The gloomy cavern’s stagnant air smelled of peat and sea salt. Lichen clung stubbornly to damp stones at the threshold.

  Bloody hell, smells like a marmite distillery.

  Harry’s wand shot from its holster. He aimed his holly death stick at his own face and cast the bubble-head charm. A bubble formed at the tip, then floated forward and wrapped around his lower face.

  Sweet relief.

  Deeper in, dust and sediment lay undisturbed. Harry strode to the heart of the chamber, wandlight flickering across the rune-etched flagstone walls. The chiselled glyphs were unfamiliar at first glance, their edges worn smooth. Yet, even eroded by time, the enchantments still thrummed.

  Harry crouched low over a recently disturbed section of the floor to better inspect the patterns.

  This site had sparked decades of debate from the time of its discovery back in the 70s.

  Some claimed it was a ritual site, others an observatory. A few fringe theorists insisted it was tied to chronomancy.

  Luna, of course, suspected the Rotfang Conspiracy.

  The lack of a central control matrix or physical artefacts left the question open-ended to this day.

  New information had been uncovered, and Kingsley was adamant Harry be the one to have the win. Good PR for the administration.

  Ah well, best do my bit for Queen and country. Tally-ho and all that rot.

  The side chamber had been discovered weeks ago, after a local muggle wandered in. His foot passed through what had seemed to be solid ground, revealing the hidden array beneath.

  Naturally, the poor sod was obliviated with great enthusiasm. His contribution, while appreciated, would go uncredited.

  Whatever he’d stumbled upon could well settle the debate. Though more likely it would instead sprout a few more.

  Either way, he predicted yet another headache.

  I can already see the Daily Prophet's headline—

  "HARRY POTTER: THE BOY-WHO-LIVED, THE-MAN-WHO-CONQUERED, DARLING OF WIZARDING BRITAIN, EVERY MAN'S ENVY, EVERY WOMAN'S DESIRE SOLVES AN ANCIENT MYSTERY. ONE THAT HAS LEFT EXPERTS BAFFLED FOR DECADES."

  Harry paused, considering.

  Bit of a mouthful, innit?

  Snorting, he got back to it. Tracing his wand tip over the nearest rune, he began the laborious process of decoding the entire ward matrix.

  With Kingsley pulling strings, the ICW Institute of Arcane Antiquities had tasked him with surveying the chamber’s layout, analyzing the wards, and recovering any artefacts for proper cataloguing.

  He finished mapping the inlaid enchantments, noting the consistency with multi-layered concealment charms. Seemed they’d relied more on powerful Notice-Me-Nots and perception filters, rather than direct curses or aggressive deterrents.

  Should just be a tidy bit of work, then.

  Tapping his wand against a spiral glyph at the heart of the array, a pulse of blue light rippled outward, illuminating sigils hidden beneath the grime.

  And just like that, the chamber responded.

  Well, that was easy.

  He definitely did not just jinx himself.

  Shifting stone rippled beneath his boots, like the turning of a lock.

  There was no flicker of warning or defensive flare from the wards. They did not reject him. The chamber recognized him.

  It welcomed him, as though he had been the key.

  Harry’s Potter Sense flared.

  This wasn’t an accident or a forgotten enchantment activating by chance.

  It had reacted to him.

  A whisper of magic brushed against his skin, weightless but inescapable.

  Something watching.

  Waiting.

  Beckoning.

  He calmed himself. Mysterious death chambers were old hat by now. It’d take more than a whiff of dodgy ancient magic to rattle him at this point.

  Whatever was about to happen had already been set it in motion.

  Seems the welcome mat’s been rolled out. Suppose it’d be rude not to oblige.

  · · ·

  The chamber lay exposed before him, uncomfortably inviting.

  It had been sealed for untold centuries, yet nothing showed any time had passed since its sealing. There was no erosion, no settling, no accumulation.

  Like it was outside of time.

  This might be one for the Unspeakables.

  Even the most perfectly preserved sites carried some signs of time's passage. A skiff of dust, a subtle scent of decay in the air, or moisture clinging to the stones. Here, there was none of that.

  No sign that a single thing had changed.

  Could change.

  Glyphs covered every centimetre of the walls, layered so densely they seemed to shift and writhe under his gaze. They twisted in ways that made his skull ache.

  This was far more than a simple warding array. It was a system whose complexity eclipsed any he’d ever heard of.

  That’ll stick a spot of starch in the Philologists’ trousers.

  Harry peered at a particular cluster, some of the runes were recognizable to his practised eye. Archaic forms of dagaz, gebo, and…

  Bloody hell, they really are moving. It’ll take ages just to untangle this mess.

  Deeming it a bad job, Harry stepped away and scanned the chamber, taking stock.

  Pedestals displayed pristine artefacts and gleaming jewellery. A stack of gold coins stood in a corner. A shelf lined with tomes, their spines uncracked, lined a sole bookshelf.

  At the centre of it all, resting atop a carved plinth, was a tattered book. It was in a bad way. The binding was straining to hold the whole thing together. Pages appeared to have been torn out.

  Harry swept his wand in one looping twirl after another, charm after charm pinging through the room.

  Minutes passed.

  Nothing happened in response to his foolish wand-waving.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Maybe Snape had been right. He looked a madman, conducting an invisible orchestra with dramatic flourishes of his baton.

  The eerie chamber that opened for me conveniently has no curses or signs of magic within. Brilliant.

  Harry reached to his waist, pulling a quill and parchment from his mokeskin pouch. The quill came to life and it and the parchment started to float behind Harry like an assistant as he approached the nearest artefacts.

  Squatting down, Harry withdrew a piece of chalk and drew a series of concentric circles. He then carefully scrawled Elder Futhark around the circumference of each layer, leaving the centre unmarked.

  Magic circle ready to analyze, he looked around at the roomful of items needing cataloguing.

  Right, best get on with it, then.

  Time blurred by as Harry meticulously checked each item for curses and then placed them one by one into the magic circle. The scratching of quill on parchment filled the silence as the enchanted device played stenographer for the site report.

  He ended with the dragon leather-bound book, its faded embossing both familiar and unexpected. The flaking gold illustrated a vertical line, within a circle, within a triangle.

  The Deathly Hallows.

  Odd coincidence, that. Could it have been the Hallows that keyed me in to the chamber?

  He currently possessed all three. It was his interest in them, along with the thrill of the Horcrux hunt, that pushed Harry into the Arcanist life to begin with.

  He’d be taking his time with this one.

  Carefully thumbing it open to the first page, Old Ogham greeted him.

  Guess I’ll need a dictionary for this one.

  Finally finished with the slog, Harry stood, stretching his arms overhead to work out the kinks in his back.

  The light played off the wristwatch Molly had gifted him years ago, a memento of simpler days.

  I’ve barely seen any of the old lot in years. Have I become a workaholic?

  His brow furrowed as he glanced down at it.

  Not even noon.

  That couldn’t be right. It had to be well into the evening by now. Looking closer, he noticed the hands weren’t moving.

  I’ll have to have it looked at.

  Satisfied that the job was done, he swept everything into his pouch. He’d need to swing by to drop off his report and the items for curation tomorrow, but for tonight, it was time to grab a bite, a pint, and a bed.

  As he departed the chamber, he considered how best to preserve the site from more curious muggles wandering in.

  Suppose the wards have done well enough in hiding the place.

  Harry placed the tip of his wand on the central motif once again, pulsing a standard activation charm.

  Then something unexpected happened.

  Rather than simply reverting to being hidden, the wall flared and glowing wards sank into it, stone rippling like water.

  Glancing down at the array, it too was reacting. It began to unravel before his eyes, individual runes rising like wisps before disappearing into the air.

  He reached forward, his fingers curling through empty space.

  The runes were gone, as if they’d never been carved at all.

  Unusual.

  A soft tick. He looked down at his watch. It was moving again.

  The hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

  He turned sharply, a sense of wrongness clenching in his chest. The cavern had changed.

  The entrance that had been open for decades was sealed.

  That was enough to finally rattle his composure. He took a slow step forward, wandlight intensifying, breath rapid.

  The passage was still there, but not as he had left it. The stone was unbroken, smooth, untouched.

  As if it had never before been opened.

  Moving closer to the exit, he ran his free hand over the boulders blocking his way. The entrance had been wide open earlier. The cavern had somehow resealed itself.

  Take a breath, calm down, and analyze the situation.

  This wasn’t impossible. Some sites did revert to their original state when certain wards were triggered. And the disappearing wards certainly had been out of the ordinary, perhaps that was it.

  He exhaled slowly, forcing himself to stay rational.

  Right, let’s start by getting out of here.

  He stepped back before sweeping his wand in a set of motions he’d learned the same day he’d first taken on a full sized mountain troll.

  Swish and flick.

  A Large stone lifted at his command, the rubble shifting without resistance as he levitated it away from the exit. Dust plumed into the air, the loose rocks tumbling aside.

  With a final glance at the cavern behind him, he stepped forward and emerged into the centre of the Ring of Brodgar.

  The towering stones stood in their usual formations. The air was crisp and tinged with the expected scent of salt and damp earth. A slow-moving sky stretched out above, overcast and grey.

  This was Orkney. Remote, windswept, and largely untouched.

  But something felt off.

  This day had brought far too many oddities.

  He took a steadying breath and surveyed the area once more.

  Nothing to do about it now. I’ll deal with this unwanted mystery after a good night’s rest.

  Then, with a turn on his heel, the air twisted.

  He was gone, the departing crack swallowed by the wind.

  · · ·

  The moment Harry’s boots touched the floor, he knew something was off.

  Grimmauld Place was warded more thoroughly than a Gringotts’ vault. The entry hall, the one space where Apparition and Floo travel were permitted, was of his own design. A compromise between security and practicality.

  It should have been exactly as he left it.

  It wasn’t.

  His wand was in his fingers before he’d consciously drawn it. His mind traced the shape of the room, eyes scanning for discrepancies.

  The layout was the same. The space itself hadn’t changed.

  But the details were all wrong.

  Gone were the subtle, personal touches. The small items from his travels he’d taken a shine to, an ever-growing stack of books leaning haphazardly on the side table, the painting of Avalon’s Lake he’d picked up in Tintagel.

  His breath escaped him in a quiet exhale.

  Gilded moulding curled along the ceiling, serpents coiled in endless knots. The wallpaper was nearly black, its baroque vines threaded with skulls small enough to miss at a glance.

  Where his coat stand should’ve been, an ebony table stood on clawed feet, topped with a silver bowl filled with river stones, polished smooth.

  Did George bribe the house elves again… This is a bit much, isn't it?

  This was not the home he had built over years of restoration and stubborn refusal to let the past define the space.

  He turned slowly, taking it in, fingers drumming once against the wood of his wand.

  This was too much, even for George.

  Someone had wiped his presence from the house and replaced it with the epitome of a Pureblood manor.

  He stepped out into the corridor and stopped short.

  The Black family tapestry stretched across the far wall, immense and brocaded with even more serpentine vines and interwoven skulls. Silver-threaded names gleaming under the dim chandelier light.

  That… That can’t be right.

  His brain stalled, like he’d missed a step walking down the stairs. A brief, gut-deep certainty that reality had skipped somewhere, and now he was struggling to align himself with it again.

  He’d practically heard Sirius’ cheering from the great beyond when he’d blasted the damned thing down and danced a jig around it as it burned.

  And yet, here it was.

  His pulse ticked faster. He squinted, gaze tracing the edges. It wasn’t just back. It was different.

  Names that should be burnt were not.

  Sirius Black was still there.

  Andromeda Black was still there.

  No marriages had been recorded for their generation. No children listed for the next.

  It wasn’t just intact, it had been reverted.

  Maybe someone dug up an older tapestry… or recreated it. But who would go to the trouble, and why?

  His heartbeat hammered, bile rising to his gut before he forced it back down.

  This is not a prank. There is no mistake.

  This is not my home.

  Harry turned and caught the edge of a folded newspaper resting on the dining room table.

  He flipped it open with two fingers. His grip on the parchment tightened.

  "Jenkins Under Fire: Is the Ministry Doing Enough to Counter the Dark Lord’s Rise?"

  Eugenia Jenkins.

  Minister for Magic in the early 1970s. She’d been ousted in ‘75 for her failure to check Voldemort's rise.

  His thumb brushed over it, feeling the crisp texture of the paper. The printed ink was sharp.

  Looking to the corner, he stopped and stared.

  The date stared right back at him, unchanging.

  1972.

  He took a slow, measured breath. His wand jabbed in a rapid motion, his skin tingled as a fast, layered diagnostic sweep over himself.

  Compulsions? None.

  Magical interference? No.

  External influences? Nothing.

  A few moments ticked by.

  Then, he made a second, sharper flick, checking for displacement markers. He could have been intercepted, or rerouted, or sent to a false location…

  No. This was Grimmauld Place. The wards, the air, the magic woven into the stones. It was all real.

  Which means I'm Goldilocks in someone else's—

  The wards pulsed.

  The Floo activated as recognized magical signatures arrived.

  The Invisibility Cloak was over his shoulders, and a silencing charm laced into the movement of his boots before he’d even paused to think.

  He steadied his breath, then backed into a shadowed corner, waiting and watching.

  Here come the three bears.