The black fire was melting the thousands-of-years-old stones of Pedasa like wax. Fiendfyre was a dark magic with its own consciousness, feeding on pure hatred. The dark flames, taking the shape of a giant cobra, closed in on the mortals fleeing screaming, turning them into a mere handful of ash in seconds. As this hell Nazir created rapidly sucked the valley's oxygen, the air had heated up to the point of being unbreathable, and the sky was covered in blood-red smoke. "Fall back!" roared Darius, swinging his wand around himself in a wide arc. "Protego Maxima!" The thick, silver shield spreading from Darius's wand barely stopped the massive fire snake's first strike. As cracks formed on the surface of the shield, Darius clenched his teeth; it was impossible to hold off Fiendfyre for long. Meanwhile, on the other side of the altar, the deadly dance between Meltem and Tariq was living its final moments. Tariq had watched Nazir's escape and, realizing his job was done, stepped back to merge into the darkness. However, Meltem had no intention of letting him go. In that critical second when Tariq began to spin on his heel to disapparate, Meltem, rather than throwing the last shock disc in her hand, lunged directly onto the man. Tariq, by reflex, turned his left wand on her. "Avada-" Before the end of the word could come, Meltem's steel-toed boot sharply kicked Tariq's wrist. As the man's wand flew from his hand, Meltem spun mid-air and drove her knee into Tariq's jaw. When Tariq stumbled backward, Meltem pressed the shock device inside her leather glove directly against the man's neck. While the blue electrical current paralyzed Tariq's nervous system, the man collapsed to the ground, twitching. "Kuzey! Lidya! Over here!" shouted Meltem, grabbing the unconscious Tariq by the collar and dragging him as she slipped under the shield Darius was struggling to maintain. From within the shadows, Lidya appeared; her cloak was scorched in places from the heat of the fire. Right behind her, Kuzey ducked under the shield, his face covered in soot, having shouldered his long wand. The black flames outside the shield were now about to swallow the shield. The silver barrier had begun to crack. "Darius, the shield is collapsing!" shouted Lidya, placing her hands on Darius's shoulders to try and transfer her own magic to him. "I know," growled Darius.
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His eyes drifted to the destruction around the altar. Out of hundreds of mortals, only scorched corpses and a handful of people fleeing in panic remained. Nazir had burned his own army without a single moment of hesitation. "We don't have the strength to withstand this, we need to go!" said Kuzey, pointing his wand at the most intense point of the fire. "We leave together," said Darius. He gripped his wand with both hands. Gathering his mind, he focused on the geography of Bodrum, the salty spirit of the sea. Fusing water and wind magic of Latin origin with his own will, he roared: "Aqua Tsunami!" The mass of water bursting from the tip of Darius's wand at tremendous pressure jetted outwards through the cracking part of the shield, directly into the center of the black fire. Normal water could not extinguish Fiendfyre, but Darius's goal wasn't to extinguish it. The moment the water collided with the hellfire, a massive steam explosion occurred. As visibility dropped to zero, the fire experienced a split-second shock and receded. "Now!" The four CORE members and the unconscious Tariq disapparated from the hell of Pedasa with a loud vacuum sound and vanished. Behind them, the black flames continued to swallow the entire ancient city. Despite the sounds of the wind and waves outside, the lower deck of the rusty yacht in the İçmeler Shipyard was as silent as a grave. A single dim yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling illuminated Tariq's face, who was tightly bound to the chair in the center with an Incarcerous spell. The man's face was covered in blood and soot. His dual wands lay on Alaz's desk. Darius stood directly opposite the chair, arms crossed over his chest. His face was expressionless, but storms raged in his eyes. Meltem leaned against the door, playing with a knife in her hand; Lidya had practically melted into the shadows in the corner. Tariq slowly opened his eyes. He looked around, then looked at Darius in front of him and smiled with bloody teeth. "Do you think you can stop that fire, Widdershins?" said Tariq, his voice mocking. "You merely ran away." "Pedasa fell," Darius said, void of any crumb of emotion in his voice. "But your master left his mortal army behind. He abandoned them to die. He burned his pawns—whose minds he poisoned, whom he empowered with wands—in a single fire. Why? If his goal is a rebellion, how will he do it without his army?" Tariq's smile turned into a sinister laugh. "You Aurors are truly very shallow. Those mortals weren't an army. They were just kindling."
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Meltem stopped playing with her knife. "What do you mean kindling?" Tariq turned his head to Meltem. "Did you think Master Nazir pitied them, that he saw them as equals with wizards? No. The Ninth Port on that parchment is not just a location as you understand it. It is the heart of all the magical veins beneath Bodrum. To awaken that heart requires a massive amount of unstable magical energy. Not pure magic... Chaos magic. Pain. Corruption." The pieces began to fall into place in Darius's mind. His eyes widened slightly. "The wands..." he murmured. "Yes," said Tariq, with a fanatical glint in his eyes. "Mortals' bodies cannot handle pure magic, they corrupt it. Nazir gave them wands and let them slowly burn themselves away. He tainted the magic. Then he gathered them over the Ports and, using Fiendfyre, sealed that tainted energy into the fault lines under the earth. Their death was not a loss, it was the ritual itself!" An ice-cold silence fell over the room. Nazir had used the mortals not just to fight, but as sacrifices to generate the dark energy that would open the Ninth Port. "Two Ports have fallen," said Tariq, leaning forward, straining his chains. "Seven are left. And be sure, Nazir has already reached the third one by now. When seven more Ports are broken, the Ninth Awakening will take place. When that armor separating the wizarding world and the mortal world cracks, my master will control that core and become the god of both worlds." Darius drew his wand and pressed its tip to Tariq's temple. The darkness in his eyes was no less than Nazir's. "Where is the Third Port, Tariq?" whispered Darius, emphasizing his words. "If you don't answer, I will force my way into your mind. And believe me, me entering your mind hurts a lot more than Nazir's Fiendfyre."
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