Two months passed in the new Nest, and Corvus finally had numbers large enough to justify satisfaction.
The first programmes had moved faster than even the more optimistic projections. Over three hundred clones had already been conceived, carried, born, and raised through the realm's altered time and the deeper acceleration of the internal arrays. Sperm and eggs had been drawn from selected Nestborn lines only, and every donor pair had been screened hard enough that no two contributing lines shared a blood relation within nine generations. Corvus had no intention of weakening the project with ordinary aristocratic stupidity.
The first task with the earliest generations was simple.
Strengthen the repeating bloodlines.
Juracán with Juracán. Thanatos with Thanatos. Hades with Hades. Hekate with Hekate. His own line with itself, where the branch required it. The first two generations existed to pull each available elder line upward in purity and trait density. If the line failed there, then there was no point dressing the failure in complexity later.
Now the third generation embryos were being prepared for implantation into surrogate mothers, and the work had already exposed the first large problem with architect stock.
They did not behave like human embryos.
That had been obvious from the first batch, but obvious was not the same as manageable.
The embryos drew too much. The mothers carrying them were being drained throughout pregnancy unless supported every day by potions, runic stabilisation, and ritual supplementation. Even then, most of those women gave birth in a state that could only be called functional collapse. Once the child was delivered, the body left behind had little value beyond disposal. The womb survived only long enough to prove that the sacrifice had completed its purpose.
The difference between witch and human had not helped in the slightest.
Corvus had tested that early. The embryos carried in witches and the embryos carried in human women showed no difference in the resulting trait expression, not even a trace worth recording. The choice made itself after that. All surrogate mothers were switched to humans.
At least there were enough of them.
The laboratories of the first tower had been organised accordingly. One wing handled extraction and embryo preparation. Another handled implantation and gestation support. The lower floors were given over to growth arrays and nursery chambers, each cluster separated by branch, generation, and destructive potential. Bastion detachments guarded the outer ring of the complex, not because the infants could escape yet in any meaningful sense, but because some of them had already proved capable of harming anyone stupid enough to treat infancy as harmlessness.
Corvus walked through the main gestation hall while reports floated beside him in slow, ordered sheets.
Glass chambers lined the walls in two long tiers. The surrogate mothers inside them did not speak unless spoken to. They spent most of their time sleeping, being fed potions, or staring through the reinforced glass with the dull awareness of women whose futures had already been consumed on paper weeks before their bodies caught up to the fact. He gave them no more thought than the programme required.
The results justified the method.
The increase in the depth and potency of Architect traits from the first generation to the second was off the charts. Potency had risen sharply, and traits had become cleaner. Stability had improved enough in some lines that Corvus began revising the long-term schedule within the first week of second-generation maturation.
That was why anticipation inside the tower had become almost explosive.
The third generation promised more.
Corvus had spent part of each day refining the embryos before implantation, altering what he could in the soul pattern while the structures remained loose enough to accept the changes. He did not force beyond what the pattern could bear. Shadow Tendrils were standard in each embryo. He wants them as his dark angels. Even though he never stretched the soul patterns to cause stress. That had been one of the earliest lessons. Push too far, and one does not get greatness. One gets malformed flesh and a waste of valuable blood."
So he worked meticulously.
He nudged the embryos toward denser soul structures. He thickened the channels that would later hold elder trait expression. He adjusted the internal patterning wherever Thanatos's model was applicable. The target remained the same even when the route narrowed.
Closer to the density and arrangement of an Architect.
Close enough that the body would stop behaving like upgraded human stock and start behaving like something further.
He stopped beside the first Hekate chamber.
The infants of that line had been difficult from the beginning, not because they were violent, but because their instability obeyed no ordinary nursery rule. They were born with immense magical potency, far beyond what even strong Nestborn lines should have produced at that stage. The first hint had appeared in the mothers, whose magic signatures spiked at irregular hours under moon-aligned conditions. The second had come at birth. Several of the children vanished from the birthing tables in the first minute of life and reappeared across the room, screaming not from pain but from outrage.
After feeding them Hekate's blood, the traits only deepened.
They slipped between points whenever emotion spiked. Hunger and anger could do it. Fear did it most often. One infant vanished from a wet nurse's arms, reappeared on a lighting brace nine feet overhead, and looked down with enough calm interest to annoy Corvus personally. They all cast without a medium. No focus beyond the intent. Spellcraft sat that deep in the bloodline.
He watched one of them now through the ward glass.
The child could not have looked older than six months by body, though the time arrays had made that a useless measurement. She sat on the floor of her chamber with a set of silver rings around her wrists and ankles, not because she needed physical restraint, but because the rings carried layered ward anchors that made the space around her harder to fold. Even so, the air near her kept dimpling in and out of reality each time her attention shifted. When the researcher inside the chamber changed the angle of the feeding bottle by an inch, the child's hand disappeared up to the wrist and returned holding the bottle anyway.
That line would be worth protecting.
He moved on.
The Juracán chambers required different precautions. The walls there were lined with copper mesh, layered insulating wards, and grounded runes cut deep into the stone. Even with all that, the nurses and handlers entering those rooms wore insulated armour from neck to boot and heavy gloves charmed to safely conduct electricity into the floor.
Most of the surrogate losses had come from this batch.
The women carrying Juracán's line were being electrocuted from the inside before labour even began. The pregnancies ran hot. By the second trimester, sparks snapped between the mothers' ribs and the containment braces built around the beds. One woman had died when the unborn child discharged hard enough to stop her heart before the monitoring charms could answer.
The born infants did not improve matters.
One boy in the fourth chamber slept inside a cocoon of grounded silk while blue-white threads crawled over his body in lazy patterns that would have killed an unprotected wet nurse in seconds. Another had shattered every glass bottle brought within arm's reach without ever touching one directly. Juracán's line was powerful, volatile, and more expensive with every surrogate mother turned to crisp corpse.
Hades and Thanatos behaved better by comparison.
That did not make them gentle.
The Hades line phased in and out of visibility with growing control as the generations strengthened. Shadows responded to them even before they learned language. Metal objects in their rooms shifted at odd hours and turned toward the cradle like flowers following a source of light no one else could see. The underfloor tremors had also intensified, though the children themselves remained physically easier to keep alive than the Juracán stock.
Thanatos's line required more active feeding.
Without supplementation, the mothers carrying those embryos began to hollow from the inside long before birth. Corvus solved that by feeding them more aggressively. Blood‑Replenishing and Strengthening Potions multiple times every day. Ritual support every third night. Those measures kept the women alive long enough to finish their function without turning to ash or dust before delivery. That counted as success in the context of the programme.
He entered the chamber reserved for the line derived from his own blood last.
This was the only wing that interested him more than the rest.
He had selected three traits from himself for embedding.
Psychic.
Necromantic.
Elemental.
Not because they were the only things worth propagating, but they were the cleanest to isolate and the most immediately useful in combination. After birth, each infant had been fed measured portions of his blood to deepen the existing traits.
The effects were already diverging.
The psychic carriers watched too much. Their eyes followed movement with an awareness that belonged to much older children. The necromantic line quieted rooms the moment they entered them. Even the house elves disliked lingering near those cradles and did so only under orders. The elemental line remained visibly the strongest. Heat, pressure, static, frost, and the thin vibration of restrained force all moved through those rooms as though the air itself had been taught new habits.
Corvus stopped at the central table where the charts for the next stage lay waiting.
The plan no longer needed revision in principle. It needed only execution.
The second generation had already been paired with carriers of the same traits. He intended to continue that through the first five generations. Repetition, intensification first. Make the branch pure before one mixes it with another and ruins the data with vanity.
If, by the fifth generation, the lines began showing a genuine transition away from human baseline and toward something closer to Architect in structure, then the next step would be clean. Controlled crossing of the strongest branches. If not, then the project would still leave him with an arsenal of stronger, repeated, stable individuals carrying highly concentrated traits and blood.
There was no real failure state there.
Only difference in yield.
The first thirty-six in the initial cycle had proven that model. The second cycle had confirmed it. By the third, the rate was industrial.
Corvus signed the next set of approvals and handed the stack to the senior researcher nearest him.
"Proceed with implantation."
The woman took the orders with both hands. "All branches, my lord?"
"All viable branches with the modified embryos. Let the embedders work on them every day. Embed the required traits in their soul pattern again and again."
That answer pleased her. She bowed and moved at once, already calling instructions to the lower tables as she went.
Corvus turned from the hall and took the lift platform up through the centre of the tower to the open balcony near the forty-seventh floor.
From there, he could see much of the realm, including the newer structures and the traffic between the buildings. His gaze turned to the sky, and he closed his eyes.
--
Arcturus opened his eyes and marvelled at the sky fortress hanging over Azkaban. The first flying fortress was finished.
Arcturus stood aboard the main observation deck with Grigori and Sigibert beside him while the great octagonal structure held station above the prison island like a judgment someone had decided to keep in reserve.
The thing was vast.
Its outer shell had been stabilised and extended layer by layer until it carried thirteen full floors within, each one broadened beyond the original limits of the structure through spatial reinforcement and anchored hard enough to survive both altitude stress and magical sabotage. Weapons sat beneath retractable housings along the angled faces. The four nuclear engines at its core had been sealed inside arrays and wards dense enough to keep them usable for at least a thousand years. Much more with maintenance.
The whole fortress was capable of space travel.
Speed remained the weak point, but the fact itself was already enough to shift the argument.
It could house the Ministry ten times over without strain.
Once the departments were moved into the new aerial Ministry, the remaining spacewould be converted with practical greed. Greenhouses, living quarters, military headquarters and warehouses to store. The top two floors had gone to a Nest branch. Corvus was clear on that topic, even though Arcturus wanted the top floor for himself.
The old man stood with both hands behind his back and looked up at the floating fortress as if measuring not its size, but the centuries it had rendered obsolete.
Grigori glanced at him. "It requires a name."
Arcturus did not answer immediately. He watched the structure hold its position above Azkaban, eight outer faces catching the light, the lower platforms turning in slow, deliberate rings.
Then he nodded once.
"Octis Bastion."
Sigibert repeated it under his breath and smiled. "Fortress of Eight."
"Yes."
The name settled as naturally as if the structure had been waiting for it.
Budget and personnel under the leadership of Manard were tripled that same day.
Work on the second flying fortress began at once.
A new age was rising.
Corvus had Architect farms in one realm and flying fortresses in another.
Soon, he would have enough blood, enough force, and enough reach to capture Thanatos by the throat and keep it.