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.”
Rose crowded over James’ shoulder where they huddled in a corner of the common room. Awed and frightened, she asked, “What does it mean? The Loom was the destiny of the whole world! How can it be destroyed?”
“Well, technically, the tapestry in the Loom was our destiny,”
Zane shrugged vaguely in the mirror glass, “The Loom was just the machine recording it. And the Vault was protecting the whole kit and caboodle. For all the good it did. Point is, the Loom had been shut down ever since Judith broke into the Vault back in our third year and stole the crimson thread, bringing Morgan here. But at least there was always the possibility that it could be started up again if the thread was somehow put back, and some version of Morgan sent back to her own destiny. That’s what’s been keeping things together in our world, although less and less every day. Now…” He raised both hands, palms up, in a helpless gesture.
“But…” Ralph said slowly, “We’re all still here. I mean, right?
So the world’s destiny can’t be really ended. Can it?”
Zane looked grave. “Professor Jackson says that the Loom was like the load-bearing wall in a house. Cut it down and the house may still stand for awhile out of sheer habit, but slam the wrong door or step on the wrong creaky floorboard, and boom. The whole place comes down forever. And he means forever forever.”
James shook his head fretfully. “But Petra was so certain it would work. What could have happened?”
Zane didn’t know, and no one else had the slightest guess.
As the evening wore on and the sun set on Sunday night, James found himself nearly mad with worry and confusion. In a moment of desperate inspiration, he leapt from his seat in the common room and tramped up the steps to his dormitory, Ralph and Scorpius following curiously behind.
“What are you about?” Ralph asked, frowning as James bent and heaved open his trunk.
Scorpius sat heavily on his own bed. “I think the stress has finally cracked him. I knew it was bound to eventually.”
James ignored them. Leaning over his trunk, he rooted inside, raking his hand through piles of laundry, wrinkled parchments, musty books, his new dress robes still wrapped in paper, some ratty and bent quills, his old trainers, his spare spectacles, and a surprising array of miscellany. Hectically, he tossed handfuls of random contents behind him, digging deeper into the recesses of the trunk.
“Where is it,” he groused urgently to himself, his voice muffled in the depths. “I almost always carry it with me. The one time it might be really useful…”
Ralph approached tentatively and knelt down next to the trunk.
A little worriedly, he asked, “What? What are you looking for?”
“Ah-ha!” James suddenly cried, leaning back and brandishing something in his upraised hand.
Ralph peered at it, still frowning. “What is it? Looks like an old Winkle.”
James didn’t answer. Scooting back and pushing aside a pile of miss-matched socks and old arithmancy notes, he put the tiny parcel of paper down onto the floor. Sitting back up, he scrambled to produce his wand, then pointed it at the parchment and uttered a short, breathless spell.
With a brief flash, the parcel of paper sprang open like an origami flower, blossoming into a sheaf of creased old parchments, covered in masses of scrawled handwriting.
Scorpius slid from his bed and moved to join Ralph and James, who leaned over the parchment, frowning with concentration.
James shook his head and squinted at the parchments. Wand still in hand, he raised it and said, “Lumos!” The wand lit, illuminating the old parchment with unearthly clarity. As always, Petra’s handwriting covered the pages, but now it was so hectic and dense, so scratched out and scribbled over, that it was a virtual ink-blot of chaos.
In a low, awed voice, Ralph asked again, “What is it?”
“It’s Petra’s dream story,” James answered, distracted. He reached and flipped over the top parchment. The backside was also covered with scrawled words and sentences, built up to a nonsensical strew, as was the page beneath. Almost nothing was legible.
“Her… what?” Ralph quavered.
James blinked and remembered that he had never shown anyone Petra’s dream story before. He had told them about it, but for some reason he’d never shown them. It had been his and Petra’s shared secret.
Through it, she had sent him private messages on occasion, usually when he most needed to hear from her. At other times, the pages had offered a glimpse into the sometimes complicated and feverish world of her thoughts.