Eight years old and the world felt suddenly very small.
I had been collecting advantages like a miser collects coins — rites, relics, runes, knowledge — each acquisition a deliberate incision in fate. Now the System offered me the final instrument of command: an Elder Wand, not the battered original that history fretted over, but a perfected artifact forged by whatever hungry intelligence ran the shop.
Its description pulsed in my mind like an instruction:
The Elder Wand — the most powerful wand. This wand is completely loyal to the host and will never betray them. Increases the user's magic control by 500% and increases the user's magical output and power by 800%.Cost: 5,000 System Points.
Too much, and not enough. Of course it was overpowered. That was the point. Power is currency; currency buys inevitability.
I purchased it without hesitation.
When the wand materialised in my hand, it did not feel like a hunk of wood and magic. It felt like a part of the wind itself — a spine of force that read my thoughts and answered before I finished them. The world reordered under that sensation. When I flexed my fingers, a low hum crept through me, as if my bones had learned to sing.
Grindelwald watched the moment I opened my palm. He did not smile in the vulgar way of a man impressed by toys. He studied the wand the way a collector studies a perfect blade — with the recognition of consequence.
"You have taken a dangerous thing," he observed quietly. "Power tempts the brief and tests the patient."
"Power is a tool," I replied. My voice sounded small against stone, but my thought was anything but. "A tool to be used with precision."
The Elder Wand fit into the calculus I had been building. With the Resurrection Stone in my possession, the Palantír filling my eyes, necromancy and alchemy singing at the edges of my mind, and now a wand that multiplied my control, the scaffolding of a new order began to look inevitable rather than hopeful.
Two of the Hallows lay in my hands — or in Grindelwald's laboratories — and their meanings had shifted from mythology to machinery. The Resurrection Stone had returned pieces of a soul; the Elder Wand promised to make those pieces obey with absolute fidelity. The Deathly trinity was no longer a tale to frighten children. It was an architecture I could exploit.
There was one restraint I did not discard: Grindelwald. He had become more than a mentor; he was an anchor — an adoptive father who had given me the first shelter I'd ever known. He loved Dumbledore in ways that history had softened or derided, and I — rational, pragmatic, fused with Riddle's old ambitions — had decided not to remove Dumbledore simply to satisfy the calculus of rivalry. Grindelwald's affection was a lever I had no wish to break. For now, Dumbledore would remain an enemy to outthink, not an immediate victim to be removed.
After the wand, I spent more points where craft and permanence mattered.
Nicholas Flamel's alchemical corpus slid into my mind for 2,500 points. Alchemy was subtler than necromancy and more patient than curses — a discipline that turned time and principle into artifacts. I absorbed his methods: the gradations of transmutation, the precise tempering required to give an object permanent enchantments, the strange chemistry that made the Philosopher's Stone possible. The recipe was less myth and more careful process: heat, rare salts, a patient hand, and a geometry of intention that bound matter to will.
The knowledge reframed everything. With Flamel's techniques I could refine Horcrux work, stabilize artifacts with permanence that even the Ministry might not detect, and craft wards and trinkets that would do the quiet work of empire — lockboxes that whispered loyalty, coins that carried sigils of obedience, charms that bent the market to my touch. If I could reproduce the method of the Stone, I could manufacture advantage in ways that money alone could not buy.
Dumbledore would hate what I had learned. He had always treated the Stone and alchemical inquiry as moral problems; now they were nothing but instruments of leverage.
When I tested the Elder Wand that night, the difference was not theatrical — it was surgically efficient. A single motion with the wand formed nine spells in quick succession: defensive shields, silent bindings, a pair of shifting transfigurations that would have taken anyone else minutes to shape. The wand obeyed instinct. My control — magnified by the System's promise — translated thought to effect with a latency that felt like cheating.
Grindelwald only nodded once, the faint lift of a man who had seen many things and approved of the one who could make them happen. "Control is the blade," he murmured. "Do not let it become your crown."
I understood. Crowns break heads. Blades are kept sharp.
That night I returned to the Palantír to test the new reach of my sight. I watched brick and mortar fold into founding days. I watched Salazar Slytherin set his first wards into stone and whisper secret runes that had been lost in other centuries. I found small clues in the archived shadows of Hogwarts — hidden sigils, barely-thought spells, defensive architectures no living archivist could have reconstructed from memory alone. The wand's presence in my hand made the visions sharper; the Elder Wand seemed to resonate with the older magics as if to say: finally, something old enough to understand you.
Plans multiplied in my head like seeds in fertile soil:
• Use Flamel's craft to stabilize artifacts and produce wards that cannot be easily brute-forced.• Bond the Elder Wand to my will with rituals Grindelwald taught and the System amplified, so no rival could claim it.• Continue to accrue points for the Resurrection Token — Lily Evans was still a calculation away. Reanimating her could bring Snape back wholly, but only at an obscene price. Patience and profit would buy it.• Begin subtle influence in England through puppets and coin, using Regulus and other resurrected assets to unlock the Black fortune and funnel resources into the Alliance.
The child's body beneath my skin still needed milk and sleep, and the world still expected cute mischief from me. Let them. Let the Ministry and Dumbledore look after the trivialities of childhood. I would be a schoolboy by day and an architect of inevitability by night.
I closed my eyes and felt the Elder Wand hum like a living thing. Power had a scent now — iron and cold oak, the taste of a promise hung between the teeth.
I had everything I needed to begin shaping history in earnest.
But first: patience. Time was an ally I had learned to bargain with. I would wait until my magic peaked, until my strategies matured and the House of Cards I built could not be toppled by a single blown breath.
For now, I sat very still and planned the next move — a child with a wand that could bring the sky itself to heel, a mentor who loved an enemy I would not touch, and a system that bought me the keys to the future.
When I finally stood, the wind outside the window sounded like a summons. The world was listening.