The day after Erkstag fell, an emergency session of the International Confederation of Wizards, convened at the urgent request of the German Minister for Magic, opened in Paris.
Bryan understood clearly the reason for the German Ministry's panic, and indeed for the broader panic already spreading rapidly through Europe's magical world at large.
For as long as anyone could remember, the various nations of Europe had never quite managed to properly fear Voldemort in any sense.
It wasn't that the men and women who ran their respective Ministries were shortsighted, or genuinely blind to what he was capable of when unleashed. Their intelligence networks were, on the whole, perfectly competent.
It was, rather, that for years, Dumbledore had worked tirelessly and largely invisibly to keep Voldemort's menace carefully contained within Britain's own borders, never once letting the true scope of the threat spill noticeably across into other countries where it might have required costly attention.
And so, to the men who governed those other Ministries, comfortable in their own capitals, Voldemort's threat had always seemed comparatively smaller and more distant than the ordinary fugitives and criminals already loose and troublesome within their own domestic borders.
Especially after Bryan's rapid rise to prominence—there were even those who had privately hoped Voldemort would grow more vicious still, reasoning that the more savage and threatening he became, the more it would keep Britain's two great wizards tethered to their own soil, with no attention left over to spare for the balance of power across the wider wizarding world.
But now that Voldemort had truly stepped beyond Britain's borders and begun plotting and striking in other nations, the deep horror that had swept across the whole of magical Europe half a century ago by that person's rise, rose up again in their minds, and sleep did not come easily to any of them that night.
Bryan found himself once more inside the same goblin-run hotel where he had stayed before, back during the Triwizard Tournament, when he'd come to Paris to present the tournament's security arrangements to the Confederation's review board.
"Well. What a genuinely rare guest."
The emerald flames in the hearth guttered and died away behind them. The moment the man coming to meet them caught sight of Bryan and Dumbledore properly out of the fireplace, a dark, unmistakable scowl knotted itself between his brows.
He crossed the room in long, decisive strides, the same faint mockery was tilting one corner of his mouth and it was aimed, notably, at Dumbledore specifically, not at Bryan.
Vipor Dreghorn who, like Bryan, held the formal office of Deputy Chairman of the International Confederation of Wizards, though with considerably more active authority currently behind the title—came to a stop directly before the two of them, meeting Dumbledore's deep blue gaze head-on.
"What wind blew you here, Chairman Dumbledore? Of all people?"
Unlike Dumbledore, Vipor kept his grey hair cropped close and practical, and his short beard neatly, precisely trimmed, and his smile, when it finally arrived, was edged with something distinctly sharp underneath its politeness.
"Oh, I heard the Confederation was calling a special session on rather short notice—"
Dumbledore seemed entirely, genuinely unaware that he was being needled at all. His face remained bright with its usual vigour despite his age, arranging itself into a pleasant, unbothered smile.
"Bryan reminded me that I still hold some small, forgettable title within the Confederation, so he suggested I'd better come along myself and show my face properly, given the circumstances."
Even Bryan felt a few dark lines cross his own forehead automatically at that particular explanation.
Dumbledore had always made a show of caring little for power and formal position but at least in years past, he'd bothered, reliably, to keep up appropriate appearances when it mattered.
These last two years, though which was to say, roughly the same two years since Bryan's own rise had truly taken hold across Britain—Dumbledore seemed to have let go of even that much pretence almost entirely.
Nearly all of Hogwarts' actual daily affairs now fell, to Minerva and Bryan to manage between the two of them. Back when Fudge was still in office, even the Ministry's formal liaison work had been handed almost entirely over to Bryan, the working connection between Dumbledore and the Ministry itself was all but severed in any practical sense.
And on the Confederation's own side of things, it was Vipor, not Dumbledore, who genuinely carried the working weight of the office between them.
As for Dumbledore himself—people at Hogwarts only knew, in general terms, that he vanished from the castle now and again for stretches of days at a time. Where exactly he went during those absences, what he actually busied himself with while away, no one could say.
Vipor knew well that there was nothing he could do about Dumbledore's approach to his own responsibilities, and if anything, over the years, he'd come to find a certain dry, private enjoyment in watching the man work so consistently hard at his own irrelevance.
What he'd just said, moments ago, had been nothing more than plain grumbling.
"And Minister Bones?"
Vipor glanced past the two of them, back toward the now-dark fireplace, its flames were already fully gone out, then turned his full attention to Bryan instead, his brow was furrowing further, a distinct trace of heat was creeping into his voice.
"Don't tell me she isn't coming to this."
"You know how it is, these days—"
The three of them walked out of the private receiving room together, side by side, leaving the public Floo connection behind them for the evening streets beyond.
The hour hung suspended at the uncertain boundary between day and night. Dusk was withdrawing on unsteady, reluctant feet across the Paris skyline, and a deep red glow lay stretched thin and fading along the horizon.
A chilly wind wandered restlessly along the banks of the Seine, carrying the damp cold of this river city in autumn, and the three men walked slowly together along the riverside flats, their faces all touched now with the same gravity.
"The Ministry's internal affairs are in complete disarray just now, Vipor—she can't spare a single moment away from London."
Bryan answered the question Vipor had put to him directly.
"Then who's here tonight to answer for the British Ministry, in her place?"
Vipor's hard-set, wrinkled face turned fully toward Bryan.
"Me, of course. Surely you wouldn't have me subject an already-exhausted, elderly woman to an entire room full of sneering faces and cold, sharp remarks tonight, on top of everything else she's currently managing."
Bryan said it with a light laugh, and beside him, Dumbledore chuckled along in the same reassuring, familiar way, the two of them were presenting a united, unbothered front.
But Vipor's own expression stayed set and serious throughout. After a long, moment, he let out a low sigh.
"The situation isn't good, Bryan—not good at all."
When he spoke again, real sincerity had crept fully into his voice, the earlier needling was totally set aside.
Whatever else might reasonably be said about their working relationship, Bryan could just about call Vipor Dreghorn a friend or, at the very least, someone whose deeper interests ran consistently alongside his own, rather than against them.
To Bryan, Vipor occupied exactly that same reciprocal role in turn.
When Igor Karkaroff had died after the second task of the Triwizard Tournament, it was Vipor who had answered Bryan's suggestion and stepped forward personally to take up the vacant post of Durmstrang's headmaster—allowing the first Triwizard Tournament held in centuries to properly continue rather than collapse into scandal and cancellation, and sparing Hogwarts the considerable disgrace that would have followed.
"The moment I received Adenauer's initial report last night, I gathered a team myself and went straight to Erkstag to see the actual situation with my own eyes, rather than rely on secondhand accounts—"
"And how is it?"
Bryan already had some working sense of the scope from other channels, but he asked anyway, wanting Vipor's own direct account.
"The whole mountain Erkstag was built into has collapsed completely, top to bottom. The Dark Mark hangs directly over tens of thousands of tons of settled rubble now, and we genuinely can't even properly tell how many prisoners actually died in the collapse and the fighting both. Hmph—I rather hope they all did."
Dumbledore did not offer any reprimand to Vipor for the extremity of what he'd just said.
It wasn't especially surprising that Vipor felt this way, given what he'd personally witnessed in past—because the alternative was something the leadership of magical Europe found even harder to stomach when they turned it over privately.
Azkaban, too, had been breached by Voldemort's forces, some months back.
But there, in that earlier incident, he had only pulled out his own established Death Eaters and a small handful of other allies—the great majority of the remaining prisoners had stayed locked securely away, and were now, in fact, being held instead at the newly established Avalon Prison under considerably better conditions.
If, however, every single prisoner currently held at Erkstag had genuinely been set loose in the chaos and in fact, both Bryan and Dumbledore had already independently received word through separate channels that this was, distressingly, exactly what had happened—
Then several hundred men and women, each and every one of them fully capable of terrible violence and demonstrably formidable with a wand even after years of imprisonment, would already represent more than enough combined force to overrun the entire magical community of any single country in Europe besides Britain.
Small wonder, then, that magical Europe as a whole found itself in such a spreading state of panic tonight.
"Last night alone, close to a quarter of the people Adenauer personally sent in to put down the initial riot died there, in the tunnels or the collapse. The Muggles living nearby noticed the disturbance too, unavoidably—some of the Confederation's own people have already been sent out separately to help the German Ministry properly contain that fallout before it spreads further into Muggle awareness. Bryan, Dumbledore—"
Vipor let out another long, weary sigh, the exhaustion of the past day was finally showing plainly on his face.
"That dark wizard—Voldemort. The chaos he's bringing with him isn't merely about to spread across magical Europe as some future risk to prepare for. It already has spread. Tonight proves that beyond any further argument."
The dusk had drained entirely away by now, the last red light was finally surrendering to full dark. In a single instant, it seemed, a thousand lights, then ten thousand lights, kindled across the sprawling city all at once, and behind them, not far off along the riverbank, the goblin hotel itself blazed bright with its own share of that illumination.
Window after glowing window looked out over the darkening street below, and a growing crowd of delegates and their attendants had already begun gathering steadily toward the main conference room as the emergency session's start time was drawing close.
"Bryan. Dumbledore—"
Vipor, who seemed in the space of these few short minutes of conversation, to have aged several years, fixed his own burning, exhausted gaze on the two greatest wizards of their age standing beside him on the riverbank.
"Whatever it takes—you have to stop that monster, once and for all. Only the two of you can manage it."