What happened that night would still be spoken of in tones of awe a century later.
The Eiffel Tower had stood on the Champ de Mars for a hundred years, and in all that time Paris had fondly called it the "Iron Giant." Tourists had photographed it from every angle. Lovers had kissed in its shadow. Schoolchildren had drawn its silhouette on the covers of their exercise books, and painters had set up their easels beneath it on sunny mornings.
It had been a friendly kind of giant, a postcard giant.
On that very night, it became an iron giant in the truest sense of the word.
The colossal frame of the tower began a complex and terrible transformation. Beams slid and buckled and reknit themselves with the shriek of tortured metal.
The arches at its base drew together and twisted, thickened and lengthened, until they were no longer arches something that could only be called legs, and the instant those legs had formed, the thing began to move.
With every step, the earth let out a low, wrenching roar, as though the ground itself were being torn up by the roots. Pavements split; lamp posts bent like grass; parked cars leapt a foot into the air and came down crushed.
A few steps later, as the giant waded out into the Seine, its upper half was already taking on the outline of a torso and two vast arms, which rose and swung heavily against a sky already turning the colour of a bruise.
Boom!
The river instantly flooded over both its banks. In the space of one breath, powerful waves driven before the wind rose up like grey walls and swallowed countless sightseers on its shores.
Café chairs and wicker tables and strings of lamps went tumbling down the streets in the flood.
The Muggles were screaming, sobbing, wailing.
A tremendous magical field churned the clear night sky into murk. A vast bank of dense cloud gathered above the tower at a speed visible to the naked eye, black and boiling and lit from within by a sickly glow, and bolt after bolt of lightning lashed down upon the fissured earth.
It looked like the end of the world.
"These beasts…"
Sirius glared up at the steel giant, whose head was now slowly taking shape against the clouds. His eyes were red, and his hands were shaking on his wand.
He did not try to flee. And it was not only he; not one of the wizards standing in the ruins of the collapsed hotel made the slightest move to run.
They all knew the giant had come for them. To flee blindly now would only lead the thing toward the Muggles, and cost more of them their lives, and so they stood rooted to the broken ground like a line of stones.
"How… how did they even do this…?"
Someone among them, staring up at the steel giant, muttered in a daze, speaking to no one at all.
It was a fair question.
Shaping steel into the outline of a human being was not, in itself, particularly complex magic. A third-year at Hogwarts could turn a stick into an exquisite wooden puppet.
But this—this was a tower of iron more than a thousand feet tall, with the weight of ten thousand tons behind every limb!
Transfiguration on this scale… the number of living wizards who could possibly have pulled it off could be counted on the fingers of one hand, with fingers to spare.
His face twisted with grief and fury, Sirius shuddered violently and ground his teeth as he glared at the monstrous thing towering into the clouds.
"Voldemort! It has to be Voldemort!"
"No, boy. That isn't Voldemort."
Alastor was panting like an ox, but his voice was steady, and flat with sudden understanding.
Across the giant's dark body, built of countless steel girders, he could see points of light that never stopped glittering like stars, tiny and cold and numberless, scattered over the whole vast frame, flickering and steadying and flickering again.
A good several hundred crazed desperadoes casting Transfiguration on that monster together!
By rights, even that ought to have been hard to achieve. A working of such size demanded a high degree of coordination and unity among all the casters, hundreds of minds beating as one heart, none lagging, none rushing, none daring to doubt.
But since the Transfiguration had succeeded, that meant one thing!
Alastor's scarred face twisted, as though he had bitten into something rotten.
"Imperius lunatics! Every one of them is under the Curse!"
Boom—boom—boom!
The giant had not yet even crossed the Seine, and the tremors it set off had already wrought catastrophe.
On the far bank, building after building burst into flame under the constant shaking, windows blowing out one after another like a string of firecrackers.
Heart-rending cries for help joined into a dirge that drifted beneath the scorched and anguished night, and the smoke rolled across the water in slow, oily coils.
A tour boat, capsized by the raging waves, had thrown several dozen tourists into the river. In the surging spray the Muggles wailed and howled, swimming frantically for the shore!
And one foot of the giant, about to come down, would end any chance those Muggles had of surviving.
Boom!
Before the giant's half-formed face, a flash of fire suddenly burst in the dark, bright and sharp as a thrown spear, and forced the thing back a step. The huge foot lifted, hung, and came down on empty water. It bought the drowning Muggles a sliver of hope.
"Pin it in the river! Don't let it reach the shore! Do not let it reach the shore!!!"
In barely the blink of an eye, hundreds of figures appeared in the air, thick as a swarm of bees: wizards, and goblins too, small, fierce, hard-faced, each straddling a flying broomstick. They fell on the steel giant in the middle of the channel with a ferocious barrage.
Bang—bang—bang!
Streak after streak of tragically dazzling fire, carrying the fury of the wizards who guarded this city, shot toward the giant like flashing meteors and the night above the Seine turned to day.
There was no longer any room to worry about whether magic would be exposed. What mattered most now was to annihilate every last one of these desperadoes right here!
The teeth-jarring, scalp-prickling groan of bending steel rang on and on.
Under the united forces' frenzied assault, dazzling bursts of fire erupted again and again across the colossal iron giant, and the vast thing gradually began to topple.
"Protego!"
Perched upon the giant's body among the girders, the prisoners of Erkstag raised their wands as one and shrieked the word as one.
At once a pearly-white film of light spread through the air, rippling at a speed the eye could follow, and around the steel giant's surface it formed yet another film of light, this one in the shape of a man.
"Take them out! Take them all out!"
Through the constant explosions rose the manic laughter of Adam Vogel, and his wand pointed straight at the dense ranks of the 'dignitaries of every nation' gathered behind Sirius and Alastor.
"Is there any point in hiding who we are anymore?"
Caked in plaster dust, 'Minister Bones' asked, her voice trembling.
"There's only one thing left for us to do!"
At Alastor's low snarl, the wizards in the ruins all took on the look of men united against a common enemy.
"Take out this scum—leave not one of them standing!"
Sirius roared, his cheeks flushed, his face wild.
"Take them out!"
"Kill them!"
"Make these inhuman beasts pay!"
Murderous, savage intent welled up in the eyes of every wizard in the ruins, and they let out a roar like knights before a charge!
Bang!
Over a hundred flying broomsticks shot upward side by side, and the air erupted in a tremendous roar as they went. With Alastor and Sirius at the head, they joined the army closing in on the giant.
Even Adam Vogel, on top of the giant, was drawn by the roar and looked their way.
Adam had already taken off the gold-rimmed glasses that had marked him as a gentleman, and now his grizzled hair whipped wildly in the gale.
With the disguise stripped away, his eyes showed the thug beneath, hard and glittering and delighted, glaring down at the crowd gathered behind Sirius.
"So that is how it is… No wonder they responded so fast. A trap, was it? Well, then! But—"
His gaze travelled over the rows of buildings crowding both banks of the river, over the bridge not far off that bridged the Seine, over the countless Muggles lost in terror and confusion, running, praying, shouting names into the smoke…
"Hahaha!"
Adam let out a manic laugh and threw back his head.
"It doesn't matter any more! Do you see it, Great Grindelwald? Do you see them? The wretched Muggles are afraid, they're wailing, they're on their knees—I have done what you once did!"
Whoosh!
Adam swung his wand down hard, and the steel giant, which had paused for a moment, began to move again.
The giant raised its right arm, twisted its torso sharply, and swept the arm sideways like a boxer, in a vast, whistling arc that tore the clouds.
Never mind the few wizards who could not dodge in time and were smashed to scraps on the spot. The gale that rose in the already wind-lashed sky shredded many a broomstick as though they were made of paper, and a dozen-odd wizards and goblins went plunging down into the water.
"Scum!"
Sirius's eyes were blood-red. He could no longer remember how many times that night he had hurled that word.
But!
The curses he fired at the giant only stirred faint ripples on the shimmering magical barrier enclosing it, and could not break through at all!
Hmmmmm!
Just as Sirius was gnashing his teeth to splinters, a rolling, muffled thunder suddenly sounded from the horizon. It travelled at tremendous speed, growing from a whisper to a howl, and in a moment, it rolled right over their heads!
"This is wizards' business, Sirius! Don't let the Muggles get involved in it. Take some people and stop them!"
Alastor flew past behind Sirius's flank and roared the order at him over the wind.
"Stop them…?"
Sirius watched the thing that had flashed past overhead and now looked ready to turn about, a dark arrowhead with a tail of fire. It must be what the Muggles called a "fighter jet." He roared in a frenzy:
"Easy for you to say, Alastor! How am I supposed to stop that thing without hurting the Muggles inside it?"
"Go and find the Muggle Prime Minister, Nash. Do not let this chaos spiral any further out of control!"
In the town of Twin Moons, Minister Bones, her face livid and her jaw clenched, said to the French Minister of Magic.
"You think…"
Minister Nash looked back at Amelia, wearing a look of bleak, joyless despair.
"…that in a situation like this, I can still persuade the Muggle Prime Minister?"
————————————
For More Chapters; [email protected]/FicFrenzy