France did not shake quietly.
Avicenne Hospital had been a clean little story until the moment the first body hit the floor. After that, everything multiplied.
GAIA issued its condemnation before the day was over. The wording was sharp and simple. An attack on healers was an attack on order. An attack on order would be answered. Borders tightened. City security increased. New checkpoints went up with practised speed, and the public accepted them because the footage had done the work.
Behind closed doors, the political leaders did not look as calm as they sounded on television.
In a sealed room in Paris, a minister paced between a window and a long table that no one dared sit at.
A staffer tried to speak, then swallowed the sentence and stared at his own hands. Everyone in the room had already learned that the wrong phrasing could make people vanish.
The phone on the desk rang again. Another call. Another adviser. Another frightened question.
"What are they going to do," someone finally managed.
No one answered.
It was not ignorance. It was the understanding that the new order did not announce consequences in advance. It applied them.
Outside those rooms, the streets did the opposite of what the minister's nightmares expected.
People showed support.
Not a polite statement or a petition. Crowds gathered in multiple cities and held signs that thanked the healers and condemned the attack. The news showed footage of children and parents chanting their thanks for the mana users. People brought flowers to hospitals and pressed them into the hands of nurses who did not know what to do with the gesture.
In Paris, a young man stood on a car roof and raised both arms, voice cracking as he shouted that the healers stayed. They did not leave. They finished what they came to do.
The crowd roared back.
They called them saints.
The word was ironically ridiculous. It was also useful.
Television stations went to work immediately. They did what they always did with anything new.
They invited experts.
A retired police chief sat under studio lights and spoke about the Bastion guards the way he used to speak about riot units. Tower shields, formations and discipline.
His tone shifted when the footage showed the shields holding strange energy instead of steel or any other material.
"Those are not normal shields," he stated, face pale under makeup. "And those weapons are not batons, which makes us understand Mana users do not deploy these units to suppress but to destroy."
A second panel guest, a historian with a tidy beard and a careful voice, leaned forward and pointed at the robed figures that appeared later.
"They do not look like soldiers," he noted. "They look like scholars. Teachers may be, this can be considered as proof that Mana users have their own internal order and society."
The presenter smiled too brightly. "Like a secret society?"
The question landed, and the public leaned in.
The theory of Mana users living among them in hidden structures or councils is strengthened.
The celebrations for the Avicenne attack on distant shores fed that theory like fuel.
In a small province along the eastern Mediterranean, a group poured into a street and shouted as if they had won a war. Someone waved a flag. Someone else kicked over a bin and laughed.
They did not understand the wider board. They only understood that they had seen a headline that made them feel powerful for half a second.
They celebrated anyway.
A patrol car rolled up and stopped.
Officers stepped out in uniforms that looked local. Their movements were too clean, their spacing too controlled.
The celebrators kept shouting. The officers did not shout back. One of them raised a hand.
A baton came down on the first man's shoulder hard enough to break a bone. Another man tried to run and was tackled into the curb. The rest of the crowd fell into stunned silence as cuffs snapped and faces hit dirt. There was no speech about morality or ordering them to disperse.
Only procedure.
Their governmental body had already been taken over by the Black Spire. The new order did not tolerate terrorism at any stage, and praising a terror attack was treated as a step too close to action itself.
A woman in a doorway screamed that it was unfair. The officer did not even look at her. By the time the footage reached televisions elsewhere, the streets had been cleared, and the celebrators were on the floor of a bus with their hands tied.
The public in Europe watched that and drew their own conclusions. The order was not optional.
-
The organisers of the attack watched different footage.
In a basement of an apartment outside Paris, three men and one woman sat around a cheap table littered with empty cans. They replayed the moment the guard went down and grinned. It felt like victory to them, like the spark that would turn to a fire.
They did not understand the robed figures. The first time one of the robed mana users appeared on screen, the woman leaned closer and scoffed.
"These demons have a strange sense of fashion," she snickered.
The others laughed.
Then the camera caught the second moment.
The robed figure appeared without warning. One breath, there was empty air; the next, there was a person in strange robes standing in a cleared room near the hospital foyer.
The robed figure took a small hourglass from a pouch. He turned it. The sand inside moved in a way that made the air around it look wrong.
One of the men swallowed. "What was that?"
The leader forced a laugh. "Who cares? We have a victory over magicals."
He did not know the word Unspeakable. He did not know what the hourglass meant.
The woman beside him was still smiling at the first clip, still trapped inside her own stupidity.
"Next time," she whispered, "we do more."
They were still celebrating because they did not know they had already been marked.
The magical part of the organisers watched from a different place.
A single television and four witches and wizards sitting too straight for comfort.
They had been useful. That was the problem.
They could not share intelligence. They could not hand over routes, names, or schedules. The contracts and oaths wrapped around their tongues and fingers, and every one of them had learned the boundary by pain. They had enchanted the coins and left them in dead drops. That was the only way they could do anything.
The youngest wizard tried to speak first.
"We should tell them who the Unspeakables are," the sentence started, then died.
His throat seized as if an invisible hand had closed around it. His face flushed. His eyes widened in panic as he clawed at his own collar.
The woman beside him caught his wrist and forced it down to the armrest. Blood welled at the corner of his mouth. His lips shook as he tried to push the word out again. Nothing came but a ragged breath.
The oldest among them reached for a glass of water and tipped it toward him without looking away from the television. The younger wizard drank with trembling hands, then sat back, silent, eyes wet with humiliation.
No one mocked him. They all remembered their own first lesson.
On the screen, the hospital foyer replayed in a loop. The dead guard, vanishing of the trash bin and containment followed by the Bastion shields.
Then the air in the cleared room shifted, and a robed figure appeared. Every person in the parlour went still. An Unspeakable.
The oldest man's fingers tightened on his glass until it creaked. His voice came out low, careful. "Unspeakables..."
The contract did not punish that phrase. It punished intent, not vocabulary.
The woman leaned closer to the television, eyes narrowing. "They are not using Aurors."
The oldest man's mouth went dry. He was aware of how the Unspeakables move; the outcome of their actions became inevitable.
This was on broadcast. This was the new order showing its teeth.
The Unspeakable produced a small hourglass.
The old wizard's face drained of colour. A Time Turner, the sand inside the glass shimmered. They understood what the mundane organisers did not. If the Department of Mysteries had stepped in with a Time Turner, then this was not an investigation that ended with arrests and court. This was a hunt that ran through time, through ledgers, through family lines. The oldest man straightened slowly. His voice came out steady. "We are finished."
No one contradicted him.
They sat and watched the hourglass turn, and the silence in the room stopped being choice. It became instinct.
The mundane organisers kept laughing while the traitors stopped breathing properly.
--
In Black Manor, Corvus was not aware of the situation.
He had two teenagers in a ritual room below ground.
Harry stood on the left and Draco on the right. Both had been marched through the door with the same instruction.
Do not touch anything and do not speak until spoken to.
Both obeyed.
The room was clean, stone and strong wards. Two braziers sat unlit at the corners.
Corvus faced them with his hands behind his back.
"This is a ritual refined and used by the Shamans of North America," he stated, voice flat. "It is simply superior to any other method of becoming an animagus."
Draco's eyes stayed fixed forward. Harry's jaw tightened, then steadied.
Corvus stepped closer to Harry's circle and tapped the air near his own temple with one finger.
"Remember, you will make eye contact only if you are sure of your mental strength and, of course, if you want the shape of the animal."
Harry held the gaze.
Corvus's attention shifted to Draco and continued to explain the steps of the procedure. Draco's throat bobbed once.
"This is a war of will." Corvus let the sentence hang until both boys' shoulders stiffened. "If you lose, you will simply forfeit your body to the animal."
Draco swallowed again and forced stillness.
Corvus did not mention that the ritual could be repeated or that multiple forms were possible. He stepped back.
Two perfect circles appeared on the floor.
They formed in a blink, lines clean as if a compass had carved them. Runes settled along the edge with a soft pulse.
Harry's eyes widened, Draco stared as if he had just watched someone bend the castle itself.
Wandless and silent, just like Professor Baier mentioned.
To them, it looked like an impossible casting.
To Corvus, it was a simple use of Psychic Mastery.
He ordered the boys. "Sit and relax."
Harry lowered himself into the circle. Draco followed, posture controlled and proud. Corvus's voice dropped into a chant.
The words hit the room like a key turning. Harry inhaled sharply, and Draco did the same.
Their bodies stayed seated, but their consciousness vanished.
Corvus watched them for a heartbeat, then lifted a hand and sealed the door with a quiet click of wards.
-
Upstairs, the drawing room continued its long wait.
Frank Longbottom stayed polite through it, which took more discipline than duelling. He accepted tea, then accepted that refusing a second cup would look like an insult, and then accepted a third because the house elves did not understand moderation.
Alice sat with her cup untouched for long stretches, eyes flicking to the door each time footsteps passed in the corridor.
Sirius tried to look relaxed and failed. Bellatrix looked delighted by the delay, like she had arranged the entire afternoon as entertainment. Narcissa kept her posture perfect and her expression calm, as if waiting for hours for an outcome was as ordinary as a staff meeting.
Frank finally cleared his throat. "Minister Black. We would like to make sure Harry is alright before we leave. We do not wish to impose..."
Arcturus waved the concern away with a small, elegant gesture. "Nonsense. I am as curious as everyone else."
His eyes flicked toward the door as if stone did not apply to him. "It has been around three hours."
He offered a room to rest. Frank declined with the same polite firmness.
They waited.
At the end of the fifth hour, the door opened.
Corvus stepped in.
Harry and Draco followed like they had swallowed fireworks.
Narcissa rose and went straight to Draco. Sirius and Alice moved at the same time for Harry.
Bellatrix drifted in after Narcissa with a grin that promised trouble.
Her eyes swept Draco's face. "Are you in your animagus form or your human form now?"
Draco looked like he wanted to answer and bite her at the same time.
Sirius grabbed Harry's face and turned it left and right like he was inspecting a purchase. "So what kind of monkey is your form?"
Harry slapped his hands away and glared. "Really, Sirius."
Arcturus cut through the noise. His attention landed on Corvus. "What are their forms?"
Corvus lowered himself into the enlarged armchair and let the room settle.
"Give them space, ladies and gentlemen."
The circle widened.
Corvus's gaze moved from Draco to Harry.
"Shift." He ordered.