"The Muggles believe the world is solid. They map the surface and claim they know the shape of the earth. They do not understand that the earth has lungs, and that it breathes."— From 'Geomancy and the Ley-Structure', Author Unknown.
July 1961, Grimmauld Place, London, England
Vega Black was four years old, and he was having an existential crisis in the Chart Room.
He stood on a velvet stool, his small hands gripping the edge of a table that was wider than his entire nursery. In his previous life, he had known geography. He knew what a map looked like. He knew the borders of nations, the blue of the oceans, the jagged lines of mountain ranges. He knew the world was a sphere of rock and water governed by gravity and politics.
But the map in front of him was destroying everything he thought he knew about reality.
"It's... layered," Vega whispered, his grey eyes wide, shifting slightly in hue as his brain tried to process the visual data.
"It is folded," Arcturus corrected from his armchair, where he was slowly peeling an orange with a silver knife. "Look closer, boy. Forget what you think a map is."
Vega leaned in.
The parchment on the table wasn't paper. It was a thin, stretched membrane, like dragon skin, hovering slightly above the wood. On the surface, it showed the world he remembered—Europe, the Americas, Asia.
But beneath that surface, glowing in faint, pulsating veins of gold and violet, was a second world.
"The Muggles live on the crust," Arcturus explained, his voice low and lecturing. "They build their cities on the skin of the world. They drill for oil, they pave roads, they fly their metal birds through the lower atmosphere. They see length, width, and height."
Arcturus waved his hand. The map sank.
The familiar shapes of France and Germany faded, replaced by swirling vortexes and currents of light that ignored national borders entirely.
"We live in the marrow," Arcturus said. "We occupy the spaces they cannot perceive. The pockets. The folds."
Vega watched, mesmerized.
He saw a glowing node in the Scottish Highlands, Hogwarts, he assumed, but he saw lines radiating from it that connected to stone circles in Ireland, to a deep trench in the North Sea, and to a blindingly bright point in the Ural Mountains.
He saw a massive, purple bruise covering the entirety of the Amazon Rainforest. It wasn't static; it was moving, like a living cloud.
"What is that?" Vega asked, pointing to the Amazon.
"Migration patterns," Arcturus said casually. "Thunderbirds. They ride the magical storms. To a Muggle, that is just a hurricane season. To us, it is a breeding ground."
Vega felt a shiver of pure, unadulterated awe.
In his old life, dragons and thunderbirds were myths. They were stories told to children. Here, they were meteorology. They were biology.
He looked at the Atlantic Ocean. In his memory, it was just water. Deep, cold, empty water.
On this map, the Atlantic was a busy highway. He saw currents of blue light—The Deep Roads—crisscrossing the ocean floor. He saw a cluster of lights in the middle of the void, pulsing like a heartbeat.
"Atlantis?" Vega breathed, the word tasting of salt and impossibility.
"The Sunken Archive," Arcturus corrected, though he looked pleased by the boy's guess. "It is not a ruin, Vega. It is a city protected by a bubble of compressed magic. The pressure there would crush a Muggle submarine like a tin can. But a wizard with the right blood-keys can walk its streets."
Vega sat back on his heels, his mind reeling.
He had spent the last year thinking of magic as "spells." Tools. Weapons.
But this... this was an ecosystem.
"It's all real," Vega whispered, half to himself. "Everything. The myths. The monsters. It's all just... biology we hid."
"Physics we mastered," Arcturus amended. "Muggles study the laws of the universe so they can obey them. We study the laws so we can negotiate with them."
The Patriarch stood up and walked to the window. He pulled back the heavy drapes. Outside, the Muggle street of Grimmauld Place was grey and rainy. A black taxi cab drove past. A woman walked a dog. It looked so mundane. So boring.
"Look at them," Arcturus said softly. "They walk past this house every day. They do not see it. They look at the space between number 11 and number 13, and their minds simply slide off. We exist in the blind spot of their reality."
He turned back to Vega.
"That is the inheritance of the House of Black, Vega. Not just gold. Not just influence. But awareness. You are one of the few beings on this planet with eyes that actually see."
Vega looked from the window to the map. The contrast was dizzying. Out there, people worried about taxes and traffic. In here, his grandfather was discussing the migration patterns of storms and the politics of underwater cities.
He felt a sudden, fierce protectiveness over this secret world. It was terrifying, yes. The magic was heavy and dangerous. But it was also wondrous.
He looked at his own hands. He willed his index finger to change.
It didn't just change shape. He felt the cells vibrating, the ancient, dormant code in his DNA responding to his command. His finger lengthened, the skin turning into the rough, scaled texture of a reptile, before shifting back to smooth human skin.
He wasn't human. Not really. Not anymore.
He was a creature of the Map.
"Grandfather," Vega said, his voice steady despite the racing of his heart. "Are there others? Like the Archive?"
Arcturus smiled, a rare, genuine expression that cracked his stony face.
"Thousands," the old man said. "There are libraries carved into the ice of Antarctica that hold spells to freeze time. There are temples floating in the static of the Sahara clouds. There are markets in Tokyo that only open during the split second of an earthquake."
Arcturus walked back to the table and tapped the map. The lights glowed brighter, illuminating the hidden world in all its terrifying glory.
"The world is vast, Vega. And you have an eternity to explore it."
Vega touched the glowing line of a ley current. He felt a hum in his fingertips—the pulse of the planet.
He didn't know the future. He didn't know about Dark Lords or Boy Heroes or Prophecies. He only knew that the world he had left behind was a flat, grey sketch, and this world was a masterpiece painted in fire and blood.
And he wanted to see it all.
"Teach me," Vega said, his grey eyes burning with a hunger that had nothing to do with food. "Teach me how to navigate."
Arcturus nodded, satisfied.
"Lesson one," the Patriarch said, closing the distance between them. "Never trust a map drawn by a man who cannot fly."