Chương 51: Ch48- Return

The next two weeks passed in a crawl. Not time-wise. Time sped by but the work was slower than a snail on tranquilizers. They marked out three corridors pretending to be four, no, really. It was some fourth-dimensional maze Cassian couldn't make sense of. Mapped every cursed tile that tried to send their thoughts sideways, and accidentally triggered one glyph that translated to something that would read "hope you weren't attached to your sense of direction." Cassian spent half a day thinking he was left-handed.

The tomb didn't fight them outright. No sudden walls collapsing or banshee screeches in the dark. Just silence. Old and watchful. Waiting to see if they'd earned entry. By the third week, Cassian had a permanent ink smear on his left thumb and a working theory about three different warding systems braided together. The corridors spiralled inward, but not neatly. Paths shifted. Sometimes rooms they marked vanished for a day and reappeared two chambers over like a shy cat.

One afternoon, he stood in front of a wall covered in hexagonal sigils, each pulsing faintly.

"If I had a galleon for every time an ancient architect decided mazes were a good idea, I would still be poor, but at least I would have a theme." Bathsheda, crouched nearby, didn't look up.

"Cass."

"What?" He paused then added.

"Oh, okay, I might've been thinking about touching it." She flicked chalk at his boot.

"You are lucky you are cute." Cassian grinned.

"Is that flirting I hear?"

"No," she muttered.

"It is resignation." They hit their first real break at the end of that week. Behind a sloped corridor lined in mirrored stone, real mirrors, not decorative nonsense, they found a chamber that wasn't on any of the original mapping scrolls. Triangular ceiling. Crushed marble floor. Mostly empty. Just air that tasted old. Cassian stepped in, wand raised.

"Smells like iron and bad times." Bathsheda followed, slower.

"Preservation charm?"

"More like stasis. Look." He pointed at a spiderweb in the corner, untouched. No spider. Just the web, frozen mid-vibration.

"Time is weird in here." She adjusted the band at her wrist, runes flaring.

"Five minutes. Then out." They circled slowly. Nothing obvious. No traps. No glyphs. No bones, thankfully. Cassian tapped the floor with the tip of his wand. It was hollow. They quickly checked, left before five minutes was up. Five minutes later, back in camp, they laid out their findings, inked up new diagrams. Nights were quiet. Fog never left. They slept in spells more than tents... one cast over the bedroll, woven to keep the damp out and the curious spirits from hovering too close.

Cassian got used to the sounds, rustling parchment, low arguments in Mandarin, the distant hum of preservation magic failing one line at a time. A month in, someone triggered a trap. Not them. A young rune scholar from Marseille, keen-eyed and overeager, stepped over a line of faded chalk and set off a cascade of illusions. Smoke poured out of the cracks. Screams filled the air... none of them real. Just noise. Echoes.

Cassian dragged the girl back by the collar, one arm shielding his head as the walls flickered with ghost-fire.

"Next time," he shouted, "wait your bloody turn!" She sobbed an apology. He didn't answer. Just dropped her outside the corridor and told a nearby medic to get her some tea strong enough to knock sense into a dragon. The trap reset itself after two days. It was a message. Bathsheda translated it.

"'Leave the dead where they rest.'" Cassian snorted.

"Bit late for that." Next month passed by. Every inch further into the tomb brought a new problem, runes that flared when one got close, staircases that looped back on themselves, sigils that changed positions just to be petty. The deeper they got, the more the whole place acted like it didn't want them there. Bathsheda raised a brow.

"Still want to touch things?"

"Not unless I want to end up in a dimension where vowels don't exist." If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. They marked it on the sketch. A red cross with a note, "Absolutely not." Cassian underlined it twice. Most of the other researchers had started keeping their distance. The younger ones clung to the outer chambers, triple-checking translation work and pretending they weren't watching Cassian for when to flinch.

The French kept arguing about rune syntax. The Iranians were mapping astral alignments in chalk. Everyone else looked ready to pack up and run if the tomb so much as sighed. Only a few dared the inner paths anymore. And those few stuck close to Cassian and Bathsheda. Not that he minded. He liked the space. The quiet. The fact that the tomb's silence had turned from threatening to annoying. Bathsheda, of course, thrived. She hadn't stopped since the day Ji Wenqiang told her to take lead.

She worked through breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, and the bits in between where sleep was optional and coffee was mandatory. Her notes multiplied like cursed rabbits. Cassian had to add another tent to theirs just to keep up with the scroll count. When August crawled to its sorry end, the tomb was nearly within reach. Nearly. Same as every other maddening ancient site Cassian had ever drooled over from behind a locked museum case, it refused to play nice. They were two chambers away...

maybe one, depending on how metaphorically you defined "sealed inner sanctum of cursed monarch." But the walls were shifting again, the sigils twitchier than usual, and a newly sprouted curse was threatening to rot through any poor sod who stepped on the wrong flagstone. Bathsheda had stared at the freshest ward for a full minute, before saying, "Haste will waste all our efforts. Let's end it here."

Cassian, who was halfway through sketching what looked suspiciously like an evil smiley face into the margin of their latest ward map, looked up.

"You sure?" She didn't answer straight away. Walked over, pinched the bridge of her nose, then dropped into his arms.

"I want to see it too," she said, muffled against his shoulder, "but alas. Time is not on our side."

"Tragic," he muttered, and didn't let go. Ji Wenqiang promised to pause everything till next year. Fair play to him. That beard stroke didn't look like it lied. But Bathsheda said, and Cassian would bet a bottle of smuggled elf-wine she was right, they would probably "accidentally" breach the tomb during a midnight stroll before the freeze could be enforced. Someone always poked the wrong rune, or leaned on a pillar that wasn't actually a pillar, and poof... surprise soul curse forcing them to push further.

He asked, only half-joking, serious enough to stay if she said yes, "Want to skip Hogwarts this year? We could move in, marry the tomb, get cursed together." She pulled back, gave him a look.

"No." So they packed. They didn't drag it out. Just rolled up scrolls, folded diagrams, and told the others where not to die while they were gone. Cassian slipped the Marseille scholar a charm bracelet before they left... nothing fancy, just a warded loop that would glow if a curse tried to singe her face off. She cried. It took a full day to untangle themselves from the site. The new liaison kept fluttering between tents, begging for last-minute advice and ward assessments. Bathsheda gave the schedule.

Cassian offered an annotated copy of his notes, which included such gems as "do not lick this stone" and "this symbol hates you personally." By nightfall, they packed every scrap of equipment they weren't leaving behind. The portkey back was easier. No stomach-churning lurch, no rogue sparks. Just a clean tug and then they were back on British soil, standing in the middle of an abandoned Ministry transfer room. Cassian looked around.

"Ah. The magic of home." Bathsheda pulled out a comb and tried to fix her hair.

"We have two days before term."

"Still time to break into a museum or two." She didn't dignify that with a reply. She Apparated him straight to Rosier Manor, gave a quick kiss like she just delivered a parcel, then vanished with a pop. Walking in, Towel met him just past the foyer with a flustered little bow and a frantic shuffle of parchment in his oversized hands. Probably something about dinner placements or illegal artefact shipments being delivered a week early.

As he stepped into the main hall, something that froze Cassian from head to toe happened, both Magnus and Regulus stood up. As in they stopped their act of sitting. Not glanced up, not nodded from their velvet thrones like reluctant monarchs humbling themselves for the prodigal embarrassment... actually stood up. Together. A matched set carved out of cold air and sharper opinions. He blinked. That wasn't right. Regulus, refined as ever, with his immaculately pressed robe.

Magnus, statuesque and carved from pure judgement, hands clasped behind his back. It was clear to him that the rest of the family had been standing there for minutes. Cassian paused halfway to the sitting room threshold, stared, not sure what to make of it.

"Have I died?" he asked, too amused for his own good.

"Is this purgatory? Is there an even worse Cassian here who gets actual affection from his family?" Regulus gave him the look. That quiet, disdain-soaked glance that meant he was already regretting his choices and probably mentally deleting Cassian from the family tree again.

"Sit," Magnus said at last. Cassian narrowed his eyes. Others seated too quickly, loose in posture but straight-backed.

"Should I be worried this is an ambush?" he asked, looking around.

"There is expensive tea. Aunties aren't throwing curses. Not even Damien pretending to be clever." Lucian sat by the window, arms folded. Aunt Viola had her chin tilted in that vague expression of 'I already know you are going to embarrass us, but go on.' Catherine's mouth was pinched so tight it could've snapped steel. Ophelia, of course, didn't even glance up from her teacup. Cassian walked over and dropped into the seat.

"If this is an intervention, I already got three exit plans and a Portkey keyed to a yak farm in Nepal."

"It is not an intervention," Magnus said.

"Shame." Towel appeared with a tray of documents. He offered them to Magnus with both hands. Cassian caught a flash of Ministry seal and... something else. Ah.

"Am I being drafted?" he asked.

"Is this where we pretend I am a war asset now?" Magnus ignored that. He took the top sheet, turned it over, then handed it to Regulus. Regulus skimmed it. He looked completely lost now. Cassian saw the twitch in Magnus's jaw. Whatever this was, it wasn't punishment. It was worse. It was opportunity.

Regulus's brows tugged in, eyes flicking back to Cassian like he was trying to make sense of some badly written riddle, except the answer wasn't '42,' it was 'Cassian did something right,' and that short-circuited about half his brain.