Harry walked between Sirius and Susan with the tension that made his heartbeat too loud.
Hogwarts had not changed simply because the tournament had ended. Students still filled the corridors. Bastion Guards still stood in their posts. Professors still moved with their busy schedules.
They walked towards the seventh floor.
His mind was going between two outcomes. Joy of finding kin or the disappointment of finding out he was alone.
That depended on what waited in Headmistress Rosier's office.
His last summons to the Ministry had concerned blood.
He had gone there before the old Ministry was sealed and dismantled for good. These days, Magicals reached the new Ministry by portkeys, which were collected from Bastion Guards in settlements, much like one would pick up a permit or travel paper. Harry still found that strange. The world kept changing around him, and half the time it did so before he learned the old version properly.
That earlier visit had been for the Potter line.
He had given blood so the Ministry could search for surviving side branches. Other houses had found relatives this way. Old family records were being torn open, compared, corrected, and extended across borders now that the magical world had stopped pretending each government was a separate universe. Some of the families from the sacred twenty-eight had discovered cousins in America, widowed aunts in Australia, and half-forgotten branches that had crossed the seas two centuries ago and then vanished into different records.
Harry had tried not to hope too much. That had failed within the first day.
After that, he had hoped every morning and then hated himself for it every evening.
He wanted family.
Not inheritance or titles. Not another lecture about being strong enough to stand alone. He had already done enough standing alone for one life.
Susan knew it.
That was why she had come.
Her hand brushed his once as they reached the stairs and then stayed close enough that he could feel her presence without needing to turn and look. She was not speaking; anything she said now would only make the waiting longer. Sirius, to his credit, had also stayed unusually quiet.
That alone should have told Harry something was off.
They climbed the stairs to the office.
Sirius knocked twice and opened the door only after Vinda's voice invited them in.
Harry stepped across the threshold and stopped.
Three people were already seated before the Headmistress's desk.
Vinda sat behind it with the same controlled stillness that made even a chair look disciplined when she occupied it. The people before her rose as the trio entered. Two more chairs appeared in front of the desk with a small movement of her hand, which Harry barely noticed because his attention had already locked elsewhere.
The three strangers had Potter faces.
Not exactly his or his father's copied three times either. But the line was there. The bone structure. The hair that never quite agreed with combs. Hazel eyes in two of them. The third was a witch with grey eyes and the same unmistakable family cast to her features.
Harry's heart missed a beat so hard he felt the space where it should have been.
Susan's fingers closed around his hand at once.
He had not even realised he had reached for her.
Vinda let the silence hold just long enough to settle everyone into the moment, then began with introducing official matters that also happened to carry an emotional weight.
"Mr Potter. Miss Bones. Mr Black." Her gaze touched each of them in turn before shifting to the three standing before the desk. "Allow me to make the introductions properly."
She inclined her head toward the grey-eyed witch first.
"Euphemia Potter, now registered through MACUSA records after the merger."
Then to the older of the two wizards.
"Charlus Potter, resident in Australia."
Finally, to the youngest of the men.
"Ralstan Potter, likewise of the Australian branch."
Her hands settled on the desk again.
"The Ministry was able to reach them once the MACUSA records were folded into ours. Their line has now been added to the formal Potter family rolls."
Harry heard every word. He also heard almost none of them in the order they arrived.
Euphemia was smiling warmly already, not in the brittle way adults smiled at orphans when they wanted credit for not looking pitying, but in the open way of someone who had already decided he was hers to welcome. Charlus held himself with the easy formality of a man who understood noble courtesy and had no need to flex it. Ralstan looked younger, perhaps only a handful of years older than Harry, broad-shouldered and visibly trying not to stare at Harry as though the resemblance surprised him too much.
Harry bowed slightly before his nerves could make him forget the shape.
"A pleasure to meet you." His voice almost held. "I am Harry James Potter, Lord of the Ancient and Noble House of Potter."
Euphemia curtsied with graceful economy. Charlus and Ralstan bowed in turn.
"Likewise, Lord Potter," Euphemia answered. The other two followed her lead a beat later, proper in timing and tone.
It should have felt formal.
It also felt like standing in front of a door he had wanted opened for so long that the hinge moving sounded unreal.
Susan's thumb pressed lightly against the side of his hand. That small pressure stopped him from doing anything foolish, such as standing there and staring while his mind tried to decide whether joy and fear were allowed to occupy the same body at once.
Charlus broke the stillness first.
He stepped forward just enough to show intention without crowding the desk. "We heard of the search only after the records were corrected." He gave Harry a measured look, kind but not soft. "Had we known the fate of our blood earlier, you would have lived with your kin and not stand alone this long."
Something in Harry's chest tightened and gave way at the same time, and tears flowed down his cheeks.
Euphemia moved next.
She did not ask permission from the room like a timid person would have done. She only looked to Harry to see whether he would accept closeness. When he did not step back, she came to him and put both hands around one of his. This was the closest he would get to a mother's hug other than Alice.
Her grip was warm.
"You have the Potter hair; this unruly trait was a nightmare when I was a little girl," she said quietly.
Harry laughed despite himself, helpless and embarrassed and too close to breaking open in front of his new relatives.
Ralstan smiled at that. "The hair is a family curse. Best to accept it early."
Sirius, who had been standing near the door with all the forced patience of a man pretending not to have arranged the emotional weather of the room, with a well-timed snort.
"That much is accurate."
Harry turned his head toward him. Sirius looked infuriatingly casual, one shoulder against the wall, arms folded, expression only a shade too neutral to pass real inspection.
Vinda was in a similar state. Her gaze touched Sirius once and then moved away before the room could notice.
Harry felt the room relax after that.
The rest came more easily.
Because there was too much behind it for that, it still came easier. Euphemia asked him about his schooling rather than his scars. Charlus asked after his studies and the state of the Potter vaults and their management, he explained how he was transferring the family wealth back to Britain with a tact that made it clear he cared about Harry before the gold.
Susan remained beside him through it all, speaking when spoken to and never once trying to make herself smaller than the moment required. Harry noticed that with satisfaction. So did Euphemia.
At one point, when Charlus asked after the future of the Potter line with the deceptively mild tone of a man discussing weather and inheritance in the same sentence, Susan did not flush or look away.
Harry did.
That seemed to amuse everyone except Vinda, who kept the room on its proper rails by the simple method of existing in it.
An hour passed without anyone noticing the shape of it.
By the end, Harry had learned enough to satisfy the first wave of hunger and not enough to quiet the second. There would be letters. There would be visits. There would be time, and for the first time in a long while, time did not look like an empty corridor with only his own footsteps in it.
When Euphemia embraced him before leaving, Harry held on for a moment longer.
Neither did Charlus when he clasped Harry's shoulder after. Nor did Ralstan when he stepped in and gave him a shorter, rougher embrace that felt like something brothers or cousins did when they did not yet know which word belonged but intended to earn it honestly.
Susan watched it all with bright eyes and stayed silent.
Once the three Potters had gone and the office door closed again, the silence left behind felt different from the one before their arrival. It was fuller. Softer, though, Vinda's office would have violently rejected that adjective if given a vote.
Harry turned to Sirius. He crossed the space between them in three quick steps and hugged him hard enough to make the older man grunt.
Sirius froze for one surprised beat, then returned it with one hand at the back of Harry's head.
"That bad, was it?" Sirius asked lightly.
Harry pulled back and laughed despite the thickness in his throat. "You are impossible."
"Yes." Sirius straightened his robes. "But useful."
Vinda said nothing to that. The faint change at the corner of her mouth was the nearest thing to approval Harry had ever seen on her face, where Sirius was concerned.
Susan took his hand again as they prepared to leave.
He was not alone anymore.
That fact stayed with him all the way down the stairs.
Neither Vinda nor Sirius had the heart to tell him these three were the results of Sirius pestering Corvus alone.
--
Back in his own realm, Corvus was measuring blood.
Twelve vials stood before him in ordered ranks.
They contained the blood of the eighth generation Architects conceived, born, and raised within the new Nest. A second rack held the originals for comparison.
He reached for the Thanatos line first.
The hybrid blood went down in one swallow. He closed his eyes and let the effect move through him. The response came quickly now, familiar enough that he could separate pressure from quality without distraction. After the first change settled, he took one of the original Thanatos vials from the second rack and drank that as well.
He stood in silence, comparing the potency, authority and density of the power as it moved through his system.
Closer, much closer. Still not equal.
He opened his eyes and turned to the researcher waiting a respectful distance away.
The man had the stillness common to the Nestborn staff, the kind that came from discipline alone. His fist rose to his chest the moment Corvus looked at him.
"The blood of the Nestborn Architects is approaching the originals," Corvus said. "Continue intensifying the same traits. Double the soul pattern sessions during embryonic development. Within another few generations, they will become something else entirely."
The researcher bowed his head. "As you command, my lord."
Both racks lifted from the table and drifted behind him as he left the study.
The programme had passed beyond proof of concept. The eighth generation stood much nearer to the elder model than even the earlier optimistic projections had promised. Another few generations of pressure, selection, and denser soul work would change the line so thoroughly that calling them human at all would begin to sound sentimental.
He opened a portal and returned to Earth.
The air felt lighter here. Elizaveta was waiting when he arrived.
That in itself was not unusual. What interested him more was the fact that she had asked for time with Fleur.
Elizaveta did not make requests like that for nothing.
He understood her too well now to pretend otherwise. Whenever she reached for something socially, emotionally, or politically, there was a structure behind it. Not manipulation, more of a practical instinct sharpened by affection, and a better understanding of people than most gave her credit for.
Corvus looked at her once and wondered what fruit this latest request would bear.
With Elizaveta, it usually ripened into something useful.