For the next several days, Dumbledore still did not appear.
Iain had no idea where he had gone, and no intention of asking. The stone house in Godric's Hollow had become his private castle. Every day, fresh ingredients appeared in the kitchen: bread, milk, eggs, vegetables, neatly cut meat, all arranged tidily in the refrigerator.
Something really was sneaking in while he slept.
And because he could never catch it in the act, this had become the single most maddening thing in Iain's life lately.
"If it isn't a house-elf, then Dumbledore must secretly be keeping some kind of magical kitchen sprite!"
Iain only wanted to see a magical creature with his own eyes.
That was not a crime.
As the saying went, desire was the engine of learning. Drawing on both his scientific background and the rudiments of alchemy he had recently acquired, Iain spent several days frantically setting hundreds of traps.
Those traps covered almost the entire kitchen in Dumbledore's old house.
Sadly, the mysterious meal-delivery culprit remained too cunning. Not one trap succeeded in catching what it was meant to catch.
Click... click... click...
The only one tormented by all this was the little skeleton.
Every time it came out of the kitchen, it was covered in snap traps. One clamped to its skull, two hanging off its shoulder blades, at least five between the ribs, another pinned to its pelvis. As it walked, it rattled and clinked.
Like a walking wind chime.
The little skeleton set the food down on the table, then came over to Iain, tilted its head, and opened and shut its jaw in a rapid sequence of clack-clack-clack noises.
Iain could not understand what it was saying, but he felt it was probably swearing at him.
"Don't look at me like that. I know this round was my fault. But the day before yesterday, when I said I wanted bone broth, you tossed your own bones into the pot and simmered them for six hours. I didn't drink it, sure, but are you really saying that wasn't on you too? Let's call this one even."
Iain removed the traps from the little skeleton one by one.
The skeleton gave him a look, then turned and walked back into the kitchen.
Iain, however, was not discouraged. He pulled out a notebook and began sketching a new design.
"I'm going to make a Poké Ball. Not just one that catches little monsters, one that can catch magical creatures too."
At his current level of alchemy, the young wizard was nowhere near capable of producing something that formidable.
This was merely the design stage.
Even so, he silently swore to himself that one day he would make it happen.
And then, with admirable honesty, he went back to his first-year textbooks and continued practicing relatively basic magic.
He was learning very quickly these days.
Iain, after all, possessed the most primal learning motivation of all:
To prepare in advance so no one would ever guess he had prepared in advance.
To work hard in secret so that later he could righteously tell people he had never worked hard at all.
This was a higher state of being.
Ordinary people simply could not understand it.
Driven by this exalted mindset, Iain had already mastered the Unlocking Charm, the Softening Charm, and the Locking Charm in less than a week.
"Today is Levitation Charm day!"
Iain kept practicing.
The very first time he cast it, he managed to lift a cup from the table.
Unfortunately, the cup spun three circles in midair and then smashed straight down onto the floor.
The cup shattered.
The little skeleton immediately swept up the pieces.
It did not so much as clack at Iain.
"My White Magic talent... even with phoenix intelligence boosting me, it's only this good..."
Still unwilling to believe it, Iain snatched Fawkes from his head and stormed up to the third floor.
He entered Dumbledore's room and pulled out a book titled Common Maledictions and Their Defensive Mechanisms. The author was a wizard with a very long name, and the publication date was from the previous century.
Iain flipped to the table of contents and ran his eyes down the chapter headings until they stopped at Chapter Three:
The Entrail-Expulsion Curse: Principles and Applications
This was a curse.
A very standard piece of Dark Magic.
Though it was rarely used directly in films or fanfiction, its name alone was enough to conjure a rather vivid mental picture.
As the title suggested, its effect was to force a target's internal organs out of their body. The victim would suffer unimaginable agony and catastrophic bodily damage.
Because the effect was so bloody, so vicious, and so revolting, it ranked among those spells in the wizarding world where hearing the name alone was enough to make one instinctively wince.
Without timely healing intervention, the damage caused by forcibly removing someone's insides was all but guaranteed to be fatal.
"I'll learn the counter-curse first..."
It took Iain a full three hours to master the counter-curse.
Then, after catching a scurrying rat and setting it on the table, he picked the book back up and spent one more minute studying the actual Entrail-Expulsion Curse.
"Eviscera!"
The incantation itself was simple.
Much simpler than a Lighting Charm.
The wand motion was simple as well: just one clean, downward slicing gesture.
As Iain's wand trembled in his hand, it flashed with a faint glow.
First resistance.
Then the wand yielded.
A deep crimson light tore through the air and struck the rat on the table. In the next second, the rat's body opened up in a gruesome display, as though it had been cut open in surgery.
Learned in seconds.
Worked immediately.
Iain stared at the shrieking rat, fell silent for three seconds, then mercifully ended its life himself.
"I don't understand. How am I this evil? Even unicorn hair can't suppress my wickedness."
There was a trace of melancholy in his expression.
He had not even deliberately tried to "feel" any emotion just now. He had not imagined anything. He had not consciously summoned any hidden power.
He had merely pronounced the incantation and made the motion.
And then the magic happened.
As naturally as breathing.
As naturally as blinking.
"Ancestors above, this cannot be blamed on me. It must be because Merlin's bloodline is simply too evil... The dark wizard blood flowing in me doesn't change the fact that my heart yearns for the light."
"Yes... I am the wizarding world's Tiga. My origins cannot bind me."
The moment he thought of it that way, Iain's gloomy mood lifted at once.
His eyes became firm again.
The young wizard had successfully thrown all responsibility onto Merlin.
And since Merlin did not immediately leap out to refute it, did that not conveniently prove he was feeling guilty and ashamed to face his own descendant?
The logic checked out.
"There is no such thing as truly evil Dark Magic. There are only dark wizards too weak to control it."
Iain snapped Common Maledictions and Their Defensive Mechanisms shut and shoved it deep into the back of the shelf, burying it behind several even thicker books to ensure he would not accidentally glance at it next time.
Truthfully, Iain disliked the Entrail-Expulsion Curse.
Not because it was dark.
Because it was crude.
Too bloody. Too brutish. A low-grade piece of savagery, without elegance, beauty, or imagination. It simply did not match his style.
"Perhaps I ought to redefine every Dark spell I come across. Improve them. Refine their dignity."
As he thought this, he remembered that wicked old witch.
He returned to his bedroom and pulled the sealed diary out from his luggage. It had not seen daylight in many days, and there were still marks on it from having heavy things piled on top of it.
When Iain opened the diary, the pages remained blank for several seconds.
Then writing began to appear.
Slowly.
Like someone who had only just woken up from an afternoon nap and was not yet in the mood to speak.
So you finally remembered me.
"Upperclasswoman."
Iain flopped onto the desk and rested his chin on the edge of the notebook, watching the dry ink crawl into being.
"I want to ask you something."
Speak.
"Do you know the Entrail-Expulsion Curse?"
The writing halted for a beat.
Then new words appeared, faster now than before.
Yes. A low-grade curse. Beyond causing pain and disgust, it has very little practical use. My verdict is this: inelegant.
That aligned perfectly with the young wizard's own opinion.
The corner of Iain's mouth tilted unconsciously.
"Then do you think... this spell could be used to extract something else?"
He had a genius idea.
He wanted a spell that could make enemies wet themselves the instant he used it.
?????
A whole page of question marks bloomed across the diary.
The legendary ancient Dark Lord from nearly a century ago felt, in that instant, a profound sense of foreboding.
And perhaps, for the first time in a very long while, deeply regretted how clever she herself had once been.
The weather in the wizarding world was changing.
Because Hogwarts...
was probably about to welcome the greatest desecrator of Dark Magic it had ever seen.