If you seek his monument, look around you.

Jeremy Taylor watched the look of utter disbelief on Mulligan's face as he took in the scale of the destruction wrought by the firestorm. Nothing remained of London as they knew it. Every scrap of living tissue was gone, burned to atoms by the flames that roared and howled in the wake of the Angel.

They emerged from the ruins and saw that what buildings remained standing were blackened, burned and collapsed so that London resembled a vision of Hell, its tumbled buildings still ablaze as the last combustible materials burned away. Tall plumes of fire poured skyward in defiance of gravity, fuel lines and refineries that would continue to burn until their reserves were exhausted. The stench of scorched metal and meat was pungent and the vista before them was unrecognisable as that fair city that stood here for nearly two thousand years.

The five stages of grief were common knowledge, and those they had managed to save did go through those stages, but the conclusions at which they arrived could not have been more different from each other. Many survivors, predominantly mothers clutching their children, picked through the rubble and pulled out their hair as they wailed to the sky which had turned from clear blue to a steely grey as far as the eye could see. Some assessed the situation and then with disturbing calmness turned and went south, leading their children with them. Jeremy did save them but he could not stop them. He had no authority over them and there were so many of them anyway. Those they did manage to restrain turned aggressive, and demanded to be released so they could go with others.

„Go where?" they were asked.

„Thames," they answered, and said no more.

Others looked upon the wasteland, but it was too terrible for their feeble minds to fathom. They knelt in the dust and rubbed it on their faces. They had to, if they were to look at it unflinching. They had to become like the wasteland. Those that did not walked around aimlessly with their eyes showing that there was something there, something in the mind that should've remained intact, but was now broken. Unlike the group that went south, they scattered with no direction whatsoever, each one departing to meet their ends in this wasteland in whatever way they saw fit.

A mercifully small group of survivors did not weep or to lose their sanity, at least not overtly. What Jeremy saw was slow, deliberate, rational. So, so rational. And that unsettled him most of all, for they prostrated themselves among the ruins as if in an act of worship, and he did not feel particularly inclined to ask them why. Maybe they just did not yet understand what just happened to them. He hoped.

The one group among the survivors, the one in whose faces he saw the strength necessary to rebuild London, was regretfully the smallest group, consisting of Eren, Mulligan, and a few other men of Anglo–Saxon stock. There he saw not horror, or grief or insanity. There he saw an understanding so large it left no room for any of those emotions, not even anger. Only hatred remained.

„I'll kill him," Mulligan hissed. „With my own two bare hands. I'll kill him."

Jeremy was silent. He tried to form a coherent thought, tried to say something that would be a good distraction for no one but himself, a distraction from the horror before him, a distraction from the fact that he had failed to stop Greymist in time. How does one measure this ruin? How does one assess this fall? He wanted to cry, to scream like those mothers scattered in the rubble before them, he wanted to tear his hair out and his face off, he did not know what he wanted to do first.

And above all he wanted to remember. He wanted to sear the image before him into his memory and to never forget it, to never forget that this is what he fought against. His enemy was not the physical shell which walked and talked and answered to the name of Malachi Greymist. No, he was that tide of living darkness. He was that fire that ran high and vast upon the bones of his victims. He was at last this scorched and barren plain, adorned with charred remnants of lost glory. He was it, and he had always been it.

Even Hermione, ostensibly his enemy, had acclaimed him as the Dark Lord, and the new master of all wizardkind. It was not a title he would enjoy for very long. But first things first. „St. Anne's Limehouse, she had said. And I'll have some friends come over to help us out..."

Eren interrupted his musing. „How can you do it? You're looking at this," he gestured at the desolation, „you're looking at the same things we are, hearing the same as us, but you can still plot?"

Hands at his back, Jeremy turned slightly to his right to regard the man in his wheelchair, the tears upon his face. „I will weep when Malachi Greymist is done for. And this time I will see to it personally. Mulligan?" he looked to his left.

„Yes?"

„I think I have a plan. Beginnings of one, at least. But it asks much of you."

Mulligan shrugged. „I am ready."

„Are you? Then listen," he pulled him in closer and wrapped an arm around his shoulder, bringing him over to where Eren sat and kneeling so they were on his level. Together the three of them conspired. And much to Jeremy's surprise, Mulligan was ready for everything he had suggested. Every idea brought forth he accepted without so much as a raised eyebrow, to the point that Jeremy had to pause and explain that these were only ideas, not a concrete plan.

The one and only time Mulligan raised a concern while Jeremy explained his plan was to point out that Greymist could break inside people's minds and read them. But Jeremy knew that already. One last thing he did before they departed was to erase the magical seal still on the gates of the bunker. They would have no further need of it, he claimed, but how could he know that? Only Jeremy knew, and he wasn't telling. Next thing he grabbed was, of all things, a spoon. He buried it halfway into the ground before the bunker and drew a circle around it inside a wand. To the outside observer, it looked like the machinations of a madman. Jeremy was the only one to see a ring of blue light manifest around the spoon, glowing so brightly he had to avert his eyes, and receding the further he was from it. Now he was ready.

Now and then they dimly perceived a new sun in the endless grey expanse above their heads, a cold sun, whose rays were frozen and barbed, shining upon their wanderings. Mulligan had turned vaguely to the southwest and they followed. All the buildings that would've been in their way had been leveled, but now they had no landmarks to guide them. Eren then remembered that long ago he had saved an offline copy of the map of London, if ever he needed guidance but had no internet. The map on his phone was useless now. All they could do is move southwest with Mulligan as their guide, and hope that some ruins of the church they were heading to had survived the mayhem. He walked ahead of them now with an odd spryness in his step. His hatred had given him purpose, and he went to it without a second thought. A far cry from the sleazy businessman they had come to know.

They encountered few people as they walked further into the wasteland, all of whom looked upon them, Mulligan in particular, with some mixture of pity. Eren imagined that to them, he looked not like a wizard, but as a man who was so broken by what had transpired that he was on the verge of skipping through the wasteland like a child. But then, who was more mad of the three of them? Mulligan, or the two madmen who had put their trust in him?

Few had gone as far inside this naught and this nowhere as the three of them, and eventually there was no one around them for miles and miles. According to Eren's map, it would've taken them just under two hours to reach St. Anne's. Instead it took them three, since they largely relied upon guesswork to determine where they were at any given moment. The sun would set very early at this time of the year, but coupled with the thick cloud of ash above them the sky was actually so dark that by the time they reached the remnants of the church they missed it completely. It was Jeremy who saved them then by casting a spell that lit up the way. The spell, and the pyramid.

It was a strange monument which stood in what was once St. Anne's churchyard. Made of portland stone, the four–sided pyramid had withstood the inferno and emerged mostly unscathed, though it had been blackened and cracked in places by the extreme heat. Jeremy sounded almost like he was about to cry when they came upon it, for it was the only sign that they had been on the right path all along.

To Mulligan, this all felt like a dream, a nightmare of some kind. Though it was hard to say who was the dreamer.

He knelt down before the pyramid and inspected all four sides of it until he found the one that faced south. He knew the church was positioned some eighty feet from the pyramid to the southwest, and they could use it to orient themselves. He knew he had found the south side of the pyramid because it was the only one that was engraved with a strange inscription. He looked up now at Mulligan and grimly intoned the words upon the pyramid. „The wisdom of Solomon."

Mulligan knelt beside him, apparently inspecting the engraving. „Hey, do you mind...?" he asked, gesturing for Jeremy to hand over his wand. The Auror obliged, and the light which hitherto was showing them the way was extinguished.

„Dormitator," Mulligan intoned the spell. There was no obvious change in Jeremy though, so at first he asked stupidly, „Did this thing even work?"

Jeremy blinked. „Did what work? Hey, is that my–"

„Stupefy!"

Jeremy was sent sprawling in the dust. There was so little light left now that Eren could barely make out the form of Mulligan as he stood and turned to him, wand at the ready. „You know, that punch of yours..." he touched the right side of his face. There was no visible bruise, but he still hissed in slight pain. „It hurt, you know? I'm sure you won't mind if I return the favor, no?" He grinned at Eren, sitting in his wheelchair. „I'm bringing you to the Dark Lord. But have no fear, you will spend the rest of your life with your family!" he exclaimed, and nodded vigorously at that, briefly turning to inspect the unconscious, tall and lanky form of the Auror laying motionless on the ground. „How do you think Malachi will reward me for bringing the two of you before him?" he wondered aloud. „I never told you about my dream, did I? The dream of being rich, and noble–"

Eren only sighed in response. „If you're betraying us to Malachi, just betray us already. Don't talk. Do what you have to do."

Mulligan smirked. „Jawohl," he said. Eren heard the beginning of the spell being uttered, saw the flash of light expand towards him, then darkness took him and he would feel nothing for a long time.