Chapter 16: The Agadir Precedent and the Balkan Tinderbox
Chapter 16: The Agadir Precedent and the Balkan Tinderbox
Autumn 1911 - Summer 1912
The Agadir Crisis, which had simmered with the threat of war throughout the summer of 1911, concluded not with a bang, but with the scratch of a pen on a treaty in November. [1, 2] In the drawing rooms of London and Paris, there was a collective sigh of relief. In Berlin, there was thinly veiled fury. In the study of Travers Manor, there was only the quiet hum of analysis and the clink of ice in a crystal glass.
Corvus reviewed the final terms of the Franco-German Accord with the dispassionate eye of a predator watching its prey exhaust itself in a foolish struggle. Germany, after its gunboat diplomacy and saber-rattling, had been forced to formally recognize the French protectorate over Morocco. [1] In exchange, they received a tract of largely worthless swampland in the French Congo, a paltry consolation prize that did nothing to mask the stark reality of their diplomatic humiliation. [3]
"Another spectacular failure for the Kaiser's Weltpolitik," Corvus mused, the scrying mirror displaying a map of Africa with the new borders shimmering in red. "He challenged the Entente and they called his bluff. Britain stood by France, Russia made supportive noises, and Germany was left with only the wavering support of Austria. [3] He has succeeded only in strengthening the very alliance he sought to break."
> ARCHIMEDES_ANALYSIS: SECOND_MOROCCAN_CRISIS_OUTCOME.
> STRATEGIC_VICTOR: FRANCE,_PROTECTORATE_SECURED.
> SECONDARY_VICTOR:_BRITAIN,_ENTENTE_CORDIALE_SOLIDIFIED_INTO_A_DE_FACTO_MILITARY_ALLIANCE.
> STRATEGIC_LOSER:_GERMANY,_DIPLOMATICALLY_ISOLATED,_NATIONAL_PRESTIGE_DAMAGED.
> PREDICTION:_INCREASED_BELLIGERENCE_FROM_GERMAN_HIGH_COMMAND_TO_COMPENSATE_FOR_POLITICAL_DEFEAT._PROBABILITY_OF_SEEKING_A_MILITARY_SOLUTION_TO_FUTURE_CRISES_HAS_INCREASED_BY_61%.
>
The crisis had been a perfect microcosm of the dynamics he had long predicted. But where others saw only political maneuvering, Corvus saw opportunity. The new slice of German Kamerun, carved from the French Congo, was rich in rubber and timber. Within a week, a newly registered German forestry and resource company, "Mittelafrikanische Holz und Kautschuk AG," owned by a labyrinth of shell corporations leading back to a Gringotts vault, had secured exclusive extraction rights from the colonial office in Berlin. The German government, eager to show some return on their embarrassing diplomatic adventure, had practically given the rights away. Corvus was now positioned to profit from the very land Germany had accepted as a symbol of its defeat.
While the great powers of Europe reset their chess pieces, a different kind of conflict was raging within Britain itself. The years from 1911 to 1914 would be remembered as the Great Unrest, a period of unprecedented industrial strife that shook the nation to its core. [4, 5] It was a war fought not in the chancelleries of Europe, but in the docks of Liverpool, the railways of Llanelli, and the coalfields of Wales.
Corvus monitored the escalating chaos with profound satisfaction. It was a symptom of the systemic decay he had diagnosed decades earlier. Stagnant real wages, rising prices, and the obscene, conspicuous consumption of the Edwardian elite had created a powder keg of working-class anger. [4] The summer of 1911 had seen a national railway strike that brought the country to a standstill, and a transport strike in Liverpool so violent that the government had sent gunboats to the Mersey. [5, 6]
He saw the unrest not as a moral struggle, but as a complex market of desperation and opportunity. His industrial empire, Travers Metallurgical & Enchanting, was largely insulated from the strikes. His workforce was not human. His house-elf teams, bound by magic and a carefully cultivated loyalty to him personally, were immune to the siren call of union organizers and socialist agitators. They worked tirelessly, efficiently, and without complaint, giving him an almost insurmountable advantage over his few remaining Muggle-run competitors.
He was not, however, a passive observer. He was an active, albeit invisible, participant. Through Nox Solutions, his untraceable Swiss entity, he funneled anonymous donations to the most radical and disruptive strike committees. A few thousand galleons, converted to sterling, was enough to keep a strike going for weeks, paralyzing a key port or railway line and causing havoc for the national economy. Simultaneously, through Aegis Enchantments, he sold state-of-the-art security wards and surveillance charms to the very factory owners and shipping magnates whose workers were on strike. He was selling the weapons to both sides of a class war, profiting from the chaos while the British state tore itself apart from within. The more the government was distracted by domestic turmoil, the less attention it paid to the quiet, inexorable growth of his own power.
The formalization of France's victory in Morocco came on March 30, 1912, with the signing of the Treaty of Fez. [7, 8] Sultan Abd al-Hafid, a prisoner in his own palace, signed away twelve centuries of Moroccan independence, making his nation a French protectorate. [9] The news, when it finally leaked, was met with predictable fury. The Intifada of Fez exploded in April, a bloody riot that saw Moroccan soldiers and civilians turn on their new colonial masters. [7, 9]
Corvus read the reports with a grim sense of vindication. It was the Boxer Rebellion all over again, on a smaller scale. A proud, ancient culture lashing out against a technologically and magically superior foreign power. The result was the same: brutal suppression and the cementing of colonial rule. It reinforced his core belief: attempting to rule over unwilling subjects was an inefficient, resource-intensive, and ultimately doomed enterprise. True security lay not in conquest, but in isolation.
The chaos in Fez provided another opportunity. During the riots, the city's ancient Mellah, or Jewish quarter, was sacked and burned. [7] Grimalkin's team, disguised as local merchants, moved through the pandemonium. They were not there to loot. They were there to acquire a specific asset: the library of a reclusive Kabbalistic scholar, rumored to contain some of the oldest surviving texts on golem creation and the animation of inanimate matter—knowledge that would be invaluable for Project Ark's construction phase and for his own research into the creation of artificial life. They retrieved the scrolls from the burning library, leaving a few cleverly transfigured fakes behind to be consumed by the flames.
As the embers cooled in Morocco, a new fire was being kindled in the Balkans. His intelligence network, now a global web of house-elves, indebted wizards, and goblin informants, had been tracking the secret negotiations for months. Russia, desperate to counter Austrian influence and still smarting from its humiliation in the Bosnian Crisis, had been brokering a series of alliances between the Balkan states. [10] In the spring of 1912, the Balkan League was born—a military alliance between Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro. [11] Their stated goal was the liberation of their ethnic brethren from Ottoman rule. Their real goal, as Corvus knew, was the final, bloody dismemberment of the sick man of Europe.
"The pieces are in place," he stated, standing before the grand map in his study. Archimedes had overlaid it with the new alliance structures and force dispositions. "The Ottoman Empire is weak, distracted by the war with Italy and internal turmoil. The League is unified, armed, and motivated by a potent cocktail of nationalism and greed. The Great Powers are too divided to intervene effectively. It is a perfect storm."
> ARCHIMEDES_ANALYSIS: BALKAN_LEAGUE_VS_OTTOMAN_EMPIRE.
> COMBINED_LEAGUE_FORCES: ~750,000. [11]
> OTTOMAN_FORCES_IN_EUROPE: NUMERICALLY_INFERIOR,_STRATEGICALLY_DISADVANTAGED.
> KEY_VARIABLE:_NATIONALISM._LEAGUE_FORCES_HIGHLY_MOTIVATED._OTTOMAN_ARMY_DEMORALIZED_AND_POLITICALLY_FRACTURED.
> PREDICTED_OUTCOME:_RAPID,_DECISIVE_VICTORY_FOR_THE_BALKAN_LEAGUE._COMPLETE_COLLAPSE_OF_OTTOMAN_CONTROL_IN_EUROPE.
> PROBABILITY_OF_SUBSEQUENT_INTER-LEAGUE_CONFLICT_OVER_SPOILS:_89.7%.
>
He issued a series of quiet orders. Aegis Enchantments was to offer the Ottoman Ministry of War a new line of advanced blood-replenishing potions and self-repairing enchanted textiles for their uniforms, on generous credit terms. Nox Solutions was to contact the military attachés of Serbia and Bulgaria and offer them bulk discounts on identical products, to be paid for through untraceable Gringotts transfers. The war had not yet begun, but he was already ensuring he would be its primary beneficiary.
Amidst this backdrop of global tension, a far more personal crisis was brewing within the walls of Travers Manor. In the summer of 1912, a tawny owl arrived bearing a familiar, elegant parchment envelope. It was addressed to Mr. L. Travers, The Nursery Wing, Travers Manor, Wiltshire.
Lycoris, now eleven years old, took the letter with a steady hand. His face, a handsome blend of his father's sharp features and his mother's refined grace, remained impassive, a habit learned from years of his father's tutelage. He broke the wax seal and read the familiar words inviting him to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
That evening, the issue was discussed in Corvus's study. It was the first time he and Cassiopeia had faced a true strategic disagreement.
"He will not go," Corvus stated flatly, swirling a glass of brandy. "The education is substandard, the curriculum is stagnant, and the ideology is sentimental nonsense. He will learn more in one year at the Institute than in seven at that drafty castle. It is an unacceptable waste of his potential."
Cassiopeia, seated opposite him, did not raise her voice. Her power lay not in volume, but in unshakable logic. "And what will you tell the world, Corvus? What will we tell the Malfoys, the Notts, the Fawleys? That the Travers heir, the most promising boy of his generation, is too good for Hogwarts? That he is being educated in secret, at an institution no one has ever heard of? The scandal would be immense. It would undo years of my work building our family's social and political capital. We would be ostracized." [12]
"Social capital is irrelevant in the face of existential threat," Corvus countered. "Their world is dying. Why should we care for the good opinion of ghosts?"
"Because we still have to live in their world for the next several decades," she replied, her voice sharp. "Your industrial empire depends on Ministry contracts. Your political influence depends on your seat in the Wizengamot. These things are maintained through a network of alliances and a reputation for respectability. Pulling Lycoris from the established path is a declaration that we are no longer part of their society. It will make us targets. It is a premature move, and a foolish one." [13]
He stared at her, a flicker of genuine respect in his eyes. She was not arguing from sentiment or tradition. She was arguing strategy, and her points were valid. She was his partner, not just his wife, and her domain—the complex, treacherous world of pure-blood society—was one she had mastered completely. [12]
"What do you propose?" he asked.
"A compromise," she said. "Lycoris will go to Hogwarts. He will be sorted, likely into Slytherin. He will make the appropriate connections with the heirs of the other great houses. He will build a network. He will learn the game of their world, on their playing field. It is invaluable intelligence. And during the holidays, and through private correspondence, you and your tutors from the Institute will provide his real education. You will teach him to see Hogwarts not as a school, but as a laboratory. A place to study the weaknesses and pathologies of a dying society from the inside."
Corvus was silent for a long moment, processing the strategic implications. She was right. It was a risk, but a calculated one. It was a more elegant, more subtle solution.
"Very well," he conceded. "He will go. But he will be monitored. And his true curriculum will be accelerated. He will not be permitted to fall behind."
And so, on September 1st, 1912, Corvus and Cassiopeia stood on Platform 9 ¾, a perfect portrait of a proud, aristocratic family seeing their heir off to school. While other parents offered tearful hugs and last-minute reminders to be good, Corvus knelt before his son.
"Listen to me, Lycoris," he said, his voice low and intense. "This is not school. This is your first long-term infiltration mission. Your classmates are not your friends. They are assets, liabilities, and data points. Identify the powerful, the weak, the ambitious, the foolish. Understand their motivations. Learn their secrets. Report everything. Do not excel so much that you become an object of suspicion, but do not be mediocre. Be respected, be slightly feared, and be underestimated. Do you understand?"
Lycoris looked into his father's cold, calculating eyes and nodded once. "Yes, Father. I understand."
As the Hogwarts Express pulled away, belching steam, Cassiopeia took his arm. "He will be fine, Corvus. He is a Travers."
Corvus watched the scarlet engine disappear around the bend. He was sending his most valuable asset into the heart of the enemy's territory, into the very institution that represented everything he planned to escape. It was a necessary gamble in a long and dangerous game. And Corvus Travers never played a game he did not intend to win.
Chapter 17: The Spoils of a Dying Empire
Autumn 1912 - Summer 1913
The first letter from Lycoris arrived via a sleek black owl a week after his departure. It was a model of concise, efficient reporting, written in a code they had developed. The parchment contained the expected pleasantries for his mother's benefit, but the true message was written between the lines, in the subtle choice of words and phrasing that only Corvus and Archimedes could decipher.
Sorting: Successful. House: Slytherin. Initial assessment of peers: Unimpressive. Heirs of Malfoy, Nott, and Lestrange exhibit predictable arrogance and limited intellectual curiosity. Primary motivations appear to be blood purity and inter-house rivalries. Faculty assessment: Largely incompetent, with the exception of the Transfiguration professor, a young Albus Dumbledore, whose magical talent is noteworthy but whose ideology is troublingly sentimental. Have established a secure communication point with Pip in the dungeons. Commencing deeper intelligence gathering.
Corvus read the decoded message with a grim sense of satisfaction. His son was performing precisely to specification. The mention of Dumbledore was a significant data point. The man was now at Hogwarts, perfectly positioned to mold the next generation of the wizarding world's elite. He was a variable that would require careful, long-term observation.
While Lycoris began his infiltration of Hogwarts, the tinderbox in the Balkans finally ignited. On October 8, 1912, Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Within ten days, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece had joined the fray. The First Balkan War had begun. [11]
It was not a war; it was a feeding frenzy. The Ottoman Empire, the "sick man of Europe," collapsed with a speed that shocked the world, but not Corvus. His projections had been clear. The combined armies of the Balkan League, fueled by a potent mix of modern weaponry and fervent nationalism, tore through the demoralized and poorly led Ottoman forces. [14]
In Thrace, the Bulgarians shattered the main Ottoman armies and laid siege to the great city of Adrianople. In Macedonia, the Serbs won a crushing victory at Kumanovo, capturing Skopje and Bitola. The Greeks swept south, taking the vital port of Salonika. [11] The Ottoman presence in Europe, which had endured for five centuries, was wiped out in a matter of weeks.
For Corvus, the war was a glorious, blood-soaked entry on his corporate ledger. The conflict was a brutal, real-world field test for his products, and the results were spectacular.
Aegis Enchantments, his "legitimate" British arms company, received frantic, desperate orders from the collapsing Ottoman government. They purchased thousands of his advanced blood-replenishing potions, which were rushed to the front lines. Field reports, intercepted by his intelligence network, spoke of Turkish soldiers surviving wounds that should have been fatal, a testament to the superiority of his alchemical engineering.
Simultaneously, Nox Solutions, his clandestine Swiss entity, was equipping the armies of the Balkan League. Serbian and Bulgarian officers, their communications secured by his encrypted dark mirrors, coordinated their attacks with devastating efficiency. Their shock troops, clad in battle robes reinforced with TM&E's lightweight steel thread, shrugged off minor curses and shrapnel that would have incapacitated a normal soldier.
He was arming both sides, and the profits were astronomical. The gold pouring into his Gringotts vaults would finance the next, most expensive phase of Project Ark: the construction of the vessel itself.
But the greatest spoils were not financial. As the Ottoman lines crumbled, a state of chaos descended upon the newly "liberated" territories. Amidst the fighting and the waves of desperate refugees, Corvus's specialist house-elf acquisition teams moved like wraiths. They were not there to fight or to save anyone. They were there to plunder.
In a besieged monastery near Salonika, they slipped past Greek patrols and entered the ancient library. They were not interested in the Orthodox icons or golden chalices. They were there for a single, priceless artifact: the Codex of Byzantine Thaumaturgy, a legendary text detailing the lost art of creating permanent magical constructs, a fusion of enchanting and architecture that had died with the Eastern Roman Empire. The codex would be essential for designing the life-support and environmental systems of his interstellar ark. The elves replaced the real codex with a perfect, magically-aged replica and vanished into the night, leaving the Greek soldiers to "liberate" an empty shell.
Another team operated behind the Bulgarian lines in Thrace. Their target was a secluded wizarding enclave, home to a rare, magically potent breed of Demiguise prized for their exceptionally pure precognitive abilities. As the Bulgarian army advanced, the enclave was abandoned. Corvus's team moved in, securing a dozen of the creatures, their silver fur shimmering in the moonlight. Their capture was a crucial step forward for Project Immortality. The precognitive flashes of the Demiguise, when properly analyzed and amplified by the Psyche-Matrix, could help him anticipate and counteract the risks of personality drift during the consciousness transfer process.
The war ground to a halt in December with an armistice, but resumed in early 1913 after a coup in Constantinople brought the hardline Young Turks back to power. [11] The result was the same. The allies continued their advance, and on May 30, 1913, the Treaty of London was signed. The Ottoman Empire officially surrendered all of its European territory west of a designated line. [11, 15]
Corvus studied the new map of the Balkans with a critical eye. The treaty was a fool's arrangement. It had created an independent Albania to prevent Serbia from gaining access to the sea, a move that enraged the Serbs. [14] More importantly, it had left the division of the main prize, Macedonia, dangerously ambiguous. Serbia and Greece had made a secret pact to divide the region between them, shutting out Bulgaria, which had borne the brunt of the fighting in Thrace. [11]
> ARCHIMEDES_ANALYSIS: POST-TREATY_OF_LONDON_SITUATION.
> PRIMARY_AGGRIEVED_PARTY:_BULGARIA._BELIEVES_IT_HAS_BEEN_DENIED_ITS_RIGHTFUL_SPOILS_IN_MACEDONIA.
> PRIMARY_BENEFICIARIES:_SERBIA_AND_GREECE.
> AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN_POSITION:_ALARMED_BY_SERBIAN_EXPANSIONISM.
> RUSSIAN_POSITION:_SUPPORTS_SERBIA_BUT_WARY_OF_A_WIDER_CONFLICT.
> PREDICTION:_BULGARIA_WILL_INITIATE_A_PRE-EMPTIVE_ATTACK_ON_ITS_FORMER_ALLIES_TO_SEIZE_MACEDONIAN_TERRITORY._PROBABILITY:_97.3%._ESTIMATED_TIMEFRAME:_WITHIN_3_MONTHS.
>
The First Balkan War was over. The Second Balkan War was about to begin. And Corvus Travers was ready to profit from it.
While wars raged abroad, life at Travers Manor continued its carefully managed performance of aristocratic tranquility. Cassiopeia was in her element, her social campaigns more critical than ever. She hosted influential members of the Liberal government, subtly gathering intelligence on their plans for Irish Home Rule and their response to the increasingly violent tactics of the suffragettes. [4, 16] Her network of society ladies provided a constant stream of high-level gossip, which Archimedes processed into actionable political and economic intelligence. [12, 13] Their partnership was a model of efficiency, a perfect fusion of his industrial and strategic power with her social and political acumen.
Their son, meanwhile, was proving to be an exemplary operative. Lycoris's reports from Hogwarts were a treasure trove of information on the next generation of the wizarding elite. He detailed the simmering rivalry between the ambitious Abraxas Malfoy and the quietly intelligent Alphard Black. He noted the surprising magical talent of a Hufflepuff mudblood named Odo, and the fanatical devotion to pure-blood ideology being instilled in the younger members of the Lestrange and Avery families.
During the Christmas holidays, Lycoris's real education began in earnest. In the shielded laboratories beneath the manor, he was not brewing simple potions from his Hogwarts textbook. He was learning the principles of alchemical engineering, breaking down complex magical substances into their constituent parts and reassembling them in more efficient ways. He did not practice simple charms; he studied the underlying runic mechanics and magical theory that made them work.
One evening, Corvus brought him into the Sanctum Sanctorum, the heart of Project Immortality. He showed Lycoris the clone vessel, the silent, perfect copy of himself floating in the crystalline tank.
"This is the solution to the problem of mortality, Lycoris," Corvus explained, his voice echoing in the sterile chamber. "Not the crude, soul-damaging butchery of a Horcrux. This is hardware. A clean vessel. The challenge is migrating the software—the consciousness, the self—without data corruption."
He gestured to the newly redesigned Psyche-Matrix. "The last attempt resulted in a temporal memory overlap, a collision of data streams. It was… unpleasant. Archimedes has since designed a quantum-coherent buffer. In theory, it will allow for a seamless, gradual transfer of consciousness, replacing each biological neuron with a stable, crystalline counterpart in the Matrix, one by one. It is the ultimate engineering problem."
Lycoris looked from the clone to his father. "Will it work?"
"The probability of success is now at 67.4%," Corvus replied. "Still too low. We need more data. We need to understand the quantum entanglement of the soul with its biological host on a deeper level. The Demiguise specimens are proving useful, but we need more."
He placed a hand on his son's shoulder. "This is why you are learning. This is why you must become more powerful than Dumbledore, more knowledgeable than Voldemort. The plan does not end with me. It is a dynastic imperative. The Travers line will not merely survive. It will endure. Forever."
In the summer of 1913, as Lycoris prepared to return for his second year at Hogwarts, the storm in the Balkans broke anew. On June 29th, Bulgaria, feeling cheated of its prize, launched a surprise attack on its former allies, Serbia and Greece. The Second Balkan War had begun. [11]
Corvus watched the news on his scrying mirror with a cold smile. The fools were doing exactly as he had predicted. They were bleeding each other dry over a patch of land on a continent he was already preparing to abandon.
He issued a new set of orders. Nox Solutions was to cease all shipments to Bulgaria. Their credit was cut off. Aegis Enchantments, however, was to offer a new line of advanced offensive weaponry—exploding curse catalysts and armor-piercing charms—to the Serbian and Greek governments, at a premium price.
He was no longer arming both sides. He was backing the winning horse, maximizing his profits, and ensuring the gratitude of the conflict's victors. It was a simple, ruthless business decision. And as the gold flowed into his vaults and the foundations of the old world continued to crack and crumble, Corvus Travers knew, with absolute certainty, that business was very, very good.