The studio lights turned every face the same colour. Powder, glassy eyes, and teeth that were too white under the panels. The anchorwoman kept her hands on the desk.
Behind her, the screen looped the same images, over and over. A grey sea. A helicopter shot of a wake that ended in nothing. A radar scope with a clean arc and a missing blip circled in red by some producer who had learned drama from traffic reports.
"We are back with our year end special," she started, voice set to calm. A thin smile sat on her mouth. "And if you have been asleep since January, welcome to the strangest twelve months in living memory."
A clip rolled. A French tricolour on a mast. A carrier deck with jets lined in neat rows. The caption read NOVEMBER. A second clip followed. A Spanish frigate. A Portuguese crest. More water, more radar, more panicked voices cut into the silence.
"It began with four frigates and two carriers," the anchorwoman went on. She tapped a card, then looked into the lens again. "Since then, NATO forces and the Russians have lost six additional carriers, fifteen submarines, and another twenty frigates. Experts believe some of those submarines carried nuclear warheads."
She said experts the same way people said prayer. To her, the more sensational the news are the more views she gets. No one knew, but in a couple of decades, this will become the trend where people turn into hookers for more clicks.
A graphic appeared. A map of the Norwegian Sea. Arrows, shaded zones, and question marks placed like mines. Another line of text slid in.
THE VANISHING VESSELS.
"The number of aircraft aboard the carriers has not been shared by the navies involved," she continued. "In the absence of official numbers, unofficial theories have filled the gap."
They cut to a street interview. A young man in a wool cap, cheeks red from cold, eyes too bright for the camera.
"Aliens," the man said, with the confidence of a person who had just solved a hard problem. "Aliens are among us. What else could it be?"
Back in the studio, the presenter held her smile and moved on.
"Major powers are blaming each other," she continued. "If the public is right and this is extraterrestrial, then the visitors appear to have developed an interest in naval procurement."
The camera cut away from her at that exact moment.
In a semi detached house in Kent, a man watched and snorted and flipped the channel without looking down.
The screen changed to a sitcom laugh track. Somebody slipped on a floor, and a canned audience found it delightful.
The man stared at it for a beat, then pushed the volume down until the voices became motion without meaning.
"Aliens," he muttered. He took a sip of tea, then winced as it had already gone cold.
On another channel, a news ticker crawled along the bottom of the screen.
TURKEY ANNOUNCES WITHDRAWAL FROM NATO.
AZERBAIJAN TO JOIN ADRIATIC ARCTIC PACT.
The man read it, jaw tightening. His hand hovered over the remote again, then dropped. He looked past the screen, past the room, as if he could see the shape of the year laid out and pinned like an insect.
He did not know who to hate for it. He did not know who to thank.
-
In the Nest, nobody needed a television to keep score.
The unofficial war room was a long chamber of stone and iron with maps pinned to boards and parchments stacked in precise piles. A wireless set sat on a side table, its valves warm, spitting out reports from the mundane world in clipped voices and frantic corrections. Corvus kept it running on purpose. He liked to hear how they tried to sound in control while their hands shook.
Krafft stood by the central table, sleeves rolled to his forearms. Grigori leaned on the edge like the table was a bar, and he was choosing a bottle. Both of them had the same look in their eyes. The look of men who had found a lever and were already thinking about the next wall.
Corvus read the top report once, then set it down.
"Fifteen submarines," Grigori said, voice flat. He sounded impressed. "They cannot decide whether to accuse Washington or Moscow. They are trying both."
"Let them," Corvus replied. He tapped a point on the map where the sea turned from lines into names. "Suspicion is cheap. It spreads on its own."
Krafft slid another parchment forward. "Land vehicles next. We have eyes on the depots. The schedules are predictable. Their best security is boredom."
Corvus looked at the parchment, then at the names at the bottom.
"Your people are in place," he said.
"My people have always been in place," Krafft answered, and the corner of his mouth moved like a private joke.
Corvus did not return the humour. His focus stayed on the numbers.
His air force, now consisting of multiple dragon breeds and a mixed fleet of aircraft, could rival any country in Europe. His trust was in the dragons, fast grown and bonded, moved like shadows above a line of new roofs. Modern aircraft sat in hangars enhanced by magic and steel, their skins charmed to confuse the eye and lie to radar. Half the pilots were from DMLE, the other half were from the Nest. They had all become experts trained hard by dozens of Pilot's experiences in time arrays until muscle memory became truth.
He wanted more.
"Tanks," he said. "Self propelled artillery and Mortars. Anything that teaches their infantry to stand still behind steel and feel brave."
Grigori's eyes narrowed in interest. "You are building an arsenal that can fight on their ground."
"I am building an arsenal that makes their ground irrelevant," Corvus replied.
A junior clerk entered, pale and eager, and held out another folder.
"Reports from France," the clerk said.
Corvus took the folder. The seal had already been broken.
The pages inside were thin, written in a hand that shook. Greenhouses emptied, again. Food reserves stripped. Gellert took even the house elves from manors that had kept them for centuries.
Magical France, Spain, and Portugal were bleeding in ways the mundane world would never notice. Not in the newspapers or the radar. It was a quiet collapse, measured in missing labour and empty reserves.
Corvus closed the folder.
"They are on the edge," he said.
"Good," Grigori answered, and did not bother to pretend he meant anything else.
Corvus turned his gaze to the schedules again.
"Begin," he told them. "And keep the pattern irregular. Let them count wrong."
At Hogwarts, the same year, made a different kind of noise.
The fifth years stood in a line that would have made an old drill sergeant proud, if any old drill sergeant had ever been allowed into the castle. They had learnt fast. The castle punished stupidity now. It rewarded discipline. The difference sat in the way they held their shoulders and kept their mouths shut.
The training hall was not the Great Hall. It was a converted courtyard under wards that turned wind into a controlled breeze and stopped stray spells dead. Targets hung at the far end, most charmed to move.
A rack of enchanted pistols sat on a table. Next to it, rifles in clean lines. Each weapon had runes carved into the grip and barrel, fine work that held steady even when a student's hands shook.
"This is not a toy," the instructor, a Senior Auror from DMLE said, voice clear.
"You will learn to fire," he continued. "You will learn to renew the basic runes on your pistol. You will learn when to use this and when to use a wand. If you cannot tell the difference, you are not ready to leave school."
He walked along the line and placed a pistol in the first student's hands. He adjusted her grip with two fingers and a look that promised consequences.
"Safety first," he said.
The girl nodded and pushed the pin without trembling.
The instructor nodded once. At the back of the hall, two observers watched. One of them wore the expression of a woman who had seen wars and survived them. The other had the quiet look of somebody who had never forgiven the world for being soft.
Militarisation was not a word anybody used aloud. The new Magical bloc turned into a war machine. They called it preparedness, defence, and reality.
The students called it their future.
-
Across the Atlantic, Akingbade sat behind a desk with the suspected movements of the new bloc.
The International Confederation of Wizards had its own rooms, its own wards, its own arrogance. They had lost too much this year. Way too much. They were not the sole authority of the Magical World at large. He was aware of the situation of Spain, Portugal and France. Soon, ICW will have no safe harbour in the old continent.
A report lay open in front of him. It was written in tidy script and filled with details of the incidents. Muggles already started to blame the Magicals. Rightly so.
CARRIER GROUP LOST.
SUBMARINE MISSING.
ARMOUR DEPOT INCONSISTENCIES.
His advisers spoke in turns, careful to keep their fear behind ritual courtesy.
"The new bloc is growing bold," one of them said.
"Bold," Akingbade repeated. It was the understatement of the century.
He tapped the paper with one finger.
"They are thieves," he said. "And thieves must be punished."
None of his people corrected him. Not one of them dared to say that stealing a carrier was not the same as stealing a purse.
They were aware of the gap between them and the new bloc. With every new Muggle Vessel, the floating ones, the flying ones, and the drowning ones, the gap was getting bigger. Akingbade only hoped they would not manage to use them.
-
In Downing Street, the silent room stayed empty until Major decided it was better to face the storm and opened the door. The brown owl was there, on its perch and waiting.
He had delayed it for three days. He had written drafts and torn them up. He had signed papers with a hand that wanted to shake and had not been allowed to.
The owl followed Major with its eyes the moment he stepped inside. Not curious nor friendly. Simply watching and waiting for an excuse to stretch its wings.
Major sat behind the desk. He set his pen down, then picked it up again because doing something with his hands felt better than letting his mind run.
He glanced at the empty seats where Lord Arcturus Black and Lord Rosier sat on their last visit.
He thought of the fiasco of the raids. It was a move destined to failure, even if they had succeeded. He was able to see it now. So it was better to call the failed attempts of the raids.
He did not want to get involved all those months ago, but his hand was forced like all the others in New York. He saw the faces of his own people when they realised they had paid the price with their lives.
He thought about the cold. The unnatural cold, reported by men who did not believe in ghosts until the night their colleagues stopped being people.
MI6 cells gone quiet. Royal Guard officers left breathing and empty. Spies vanished. Contracts broken. Secrets dragged into light like bodies from a river.
Then the ships.
The world had not been this tense since the worst days of the Cold War, and now it felt worse than that because nobody knew who to negotiate with. You could not call a missing carrier on the telephone.
Major wrote anyway.
He kept the letter short and kind. If he understood anything about Arcturus Black, it was his disdain towards mundane humans. They wanted seperation and they were right to do so. There was no common ground where these Magical humans could shape reality with their wooden sticks, and he was not stupid enough to act in arrogance.
People will not agree and accept other human beings to have such unnatural.. he corrected himself, Superpowers. Yes, magic was a superior power, and yes Mundane people will do their best if they were to be exposed. He conducted his research, and their population was something to laugh at. They could not threaten the World Order with their numbers, hence the need for secrecy.
So, he will give them what they want. If it is segregation they wanted, they can have it in spades. If they want no Mundane zones, he will provide it. He just hoped it was not too late, for he was sure it was they who got all those Vessels, Submarines and Aircraft. It was a mercy of heaven that they had no idea what they held in their hands.
He rolled the parchment and stood.
The owl extended its leg before Major even reached the perch. He wondered what the experts would find if they examined this bird. Again, he sopped his mind. The tension of the political world was affecting him.
Major fastened the letter. He hesitated for a fraction, then moved to the window and pushed it open.
Cold air spilt into the room. The sky outside was the colour of old steel.
The owl launched without a sound.
Major watched it climb into the dark, a small shape turning into nothing against the clouds.
He stayed at the window after it vanished, hand still on the frame, as if he expected a reply to arrive before he closed it.