James Potter and the Crimson Thread

22. THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Professor Odin-Vann didn't return that night, or at all on Saturday.

James, Rose, and Ralph finally grew impatient on Sunday afternoon and knocked on his door, but to no avail. The sound of sneezing had stopped from within—either the recording had worn out or the trained mimicking beast had finally grown bored and either given up or escaped.

"Maybe he's asleep," Ralph whispered, listening close to the door, but Rose shook her head.

"There's nobody in there. You can tell by the silence of it. He's not returned yet."

As they wended their way disconsolately back through the weekend silent corridors, passing through sunbeams dense with floating motes of dust, James asked, "It couldn't have worked. Whatever he and Petra tried, it must have failed. Right?"

Rose shrugged and sighed. Uncharacteristically, she had no hypothesis or comment whatsoever.

The Daily Prophet weekend edition called the earthquake a

"temporary shift in magical polarities", quoting a technomancy professor from the wizarding university in Warsaw. "These things happen with cosmic regularity, though in cycles of decades or centuries, thus few alive experience more than one such event. There is nothing to be concerned about now that the moment has passed."

The rest of the newspaper had been filled with stories of the effects of the quake, most fairly minor, but a few with serious consequences. A few houses and buildings had collapsed, not from the tremor itself, but from the brief interruption of magical force, breaking the spells that had kept the ramshackle old structures intact and upright. James mused that the Burrow probably would have been one such casualty if Merlin had not shored it up himself, being part owner and occasional resident. Other stories were variously bizarre or inexplicable. A wizarding zoo in Russia was suddenly overrun by freed beasts when its magical locks failed. Similarly, the American wizarding prison, Fort Bedlam, saw the escape of several inmates when their unplottable exercise yard suddenly burst out into the Muggle city of Phoenix, Arizona, appearing right in the centre of a busy Muggle park. Elsewhere, a wizarding warehouse full of crated vials of Floo powder mysteriously exploded, igniting the thousands of vials and thus sending bits of burning crate shooting like fireworks out of hundreds of random hearths all around Wales. One such Floo misfire lit a cottage on fire, burning it and a nearby barn to the ground. Thousands of injuries were reported worldwide, and, tragically, more than a dozen deaths, most from failed brooms during high altitude flights.

"Professor Jackson says it was no normal event, no matter what the papers say," Zane proclaimed seriously from the Shard later that afternoon. "There was an assembly in the theater about it and he told us everything. Basically, all the magic in the world is tied together in a huge invisible field, kind of like the magnetic poles of the earth. Something broke the field for a few seconds, completely disrupted it, like a huge hand flipping a switch, turning off magic for a few seconds. It came back on, but just barely. And nobody knows how long it's going to last now, or how strong it will continue to be."

"But what caused it?" James asked, keeping his voice low and leaning close to the Shard. "Was it Petra and Odin-Vann? Did they succeed in their plan?"

"I don't know if it was them," Zane admitted with a shake of his

head. "I haven't heard a peep from either of them. But if it was them, it didn't work, and that's the understatement of the century. The Archive's been completely destroyed. The Loom is gone, no more than a pile of ash buried under a hundred tons of dirt and stone. Nobody knows for sure what caused it. But there's no repairing it."