Autor's Note:

Please recognize the fact that I simply found the scenario fascinating. I may one day resume this beginning of a story, but do not wait for it.

The Descent

With a tired and bored look, Percival Ignatius Weasley studied the request list for the next day, while Marcus Flint, one of the few people friendly to him - and wasn't that already a testimony of his miserable position - talked him up. It was always the same.

"Percy, if you refuse to join the organization any longer, eventually it's going to reflect negatively on you. You can't insist forever that your family honor requires it. That way you'll always be a blood traitor to the better families."

"I have openly and clearly communicated that I am committed to the Traditionalist Bloc. We were granted to use the old rights. My family's feud with the high houses of the purified society prohibits me from being a member of the organization. My honor is at stake, Marcus. House Weasley, a pureblood one - in case you've forgotten - has been defiled. To join those responsible for it would be a breach of my duties as head of my house. And at that, it doesn't matter how I feel about their misdemeanors and depravities."

Of course, he would never tell Flint how he really felt about them. And about himself. It still amazed and horrified Percy how readily this new ministry accepted that he was one of them. Certainly he had been a sometimes even too industrious public servant. But then, the Ministry of Magic, though it had its gross faults, had been, despite everything, a place of law. Had he later, when that changed, spoken out openly against the atrocities committed in the name of the whole British wizardry, he would be dead today. He had dutifully done his job, taking protocol in show trials. As always, bitterness sprouted in his heart as he thought of how he had sat there with a stern, emotionless stare. Cold as a machine of the Muggles his father had loved so enthusiastically.

"Everyone knows the Dark Lord won't tolerate these excuses much longer," Flint said.

"The traditionalists say the same thing about your progressive faction," Percy replied boredly. It was a euphemism to call the Dead Eaters progressive, of course, but they had usurped the term for themselves. Sometimes he had trouble keeping the disgust he actually felt out of his voice. How anyone could voluntarily join Voldemort's organization was beyond Percy's imagination to this day. Who would want to be a member of a raiding party when there was a more dignified alternative available? Of course, this was only for purebloods, but that was not his problem at the moment. Flint was not wrong, however. This rift that ran through the winning side of the Civil War was deep and often impossible to bridge. It was becoming increasingly clear that the dark lord had forged an unstable coalition. Percy was sure that their great tyrant was waiting to see which side would ultimately prove stronger so that he could eventually join it.

Flint looked at him as if he was a bit dim-witted or retarded as he cuttingly declared, "The dark lord founded the organization. We are his vassals. Submitting to the old houses doesn't suit him. I warn you amicably not to rely too much on these old men. The youth stands with the dark lord and the organization. The future will bring you only misfortune if you stick to your stubbornness. The time of the old guard is over, even if it still struggles here and there. Even Lord Greengrass has realized this by now and is part of the organization at this point as the reasonable man he is. You are ruining yourself. Don't you see that?"

"And as before, I can only reply that I am willing to die with the old ways if necessary. At least the Lord of our glorious nation will grant us that. I did not stand by and watch my family perish so that now I must also give up what I betrayed them for. No, Marcus. If it comes to that, I will insist on a duel, as my honor demands of me. House Weasley and the participating houses of the coalition against my house, Malfoy, Lestrange, Rowle and Ralton have a truce. If they wish to revive the feud by forcing me to publicly confess to the villains against my family, then this truce is over."

Not that he had really betrayed his family. He had distanced himself from them early on, because he had hoped to make a jump in his career. His anger at his father's reputation had been boundless even before his family expected him to accompany them on Dumbledore's Crusade. He wasn't going to let them and their silliness hold him back anymore. Had he really not believed in Voldemort's return then? He simply hadn't cared, if Potter's tale was true, if he was honest. After that, the damage had been done and he simply hadn't dared to ask for their forgiveness. He still sometimes wondered, why the cursed hat hadn't sent him to Ravenclaw back then, as it had always been his wish. He hadn't really acted brave in the end. Instead, he'd been clever.

"Percy, you never used to be so stubborn about things like that in the past. I'm sure you could turn it around to make a peace deal possible. It would bring you much needed prestige. Just look at you! Department head in the magical archives. That position is a dead end. You used to be so ambitious! You wanted to become the Minister of Magic, if I'm not mistaken. Sure, we weren't friends then, like we are now, but even I can see that. Since when are dusty regulations more important to you than your own success?" asked Flint, shaking his head. Looking up from his lists and eyeing Flint disparagingly, Percy explained with false bitterness, "My father clearly positioned himself as a blood traitor. My opinion didn't matter there, but I did the best I could. My father had no appreciation for the duties and decorum of an old house. I put up with that as long as I could and stuck with it. When he ultimately crossed the line of decency, I turned my back on my family for the first time in shame. Nevertheless, I remained neutral. Did not interfere, as it is expected in the case of family discord. And now I am head of my house and decide for myself what is right and what is not."

As always, when someone ridiculed this low point in his career, he ignored it so that it would implicitly appear like he was embarrassed by the topic. Flint would never know that Percy had actually maneuvered himself into this position - and quite skillfully, he thought. He had been an assistant under Minister Thicknesse long enough to draw up comprehensive blueprints for restructuring the ministry in order to be able to grant all prominent pureblood families at least one department headship. In the end, he had noted in all possible drafts a hierarchy for them, among which the head of the magical archives was the lowest. Although it had been somewhat presumptuous at the time to actually hope for such a position, in the end he had calculated correctly. After almost two years of inner tearing over his collaboration as a demoted clerk, he was promoted to his new office because of his high birth – to the laughter of the other purebloods.

They had not understood his plan. Nor how much knowledge was now at his disposal. He had realized soon enough that nothing could really be saved anymore. Magical Britain had become a swamp of injustice and arbitrariness. And he despised both. So there was only one radical solution that could be carried out by one: An intervention in the course of history. A time travel. Now at that time his knowledge of this field had been pitifully limited. He had hoped for a quick and easy way to solve it. A secret time machine, which the Unspeakables held back from the public with good reason. Unfortunately, the findings of the British Department of Mysteries were very sketchy and confused. Timeturners quickly proved useless to his intentions. They were used to extend time, not to change it. After all, they were designed to allow more time without compromising history. They were originally created to observe the past without changing it. A historical project. Unfortunately, it had turned out that time travel of this kind nevertheless let as much time pass on the body as it corresponded to the jump back and thus they became relatively useless. After all, even a magical person could rarely live longer than 150 years, and to examine the past a hundred years ago would have cost a hundred years. Moreover, the old models were very harmful for body and soul. Even traveling to a past week could already lead to severe states of confusion.

"If you refuse to be reasonable, then I can't help you," Flint snapped him out of his reminiscence. Percy nodded and took the opportunity to change the subject, "Have you heard anything new about the Thorfinn Rowle case? Do your colleagues still think it was a suicide?"

Flint scratched his head uncertainly and eyed Percy uncomfortably, who himself involuntarily grinned sharply. He said, "It looks like it. We haven't been able to detect any foul play. I know Percy, what he did goes against your famed family honor, but you should be more careful with your smirking when it comes to him. Even if everyone understands your grudge, he was still a deserving high Dead Eater for the organization."

"Of course you're right Marcus. It's certainly a detriment to the new magical Britain to lose someone like him."

Without considering the ambiguity of his statement, Flint tossed in without elaborating, "I have to go now. You should really visit us at home again sometime. Just come with me today. The house elves always make too much food anyway."

"Millicent detests me. She called me a blood-traitorous disgrace to the wizarding community the last time I visited, never to cast a shadow over her home again. I do not feel comfortable with that. You mean well, but you're only making unnecessary trouble for yourself, Marcus."

"But you could see June again, she's visiting. Milly would understand," Flint said unmoved. It was one of those awkward situations that came with being publicly committed to the traditionalists. Marrying in a manner befitting one's station was part of maintaining the proper mores. Flint had immediately seen this as an opportunity to pair him with his immensely malformed older sister, who was not even considered a worthy bride by the Goyles, although they lived by the principle that ugliness strengthened character. In fact, contrary to first impressions, June Flint was a nice, witty person. He was admittedly not attracted to her, but she still was a person he respected. If the Flints had been a wealthy family, she probably would have been married off long ago. Still, he was uncomfortable with the situation the Flints were trying to push him into. If he didn't have a long and carefully balanced plan that involved his disappearance from this messed up timeline, he probably wouldn't be too contrary at all. He would still dislike it, but he probably would have accepted it sooner or later.

"Go home Marcus. You know my reasons for not getting into an engagement process. But give her my best," Percy replied, trying to sound a little sad. Shaking his head, Flint sighed, "You and your stupid honor. You poison your happiness until it kills you when you finally seize it. Have a nice evening Percy."

With these words the still hulking man turned and left the archives. When Percy heard the door slam shut, he exhaled in relief. This strange friendship between Flint and him had developed when he, as clerk of the court, and Flint, as a lowly auror, had entered into conversation after trials. It had soon been about rather non-political things and that had reminded Percy of times when such things truly still existed. That which was truly private. Today, everyone snooped around in each other's lives in order to be able to denounce the other, if it became necessary. At least that was Percy's impression.

He was glad to escape all of this. And he didn't have much time left in this perverted world. It had been the dark lord himself, who had given him an ultimatum precisely 27 days ago. Flint obviously knew nothing about this. The grotesque tyrant had visited the archives and pretended for a few moments that he was looking for old archive records. Then he had come to him and explained that several parts of the archives were being "reorganized" and that he would be on vacation for three days. After that, he was to re-record the holdings. But before the creature left him alone again, it had handed him a letter that was an invitation to its own initiation as a Death Eater. And this meant that not even the excuse of being a traditionalist counted anymore. After all, the dark lord was practically his liege lord. And he had to follow his instructions.

Fortunately, he had finished copying the entire archive more than five years ago and did not suffer from the many books the Dark Lord had removed from the archive. Among them was everything that dealt with soul magic and time travel. Presumably, the dark lord had finally realized the danger these aged legacies could pose to him. Percy could only praise himself for thinking so far as to secure the knowledge as quickly as possible. And not only by making copies of the books, scrolls, and individual pieces of parchment, but also by protecting his own mind. Occlumency was a difficult art to master when you had no one to practice with. And yet his efforts had been enough. Now, the dark lord had not dug too deep and had only brushed the surface of his mind. There Percy had shown him memories of a boring job he didn't care about at all, and his urge for revenge. The latter was a calculated risk. It should not show him in the best light, but nevertheless radiate honesty. Apparently it had succeeded. The dark lord had even commented almost amicably that Percy would get targets for his righteous anger.

He still shuddered at the thought. It was a fortunate circumstance that he had been finished with his preparations since almost a year. Of course, it had taken him long enough to get to this point. And he had suffered many failures and mistakes. Nevertheless, this had only helped to steadily build up his understanding. The ritualistic approach to magic had been the first step on his path. Today it was only practiced either by crackpots or geniuses. It was considered dangerous, unpredictable and outdated. All this was not entirely wrong. For most matters, wand magic, or that of potions, was superior to old-fashioned rituals. But the more complicated a spell became the more the advantages of the ritual stood out. And Percy was dealing with the most complicated construction of magic he had ever seen. He was not the first to try this with time travel, of course. That these did not succeed was related to his first problem: deterministics. Not to be confused with determinism, because it had nothing to do with fate. Rather, the difficulty was to determine in a formal way, how far the ritual should take him back. How was a set of runes supposed to know what a year was? Of course, there were lengthy constructs of various runes that were supposed to represent temporal concepts. But this was fuzzy, extremely imprecise. He could send himself back a couple of days into the past, or a thousand years. Only a small mistake could have a catastrophic effect. And this had happened so often in past experiments that this research had been stopped – and long before even the time turner was developed. He wrote long, continually new rune sequences, trying to remain as accurate as possible but as vague as necessary. But he did not succeed in achieving a result that incorporated errors within a safe range. He was firmly in despair at his inability to find a solution. He had been tired. Had almost given up.

Then one day he was going through his family's old stuff. In the process, he had come across a curious object. It had resembled a very fancy Muggle lighter, but strangely it seemed to swallow light instead of producing it. Nevertheless, his curiosity as to how it worked had snapped him out of his depression. He had taken the strange thing apart and looked at the astonishingly simple runic rows. He had not understood them in any way at first. But it had been a good kind of frustration. One thing he could learn, unlike his time travel problems. Using his overflowing library of secret, forgotten and obscure knowledge, he could decipher what he had not understood. Divinatory enchantment. A whole new world for him.

And it ultimately solved his first problem. As a fairly unknown branch of enchantment, it used rune descriptors in ways he would never have thought of. Instead of determining for himself exactly what point in time he wanted to get to, he could simply leave that to the magic itself. The lighter was only in appearance a light extinguisher. In reality, it was a strange apperation aid that divinatorily placed certain coordinates in the user's head. And if that was possible with spatial locations, why not with temporal ones?

Percy's gaze fell on the large clock he had placed in his office. With a determined nod, he rose. It would be the last day of work he finished today. He would not return. He locked up the archives and made his way to the atrium. From there he disapperated and immediately found himself in his house. It had once belonged to his aunt Muriel. A lowly branch of the Prewitt family. And although Muriel seemed to everyone to be enthusiastically burning for the new regime, she didn't care much for him. It was, as if she wanted to challenge him to reveal his true blood traitor face at their occasional, uncomfortably stilted meetings over afternoon tea. In the end, she had left him the house nevertheless. Perhaps he had finally convinced her. The other Prewitts wanted nothing to do with him and were annoyed that a Prewitt estate had gone to the last Weasley in Britain. Not that he cared. The Prewitts had never liked Arthur. And they regarded his wife's children with indifference and coldness. His parents had never told him what had happened and he didn't believe it was just the Weasleys' reputation.

He had even expected the old crook to bequeath the house to Charlie. The latter now lived completely in Romania and had even his own family there. They wrote each other chilly holiday greetings every Christmas. He had always got on worst with Charlie out of all his siblings, even before the twins. They were just too different. Charlie was loud, fidgety and always on the move, while Percy had been more quiet, patient and withdrawn. And nowadays his brother had considered him a closet Death Eater for far too long to be able to develop warm feelings for him even over their shared loss. Percy's face grimaced at the thought. They had probably all felt that way in the end.

He walked into one of the empty rooms in his house and tapped his wand in an intricate pattern on a dusty carpet for a few moments. The whole room was enchanted to leave a very shabby, neglected impression - just like most of the rooms here actually looked. Only a master cursebreaker would be able to recognize his protective spells, and that only if they looked past the mundane camouflage. A trapdoor rose in front of him, leading him down a staircase into a magically greatly enlarged room that was about the size of his basement altogether. As he entered and the trapdoor above him closed it again, a man's gruff and raw voice rang out to him at the same time: "Release me at last, you miserable, filthy freak!"

"Ah, how do we feel today, Rowle? Is the comfort to your liking today, perhaps?" asked Percy, who went to a rack of sight-proof curtains and opened them on the side facing the wall. This revealed a man strapped in an extraordinarily uncomfortable manner to an upright steel grate. He had been at this installation for exactly ten days now. Percy did not stifle his sardonic grin. He had needed large amounts of magical human blood for the final moves of his preparation to obtain the dye for the runes. That he hated this man was an understatement. It had been depressingly simple to capture this idiot. The protective spells on his cottage had been pathetic for Percys level of skill. So it had been easy to replicate them. He had removed a strangled corpse from a Muggle mortuary and turned it into a likeness of Rowle. Then he had hung the fake Rowle from a noose. He hadn't been sure if the new Aurors would detect his hand, but expected their incompetence.

"This is your lucky day Rowle. You will be freed from all worries today."

"The dark lord will let you worm suffer in agony, if I tell him about this. I can resist your memory spells. You will burn, blood traitor!" the man drooled in his hoarse voice. He had probably been screaming for help all day again. Percy just laughed and shook his head as he pulled a fancy curly-bladed dagger from his robe.

"Do you know what this is, Rowle? This is an athame. An ancient ceremonial edge that allows the user to perform ritual sacrifices in a time-delayed manner. It absorbs the life essence and magic of the victim, then releases it at just the right moment," Percy explained to the now somewhat unsettled Death Eater, waving it around a bit in front of his face. His prisoner said cautiously, "You're not a dark wizard. You don't have the balls for that. Your little game is laughable, Weasel."

"Is that so? Then you'll be pleased to know that I firmly believe in getting your hands dirty sometimes. I've been looking forward to this moment ever since I tied you disgusting piece of shit up here. Death by athame is supposed to be immensely painful on a mental level. You can literally feel your life leaving you, even though you're so attached to it."

"Maybe you would have made a good Death Eater after all. I could convince the dark lord-" but that's as far as Rowle got, only gasping as Percy drove the dagger into his side up to the hilt. With a disgusted expression, he rumbled, "Do you really think I have mercy for you? What you did to my sister is so unforgivable that this death is almost gentle. At least you're fulfilling a good purpose for once in your worthless life."

Rowle had not only raped his sister. He had conditioned her. Erased her memories and rebuilt her as a dimwitted, willing slave for pleasure. In retrospect, he had always wondered, why Voldemort had not generally used this procedure to destroy his enemies. But it turned out that Thorfinn Rowle, as Obliviator, was a greater master of mental magic than most could ever achieve. By the time Percy learned of this, his sister had been that empty shell for two years. Of course, Rowle had never planned for anyone to know. Percy had always assumed she had died in the turmoil of the Battle of Hogwarts, as had the vast rest of his family. But in his curiosity, Percy had tried certain divination spells and searched for his sister's corpse. Since it remained untraceable, he had switched to searching for a living one and followed it to Rowle-Manor. There he had found her wasted form. Incapable of independent thought, on the mental level of an abused child. After finding only agony and terror lurking in her thoughts behind the artificially grinning facade, he had decided to burn her memories away completely. He even compromised his own plans in organizing the lost soul a trip to Romania. He still fervently hoped that she had really reached Charlie in the end. Of course, his attempts to divinate his brother's whereabouts and then create a portkey towards that place should not have been noticed by anyone, but for all his pride, he was not entirely free of paranoia. They would be the last Weasley in this cursed world. After seeing a memory of the battle, it had always been clear to him, who had murdered his family. Rowle, in addition to Ginny, had also had Ron on his conscience. Bill had been felled by Malfoy senior, his mother murdered by Rabastan Lestrange, as had his father, and Fred by a Dead Eater named Seymore Halton. Only George was struck by a collapsing structure.

The Death Eater before him squirmed as much as he could and strangely Percy took no satisfaction from it. The human sacrifice would begin the ritual and give it power. Of course, this had nothing to do with the soul itself. It was only a representation of a magical-total act, that is, an act that could no longer be reversed even with magic. Death had always taken first place in this category. What was fascinating was that the significance of such an act corresponded directly to the effect it had on the perpetrator. An innocent soul committing homicide would probably have the greatest effect, while a sociopathic mass murderer probably might as well not do it at all, since he made no sacrifice, after all, he was only being himself. Sacrifices in such rituals were always related to the user. There was a good reason, why the Death Eaters could hardly use rituals. What did they have to sacrifice? The most repulsive among them hardly knew any positive emotions. They might be able to kill a person, who did hold meaning to them, but they were too possessive for that. And for Voldemort himself, not even that was an option. After all, the walking monstrosity was only interested in its own survival.

When his opponent stopped twitching, Percy pulled the athame out of the bastard's gut. The metal glowed with an eerie greenish light that was probably not by chance reminiscent of the Killing Curse. He put the blade back into its sheath and put it aside for the moment. With his wand raised and pointed at the cadaver, he spoke, "Crematur corpus."

A white fire reduced the dead body to fine light grey ash in seconds, while the clothing remained untouched. With another wave of his wand, he gathered the ashes into a container. He would still need them. For killing a person was not his only sacrifice. He still had a potion to finish and to consume. The potion itself was again a rather obscure curiosity invented for an entirely different purpose. The Elixir of Purification eliminated a parent from its own blood. It had been developed by a half-blood, who wanted to destroy any connection to his Muggle mother. He and all others, who had tried this, died agonising deaths from it. The inventor had made a serious error of judgment and ignored where the spare parts for the banished creator were supposed to come from. Presumably, in ironically typical pure-blood behaviour, he had assumed that magic would take care of it. Later, the potion was only used as an instrument of murder against non-purebloods.

But the potion was easy enough to modify. He only had to specify which bloodline his new gene pool should come from. In his case, that was easier than he thought. He chose Arcturus II Black, from Cedrella Black, his grandmother, who was her father and therefore his great-grandfather. He had tried the potion with rats – of course adapted to them. And these lived to this day, which was why he assumed it was safe. Of course, he had had to act as a grave robber to get some dead matter from his great-grandfather. In the end, he had chosen a rib because they were easier to loosen while leaving the skeleton superficially intact.

He turned his face into the room. In front of him were three concentric circles. Around these were many runes and symbols drawn in Rowles blood. But he turned further and strode to a corner of the room where the potion was bubbling. At three precise intervals he sprinkled the ashes into the potion and kept stirring first left, then right. It was supposed to represent that the rib came from a dead man three generations removed from him. Then he slowly let the rib bone slide in. The previously marshy brown liquid turned blood-red at once. He let the liquid cool a little, filled some of it into a vial and closed it with a cork. He placed this and the athame at the edge of the outermost circle.

As soon as he ingested the elixir, he would cease to be Percival Weasley. Arthur would be exorcised from his own flesh and replaced by Arcturus Black. In a sense, he would then be an illegitimate child of two people, who had probably never met in life. He would not be able to bear the surname Black or Prewett, the laws of the bloodlines forbade it. After all, this ritual was not the only one that could change the lineage. To prevent unwanted additions to the family through such illegal schemes, those who attempted them were denied the right to belong to a family unless they were officially inducted into it. It made his insertion into the past harder – thus a good sacrifice - and this was quite besides the fact that his belonging to the Weasleys meant a lot to him by now. It was less about belonging to the House of Black or Prewitt, and more about taking away his own allegiance to a family. This act also had strong magical-total aspects, since a reversal was only possible with abstruse effort, and was accordingly a powerful offering to the magic of the ritual. He would become Percival Ignatius and he found that his middle name made a passable new surname. Perhaps it would also have a liberating aspect to be truly nobody, but his displeasure prevailed.

Another thing he counted as a sacrifice was that, apart from the clothes on his body and the wand in his hand, he would take nothing with himself into the past. Not his wonderful, stolen library, not his money. The ritual needed all the power it could get, so he would give up whatever was feasible. Especially the books he oddly enough had gotten from Ronald's legacy were difficult to give up. Although he thought, he already knew them by heart, one never knew, if one was missing something. He was sure that the books had originally belonged to Granger. And they were closely connected to the ominous task Dumbledore had given Potter before his death.

That was something he simply could not fathom to this day. Why give this mediocre, work-shy and above all adolescent wizard a task that was so significant that no one should know about it? Anyone would have been better suited! In the end, the three of them ran to their doom. And he didn't even know if they had succeeded at least somewhat. It hadn't taken him very long to realize, what it was all about. All the books had only one very rare subject in common: the Horcrux. If he was honest, Percy didn't know, how the Dark Lord had managed to perform this ritual. And by the looks of it, more than once. In fact, there shouldn't have been anything left for the tyrant to sacrifice that he felt anything for. Perhaps he had sacrificed parts of his soul altogether? It was the only option Percy saw. What he did know, however, was that his brother had appeared with his friends in three significant places during that terrible year: the Ministry, Gringotts and Hogwarts. Therefore, Percy assumed, there were three Horcruxes. A significant number.

Percy had chosen the number himself for his ritual. Three sacrifices. Three circles that together served three precise functions. His gaze brushed the innermost ring and with it the biggest problem for which he had expended the most effort. It took him back to the beginnings of the project. After he had settled the topic of location through the divinatory enchantments, he had to face the problem of aging and especially the mental decomposition. He had worked mostly with medical stasis spells in the beginning, but in test runs transporting apples placed in stasis to abandoned locations, he found at best a completely rotten apple or nothing at all and at worst once even a tree. He found that the spell was not stable in the time stream. In fact, he even feared that his wand would not survive the trip either, but he would take his chances on that. Of course, he had first tried to add a static ritualistic component that would replace the spell. But he was unsuccessful. The runes were too limited for that purpose and even the divinatory variant did not help. He had even resorted to using prehistoric cuneiform, and that in itself showed his desperation. There was simply too little known about the ancient meanings of the characters. And his approaches failed miserably. Once he even unintentionally blew up the ruin of a church, which he had used as a testing area.

But again, his help came in an unexpected way, this time in the form of goblins. Or rather, their understanding of magic. He had been dumping galleons in his vault at Gringotts, as he did quite often, when his eyes strayed to what was an truly ancient family chronicle of the House of Weasley, that he never consciously noticed before. It was in pristine condition. No book could preserve itself so well. And it was not enchanted at all. Violating the pact between wizards and goblins, he cast some analysis spells. They did not help him though and he did not understand what they showed him. But it had rekindled his fire and at home he had consulted the copied archive. It had extensive literature on the magical theory of goblins. Some contradicted each other, on others there seemed to be a common understanding. But above all, it introduced him to a way of thinking very adapted to natural circumstances. A goblin did not cast a spell on an object, it only brought to light what it already held. And although they believed that anything was somehow in everything, it just did not do so to the same degree. A piece of metal offered different dominant concepts than the water in a creek. With each subsequent visit to his vault, he understood more of what he was seeing. It was more complicated than a simple stasis spell. Everything was constantly changing in the goblins' understanding, and getting in the way of that required sophistication. And it showed that the goblins very well understood something about a kind of temporal magic that he had not thought about at all. First, a very slow effect of rejuvenation occurred. Wizards had been doing such things for centuries with potions and animals. So the book became younger and younger. If that had been all the goblins did, then the writing would slowly disappear and the parchment would become purer and purer until it even became the untreated hide of a cow again. But at the same time, they caused the book to age to an extent so balanced that time no longer existed for the book. It rejuvenated itself as it aged and thus remained without blemish and decay.

Of course he could not be sure, if the book would not become old or young over very long periods. But that was not really a problem in his case. He only had to link it to the same kind of enchantment that governed his time of arrival in the past and thus bring about the necessary rejuvenation that would keep his age constant. Nevertheless, he could not trust his skills in this as much as he would like. His sad replica of goblin magic seemed to produce the expected results, but he understood that compared to the highly complex works of its inventors, it was rather crude and just barely functional.

He sighed. It was time to leave. What exactly he would do in the past was not yet clear to him. Certainly he would fight Voldemort and his band of perverted souls. He would try to track down and destroy the three Horcruxes. But how he was going to do that, he did not know yet. A great nervousness and uncertainty flickered in his heart, the likes of which he hadn't felt in a long time. It was one thing to plan a trip into the past and quite another to actually implement it. He took another deep breath before picking up the athame and the bottle. He stepped between the outer and middle circles and declaimed: "Vitam clepserim. Illa vivescat ritum."

He placed the cutting edge in the space between the circles and stepped over the border of the middle one. The previously red runes and symbols of the outer circle began to glow unearthly in a green radiance. He continued to speak: "Possessionis amitto. Illis firment ritum."

With that, he stepped into the innermost circle, while the signs of the middle one began to glow pale. He gathered himself briefly again before reciting the last formula. He had written it in Latin to emphasise the serious and almost sacred nature of such a ritual: "Patrem abjugo. Ille adnectat ritum."

With that, he brought the vial to his mouth and gulped down the liquid as fast as he could. The fact that it tasted like a mixture of oversalted raw liver and petrol made it a difficult task. But he managed not to vomit the liquid right back up and his face was enveloped in a sinister red glow. His body was torn by spasms and he became aware, despite a certain befuddlement that spread through him, that his skin was cracking and even some of his bones seemed to fracture. A deafeningly shrill whistling rose. And the light around him became unbearably bright and burning. For a moment he seemed to be the centre of an infinitely hot flame, and his flesh was boiling. Then he sank into a blissful night as his consciousness faded and his will to endure dissipated.