In a forest, a tall old man with nothing on suddenly appeared and fell straight into a mud pit.
Cappadocia struggled to his feet, looked around, and let out a breath. "I got out..."
He stood up, the panic fading from his face. Looking down at his filthy naked body, he frowned slightly, casually plucked a blade of grass from the ground, and with one stroke turned it into a wand.
Cappadocia's Titan bloodline came from a gigantic arm in the ruins of Asgard, one that remained wrapped in flames even in death.
That bloodline not only gave Cappadocia a powerful body and transformed his magic, it also gave him the ability to transform into a Titan.
The downside was that this transformation destroyed everything on him, including his wand.
So Cappadocia's most practiced skill was making a wand barehanded with that absurdly powerful magic of his. After all, for a wizard, once you had a wand, you had everything.
He used a spell to clean himself from head to toe, then conjured a robe to cover his body.
After that, he found a rock to sit on and began thinking about what to do next.
He could not go back to Raven. The First Senator, now occupying Nicolas Flamel's body, had probably already taken Raven in hand.
That bastard, who had apparently been grooming Nicolas Flamel from who knew when just to steal his body at the end, had probably been controlling Raven from the shadows for ages. Going back now would be suicide.
Just thinking about him put a flicker of fear in Cappadocia's eyes.
Terrifying. Far too terrifying. From the very first moment he saw him, Cappadocia had felt an overwhelming suffocation and despair, the kind that made resistance impossible and escape feel equally impossible.
That fear seemed to come from the depths of his soul. It left Cappadocia unwilling to confront him at all, but he also knew the man would never let him off lightly.
After all, by his own words, Cappadocia had been nothing more than a pawn he had cultivated.
So Cappadocia had acted like a brute, the sort of brute who threw out a bomb in a card game without hesitation. He had opened with a trump card and pretended he meant to die together with his opponent, when in truth all that recklessness had only been cover while he looked for a chance to run.
And he had succeeded.
But that also meant losing the Raven he had spent nearly two hundred years building up.
Cappadocia was unwilling to accept that. If he could, he would much rather kill the man and take Raven back for himself.
He had fought Nicolas Flamel for so long precisely because he wanted sole control over Raven. He had never imagined that in the end, one of them would die, the other would flee, and Raven would fall into the hands of that elusive First Senator instead.
"That man... is Odin, the legendary Eternal Wizard. Only he could possess that kind of power."
For someone who had spent his life chasing the power of an Eternal Wizard, Cappadocia knew better than most what one looked like.
"The only one who can oppose an Eternal Wizard is another Eternal Wizard."
"But where am I supposed to find another Eternal Wizard? And how do I make sure they'll actually help me deal with Odin?" Cappadocia sank into thought.
By now, the Eternal Wizards had all more or less left the stage of history, whether through perfectly normal means or downright ridiculous ones, and Cappadocia knew only a few things about them.
Those were Eternal Wizards, beings once called gods. Aside from a handful of people who had caught fragments of the truth and turned them into half-right legends, most people did not even know such beings existed.
The only legend that came close to the truth was the one about Death, who created the Deathly Hallows.
"Do I have no choice but to start with the Deathly Hallows?" Cappadocia frowned to himself.
The Deathly Hallows, the Resurrection Stone, the Invisibility Cloak, and the Elder Wand, were fairy tales to ordinary wizards, distant legends to those who knew something, but to Cappadocia, who had once controlled half of Raven, they were merely an interesting piece of intelligence.
The kind of intelligence that circulated freely inside Raven and was not even considered worth hiding.
"The Resurrection Stone is in the Gaunt family line. Voldemort had it once. The Invisibility Cloak... that belongs to the Potter family. If Dumbledore didn't quietly pocket that Deathly Hallow, it should now be in Harry Potter's hands."
Cappadocia thought it through. "The troublesome one is the Elder Wand. According to the information, it's Dumbledore's wand now..."
Taking the Elder Wand from a legendary wizard would not be easy, but for Cappadocia, it was not impossible. Dumbledore was no Eternal Wizard. Cappadocia was confident he could defeat him.
But he had only just escaped from Odin. If he acted too openly now, it would probably draw pursuit.
Cappadocia hesitated, then muttered to himself, "I need to be careful... best if I have a puppet... not one that has to obey me, just one greedy enough..."
And he could think of two candidates.
"One is Tom Riddle. The other is Gellert Grindelwald."
There was really no need to hesitate about which one to choose.
Both men had stolen Nicolas Flamel's Philosopher's Stone, and one of them was trapped in Nurmengard.
And more importantly, they were not the same sort of person. The difficulty of controlling them was completely different.
In the end, Grindelwald had shown less raw power than Voldemort, and Grindelwald was deep, calculating, and extremely good at manipulating people. He would be very hard to control. Handle him badly, and he might seize the chance to rise again while using Cappadocia as a stepping stone.
Voldemort, on the other hand, was stronger in direct display but less gifted in the brains department, which made him much easier to control.
And he still had the Philosopher's Stone in his possession, that thing was the highest masterpiece of alchemy, something Nicolas Flamel created with knowledge drawn from the World Tree.
"Help him obtain the Deathly Hallows, then use his Horcruxes to control him. Voldemort... really is the perfect puppet." Cappadocia grew excited.
"Next, I just need to go find him. From the information I heard before, Voldemort's lair should be in Albania. Going there now should be enough to find him."
As one of Raven's Senators, he had still been able to get a good deal of information from the Second Senator's faction.
Having decided on his target, Cappadocia waved his wand and Apparated to Albania.
He did not have much time to waste. Odin, having taken control of Raven, was like a serrated whip cracking closer and closer behind him.
It took Cappadocia quite a while to find Voldemort's lair.
The information had not been very detailed. It only said that Voldemort was somewhere in a forest in Albania. Albania was not especially large, but finding the exact forest was still not easy.
For wizards, however, the speed and convenience of Apparition greatly reduced travel time.
And so, before long, Cappadocia found the forest where Voldemort was hiding.