And then, distantly, the silence was interrupted by a chorus of distant yells and howls of surprise.
As a single mass, the crowd of students hurried to the windows along the corridor wall, peering out into the sunlight. James saw nothing at first. Then, with a jolt, he spied something falling toward the Quidditch pitch. It was a person on a broom, tumbling end over end, followed by two more and a couple of Bludgers, dropping like stones.
They dropped past a fringe of trees, sparing everyone the sight of them crashing to the pitch below.
“Their brooms gave out,” Graham Warton said in a high, disbelieving voice. “They were practicing for tomorrow’s match, the Slytherins were! And their brooms gave out! Did you see it?”
James still had his wand in his hand. He held it up suddenly.
“Lumos,” he commanded in a dry voice.
Nothing happened. His wand protruded pointlessly from his hand, as dead as a stick.
He looked up from it, dread suddenly filling his chest, and his gaze met Rose’s as she pushed through the crowd, coming alongside him.
“Look!” Nolan Beetlebrick said suddenly, pointing to the window again. “Do you see it?”
James pressed his face to the glass again as Rose crowded in next to him.
It was the greenhouses this time. They were shaking as if in the teeth of a windstorm, throttling so that their glass panes vibrated and cracked. Some began to shatter in places, their shards bashed aside by unfurling leafy tentacles and thorny vines. Whatever plants were capable of locomotion, they were beating at the glass, straining for release, breaking through and boiling upward in writhing, twining masses.
Professor Longbottom burst through the door of the centre greenhouse, his robes torn, green vines twisted about his arms and legs.
He swatted at them, pulled them off and threw them to the ground, stamping on the writhing bits and producing his wand. He pointed it back at the greenhouse, seemed to call a spell, and then raised his wand, examining it in silent surprise as nothing happened.
Little did James know, at that moment, the extent of the event as its various effects befell the entire world.
In nearby Hogsmeade, a group of three Muggle hikers stumbled into the High Street, having suddenly encountered an entire mysterious village where only dense trees and brush had been moments before.
They wandered into the unlocked door of The Three Broomsticks, wide-eyed and gape-jawed, as Madame Rosemerta called helplessly, “Who are you? You shouldn’t be here, now! You shouldn’t be here!”
In London, the recently repaired brick wall separating Diagon Alley from the Muggle city proper cracked, bowed, and then collapsed in a rain of dust, dry bricks, and fresh mortar. The proprietor of the Leaky Cauldron, an old wizard with a nose the size and texture of a blood orange, peered out the rear of his establishment, took one look at the demolished wall, and then hurried out the front, jamming an old fisherman’s cap onto his head and leaving a sign swinging on the locked front door: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, OR THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, WHICHEVER COMES FIRST.
In recently reopened and repopulated New York City, thousands of Muggle denizens looked up from the brief earthquake that had only just subsided, blinking at the sight of innumerable strange signs and establishments as they materialized all over and atop the Muggle city, along with suspended thoroughfares of flying buses and broom-riders, many now struggling to stay aloft as the world’s magical field flickered disastrously. One such Muggle, an old cabbie of Pakistani descent with a tweed cap pressed down over his thick greying hair, sighed and shook his head wearily. “Not again,” he muttered to himself, as screams of awe and terror began to rise from the streets all around.
In Philadelphia, where the quake had been worst of all, streets bulged and windows shattered for blocks in every direction as a tiny, empty lot surrounded by an old stone wall suddenly expanded, blasting outward to a size of several square blocks, shoving space and time aside like an erumpent crowding onto a bus. Vehicles screeched to a halt or rammed into each other as streets rearranged themselves, entire blocks resituated, street signs spun, reoriented, and grew entirely new names.
And centred above it all, a sudden storm threw waves of boiling clouds out over the city, swirling and spiraling down over a single dark point, forming a sort of metaphysical compass pointing not at true north, but at the hub upon which the wheel of time and destiny turned—a strange and ancient device buried deep beneath the stone dome of the Alma Aleron Hall of Archives.
In the darkness beneath that dome, two hundred feet down, surrounded by raining grit and groaning stone as terraces and iron stairways tilted, crumbled, and began to crash in on themselves, two voices called to each other in shocked alarm.
“Destroyed!?” Petra Morganstern shrieked, her hair grey with dust, her eyes wild with horror and surprise. “How can the Loom be destroyed!?”
“Sabotage,” Donofrio Odin-Vann gasped, his face bleeding from a wide cut across his forehead. He limped to her from the ruin of the Vault where its brass and crystal leaves lay warped in on themselves, or broken, or melted to glowing sludge by the force of the magical blast which had just shaken the entire earth. “Someone, somehow… they knew we were coming. They set up a technomancic chain reaction. It was triggered the moment that we approached with the thread and began the spell of replacing it…”
Behind him, and all around, the walls shook violently. A dull roar echoed from high above as levels began to collapse down onto each other like dominoes, disintegrating and crushing thousands of ancient, priceless relics and their stored memories.
Petra’s eyes sparked with furious, desperate light. “But how is that even possible! Who could have known! Why would they have risked the balance of the entire world just to stop me!?”
Odin-Vann grabbed her arm, began to pull her away from the destroyed Loom. A snarl of frayed threads and torn tapestry smoked from the ruin. The Loom itself was nothing more than a smouldering frame of char. “It doesn’t matter! Not now! We must go before the entire place comes down on our heads!”
“No!” Petra cried in fury, immobile as stone, her eyes steaming like dry ice. “It can’t be finished! I cannot be stopped!”
“There is another way!” Odin-Vann shouted, shaking her and making her look at his face. “It will cost much, but there is one final option that I never told you about! A last, ultimate resort! But only if we leave now!”