Balthazar Urquart was hit by a wave of familiarity as he stepped into the Department of Mysteries for the first time since he left it five years prior. While he knew the inner workings of the department were ever-changing, the physical shell that housed them was, reassuringly, ever the same, filling the new department head with both a sense of déjà vu and a feeling of homecoming. He had spent more than a decade here, before everything had changed, and while part of him worried that moving backwards could do more harm than good, he was, by and large, eager to return to the work he had loved before life had become…tarnished by the swinging of the pendulum.

The first face to greet him was not the present secretary, as Balt had expected (who was pointedly not looking in his direction but instead busying herself with a sheaf of papers on her desk), but his replacement. Well, the man who currently held his old job—Balt knew Mulciber had not been a direct appointment.

“I doubt it—Mrs. Lestrange never took me as the sort to redecorate,” he returned, “though if you would rather walk than sit, I’d appreciate being brought up to speed while I get the lay of the land again.”

It had taken a second pregnancy and an even more liberal shift in the Ministry to pry Belphoebe Lestrange from the Department of Mysteries, a vacancy that Balt was privately very glad for. Still, he had to wonder if Mulciber begrudged him the promotion that, traditionally, would have gone to the sitting Assistant Head. True, the Ernest Mulciber he had known had always been more for practice than paperwork, but men were fickle creatures, prone to changing as time wore on.