"—First, allow me to properly report to the full assembly on the violent incident that occurred last night at Erkstag—"
Twelve massive Roman columns held up the classically styled, circular chamber, its concentric rings of council tables were filled to uncomfortable capacity for the emergency session.
Every nation with an established magical civilisation across Asia, North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Oceania had sent whatever representatives they kept permanently stationed in Paris to attend.
Row upon row of solemn, uniformly grave faces, lit by the dim, flickering candlelight suspended over their heads and pressed the atmosphere of the vast chamber to something close to its breaking point.
Of the concentric rings arranged around the central podium, the innermost held seven seats: Chairman Dumbledore, seated at the centre; the five permanent vice-chairs, among them Bryan Watson and Vipor Dreghorn; and the rotating vice-chair position, currently held by French Minister of Magic Terris Nash.
Standing at the podium positioned at the centre of the great hall, his left arm bandaged and slung from his neck, German Minister of Magic Nicholas Oronkos Adenauer addressed the full assembly.
Contrary to what most of the gathered representatives had privately pictured beforehand.
Minister Adenauer, well known throughout diplomatic circles for his fierce, quick temper, showed no obvious anger at all in his manner tonight.
His pale, haggard face wore no excess expression at all—only the abnormal, telling pauses scattered through his speech, the faint, laboured catches of breath between them, revealed to anyone watching closely that his composure was running far less steady beneath the surface than it first appeared.
"At nine twenty-seven last night, precisely, a mob of rioters appeared without warning near the Muggle landmark of the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin. They attacked the surrounding Muggle population indiscriminately, killing thirty-one outright and wounding a further one hundred and seventy-two, several critically."
For the moment, no newspaper—Muggle or wizarding, in any country had yet run the full story publicly.
But the wizards seated in this gilded, tension-filled chamber were no ordinary men and women, whatever else divided them; every single one present had already, through their private channels, heard some version of the news well before tonight's session.
Still, only the German Ministry of Magic itself currently held the exact, verified casualty figures being read aloud now.
There was no doubt that this particular incident would be written permanently into the modern history of the wizarding world, much like the recent, devastating collapse of the Muggle bridge in London.
Sharp, audible intakes of breath rippled through the packed hall one after another as the numbers landed properly.
The full weight of the morning's revelation sent more than a few resentful, searching glances drifting inevitably toward the innermost ring of seven seats toward the youngest and the oldest wizards seated among them, the two names that inevitably attached themselves to any conversation about Voldemort.
People had privately hoped, in the tense minutes before the session properly began, that once the grim news broke fully in the open chamber, the two figures under such sustained scrutiny might finally reveal some visible flicker of emotion, some crack in their composure that the room could properly read.
Instead, they were disappointed once again.
At the centre of that gathered, searching gaze, Bryan and Dumbledore sat like a matched pair of carved statues, eyes lowered toward the podium, and expressions unreadably still.
"By the time I led the strike team to the scene, this extremely malicious mob of rioters had not put up any sustained fight at all. They were sharp, and tactically disciplined—they fled the area entirely before we could properly raise the containment wards around the site—"
Adenauer continued in that strange, halting manner of his, pausing every sentence or two to draw a visibly strenuous breath before proceeding.
"There were, unfortunately, many direct Muggle witnesses to the attack itself. I had no choice but to summon every available employee of the German Ministry to the scene immediately, to properly erase memories on a mass scale, and to dispatch a senior liaison to negotiate directly with the Muggle Chancellor's own office, requesting his government's cooperation in sealing off the incident site on a considerably wider scale than we'd normally require. As for myself personally, I led our elite Auror corps in pursuit of the fleeing attackers."
"Did you find them, Minister Adenauer?"
From the seven central seats, Minister Nash of the French Ministry of Magic, his eyes flicking sideways briefly toward Bryan seated one position away, asked the question that was already sitting on nearly everyone's mind in the chamber, his voice was low and appropriately gravelly for the occasion.
"The Ministry did indeed uncover some traces of their movement, Minister Nash. I believe firmly that if we press the pursuit further, we will eventually locate that gang of vicious criminals and see them delivered properly to the gallows for what they've done. But—"
Minister Adenauer, who was known throughout the Confederation for his particular fondness for capital punishment(the gallows) as a deterrent, abruptly raised his own voice.
"—a new piece of grim news arrived that very same night, interrupting our pursuit, and I was forced to redirect my attention to it first!"
Minister Adenauer's gaze swept slowly across the packed, silent room before finally, deliberately settling on the seven central seats.
"I trust the representatives seated here—Chairman Dumbledore, the assembled vice-chairs—already possess the relevant information. Yes, that's correct. Erkstag has been breached."
The wizarding world of Europe boasted, by long and proud tradition, three magical schools of world renown: Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, and Durmstrang.
At the same time, European wizardkind also maintained three equally famous or infamous magical prisons: Azkaban, Erkstag, and Nurmengard.
Of the three, if judged strictly by scale and standing within the international system, Erkstag was unquestionably first among equals.
As for the other two, there is little need to explain at length why Nurmengard existed in the first place, given its single, notorious occupant, while Azkaban served, almost exclusively, Britain's own domestic needs alone, holding primarily British criminals under British jurisdiction.
Erkstag, on the other hand—nominally an abandoned facility on paper functioned in actual practice as the shared, informal "public prison" serving the nations of Europe.
Even setting aside the various members of the Purists whom Vice-Chairman Bryan Watson had sent there for containment, the facility still held, by a considerable margin, more total prisoners than either of the other two combined.
"When you say breached—"
A wizard of mixed heritage, dressed in robes carrying distinctive regional flair in a rich purple, furrowed his brow deeply at the podium.
"Do you mean to say every single prisoner held at Erkstag has already been rescued out by these attackers?"
"Oh, perhaps the actual situation isn't quite that thoroughly dire, not yet at least—"
Minister Adenauer answered from the podium, his calm tone carrying not without a certain trace of grim mockery underneath.
"You may not be fully aware, given your nation's distance from the region, but Erkstag sits built directly into the living body of a mountain in the Eastern Alps. Last night, the duel between our Aurors and the intruding force brought the entire mountain down around everyone present.
At present, my Ministry is still working to clear the mountain of settled rubble which will take considerable further time given the scale involved. We have found, among the ruins uncovered so far, the confirmed bodies of some number of prisoners who had been held at Erkstag prior to the attack.
I ask for your patient understanding on this point—determining exactly how many prisoners actually escaped the facility, versus how many died in the collapse itself, will genuinely have to wait until we've cleared the wreckage completely and properly.
I cannot responsibly give you invented numbers tonight."
The wizard who had asked the earlier question nodded slowly at the explanation and fell back into thoughtful silence.
"Then, Minister Adenauer—"
The French Minister Nash pressed forward immediately.
"—do you personally suspect, based on everything you've witnessed firsthand, that the vast majority of the prisoners have already been successfully rescued out?"
"Personally, I sincerely hope that this particular worst-case scenario has not, in fact, come to pass."
Minister Adenauer said it plainly, his face had gone cold.
"That is, roughly, the full situation as it currently stands before this assembly. At present we genuinely cannot determine how many prisoners were successfully rescued, nor can we yet confirm where the rioters who breached Erkstag have gone to ground since fleeing.
I must remind everyone gathered here tonight, in the most solemn possible terms, that these formidably powerful, evidently well-organised rioters may well have set their sights on the prisons of every single nation represented in this chamber, wherever criminals are currently held under lock and key.
They breach the prisons specifically to free the prisoners inside, and in doing so, seize the opportunity to grow their own available strength and numbers with each successful raid."
Sweeping his gaze across the entirely silent hall, Adenauer suddenly did something that no one present had genuinely expected—he stepped fully out from behind the podium table, and, facing the many hundreds of eyes now fixed on him, bowed low to the full assembly.
Throughout all of this unfolding drama, Dumbledore's own calm expression never once wavered, though a faint, unreadable glimmer stirred somewhere behind his eyes as he watched the bow unfold.
Bryan, too, chose that moment to lift his own head fully, leaning back against his chair, watching the German Minister of Magic closely—his face revealing neither visible pleasure nor displeasure at the performance playing out before him.
"Nicholas?"
Dumbledore, presiding formally as Chairman of the whole assembly, asked in his typically gentle tone.
"I believe I should offer, here and now, on behalf of the entire German Ministry of Magic, a formal apology to the international wizarding world assembled tonight!"
Minister Adenauer paid no attention to Dumbledore's gentle prompt. His own gaze swept over everyone present in the chamber, and his voice rolled out through the great hall like building thunder.
"We have betrayed the trust that the world's magical civilisations collectively placed in us, as custodians of that facility. We nearly let magical civilisation itself be exposed before the Muggle world in the very worst way imaginable, given the scale of casualties and the proximity to the Brandenburg Gate.
We failed to properly guard Erkstag as we were entrusted to do, and in doing so, we have exposed every single nation's magical civilisation to the threat of this mob calling itself the Death Eaters. We—"
His voice grew increasingly ardent, his words were ringing now with what sounded, to every ear in the chamber, like sudden and genuine repentance, the sound was reverberating powerfully through the great circular chamber.
German Minister of Magic Adenauer, visibly and dramatically overcome by the moment was delivering his formal apology to the assembled world's magical civilisation through this joint session, taking every conceivable measure of blame directly upon his shoulders in one single, sweeping, gesture.
So it really was aimed at us, after all, then.
From among the seven central seats, Bryan thought to himself privately, his external expression was weary and entirely unmoved by the performance unfolding before the full assembly—
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