The Gravity of Magic
Everyone knows there's secrets in this world. Conspiracies and plots run rampant in our smallest endeavours. There are things hidden, waiting to be discovered by curious minds or used by those more conniving amongst us.
Chapter One:
The prime minister frowned. The morning newspaper was spread across her desk. There had been another massacre, this time in a shopping centre just out from London. 5 dead, 13 injured. According to the newspaper they had been cut down with a Samari sword by a man named Reid Devons, a previously thought respectable, middle-aged accountant.
Crime had skyrocketed in the last decade and the prime minister had recently been voted in after promising that she would crack down on crime and find solutions to the endless waves of senseless crimes across Britain. So Victoria Spader barely had a celebratory drink before sitting down in the fresh leather chair of her new office, determined to do just that and find solutions.
The problem was the crimes all did make sense. For example, Reid Devons had, according to the newspaper, confessed to taking a decorative Samari sword from his neighbours' collection, sharpening it and then taking it to the mall to seek retribution for the food poisoning he had gotten from the shopping centres food court barely a week earlier. Bizarre but isolated and unrelated to any other crime.
Victoria's frown deepened as she looked at the grainy newspaper photo of Reid Devons, trying to find some sense in the man's eyes. Like all the other massacres and murders there was none to be found. He just looked like a regular guy -he had a family, paid his taxes and was gainfully employed. If there was any pattern to the crime wave this was it –the cases were perpetrated by normal, happy seeming people and all of them had such strange motives. Old ladies killing their neighbours over untrimmed lawns, bus drivers driving through crowds of pedestrians.
Scientists had been bamboozled, looking for newly evolved, or engineered viruses. Sociologists were trying to trace the crimes back to find a tipping point and psychologists were studying the killers so deep they knew more about them than their own partners.
Setting out to outline her speech, which would be her first official public address as Prime Minister, Victoria made a side note to ask her assistant to get her more research reports on the crimes. She wanted to up the crime research budget as her first move, though others had been arguing that all available resources needed to be put into crime enforcement and harsher laws. At the rate the country was going there would be more people in prison than the U.K. as many people had been leaving the country and getting as far away as possible.
Just as she had emailed her assistant she heard a pompous cough coming from the corner of the room. Startled she looked up but there was nothing there except for an old painting in the corner of the room. Just as she looked back down at her work she heard the coughing again. It wasn't until the painting in the corner of the room started to talk that she was startled enough to knock all her work off the desk.
"Please rise to great the Emperor of Magic, Lord Voldemort" said the man in the painting and before Victoria could think too hard about what strange disease she might have contracted the fireplace glowed green and a man stepped out from it.
He was a tall and aristocratic looking man. Victoria stepped back further standing behind her chair. She would have even if he had entered the room in a less startling way. He was a man that people would find themselves drawn to at a distance but not up close.
Up close he was too intense, too angry looking. He stared at her as one might look at a piece of bubble gum stuck to the bottom of their shoe, even as he began to introduce himself.
"I am Lord Voldemort and I am the Emperor of Magical Britain and as such have come to educate you, the new muggle leader, to the way the world really works."
He didn't hold his hand out to greet her and Victoria wasn't quite sure how to respond. If he hadn't stepped out of her fireplace she would have been calling security faster than you could blink.
"Magic?" she asked after a beat.
"Yes, magic. It is the thing which elevates a percentage of the population above the rest. It gives us the power to transform ourselves and our environments. To defend ourselves from enemies and death alike and to live above the plebeian problems you poor muggles dismiss as being just a part of life."
As the man, Voldemort, said this he demonstrated each point by turning her teacup into a spider, duplicating it and then sending a green light at the eight-legged creature which made it crumple in on itself dead.
He did it all without a word, like one might absentmindedly make a cup of tea while talking on the telephone.
"I'm sorry Mister-"
"-Lord"
"Yes, Lord Voldemort, I don't understand. You're saying that there are people living, right here in Britain, right under our noses, that can do magic –real magic and nobody else even notices?"
"Little Minister, you all notice. You all walk past magic everyday but it is above you and none of you really wants to know, so you don't. Instead you are all happy, more than happy to come up with other, more common explanations than to know that you're all running around as mice amongst pits of snakes."
"How many? How many people are there like you?"
"Like me? None. There are however many who can wield magic. Of course the exact number is above your pay grade."
He spoke to her like she was a petulant beggar on the side of the street.
"Then why are you here?" asked Victoria suddenly curious as to his motives.
"I am here due to archaic laws of a bygone era. They state that the leaders of both nations must know of the other. That I must make your acquaintance. Frankly I wouldn't have bothered otherwise but one can only pass through so many changes in the law at a time."
"Well alright, you've introduced yourself then…" Victoria stated, despite finding herself more than curious about this magic business, she more than anything wanted this Lord Voldemort out of her office as soon as possible.
"Now, now, are you sure?" asked Voldemort, who was now toying with the newspaper on her desk and scanning her notes on the crime waves. "I could perhaps enlighten you on this 'crime wave'. Since I am here. In the name of diplomacy of course.
"You know something about the crime wave" Victoria said.
"Yes, the wizarding world has recently emerged from a time of conflict. Of course war couldn't not be noticed by you muggles in its entirety so a special division in the ministry was assigned to giving reasons, logical reasons to these little skirmishes. Not to worry your little head though. The conflicts are dying down now and the wizarding world is finding its new equilibrium."
"You, your people are responsible for all this?" asked Victoria with a shiver, imaging a person in place of the crumpled spider Voldemort had demonstrated magic on.
"Not my people. There was a rebel group who insisted on creating anarchy and skirting laws and even their own government. You don't need to worry about it." Voldemort stated.
That was seemingly the full extent that he was willing to speak on the topic as he quickly issued parting platitudes before climbing back into the fire place and disappearing in a flash of green.
Victoria sat very still after he had left, collecting her thoughts, before pulling out a new sheet of paper and writing everything she had found out. She would need to put someone on it and find out more about these people, these wizards, and if they were as dangerous as Voldemort had eluded to.