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CANADA AFTER THE SEPARATION ACT OF 1867
While many elements of magical societies in America were being rocked hard by the Rail-Splitter's ongoing rampage against the undead, inhabitants under the administration of the newly "independent" magical government of the Dominion of Canada were looking at an undiscovered country that loomed before them full of promise the likes of which no magical could imagine.
Now effectively free of any constraints save for the commands of Queen Victoria's chosen governor general, Charles Monck, the 4th Viscount Monck — the native of Templemore in Ireland's County Tipperary was very supportive of whatever was done to enhance the lives of all Her Majesty's Magical Subjects of the Dominion and all allied magicals, human and non-human alike — and the logical suggestions of leaders of the International Confederation of Wizards at Geneva, the Canadian Ministry of Magical Affairs and the Canadian Wizengamot got to work in creating an open-minded society that would not only allow magicals of all stripes to prosper within the understandable constraints of the Statute of Secrecy, but also welcome foreign magicals who might want to seek a new destiny from whatever oppression they endured in their old homelands in Europe and elsewhere.
While the obvious problems of the non-"Canadian" territories of Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Rupert's Land and British Columbia meant the Ministry's geographical influence was initially limited just to the four original provinces in the summer of 1867, such changed rapidly as the normal side of the British Empire moved to divest all territory north of America to Ottawa's overall legal control. Temporary magical ministries in those colonies who had yet to join the Dominion were set up, though those personnel were folded into the central Ministry in Québec City as those colonies became new provinces of Confederation or were merged into the newly-created Northwest Territories to manage the old trade territory of the Hudson's Bay Company. Like America, Canada did not possess subordinate provincial or territorial ministries of magic; it was seen as an unnecessary extra layer of government between the leaders in Québec City and magical citizens of the Dominion, even with a much greater overall proportional number of magicals within Canada in comparison to other nations.
By 1870, the administrative organs of government had been restructured to see to the needs of all magicals across the land. The Ministry formed the Dominion Magical Police to serve as the law enforcement arm, which paralleled the creation of the Dominion Police two years earlier on the normal side of things. Inter-species relations and relations between migrant-descent human magicals and native-descent magicals was managed by a single Department of Magical Unity whose only real responsibility was to ensure that any disruptive issues between various groups didn't flare up into rebellion and risk Statute violations. To ensure the common defence against foreign threats and better aide the common order, the Department of Magical National Defence was formed to manage a new part-time "Regiment of Canadian Foresters" that would organize battalion-sized mixed combat groups in each of the provinces and the Northwest Territories, plus help form a naval militia once a special location to build ships was running smoothly. To the shock of observers from Europe, there were no special governmental teams created to suppress the various lunar therianthropes living in the Dominion, to say anything of other "violent" magical sentient beings. Safe houses that had been in existence since the days of New France were there for those people afflicted with lycanthropy and its affiliated illnesses to seek safety against spreading those afflictions to friends and loved ones. Atop that, the inherent rights of beings such as the Kobaloi or the Veela to practice their own forms of magic without undue restriction was enshrined in the basic law of the land. And while the Department of Magical Education was happy to coordinate with American magical schools as well as Hogwarts and other foreign schools as magical children came of age, the drive to create an indigenous Canadian academy that would teach Canadian values to local magicals began.
Right away, trouble began thanks to the furor in America. Vampires had always been seen as equal to other magical beings since the days of New France even if "demon-possessed" vampires were normally culled by law enforcement authorities when they were found if a Slayer wasn't available to deal with them. Daywalker vampires were especially seen as welcome among magical Canadians because of their obvious versatility in law enforcement and combat. Much to the shock of many foreign observers watching over the evolution of the Canadian ministry, the first Director of the Dominion Magical Police was a five-century old daywalker from Castile who settled in Kingston named José Ramón Fernando y Sebastian; he had fought to liberate his homeland during the Reconquista before he was turned by one of Adam Sewell's old allies. Because of that, Sewell's poisonous philosophy didn't gain any traction in the Dominion; those that fought with the five millennia-old daywalker to create the Confederacy that fled to Canada were captured by DMP officers and teleported into the Rail-Splitter's path.
However, when Abraham Lincoln began preaching for greater magical equality in the Union during times he rested, people of magical species on both sides of the border began to agitate for greater freedoms within America. That caused a storm of headaches among leaders in both the Department of Magic in Washington and the Ministry of Magical Affairs in Québec City. They didn't dare get on Lincoln's bad side even to ask him to stop making those speeches; the melancholy that had haunted the Rail-Splitter before his "death" at Ford's Theatre in 1865 had finally found expression in the ebony meson flowing in his veins and anything that upset the man could cause an explosion which could kill all around him. Neither the Department nor the Ministry felt it right or proper to interfere in the other government's affairs; people on both sides of the Great Lakes knew it was the friction between American conservatism and Canadian liberalism that helped unleash the Second Foresters War decades before. While there were many in America who were sympathetic to the cause of magical equality among the species, years of harsh enforcement of Rappaport's Law had ultimately created a culture of inflexibility in the halls of the Department and the Magical Congress, a school of thought that instantly balked at the idea of allowing any sort of greater freedom for any non-human magical out of the understandable fear that doing such threatened the very fabric of the Statute of Secrecy. What was worse in Canadian eyes, there was a growing "pureblood" movement in America who were clearly striving to remove long-entrenched democratic rights for no-maj-borns in the Union, disguising itself with the excuse of "proper" enforcement of Rappaport's Law in the face of "growing agitation" among non-humans. Worst of all, rumours of new generations of Scourers whose ancestors managed to evade the Foresters' brutal sweep of America after 1814 were starting to percolate, causing a growing sense of panic in Washington as various groups began to agitate for even more restrictions on both humans and non-humans alike to ensure no Statute breach, not to mention find a way to suppress the "idiot radicalism" seen as "haunting" the Dominion, which saw some of the pureblood leadership in America move to influence the normal Congress to see if "manifest destiny" could be pressed north of the 49th Parallel.
"There is a new Foresters War coming soon," the first post-1867 Minister of Magical Affairs, Dalton Saint-Pierre of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, advised the first commander of the Foresters, Colonel Oscar Kingsbridge of Edmunston, in 1876. "I suspect it'll start because of some foolish thing the Yankees will provoke. Prepare the Regiment. I want us to be ready."
Such an observation, Kingsbridge would later comment, was quite prophetic.
Then came the "Miracle of 1889"...
THE RISE OF THE PROTECTOR OF ALL LIFE
No one among the Niitsitapi of what is Alberta and northeast British Columbia had ANY idea what the Tear of the Stars was.
For as long as the lore elders could recall, the strange cave located near where modern day Fort Saint John on the Alaska Highway in British Columbia now stands had always held the curious metal necklace with the strange crystal on it that pulsed with a power that seemed as old as the very Earth itself.
Try as warriors of the Niitsitapi could to remove the Tear of the Stars from its stone perch in its cave, none succeeded; whenever anyone touched the thing, they were instantly vaporized by a power greater than anything imaginable.
Why was it there?
Who had created such a thing?
Why was it in the lands of the Niitsitapi of all places?
Fortunately, as exchange of knowledge between North America and other lands grew in the wake of first normal contact between the Old World and the New World, information was passed on to the Niitsitapi that revealed the existence of the strange dense crystalline material known as "mesonium" in Europe, whose main sources were in the blood of the Undying Lord Josef von Taserich and his "son", the Immortal Master Hosan Hirosuke, now living in Japan and serving the Heavenly Sovereign Meiji as the Restoration forced that island nation to modernize in the wake of threats from Europe. Thanks to that, it was discovered that the core of the crystal of the Tear of the Stars was ebony mesonium, with a middle shell of a ruby-red crystal, that in turn was encased with an opaque diamond-silver layer.
Still, it didn't explain what the Tear of the Stars was.
And then came that cloudy Wednesday morning in the early summer of 1889...
The area around the Cave of Tears (as the Niitsitapi called the place where the Tear of the Stars had been found) had been recently inhabited by daywalker vampire refugees of the Rail-Splitter's hunt, who formed a small village on the shores of the Peace River near where the Beatton drained into it, some distance from the site of an old Northwest Company trading post. All supporters of Adam Sewell's dream of a "nation of vampires" from the American South and knowing the Dominion Magical Police (not to mention the magical wing of the North-West Mounted Police, founded in 1875) and the Canadian Foresters' "V" Company would send them right into Abraham Lincoln's path, they stayed to themselves, not doing anything to draw the wrath of Niitsitapi bands, thus bring magical warriors and a certain undying lawyer from Illinois down on their collective necks.
Unfortunately, someone was about to expose them.
An orphaned woman named Dean Raeburn.
The woman born sixteen days after Confederation became law in Canada in 1867 — her proper name was "Deannette Antonia Raeburn"; the first name was a contraction of her grandmothers' names "Deanna" and "Annette", which she had come to despise with all her being — was a native of Queenston near Niagara Falls. Descent of Scottish traders who fled to Upper Canada after the Revolutionary War from New Jersey, Dean's father Daniel had been an investor in railroad and shipping companies on both sides of the border and had created quite a tidy pile to become one of the financial elite in the new Dominion. That attracted the jealousy of Dean's paternal uncle Edward, who arranged for the deaths of Dean's parents and twin sister in a fire in 1879. Able to flee thanks to sympathetic friends, Dean headed to the Territories, hoping to avoid her uncle until she found a place of safety. Eventually falling in among the navvies who built the Canadian Pacific Railway across the Prairies during the 1880s, she made her way to Fort William (now part of Thunder Bay), then moved on to Kenora, then Winnipeg and on to Regina, Calgary and finally Edmonton. There, in the old Hudson's Bay Company trading fort, she met a Niitsitapi precognitive who called himself "Long Dream", who sensed a great future about this orphaned girl who had endured many harsh winters in the unforgiving Canadian plains. With that, he escorted her west towards the Peace River valley...
...and a date with destiny.
On Dean's twenty-second birthday (17 July 1889) while riding for fresh food to her hosts who were camped on the Pouce Coupe River near where modern day Dawson Creek stands, she found herself encountering a shanty tavern full of what appeared to be American prospectors from the old Confederacy seeking their fortunes on the shore of the Peace. After greeting them, the native of Ontario felt something call out to her from a nearby cave. Noting her presence, one of the daywalkers decided to have a little "snack". It was then that a man in funeral black appeared on a running horse, swinging a woodsman's axe coated in silver. Hearing the scream of "Rail-Splitter!" from the just-exposed vampires made Dean flee into the cave...where she found a beautiful necklace with a glowing crystal. Hypnotized, she touched the Tear of the Stars...
The explosion of power that followed instantly transformed a hungry orphaned woman who endured over a decade of harsh cold and the constant threat of violation from horny railroad workers into something that matched Lord Rjazán' and Josef von Taserich themselves!
As magical seers around the world all declared on sensing that...
...the Protector of All Life had risen at last.
Now armed with power that seemed to equal the Sun, Dean charged out of the cave to intercept gunshots against a wand-welding woman watching the back of Abraham Lincoln. Stunned to see a local "no-maj" do something like that, Mollie Bean then stood there gaping as the strange girl with the near-Yankee flat accent draw out a chisel-pointed straight sword made of dark grey stone-like metal to physically RIP apart the vampires with brutal cuts at waist-level. Within a minute, the last of the vampires had been destroyed...which is when a cavalry troop of Foresters charged onto the scene riding beautiful pegasii. Before the leader of the troop, Captain Joseph Harlan (a descendant of New France's first minister of magical affairs) could ask what was going on, the strange woman with power that blinded the mage-senses of all the magicals there projected a beam of energy into the Rail-Splitter...which de-crystallized the ebony mesonium in Lincoln's blood to a more mentally-stable "ruby mesonium" state, thus draining the blood lust from the former lawyer and lifting the grief and melancholy that had haunted the man for years. Since he had established strong relations with the Niitsitapi magicals over the previous couple of years, Harlan turned to ask a smiling (and just-arrived) Long Dream this, "Is that the Tear of the Stars, Elder?"
"It's called a Power Jewel, Captain."
That was Dean Raeburn...
...who was about to become something quite unique in Canadian history.
THE MIRACLE OF 1889
Steven O'Brien of Galt (now part of modern day Cambridge) in Ontario, who had been elected the third Minister of Magical Affairs in 1887 after serving as Director of Magical Unity for two terms, would have preferred NOT to deal with this particular headache.
There were the positives of what came to be called the "Peace River Incident".
A famous vampire hunter had been rendered sane after being subjected to nearly thirty years of ebony meson poisoning.
A coven of daywalkers who supported the philosophy that nearly saw the United States ripped apart had been destroyed.
Then came the negatives...
Seers were flocking in droves to Canada to seek out this mysterious "Protector of All Life" who had just woken to her power...
Never mind the woman was an orphaned heiress of a large family fortune...
Never mind that said woman's uncle wanted to see her dead...
And given that said woman was a normal of all things...!
The battle lines were instantly drawn up.
On the one side stood all native Canadian magicals shoulder to shoulder — and who were glad to help other human magicals in the Dominion understand what was really going on — all the non-human magicals of Canada, sentient magical creatures like dragons, all the Foresters regardless of their ancestry and the Rail-Splitter himself.
On the other side was the International Confederation of Wizards, egged on by pureblood gentry in Europe, not to mention their slowly-rising American allies who were moving to seize the throttles of power within the Department of Magic.
In the middle was Dean Raeburn.
It was the perfect recipe for a magical war.
The Statute of Secrecy was clear on this matter:
Raeburn was a normal without magical relations, thus she had to be obliviated of knowledge when it came to existence of magic and the magical enclaves hidden around the world.
Everyone soon learned that her bond to the Power Jewel made that impossible!
Try as Canadian authorities might — even when the native of Queenston was receptive of the idea at the start after understanding the concept of mugalophobia — NO MAGIC OF ANY TYPE worked on her!
When ICW agents came to Québec City to force the "muggle" to submit and surrender her strange device, it quickly turned bloody.
To the Europeans, it was like facing the Undying Lord himself!
After confirming with Minister O'Brien that the ICW had no right to override Canadian magical law concerning the fate of any inhabitant within the territory of the Dominion, Raeburn used her Jewel to teleport them back to Europe!
This was after she had been forced to kill two with her "cat's claw" sword, which was forged of an impossibly dense material known to sentient beings on other planets by the term neutronium; it had been forged by the Jewel's omnipotent creators three billion years before — and wasn't THAT a mind-blowing concept! — from the heart of a collapsed star of all things!
"Please don't tell me people in this country are that boorish!" the native of Queenston pleaded to the Chief Witch of the Wizengamot, Jeanne Druvais of Moncton, after another group tried again within days of the original encounter in Québec City...and this time, they came ready to use the "Unforgivable Curses" to make the "muggle freak" submit to them.
Fortunately for Raeburn's personal sense of loyalty to the Dominion — to say anything of the safety of members of the Canadian Wizengamot, not to mention the maintenance of the Statute! — Madame Druvais immediately assured the native of Queenston that local magicals were quite open-minded in comparison to European purebloods.
After getting an immediate crash course on European magical blood politics, Raeburn scowled as she revealed her late father had bred horses for a hobby and had long learned to disallow close relations a chance to mate to avoid weak foals. As members of the Wizengamot and others showed Raeburn how Canadians loathed the European (and now American) attitudes towards "mudbloods" (to borrow the common British vulgarity for normal-borns), the banker's daughter proposed such people should be called "stalebloods" if they chose to "breed themselves into becoming 'squibs'". That endeared her to descendants of the née moldues from Québec and old Acadia, not to mention the descendants of no-maj-born migrants who joined the United Empire Loyalists after the Revolutionary War.
Thus, when the THIRD group from Geneva portkeyed in a week later to force her to submit to her "betters", Raeburn declared that Canada was a "civilized nation" that did not tolerate "staleblood fools", then sent them for a swim in Lac Léman outside Geneva!
The purebloods of Europe didn't appreciate being called "stalebloods".
Especially when muggleborns got hold of the insult and began using it against their "betters".
By the end of August of 1889, news of the "strange woman with the power of the Praetorian Guardian and the Undying Lord" and how she came to be the way she was made its way to normal-born advisors of various monarchs and other rulers of Europe thanks to friends in local magical ministries who were getting constant updates from Geneva. Enraged that someone who saved the sanity of a friend was being threatened for things she had no control over, Queen Victoria immediately issued a Magical Royal Proclamation declaring that if the Ministry of Magic did not withdraw support to the "mad assault the Protector of All Life", all who conspired against the Canadians would be guilty of Treason Against the Crown and sentenced to the most feared jail of all, Her Majesty's Prison Gonebren in the moors of Cornwall. Vladímir Taychéshko got Tsar Aleksándr III to use a Magical Imperial Decree to withdraw Russia's support on this issue, which was copied by Josef von Taserich — who was personally quite unnerved by the idea of a mere child getting her hands on something like the Power Jewel; until it had bonded with Dean, the Undying Lord hadn't sensed the ancient crystal whatsoever even when he had travelled to North America — persuading Kaiser Wilhelm II to pull Germany's support. That was followed by Kaiser Franz Joseph I pulling Austria-Hungary's support to the ICW while Hosan Hirosuke made the Heavenly Sovereign Meiji withdraw Japan's support (who in turn was followed by the Guāngxù Emperor of China and King Kojong of Korea) and Abraham Lincoln advising President Benjamin Harrison to use a Magical Executive Order to make the Department of Magic back off.
To the horror of the "wise elders" within those halls who thought themselves the greatest single power on all of Earth, the very sense of invincibility that had filled the halls of the International Confederation of Wizards for years was GONE!
No thanks to a MUGGLE of all things!
Even worse, when ICW leaders tried to impose sanctions on Canada for their "appalling lack of respect for enforcing the Statute of Secrecy" — and began plans to build an independent enforcement division that could sweep in and deal with "rebel" governments that defied the Confederation — the lack of support from many key players made it all fall flat.
Within a year of the "Miracle of 1889" (as Canadian magical historians later came to call it), dark lords all across Europe who smelled blood in the water concerning the "traitorous weakness" as showed by leaders of ministries moved to launch bloody rebellions that lasted well over two decades in some cases, critically bleeding out certain groups and leaving magicals unable to support their normal counterparts when the War to End All Wars was launched in the summer of 1914...
Not to mention a certain rebellion in America three years after Dean Raeburn helped Abraham Lincoln regain his sanity...
To Be Continued...
WRITER'S NOTES
The Reconquista ("reconquest") is the Spanish/Portuguese name for the period between 710-1492 when the Christians of the Iberian peninsula strove to recover the land from the Muslims that had invaded the peninsula from northwest Africa.
The Niitsitapi is the proper name of the confederation of native Americans known as the "Blackfoot".
Major Deannette Antonia "Dean" Raeburn is one of my first fictional creations; I began to devise the first version of her when I was in elementary school. I based her on Captain Marvel (AKA Shazam) (Billy Batson) as I saw him in the pre-Crisis of Infinite Worlds universe that existed in DC Comics, though I moved away from making her magical to making her a rough equivalent of a Green Lantern whose power source, the Power Jewel, projects energy into the body to enhance it to Superman-like levels. She has always been mentioned in many of my stories and made her first appearance at this website in The Thunderbird's Tears. The concept of Jewel Warriors, as noted before, first appeared in Wanderers.
Neutronium as used here is the densest known material in the Universe. I was inspired by the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine" and the coating of the Planet Killer which was destroyed thanks to the detonation of the impulse drive reactors of the USS Constellation at Jim Kirk's command. In effect, this is a collapsed atom composed of energy-neutral neutrons. Given what the standard size of a neutron star is (with an average diameter of 10 kilometres and a probable mass of four octillion [4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000] tonnes), the density of neutronium in such a case would be around 954,930,465.15 tonnes per cubic centimetre. With that, one could guess the potential overall mass of a straight-blade, chisel-pointed, single-edged sword about the size of a nodatchi such as the Cat's Claw sword Dean Raeburn uses. Of course, to prevent the Cat's Claw from punching through the Earth itself, ruby mesonium is wrapped around the hilt, reducing the gravitational pull on the blade to something more easily used in battle. Dean herself made the scabbard of ironwood infused with ruby mesonium taken from the Canadian Shield to prevent it from being wrecked by the sword.
Her Majesty's Prison Gonebren was first mentioned in The Icemaidens and the Philosopher's Stone. It was the main prison facility used by the government of British magicals until it was replaced by Azkaban in the early Eighteenth Century. In the universe of my stories, Gonebren (known to most British magicals as "You Know Where" or the "Unspeakable Place") is held in reserve; the magical keys that could open the place up being in the custody of the Sovereign, only loaned out to anyone whenever the Crown elects to directly intervene in magical affairs as shown in Wizards and Avalonians III. Gonebren is inhabited by the Hollows, the transformed spirits of dead normal people who had been wronged by magicals while they were still alive. And no, there's no correlation between the Hollows of Gonebren and the Hollows that appear in Bleach!
