With an icy chill in his eyes, Dumbledore quickly unlocked the mechanisms in the Headmaster's office to access the Quill of Alzuhod.
Once in his hand he began to write, directly on the air.
His spirituality flowed freely, pouring into the quill as fiery ink slowly formed words that weaved the very fabric of the universe.
'Since the True God supporting Gehrman Sparrow in his ascension is an old god, he knows much about the world. And as such, in order to gain the Beyonder Characteristics for the ingredient of the next potion, Gehrman Sparrow finds his next target with the help of a True God. This is a reasonable development.'
'Since Gehrman Sparrow cannot fight and obtain the next Beyonder Characteristics on his own as he needed a distraction for advancing during the previous sequence, he will cooperate with his friends to fulfill his mission this time. This is also a reasonable development.'
…
"My Lord, the Acolytes await your next words." A woman said, kneeling deeply on the floor, her head close to touching the cold leather coverings only an inch away from her head.
Grindelwald said nothing for a few seconds, his cold eyes looking beyond what appeared to be time and space.
As if having stumbled upon something interesting, his lips curled distinctly into a smile. A flicker of amusement flickered in his eyes before his expression turned neutral once again.
"Tell them to write more papers about Albus. Make sure that the Bones are included in this one along with the Blacks. Start white washing certain 'incidents' of the past…make them seem appealing…only to the fringes of society such that they are willing to act on those tendencies. Make everyone else feel dissatisfied with the current order."
After a brief silence the woman spoke once again.
"Yes, Lord. It will be done."
Once the woman walked away, the smile on Grindelwald's face showed up once again.
His eyes lit up with excitement as he began to softly hum before slowly singing in the same tune with a frenzied look~
"O Bella Ciao~! Bella Ciao~! Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao~!"
~~~
…
In a dark ground under the open sky filled with thick fog mixed with smoke and the stench of blood and burning corpses, kneeling at the foot of a grand altar, Voldemort remained silent.
His ears occasionally twitched while eyes flickered underneath their lids.
Above the altar lay the frozen body of a crazed woman, Bellatrix.
She hovered, in stasis, her wild curled hair floating in space, moving slowly like the small scale model of a universe. Her eyes shut making her seem almost serene if not for the perversely happy expression frozen on her lips with her tongue hanging out like a dog's.
In her hands lay the Death Pathway Card of Blasphemy.
Candles of corpses stood off to the side, burning their fat through their heads, using the spine as candle wicks while the immense heat and smoke they gave off simply fell to the floor turning it foggy.
Piles of skulls and bones stood to the sides indicating grand bonfires of fires that had already extinguished. Their mountainous figures towering out of the foggy floor like a spire reaching for the skies.
Under the silence, a soft sapling sprouted underneath Bellatrix on the altar. It grew quickly. Its vines twirling around as if in search of something.
All of a sudden the night sky broke.
Almost as if a piece of it had fallen off.
A thin ray of crimson shone down onto the altar before it exploded into the environment itself.
Everything in the area turned to adopt a soft glow of crimson, the corpse candles, the bonfire skulls, the very smog itself and of course both Voldemort and Bellatrix themselves.
Within seconds, what was once a vast desolate plain, in remonstrance turned animate.
Trees sprouted out of the curling smoky fog of the ground.
Each skull in the dead bonfires of people started to tremble and become corrupted, dragging themselves onto the unfurling branches of the newly sprouting trees.
The gazes of several high level beings landed on the area but before any of them could figure out what was going on a strange occurrence was birthed throughout the entire planet that forcibly dragged their attention elsewhere.
And then as if a twisted spring had come early, the skulls hanging from the tree branches bloomed into flowers whispering every bizarre desire.
Black hearts grew out of some of those flowers flickering between tangible and intangible, the contents of those hearts changing from whispers to horrified shrieks to loving and tender melodies that would sooth the mind.
A few of those black hearts soon turned crystal clear as they lost all sense of madness and corruption, but they only turned further eerie when a thin crimson light started to glisten along their curves.
The smoke underneath the bizarre forest bellowed, puffing up as the branches of these bizarre trees cracked and collapsed into it.
The shock caused by the fall caused the embellishments on these branches to fly off and instantly transform into the black smog themselves.
These faint wisps of black corruption streaked through the air, hijacking the flow streams present in it created from the heat caused by the burning corpse candles.
They flowed smoothly and blended neatly into Voldemort's robes before slowly turning into thin but visible currents that traveled into his nose slits as he breathed them in.
Voldemort stayed kneeling for as long as the corpse candles seemed to have burnt to a crisp. His body perfectly still as if a single unplanned movement could ruin everything.
Once the bodies turned to ash and the trees fully collapsed with not a speck of their presence remaining, Voldemort stood up, slowly, his fists clenching as he looked down to examine them.
The mountainous bonfire of skulls that had been resting silently had long vanished but the ashes of the corpse candles had transformed.
High pitched wails pried into the air and before long the same corpse candles that had been burnt to ashes were now on the ground, curling up like fetuses as their orifices bled out in throes.
Voldemort gave them a single glance and simply waved his hand to cause all of their entrails to be ripped out of their bodies.
The entrails and all the contents within them were soon dragged out, pulling with them the somehow still living people that were attached to them, as they were bound by a thick black liquid that poured out of their minds, turning into a grotesque grand tree made up of human organs.
As the thick smog slowly cleared, Voldemort simply waved his hand and vanished with a silent swoop along with Bellatrix, the altar and the living tree.
…
"Hmm…stop annoying me Daphne." Hermione said, pushing a strange cat with an unmistakably human head that was beside her with her hips as she tried focusing on her book.
"Mew~rp?" The cat said softly, her eyes pleading as she placed a paw on Hermione's soft hands.
Hermione looked at the little cat as its ears quickly perked up and it began swishing its tail like a whip happily.
"Augh. Fine. But when I'm failing class because of you again, I'll hand you over to Professor McGonagall!"
The cat seemed startled at Hermione's declaration, its already wide eyes widening in panic, but there was no escape!
Hermione whisked away the cat as she quickly rubbed it against her cheek. "I missed you Daphne…it feels like it's been so long since I've seen you for some reaso-"
PUCHI
The cat exploded, painting Hermione in a fresh coat of blood, entrails and memories.
The scene changed rapidly as Hermione found herself back in the same scene from before.
A bloody and disaster struck street covered with corpses of out of control beyonders whose life she had reaped.
Her eyes, however, remained fixated on the hollow void in front of her.
The place that should've been occupied by Daphne was now an empty void filled with nothing but faraway stars pulsing.
Suddenly Hermione realised.
Although strange, the place she was was a dream.
But even though one part of her mind had awoken…
'....I can't even save her in a dream.'
'...'
Just as the cold and depressing sorrow began to sink deeper into her, Hermione felt something warm embrace her.
A soft warmth first spread across her back before it seeped into her being as a soft golden light simmered around her.
Surprised and confused, Hermione quickly turned around.
'Hmm…?'
A simple symbol floated in front of Hermione, hovering mid air, somewhere.
It simultaneously seemed like the symbol was quite small and right in front of her as if she could immediately grab it, while also feeling quite large and appearing to be at a distance she could never hope to reach.
As Hermione observed the symbol carefully, she realised that it was separated into two parts.
The first one was the inner part of the symbol that was small and looked to be embedded into the outer symbol.
'An inception of doors that hold a bright star garlanded by a necklace of stars?' Hermione concluded as she observed the inner symbol.
'Doors…'
'Does it have something to do with the True God of my pathway? The Door Pathway? But didn't Mr. Error tell me that the Door pathway has no True God currently?'
Then Hermione closely observed the outer symbol that was larger and looked like an ever shrinking loop of time.
'...? It looks like the symbol on Mr. Error's doors during our rituals…'
'What's this?'
'Have I been corrupted!?' Hermione panicked.
The struggle for breaking out of her dream was almost ephemeral to Hermione as she simply and directly invoked the Honorific Name of Mr. Error.
And without a care for anyone in the world once woken up, Hermione set up a wall of spirituality to shield her own four poster bed from anyone else in the room before setting up a quick ritual on her bed.
…
'Huh? Someone's praying to me? So late?' Loki thought as he looked with slight reluctance at having to leave studying the Killing Curse which he decrypted held secrets he could use.
Without another word to avoid disappointing his 'beloved' devotee Loki vanished into the Sefirah Castle by simply using the Sequence 3 Mentor of Deceit Beyonder Characteristics and looked at who had called for him.
As soon as he entered however, he noticed the strange glow from the symbol behind his chair and the one behind Hermione's.
"Hermione? What happened to her?"
Loki wrapped her pulsing crimson star in a blanket of his spirituality as he studied the contents of her 'prayer'.
And so even before Hermione had woken up, Loki was already peering into her dream, spotting her looking right at the symbols that had manifested in front of her.
'Hmm…a symbol that contains doors inception which holds a bright star within it sitting above a necklace of stars…behind which is an ever shrinking spiral of time?'
'That's just the symbols of the Door and the Error pathway.'
'But…'
'Why would they appear in her dream?'
'...'
Loki's mind gathered the relevant thoughts before his decryption abilities worked in full swing.
'I remember her trying to learn occlumency to protect herself from Dumbledore, perhaps this is just a fruit of that and she dreamt up the symbol subconsciously in her mindscape after being able to access it?'
But then Loki's eyes fell on the scene behind Hermione and his eyes widened as he recognised it. After all, the aftermath of Daphne's death was something that was burnt within his memories.
It sparked a fresh idea.
And so just to verify this logic Loki turned towards Divination, writing the statement-
'Hermione's spirituality manifested to her the symbols of the Error and the Door pathways in response to her dream making her remember the incident of Daphne's death.'
-while holding a topaz pendulum above the parchment.
'Clockwise.'
'But how does she know these symbols…? The Error symbol she could have simply noticed during transactions.'
Loki once again turned to divination, and this time he turned to dream divination.
"The reason these symbols showed up in Hermione's dream."
Repeating the statement seven times Loki let his spirit body roam the astral world.
The first scenes Loki saw were simply the dream that Hermione had seen from beginning to end, and so when he was about to give up after assuming that it was just some strange subconscious manifestation the scene abruptly changed.
It changed to an old man, tall, lanky, with a bread as tall as himself and a crooked long nose, as if it'd been punched a few times and broken a few more.
'Dumbledore?'
'...what's he doing?'
'How did he cause those symbols to show up in her dream without alerting me that he was thinking of those symbols in the first place?'
'...why's he so angry?' Loki finally thought as he saw Dumbledore's eye reddening.
That was when Loki saw what Dumbledore did, pulling out the quill of Alzuhod to write down a 'prophecy' to explain a 'reasonable' development.
Loki's mind flashed through several pieces of information including Salazar having just promised to guide him to the Sequence 2 Beyonder characteristic before frowning softly.
'...didn't I lose control of my emotions just a little while ago too tonight?'
Loki quickly and thoroughly checked Hermione to see if there was anything wrong with her, and upon seeing no errors with her fate or her body, he conjured up Mr. World who spoke to her through a prayer and sent the message into her star.
…
Hermione who had just finished relaying her prayers to Mr. Error found herself blinded by the grey fog as an illusory message played out in front of her.
"Miss Magician, dreams can be a medium for revelations from the spirit world. A place where time blends together in a strange way. Seeing the death of a loved one with the symbol of authority of your pathway often indicates the need for you to get stronger. It is a warning from your spirituality, perhaps about the coming future."
The vision darkened for a second before a flood of crimson light took over once again as Mr. Error himself appeared in front of her.
However, he didn't speak for as long as Mr. World.
"Get stronger."
…
Once Hermione was sent back, Loki was about to consider the consequences of Dumbledore's actions more deeply since it seemed strange and impulsive, except just as he was about to think more, almost every single crimson star in his proximity that he'd frequently touched for the Tarot Club began to glow.
As Loki's gaze swept past all of them, he found them all to have a similar dream as Hermione just did.
They each witnessed the most tragic incident of their lives and saw the symbol of their pathways combined with the symbol of the Error pathway near themselves.
'Sigh…'
'Dumbledore is powerful…'
'He truly knows the art of pushing papers.'
'First the staff at Hogwarts and now the only staff member at the Sefirah Castle.'
'It's as if he's the bane of all things related to a castle.'