After the lunch hour, Yavin Morgenthau's office.


An hourglass sat in the centre of Yavin's desk, surrounded by other similar oddities, its red sand drawing grains from the lower portion to the top. He was watching the surreal and maddeningly slow progression with a bored countenance: it was to do with the new moon tonight, the draw of mortal blood to vampiric appetite. A pet project belonging to a group of trainees who were trying to puzzle out certain qualities of the vampire population.

The door opened and Yavin sat straighter in his chair as he looked up. Ah. It was Solomon's curious auror - the one who had expressed interest in meeting him, due to level two's intention to request help with their pentral problem.

"Jonas Trevelyan," he pushed aside the hourglass and stood to reach his hand across the desk. Behind him, the view outside the windows were placid save for what appeared to be a sandstorm in the desert. "I understand you, aha, you wanted to see me. Please, please do sit." Yavin nodded at one of the chairs before him.

Unlike some predecessors of level nine, it was important to him that some of the department's working were open to the curiosity of other floors. Not many, of course, but enough to keep them from stagnating. He assumed his seat again.

"Drink?" Yavin asked and raised his eyebrows enquiringly, gesturing vividly at nothing in particular.

It was always a strange, fascinating journey to the depths of Level Nine.  Jonas considered it a pity that the Unspeakables who worked there weren't more open to visitors, because he would have gladly taken leave to wander through the mysterious corridors to puzzle out the enigmas and riddles hidden there.  Unfortunately, his curiosity was always curtailed, cut short by the secretive denizens who considered curious Aurors a bother to be tolerated as little as they possibly could.

Yavin Morgenthau's office was hidden away behind two tall black doors.  Jonas glanced around the white marbled room as he entered, taking in the squishy-looking brains preserved in jars; the smartly-dressed skeletons, which were reclining around the room in various poses of leisure.  Behind the Department Head's ebony desk were three long windows, which seemed to be showing three different scenes at once.

He would have happily taken more time to study the curiosities before him, but that would have been rude.  Jonas flashed the other wizard a friendly smile, reaching across the desk to grip his hand firmly.  At first glance, Yavin Morgenthau looked nearly as interesting as his office.  Tall and lean, with a pink waistcoat decorated winged skulls and roses that would probably make his daughter Gwenna squeal with glee, if she weren't intent on leveraging her moodiness to prove that she had recently advanced into her teenaged years.

"Pleasure," he said cheerfully, easing himself carefully to sit.  "Yeah, of course.  Cheers." 

Not knowing what he was being offered made it much more interesting to accept the offer of a drink.  One could guess plenty about a man, depending on how he saw fit to welcome his guests. 
 
But he also couldn't ignore the skeletons in the room.  "Mates of yours?" Jonas asked brightly, nodding to the nearest osteological figure, which had adorned its bony neck with a well-tied cravat.  "Don't suppose they'd like to join us, would they?"

He drew his wand, gesturing absently at one of the shelves by the work table as his visitor took a seat. Glass containers - more suited to laboratories than an office - began to decant a variety of strangely coloured liquids and glimmering crystals. By the time Yavin was comfortable in his own chair, two copper glasses found themselves drifting towards either wizard.

A cold and sparkling blueberry concoction, topped by gold flakes and crystallised petals of iris.

"I'm not, aha, not sure myself," he smiled as he took his drink and glanced thoughtfully at the closet grinning skeleton. "Found them lying around here and there in the Labyrinth. They, hm, they have a mind of their own."

The skeleton rattled its head slightly and went still.

Level two knew about the Labyrinth from the kidnappings in February, he assumed, though even then their access to the area had been restricted. For their own safety. One never knew what could be found down there in chambers occupied or abandoned; his own excursions were usually eventful and surprising.

"You're here to, um, to discuss pentrals." Yavin turned back to Jonas conversationally, leaning back and crossing his legs. "What do you already know, upstairs?"

The drink that drifted towards him was fascinating in itself: a purple, bubbly liquid, with bits of golden glitter and crystalized purple petals drifting on its surface.  Jonas plucked it out of the air, and then regarded it quizzically for a moment, one eyebrow quirked. 

The rattle of the nearest skeleton interrupted his investigation.  The Auror glanced at it, then flashed it a quick smile, raising his glass in a polite half-toast before he took a sip.  The sparkling liquid tasted like blueberries.

He would have liked to consider the drink further, but his host interrupted, sending them spiraling back towards business.  Jonas regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, raising the copper glass to take a second sip as he considered his response.

"Not as much as I'd like," he said at last, stretching his bad leg out in front of him.  "Been a bit of a challenge to find any definitive resources on them.  Most of what we have found comes from medieval poems and ballads -- The Elegy of the Lady's Locket, some epic about a grieving knight.  Plenty of poetic contemplation of all of the sorrow that comes from creating a pentral, but a bit of a trick to pluck out any hard facts."

That had really been the rub of it so far.  Even Aileen Reid, their resident expert by default, could only recall limited information about the strange, soul-like spirits.  The Ministry library had proven to be woefully under-resourced.  It had been challenging to piece together reliable answers for Carstairs, when most of what he was relying on was solely his own observations and instincts, woven and intertwined with whatever hints Aileen or Abby could give him.

"We've learned a bit more from the pentrals themselves, though."  He raised his glass to take another sip, watching Morgenthau carefully.  "They're the souls of people who were murdered in a dark ritual.  They can be trapped inside objects -- just like they often are in the poems -- but they can also take refuge in people.  When they do, it seems like their memories and sense of self often become all muddled up with their host, but even that seems to differ from possession to possession."

He listened quietly, drinking the surprisingly zesty concoction - not as sweet as its looks might indicate: he had learned recently that too much sugar took away from the natural flavour of fresh blueberries. Maybe it was old age. Sweet things didn't have the same allure as they used to, give or take the odd indulgent cookie and cake. Nowadays Yavin liked nuance on his tongue.

Just as he did in his mind as he watched the auror across the desk explain what they had thus far uncovered about the nature of pentrals. Trevelyan appeared straightforward. And yet also a naturally curious wizard, if his reaction to the office was anything to go by, which was a quality that deserved no reproach.

             "... it seems like their memories and sense of self often become all muddled up with their host, but even that seems to differ from possession to possession."

"So they vary in the way we do, hm,  from individual to individual. They are individuals, in many respects." Yavin set aside his copper glass and adjusted his spectacles with an air of thoughtful distraction. "We have, hm, we have drawn similar conclusions. There are still experiments I would like to run but, as you imply, these pentrals have fused with their hosts."

Like a parasite he had once studied, that bonded to the nervous systems of its victims and made them impossible to separate without a high cost. But Yavin was optimistic: he understood consciousness and soul magic enough to know that all was not lost.

"My unspeakables have noted a, aha, a physical strain in the possessed," he continued and stood up abruptly, cracking his knuckles. "Two souls, one body? Impossible without, um, that is, eventual deterioration of body and mind. You'll remember the case of your Lord, ah, your Lord Voldermort and that turbaned professor."

Unicorn blood has been used to sustain the body housing the Dark Lord and his servant. There were traumatised unicorns found at the manor. The supposition was clear.

He moved towards one of the windows, passing by the desert and pausing at the solitary lighthouse. "We understand the how but we do not, aha, do not understand the why." Yavin glanced over his shoulder at Jonas, as if the auror knew the answer to this question. "Why harvest so many souls?" he sighed at his own inability to figure it out. "What purpose could it possibly serve?"

He had been listening carefully, fingers wrapped around the cup with the bubbling purple concoction, when the Department Head's allusion took a turn he hadn't been expecting.

It had hardly been his Lord anything.  The abrupt attribution struck like an unexpected slap.  Jonas pressed his mouth into a terse line, his eyebrows rising.  In that moment, Morgenthau's American-ness, the hard Rs and nasal sound of his accent, made the tall, lanky wizard seem much more foreign and much less friendly than he'd appeared only moments before.

But he hardly had time to be offended.  Jonas paused, glancing at the nearest skeleton.  For a moment, he wondered if it ever had reason to feel the same sort of affront.

"There's the rub, innit?"  He kept his voice even, although there was the faintest hint of an edge that hadn't been there a moment before.  Jonas shrugged, shifting in his chair to stretch his right leg out in front of him. 

"They didn't seem to be actively using them in spells, once they created them."  He thought back to the room at the top of the hidden staircase, with props like something out of a bad horror film.   "Just trapping them -- collecting them.  We've found connections between Lori Lilly and a few of the bodies, as well as at least one of the pentrals, but it seems like a lot of bloody effort to go through simply to eliminate someone you knew."

There were much simpler ways to inflict pain on someone.  Absently, Jonas stretched his legs out in front of him, rubbing at his right knee.  He'd wandered down this mental path plenty of times already.  Where was the value in an incorporeal spirit?  What had driven the Lillys to maintain their morbid museum of discarded souls?

"You ever seen anything like this before?" he asked.  From what little he'd heard of the new Level Nine Department Head, Yavin Morgenthau was well-traveled, adventuring around the world.  It hadn't occurred to Jonas that this crime could be so anomalous that the older wizard hadn't previously encountered anything like it.  "Collecting souls to use in some kind of dark magic?"

He noted, with some interest, the change coming over the other man. So. Voldermort's name still had some power in these parts, did it? Yavin had often annoyed his late wife by calling the Dark Lord just that - her Lord Voldermort. As if the entire island had a say in the circumstances that brought about the first and second wars.

            "...but it seems like a lot of bloody effort to go through simply to eliminate someone you knew." Jonas continued.

"Mm. You don't do this to, aha, to eliminate, you do it to torture." Yavin agreed as he set down his drink and interlaced his fingers over the desk, leaning slightly forward. "But there isn't a personal connection with all of the bodies, unless... ah."

He fell into silence, gaze following the movement of Trevelyan's legs for a second. Yavin was obviously thinking or trying to recollect something. His dark eyes glittered with an unnameable emotion and he scowled at nothing in particular. Collecting souls. They were discussing this as if though Lori Lilly was a rational criminal when, of course, he knew that magical aberrations didn't always attract rational minds.

"I have... I have seen something similar. A wizard in, that is, in Gujarat who murdered muggleborn witches to extract their, hm. Their radius and ulna bones." Yav glanced at one of the skeletons, who abruptly raised its arm in response, waving. "He, hah, he collected them, thinking the bones of your dominant wand arm held some unknown, hm, power."

The skeleton dropped its arm. He turned his attention back to Jonas, the frown twisting into a horrible smile. "A serial killer, wouldn't you say? He had a modus operandi, a type of, um, of victim. A logic that wasn't, ah, wasn't immediately clear to others. They caught him before he could use the bones in a ceremony."

At the time, Yavin had almost wanted to see what strange ritual the wizard would have performed. The authorities didn't share his spirit of inquiry.

"I intend to, hm, to study some of these possessed persons. Maybe we'll figure out if Lori Lilly also has, I mean, also has purpose for collecting the souls. And it will bring us closer to establishing her M.O..." he trailed off before affecting an apologetic expressing. "Sorry. Bring you closer."

Merlin forbid level nine be accused of meddling.