Chương 42: Ch39- Gravitas

Ancient Variant Unlocked: Gravitas Ascendio Condition Met. Gravitas Ascendio - Older form of levitation magic. Draws object upward through gravitational displacement. Lingers mid-air until caster severs connection. Cassian raised an eyebrow.

"Here we go." He dropped onto the couch with a thud and slung one arm over the backrest like a man awaiting divine punishment. Then shut his eyes. Didn't help. It came instantly. No warning, no buildup. The room pulled sideways. Cold, damp air and the scratch of stone under his knees. Cassian opened his eyes into a thick darkness. Wherever he was, it smelled wet moss, rusted metal, and that sharp, mineral bite of old blood. The floor beneath was earth. His hands weren't his anymore. Fair, soft hands.

The robe on his arms wasn't black. Brown, soft. Goat wool? He felt the sting before he knew what caused it. Sharp, across the back, like the air itself cracked open. He staggered forward. A whip. That was obvious. Either the host remembered or pain was universal. He moved forward, more like stumbled with the pain. His… no, the body didn't flinch. Just kept walking. A slave. Brilliant. He glanced down. Rope around the wrists, frayed, rubbed raw at the edges. Shackled, but lightly.

There were others, walking ahead, line of bent backs and bent heads, all quiet except the ones who couldn't help crying. They didn't last long. Cassian didn't recognise the language of the cries. Something old. Southern. Could've been Akkadian, maybe even proto-Arabic, if he squinted through ten thousand years of linguistic rot. Sounded rough, almost like stone grating on stone. The line stopped. Cassian stopped with it. Trying to look around.

He learned that the hard way the last time his mind took a scenic detour through someone else's misery. Better to pay attention. Collect the clues. Write mental notes and hope he didn't vomit from the vertigo. They stood at the base of a stairway. Sloped stone, wide and worn, climbing up into a shadowed arch. He didn't have time to study it... another whip cracked. Someone shouted. Movement resumed. The host's head lifted a bit to catch a glimpse of a structure. Monolith. Cut straight into a cliff face.

The entrance gaped like a mouth. Pillars flanked either side, carved with symbols that made Cassian's historian brain twitch. Another shove. Someone behind him reminded him to move. So he did. The corridor inside was dark. Chilly, damp, and narrow. Labourers. Dozens of them. Some older, some no older than second-years. Faces thin, eyes sunken. A few wore nothing but ragged cloth at the waist. Compared to theirs, the host's robes were much better. Goat skin was probably silk of this time.

Cassian stumbled a step, caught himself, and followed the rest of the line in. Everyone else dropped to their knees the second they passed into the chamber... some slow, some like their legs just gave out. It became clear he was the only one in the cavern who had any magic. The goatskin robe made more sense now. Cassian stepped closer to the altar. He raised both hands and spoke. Not anything modern. The words scraped the back of the throat.

And still, even without knowing the exact tongue, Cassian recognised the structure. He could feel the spell underneath it. Gravitas Ascendio. Cassian didn't know why the interface gave him the Latin name. The spell rolling off his tongue now wasn't Latin. Wasn't even close. He tried to memorise whatever he could and moved. The slab in front of him, wide, solid, easily a tonne of cut stone, began to rise. Clean off the ground like some invisible chain yanked it upward.

It didn't even shudder or groan under the weight. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. The guards stepped in. Two of them, robed in something darker and heavier than the others, moved around the edges of the monolith and pressed their palms to its corners. Together, they spun it. The stone spun mid-air. Freely. The altar might as well have been a feather the size of a house. Cassian's stomach twisted. This was the host's memory, the host's casting.

But he felt the spell all the same. Felt how it worked... how it grabbed the world and told it to sod off. One of the guards gestured up as people on the ground started to chant, Wake... wake... wake, and heed my command. Cassian followed the motion. Overhead, built into the cavern ceiling, was a wide notch. Stone ribs braced it, four arms extending outward like the branches of a windmill. That's where it went. The spinning altar would be lifted up... slotted in, spinning while locked into place.

The whole chamber was built for it. Cassian could feel the strain building now. Magic pouring out like a wire humming at full charge. A few more seconds and the spell would fray. Maybe drop the altar on someone's head. Maybe on his. He stepped forward, arms still raised. The altar climbed. Faster than before. Up, up, into the carved notch above. It fit. Not like two woods resting against each other... more like gears biting down.

The massive altar didn't just float, it rotated, slotted neatly into the arms above like a key turning in a lock. The arms accepted it with a mechanical click that felt wrong for something made of rock. No grinding, no scrape. Just click, click and settled. Cassian barely had a second to take it in before the air shifted. Light cracked across the seams of the stone. A breath of furnace-dry heat slid through the chamber, fire without smoke, as if something old had just breathed. Lines lit up...

runic etchings, old ones, the kind that weren't drawn so much as carved into existence. They burned gold, then flared bright as a sunburst before dimming to a soft pulse. A circuit. That was what it was. This whole chamber was a power grid, and the altar wasn't just furniture, it was a bloody engine. Cassian tried to move. His feet didn't cooperate. But his head snapped up, catching the pattern again. The symbols weren't ornamental. They were aligned, rhythmic, humming in sync with the floating mass above. Wake...

wake... wake, and heed my command. He wanted to get closer, inspect the carvings... half a dozen of them looked Mesopotamian in style, but not quite. There were gaps. Corrections etched over older glyphs. Modifications, probably. Like someone had tried to improve an ancient enchantment by slapping on new parts without understanding what the old ones did. And it worked. That was the worst part. The bloody thing was active. Cassian tried to lean forward. He was so close, just needed to read one of the root runes.

Figure out what branch it belonged to... The spell snapped. The chamber vanished. Cassian hit the floor of his room with a thud and a string of words that would've got him detention in every respectable institution from here to Gringotts. He groaned, rolled halfway onto his side, and pressed his forehead to the cool floorboards. He kept his eyes shut for a moment longer, like maybe the vision would drift back in if he prayed enough. Nothing.

"Ugh," he muttered, dragging himself upright by the desk. His limbs felt like someone else's... wobbly, too long, reluctant to cooperate. He groped around until his hand hit the edge of the table, then pawed over the mess until he found the right notebook. Not the one with the Ancient Rune mapping. Not the one with Tonks' therapy notes. Not the bloody map he was trying to decipher. The ratty green one with the broken spine and half a biscuit wedged between pages 13 and 14. He opened it. The biscuit crumbled.

- Goatskin. Southern dialect, maybe Akkadian-adjacent. Deep cave or constructed chamber. Gravitational lock-spell system, Gravitas Ascendio used in ritual or sacrificial mechanism. Power-matrix, altar = rotor. Hybrid (magitech?). Maybe blood-bound? - He paused, tapping the side of the pen against his temple. Bit of ash in the air. Definitely felt sacrificial. But no obvious offering. Unless the spell itself was draining them. That thought sat wrong.

He underlined it twice and scribbled a quick note beside, Spiritual displacement? Who is paying the cost? Another scribble. - Could be linked to place-based enchantment. Carvings not decorative. Actual bloody framework. Symbols overlaid... new script on top of older base system. Almost like someone took a Mesopotamian curse matrix and stapled a charging rune on top. Who does that? - He sighed, squinting at the sketch he butchered for the fifth time. The runes were vague.

Whatever the reason, they wouldn't hold still in his memory long enough to draw properly. Might've been a blessing. Because the theory brewing in the back of his head? Nasty business. If he was right, that altar wasn't just for lifting stone. At least he got something useful out of it. Gravitas Ascendio. Sounded like a fancy way to say "up you go," but the mechanics underneath? Different beast entirely. Not standard levitation, more like bending the field itself. Efficient. Dangerous.

Very much not Ministry-approved. He would need to test it properly, see if the thing could hold weight or just throw it. And it came with a warning label stamped straight into his skull, whatever that place was, whoever that memory belonged to, it wasn't ceremonial. That altar didn't rise for show. It clicked into something. Powered it. And the people who built it knew exactly what they were fuelling. Cassian rubbed the bridge of his nose feeling throbbing behind his eyelids. His mind felt sluggish.

When Christmas arrived, Tonks still hadn't managed to turn into her mum while under the effects of Polyjuice. Bit of a letdown, considering the three months of damp sock flavoured trauma she choked down. But with school breaking up and no miracle morph on the horizon, she packed up her trunk, hugged Bathsheda with genuine affection, and gave Cassian a look that promised at least one prank if her eyebrows grew back crooked.

"Enjoy the holidays," he told her, ruffling her hair.

"Choke on a pinecone," she replied sweetly, and took the train the next morning. That left Cassian with two options, spend the holidays trapped in Rosier Manor with the family equivalent of a tax audit, or do literally anything else. He took the second option. Of course.