He'd been given chicken on the bone, a glass of milk and an entire dish of salt for dinner that night, pushed through the flap in his door without so much as a word from the guard outside. As he did every night, Gellert took a moment to marvel at the creativity of Hermione's agent within the tower as he cleaned the flesh from the bones and spared a mouthful of the milk to drink. Did she brief them on what to deliver, or did they already know? Was there a practitioner of the old ways hidden among those that Alice herself had selected to guard him?

His knowledge of ambient magic and it's working had always been poor, but he remembered fragments - red bone, submerged in milk overnight to smooth the lingering magic of a violent death. Frigid water, pulled through the earth from the distant stream to the tap in his cell, to cleanse and ground his body in the first light of morning.

He stripped off his filthy prison rags, shoving them and his cot into the shadowed corner of his cell. He scrubbed every inch of his body, scraping with his nails until his toes tingled with the cold and his fingers were numb. Then, as the sun crested the hills he retrieved the bones, forcing his stiff knees to bend so that he sat on the floor, bones in one hand and milk in front of him next to the untouched dish of salt.

He spread the salt first in a protective ring around him. Nurmengard was a tower saturated in pain and foul magic, filled with restless spirits too shattered to form ghosts yet too tortured to ever move on. A ring of milk, painted around his eyes, nose and mouth, a rune on his forehead and chin. Another on his chest, on the backs of his hands and the soles of his feel. The undead would not see his ritual, hear his ritual, or know the magical paths he walked. They could not touch him, they could not interfere.

Then he reached inwards, drawing his magic up through his arms and into his hands. His brittle skin broke as easily as the chicken bones, spilling a slick of red blood that ran in rivulets, drawing his magic along with it. The blood darkened to match his magic, corrupting and rotting to become something more akin to tar.

Then he reached out, closing his eyes and spreading his senses. It felt like he was trying to decipher a long forgotten language as he peered at the flow around him. It was a new moon; a time when the sun and moon aligned and pulled the magic into a torrent with the strength of a rip tide. It was light too, but not nearly so unforgiving to a creature of darkness as the magic of the Solstice, with Samhain and the turn to darkness only days away.

It snatched threateningly as soon as he touched it, pulling at the threads of his magic and trying to sweep him along with it's rapid flow. He fortified himself, steeling his magic and building a framework to direct it to his will…

Then he paused. Hermione was the most successful channel he'd ever heard of, with not a single failed ritual to mar her record. She had never battled the ambient magic. So instead of dipping in a toe and holding it against the current, he floated his magic out, gossamer light. Then, like the fine shift of a gliding bird's wing, he dipped his magic just into the surface. It flooded up and into him, saturating his core and escaping through his open mind without hinderance. It was… easy. Beautifully, laughably, gloriously easy.

He laughed, threading metaphysical fingers through the flow of magic in his core, delighting in the way it felt. There was no intent to ambient magic, no purpose to it's flow, just movement for the sake of movement. It was magic in its purest, unaltered form. It was as warm as the sun on his face, as clean as the cold air that prickled over bare, scrubbed skin, old as Hermione's eerie family magic yet with as much youthful energy as a yearling unicorn.

But already the flow was beginning to slow. He had to dip deeper, draw up more.

'Bear with you my offering, as the old moon dies.' He opened his hand and the blood slick bone dropped between his fingers. There was a surge of magic, sparking down the trail of blood and searing the length of each bone, consuming them in light that burned his closed eyes and fizzled the wispy hair on his bare legs. The offering was torn away by the magic, and Gellert let it go, trailing strings of the blood and magic he had offered like drogue. Like a spool of rope, his magic wound out, towed by the offering and the wild rush of the new moon magic.

'Let it be cleaned, returned as new month rise.' He gritted, desperately trying to slow the spill. Had he miscalculated? Performed the ritual too far from the moment of the turn? The rush of magic was slowing, but not fast enough. He'd toed the line of magical exhaustion often as a child, but his older body wouldn't cope with a fever, not in his cell with winter approaching. He couldn't die before Hermione came for him. He refused.

He dug deeper, dredging up magic from every corner, cutting off links and recalling magic from long forgotten transfigurations, curses, charms. Across the sea, an elderly witch blinked and straightened, seeing clearly for the first time in almost a century. In a dusty museum vault, bejewelled necklaces reverted to acorns which crumbled to dust. A curse holding a carving in place over a list of names dissolved, allowing them to be read once more.

And the tattered, patched, spliced string held as the rush eased, paused.

A breath. A moment of stillness.

Then, with the inevitable force of a turning tide, the magic returned. There was no time to re-spool, to restore the broken spells. It was all he could do to catch it as with was borne past, trap it within before it could be carried away in the opposite direction.

And it was changed - dyed to match the ambient magic that carried it. No longer rotten, corrupted, blackened, but neither was it light yet. It was the medium grey of the equinox, balanced. A new beginning.