CRACK-CRACK!
The earth shuddered without pause beneath the assault, and the thick ice, frozen solid by weeks of bitter cold, split open in one harrowing fissure after another, the fractures were racing out across the lake's entire surface.
The two spheres of blazing light hanging suspended above the lake swelled rapidly in size, their combined radiance rolling across the ice, melting it instantly wherever it touched, and setting the water beneath into violent boiling.
The countless creatures living beneath the frozen lake's surface felt this overwhelming power of calamity bearing down on them from above, and every single one of them fled instantly, swimming desperately in every direction to get away from the source.
But no speed available to any living being could outrun the swelling light. The instant it touched them, they were vaporised on the spot, not even a scrap of physical residue was left behind to mark that they had existed at all.
The lake water itself evaporated too, and the surging white steam, caught up violently in the raging wind, curled steadily into the high sky above. Seen from any distance, it looked exactly like the mushroom cloud left behind by a nuclear blast.
CRACK-CRACK!
By the time the two orbs of light beneath the ashen sky finally stopped their expansion, they had swallowed up nearly half the entire vast lake between them, an area that had, until minutes before, sheltered an entire winter ecosystem.
They strained against each other continuously, and with every passing second their overwhelming, combined magic struck off hundreds, even thousands, of individual thunderbolts, hammering down relentlessly into the lake's now-exposed bed, down into the crimson magma visible far below—the booming of the sustained blasts was never letting up for even a moment.
Battered by the ferocious wind and the lake water surging violently up onto the shore, the pine forest bordering the frozen lake was utterly destroyed, one straight, towering pine after another was flattened entirely to the ground in rapid series like scattered matchsticks.
WHOOSH!
The gale, growing fiercer by the moment, finally surged into the high sky and, with a force fit to raze entire cities and topple whole nations, tore straight through the layered clouds above—sweeping clean, in a single, decisive stroke, the gloom that had smothered the earth for so many days without pause.
Sunlight fell across the earth once more, long absent from this corner of the world, carrying the gentle red of a dying dusk.
The blazing light thinned by degrees. When it finally faded and the roar of the blasts died away at last, at the centre of a space still threaded with countless flickering remnants of lightning, Bryan and Grindelwald stood facing each other.
Strangely, the air between them was not nearly as tense as it should have been, given everything that had just unfolded.
Grindelwald's face was calm throughout. Bryan's, meanwhile, carried the faint trace of a smile.
"Feeling considerably better now?"
Bryan asked.
Grindelwald looked at the young man standing before him, smiling faintly in return, and kept his silver eyes light and externally untroubled but inside, he genuinely could not still the turmoil crashing through him.
He had sat in his cell at Nurmengard these past many years, and yet more than half the newspapers that had eventually reached him there had still been filled with reports of this particular young man.
Nor, in fact, was this the first time he had crossed paths with Bryan Watson.
But it was only in truly contending with him directly—in feeling for himself this particular magic, at once so weighty and so mellow—that one could grasp, why the wider world showered him with such unstinting praise.
'Praise worthy of the name they called him: heir to Albus Dumbledore.'
But none of that mattered at this moment.
His gaze settled instead on Jasnah, floating unconscious beside Bryan, and the silver light in Grindelwald's eyes slowly faded away. His back curved back down into its old, familiar stoop.
After a long moment's silence, "See her settled—"
The torment and sharpness that had, only moments before, drawn tight between his eyebrows dissolved away, and Grindelwald became, once more, simply old man Enno.
He said it in a low voice, then turned and drifted slowly toward the ruined lakeshore.
"You wouldn't genuinely want me to give you a lift, Professor Grindelwald?"
Bryan watched calmly as the old man drew farther away across the shattered ice.
Not until the stooped figure had blurred fully into the distance did his answering voice come drifting back on the scorching, settling wind.
"I'll come."
Bryan pressed his lips together at that, and, drawing his gaze back, took in the full doomsday scene spread around him.
Muggles and wizards both would surely come, eventually, to investigate what had happened here tonight, but Bryan had no intention of putting any of it right before they arrived.
"Let's go, then—"
He said it to Jasnah, still lost in her faint, and the two of them vanished together into the deep, distant mountains, far from the world of ordinary men.
Night was drawing near now, advancing from the far edge of the surrounding wilderness, driving off the last crimson glow the dying sun had scattered thinly across the earth below.
But when the overbearing tendrils of that advancing darkness reached toward Malfoy Manor, standing at the wilderness's edge, they flinched sharply back, as if scalded by the contact, then curved silently away—giving the manor now claimed entirely by death a wide respectful berth.
The garden that had once been lush and elegant had lost every trace of its old life, eaten thoroughly hollow by some patient, spreading death.
The greenery still standing within it, stripped of all its former colour, hung its branches low toward the ground, and through the whole ruin ran something faintly uncanny.
Cliodna stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of her bedroom, silently watching the withered, dying garden below, worry was showing plainly across her green eyes.
In fact, watching this wicked grey mist steadily consume life around her was the only thing left for her to do—a prisoner in this very manor, held here by Voldemort.
She raised one finger slowly, and from its tip bloomed a soft green light, the colour of life.
A ribbon of that green light, fluid as flowing water, twisted through the dim air of the room and drifted slowly toward a vine clinging to the black iron railing of the balcony outside.
The vine, left with only the thinnest threads of green by the drought, seemed to drink the offered light in like rain, visibly reviving into vivid, saturated colour before her eyes. Cliodna could feel, in the faint sway of that eager vine-tip, something like a plea.
And yet, she understood clearly that all of it was doomed, ultimately, to be in vain.
The grey mist drifting through the surrounding air stirred at once, restless, like a shark that had just caught the distant scent of fresh blood.
Windless, it gathered together on its own, baring claws and fangs around the vine that had just put out new, hopeful green and then, under the weight of Cliodna's focused gaze, the vine withered all over again!
Nor did the assault end there.
The living grey mist pressed swiftly forward toward her, tracing its way back along the emerald band of light that, like a lifeline, had carried vitality out to the vine in the first place.
PFFT—
Cliodna severed the green light blooming at her fingertip sharply, and the bond still lingering faintly in the air scattered at once into fading motes of dying light.
The grey mist gathered on the balcony did not disperse this time, the way it had done, every other time she'd previously tried this. It hovered before her a moment instead, and from within it drifted, faintly, some new and unfamiliar stirring of intent.
The breath she had been about to sigh out caught sharply in her throat at that change. After a moment's stiffening, the light in Cliodna's eyes sharpened all at once.
The mist seemed to sense the sudden edge in her gaze; it lost its apparent interest in the "delicious" life before it and scattered away like a group of startled rabbits fleeing a predator.
'These mists—'
Cliodna's faintly pale lips moved silently, the worry sitting in her eyes were deepening further at what she'd just witnessed.
She had all but watched them grow steadily stronger, day by day, over these past months of captivity.
Knock, knock, knock—
A sound like a balloon popping came first through the air, and then the actual knock at her door pulled Cliodna back from her circling private worries.
"Yes?"
"Honoured Miss Cliodna—"
The voice reaching her through the closed door was careful and tentative.
"The great Dark Lord requests your presence for dinner."
'Dinner?'
In the dim, lightless bedroom, Cliodna, still standing at the window, drew her eyebrows together sharply at the unexpected summons.
She was a prisoner here, and she always carried herself with a prisoner's full awareness of precisely what that meant for her daily existence.
Voldemort had never strictly forbidden her from leaving her room, and yet since first arriving at Malfoy Manor under these circumstances, she had never once left it lightly.
She did not want to see Voldemort.
Voldemort, for his part, had no wish to see her either, but she still, evidently, had her uses to him, and so he continued to let her live regardless.
The day Dumbledore and Watson fell, that would be the very day her life ended too.
This much, Cliodna understood well.
Dining together, in any sense—such a thing had never once happened, in all these months of her captivity here.
Without thinking it through fully, Cliodna was on the verge of simply refusing outright.
But the words caught themselves at her lips before she could speak them, and she turned instead to glance out at the grey mist drifting outside the window, considering.
"Understood. I need to change first."
Cliodna said, her tone entirely cold.
Dressing herself for the occasion was, of course, not meant to please anyone gathered downstairs. She simply did not wish to reveal even the faintest, smallest trace of despair before Voldemort and his followers, whatever the purpose of tonight's summons turned out to be.
A little while later, she stepped out of her room dressed in a pale beige gown, simple and elegant in its cut.
She wore no makeup at all, and still she made every ancestor of the Malfoy family, hanging captured in their frames along the dim, portrait-lined corridor, fall silent mid-sigh, watching her descend the grand staircase with unmistakably admiring eyes.
Some of the figures in the portraits even leapt actively into other people's frames along the wall, eager to trail after her progress down the stairs.
Tap, tap, tap—
As she pushed open the grand entrance doorway that so perfectly embodied the Malfoy family's pride and glory, a figure wrapped head to toe in black robes, distinctly bat-like in his overall silhouette, came walking up from the entrance hall beyond.
The newcomer, too, seemed not to have expected to find her waiting here. His steps faltered for a brief moment, and deep in those pitch-black eyes, Cliodna caught a flicker of surprise, there and then immediately gone again.
"Hello, Severus—"
After a moment's silence, Cliodna said, nodding once to the man standing in front of her.
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