Sirius bolted upright, but the world tilted violently, forcing him back onto the stone floor.
"Wha—?"
"Sirius? Mon Dieu, are you alright?"
Gentle hands caught his head before it met the stone again. He let them. He didn't have much choice — his arms had apparently decided to take a vacation along with the rest of him.
"Esme." Her face swam into focus slowly, the way faces do when the brain is still negotiating with consciousness. "Where—?"
"We are still in the vaults. Ragnok was kind enough to permit us this space."
"The—"
"The children are fine, Sirius." Her voice was precise, anticipating the question the way a good healer anticipates the next symptom. "They are safe. All four of them."
He closed his eyes. Opened them again. The ceiling of a goblin inner sanctum stared back at him.
"How long?" he asked.
"A week."
"A—" He stopped. Tried the number again. "A week?"
"I was out for three days before I woke," Esme said, helping him sit up with the brisk practicality of someone who has lifted unconscious people off floors before and has no illusions about the dignity of it. "The goblins were nearly ready to contact my family. Thankfully, I came around in time. We both know it is best not to involve Abraxas or Lucius in anything."
"Right." A week. Seven days. He had missed seven days of, he didn't even know what. He became aware of a deep, radiating ache that seemed to have taken up residence in every bone he possessed. "The children. Where?"
"Here," Esme said, and something in her voice shifted. Not softer, exactly. More deliberate. Like a door being opened carefully. "They are here, Sirius. Do you want to meet our children?"
Our children.
Mine.
He understood the distinction immediately, in his bones, in whatever part of him the ritual was successful. They were not the same children who had gone into that pool. They were someone new — someone his, in a way that had not existed a week ago and was now as fundamental as his own heartbeat.
He let Esme help him to his feet.
They were across the room, arranged on their slabs in the deep, untroubled stillness of their new life. Four of them. He had agreed to it, had chosen it, had stood in a vault and let ancient magic bind his soul to theirs.
Knowing a thing and seeing a thing are different countries entirely.
His feet carried him toward them before he had consciously decided to move.
The eldest was the one he went to first. He would have known him anywhere, not because the face was familiar, it wasn't, it was entirely new but because some part of Sirius rational thought simply knew, the way you know a voice in a crowded room. Ink-black curls fanned against the white linen. Gone was the famous Potter hair. Skin paler than it had been. The Potter nose softened, the jaw still a child's jaw, still finding itself, but already with something in its line that made Sirius think, uncomfortably and with a complicated feeling he could not entirely name, of the Black family portraits in a house he had fled at sixteen and never gone back to.
He looked, Sirius thought, like he belonged.
"Meet our eldest son and heir," Esme said, quietly, from just behind his shoulder. "Rigel Sirius Black."
Sirius said nothing for a moment.
Rigel. The brightest star in Orion, the foot of the Giant. He hadn't known, when they had chosen the name in the frantic, exhausted negotiation of the days before the ritual, how it would land when applied to an actual sleeping child. He knew now. It landed like something enormous and irrevocable, like a stone dropped into very deep water.
By giving the boy his own middle name, Sirius had done something he hadn't let himself examine too closely until now. He had tethered himself. In the Black family tradition, the heir carried the father's name as his own middle name. It was a declaration of continuity, of investment, of this child is mine and I am his. He had known that when he agreed to it.
He hadn't known it would feel like this.
He reached out and very gently, very carefully, pushed a dark curl back from the boy's forehead. His hand was steadier than he had any right to expect.
"The second," Esme continued, moving to the next slab, "is Corvus Arcturus Black."
Sirius followed her, and looked at his second son, and felt something in him that he could not have put into words if someone had offered him a hundred years to find them.
Nathan — Corvus — had changed. His hair was a mass of soft blonde curls, entirely unexpected against the boy's still-thin face, still-fragile frame. He was not healed. He would not be fully healed for a long time. But the shadow that had been killing him, that slow dark rot that Esme had named pre-Obscurcissement with clinical composure while her eyes held something that was not clinical at all, that shadow was gone.
He had been fated to die.
Sirius had known this, had been told this, and had understood it as information. Looking at Corvus, his son, breathing in the quiet of a goblin vault, he understood it as something else entirely. As something that had nearly happened, that had been a week away from happening, that had not happened because two people had been desperate and stubborn and very slightly insane.
He paired the name Arcturus with the boy deliberately. The name of the current Lord Black, the grandfather who had never known these boys existed. Sirius was making a declaration in the only language the House of Black had ever truly understood. This boy is the anchor. This boy counts.
"He is not completely healed," Esme said, her healer's voice back in place, precise and professional, and Sirius heard what it was covering for because he was learning to hear that now. "His magical core is strong , remarkably strong, actually. But his physical body will take time. He will tire easily. He may need a cane or a chair when the strain becomes too great."
Sirius looked at Corvus for another moment. Then he nodded, once, and followed Esme.
"Our only girl," she said. "Lyra Portia Black."
Lyra was neat even in sleep, her straight blonde hair fanned precisely against the stone as though she had arranged it herself. Lyra. The Harp. Lyra, the Harp. In a house of madness, she would be the music. She is hope. Portia as a reminder of her ties to the Peverell family now absorbed with the Black family through Sirius. She will remain the inheritor of the Peverell estates.
"And our youngest," Esme said, her voice doing something almost imperceptible on the word youngest, "Alphard Regulus Black."
Sirius looked at the smallest of them. Dark hair, pale skin. Two years old, and already, even asleep, already looking more like —like someone Sirius had lost, someone he had spent five years believing was gone.
Regulus is alive.
The entity had said it, with the absolute precision of something that did not say things it did not mean. And Sirius had carried that knowledge through a week of unconsciousness.
He had named the boy after his lost uncle Alphard — the solitary heart of the Hydra, the man who had loved him without condition and left him the means to survive on his own terms. And Regulus, because some things deserved to be said even when they couldn't be said out loud.
He looked at the tiny sleeping face. "He looks like him," he said, quietly.
Esme glanced at him. She did not ask who. "Yes," she said. She never met Regulus nor seen his face, but she agreed anyway.
They stood in the quiet for a moment. All four of them. Four small shapes, four new names, four lives that were now irrevocably his to be responsible for in a way that he had no map for and no precedent for and no choice but to figure out as he went.
He became aware, distantly, that his jaw was very tight. He made a conscious effort to release it.
"Can we take them?" he asked. His voice was remarkably ordinary. He was very good at ordinary when he needed to be.
"Yes," Esme said. "The paperwork is in order. Birth certificates, marriage certificate, the wills. We just need to sign." She paused. "The time magic on the marriage certificate is already set. As of today, that we have been married for six years."
"Six years," Sirius said.
"A precaution. It removes questions about the children's legitimacy."
"Right." He processed that. "So, we're married now."
"We are married." Esme repeated.
"I never thought I would be married."
"You and me both, Mon Cher," Esme said, with the dry precision of someone filing a fact under things that are true and will require adjustment. "You and me both."
The footsteps of Ragnok echoed before the goblin appeared, his armor catching the ambient light of the vault.
"Esme." He nodded. His sharp eyes moved to Sirius. "You are awake."
"Apparently," Sirius confirmed.
"The papers are prepared. The goblin nation will hold these records to the end." He set the parchments on the table and extended the quill.
"The marriage certificate is backdated by goblin time-magic to six years prior," Ragnok said, sliding another parchment across the stone table. His armored fingers moved with the brisk efficiency of someone who had facilitated stranger transactions than this and would facilitate stranger ones still before the week was out. "To any magical inquiry — Ministry records, family magic, genealogical examination — you and Esmeralda Black have been married for six years. The children's birth records have been adjusted accordingly."
"Esmeralda Black," Sirius said, mostly to himself. He hadn't said it aloud before. It sat oddly, not unpleasantly, the way unfamiliar furniture sits in a room you're still learning.
Esme, seated beside him in the straight-backed way she had that suggested she had been taught posture as a moral virtue, did not visibly react. She signed her portion of the document with a clean, decisive stroke.
"The Peverell estate arrangements," Ragnok continued. "The primary estate in the Black Forest remains sealed. Its wards recognize no current heir as sufficiently empowered to claim it. The coastal property — which you have already occupied — transfers to the House of Black in its entirety, with the provision that Lyra Portia Black retains the right of inheritance as Portia Peverell's designated heir through godmotherhood."
"Will the estate accept that?" Esme asked. "A Black heir rather than a Peverell one?"
"The estate will require time," Ragnok said. "Old properties have long memories. But the ritual has already begun the process of introduction. Think of it less as a legal transfer and more as..." he paused, apparently searching for a Muggle-accessible metaphor, and finding one with the slightly pained expression of someone reaching for something they don't usually keep within arm's reach, "a formal introduction at a very old dinner party. The house knows the children now. Acceptance will follow."
Sirius nodded. He was only half-listening. His eyes kept moving to the four slabs across the room, where four small figures slept with the deep, untroubled stillness of the newly remade.
Ragnok followed his gaze. Something in the goblin's expression shifted, not softened, exactly, goblins did not soften as a rule, but settled into a quality of gravity that felt, from Ragnok, like the highest form of respect.
"There is one matter remaining," Ragnok said. "Regarding the eldest."
"Rigel," Sirius said. The name still felt new in his mouth, like a word in a language he was only beginning to learn to speak. "What about him?"
Ragnok set down his quill. He folded his hands on the table, which was, Sirius had come to understand, the goblin equivalent of a deep breath.
"During the ritual," Ragnok said, "our diagnostics detected an anomaly within the boy's magical core. Specifically, within the scar."
"The scar is gone," Esme said, her healer's attention sharpening immediately.
"The visible scar is gone," Ragnok corrected. "The wound that created it is not. What remained inside the boy when the Dark Lord's curse rebounded. We did not have a name for it, initially. Our eldest archivists were consulted." He paused again. "Are you familiar with the term Horcrux?"
Silence.
Sirius looked at him. "I know it," he said carefully. "It's very dark magic. The theory is that a wizard can split the soul." He stopped. His jaw tightened. "Are you telling me—"
"A fragment of the Dark Lord's soul entered the boy on Halloween 1980," Ragnok said, with the clean precision of someone delivering a truth that deserves to be delivered cleanly rather than buried in softening language. "It lodged in the scar. It has been there since."
The room was very quiet.
"During the ritual," Ragnok continued, "the fragment did not transfer or expel. The ancient magic of the adoption recognized the fragment as a foreign presence and attempted to contain it. It is still within Rigel. But it is no longer loose." He chose his next words with visible care. "Think of it as enclosed. Walled off."
The boy's own magic now vastly strengthened It was not the stillness of shock. It was the controlled stillness of a man who has received terrible information and is refusing, through sheer force of will, to let his reaction make the situation worse. His hands were flat on the table. His breathing was measured.
"So, there is a piece of Voldemort," Sirius said, very quietly, "inside my son. And no one knows what it will do."
"No," Ragnok said. "No one knows."
"Can it be removed?"
"We do not know."
"Will it — will it affect him? His mind? His magic?"
"We do not know," Ragnok said again, and there was something in his voice on the third repetition of those words that was not apology but acknowledged the weight of the not-knowing. "What we know is this: the fragment is contained. The boy's magic is strong. Stronger than any child's core our diagnostics have measured in recorded goblin history. And the renewal that you triggered has changed the conditions of everything. What was true of Horcruxes before may not apply to what exists inside Rigel Black." A pause. "We will monitor. Our nation's commitment to this family extends to that."
Sirius looked at the sleeping boy across the room. The ink-black curls. The pale face. The smooth forehead where a jagged scar had been and was no longer, or was, or both, depending on which layer of reality you were reading.
He thought of the entity's voice in the starfield. The scar is not merely a scar. But that is a conversation for another time.
He had filed it. He had known it was coming back. He had not known it would come back quite this soon, or quite this sharp.
"Thank you, Ragnok," he said. His voice was steady. He was very proud of his voice for being steady.
"Alright," he said and turn to Esme. "Let's take them home."
*****
Arriving back at the castle was disorienting in a way Sirius hadn't anticipated.
He had been to Blackwood Castle, the ancestral Black estate, exactly twice as an adult; once for a funeral, once for a meeting he had no intention of attending that he had attended anyway out of some residual, infuriating sense of obligation. Blackwood was all deliberate grandeur, every stone placed to remind you of the family's importance. It had never felt like a home. It had felt like a statement.
This was different. This was empty stone and sea wind and potential, and it was his.
Theirs.
Since the Peverell magical signature had dissolved with Portia's death and Esme's inheritance, the wards could be remade entirely. They can rebuild from the foundation with the Black and Malfoy signatures woven through them, something genuinely new grown from the bones of something ancient. Standing in the entrance hall with the Atlantic audible through the walls and sleeping children in their arms and a floating stretcher, Sirius thought that if he had anything to say about it, this would be the new Black seat. Not Grimmauld Place with its screaming portrait and its smell of old grief. Not Blackwood with its performance of importance. This now known as a fortress on a leyline above the North Sea, earned rather than inherited, chosen rather than assigned.
The naming took longer than it should have.
"Blackmoor," Sirius suggested, because the main line was Black and the naming convention followed a pattern — Blackstone, Blackwood, it seemed logical.
"There is no moor here," Esme said, with the patient tone of someone explaining something that should be self-evident. "We are on a cliff above the sea."
"It's evocative."
"It's inaccurate."
They went back and forth for longer than was dignified, which Sirius found he didn't mind. There was something almost ordinary about it. Just two people arguing about a name in a draughty corridor while a two-year-old attempted to climb a decorative pillar in the background.
In the end, they agreed on Blacktide Castle. The castle stood where the cliff met the North Sea, and the tide was what you heard first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It suited.
The castle was far too large for six people. Two adults and four children rattled around in it like seeds in a gourd. They designated the eastern wing as the family wing. The one place in the entire structure that was only theirs, sealed with the new wards and accessible to no one else. The rest they divided by purpose: office, laboratory, the many rooms whose functions they hadn't decided yet and wouldn't need to decide for some time. It gave Sirius something practical to think about, which was, as Esme had probably already deduced, exactly how he processed things he couldn't otherwise process.
The family wing caught the morning light first. Esme had laid the groundwork weeks before the ritual. Beds conjured, rooms assigned, the absolute minimum of warmth and function pressed into stone that had been cold and empty for a very long time. It was not comfortable. It was not yet a home. But it had the shape of one, and Sirius had learned, in a decade of living out of safe houses and Custodian lodgings, that the shape was where you started.
The boys' room first.
He brought Rigel to the doorway of the room that had been prepared for him and watched the boy look at it, at the bed, the window, the walls, with an expression that Sirius was beginning to recognise as Rigel's version of thinking. Not childlike blankness. Something older. Calculating. Then the dark-haired head turned, and those blue-green eyes moved to the room next door, which was Corvus's.
Sirius didn't wait for a question that wasn't going to come.
"You can share," he said. It came out before he'd entirely decided to say it, which was becoming a pattern with this child. "If you want to. Until you're ready not to."
Rigel looked up at him. The steadiness in that gaze sat oddly on a five-year-old face, the gaze of someone who had learned to read adults very carefully and was currently reading him.
Whatever he found there, it was apparently sufficient.
Without a word, he went and sat on Corvus's bed, and waited.
Sirius understood it then; in the particular way you understand things when they are right in front of you and undeniable. The adoption had erased the memories. But the body remembered what the mind had forgotten. And Rigel's case, the comfort of another person close by in the dark, the instinct built over five years in a cupboard where two small boys had been each other's entire world. Corvus was still Corvus to whatever part of Rigel's memory had survived the ritual's rewriting. The separation anxiety wasn't irrational; it was faithful, in the way that deep things are faithful even when the surface has been changed entirely.
Esme had said it plainly in the vaults, in the quiet professional tone she used when the information was important enough to deserve plainness: the older ones will still experience psychological reaction from their life before adoption.
So, they would give the boys a shared room and not make it a thing. They would add the separate rooms later, when they grow older and want their own privacy.
Rigel sat on Corvus's bed with his hands in his lap and his back very straight, and waited for his brother to be brought in, and Sirius thought that he had never in his life seen patience that looked quite so much like survival.
He went to get Corvus.
*****
Alphard had opinions about the castle.
He did not express these opinions verbally, or not in any conventional sense. He expressed them through following Sirius everywhere.
Not conspicuously. Not with any announcement of intent. He simply materialized wherever Sirius was, at a consistent distance of approximately three feet, and observed. When Sirius stopped, Alphard stopped. When Sirius turned, Alphard turned. When Sirius crouched to examine a section of wall where the ward-work needed reinforcing, Alphard inserted himself directly between Sirius's knees and examined the same section of wall with identical gravity, as though he too had considered opinions about the structural integrity of ancient stonework and had been waiting for an appropriate moment to contribute them.
"What are you doing?" Sirius asked, at around the fourth repetition of this.
"No," Alphard said.
Sirius looked at him. "That wasn't a yes or no question."
Alphard appeared to consider this information carefully. "No," he said again, with the serene finality of someone who has made their position clear and sees no need to elaborate.
Sirius pressed his lips together very firmly and turned back to the wall.
Lyra, by contrast, would look at him, a long, considering look, the kind that saw more than it should from a four-year-old, and then turn and walk away in the opposite direction. Quickly. Not running. Just walking with great purpose and no apparent destination. As though she had assessed the situation, reached a conclusion she intended to keep to herself, and decided that the far end of the corridor required her immediate attention.
Sirius was not sure what to make of this. He was fairly sure she was the most unnerving of his four children and was equally sure he was not supposed to find that thought as fond as he did.
He was learning things about himself. Fatherhood, it turned out, was efficient that way.
*****
They found an hour for themselves after the children were settled. Corvus and Rigel in their shared room, Lyra in hers, Alphard asleep in the small adjoining room off the main family chamber where he had, apparently, decided he lived there now. Any attempt to get him to his actual room is met with massive tantrums Sirius has never seen before. Were toddlers this fussy?
The castle was quiet in the way that new places are quiet, full of its own unfamiliar sounds settling into something that would eventually become background.
Esme brought tea. She was, Sirius noted, very good at producing tea in circumstances that did not obviously contain the means to produce tea. He suspected this was a skill developed over years of field work and chose not to examine it too closely.
They sat in the main chamber, the Atlantic outside the high windows going dark as the last of the day dissolved into it.
"So, you met someone, too." Sirius said.
It was not a question. He had seen it in her face when he'd mentioned the starfield, a flicker of recognition quickly composed back into professional stillness.
Esme was quiet for a moment. She turned the teacup in her hands, a small, precise rotation, once. "Yes," she said. "Though mine was different."
"Who did you see?"
She looked at the window. The composed quality of her expression was there, intact, but underneath it — and Sirius was, among other things, trained to read people — was something that had been shaken and had not entirely settled again.
"Portia," she said.
The name landed with the weight of something that had been carried for a long time.
"She looked — she looked exactly as I remembered her. Before the malediction took hold. Before—" Esme stopped. Began again. "She was standing in a place I didn't recognize. Very bright. She was smiling." A pause. "She always smiled. Even when she shouldn't have. It was one of the things that was most—" She stopped again.
Sirius said nothing. He had learned, over years of fieldwork and other people's grief, that silence at the right moment is more useful than any word.
"She told me she had agreed," Esme continued, her voice even and precise, the way her voice was when she was holding something with both hands. "About the estate. About Lyra and Alphard. She said — she said she linked the name herself. Lyra Portia." A breath. "She said she was glad it was us. That she had watched the ritual. She said—" Esme's jaw tightened slightly. "She said she was glad her children would be loud."
Sirius let that sit.
"She said that to you," he said.
"She said that to me." Esme turned back from the window. Her eyes were dry, but the shaken quality was still there, visible now in the set of her shoulders. "Portia was the loudest person I have ever known. She laughed at everything. She thought I was too quiet." A small, painful, genuine curve of her mouth. "She was not wrong."
"She sounds like she was terrible," Sirius said.
Esme looked at him sharply.
"Loud, always smiling, extremely opinionated about other people being too quiet," Sirius continued. "Exhausting. Entirely insufferable. The best kind of person."
Esme held his gaze for a moment. Then something in her face eased, very slightly, like a door that has been braced shut and has decided, for now, to unlock. "Yes," she said. "Exactly like that."
They sat with it for a moment, the way you sit with the shape of someone who isn't there anymore.
"What did yours tell you?" Esme asked.
"Mine didn't tell me much," Sirius said. "It specialized in significant information delivered as obliquely as possible, followed by refusing to answer follow-up questions. Very professional operation." He paused. "It told me Harry — Rigel — is the prophesied child. Not Charlus."
Esme went still. "What?"
"The curse chose him on Halloween. It always was him. Everyone looked at the wrong boy." He kept his voice level. He had had a week unconscious to begin, if not to process, then at least to stop bleeding. "It also told me the scar was more than a scar. Though it declined to be specific. Ragnok was specific."
"The Horcrux," Esme said. Her healer's mind had clearly been running that thread since the vaults. "I have been thinking about it since Ragnok explained. The containment the ritual built. I have never encountered anything in any magical literature I have read, and I have read extensively."
"Is that good or bad?"
"It means there is no precedent," Esme said. "Which means there is no established prognosis. Which means—"
"We watch him," Sirius said. "We learn what it does as we go. We find the information we need."
"And if there is no information to find?"
"Then we make some." He looked at her steadily. "You rebuilt a Peverell fortress on a leyline using a combination of ancient magical healing and Muggle medical research. I have spent ten years extracting intelligence from situations that had no business yielding it. We are not unequipped for problems without precedent."
Esme regarded him for a moment. Something in her expression was assessing, not the clinical assessment of a healer, but the subtler assessment of someone deciding how much to believe in another person.
"No," she said, finally. "I suppose we are not."
****
Sirius checked on them before he slept.
Corvus and Rigel first. The door was ajar, which was how they had left it — Rigel had been very clear, without using any actual words, that the door was to remain ajar. Sirius looked in. Two small shapes under the blankets, close together, Corvus's blonde curls and Rigel's dark one's side by side on the pillow. Both breathing. Both still.
He stood there for longer than was strictly necessary.
Then Lyra. She was curled on her side, self-contained even in sleep, her straight blonde hair across her face. Sirius reached in and moved it, very gently, the way he had seen people do in films and had always thought looked unnecessary, and discovered it was not unnecessary at all, it was simply necessary in a way that you couldn't understand until you were the one doing it.
Then Alphard, who had wound himself into a configuration that seemed structurally improbable for a body with that number of limbs, and who was making small, intermittent sounds that were almost but not quite snoring.
"No," Alphard told him quietly, and felt something unknot in his chest at the absurdity of it.
He went to bed.
****
The castle settled around its new occupants, the old stones adjusting to the warmth of fires lit and breath breathed and small feet that would, in time, learn every corridor.
In the room he shared with his brother, Rigel lay still until the sounds of the castle told him everyone was asleep.
Then he got up.
He did not stumble. He moved the way he had always moved through dark spaces — carefully, without sound, with the particular competence of a child who had learned very young that being noticed had consequences. The floor was cold stone under his feet. The moonlight came through the high window and made the room silver and shadow.
He found the bathroom. He closed the door behind him, slowly, so it did not catch.
He looked in the mirror.
The face that looked back at him was new. He knew it was his because he had been told it was his, and because he could feel it moving when he thought about moving it, and because the hands that reached up to touch it were the hands he had been living in for a week now. But new. Ink-black curls where there had been messy dark hair that always needed cutting. Pale skin. A jaw that would one day be strong and was currently just a small boy's jaw.
He looked at his eyes. Blue-green. The color of shallow ocean over sand. He had not had eyes this color before. He raised one hand and touched the corner of one eye, lightly, the way you check something is real.
Then he moved his fingers to his forehead.
It was smooth. That was the thing that was wrong, the thing his hand kept not finding. The absence of something that had always been there, a ridge of skin, a shape he had traced with his own finger in Aunt Petunia's bathroom mirror more times than he could count, wondering what it was and why Uncle Vernon looked at it the way he did.
The scar was gone.
He pressed his fingers flat against the smooth skin of his forehead.
It was not there.
He could feel it anyway.
Not with his fingers. With something that was not his fingers — something underneath, something that the new face and the new name and the new magic had not covered over, could not cover over, the way you cannot cover a sound by covering your ears. It was there. It had always been there. It was patient, and quiet, and it knew he was looking for it, and it did not move.
Rigel stood in the bathroom of a castle that was learning to be his home, in a body that was learning to be his body and looked at the face that was learning to be his face.
He did not cry. He had not cried in a very long time. Crying had never been safe before, and the knowledge of what was safe did not leave just because the circumstances had.
He checked: eyes, nose, jaw, forehead. The new curls. The new color of his skin. The shape of his mouth, which was new and was also somehow his.
He pressed his hand one more time against his forehead.
Gone and not gone.
New and not new.
He looked at himself for a long time, the way you look at something you are going to need to know very well.
Then he turned off the bathroom light and went back to bed, and lay very still beside his sleeping brother, and stared at the ceiling of a castle above the North Sea until morning came.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
So, the ritual is done. Harry, Nathan, Penelope and Pietro are now Rigel, Corvus, Lyra and Alphard. And that will be the names we will use starting the next chapter. Originally it was supposed to be Polaris for Penelope, but I wanted name with meaning in a way. Anyway, Harry' or Rigel's fate is still intertwined with Voldemort just in a different way now. Not the same with the last prophecy anymore. So, is he still the prophecy child? No. Not anymore. More like different. I just answered this because people are curious.
Also, Lyra will remain the Peverell heir and will get all the estates and the money. This is because the Peverell was through Esme not Sirius so think of it is as an inheritance where her godmother willed it to her. Except the Blacktide castle. There is a big reason why this is important and that won't be revealed until we reached the Wizengamot chapter and that will be a while. Also, yes, they lost their memories. Except for Rigel. Rigel still remembers but he won't tell his new parents about it.42Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡM5T5Z2WqHg
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