Chapter 10: The Century's Brutal Dawn

Chapter 10: The Century's Brutal Dawn

Winter 1900 - Spring 1901

The twentieth century arrived not with a bang, but with the quiet, relentless ticking of a clock that only Corvus Travers could hear. To the wizards and witches of Britain, it was simply a new year, another turn of the seasons marked by Ministry galas and the familiar rhythm of life behind the Statute of Secrecy. To Corvus, it was the dawn of the final act, an age of unprecedented technological acceleration and ideological bloodshed that would render their insulated world obsolete. He felt no sense of dread, only the cold pressure of a deadline.

His study, a sanctuary of dark wood and leather, was transformed into a war room. The air, usually scented with old parchment and expensive brandy, now crackled with the invisible hum of Archimedes processing data from across the globe. On the large, obsidian scrying mirror that dominated one wall, shimmering images and columns of text replaced the usual placid landscapes. It was here, in the winter of 1900, that Corvus conducted his post-mortem on the future.

The subject was the Boxer Rebellion, a conflict that had concluded months earlier in China but whose implications were only now being fully analyzed. The reports flooding his desk were a mosaic of a world he understood with terrifying clarity. There were clippings from The Times of London, their language jingoistic and self-assured; intercepted diplomatic cables between European powers, thick with rivalry and colonial arrogance; and, most valuable of all, the precise, emotionless reports from Flicker, who had led a small team of house-elves to Beijing under the guise of acquiring rare silkworms for Cassiopeia's private collection.

"Display Flicker's primary observations alongside the casualty analysis from the Eight-Nation Alliance," Corvus commanded, his voice low. He swirled the amber liquid in his glass, the firelight catching the facets of the crystal.

The scrying mirror split into two panes. On the left, Flicker's report, written in neat, spidery script, detailed the Yihetuan's rituals. It described men and women, convinced of their own spiritual invulnerability, practicing the calisthenics that had earned them the moniker "Boxers". They believed their mastery of chi and their devotion to tradition would make them impervious to foreign bullets. On the right, Archimedes displayed the grim calculus of their failure.

> DATA_ANALYSIS: BOXER_REBELLION_CASUALTIES.

> ESTIMATED_BOXER_&IMPERIAL_CHINESE_FORCES_KILLED: >20,000.

> EIGHT-NATION_ALLIANCE_KILLED_IN_ACTION: ~520.

> PRIMARY_CASUALTY_VECTOR: SUPERIOR_FIREPOWER(MAXIM_GUNS,_KRUPP_ARTILLERY).

> CONCLUSION: TECHNOLOGICAL_DISPARITY_PRODUCED_A_CASUALTY_RATIO_OF_APPROXIMATELY_40:1.

> 

"They were fanatics armed with faith and spears," Corvus murmured, his eyes fixed on the numbers. "The Muggles came with machine guns, artillery, and railways to supply them. The result was not a battle; it was an extermination. It is the perfect microcosm of our own future if we remain here."

He had followed the entire affair with clinical detachment. He noted the complex mix of nativist belief and economic hardship that fueled the uprising , and the cynical opportunism of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who first tacitly supported the Boxers to drive out foreigners, only to be swept aside by the forces she had unleashed. He watched as the international force, a viper's nest of competing empires, set aside their differences to relieve the besieged Legation Quarter and then proceeded to sack the ancient city with brutal efficiency.

"Archimedes," he said, setting his glass down. "Compile this analysis. All of it. The reports, the casualty data, the logistical timetables of the Alliance's deployment. Create a formal white paper. Title it: A Case Study in Asymmetrical Annihilation: The Boxer Rebellion and the Inevitability of Magical Extinction. It will be the cornerstone of my argument when the time comes to recruit."

He was not merely satisfying his own curiosity. He was forging a weapon of persuasion, a document of such cold, irrefutable logic that it would shatter the complacency of any pure-blood lord who dared to read it. He would show them their own future written in the blood of Chinese peasants. The theory of Muggle threat was no longer a theory; it was a proven historical event.

Galvanized, he turned his attention from history to economics. The analysis of the Boxer Rebellion was a strategic forecast; now, he would act on it. Project Midas required a new, more aggressive phase. The wizarding economy, with its artisanal guilds and fragmented, family-owned suppliers, was a quaint relic. He would replace it with the brutal efficiency of the Gilded Age.

His target was the very foundation of the magical world: its raw materials. For centuries, families like the Notts had owned their moonstone mines, the Selwyns their silver deposits, and a dozen other ancient houses their various quarries and forests, operating them with a gentlemanly inefficiency that prioritized tradition over profit. Corvus saw them not as peers, but as assets to be acquired.

He initiated a multi-pronged assault, a perfect synthesis of the strategies employed by the Muggle titans he so admired. First came the horizontal integration, a page taken directly from John D. Rockefeller's playbook. Travers Metallurgical & Enchanting, his industrial behemoth, began a campaign of predatory pricing. They flooded the market with mass-produced cauldron bottoms, stirring rods, and potion vials of superior quality and at prices the small, independent artisans couldn't possibly match. One by one, the family-run smithies and workshops that had served Diagon Alley for generations found their order books drying up.

Simultaneously, he pursued vertical integration with the ruthlessness of Andrew Carnegie. Why buy silver from the Selwyns when he could own the mine itself? His first target was Lord Tiberius Selwyn, a pompous, tradition-bound wizard whose family had controlled the richest silver mine in Wales for five centuries.

The meeting took place not in the Ministry, but in a private dining room at a discreet London club. Corvus, looking younger than his forty years, faced the aging patriarch across a table of polished mahogany. He did not threaten or bluster. He simply laid out the facts.

"Lord Selwyn," Corvus began, his tone one of polite reason, "Travers Metallurgical has recently perfected a new silver-refining process. It's a magical adaptation of something the Muggles call the Parkes process. It allows us to extract silver from lead ore with 99.8% purity. As a result, our production cost for pure silver has fallen by nearly sixty percent."

Selwyn scoffed. "Wrocklegill Mine has produced the finest silver in Britain since the 1400s. Your newfangled tricks are of no concern to us."

"On the contrary," Corvus said, placing a small, impossibly smooth ingot on the table. "This is our silver. As of last month, we began selling it on the open market at a price thirty percent below your own. Your orders from the major potion suppliers have already declined by half. Archimedes projects that within six months, Wrocklegill Mine will be operating at a net loss."

The colour drained from Selwyn's face. He understood. Corvus wasn't competing with him; he was rendering him obsolete.

"This is… this is an outrage! An attack on an ancient and noble house!"

"This is business," Corvus corrected gently. "However, I am not without sympathy for your position. I am prepared to acquire the Wrocklegill Mine and all its associated assets for a generous sum. Enough to ensure the Selwyn name remains prominent in society for generations to come. You can maintain your lifestyle, your seat in the Wizengamot, your dignity. Or," he paused, letting the silence hang in the air, "you can preside over the bankruptcy of your ancestral legacy. The choice is yours."

It was not a choice. It was a death sentence delivered with a smile. Two weeks later, the deed was signed. Corvus now owned the mine, the land, and, most importantly, the dozen house-elves who had served the Selwyn family for centuries. These were not domestic servants; they were specialists in subterranean warding, geological divination, and the handling of magically unstable ores—invaluable assets for both TM&E and the future, clandestine excavation of his Ark's launch facility. He was not just building a trust; he was systematically dismantling the power base of the old aristocracy, making them dependent on his industry for the very materials that built their world.

The final piece of the old world fell in the spring of 1901. News arrived, carried by owls and whispered through the Floo network, of the death of Queen Victoria. While the wizarding world was politically separate, the monarch was a figure of immense symbolic weight, the anchor of an era. Her death was felt even in the magical enclaves as a profound, tectonic shift.

That evening, Corvus sat with Cassiopeia in the formal drawing room of Travers Manor. A fire crackled in the hearth, casting long shadows across the tapestries. Cassiopeia, ever attuned to the social currents, was somber.

"It feels like the end of an age," she said softly, setting down her embroidery.

"It is," Corvus agreed, his eyes distant. "Victoria represented stability, industrial certainty, a kind of grim, moral confidence. She was the avatar of the nineteenth century. Her death is the symbolic end of the world that was."

"And the new world?" she asked.

"Edwardian," he said, the word tasting of change. "More decadent, more fluid. The scandals of the Marlborough House set will become the norm, not the exception. Society will be faster, more extravagant, and less stable. There will be new art, new ideas, new money… and new vulnerabilities."

He looked at his wife, the perfect partner in his grand enterprise. "Our public posture must shift accordingly. Less Victorian restraint, more calculated Edwardian flair. We will host more parties, embrace the new styles. We must be seen not as relics of the old world, but as masters of the new one."

Cassiopeia nodded, her mind already working, planning the guest lists, the new decorations, the subtle recalibration of their family's public image. She was the general of his social campaigns, and he had just given her new marching orders.

Later that night, as the manor slept, Corvus stood alone in his study. The fire had died to embers. He thought of the dead queen, the bankrupt lord, the slaughtered Boxers. They were all ghosts, relics of a world that was already gone, swept away by the brutal, cleansing tide of progress. He felt no pity, no remorse. Only the cold, sharp clarity of a man who saw the future and was building an ark to escape it, one ruthless acquisition at a time.

Chapter 11: The Crucible of Legacy

Autumn 1901 - Summer 1903

While Corvus waged his economic war upon the foundations of the wizarding world, two other critical fronts of his grand strategy were advancing with silent, meticulous precision. One was a project of construction, forging the very human capital that would populate his new world. The other was a project of deconstruction, unraveling the most fundamental mystery of all: the nature of the soul itself. These were the twin pillars of his future—one built of young, pliable minds, the other of his own immortal ambition.

The Travers Institute for Magical Advancement, nestled in a secluded, heavily warded valley in the Lake District, was a world away from the soot-stained industrialism of his factories or the gilded intrigue of London society. Here, the air was clean, the grounds immaculate, and the purpose absolute. It was a crucible designed to forge a new kind of wizard.

By the autumn of 1901, the first cohort of twelve students was two years into a curriculum that would have been utterly alien to any Hogwarts professor. Corvus visited quarterly, his presence less that of a benevolent headmaster and more of a chief engineer inspecting a critical prototype. He walked the halls, his steps echoing in the pristine silence, observing the engine of his legacy at work.

In one classroom, a severe-looking witch with a mastery of both Arithmancy and Muggle mathematics was teaching the principles of differential calculus, using magical runes to represent complex equations that danced in the air. The students, none older than eleven, followed her lecture with an intensity that bordered on unnerving. In another, a former Unspeakable led a practical session on advanced Transfiguration. But instead of turning teacups into tortoises, the students were assembling a working model of a simple internal combustion engine, transfiguring blocks of inert wood and metal into functioning pistons, cylinders, and crankshafts.

This was the "total education submersion method" in practice, a concept Corvus had refined from the crude, often disastrous experiments of Muggle history. Every moment of the students' lives was a curated learning opportunity. Their diet was optimized for cognitive function. Their recreation involved complex strategic games. Their loyalty was cultivated with a near-religious fervor. They were taught that they were the chosen few, the pioneers of a new, logical, and powerful world, rescued from the chaos and prejudice of the old one.

Corvus had studied the histories of so-called "forced prodigies" with clinical interest. He saw the tragic burnout of figures like William Sidis, whose father had pushed him to intellectual heights at the cost of all else, as a failure of engineering, not a refutation of the concept. His Institute was designed to avoid those pitfalls. The intense academic pressure was balanced with rigorous psychological conditioning, building resilience and ensuring absolute emotional stability. He was not creating fragile geniuses; he was manufacturing loyal, hyper-competent assets.

His prize pupil was Elara, the Muggle-born girl rescued from a London workhouse. Now eleven, she was a prodigy of terrifying potential. Corvus entered the Transfiguration workshop and observed as she put the finishing touches on her engine model. With a final, wandless flick of her fingers, a gear shifted into place with an audible click.

"Explain the principle, Miss Vance," Corvus said, his voice cutting through the quiet hum of concentration.

Elara stood, her back straight, her eyes bright with intelligence. "The combustion of the fuel-air mixture, sir, creates a rapid expansion of gas. This kinetic energy drives the piston, which is converted into rotational motion by the crankshaft. The magic is not in the creation of the energy, but in the perfect, frictionless transfiguration of the components and the containment of the explosive force within the enchanted cylinder walls."

"And the underlying physics?" he pressed.

"The laws of thermodynamics, sir. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another. Magic does not break the laws; it provides a more efficient mechanism to exploit them."

Corvus gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. He turned and left the workshop without another word. Back in his private office, he made a note in his log, a shimmering document only he and Archimedes could access.

> SUBJECT: ELARA_VANCE.

> PROGRESS_REVIEW_Q3_1901.

> COGNITIVE_ELASTICITY: +2.1_SIGMA_ABOVE_PROJECTIONS.

> SYNTHETIC_REASONING_ACROSS_MAGICAL/MUNDANE_DISCIPLINES: EXCEPTIONAL.

> EMOTIONAL_DEPENDENCY_ON_INSTITUTIONAL_STRUCTURE: 98.7%.

> ASSESSMENT: PRIME_CANDIDATE_FOR_COLONIAL_LEADERSHIP_CADRE.

> 

She was the first brick in the foundation of his new civilization, and she was perfect. He was not just building a population; he was pre-emptively designing a new, functional class structure for his colony. It would be a meritocracy, but a rigid one. At the apex, his own immortal dynasty. Below, the Alphas—the engineered elite from his Institute. And below them, the loyal, skilled Betas from his industrial empire. It was a society designed for maximum efficiency and absolute control, a system far superior to the decaying blood-based hierarchy he had been born into.

While Corvus managed the "hard power" of industry and education, the "soft power" of his empire was wielded with exquisite skill by his wife. Their marriage was not a romance; it was a merger, and Cassiopeia Travers was a master of her portfolio.

In the summer of 1903, Travers Manor hosted the most sought-after ball of the London season. It was a symphony of Edwardian excess, a deliberate display of the new wealth and power of their house. Hundreds of guests in silks and jewels moved through rooms glittering with crystal chandeliers and filled with the scent of a thousand enchanted flowers. At the center of it all was Cassiopeia.

To the casual observer, she was the perfect society hostess, gliding through the crowd with a warm smile and an effortless grace. But Corvus, watching from the shadowed alcove of the ballroom, saw the truth. She was a general conducting a campaign, and the ballroom was her battlefield. Every light conversation was an interrogation, every shared confidence a piece of intelligence. She was the manager of his social lobby, a weapon more subtle and often more effective than any curse.

She had mastered the intricate, unspoken rules of their class. She knew which lord was having an affair with which minister's wife, a common enough occurrence in the racy circles that aped the King's own lifestyle, but a powerful piece of leverage if the indiscretion became public. She cultivated the wives of influential men, turning their gossip into actionable intelligence. She even hosted a small, private tea for several prominent members of the burgeoning women's suffrage movement, not out of any personal conviction for their cause, but to identify the most radical and influential witches among them—individuals who could be useful for creating social disruption later, or who needed to be monitored as potential threats to his own orderly plans.

Corvus watched as she cornered the wife of Lord Yaxley, a key member of the Wizengamot's finance committee. The conversation was a masterpiece of social manipulation.

"Lady Yaxley, you look simply radiant," Cassiopeia began, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. "But you must tell me your secret. How you manage to look so serene while planning your daughter's debut… well, it's a miracle! I hear the costs of a proper season are simply ruinous these days."

Lady Yaxley, flattered and flustered, gave a weak laugh. "Oh, it's a nightmare, my dear. Tiberius is at his wits' end. He says the goblins are charging us a fortune for the new loans on the estate…" She clapped a hand over her mouth, realizing she had said too much.

Cassiopeia simply squeezed her arm sympathetically. "Men. They worry so. I'm sure it's nothing."

Later that night, long after the last guest had departed, Cassiopeia found Corvus in his study. She unpinned a diamond clasp from her hair, her expression now as cool and analytical as his own.

"Yaxley's estates are mortgaged to the hilt," she stated, no preamble needed. "He's leveraged against his Wizengamot seat. He will be highly receptive to a private, interest-free loan. In exchange for his vote on the Industrial Standards Act, of course."

Corvus nodded. "Excellent work, my dear."

That was the extent of their romance—the perfect, frictionless synergy of their shared ambition. They were co-CEOs of Travers Incorporated, and business was booming.

The culmination of his personal ambition, however, lay far from the public eye. Deep beneath the manor, in the shielded, sterile environment of the Sanctum Sanctorum, Project Immortality was reaching a critical milestone.

He stood before a crystalline growth tank, bathed in the soft, pulsating glow of the runic arrays that sustained it. Floating within a nutrient-rich, magically-charged fluid was a body. His body. It was a perfect clone, grown from his own tissue, identical to him in his physical prime. It was a flawless piece of biological hardware, healthy, strong, and utterly, terrifyingly empty.

The sight filled him not with wonder, but with a profound sense of clinical purpose. This was the vessel. Now came the challenge of transferring the contents.

"The first clone has achieved full maturation with 99.4% genetic fidelity," Archimedes's voice stated, cool and disembodied in the silent lab. "However, simulations of direct consciousness transfer continue to encounter the identity paradox. The copy would awaken believing it is you, but your own continuity of consciousness would be severed. It is a fork, not a migration."

Corvus stared at the face of his double, so like his own yet so devoid of the ruthless intelligence behind his eyes. He was well aware of the philosophical traps, the theories of consciousness as an "irreducible singularity" that could not be copied.

"That is a metaphysical objection, Archimedes, not an engineering one," he countered. "Voldemort's method was crude—smashing the hard drive to back up a file. We will not copy the software. We will migrate the entire operating system."

He gestured to a chair at the center of the lab, a menacing throne of polished steel and silver, with a complex helmet-like device suspended above it. This was the Psyche-Matrix.

"The process will not be instantaneous. It will be gradual. A magical-neural interface. We will begin by mapping my brain, neuron by neuron. Then, we will use the Matrix to create a parallel processing pathway. For a time, my consciousness will exist in two places at once—my biological brain and the Matrix. Then, we will begin to systematically deactivate the biological pathways, migrating their functions to the Matrix in real-time."

It was a magical version of the "robot brain surgeon" analogy he had read about in the speculative science of his past life. He would not be copied and deleted. He would be moved, piece by piece, his stream of consciousness flowing from the failing hardware of flesh into the perfect, eternal hardware of his own design. From there, it could be downloaded into the waiting clone vessel.

"The risk of personality drift or catastrophic data corruption during the migration process is calculated at 37.2%," Archimedes noted.

"Unacceptable," Corvus stated flatly. "Refine the runic arrays. We begin live, low-level mapping next month. We will solve this problem. I have no intention of dying, Archimedes. Not now. Not ever."

He looked from the empty face in the tank to his own reflection in the crystalline wall. One was a shell. The other was a man on the verge of becoming a god. And he would let nothing, not philosophy, not morality, and certainly not the risk of mere oblivion, stand in his way.

Chapter 12: Engines of War and Flight

Autumn 1903 - Winter 1905

The clock of Muggle progress, which for decades had ticked at a steady, predictable pace, suddenly began to race. For Corvus, each new headline in the mundane newspapers his elves procured was another beat of a war drum, signaling the rapid, terrifying acceleration of the very forces he planned to escape. The age of hiding was drawing to a close, and the comfortable, multi-decade timeline for his grand design was shrinking with every passing day.

The event that shattered his calculus arrived on a cold December morning in 1903. An urgent report, dispatched by one of his operatives in America, appeared on his desk with a crackle of displaced air. It contained a single, grainy photograph and a short, concise summary. The photograph showed a fragile-looking contraption of wood, wire, and cloth, hovering mere feet above a sandy beach. Two men stood nearby, one in the act of running alongside the machine.

Corvus stared at the image, a chill running down his spine that had nothing to do with the winter air. "Archimedes. Analysis."

The scrying mirror in his study flickered to life, displaying the data.

> EVENT: FIRST_SUSTAINED,_CONTROLLED,_POWERED_HEAVIER-THAN-AIR_FLIGHT.

> LOCATION: KITTY_HAWK,_NORTH_CAROLINA,_USA.

> PRINCIPALS: WRIGHT,_ORVILLE_AND_WILBUR.

> INITIAL_FLIGHT_DURATION: 12_SECONDS.

> INITIAL_FLIGHT_DISTANCE: 120_FEET.

> LONGEST_FLIGHT_OF_DAY: 59_SECONDS,_852_FEET.

> POWER_SOURCE: 12-HORSEPOWER_INTERNAL_COMBUSTION_ENGINE.

> 

Any other wizard would have scoffed. A flight shorter than a broomstick ride to the end of the garden. A machine so flimsy a strong gust of wind had shattered it after its final landing. But Corvus saw not the fragile machine; he saw the future it represented, laid out in a terrifyingly clear trajectory by Archimedes's predictive models.

"Project the technological cascade," Corvus ordered, his voice tight.

The mirror shifted. A timeline unfurled, branching into dozens of pathways.

 * 1910-1920: Rapid development of military reconnaissance aircraft. The concept of aerial bombardment becomes a strategic reality.

 * 1930-1940: Mass passenger air travel connects the globe, rendering distance irrelevant.

 * 1950-1960: Jet engines break the sound barrier. The first artificial satellites are launched into orbit, staring down from the heavens.

 * 1970-2000: Global satellite surveillance networks. High-resolution imaging capable of identifying a single person from space. Interplanetary probes. The complete and total erosion of secrecy.

"They have conquered the sky," Corvus said, the words falling like stones into the silent room. "It will take them less than a century to conquer the space above it. The age of hiding is officially over. The final deadline is no longer an estimate. It is a certainty."

His initial, phased plan—learn, achieve immortality, then build and migrate—was now a luxury he could not afford. The projects had to run in parallel. The pressure had just increased tenfold. He had to perfect his own immortality while simultaneously designing and building a vessel capable of interstellar travel, all while managing a burgeoning industrial empire and preparing for a continental magical war. The grand strategy had just become a desperate, high-wire act against a clock that was ticking faster and faster.

Spurred by this new urgency, he immediately moved to formalize his strategy of profitable neutrality. The nascent revolutionary movements on the continent, led by the charismatic and dangerous Gellert Grindelwald, were no longer a distant storm. They were a coming market opportunity.

He convened a secret meeting in the Gringotts vault that served as the headquarters for his untraceable shell corporations. The attendees were not wizards, but a council of his most senior and ruthless goblin account managers, their sharp eyes gleaming in the lamplight of the subterranean chamber.

"The human world is on the brink of an arms race," Corvus began, his voice echoing off the stone walls. He projected an image of HMS Dreadnought, the revolutionary British battleship that had rendered all other navies obsolete overnight. "Britain and Germany are locked in a naval competition, each trying to out-build the other. This competition is fueled by nationalism, fear, and industrial pride. It will bankrupt them both, but the arms manufacturers, like Krupp in Germany and Vickers in Britain, will become obscenely wealthy."

He then projected images of Grindelwald's symbol, followed by the crests of the British, French, and German Ministries of Magic.

"We are about to see the magical equivalent. Grindelwald's followers and the established Ministries will soon be locked in their own arms race. Our goal is not to pick a winner. Our goal is to be their Krupp and their Vickers combined."

He laid out the business model with cold precision, a direct application of the economics of total war. He instructed the goblins on the full operationalization of his two fronts. Aegis Enchantments would become the premier defense contractor for the Ministries, selling his patented, superior healing potions and reinforced battle robes. Nox Solutions, its dark twin, would discreetly supply Grindelwald's growing forces with essential, non-lethal support: untraceable financial instruments, secure communication devices, and rare potion ingredients.

"But the true genius," Corvus explained, a flicker of pride in his voice, "is in the intellectual property." He detailed a plan lifted directly from the complex international patent-sharing agreements of firms like Vickers and Krupp. "Aegis will develop and patent a new, highly effective personal shield charm matrix. The patent will be sold to a neutral, third-party holding company registered here in Geneva. That company will then license the manufacturing rights to both Aegis and, through a separate, anonymous subsidiary, to Nox Solutions. Every time an Auror and an Acolyte throw up a shield in battle, they will be using our technology. We will receive a royalty on every single charm cast. We will sell the steel to both shipyards, and we will own the patent on the rivets that hold them together."

The goblins' sharp-toothed smiles were all the approval he needed. His neutrality was not passive. It was a predatory business strategy designed to bleed all other factions dry, ensuring that when the dust of their ideological war settled, he would be the only solvent power left standing.

With his financial war machine primed, he turned to the political front. His industrial dominance was nearly absolute, but he needed to codify it into law, to create a monopoly so complete it was legally unassailable. The vehicle for this was the "Industrial Enchanting Standards Act of 1905."

The debate in the Wizengamot was a masterclass in political theater. Corvus, now a respected, if somewhat aloof, junior member of the chamber, let his allies in the Mercantilist bloc do the talking. They argued passionately for the Act, framing it as a matter of public safety and national pride. It would ensure all enchanted goods sold in Britain met the highest standards of quality and durability, protecting consumers from shoddy foreign imports and unreliable local craftsmen.

It was, of course, a lie. The Act was a legislative weapon. Its technical specifications, capitalization requirements, and inspection protocols were written by Archimedes and were so complex and expensive that only Travers Metallurgical & Enchanting could possibly comply. It was designed to legislate his competition out of existence, a magical perversion of the Sherman Antitrust Act being turned against the very competition it was meant to protect.

The victory was secured not on the floor of the chamber, but in the drawing rooms and private clubs of London. Cassiopeia's social lobbying had laid the groundwork, identifying members with debts and vices. Discreet, untraceable loans from Travers-controlled financial entities had secured key votes. Pragmatic arguments about strengthening the magical economy against foreign competition had swayed the undecided. When the vote was called, the Act passed by a comfortable margin. Corvus had not just built a monopoly; he had made it the law of the land.

That winter, as 1905 drew to a close, Corvus sat once more in his study, reviewing the latest intelligence. The world was a tapestry of rising chaos. Archimedes presented a new file, linking disparate events into a single, chilling narrative. The first report detailed the official founding of Sinn Fein in Ireland by Arthur Griffith, a new, potent force for Irish nationalism. The second was a collection of frantic reports from St. Petersburg, detailing the "Bloody Sunday" massacre and the subsequent eruption of the 1905 Russian Revolution—a wave of strikes, mutinies, and peasant uprisings that had shaken the Tsar's empire to its core.

Archimedes cross-referenced these events with the latest intelligence on Grindelwald's activities in continental Europe. A pattern emerged, a global zeitgeist of violent upheaval.

> ANALYSIS: GLOBAL_REVOLUTIONARY_WAVE.

> COMMON_IDEOLOGIES: SOCIALISM,_LEFT-NATIONALISM,_ANTI-COLONIALISM,_RADICAL-REPUBLICANISM.

> CATALYSTS: ECONOMIC_DISPARITY,_NATIONALIST_FERVOR,_CLASH_OF_IDEOLOGIES,_FAILURE_OF_TRADITIONAL_POWER_STRUCTURES.

> CONCLUSION: GRINDELWALD'S_MOVEMENT_IS_NOT_AN_ISOLATED_MAGICAL_PHENOMENON. IT_IS_THE_WIZARDING_WORLD'S_MANIFESTATION_OF_A_GLOBAL_TREND_TOWARDS_REVOLUTIONARY_VIOLENCE.

> 

Corvus looked at the data, at the interconnected web of mundane and magical rebellion. He did not see good versus evil, or right versus wrong. He saw a historical tide, a predictable and destructive storm that would engulf the world. Dumbledore would try to stand against it. The Ministries would try to contain it. Grindelwald would try to ride it to power.

They were all fools, fighting for control of a ship that was already sinking.

Corvus had no intention of joining their fight. He would not take a side in a historical inevitability. He would simply finish building his ark, load it with everything and everyone he valued, and sail for a new world, leaving the old one to drown in the fires of its own making.