He regained consciousness slowly, extending his senses in an attempt to figure out where he was. His magic ached painfully as he extended it and he was horrified to realised that it was almost depleted. Wherever he was, he would be defenceless for days whilst he recovered. He vaguely remembered the lashing wind of the portal tearing at his magic like a sandstorm as it tried to instinctively protect him.

He resigned himself to a mundane, physical assessment of his location. Birds twittered and cawed with the suggestion of early morning but there was a distant screeching that sounded distinctly magical so he certainly wasn't anywhere muggle. There were no rustling trees, or even rattling branches and the surface he lay on was warm and soft, if not heavy with musk and dust so he was inside, despite the warm sunlight that caressed his skin.

He blinked open bleary eyes, crusted with tears which crackled and flaked as he squinted at the bright light.

He was in a castle of some sort, he decided. The window towered up, easily twice as tall as he was yet nowhere near as high as the ceiling.

He sat up just as the door swung open, then he jerked fully awake as a skeleton clunked in. He scrambled backwards beneath the covers, back slamming painfully into a carved bed head.

Then skeleton wore clothing - a dress which suggested that it had once been a woman and a scarf tied around it's skull. Clutched in bony fingers was a tray baring a fragrant chalice, a dark cake of something like bread and a steaming bronze bowl. Already pressed against the wall, Gellert could back away no further as the skeleton laid the tray on the dusty green bed spread, then picked up the chalice and proffered it to him. One bony finger tapped against the tray and Gellert glanced down. Written onto the chalk was a series of Ogham runes, large and simple. He squinted, attempting to decipher it.

'Spruce and juniper tea?' He decided, glancing up at the skeleton questioningly. It nodded enthusiastically and brandished the chalice in his direction again.

He'd met skeletal servants before at the Barrow of Gorlois and although creepy, they'd been benign. He took the chalice, surprised to find that it was the perfect temperature. The tea was fresh and warming, even if it was like nothing he'd ever eaten before. Tart and slightly lemony, he found himself scrunching his lips together and wishing for a dash of honey or sugar.

The skeleton waited expectantly until he'd drained the entire chalice before offering up the bowl of thick, stringy soup that was identified by the runes as rabbit, pine and thistle along with the hunk of dense acorn bread.

He ate both, enjoying the nutty bread and finding the soup to be rich and gamey despite the unappealing appearance and texture. As he ate, he watched the skeletal maid. She seemed to have decided that he could eat unobserved and was taking the opportunity to conduct some much needed cleaning of the dusty furniture.

The room was spectacular, built on a scale he'd never imagined despite growing up in the huge Blau Berg castle. There was a rug covering the floor which he imagined had once been green but was now so thick with dust that it appeared grey. Debris was stacked up against the corners of the room - little mounds of leaves and shredded fabric. The furniture had once been grand - ornately carved and decorated but in desperate need to a fresh coat of oil. A huge wardrobe was built into one corner, one door hanging off and the other flat across the floor. Clothing spilled from the maw, shredded and bunched into a nest with a mess of feathers and twigs. The dresser next to the ruined wardrobe was topped by a massive disk of tarnished bronze which he imagined had once been polished to a mirror. The surface was covered in little ceramic jars and bottles which were in comparatively good condition, as was the chair that was tucked beneath it. The bed that he lay in was in much better state and he assumed that some kind of warding had been keeping the pests from the sheets and drapes because they seemed dusty but otherwise okay. In sharp contrast to the rest of the room, elaborate tapestries covered the walls to either side of the bed, so pristine that they could have been woven only yesterday.

The skeleton used a bundle of small sticks on a pole to batter cobwebs from sconces on the walls, occasionally stopping to pull down one of the brightly coloured, teardrop shaped shields and polishing it with a rag tucked into her belt.

Finishing his soup and determined to find out where this strange, magical, abandoned castle was, he pushed back the covers and swung his feet out of bed.

The world spun dizzyingly, forcing him to stabilise himself against one of the bedposts. The skeleton clacked nervously, crossing the room and hovering nervously as he pushing himself up to standing.

His cloak was on a chair next to the bed and he pulled it around his shoulders as a defence against the cold air blowing through the open window.

The skeleton shadowed his unsteady progress across the room until he reached the support of a wax-stained desk beside the window. The walls were incredibly thick - easily three meters, so he crawled across the massive sill until he could look around properly.

He had guessed that they were high up in a tower but he had failed to comprehend just how high they could be. The castle was built on a cliff so the pearly white stones plunged dizzyingly down, melding with pale grey granite before diving into craggy, messy water. Birds circled below, nesting in snowy alcoves in the cliff. If he leaned out over the void he could peer sideways to another tower which soared up two more massive windows above him to a set of jagged crenellations.

A banner drifted and snapped in the breeze, not quite in view from his vantage point as the breeze only occasionally blew it into view. The shade of blue was distinctive, even without being able to make out the entire white figure that marked it. He only knew of one family that was old and influential enough to have never needed to embellish it's crest.

Gorlois.

They had somehow ended up in on of Hermione's family estates. Had she cast something, had her Sect done something and picked him up in the process or was it part of some larger, older enchantment?

The door banged open, slamming against the stone wall behind it.

'Hermione!' He breathed as his sister burst through. She still wore her thick fenrir-skin cloak but she wore a different dress - unmistakably like the ones her ancestors wore at Samhain with the girdle around the waist and the free-flowing skirts. It was laced up over her chest without an undershirt so he could see cloth bandages wrapped around her chest and peeking over her shoulder. A pair of armoured skeletons and another maid skeleton hurried behind her, flapping their hands in a way that clearly conveyed their concern that she was up and about.

'Gellert! We're in Avalon!' Hermione said excitedly.

'Avalon...' Gellert glanced around again and now that he knew what to look for, he realised that there were no joins in the stones that made up the walls - it was like they'd been carved straight from solid rock. Hermione had once told him that it was rumoured to be a Fey castle, and he could believe it. The height alone and the precarious balance atop the cliffs made it unlikely that any mortal had built it.

'Come on!' Hermione urged, clasping her hand around his upper arm and leading him from the room.

They emerged onto a tight spiral staircase which was studded with slitted windows that didn't allow a view of anything but a view of more sky. He expected her to take him down, but instead she turned right and made her way up the staircase. He followed behind her, wheezing for breath and wondering how excited she must be to be this energetic despite the not insubstantial bandage around her chest.

The spiral staircase ascended up three more floors, all of which had closed doors before opening up into a long gallery. One entire wall was open to the elements, looking out over a glittering lake towards misty hills capped with crystalline snow. Hermione led him along the gallery without pause towards another door at the far end. This one led to a short spiral staircase which emerged into a small semi-circular room. This was some kind of guard house and was stocked with warped bows, crossbows and piles of mouldering arrows along with two cabinets of rusting swords. Hermione ignored all of this and almost dragged him through the set of double doors that emerged onto a rooftop. They were at one of the tallest points of the castle now; only the colossal tower behind them rose higher. Hermione let go of his arm as he approached the edge and peered over.

He'd assumed that Avalon was a castle, but he realised now that that wasn't quite right. It was built like a castle with layer upon layer of towers, turrets and minarettes. Crenellations and curtain walls wrapped around the hill that it was built upon like a pile of ropes, bartizans hung over dizzying drops becoming higher and higher until it peaked at the tower behind them. But Avalon was a city - even from here he could see the smaller houses that were packed into the lower streets and built up against the inside of the concentric curtain walls with their lattice of connecting stairwells. It was built upon an island which would once have been serviced by what looked like a crumbling port at the far side, long since devoid of ships. Yet it was blatantly also magical - several tiers of the city held rooftops that were clearly designed for landing beasts and still held stone troughs. Nestled in the centre, near the top of the structure where the castle proper started was a massive courtyard which surrounded a set of portal stones, patrolled by skeletons in glittering armour.

'It's incredible, isn't it.' Hermione breathed, standing beside him.

'It is. Can you imagine if we still lived like this? How many wixen must there have been to fill this city?'

'It wasn't just wixen.' Hermione corrected, 'it was a place of peaceful coexistence between everyone; muggles, beings, non-beings, wixen, beasts and creatures. There's a massive goblin warren dug into the mountain below the castle and a Mer village built into the base of the harbour walls. There's a wing for house elves and an entire infirmary tower in the lower city, there's gardens for fey, nine stables, a dragon roost in the cliff and three owleries. There's a twenty two story subterranean mausoleum for the undead, three ritual grounds, a goblin forge...'

'Hermione?' Gellert eventually interrupted. 'How do you know this?'

'Oh, I saw a map.' Hermione paused, regathering her thoughts before launching back into her list of the facilities that the city offered.

'Is the entire city warded?' He asked after a moment, surveying the huge footprint.

'The whole island.' Hermione replied. 'And the wards default to closed, which is why nobody's been able to find it since Morgana died.'

'It's incredible.' Gellert muttered. Everywhere he looked, details sprung out at him. The entire city was a monument to the power of Hermione's family from the hundreds of blue banners to the Grims carved into the stonework to the sheer size of the place. This was not a private home with the ability to shelter a kingdom, this was a kingdom in it's own right.

'Shall we go down, take a closer look?' He suggested and Hermione nodded excitedly, turning to the pair of protective skeletal guards who had followed them up here and requesting the quickest way down.

They were led into the massive central tower through a large set of double doors. He decided immediately that this tower had been the Gorlois family's private living quarters. The room they found themselves in was a study, decorated with massive bookshelves, ornate tapestries and a huge fireplace. This room must have been powerfully warded because it was entirely untouched by time - even the ink well was still full of wet, dark ink. The skeletons closed the doors behind them, leaving them all in the otherwise exit-less room. Then, one of the skeletons held out a bronze bowl of what looked like ash. Hermione took it uncertainly and copied the skeleton as it mimed dipping it's fingers into the bowl and drawing shapes on the wall. The set of runes glowed briefly, then sank into the wood and the two skeletons opened the doors with a flourish.

Only they didn't lead to the rooftop anymore. Now, the doors led to a cavernous hall. The floor was a single sheet of sapphire blue stone, glittering with specs of mika like the night sky. Thick stone doors large enough to walk a dragon through closed them off from the outside world beneath a spectacular rose window of blue stained glass that, considering the time when the Gorlois family had owned the castle, would have been an unbelievable display of opulence at the time. Opposite the entrance was another set of matching doors, carved with the face of a massive grim and trimmed in silver. Continuing the theme, Gorlois blue banners hung from the ceiling depicting the family seal. Each was larger than the two entrance doors, yet there were two hung on either side of the side door they'd come through and another two either side of the similar door on the opposite wall.

Dwarfed by the scale of the room and everything in it, skeletal guards stood flanking each door. Each wore glittering silver mail, Gorlois livery and carried a wickedly sharp pike hung with a smaller, liveried pennant.

Gellert trailed Hermione and her pair of guards to the stone doors where the two flanking soldiers banged their pikes against the stone floor. Silently, the massive doors swung outwards.

They were in the courtyard with the portal. It was large enough that even the towering curtain wall didn't seem to cast a shadow. The courtyard had gone wild in the time that the castle had been abandoned. Fully grown trees had speared up between paving stones, forcing the chunks of rock aside and creating deeply shadowed corners where magical plants had run rampant. Presumably, the walls were enchanted to keep them a pristine white because nothing grew on them. A small number of undead caretakers were beginning to tackle the undergrowth but it seemed that unlike the guard's weapons and armour, their gardening tools hadn't survived the test of time because they were improvising with varying success.

The wixen duo traversed the courtyard with some difficulty, fighting their way around the overgrown portal towards the gatehouse.

If Gellert had thought the castle walls were thick, he was blown away by the walls. Five meters at least of solid rock, supported by sturdy watchtowers and riddled with nasty muggle traps that he recognised from the research they'd been doing into castle construction.

The gates were two-fold. At the first impact of the pikes against the ground, two thick wooden doors swung open. Then a second clack of pikes against the stone floor had the gleaming portcullis rattling skyward.

Then they were out in the deserted streets of the city.

This area had suffered the ravages of time more extensively than the castle. The streets were a maze, made worse by the tangles plants and pests that had taken up residence inside it all. Twice, Gellert had to pry a gnome off his ankle and once Hermione accidentally startled a wild hippogriff that was dozing in a porch.

'Look!' Gellert hissed, snatching at Hermione's arm to stop her moving. She froze obediently as a ghost drifted across and intersection, leading his spectral horse by the reins.

'Come on. Lets ask him where everybody went!' Hermione hissed, tugging herself free and hopping through knee-high bracken to chase after the figure.

'Hello?' The young witch called out. Ahead of them, the ghost paused then turned to look at them. Even with the sunlight making him difficult to see properly, they could read the blatant shock on his face.

'High Priestess?' The ghost asked.

'I am.' Hermione confirmed.

'You are the youngest Gorlois, the new line?' The ghost fell to spectral knees, prostrating himself in front of her. 'My Lady, it is an honour to meet you. Centuries, I have wandered these empty streets. I did not believe the living would ever walk here again.'

'They will.' Hermione promised. 'But what happened to everyone when Morgana died?'

'Oh.' The ghost looked around mournfully, eyes running over the abandoned houses. 'With the wards locked down, nobody could come in. Some left straight away because they needed the outside world to do business, others left when they began to miss their family or because they couldn't find life partners on the island. Those who stayed... well, they weren't immortal. Lord Finvarra stayed until the last of the wixen died, but even one of his kind cannot maintain a magic city alone. I assume he considered Avalon lost because eventually he too left.'

'Thank you.' Hermione dismissed the ghost and turned back up to the castle and Gellert trailed behind her.

'What I don't understand is how we got here.' The young witch admitted. 'The wards are still closed, I can feel it.'

'I have a theory.' Gellert began. He'd been running it over in his head whilst they walked, pondering the possibilities. 'I think we found the place because we didn't look for it - if the enchantment stops you knowing the location of Avalon, you can't know it to request it. So you can't apparate, you can't floo, you can't even open the portal because to do all of those you have to be able to focus on the location.'

'What if Avalon isn't just the intersection of ley lines, what if it's the start of them? I saw texts that said that Avalon was the gateway to the fey plane.'

'That would explain why we ended up here.' Gellert acknowledged, 'And, of course, everyone else who ended up here accidentally would have been burnt out by the wards. That explains why I feel so drained. They must have lowered for a second to let you through - they're your wards, so they're hardly going to hurt you and I must have gotten past at the same time.'

'The question is, how do we lower the wards?' Hermione asked as they reached the gates. Upon seeing them, the guards rattled their pikes to lift the portcullis again.

'There'll be a spell chart somewhere - there has to be, or nobody would ever be able to add something.' At least, Gellert hoped there was. For all he knew, the warding diagrams hadn't been included in the preservation enchantments and had rotted away centuries before his own family castle had even been built.

'Or...' Hermione said, obviously thinking along the same lines. 'There might not be.'

Gellert let his eyes rove over the castle, imagining just how many rooms it must contain. Blau Berg had fifty one and this castle was much, much bigger. It would take days, if not months to even glance over every text in the building and that's assuming that such an important piece of paper wont be easy to find. Meanwhile, they'd disappeared from their locked down school for who knew how long - they were Locum Patriarch and heir to the ruling family of Germany. His mother would be worried sick, Berg would be devastated and Germany would be without any coven leadership; ripe for the taking by the revolutionaries.

'We can't stay to search.' His sister breathed, 'but they can search for us.'

She was looking at the skeletal servants and guards.

'They definitely don't need to be guarding everything so closely. If nobody's made it in since Mordred's day, its highly unlikely anyone else will get in.'

'That's it!' Hermione cried and without any more explanation she dashed off towards the huge castle doors.

She was fit and agile so despite having spent the morning traversing the difficult terrain of the ruined streets she was able to reach them quickly. They swung open at their approach, but Hermione didn't take a left back to the magic side door they'd taken down from the tower. Instead, she headed straight for the opposite doors. Like every other doorway, the guards on either side drummed their pole axes at her approach and the doors swung open.

It was a throne room. A similar size to the entrance hall, the only piece of furniture was the carved throne on the dais. The abandoned seat was eerie, somehow sadder than the entire abandoned city. It was the same feeling that had come over him when they'd wandered through the ruins of his castle the Yule previous. It took him a moment to realise that it was fear - a chilling reminder that even the most powerful dynasties came to an end with time, that nothing was eternal.

Whilst he'd been thinking, Hermione had already made her way to the foot of the throne. He half expected her to sit in it, but instead she bent down and picked up something from the base of the throne.

'What's that?' He asked, peering at the black rod in her hand. The room had excellent acoustics and despite the distance his voice carried easily throughout the whole room.

'Morgana's staff.' His sister answered. 'You see, someone has been here since it was abandoned - one person, who just happened to have a part of this as a trophy. He managed to get through the wards when he apparated with it, so whose to say we can't do the same and use it like a key to get back.'

'Genius.' The young wizard breathed. 'Let's go home.'

'I bet Berg is worried sick.' Hermione took his hand and together they walked out of the throne room. As the doors closed behind them, he saw a quick flash - a glimpse of prophetic vision.

Hermione, taller and with features chiselled into beauty by maturity. She wore a dark crown on her brow and Morgana's staff leant up against her throne like a sceptre. He stood at her right shoulder and Mordred stood at her left, but the rest of the dais was obscured by the massive crowd that thronged the rest of the room. But he knew that the rest of the court was there, standing in support of his sister. They were everything he'd dreamed of and more - powerful, influential and adored by the people.

He blinked and the vision was gone. They once more stood in an abandoned city... but he knew it wouldn't be abandoned for long. Hermione couldn't have been more than twenty in the vision.