Sirius coughed, waving the overlong wand at the spiderwebs above his bed. Holing up in a place some younger fellow with red hair had found for him had been a new experience, but it was a sight and a half better than Azkaban. Really, he should be grateful the worst thing about Ghana was the spiders, however clever they seemed to think they were.

Using the old man's wand was not something he had envisioned himself doing, but he was without one at the time and decided necessity outweighed respect for the dead, a decision he had made a few times in the past. Remus, he remembered, would insist on burying their fallen friends, when he always thought a good fire charm would at least hedge out the possibility of the body being used to create an Inferius.

"Funerals are for the living, old friend," he whispered to no one. "You always did take losses hard, didn't you?"

There had been more than enough in the last war, though he frowned at the terminology. From the way it felt and the time he lost in prison, he could not be sure that there was a 'this war' and a 'last war', or if the war had simply died down to start up again. Remus certainly would not be remembering much of the time in between, so he would be no help in making the distinction, though there was no one else he could contact.

Shortly after escaping the prison's ruin after a few attempts at Apparation with an unfamiliar wand, he found his old friend, as expected, by howling. Perhaps the only reason he survived the swipes the werewolf took at him before at last calming down was because of how rail-thin he had become in Azkaban, even in his other form. He managed to hang on long enough for Remus to recognize him, though there seemed to be something wrong with his eyes. A few Hogwarts professors had gone out to look for the werewolf that had apparently bitten a student, found the two of them, and probably recognized him for an Animagus, but asked no further questions as they puzzled out what was wrong. Apparently his old friend had managed to curse his eyes to remain in his beast form, though the teachers assumed someone else had done it to him.

Since then his journey to find his brother had taken him to Africa, where the remnants of the Order believed some Death Eaters to be operating in secret. With no established networks of dark wizards that were essentially equivalent to those a careful eye could see across Europe, some groundwork had to be lain and the task could be assumed to fall to more junior members of the organization. He avoided Professor McGonagall, who might have recognized him, and asked one of the newer teachers if there were any graduates looking for dark wizards, and where they might be after Remus identified himself as a former Order member. They had been without leads, but someone remembered one Arthur Weasley, who had been willing to participate late in the war, who might have had a son in Africa. It was the thinnest connection he could have found, but it was also the only one.

Getting to Egypt had been easy enough; he had expected more resistance from law enforcement, but it was not as if he had been the only escapee. Finding the young man had been slower and more difficult, because he had only been given a city in which to look, but apparently Bill had been expecting him. Reusing a fake name from his younger years, he identified himself as Snuffles Starr, an Order member in search of dark wizards. He seriously doubted the younger wizard believed him, but he said Egypt was the wrong place to look. There were dark wizards, to be sure, but no one who wanted anything to do with the Death Eaters.

"If you want to find people who might be forming networks, you'll need to look into the Ashanti Kingdom and the Kingdom of Dagbon."

"I suppose that can't take more than an afternoon," he remembered saying.

"If you give a damn how long it takes, that's your business. I'm only telling you what I know, which isn't much."

"What else do you know?"

"The North is a dangerous place. Dark wizards are actively fighting some other group that wants to ally itself with the Death Eaters, who seem to be handing out a few old secrets to make inroads."

"Why wouldn't they?"

"I don't even properly know who they are- they're a touch secretive, but the bodies show signs of dark magic."

Having learned that the Kingdom of Dagbon was in the northern half of Ghana, getting there was the easy part. His appearance had been something of a windfall for the wizard with long red hair, as it turned out Animagi were somewhat more common where he was going than in the rest of the world. As if I shall not stick out like a sore thumb all the same.

In the past few days he had secured a simple hut, though its appearances were quite deceiving. It was comfortable except for the spiders, and there was a well bucket that seemed to serve as a Pensieve, though the memories were vast and went back generations. The former owners of this home must have been pure, or whatever it is around here. Asking around, no one who spoke English seemed to know about blood status terms, but everyone knew they were dead, and the home was easy to obtain because of the spirits.

"Usually we leave homes as they are," an elder explained one morning. They sat outside what appeared to be his home, a small structure of stone and sticks, with a magical herb garden in the back. "It is better not to disturb the dead."

"I haven't seen any ghosts yet," Sirius decided. What's dead and gone should stay dead and gone, whether it's my family or Voldemort. I would have preferred both. "How did they die?"

"Rawlings supporters do not long live when dark wizards arrive," the old warlock said at length. He wore no shirt and seemed to practice Divination by tossing bones in a bowl of sand. "I predicted it." I'm sure you did.

"Rawlings?"

"Dealings of the do-no-magics concern us," the elder continued. "He put the changing regimes to rest, and restored order with the Constitution. He is president now." Sirius had been in Africa long enough to know they had a different understanding of the Statute of Secrecy, with many countries not having a specific magical government to enforce it. If you think about it, this is one of the main functions of the Ministries around the world.

"You don't like him."

"No. I believe he is a hypocrite. Before him we had men who did what was necessary, and we removed them when we liked it. Before I continue, to whom do I speak?"

"I am a wizard who seeks dark wizards from my own land," the traveler said at length. The locals had entertained his questions out of interest thus far, but there was only so far that would go. "One of them is my brother, and I have to find him, whether he lives, dies, or has gone from me entirely."

"One of your Death Eaters, then? They were here."

"He remains my brother. Did they have anything to do with the death of that family?"

"No. That was over thirteen years ago now," the old man said, shaking his head. "I have spoken with you because I was concerned you might be a dark wizard, another one come to divide our community."

Sirius silently concluded the concern was reasonable, if grudgingly. He had hoped no one would ever mistake him for a dark wizard, or even as a member of his own family, but there was always the fear of the other, the outsider. If he saw another Englishman, he might think the man my brother. If he saw my brother, he might think we were the same person. He had some difficulty in telling the natives of the Kingdom of Dagbon apart, and were he being honest with himself, he knew not whether to assume the same man greeted him every morning or a different one.

"It must have taken courage to meet with me."

"Not so." the warlock responded, smiling. "You are in the shade."

The traveler blinked, not quite understanding, though it could be a local phrase. No, they speak their own languages among themselves-

"I see."

"You do not. One shadow overlaps the other, and darker shadows form," the old wizard explained. "You, however, have two shadows. One appears when the other disappears."

"I have heard that I am not the only one."

"You are correct. There are some here, though not as many as there were in the days of old. It is an ancient magick. Some believe it comes from here. There are other explanations."

"I don't know where else it would have originated," Sirius decided at length. "They say that Africa is the birthplace of Transfiguration, or at least where it was developed to a great extent. Turning humans into animals seems like it would be something the ancients could have accomplished."

"Can you do magic without a wand?"

"I suppose I can, if turning into an animal counts."

"Do you transfigure yourself to a dog? Do you use the same theories and understandings? Do you know how it is you are a dog?"

"I suppose it might be different, in that light."

"It is different, but not different in the way you think," the old warlock said, casting bones again. He did not seem to be recording what the future held, a true Seer or no. The traveler simply waited for him to continue. "It is Transfiguration. It is not the Transfiguration you know."

"What is it?"

"It is the original. It takes many years to understand, but when it is understood, nothing is impossible."

"Nothing? You can turn a dark artefact to a human being? You can turn one of Jupiter's moons into a theory?"

"No one knows how," the African wizard said at length. "That does not mean it is impossible."

Sirius said nothing in response, though someone else decided to intervene in the silence. It was an elderly woman, though he did not want to assume she was the man's wife. It was, of course, his best guess, though he had grown tired of being wrong about everything in the last few days.

"Does he want something? They always want something."

He only smiled to himself. Prejudice was something his family and their friends might have invented, depending on the timing, but it was not something they monopolized.

"He looks for his brother, a dark wizard. He is no dark wizard himself. His shadow is a loyal dog."

"Is he loyal to his family?"

"He is loyal only to ideas," the traveler answered. It will be a cold day in Hell before I am loyal to my family. I am responsible for my family.

"What kind of ideas are those?"

Sirius kept his annoyed expression from surfacing. It was not every day he was asked to explain the hows and whys of his views; most everything seemed black and white at home. He only remembered two sides in the last war.

"I believe in equality," he said after a pause. "I don't believe in safety and security. The manors should be as dangerous as the streets. The schools should present as dark and cold a world as the insides of the prison cells and the courtrooms." He had heard long ago that making things worse for some would not make things better for all, but it always seemed close enough. In truth, he had no exhaustive theories about how systems should be run, and it was more of a personal philosophy, but if it was good enough for him, it might serve others just as well. He sighed. "More importantly, though, we need justice and law. I thought for years it was easy to tell the difference between good people and people who needed killing. They came from old, blood purist families, they were willing to use dark magic, and they killed people. Then someone applied the same standard to me."

He allowed the silence for a moment.

"What happened?"

"I was lucky to be imprisoned without a trial instead of just cursed in the back. Don't know if it was a worse betrayal when Pettigrew killed my friends and framed me for it or when Crouch took the bait and handed me multiple life sentences on suspicion after I had supported him for years."

"Crouch? I have heard this name before."

"After the war died down, the Ministry proper decided he was bad for P.R, so they moved him to International Relations. He was the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement before that, and if he gave me a trial, I would have lost it anyway, because I looked guilty, but he might not have wanted to risk my getting released later. He had a kill on sight policy, so I suppose my lack of resistance to being arrested was what saved me." The older people listening had developed grave expressions. "For years I admired him, I wanted him for Minister sooner or later- I even protested when Evan Rosier was brought in alive for a trial."

"What did you learn, brother?"

"A wise man told me that it is our choices, more than anything else, that determine who we are," Sirius started again. "My choices are what separate me from my family, and they should have been what separated the guilty from the innocent. Instead I got what I wanted. I was imprisoned on suspicion charges and I served thirteen years before Azkaban was destroyed and I escaped. The rule applies to the other side as well. The choices that Crouch and his people made make them evil, and that they lacked silver masks only makes them a different kind of evil."

"Perhaps it was fate that I met you today," the old wizard said at length. "I knew that I would teach, and I knew that I would learn. I did not know that it would be the same man."

"Have you seen any Death Eaters in your village?"

"Yes, one who looked like you, and another who was quite different. They were not wearing silver masks, but what they said identified them. Your brother will be going north to Morocco." he revealed, tossing a length of black hair in the sand and shaking his head. "I do not know what he will be doing there, but I warn you of the dark wizards."

"So I've heard." the traveler muttered. "I had thought he would be here, even when I heard of Death Eater presence in the northern part of the continent."

"You did not know your brother was among them, then?" Sirius shook his head. "Now you do. He went with a younger man who might have been an Egyptian."

"I thought the dark wizards in Egypt didn't want anything to do with the Death Eaters."

"There are always exceptions, or so they say," the old witch decided. That fits with the way I understand things, oddly enough.

"I agree, actually. There are no absolutes." I have to leave tomorrow at first light. If I go at night, I'll be exposed and no good to anyone.

"Is that not an absolute?"

"I suppose it is. Then that is the only absolute, that there are no others," he decided, somewhat annoyed by the roundabout approach. In truth, he could not tell whether the man or the woman was trying to argue for or against absolute truths.

"Is that not also an absolute?"

"Then there are two absolutes."

"A third appears," the old witch decided, her spiderwebbed eyes laughing in their near blindness. "I fear you may end up in a whole universe of absolutes."

"They're absolutes that build on each other, one implies the rest. If I know that there are no absolutes, then I know that that is the only absolute."

"So there is an absolute."

"Yes, one."

"Why that one? If there is an exception to everything, there must be an exception to such a rule."

"That's only another way of phrasing it," Sirius responded, increasingly off-put. "One implies the other."

"Yet what else does it imply? Is not death absolute?"

"Voldemort was dead."

"If he could come back, others would as well. His death was not death." Interesting that you would have heard of him, though I suppose everyone would at some point. Using the Philosopher's Stone to restore oneself from a shade is no mean feat.

"Very well, let us assume two absolutes- death and no other absolutes. If there are any other absolutes similar to death, and I should be informed of them, I shall add them to the list." As he spoke he realized the error.

"Then you do not know there are no other absolutes. There are the absolutes you know, like death, and there are absolutes you do not know."

"Well, of course I don't know about them-" he started back.

"Fear nothing, Mister Black," the old wizard decided. "You live in a world that is mostly without absolutes. There cannot be none, and there cannot be two or more. Men say they can craft a spell that is unstoppable, but what happens when it meets a shield immovable? Any two absolutes can be found to conflict, though again you have given me something about which to think. If I see you again, living or dead, we shall have much to discuss."

"If there is only one absolute, what can it be?" the traveler asked.

"That is for you to discover, but not today, and not tomorrow. Today you must rest, and dream. Tomorrow you will seek out your brother."