It was late at night when I was a dozen leagues away from the town. I left the road and went deeper into the forest. I killed my horse and used a spell from school of death to destroy its corpse. You can't leave any traces behind you. Also, I had to cast a special spell on Venice. It covers all traces - from footprints on the ground and smell to spiritual fluctuations left by my soul on the astral and magical backgrounds. Hiding my path, I opened a portal to a place a few hours away from Elena Rovenkelo's hideout near the right tree. It was fortunate that Salazar had an episode related to the castle near the coordinates where Rowena's tiara was found. And now, I have her treasure in my possession! Her daughter's protection around the oak was not a significant obstacle for me after I disarmed her mother's secret chambers. Another portal brought me to one of many caves high in the Alps, where Slytherin has a hidden lair.There was a room for rituals, a potions room, and a storage pantry with ingredients. There was even an ordinary apartment with a bed, clothes and toiletries. All minimalistic and without luxuries. Well, he built it when he was just a traveling mage. He was looking for a better deal before he became famous. Of course, he didn't know about Godric yet. Why open a portal instead of apparating? They still needed to invent spatial enchantments, but portals were available only at octave five or higher. I created a diagnostic circle in the ritual room and placed the tiara inside it. With bare hands, wary of anything related to Morgana, I wore dragon-skin gloves and stepped aside. Taking them off, I ran a scan on the creation of former Slytherin Mistress. Morgana was more paranoid than Slythern, and he only accidentally managed to discover the password to her private rooms.And that was only because he could remember everything that had happened around him while he slept when he woke up in the morning. His magical, cosmic vision and hearing organs were still monitoring the situation in his sleep, memorizing what was happening around him. Rowena had never brought Salazar to her private chambers. Neither did he know about them. He just thought that the place where he slept with her was her Chamber of Secrets. In reality, it was just a standard room that could be created by a bailout. And then, one day, Rowena jumped out of bed after a stormy night when she was lying with her lover. Apparently, she had received a signal. After checking Salazar's sleeping fortress, she opened the door to her private apartment in the wall. That's how she knew the password for her Hogwarts home. "No, are you serious?!" I gasped as the ritual ended its diagnostic, revealing its test results. The tiara was not only a key to accessing Hogwarts governance.Thanks to the higher spirit of mind encased within it, it proved to be a very powerful mental amplifier. But that wasn't all it was either. Thanks to Rowena's library, I now know about soul magic, demonology, shamanism and astral magic, all of which allowed me to find a well-hidden absorber inside the tiara. To be more precise, it's not even a sink but a hidden space outside reality and dimensions shielded from Sansara's wheel. From there one can control the artefact and influence anyone who uses it. It's not a Horcrux or a phylactery, but something more perfect and clever.After all, even my spiritual and astral vision did not recognize the wreath as a prepared space for a soul to comfortably stay in, with the possibility of interacting with the world around it after getting there. Seeing only an already captured spirit of the mind.
After a week of calculations and experiments, I finally managed to get Morgana's soul out of the wreath without damaging the diadem key. Now holding the emerald-encased soul of Salazar's mistress in my hands, I pondered how best to deal with it.
I had a crazy idea. I did not know if it was worth it, but it could make me a fully-fledged demon. I had done it before and shredded Salazar's soul without flinching.
Having to count and think, after another week of calculating, I had parchments with ritual details to help me with this difficult task.I wouldn't have let Morgana's soul enter the interior of my body or become possessed to defeat her in a duel. Nor would I split her soul into shells and absorb them all at once.The ritual I developed was staged. The first subjected Morgana to a monstrously powerful mental attack. Second, under my control, invaded her mind and destroyed her personality, while preserving her memories. Third, ripped out her memories, Fourth severed the ties between all the shells of her soul and the core, releasing them into the wheel of Samsara. Fifth triggered the absorption of prana by the second shell. Sixth recycled her astral shell into pure energy devoid of any traces of her personality and used it to strengthen myself. Seventh dispelled her spiritual essence to hell because I didn't want any more female roaches.
Morgana was fat and mammoth-sized. After her memory has been erased, the eighth must erase all memories and identity from the mind shell and allow it to be used for reinforcement. The ninth repeats the demonic mechanism of eating essence, through which it must absorb and strengthen its magical knowledge. Her memory remains in the mind as an archive. Everything has been checked dozens of times. The question is what to do first - eat the kitsune's heart or do the ritual? If you eat the heart, you will need at least a month to recover from absorbing the kitsune powers and abilities, and then put your soul in order. It would be dangerous to have two such complex effects on the soul without a break in between. If you do the first ritual with the kitsunes' soul, your heart will only absorb after six months. Absorbing the power of the kitsun will affect almost all your soul, and it will take longer to stabilize it.But I'd already taken too long to absorb the heart. The longer it was removed from the kitsune, the less chance I had of successfully absorbing it.
Fuck! Why didn't I leave a way for my apprentice to contact me, so I could send her a message? A patronus is the only way to notify the badoer family about the delay. Except, my patronus could be used to send people to the afterlife unprepared. I have one that looks like a basilisk. But it's not as pretty as the silver one I saw in the film; it's almost indistinguishable from my real self. Ten meters tall, same dark green material, yellow eyes. It's a real charmer!
Well, I backed myself into a corner. There's pretty good defense on the castle of badoer. I only know two ways to get this message through without disturbing the signaling spells.
The first is my patronus. It's High Light enchanted, harmless to humans.So, he can enter Francesco's castle unharmed and deliver my message. The second is to summon a demon from the middle circle, subdue him and send him on a mission to deliver the message, but I like that one even less. Unable to think of anything better, I waited until late afternoon, when eleven o'clock came. I summoned my charming Patronus and dictated a message to my apprentice telling him that I would be delayed by three months in my trip but would try to arrive early, then I sent it to Maria apologising to her and any possible witnesses. It was good for Salazar to have a silver-coloured viper as his patronus. Oh, well, never mind, it's time to get on with the business and get my mind off my head. It took me three weeks to stabilize my soul and assimilate the powers and abilities of Kitsune, which I was able to do so quickly thanks to special elixirs containing the creatures' organs.They helped me to calm and normalise my disturbed soul. I could easily incorporate the gift of material illusions into myself. These Kitsune illusions are a miracle. They are similar to the shadow clones from Naruto, and they have limited intelligence. It all depends on me and my message when creating them. If I create a copy of myself, it can cast magic, but only until it runs out of mana and mental energy. They're quite strong, but I need to be even stronger. More specifically, about 20% of my true physical stats distinguish them from shadow clones. The only difference is that they can't transfer memory and experience. However, I have ideas on how to give them that ability. I need more time to experiment, but I can transfer consciousness into them and see through their eyes, which would be an excellent espionage opportunity, as they can't be detected by local European wizards' magic.Create a sparrow or even a fly, let it fly, put it somewhere near the intelligent people you are interested in and listen and watch what they are whispering about. The ritual to absorb Morgana's spirit went well. I didn't know about Prana; I didn't think it could affect my body like that. Good thing, at least, I had metamorphosis, and the changes that occurred to me weren't so severe. Thanks for not getting boobs. Not all Pranas, as it turns out, are equally healthy. Female Prana is very different from male Prana. So now, I'm in my true form. But to hell with the small things. Because, what I got from her memory far exceeds that minor inconvenience. Morgana was born a thousand three hundred years before Christ. She was the priestess of Morrigan, the Celtic goddess of death and fertility. Her training in magic started with Druidism, where she became very powerful and skilled in curses.And with her talent, she was able to attract Morrigan's attention. After becoming her priestess and serving her for three hundred years, she learned of the afterlife that awaited her in the Mistress' halls. This fate greatly terrified the priestess. She threw all her energy into finding a way to escape such an honor. And then, she found a way to avoid meeting her mistress, whose halls she would enter after death. That way was to move into other bodies and take them over.
So she ran around taking over the bodies of her daughters until the day when her daughter stole her tiara and, a week later, died herself. Then Rowena had the misfortune of being ambushed by the Inquisition in France, where she arrived to begin searching for her tiara. The churchmen were able to destroy the next receptacle she possessed in a devastating battle.As a result, Morgana's soul was taken to Albania, where she found herself inside a tiara in a hollow oak tree, which had been hidden by Elena Rovenkelo. However, the older woman had some misfortunes. She was a moderately cheeky and lucky person. If anything, that's me. With her knowledge, she could easily create an immortal body. In fact, her soul had already had an eighth shell for a long time. So, if she stayed in one of her previous bodies for more than three hundred years, her body would stop aging, giving her back her youth and appearance of a twenty-year-old girl. It was normal for a mage to live for three centuries, except she couldn't do that because the curse of the master sought her out. When Morrigan realised that the cunning priestess tried to sneak away, he launched a curse on the world targeting the soul of the careless servant. If his soul had been fully open to the world, the curse could have found him immediately.
So, she hopped from body to body, hiding from it. She realised that she could not yet overcome the curse of a whole goddess.
Morgana has been searching for a way to get rid of the curse all this time. This forced her to learn all the magic she could. And thanks to her efforts, I now know many types of magic and the history of this world.
Over a hundred thousand years ago, there was a great event on a multiverse scale during the Ice Age. Doses of worlds converged at one point and portals began to open on our planet. In some cases, convergence with a new world was short; in others, the portals were kept open for thousands of years. At that time, there were no developed civilizations yet, and tribal relations between Cro-Magnons - the indigenous inhabitants of Earth - had just begun to form.By the way, Mongoloids, Indians, nations on the territory of Persia, Indians from both Americas, Negroes and Caucasians are all people from different worlds who have penetrated through these portals.
Europaeoids are newcomers from Midgard, who assimilated most of the indigenous population of Earth - Cro-Magnon. Slavs are a mix of Caucasoid and Aryan. This is a world where the biggest portals are in the mountains of Tibet and the Urals. The convergence and divergence of different worlds in space lasted fifty thousand years. After they were removed and the connection was broken, spatial gaps - domains and anomalies - formed. But one world remains forever attached to ours. Today, it is known as magical. Most magical settlements and Hogwarts exist there.
Human races that came to us lacked knowledge and strength to return home. Many of them didn't want to go back either.Each with its own reasons, some had endless wars, some had very aggressive flora and fauna, some, like the Indians of America, came from a dying world entirely, only the Fae knew how to cross between worlds, finding that nothing was interesting in our world, most left Earth. Now, as for the gods, all local pantheons such as Scandinavia, Greece, Slav, China, India, America, Egypt and the nations of the east were formed by powerful magicians, those were already born on Earth and managed to form their own religions, because of them they received an influx of biblical hymns that made them divine beings. Morgana didn't know why but about three thousand years ago the exodus of Gods to other worlds started and ended before the coming of Christianity, Morgana was an extremely knowledgeable priestess who knew a lot about apostolic magicSo, now I understand the nature of one god. It is well known that this faith has Jewish roots. Originally, it praised Yahweh, also known as Shebaoth, who was a powerful Babylonian magician of light. As it turns out, he was elevated to the divine status by the Jewish tribe. However, he is not omnipresent or the creator of all things. The true creator of the multiverse, primordial chaos, where worlds are born and dissolve, who created souls and immortal atman, and who embodied the wheel of samsara, never personally visited our world. He is mysterious and elusive, and does not care about us. And so, one day, the gods left our world, leaving their egregors to wither and collapse without their presence. But the egregor of Sabaoth remained unaffected, and this individual created his own cult and appropriated the Creator's merits in his teachings.While in our world, praise came to him as a reward for deeds he had not done. When he left, the egregor of faith remained intact. It did not collapse only because the Creator was present in every corner of the Meta-Universe. After all, every world was his creation. Even if a Demiurge created the world, it was created from the chaos created by the true Creator. This kept the belief in one Creator intact. His invisible presence was also in our world though he was not personally here. The flock of Christianity and Islam grew, where they also believed in one Creator. Gradually, the pseudo-mind of the egregore developed. It began to manage faith energy to the extent of its reasoning, formed from the aspirations and prayers of adherents of all confessions of the Creator.He also began to perform miracles in response to the most sincere requests and pleas of those who truly believed. Morgana's knowledge revealed to me new dimensions of the structure of the universe and the forces that govern it. I also learned from the same source about the nature of divine beings. Not to mention, there are many spells from forgotten schools of lost civilizations.
Two weeks after Svyatozar left Baedor Castle, evening. The head of the guard, who was also the most powerful mage in the service of the family of Baedor, was making his rounds around the castle, checking the magical defenses responsible for the safety of its inhabitants. He had served the family for more than twenty years and had never regretted his choice. At the age of thirty, he worked hard to obtain the coveted title of Master of Combat Magic, and after barely leaving the guild, he was invited to a meeting with Francesco Badoer.There, he was offered the position of personal bodyguard for the then-heir to the family. Now, this mage is head of security and entire combat wing for this not-insignificant family that has vast assets in many cities. He owes a lot to Francesco, after all, it was because of his service to him and the associated status that he was able to marry his beloved Sabrina, a flower. He is not an aristocrat but a mage, and his wife was one too. Just because their matchmaker was her master, made him happy as a family man and a father. His daughter is now six years old, and she is gifted like her father. All these thoughts flow slowly through Silvio's mind, giving him joy, pride in his accomplishments and family, and being part of such an honorable family.
But suddenly, he heard a scream from the chambers of Lady Maria, the favorite of his master, Don Francesco. At that moment, the signaling spells of the castle's defenses alerted him that high-level Light spells were being used there.
He was a skilled magician and knew that "light" did not mean harmless. So at the speed his trained body could, he rushed into Maria's chamber, petrified by fear and despair.
"Basilisk!!!" - screamed his mind in terror. In that moment, logic and reason were overwhelmed by emotion. He didn't care how the snake had gotten past the recognition and signaling charms of the castle and made its way here. His entire being was frozen by primal fear of the predator he could do nothing against.
A huge snake was coiled around Maria's bed, its mouth a dozen centimeters from her face. But as it entered her room, the basilisk turned around abruptly.The mage's eyes couldn't even catch any movement as the snake was already hovering above him. Its yellow eyes stared into his, and he had already said goodbye to his life. The Basilisk took him and melted away.
- What... was... that...? - After a few seconds, Silvio, having overcome his fear, asked in a defeated voice, without addressing anyone in particular.
Maria's excited voice replied, "It was my teacher's Patronus."
Silvio paused to absorb what he had heard.
After looking at Maria to make sure she was okay, he said goodnight and closed her door.
"If this is how Light enchantments work in Svyatozar's show, then I can't imagine what his combat enchantments would be like. I'll tell Francesco tomorrow. Due to his service, Silvio has often been in dangerous situations, and has developed a gift to sense the level of danger his enemies pose.When he came face to face with Svyatozar's patronus, he realized that he would not escape alive if he posed a threat to Maria. The basilisk would have bit him in half and neither his magical combat skills, expensive defense artifacts, or enchanted goblin steel armor would have helped.
- I need a drink!
Saying this, he headed for the kitchen where he grabbed a few jugs of wine to douse his fear with alcohol.
*****
It took me another month of nearly continuous meditation to calm my spirits and help them stabilize. Also, sorting out the memories of a two-thousand-year-old wizard. A lot of his knowledge was useless to me. But I now have recipes for elixirs and potions, rituals, and meditations that will greatly benefit a female magician. This will be very useful to my students. Still, sometimes Morgana comes across bodies without magic, so she needs such knowledge.After all, she didn't always capture her own daughters. My control of energies went out of whack when mastering spiritual shells. After a big increase in power, I had to adjust to my new level. And when my magic was relatively in order, and I could use it without fear of my Lumos blinding or burning something, I decided to return to Venice. As I honed and regained my control, practicing my spells, I redesigned the defenses of my hiding place using the new knowledge and rituals acquired from Rowena's memories. Still, her knowledge is impressive! There is so much more to it that it will take me two hundred or three hundred years to learn and apply it. Now that I have done the work on my sanctuary, I can hide from even divine attention, which is expensive. And I am the only one with portal access.For someone else to get here, they must first accidentally stumble upon a twist in one of the branches of an extensive network of caves, at a depth and distance from the surface of several kilometers. And this can only be done by bumping into a wall, having the knowledge to realize it is an illusion, and requiring a level of knowledge not less than that of a Master. Then, he would need to push through defenses, which are only available to full Archimages in strength.
Moving to the clearing in the forest where he went to Albania's forests, I came upon the path. There, using my newly acquired gift of material illusions, I created a horse equipped with all necessary ammunition. Riding it safely to Venice, it was a very convenient and practical gift.
When I arrived at Castle Badoër, my first desire was to visit Francesco, but alas, he was away not only from home, but also from Venice.He went to Milan on business this morning and wouldn't return for a week. All right, then, I'll check on my student. But she was busy talking to her confessor, Cardinal Amati. After sending a servant to notify Maria and Vencenzo of my return, I decided to go to my room and lie down for a while. I hadn't slept much during my journey, the absorption of Kitsune's heart and Morgana's soul - meditation doesn't count as sleep, does it? Yes, it relieves mental tension to a great extent. But it wasn't sleep, and my mind hasn't rested properly in the past two months. But just as I was about to take off my hiking clothes and take a bath before bed, there was a knock on the door. A servant told me that Cardinal Vincenzo wanted to speak with me, waiting for me at the apartment assigned to him in the castle. Oh, well. I better go see him now and not make the Cardinal wait.Why test his patience? - Hello, Your Eminence. I looked around his room and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. When offered to choose my own apartment from the available ones in the castle, I chose the most Gothic and gloomy one. And it's not even clear whose choice it was: mine from my past life or Salazar's. The drawing room of Cardinal's apartment could be described by two words: "asceticism" and "practicality". It was noticeable that more furniture and tapestry had been removed, apparently at Cardinal's insistence. But now there was more church equipment. A small iconostas on the wall and an old wooden crucifix reeking of holiness were interesting. Good afternoon, Svyatozar, and I asked you to call me by my name.You are not a Catholic and my spiritual rank is unimportant to you, so we are on equal footing, where both of us see only Christians in each other, nothing more. And when he followed my gaze, he became even more excited and enthusiastic: "Do you also feel the grace of the Crucifixion?" After a little hesitation, he replied: "This Cross was brought from Jerusalem by Brother Gottfried of Bouillon in 1121."
I have never found its origin, but it clearly belonged to a righteous and holy man. My mind was already swarmed with ideas about how I could discover its history. I wasn't a true believer in my previous life, but in this one, after acquiring memories of Salazar and Morgana, I gained reliable facts confirming the existence of gods and a creator. This very elemental holy artefact was like an embodying Light, crystallized as a simple wooden cross half a meter long. And I was curious to know how it came to be and who influenced it.
It is like the sun shining in my eyes, not blinding but giving peace and hope. If you let me touch him, Vincenzo, I can shed light on its origins. The Cardinal flinched at my words and fixed his gaze on me: "Do you really think you can do such a thing?" Really? It turns out that you too, Cardinal, can be moved to vivid emotions.I could hear in his voice now the anticipation and excitement of a religious fanatic who had been told that he was going to meet the Creator. - Yes. I answered him without any such vivid emotions. Having received permission, I went up to the wall. Touching the cross, I used a spell from Morganna's memory which allowed me to connect with the infosphere and see the past of an object through its astral and mental information matrix. As soon as the spell left my fingers, when I touched the wood, it was like I was disintegrated. If it hadn't been for my long experience with apostolic magic when Morganna was a priestess of Morrigan, then I wouldn't have been able to protect myself from the influence of Christianity's egregore on my mortal body. But as a fool I shouldn't have stuck my head so close to the window, that is, the cross, into the belief egregor on Earth.If I hadn't had my own gift for mental magic and Morgana's skills in handling the energy of faith, I would have been burned in a few seconds, exploding into flames like flaming poplar. Searching for a way to solve this ocean of holy light energy, I channeled it into healing a soul that hadn't fully recovered. But once she was completely healed and the energy wasn't there to heal, but to cripple me, I sent it towards the only Christian symbol on me - a silver Orthodox cross around my neck. Then, the room lit up in bright white light and the cross on my chest heated up to several thousand degrees. It didn't burn through me because I transformed my skin into basilisk skin and created a heat shield. The cross didn't evaporate because it was a symbol of faith. My emergency rescue lasted for about five seconds before I managed to sever the connection with the egregor.But by that time, I was mentally squeezed to the bottom. I had to use all my mental power to control all the energy that had just gone through me. It was not even close to being able to do so. Like a surfer catching a wave, I tried to hold on to it and not let it sweep me under. I was terrified.
As the light left me, I looked around and saw the Cardinal kneeling and praying before me. My consciousness had not yet returned to normal, and I started to consider the implications of what had happened. Let me start with my own self. My soul was now completely whole and unified. There was no fragmentation in the spiritual spheres where my soul hadn't yet assimilated parts from Morgana's. The gifts I received from Kitsune, which I attached as a satellite to my Nagan heritage, merged with the illusions completely, and those gifts became a unified mechanism.This mechanism was strengthened by an order of magnitude by the perfection of my spiritual artifact, which is, in fact, any innate gift. Now, about the Orthodox Cross. It was created by transmutation from alchemical silver, and any transmuted material has a very small astral body, because it reflects the memory of the development and evolution of the material, and it was created from pure energy, which took physical embodiment in the form of a silver cross, so it has no history as such, that is, there is no memory of its birth in the bowels of Earth, its journey through the streams of magma, solidification, and stay in rock, how it was found in the form of ore, processed, metal obtained, he had not seen the hands of the craftsman who created him the symbol of Christianity, nor felt the influence of the Smith's soul on his creation.He was practically a blank slate. When I directed the attention of the egregor towards him, he accepted the essence of teaching in the Creator and His grace. In doing so, guided by my worldview to some extent, he cut away the concepts that were disgusting to me. Thus, this divine artifact was firmly attached to me now. However, it does not make me the guide to any teachings of the book, be it the Bible or the Koran. I may be blessed and healed by it but I am not obligated to follow any faith currents. My knowledge and acceptance that the Creator exists are sufficient. I do not require Him to worship.
Third, I learned the history of this cross's appearance.The wood used was once a table plank, where Christ and His twelve disciples sat at the Last Supper. When Jesus was crucified, Bartholomew, one of the Apostles, took the table apart and made a cross from the last board, opposite the place where Christ had sat. Then this Cross went to the disciples of Bartholome. When Christianity became a world religion and gained a large following, it came to the temple in Jerusalem. From there it was taken by a knight of the First Crusade and, together with him, came to Rome. There it lay for a long time in an artefact vault. Fourth, the emission of holy power that transformed the ba-hon, which passed through me and spread out into the world in a wide wave, affected all the inhabitants of the castle and maybe even neighbouring estates. "What am I supposed to do now?", I wondered, looking at Cardinal, who was beating in religious ecstasy, now a typical fanatic.Still, his will could not entirely preserve his personality from the grace that had fallen upon him. Ahh! I hope it's a temporary effect.