Returning to this place, Hermione felt a quiet pang she hadn't expected.

Her first real conversation with Dumbledore, the one that had actually mattered, had happened in this room, in front of this mirror.

But this wasn't the time for nostalgia.

Aside from the mirror, the room was empty. Not even a ghost.

"Is Gellert actually here?"

Hermione looked at Dumbledore.

He nodded.

The basement air was still.

She swept her gaze around the room and let her senses spread outward like a tide, washing into every corner.

Nothing.

No magical fluctuations. No hidden barriers.

She frowned and pushed her magic out again, her pupils blooming faint blue.

Still nothing.

Not invisibility, then.

That didn't make sense.

She turned back to Dumbledore, genuinely puzzled.

At her current level of mastery, it wasn't just Grindelwald she could see through, even if Dumbledore threw every ounce of his power into a high-level Disillusionment Charm and layered an Invisibility Cloak on top of it, she would still catch something. Some trace. Some residue.

Unless the person simply wasn't in the room.

Dumbledore didn't answer. He just looked toward the large mirror at the center of the room.

Hermione followed his gaze.

The surface was smooth and flat, reflecting the two of them back in perfect silence.

She stared for a moment. Then something clicked, and her eyes went wide.

An absolutely absurd thought surfaced in her mind.

"Don't tell me you hid him inside the mirror."

Dumbledore smiled and nodded. He walked to the mirror, raised his hand, and waved it gently across the surface.

The glass rippled like disturbed water.

Without a moment's hesitation, he stepped forward and walked straight through, his body dissolving into the surface and disappearing.

Hermione looked back at the mirror. Only her own reflection remained.

She didn't hesitate either. She stepped through.

The other side opened up like a held breath finally released.

No more dark basement. In its place: a vast, open world. Blue sky, white clouds, green hills rolling away into the distance. Closer in, a wide lake lay perfectly still, not a ripple on its surface. A few quaint wooden cabins sat nestled along the shore.

"I have you to thank for this, actually."

Dumbledore noticed the disbelief on her face and explained.

"I spent decades studying your Mirror Dimension. Eventually made some real progress — enough to form a space this size, though I couldn't sustain it for long on its own."

"So Gellert and I worked out a method to anchor the space inside the mirror itself. It became a world you can enter and exit at will."

"The most important thing is what it does to outside perception. Stand right in front of the mirror and you'd think it was just a mirror. No one can detect what's inside."

He paused, something like quiet wonder in his voice.

"An ordinary mirror couldn't hold this. Only the Mirror of Erised — its material, its nature. It already had something like this property built in, just on a much smaller scale."

"Gellert has been living here ever since."

He walked to the largest cabin with the ease of someone who had done it many times before, and knocked.

Footsteps came from inside.

The door opened.

An old man stood in the doorway. Slender, dressed in plain cloth, hair gone mostly white, his face deeply lined. But his eyes, heterochromatic and sharp, were still full of life.

Faint but unmistakable: the shadow of the Dark Lord who had once swept across Europe.

Gellert Grindelwald.

The moment he saw Hermione, he went still.

The teacup slipped from his hand and hit the floor.

SHATTERED!

He stared at her. His lips trembled slightly.

A full minute passed before anything came out, his voice rough with age.

"Good... good."

"You're back. That's all that matters."

He seemed to catch himself then, and quickly stepped aside.

"Come in. Come in, quickly."

Inside, the room was warm. A fire burned in the hearth. A few books sat open on the table. Grindelwald waved them toward chairs and put fresh tea on.

"70 years."

He looked at Hermione. His gaze was complicated, and his face was full of feeling.

"And here you actually are."

He shook his head slowly. "It's been so long. Long enough I was starting to forget your face."

Hermione held her teacup and felt something she rarely felt: guilt.

Back then, she had walked away. Left behind a Witch Cult barely off the ground, a pile of loose ends, and two old men holding a promise they'd wait on for most of their lives.

Even by her standards, and her skin was famously thick, that had been a little heartless.

Grindelwald seemed to read it on her face. He smiled.

"Don't carry too much of that. This was never only your burden. It was our cause too. I never forgot it. Not once, in all these years."

He sat up straighter. Something sharp moved through his eyes.

The unyielding pride of the first Dark Lord, still intact.

"The Witch Cult has been growing steadily."

"At this point, more than half the Wizarding World is already under our control."

His tone was calm. The words were anything but.

"High-ranking officials across every Ministry of Magic — we have people inside nearly all of them. Even some of the oldest pure-blood families have quietly pledged themselves to the Witch Cult. Subordinate houses, now."

"That said," Grindelwald continued, shifting gears, "per the rules you set from the beginning: no one moves without a direct order from the Witch herself. No exceptions."

"Even if they see you in person, they will not approach. They will not acknowledge you. They wait for your final command. When it comes, the net closes all at once."

Hermione listened and felt deeply, thoroughly satisfied.

This. This was what professionalism looked like.

Next to Grindelwald, the Death Eaters were a street gang. A rowdy, disorganized street gang. Voldemort had dragged his rowdy punks from city to city staging terror attacks, demanding people bow down and acknowledge how powerful he was.

And here was Grindelwald, who had quietly walked into the entire Wizarding World and taken it apart from the inside without anyone noticing.

One was Hydra. The other was Chan Ho-nam.

They talked for a while. Once Hermione had a solid picture of where the Witch Cult stood, Dumbledore reached into his pocket and set a small black wooden box on the table.

"This is what Hermione came for."

He opened it. The ring sat inside, the Resurrection Stone set into its band.

"She's already worked out that the seal on the ring wasn't targeting the Horcrux. It was targeting the Stone."

Grindelwald nodded, and his expression went serious.

"The Dark Magic curse layered onto it is nasty work. Genuinely insidious."

"The moment it touches skin, it invades immediately, runs along the body's magical pathways and cuts off the life force from the inside. One moment of carelessness and it has you. You could say it was built specifically to take down powerful wizards."

He looked at Dumbledore.

"It's fortunate Albus didn't try anything on his own and brought it straight to me. Even with the 2 of us working together, it took 3 full days to break the curse and destroy the Horcrux."

➤ Next: Death!

Chapter 370 - Death!

Dumbledore continued:

"At the time, I never imagined this thing had anything to do with Tom. I simply assumed someone had placed a powerful curse on it to keep the Resurrection Stone out of other hands."

"It was only after you unraveled the mystery of the Chamber diary that I realized it was also Tom's Horcrux."

"But Tom clearly had no idea the stone set into it was the Resurrection Stone. Otherwise he never would have left it sitting in the Gaunt Shack."

Hermione understood.

That made sense.

No matter how formidable Voldemort's curse was, it could never have held against Dumbledore and Grindelwald working in tandem.

Then a thought struck her, and her brow furrowed.

She'd spotted a problem.

Both of them were perfectly fine. Their power was at its peak. The Witch Cult's reach was enormous.

So why,

"Wait. Something doesn't add up."

Hermione looked between them.

"One of you is working in the open, one from the shadows, and both of you are alive and kicking..."

"So what was the deal with Voldemort?"

The real question.

"When Voldemort rose and took the title of Dark Lord from you, the two of you could have moved together and crushed him flat. Couldn't you?"

"With your combined abilities, even accounting for his Horcruxes, a few decades of looking should have tracked down most of them, if not all. That's hardly an impossible ask."

"By any reasonable logic, that noseless freak should have been dead and buried long ago. So how did he get to rampage across the Wizarding World for decades, until a newborn baby's accidental deflection was what finally did him in?"

Because Voldemort and the Death Eaters stirring up chaos would have put constant pressure on the Witch Cult's shadow operations. These two had every reason in the world to put him down.

Dumbledore and Grindelwald exchanged a glance.

Something faintly bitter surfaced in both their eyes.

"It isn't that we didn't want to, Hermione."

Dumbledore sighed. His voice was tired.

"It's that we couldn't."

Hermione went still.

Couldn't?

One Voldemort had actually left both of them completely helpless?

Grindelwald spoke up, his tone abrupt:

"Guess how long I've been living inside this mirror."

Hermione shook her head.

There was no way to guess that.

"Twenty-seven years."

The number dropped into the air.

A number Hermione hadn't come close to expecting.

His voice was low. "27 full years. I haven't set foot outside this mirror realm even once."

Hermione's pupils snapped tight.

27 years?

His imprisonment in Nurmengard was a fabrication, but his confinement here was real?

Dumbledore let out a quiet breath. "I couldn't finish Tom alone. That's why things stand as they do."

"What happened?"

Hermione's voice had gone flat.

She didn't believe Grindelwald had locked himself in here by choice.

Even if he couldn't show his face in public, that was no reason to not walk out the door. Polyjuice Potion, the Disillusionment Charm, a bit of strategic Memory Modification, there were a dozen ways to move unseen. This wasn't hiding. This was something else entirely.

"It isn't that I didn't want to leave."

Grindelwald gave a short, bitter laugh. Then his expression shifted, turned grave in a way that had nothing performative about it.

"It's that I can't leave."

"I've been... marked."

He was working to hold his voice steady. He wasn't quite managing it. Beneath the surface, the unease was there, and underneath that, something that looked like genuine fear.

"The moment I dare take a single step outside this mirror. The moment my magical signature touches the outside world."

"They sense it instantly."

Grindelwald drew a slow breath.

"And then I die. No struggle, no second chance. Just — done."

Hermione froze.

Her mind stalled out for a full second.

Then it started moving at full speed.

Impossible.

There was no one like that in the original story. No one.

Who was Grindelwald? The first-generation Dark Lord. One of the absolute peaks of wizarding power. The most dangerous dark wizard in a century.

Who in existence could terrify him to the point where he wouldn't even step outside?

Who could make him feel that kind of death, certain, immediate, inescapable?

And even setting that aside, even granting that some hidden monster existed who could do this to Grindelwald, his opponents were Dumbledore and Grindelwald. Together. Moving against one meant moving against both. Simultaneously.

There was no one in this world. No person, no creature. Nothing that could withstand the two of them combined.

Not even her. Without the grimoire, without the foundation she'd built through the Marvel world, relying only on what the wizarding system could offer, she wouldn't last against these two either.

So who was it?

When had someone like that ever appeared in the Wizarding World?

Since the day she'd crossed over, she had kept her hands on every thread. Even when she'd tumbled 70 years into the past without warning, she'd still maneuvered everyone into place. Still stayed ahead.

This was the first time she'd felt it, genuinely felt it, that things might be slipping beyond her reach.

Hermione's gaze dropped. It landed on the Resurrection Stone sitting in its box on the table.

"Hold on."

She pointed at it. "What does any of this have to do with the Resurrection Stone?"

"Do you know the Deathly Hallows?"

The information surfaced in her mind almost immediately.

"The Elder Wand. The Invisibility Cloak. The Resurrection Stone."

"Legend says that whoever unites all three becomes the Master of Death."

Grindelwald nodded.

"I thought you might."

"It's just a story," Hermione said flatly, shaking her head. "Those three objects are genuine alchemical artifacts — I won't dispute that. But the Master of Death claim? That's nonsense. If Death were a real entity with that kind of power, it wouldn't be controllable by a few items some wizards cobbled together."

Grindelwald looked at the Resurrection Stone. His gaze went somewhere distant.

"When I was young, I believed every word of that legend. I thought it was the key to absolute power."

"I spent years hunting through ancient texts, tracing every mention of the Hallows. It even drove a wedge between me and Albus."

He glanced briefly at Dumbledore.

"But as time went on, I started having the same doubts you do."

"I carried the Elder Wand for a long time. It does carry something, a genuine enhancement, a real amplification of power. But it falls so far short of a Death-level legend that there's no comparison."

"Eventually I let it go. Stopped chasing the other two. Focused on building the Acolytes."

He looked back at Hermione.

"Then you left. Seventy years ago."

"I followed the plan. Let Albus defeat me. Let myself be locked into Nurmengard. Disappeared from public view, slipped into the shadows."

"With time on my hands, I found myself thinking about the legend again."

"I talked it over with Albus. We decided to make one last effort, find the remaining two Hallows together. Call it settling an old obsession."

He paused. The color in his face had begun to drain.

"We spent more than a decade making quiet inquiries. Careful. Patient. Until, 27 years ago, we finally had all three."

Hermione's eyes narrowed.

The Elder Wand, stolen from Gregorovitch in his youth. The Invisibility Cloak, held by the Potter family. The Resurrection Stone, in the Gaunt Shack. With their combined strength and connections, acquiring all three in secret wasn't a stretch.

"And then?" Hermione asked.

Grindelwald's voice had gone hoarse.

"It was an ordinary night. Godric's Hollow."

"The moment all three came together in my hands and the resonance began—"

"I didn't become the Master of Death."

"Instead, something happened. Something I was completely unprepared for."

Grindelwald closed his eyes. The corner of his mouth pulled tight in a faint, involuntary twitch.

He didn't go on. His expression had cracked open just enough to show what was underneath, dread, raw and unmasked, like the memory of that night was still right there behind his eyes.

It was profoundly wrong. That expression didn't belong on this face. This was the man who had held the entire Wizarding World in terror for decades. The lines didn't fit.

Listening, Hermione had already formed a guess. It was the only guess that made logical sense.

She still found it absurd.

"What happened?"

Grindelwald answered her. Each word deliberate. Each one placed with care.

"Death appeared."

➤ Next: Ancient Magic! — Face to Face