For a few seconds, Bill's face was a frozen lake, stunned solid. Then, his professional Curse-Breaker instincts thawed it rapidly.
He took a deep breath. The air was thick with dust and the scent of long-dead plants. It grounded him. It yanked his drifting, shocked mind back into his body.
"I see it now."
Bill's eyes sharpened. He paced a slow circle around the seven ceramic urns. His steps regained their distinctive rhythm – a blend of deliberate calm and meticulous precision.
"The intruder's story… Anh-Kaa used the order of the spirit hauntings he triggered as the passcode."
He stopped. His gaze locked onto Douglas, a spark of finally, a worthy puzzle flashing in his eyes.
"So, the logic is simple. The order I found them in the storybook is the order."
Bill's mind was spinning fast now, a precision instrument recalibrated and humming.
"First story in that forged fairytale book was Whispers of the Nile. The girl with the lotus crown."
He pointed his wand at the urn emanating mournful, helpless weeping.
"First note. Sorrow."
He moved to the next urn, the one whose shifting light had shown a sandstorm blotting out the sun.
"Second story. Guidepost in the Sandstorm. The merchant caravan, the man in grey robes."
His wand shifted to the Fear urn.
"Then The Potter and the Green Lizard. The snake-shape in the well-water."
He pointed to the Deceit urn.
"Finally, The Prince and the Flower of Forgetting. The prince searching the tomb for the flower that erases pain." He aimed his wand at the 'Oblivion' urn.
"Sorrow. Fear. Deceit. Oblivion…"
Bill recited the sequence, a look of impending triumph on his face.
"That leaves Rage, Hunger, and the 'key.' The rest of the melody."
It was flawless deduction. Impeccable logic, rooted in the physical clues.
Douglas didn't argue. He just watched, quiet, his eyes holding a thread of probing curiosity.
"My lead."
Bill raised his wand. He stood like a conductor before a symphony, his focus absolute.
He didn't cast immediately. First, his wand tip traced a soft, slow circle in the air. Setting the tempo. A gentle opening.
He pointed it at the Sorrow urn.
A thread of silver-white magic, fine as a spider's silk, flowed from the tip. It reached out, soundless, and brushed the urn's lip.
The urn's weeping shifted in pitch. The helpless sobbing softened, tinged with something like… relief. The relief of being heard.
It was working.
A faint smile touched Bill's lips. His wrist turned. The silver thread drew a graceful arc through the air, stretching toward the Fear urn.
Connecting the first two notes.
The instant the thread touched the second urn, everything went wrong.
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM—
The whispering chorus of the tomb didn't just swell. It snapped. It shifted from a background hum to a shrieking, ear-splitting crescendo.
It wasn't noise anymore. It was red-hot, barbed wire. It was iron needles, blazing, driving straight into their brains.
The tomb vanished.
Bill wasn't looking at cold stone anymore.
He saw The Burrow.
His home. That wonderfully lopsided, impossibly warm pile of a house that held every memory of his childhood. It was burning.
Orange flames licked and devoured the wooden walls. Black smoke poured from every window like a demon's gaping maw.
He heard them.
Ginny's sharp, terrified scream. Ron's roar of pure despair. His mother's voice, tearing itself apart on his name.
Each sound was a knife. It twisted in his heart.
He lunged toward the fire, a mad, instinctive charge.
An invisible, ice-cold wall slammed into him, throwing him back.
He could only watch. He was forced to watch as the house groaned and began to collapse in the inferno. He saw silhouettes—his family—swallowed by the flames.
Powerless.
This was his deepest, most primal fear for his family's safety. His constant, low-grade anxiety. Now amplified a thousandfold into a searing, personal hell.
"PROTEGO!"
Bill roared the spell within the vision. Raw power blasted from him, trying to build a shield.
He saw his own magic pass uselessly through the flames. No ripple. No effect.
The nightmare held him, stubborn as a parasite.
Meanwhile, Douglas's world had also shifted.
But he wasn't drowning. He was more like… a spectator who had willingly stepped into a private screening.
The scene of his seven-year-old self's car crash reconstructed itself around him.
Cold rain lashed down. The shriek of tearing metal scratched inside his skull. His parents' blurred faces beyond the shattered glass swam into view again.
Then, the orphanage. The impossibly high, hollow corridors. The precise, nauseating cocktail smell of antiseptic and cheap stew filled his nostrils.
The loneliness of being thrown away by the world washed over him.
This time, the tide didn't pull him under.
His soul was… different.
It wasn't a blank slate. It was a piece of parchment that had been written on, carefully erased, and written on again.
His past-life memories were faint, blurred. But they had left behind a residue. A tough, invisible layer at the very core of his being.
That layer made his current experience… fascinating.
He could feel the ancient curse's power clearly. It was like a skilled surgeon with a probe, tracing the deepest, oldest scars on his soul. Poking. Examining.
The pain was real. The loneliness was real.
But his consciousness was detached. A calm observer, clinically reviewing the data.
He didn't resist. He opened his mind wider, letting the curse-force rage through his mental landscape.
He was… enjoying it.
This was a free, in-depth soul scan.
He could clearly see where the childhood trauma had left its deepest cracks in his spirit. He could touch how the loneliness coiled, vine-like, around the core of his vitality. He could even analyze which negative emotion the curse struggled the most to amplify—where his psychological defenses were strongest.
He was a hacker, watching a stress-test on his own firewall, calmly logging every exploited vulnerability, reverse-engineering the attack code.
His body trembled slightly. A soul being touched always triggered a physical response. But his mind had never been more clear. More cold.
He saw Bill beside him, thrashing in agony, a lion caught in a net.
Douglas decided the scan was over.
He lifted a hand toward the source of the screaming. His voice was quiet, but it cut through every illusion with absolute authority.
"Enough."
~~~~❃❃~~~~~~~~❃❃~~~~
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