In that instant, the air seemed to stop moving.

"Death, or rather, the entity the world calls Death — appeared."

Grindelwald closed his eyes. His voice carried a tremor that was barely perceptible.

"No warning. No magical fluctuation. It simply peeled itself out of the shadows from nothing."

"A hazy black shape, draped in tattered robes. No face. A massive scythe in its hands."

"It was nothing but a shadow — and yet it was the most terrifying thing Albus and I had ever seen in our entire lives."

"A single glance felt like it would freeze your soul solid."

"We both knew something was wrong immediately. We joined forces and cast our strongest defensive magic."

"And yet..."

Grindelwald swallowed.

"The shadow just swung the scythe."

"No magical fluctuation. No incantation. Nothing. Our defensive magic dissolved like wet paper the instant it made contact — silently, completely, without a sound."

"The next second, that freezing aura pierced straight through my body."

"Every shred of magic I had was sealed away in that single moment. Gone dormant. I couldn't summon even the smallest fraction of power. I couldn't cast the simplest spell. I was no different from an ordinary person."

"Completely helpless."

Hermione's pupils contracted sharply.

This description. This power. She knew it. She knew it far too well, but how? How was that possible?

Neither man caught her momentary loss of composure, or perhaps they did and simply assumed she was shocked by the creature's strength.

Dumbledore sighed and took over.

"I was the one who got us out."

"I cast Apparition immediately and pulled Gellert out of the valley."

Even in recollection, the lingering dread hadn't left him.

"I kept Apparating, one jump after another, dragging him across half of Europe."

"It didn't matter where we went. Didn't matter how hidden the location, how much distance we put between us, even places layered with anti-tracking wards, the shadow would reappear in an instant."

"It seemed to have some way of locking onto me."

Grindelwald cut in. "And it only cared about me. It ignored Albus entirely."

"Even when he stepped in front of me to block it, the shadow passed straight through him. I was the only target."

Hermione was quiet for a moment, then asked:

"Did you try getting rid of the Deathly Hallows? Maybe the shadow was only after them."

"We tried."

Grindelwald shook his head. "On the second day of running, I threw away both the Invisibility Cloak and the Resurrection Stone. I even handed the Elder Wand to Albus."

"It made no difference."

"The thing didn't care about the Hallows at all. It wanted my life."

Grindelwald laughed, a short, humorless sound.

"That was the most wretched I have ever been."

"Hunted by something we couldn't name, fleeing across the world like a stray dog, unable to stay anywhere for more than three seconds."

Dumbledore's voice was heavy.

"I tried everything I knew. Nothing slowed the shadow by even a second. We were cornered, and Gellert's strength was nearly gone."

"In the end, with nowhere left to turn, I used a Mirror Dimension I hadn't even finished developing. A half-formed attempt."

He looked at Hermione.

"I forced open a mirrored fold in space and pushed Gellert inside. And in that moment, the shadow stopped."

Hermione's gaze sharpened.

"It couldn't find me anymore."

Grindelwald said, "The Mirror Dimension cut off whatever sense it had of me. It stayed where it was. It stopped giving chase."

"But the moment Albus dropped the Mirror Dimension, it would lock onto me again and descend immediately."

"If Albus hadn't pushed himself to his limit sustaining it, fleeing with me the whole way, back to Hogwarts, into this Mirror of Erised, I would have been dead long ago."

Dumbledore gestured at the space around them.

"I used the mirror's own unique properties to solidify the Mirror Dimension inside it. A sanctuary that could hold indefinitely."

He picked up his teacup and sighed quietly.

"But it only treats the symptom."

"We tried many times. The moment Gellert steps outside this mirrored world, the shadow descends instantly and tries to kill him."

"So he stayed. 27 years, hidden here."

Dumbledore went on:

"That said, we didn't spend those 27 years doing nothing."

"I had Gellert lean slightly past the mirror's surface to draw the shadow out, then attacked it every way I could think of. I even attempted to seal it."

"Nothing worked."

"The shadow appears to be a projection of magic rather than a physical entity. Every spell passes straight through it. Nothing can touch it."

"To keep anyone else from stumbling into it, I had to deal with the three Deathly Hallows separately."

"I sealed the Resurrection Stone with the most powerful binding magic I had and kept it in the mirrored world. The Invisibility Cloak was always the Potters' heirloom, I returned it to its rightful owner. The Elder Wand I took from Gellert myself and made certain it would never reach another's hands."

When they finished, both men looked at Hermione.

They had expected something from her. Some unique insight, some angle they hadn't considered.

But her reaction had been strange from the start. She'd gone completely silent, and with every passing moment her expression had grown worse.

"Hermione?"

Dumbledore called out carefully.

She didn't respond. Her mind was somewhere else entirely, her lips moving in a low murmur.

"Sealing all magic... sealing all magic..."

Then she shot to her feet and grabbed Grindelwald's wrist.

He flinched, startled, no time to react, and felt a surge of powerful magic push through Hermione's hand and into his body.

Hermione closed her eyes. She let her magic follow the current of his blood, tracing a full circuit through him.

When she felt it, that unmistakably familiar force, her whole body went still with a sharp, involuntary tremor.

Just as she'd thought.

This was...

Ancient Magic.

Silence.

No one in this world understood Ancient Magic better than she did. No one, except for that transfer student, years ago.

This method of locking down a wizard's magic completely, rendering every spell inert, it was Ancient Magic: Silence. Unmistakably.

Then something else struck her. She closed her eyes again.

When she opened them, the world had gone gray.

There, hovering above Grindelwald's head in that colorless field of vision, a dark red mark pulsed with a faint and fitful light.

Ancient Magic: Link.

More precisely, the mark that Link left behind.

Hermione stared at it. The ground seemed to shift under her feet.

How...

How was this possible...

She forced the shock down, hard. Let the magic drain from her eyes. The world bled back into color.

A slow breath in. She steadied herself, then looked up at Dumbledore and Grindelwald.

Both men were watching her in tense silence, waiting.

"I know how the shadow locked onto you," she said. "And how it sealed your magic."

➤ Next: The Identity of the Dark Shadow

Chapter 372 - The Identity of the Dark Shadow

Hermione's voice was perfectly calm.

The words hit like a thunderclap.

Grindelwald shot to his feet.

Dumbledore's eyes filled with disbelief.

Twenty-seven years of research. Ancient tomes exhausted, countless possibilities tested. Not a single clue to show for any of it.

Hermione had listened to the story and touched him once.

And she already knew?

Dumbledore forced the shock down, his voice coming out urgent.

"Hermione, what is going on?"

Years of fruitless searching, and now Grindelwald himself was involved, even someone of his composure couldn't hold still.

Hermione didn't answer. She turned to look at Grindelwald instead.

"We'll talk in a moment."

She raised her hand. Magic gathered at her fingertips.

"Let me see if I can remove the seal and the tracking mark the shadow left on you first."

Both men froze.

Not only had she identified the methods at a glance, she knew how to break them?

When had she ever studied something like this?

It felt like she was the one who had spent years dealing with dark shadows, and the two of them were the fresh-faced outsiders who'd just stumbled onto the scene.

Hermione's internal assessment: Dumbledore and Grindelwald are amateurs.

Questions could wait. There was an order of priority here.

Removing the threat on Grindelwald came first.

The two men exchanged a glance and said nothing. They simply watched her.

They looked composed. But the anticipation leaking through their eyes — the barely-suppressed excitement — gave them away completely.

Twenty-seven years.

A full twenty-seven years.

Gellert Grindelwald, the Dark Lord who had once made the entire European Wizarding World flinch at his name, had been trapped inside this mirror for twenty-seven years.

If those shackles could actually come off today...

"Gellert. Clear your mind. Don't resist."

Hermione raised her right hand, fingers spread, hovering just above his head.

The grey-white vision opened.

Magic flowed from her palm and spread over him completely.

At the same time, she reached for everything she had, every thread of Ancient Magic inside her, and began working on the Silence binding his power.

Her magic split into countless fine filaments and wound around the dark red mark at the top of his head.

Her brow furrowed almost immediately.

Harder than she'd expected.

The seal and the mark had grown deep into Grindelwald's magic circuits over the decades, fusing with his body until they were nearly indistinguishable from it.

Forcing them out would risk damage that couldn't be undone.

So she didn't force. She worked carefully, methodically, using her own Silence and Link to pick the binding apart thread by thread, wearing away at the shadow's magic one fraction at a time.

Seconds passed. Minutes.

Dumbledore watched her without blinking, barely breathing.

Time blurred.

Sweat beaded along Hermione's forehead. Her face had gone pale. Her breathing was heavier than it should have been.

She had never burned through this much magic before. Not once.

"Dispel!"

Her eyes snapped open.

Blue light blazed in her gaze.

Her fingers closed into a fist.

A cracking sound rang out, one only she could hear.

In the grey-white vision, the dark red mark fractured. Hairline cracks spread across its surface, and then it shattered.

The seal collapsed with it.

"Phew..."

Hermione let out a long breath and slowly withdrew her hand. Her body swayed. She looked wrung out.

Dumbledore stepped forward quickly and caught her arm.

"How is it?"

She waved him off. "I'm fine."

A beat.

"It's done. The seal is broken."

She'd managed it just before her reserves ran dry.

At those words, Grindelwald's eyes flew open.

He reached for his magic immediately.

The next instant, he went very still.

It flowed.

It actually flowed.

He looked down at his hands.

Inside his body, that body that had been silent as a tomb for twenty-seven years, the magic that had been locked away was surging back. Like a volcano waking after decades of dormancy.

He had almost forgotten what this felt like.

A sharp light entered Grindelwald's eyes. He pointed one hand at the empty space beside him.

A plume of eerie blue Fiendfyre erupted from nothing, blazing upward and reshaping itself mid-air into a firebird. The heat radiating off it was vicious.

His magic ran without friction. Without limit.

It was back.

All of it was back.

"HAHAHAHAHA!"

Grindelwald threw his head back and laughed. The sound rang off every wall, raw and unrestrained, two and a half decades of frustration and relief crashing out of him at once.

"Twenty-seven years! A full twenty-seven years! I can finally use magic again!"

Dumbledore watched him laugh.

He reached up quietly and wiped the corner of his eye.

He knew exactly how those twenty-seven years had felt.

Grindelwald turned to face Hermione. The laughter faded. What replaced it in his eyes was something quieter.

He opened his mouth.

There was too much to say, and none of it came.

Everything he could have said collapsed into two words.

"Thank you."

Hermione shook her head. "Don't. You don't need to thank me. I owed you both this."

Grindelwald collected himself. The elation receded from his face, and the steadiness came back. He looked at her, and his expression sharpened with a question he clearly needed answered.

"How did you know?"

"Why do you understand the shadow's methods well enough to break them?"

Dumbledore's gaze settled on her too. This had gone well beyond what either of them could account for.

They waited.

"Ancient Magic."

Hermione's voice was even.

"What the shadow used was Ancient Magic."

Silence.

Both men went rigid at the same moment.

"The ability used to seal Gellert's magic is called Silence. It's one of Ancient Magic's core techniques — it shuts down a wizard's magic circuits completely, renders every spell inert, and reduces a wizard to an ordinary person."

"The tracking mark on his head is a variant application of a different Ancient Magic ability called Link. It should be capable of locking onto a target directly across space."

She looked at them both.

"As it happens, I've mastered both. That's why I could work backwards and undo what the shadow did."

"Ancient Magic..." Dumbledore murmured.

Something cleared in his eyes. A long-standing confusion clicking into place.

That explained it.

In terms of modern magic, no one alive could match the two of them. Any spell, any curse, anything within the current magical system, working together, there was nothing they couldn't crack.

But Ancient Magic? They were no different from first-years walking through Hogwarts' doors for the first time. Complete outsiders. Starting from zero.

Grindelwald drew a slow breath and pressed down the shock still moving through him.

"So that's why..."

He said it quietly, to himself. "No wonder we never got anywhere. We were working in the wrong direction from the very beginning."

Dumbledore lowered himself back into his chair.

"Knowing it was Ancient Magic wouldn't have helped us, either." He shook his head. "By its very nature, Ancient Magic can't be broken through conventional research."

"There's likely no one else in this world who could have done what Hermione just did."

Grindelwald didn't argue the point.

Ancient Magic wasn't something you studied your way into. It was passed down, lineage and inheritance and innate aptitude, all of it working together. Without the core transmission, you could spend lifetimes researching it and come away with nothing. And even if someone broke it apart and laid every piece in front of you, if you didn't have the right aptitude, you'd still see nothing.

Aptitude in the modern magical system meant nothing here. Even Grindelwald. Even Dumbledore. It didn't matter.

The three of them sat with that for a moment.

There was relief. Real relief. Grindelwald was free of something that had bound him for the better part of three decades.

But the question that relief couldn't dissolve was still sitting in the room.

"What is that shadow?" Grindelwald broke the quiet first. His voice had weight to it. "Why did it want me dead?"

Dumbledore said what all three of them were already thinking.

"My suspicion is that the shadow's true identity is none other than the entity from the old legends..."

"Death."

➤ Next: News of the Transfer Student