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They found Percival Graves in the cellar.
Seraphina is quite sure that Grindelwald’s choice of the aforementioned location was no accident. The man was meticulous to the extreme - look. He was saying - not to her, but to the man he had captured. Captured and held in his own home, what should have been the seat of Percival’s power - it was insult piled on insult, deliberately designed to further denigrate his victim.
Not that he had needed to, by the end.
Seraphina was there when they broke down the cellar door. She knows full well that by the end - by the end, Percival would have been unable to appreciate the subtleties of the insult.
She will remember Percival as he was. That is her promise to herself. She will remember her friend - who laughed with her over arithmancy equations and stood by her at her wedding, who kept her stocked with chocolate and firewhisky through her divorce. She will not allow herself to equate what - what they found in a cellar that stank of piss and shit and rotted flesh with her friend. He’s more then what a sociopathic madman did to him.
Percival Graves is her friend.
Seraphina shivers, fingers running down the slick glide of Oraculum’s scales as the brightly colored viper curls around her wrist.
Dindrane was Oraculum’s friend. Once.
She doesn’t know if her friend’s soul wants anything to do with her.
**
Tina’s heard the rumors. She doesn’t need to.
She was there when they carried Director Graves from the cellar, shouting, screaming for a healer, any healer, now! She was there when the mediwitches and mediwizards descended in a rushing horde.
She was there, when they opened the door, and for a long, long moment her brain simply could not comprehend the sight before her eyes.
That can’t be a person. Bones don’t bend like that. That was her first, unthinking response, in the split second before she realized what was in front of her. When she realized she could see bone.
She could see bone. She could see dried blood, and rotting flesh and swollen limbs and burns cuts lashes spellfire maggots no -
Percival Graves is expected to make a full recovery. Physically, at any rate. Mentally, no one knows. Especially with his dæmon’s - condition.
He wouldn’t let go of her. Tina knows that much to be true - Dindrane had been clutched to the Director’s chest with a strength that would have killed a purely flesh-and-blood creature; the healers had had to do everything short of literally breaking his bones in an attempt to make him loosen his hold on his soul. A dead man’s grip - no one had said that, but they’d all thought it.
As bad as Director Graves’ condition had been, Tina knows that it is his dæmon who will haunt her nightmares.
Lupercus nuzzles comfortingly at her side. Tina shivers, resting a hand on the wolfhound’s head.
Lupercus and Dindrane had never been particularly close, but even Tina had admired the eagle that could have stepped straight out of the Great Seal of the United States of America. Dindrane - recruits whispered that the bald eagle could see everything. Especially the clumsy habits of new hires; there were rumors that Dindrane’s unblinking gaze was a particularly effective assist in interrogations.
She had been powerful and beautiful, a badge of honor, and she -
Percival Graves had been found clutching what might have been an eagle. The most that could be said about it was that it was bird-like. Feathers plucked, broken wings so much char, beak shattered, talons ripped from her feet -
And for all the qualities Grindelwald’s nameless wolf-dæmon possessed, opposable thumbs were not among them. That amount of damage - that kind of damage - would have had to have been delivered by human hands.
Tina wants to vomit. Wants to cry and scream and shout at the taboo of it - there was a word that no one dared share, one that hovered, unsaid, in the air between them. There was a word for those that forced themselves upon others.
And there had been one last thing.
Dindrane‘s proportions hadn’t been anything near to those of an eagle. Not anymore.
**
Re-Settling after a traumatic event wasn’t entirely unknown.
Newt has even seen it before - in the War, and during the aftermath. Strange, what people discovered themselves to be on the battlefield, when they found themselves doing things and being things they’d never thought themselves capable of. Newt had seen monkeys turn to butterflies, and leopards shift to wolves - not often, but he’d seen.
Axolotl huffs behind him, a laugh that held nothing of humor; Newt ignores her as he bends over the prone body of the other man.
Right. The point was that a settled dæmon re-settling into an entirely new form was - not common, but not unheard of. The problem, however, appears to be that no one can figure out just what has happened to Director Graves’ soul. Or, more precisely, just what shape his dæmon has taken for her own. Harder still to tell when the small crushed form is swathed in bandages and smeared with salves.
Until someone, apparently, had remembered that Newt was, in fact, a licensed magizoologist. With extreme familiarity with - quite a vast array of animals, in various conditions ranging from healthy to - not healthy. The latter far more often then he’d prefer, personally, but - well.
“She’s not an eagle.” Newt murmurs softly, eyes tracing the arch of one wing. “The wings are all wrong - “ He frowns slightly. “Too small as well. Too small by far.” There is a shiver to one side as Tina clasps her hands together; Newt shoots her a quick, apologetic wince before returning his eyes to the devastatingly still form.
The frown deepened as Newt mentally runs through a list of the more common avians - raven, crow, parrot, sparrow, falcon, eagle, bluejay, chicken, pheasant - no, no, no, and no. The size was wrong, proportions didn’t match, the angles were off -
“I’ve seen this kind of bird before.” He had. He had, he knows he had. But - where? Axolotl is a firm, steadying presence at his side, and - his own dæmon. Something tickles the edge of his mind. Axolotl is to him as Percival’s unnamed dæmon (really, no one had bothered to introduce her) is to the Director. Yes, there is the obvious, but there is something more. Something about the specifics of his and Axolotl’s interrelationship is mirrored in Graves’ own connection to his soul, and -
Oh.
Oh.
Newt stares at the body sleeping in the hospital bed in outright wonder. “Oh.” The words are tiny, seeming to come from a long, long way away.
“Newt?” Tina is at his side. “Do you - what is she, Newt? What - “ and he could hear her swallow. “What’s happened?”
“I - “ Newt plunges a hand in his pocket, searching frantically for paper, for a quill, for - he has to write this down. He has to take notes he has to take so many observations. “It’s incredible.” Axolotl is shimmering forward, her own wings half-extended - Tina shrinks back instinctively as his dæmon shoves past her to stare greedily at the prone patient. “I must take notes, I didn’t think this was possible, I -” Newt’s head snaps up, hand stretching out in a futile gesture of warding. “Axolotl, don’t - “
A horned head sinks; Newt watches, his mouth dropping, as the Common Welsh Green’s snout brushed, with utmost delicacy, against a small form wreathed in bandages.
Fire explodes into being; the heat hit them like an eruption as the sudden light scalds their eyes - they might as well have tried to look into the sun. Newt is dimly aware of an alarm ringing in the background, the frantic rush of feet and the cries of startled magicians - “Tina, don’t!”
Newt grabs Tina, jerking her away and curtailing her instinctive lunge towards the hospital bed. “You can’t!”
“Newt, let me go he’s burning let me go!”
“No! You can’t interrupt!”
The flame billows higher, and for one split-second his own dæmon is outlined in incandescence - dragons had an extremely high heat tolerance, Newt reminds himself. He isn’t worried.
He isn’t - all of his attention is fixed on the shape moving in the heart of the fire. On the song rising through the air - rusty and unpracticed, but growing in strength and surety with every moment until the melody is a scream of joyous triumph.
The phoenix settles into place, plumage shining the red and gold and glory of a living flame.
**
Dindrane chirps, head tilting to the side as she stares curiously at the strange dragon.
Percival Graves opens his eyes.