hall erupted into screams. Plates shattered, owls shrieked, and even the professors stood in frozen disbelief.
Dumbledore rose, wand lifted, voice magnified to thunder. "Remain calm! Remain seated!"
But calm was impossible when reality itself was glitching.
Eric, seated with his Beta Architects, kept still. His mind raced, mapping probabilities. That wasn't just a visual illusion. The Hall's wards had clashed with something deeper—something rewriting the base code of magic.
Regulus leaned close. "It's starting, isn't it?"
"Yes," Eric said. "And it won't stop here."
---
The Infection Spreads
By nightfall, the castle itself was sick.
Staircases froze halfway through motion, trapping students mid-step until professors pried them free. The portraits didn't just move—they looped, repeating the same gesture endlessly until the paint itself peeled. A raven in one frame flapped its wings for hours, each stroke slower than the last, until its head melted into smear.
Even the ghosts faltered. Nearly Headless Nick appeared during dinner—only to glitch, stuttering between rooms, his head jerking back onto his shoulders and off again in maddening sequence.
"Magic is eating itself," Ailis whispered in horror.
"No," Eric corrected. His eyes gleamed with calculation. "Something else is eating it. The Originals."
---
Dumbledore's Confrontation
He expected Dumbledore to summon him, but instead, Dumbledore came to him.
The old wizard appeared at the edge of the Black Lake, where Eric had set up temporary wards to monitor the paradox flux. The lake reflected nothing—not sky, not stars, not even the moon. Just black water.
Dumbledore stood silently for a long time before speaking. "Severus," he said softly, though his eyes carried none of the gentle twinkle he was famous for. "What did you build?"
Eric didn't flinch. "A system. A blueprint strong enough to anchor the future."
Dumbledore's gaze shifted to the water, where ripples moved despite no wind. "You tore a hole, boy. Not in space, not in time, but in certainty. Hogwarts was built upon ancient convergences. When you rewrote the leyline equations… you invited something in."
Eric tilted his head. "Not invited. Awakened."
Dumbledore turned, robes sweeping the ground. "Then understand this: what is awakened does not sleep again."
For the first time, the old wizard's voice cracked—not with weakness, but with something worse. Fear.
---
The Originals Stir
The nightmares began that night.
Each Inner Circle member dreamt of a chamber they had never seen: a void of mirrors, infinite and suffocating. Within it stood figures—blurry at first, but sharpening with each repetition.
Tall. Pale. Hooded not by cloth, but by absence. Their faces were smooth planes of light, their hands elongated into branching veins of shadow.
They spoke without mouths.
We are the Architects before the Architect.
You build upon theft. You code upon error. You breathe because we allow it.
When Lisette woke, her pillow was burned with runes she had not written. Cyrus woke with ink-drenched hands, sketches of the figures etched across his arms. Ailis couldn't wake at all until Regulus slapped her hard enough to bruise.
And Eric?
He didn't dream. He heard them awake.
---
The System Shatters
The following morning, the Paradox reached its crescendo.
Students streamed into the courtyard only to find the horizon missing. Past the edge of the Black Lake, the world was simply gone—buildings cut off into white noise static, trees ending mid-branch. Birds flew into the emptiness and never returned.
Screams echoed as reality peeled away like paint scraped by invisible hands.
Hogwarts itself split. One corridor led into three different versions of itself. A tower folded in on itself like a broken chessboard. The Great Hall stretched a hundred meters too long, tables twisting into infinity.
"Control nodes—now!" Eric barked.
The Beta Architects snapped into motion, just as trained. Lisette stabilized the wards by raw instinct, forcing the castle's collapsing enchantments to hold shape. Cyrus's drawings became maps of what would break next, his ink guiding them like prophecy. Ailis pulled ley currents back into alignment with her bare will, her magic sparking like lightning through the air. Regulus managed the panic, directing terrified students into the few areas that still held.
Eric, at the center, activated Nemesis. The gauntlet flared black, chaining spell after spell into a lattice of enforcement code. He pulled equations into being, runes stacking midair like living gears.
But the more he stabilized, the harder the Originals pushed.
Child of Code, their voices thundered across the fractures. You write upon sand. We are the bedrock. Yield.
The castle groaned like a dying beast.
---
Eric's Defiance
Eric stood at the shattered courtyard, static gnawing at the edges of the world, the Originals' presence pressing into his skull like knives of ice. Students wept, professors battled shadows that weren't shadows, and reality bent in ways that defied all arithmetic.
Yet his eyes blazed with defiance.
"You were architects of survival," he hissed into the roaring void. "I am the architect of design. Survival is accident. Design is destiny."
He raised Nemesis high. Magic screamed through it, a torrent of chained spells, paradox math, blood-sealed logic.
The courtyard lit with green fire, the ground trembling as Eric forced the broken equations into coherence.
For a heartbeat, the world stilled.
The whispers cut off. The static froze. The horizon returned.
And Hogwarts stood—fractured, scarred, but still standing.
---
Aftermath
The students believed it was another battle won by the professors. Dumbledore gave no correction. The staff scrambled to patch wards and soothe panic.
But the Inner Circle knew the truth.
The Originals had not been defeated.
Only delayed.
Lisette sat in silence, her hands still glowing faintly from overuse. Ailis vomited blood behind a column, too drained to move. Cyrus stared at a final sketch—one he hadn't drawn consciously. It was of Eric, seated on the obsidian throne of Slytherin's chamber… but behind him, ten faceless figures stood, their hands on his shoulders.
And Regulus? He said nothing. But his eyes lingered on Eric longer than usual, filled not just with loyalty, but with the faintest shadow of doubt.
Eric turned from them all, watching the sky settle into false calm.
"We've forced their hand," he murmured. "The Originals won't stop now. Which means neither can we."
He clenched his fist over Nemesis.
"If they want to rewrite reality—then I'll overwrite them."
---