On a rain-soaked, zero-visibility night, a flower of evil bloomed silently over Berlin.
Amid shrieks of sharp, deranged laughter, the fully-grown manticore that had guarded Erkstag for nearly a full century howled in raw agony beneath the merciless, consuming press of Fiendfyre, its age old patrol duty was ending in a single night of fire.
Its massive, barbed tail lashed wildly against the black stone walls in its death throes, the impact was carrying deep into the mountain's own foundation. Erkstag itself trembled at the strike, dust was sifting down from ceilings that had held firm for a hundred years.
A dragon, conjured entirely from pale, hungry flame, spread its wings wide—the wingtips grazing the narrow passages carved painstakingly into the living rock and hundreds of young manticores, barely more than cubs, came pattering down helplessly into the abyss like rain while their small, panicked cries were swallowed instantly by the roaring fire.
The Dark Mark had bloomed for the very first time outside of Britain's borders, hanging green and distinctive above the burning prison.
"Ah. No wonder Bryan Watson is so fond of Fiendfyre—"
Bathed in the arrogant, flickering light of the flames, Adam Vogel pushed his gold-rimmed spectacles up the bridge of his nose with one finger. He watched the mature manticore's dying wails fade slowly into the depths of the abyss while an elegant, thoroughly unbothered smile spread across his lips.
"This truly is a remarkably practical piece of magic."
No one answered him.
Greengrass, Jasnah Vogel, and the others standing arranged behind him were all silent, watching with matching cold indifference as Bellatrix danced madly, almost joyfully, at the very edge of the abyss, her wand was whipping out more and more Fiendfyre in great, uncontrolled arcs, feeding the conjured dragon further fuel.
Bang—Bang—Bang!
A string of sounds like distant firecrackers echoed suddenly from beyond the narrow, labyrinthine tunnel stretching away from them, and the faces of the Death Eaters gathered at the abyss's edge visibly, uniformly changed at the sound.
The wind stirred by the surging Fiendfyre tossed Jasnah's soft brown curls loose around her face. She turned toward the pale, echoing corridor, a flicker of indifference passing across her face.
"What's going on? Is that the German Ministry of Magic already? They shouldn't be arriving this quickly."
"Nothing especially strange about it, Jasnah. I imagine our dear Malfoy has run into some trouble of his own on his end of this whole arrangement—"
Adam, who had been savouring a grand spectacle of destruction only to have his private pleasure interrupted by the noise, let his smile fade slightly as he said it softly, regretfully.
"A pity, that. But I think it's time we made our own arrangements to leave, rather than linger for the full show."
Rodolphus Lestrange stepped forward at once to call Bella back from the edge, but the only answer he received in return was an impatient, unbroken stream of vicious curses aimed indiscriminately in every direction.
"You damned savages, I swear I'll see every last one of you hanged before this is through!"
The furious voice, amplified unnaturally by wild magic, became deafening in the enclosed space, echoing off stone that had never been designed to carry sound this way.
"Apparition's been blocked!"
Greengrass stepped forward, calling out with more than a hint of genuine, rising panic bleeding into his voice.
"The German Ministry has already reactivated this prison's protective wards, from the outside. I don't want to make things sound worse than they actually are, but there's no doubt about it—we're sealed in."
Greengrass wiped a bead of cold sweat from his own temple with a trembling hand, his face gone had ghastly, sickly pale in the shifting glow of the Fiendfyre still burning behind him.
"Mr. Vogel, we're trapped inside this prison now, with them. I think our entire mission has failed at this point."
"Oh, I have to correct you on one particular point there, Mr. Greengrass—"
There was something distinctly manic bleeding through beneath Adam Vogel's leisurely, easy-going manner, a current was running just under the calm surface.
"Our mission hasn't failed in the slightest. I fulfilled my promise to the Dark Lord, and rescued our companions held prisoner in this very facility, exactly as instructed. Of course, as you correctly point out, we've fallen one crucial step behind schedule, and the German Ministry has us cornered as a consequence of that delay. These things happen, in the course of ambitious work."
The sound of hurried, chaotic footsteps drawing closer was rapidly growing louder throughout the tunnel network, and Voldemort's assembled old guard could not help but slide toward panic at the rising evidence of their situation.
Aside from Bellatrix, who was cursing under her breath as she finally, reluctantly stopped conjuring fresh Fiendfyre, the only two among the whole gathered group who managed to remain visibly calm throughout were the father-daughter pair, Adam and Jasnah.
"What should we do, Father?"
Perhaps it was a deliberate, cultivated affectation, or perhaps she had simply spent too many years playing the careful role of a respected professor at a Muggle university, but Jasnah who went by the name Rosier in that other life carried herself throughout the entire crisis with something closer to a scholar's erudition and grace than any trace of fear.
She glanced toward the shifting shadows moving around the bend of the deep corridor ahead and asked the question with detachment.
"You filthy mongrels, you hypocritical, nauseating, sanctimonious pigs think you can kill us too? Not a chance in any hell!"
Without waiting for any order from anyone present, Bellatrix charged forward alone into the tunnel mouth with that particularly terrifying, shrill laugh of hers ringing ahead of her like a war horn.
"I believe Mrs. Lestrange has already shown us how we ought to handle the crisis at hand, quite eloquently in her own fashion—"
Adam Vogel watched Bellatrix charge recklessly forward into the narrow corridor with an appreciative, almost fond smile and said, turning to address the remaining group.
"The situation couldn't be clearer, could it, everyone gathered here? If we want to escape the gallows tonight and live to see tomorrow, then our only realistic option remaining is to bury Minister Adenauer and whatever elite forces he's brought along from the German Ministry, right here, in this very mountain.
I think it's rather high time the wider world learned properly that the great Dark Lord's reach and power is by no means confined merely to the British Isles."
With that declaration, Adam Vogel stepped forward himself, moving to meet the fight directly, and Jasnah followed close behind her own father without hesitation, her pale, composed eyes were revealing little in the way of visible fear, only a cool, settled contempt for what she plainly considered the mundane, unremarkable world closing in around them.
"Wait!"
Greengrass's face twisted hard with distress at the escalation.
"The Dark Lord never gave us any explicit order to engage the German Ministry directly. I think we should instead—"
The great dragon of Fiendfyre that had already slaughtered the young manticores folded its burning wings and plunged suddenly, without warning, into the mine-like tangle of tunnels stretching below them.
The violent explosion that followed a second later threw up thick clouds of dust and choking smoke that blotted out everyone's vision entirely for several long seconds.
"We should be using the terrain—this complicated, half-collapsed ground beneath us to properly manoeuvre and find some genuine chance to slip away quietly, not stand here trading curses openly with the entire German Ministry!"
Amid the rumbling, ongoing echo of the fresh explosion, Greengrass's shouted objection sounded hopelessly frail and small against the surrounding chaos.
"You madman of the Dark Lord, is that what you actually want—to make us enemies of the entire wizarding world at once? Well, I refuse to go mad alongside you—I still have two young daughters waiting for me at home!"
"Kindly show my father some respect while you're speaking, Mr. Greengrass—"
Jasnah seized Greengrass firmly by the shoulder without warning and yanked him back a full step, pulling him clear just in time from a dense, deadly curse that sizzled past where he'd been standing a moment before.
"I believe there isn't a single thing the Death Eaters have done, collectively, on the Dark Lord's behalf across these past years that hasn't already made them enemies of the wider world in some fashion. Tonight changes nothing vital about our position."
The most brutal confrontation of the entire night began.
The narrow, twisting corridors stripped the German Ministry's forces of their numerical advantage almost entirely, the tunnels were too tight and winding to allow more than a few defenders to properly engage at any given point.
And their own fear that Erkstag itself might collapse entirely under sustained magical assault left the German Ministry officials hesitant to commit their full available force, holding back spells that might bring the mountain down on everyone present, friend and enemy both.
By comparison, the Death Eaters cornered now, with no remaining choice but to fight to the death or surrender to certain execution were far less constrained by any such careful consideration.
They tore into Erkstag's foundations like the shoddiest, most reckless demolition crew imaginable with spells crashing into load-bearing stone with total disregard for what might follow.
Buried deep within the surrounding mountain, far from any nearby city or witness, the prison shuddered violently under their combined, reckless destruction, and large chunks of old ancient rock came crashing down from above like a sudden, deadly rain, burying combatants from both sides indiscriminately.
In such total, spreading chaos, both the Death Eater ranks and the German Ministry's own assembled forces were quickly, thoroughly scattered across the collapsing tunnel network—any semblance of organised command or coordination becoming utterly, immediately useless within minutes of the fighting's true start.
Death swung his scythe lightly through the chaos, reaping one life after another without evident preference for either side.
Jasnah had no idea, by this point, how long she had wound her own way through the dense, blooming flashes of green curse light lighting the tunnels around her in brief, strobing bursts.
She had lost track of her father somewhere in the collapsing confusion, whether he remained alive or had already fallen, she genuinely didn't know, and she could no longer reliably tell whether the curses flashing out from the shadowed corners around her originated from enemies or from her own remaining allies.
The roar of collapsing stone never properly ceased throughout, one section was giving way only for another to begin its own slow, grinding collapse elsewhere.
The half-abandoned prison, hidden deep within its mountain, had already been half-exposed directly to the pouring rain outside, whole sections of ceiling was torn away to reveal storm-dark sky above.
In the damp, disorienting darkness, lit only by intermittent flashes of spellfire, Jasnah struggled continuously to dodge every falling stone hurtling toward her from above, searching desperately for any viable way toward survival as the very earth shook and heaved beneath her unsteady feet.
She was so consumed by the sheer effort of staying alive that she never properly noticed, in that moment, that the fierce, spreading fighting had already, quite thoroughly, shattered the ancient protective magic that had held Erkstag sealed and contained for so long.
…..
Back at the British Ministry of Magic, in a considerably quieter office some considerable distance away, Bryan and Amelia sat together, staring at each other in stunned, prolonged silence over the sternly-worded letter of formal reprimand from the German Ministry of Magic held between them.
————————————
For More Chapters; [email protected]/FicFrenzy