The moonlight came down cold and pale across the ground, the kind of light that illuminates without warming anything.
The birds that usually filled the night with noise had gone quiet. The whole garden was still.
Tom came out onto the terrace with a half-bottle of rum and leaned against the stone railing. He tilted the bottle back and drank a long measure without pausing.
He did not particularly like rum. It was a sailor's drink, too sweet underneath the burn. But it had been within reach, and that was enough for tonight.
"This isn't your fault, you know."
Ravenclaw's voice came through from the learning space, composed and unhurried, not pressing.
Tom exhaled and finished the rest of the bottle. "I was too occupied with other things. I let Astoria's situation drift, and I told myself there was time, that we had years before anything became critical." He set the empty bottle on the railing. "I was wrong about the rate."
The strengthening tonic had been keeping Astoria's constitution at a normal baseline, and Tom had been satisfied with that. What he had not accounted for was that the blood curse was not static. It grew alongside the vitality it consumed. The more life force it absorbed, the more capable it became of absorbing further. And because Tom's tonics had been consistently feeding Astoria's vitality above what her natural constitution would have produced, the curse had been eating well, developing ahead of the schedule her age would have suggested.
The baseline remained held. The tonic and the Elixir of Life together would prevent anything immediately fatal. But the trajectory was wrong. The curse was accelerating, and if nothing changed, Astoria would not die young, she would simply become weaker year by year, one slow diminishment at a time, until the illness that had once tortured her childhood came back and did not leave.
"Rowena. Does my approach make sense to you?"
Tom's consciousness moved into the learning space, to Ravenclaw's garden villa. He set everything else aside. This was the problem in front of him now.
The approach he had in mind was to break the blood balance. The Greengrass curse was a curse of bloodline, written into the family's magical inheritance the way a disease was written into genetics. If he could introduce a powerful magical creature bloodline into Astoria, dilute the Greengrass blood with something that carried its own strength, the curse's grip on her might weaken proportionally. If the introduced bloodline was strong enough, it might not merely weaken the curse but overwrite it from the inside.
The risk was in the fusion process itself. Blood integration that went wrong could cause a collapse reaction. And the problem with testing the approach was that he knew of only two people currently afflicted with a blood curse: Nagini and Astoria. Their conditions were entirely different from each other, which made neither one a useful control for experiments involving the other.
Every time Tom ran through it with the full force of his Myriad Thoughts ability, he found new potential failure points. Dozens of them.
Ravenclaw's eyes moved with the quality of someone running calculations that existed in no written form. After a moment she said, "I'm inclined to support the approach. But I share your concern. Killing is straightforward. Healing is not. After centuries, even the wizard who originally cast the Greengrass curse may not have understood what it would eventually become. These things develop in ways their creators never anticipate."
"So I cannot promise you this is without risk. The best way to verify it..."
She looked at him and smiled slightly, leaving the sentence unfinished. Not from reluctance, but because she knew he had already arrived at the same conclusion and did not need the words.
"I'll create a curse that behaves similarly."
Tom said it immediately, without hesitation.
It sounded extreme. Against Astoria's life and health, extreme was a reasonable cost.
They worked through the night, the two of them together in the learning space, building and stress-testing the design of an analogue curse, something that expressed the same characteristics as the Greengrass blood curse without sharing its specific origin. Two exceptional minds working on the same problem produced a pace of progress that a single person could not have matched. But they did not rush toward a conclusion. The closer they got to the final design, the more carefully they moved.
By the time grey light was showing through the windows, Tom withdrew from the learning space, made several consecutive Apparitions, and arrived at the Reichstag in Berlin.
The grand chamber was empty. All the usual attendants had been cleared out. Grindelwald sat alone at the podium, looking out at the rows of vacant seats in the hall below, somewhere else in his thoughts entirely. Remembering people, most likely. The room had the quality of places that have held crowds and now held only their absence.
He came back to himself when Tom appeared, looked at the boy, and immediately registered that something was off.
"Trouble?"
"More or less." Tom did not deny it. He laid out Astoria's situation and the blood curse's progression.
Grindelwald listened through to the end, then nodded slowly. "You have time. Don't lose your patience over it. The worst mistakes I made early on came from forcing timelines that needed to breathe. I wasted years on detours that discipline would have prevented."