There are nights that refuse to end, their echoes rippling through history long after the stars themselves have shifted.
The night Hogwarts cracked open was one of them.
The Silence After
The castle bled silence.
Charred stone walls glimmered faintly where arcane fire had bitten too deep. The air reeked of ozone, scorched blood, and something older—like parchment burning in a library no one remembered. Portraits whispered nervously, their painted mouths unable to reconcile what they had seen: students wielding weapons no Hogwarts child should command, professors trading spells with shadows that seemed to rewrite the rules of magic.
The Astronomy Tower was blackened at the edges, as though reality itself had blistered there. The floor still trembled, faintly, with the memory of resonance signals.
Inside the Great Hall, cots had been transfigured from long tables. The wounded groaned softly; House-elves scurried with poultices and phoenix ash. Yet even among the half-healed, eyes shifted constantly to the high table—searching for answers in faces that held none.
Whispers of the Architect
The war had lasted less than three hours. It felt like an eternity.
And yet… the students whispered of Eric.
Some called him "the phantom who fought professors like equals." Others swore they had seen him bend wards with a gesture, his gauntlet Nemesis crackling like living thunder. In the retellings, his name fractured: Severus, Eric, Snape, the Architect.
No one knew which was true. No one dared ask directly.
In the shadows of the Hospital Wing, Regulus Black moved silently, intercepting gossip, filtering information, funneling it back to Eric. Lisette kept her head bowed, helping with the wounded, her telepathic gift nudging fear toward reverence. Cyrus sketched battle afterimages in ink that refused to dry, the strokes whispering warnings of futures not yet born. Ailis stood watch over leyline fluctuations, eyes burning with knowledge no child should bear.
They were students only in name now.
They were Beta Architects in truth.
The Professors' Reckoning
McGonagall's voice broke first in the staff meeting.
"This was not a duel," she said, her Scottish burr trembling. "It was a rehearsal. Someone—something—is engineering a war beneath our roof."
Flitwick, normally so precise, looked years older. "I measured the counter-wards personally. Rowena's protections should not break. And yet that boy—"
"Not a boy," murmured Slughorn, his voice soaked in dread. "An operator. A strategist. If what I saw is true, then Severus Snape is no longer Severus Snape."
At the head of the table, Dumbledore sat motionless. His hands were steepled; his blue eyes clouded not with confusion, but calculation.
When at last he spoke, the words chilled the room.
"We stand at the threshold of an equation greater than Grindelwald. If we fail to solve it, it will solve us."
Beyond Britain
News traveled faster than Floo powder.
In Paris, the French Ministry convened in its glass chamber. The air buzzed with enchantments designed to ward off lies, yet even truth felt insufficient.
"A magical satellite projected leyline schematics across continents," one official whispered. "If the British boy controls such instruments, he could destabilize our Veil-bound reserves."
Durmstrang's headmaster received a sealed note carried by raven. He read it once, then burned it. The words still echoed in his skull: Integration precedes domination.
He muttered to himself: "This is no British matter. This is continental."
In New York, across the marble floors of MACUSA, an Auror captain slammed a report on the desk of Madam President.
"Teenager or not, the Architect's doctrine is circulating on our streets. If our people believe in his philosophy before our government even responds…"
Her reply was ice: "Then perhaps we are already too late."
Whispers spread across the wizarding world. A prophet. A warlord. A phantom genius.
No one could agree on who the Architect was.
But no one denied he existed.
The Architect Himself
Eric watched the ripples with calm detachment.
He stood in the chamber beneath Hogwarts, where Slytherin's workshop pulsed faintly with his blood-coded signature. The green crystal walls reflected his face—yet the reflection was beginning to betray him.
His eyes burned faintly violet at the edges now, where logic-runes bled into iris. Veins at his wrists glowed intermittently like conduits. Every use of Nemesis deepened the corruption. Every sleepless night coding doctrine into spell-logic pushed him further from humanity.
He did not care.
Pain was irrelevant. Flesh was scaffolding. Only the Code endured.
The Beta Architects assembled before him. Regulus bowed his head, silent but certain. Lisette's telepathic hum steadied the group. Cyrus laid his sketches at Eric's feet—spirals of blood and flame intersecting leyline maps. Ailis spoke softly, her voice threaded with fear.
"They will come for us. Professors, Aurors… maybe even Dumbledore himself."
Eric stepped closer, gauntlet whispering static against the stone. His smile was carved from ice.
"Then let them come. For each move they make, we will already have written the counter-equation."
Invasive Equations
He revealed them that night.
A sequence of logic runes stitched with living ink, designed not to break wards but to colonize them. Unlike brute-force spells, these equations infected protections, rewriting them line by line until they obeyed new commands.
A shield would become a prison.
A barrier would open only for those Eric named.
A killing curse could be trapped, folded, and redirected back to the caster.
Lisette shuddered as she touched the parchment. "It feels alive."
Eric corrected her without hesitation.
"It is alive. These equations will spread through wards like a parasite. And once embedded, no government will remove them without tearing down their own defenses entirely."
A weapon that turned enemies' strength into dependence.
A doctrine not of destruction, but of inevitable submission.
Hogwarts Uneasy
Aboveground, the castle stirred restlessly.
Students tiptoed through corridors that hummed faintly with aftershocks. Ghosts whispered prophecies they would not remember in daylight. Even Peeves the Poltergeist vanished, unsettled by a mischief greater than his own.
Some students wrote Eric's symbols on parchment and hid them under pillows, believing them protective. Others avoided his name entirely, as though speaking it would summon catastrophe.
The castle itself seemed to bend toward him.
Dumbledore's Counter-Move
Albus Dumbledore appeared, unannounced, in the chamber of the Wizengamot. His beard was unkempt, his eyes dimmed, but his voice carried iron.
"The Architect is not merely a threat to Hogwarts," he declared. "He is an infection of thought. He offers order in a world that fears chaos. That is why he will succeed—unless we act."
Murmurs filled the chamber. Some elders nodded gravely. Others hesitated.
One voice rose above the rest: "And if we cannot stop him?"
Dumbledore's reply was quiet.
"Then we must survive long enough to guide what he builds. For if the boy writes the future, someone must teach him mercy."
Project: Leviathan
Far beneath Hogwarts, Eric began sketching something beyond even the Invasive Equations.
A colossal diagram sprawled across crystal floor and wall—circles within circles, mirrored leyline maps, overlapping resonance codes.
At its heart: a vast, serpentine engine coiled in runes of binding. A design that could merge magical ley currents with planetary energy itself.
He named it simply: Project: Leviathan.
Regulus watched the schematics with something between awe and terror.
"What does it do?"
Eric's gaze did not shift from the glowing lines.
"It makes the world breathe according to my rhythm."
Echoes Beyond
On a mist-laden morning weeks later, a fisherman in the North Sea swore the water beneath his boat pulsed like a living lung.
In Tokyo, leyline sensors flickered erratically, as if someone had pressed a new equation into the earth itself.
In Cairo, ancient wards on the pyramids whispered, not in their builders' voices, but in a rhythm eerily similar to Eric's doctrine.
The world was already changing.
The Prophecy
And one night, as storms coiled over Britain, the seers of three continents woke screaming at once.
Their prophecies bled together into one whispered echo, carried across dream and distance:
"A child of no bloodline will write the dominion of all.
He will build a throne not of gold, but of equations.
And when the world kneels, it will not be in chains—
But in perfect, chosen order.
Beware the Leviathan.
Beware the Architect."
The words lingered in the silence that followed, like the toll of a bell no one could unhear.
And in the chamber below Hogwarts, Eric Dillan—wearing Snape's face, and more than Snape's mind—looked up from his schematics with a faint smile.
He did not hear the prophecy.
He was already writing it.
---