Luna lets the letter go. The sheets of paper tear from her hand, soaring like a flock of doves. They rise, then fall, tugged here and there by the wind, jerking up and down until they finally disappear from view.
She is standing atop the largest dome she's ever seen, the grandest marvel the Wizarding World has seen in hundreds of years. And they are coming to tear it down.
Her hand rests, for comfort and safety—it's a long way down—on a copper cylinder. A cylinder so large it would take 60 men to wrap their arms around it. It juts out over an ice-kissed valley and stretches into the sky. The reflections of the sunset in the metal dot the treeline and sun dogs are chasing the sun over the horizon.
It took her a long time to find this mountain, to find the perfect place to erect her telescope. And now, it would seem, she'll barely have time to watch the stars. Tonight she'll watch the comet named Swan arrive, and tomorrow–tomorrow, the Ministry will arrive in the form of Percy Weasley, and she'll just have to breathe slowly in and out while she tells him they are just scared. They are the old guard wanting everything to stay the same, and he doesn't have to be. He doesn't have to be scared, doesn't have to rigidly hold on to the past. She will show him the comet. After dark, they will watch it move across the sky, past them, past, past, until only its misty tail can be seen.
It's much later, and the stars fill the sky so full they're falling into the cold lake in the valley. The lake that's so cold but never freezes over because the tiniest tendril of thermal heat seeps through the bedrock. Luna is standing by the telescope, leaning into the eyepiece. Staring out over the Astral Plane, as the centaurs would have it. She wonders what they see if they see a dragon languishing far, far beyond the sun. Do they see the stars dying?
She shifts the huge contraption with levers and wheels until the comet that seems to be coming for them comes into view. It looks ready to vanquish, set everything ablaze. Luna knows it won't. It's just passing by, just like a migrating Swan, large, heavy, impressive, but not dangerous. Only beautiful.
The sun rises as it is wont to do. At high noon the comet will be at its closest, but even with such an impressive instrument, Luna will not be able to see through the cloud cover. It doesn't distress her too much. Even the imminent loss is far from her mind while she roams the mountainside and the hills for herbs. The song she sings under her breath scares little creatures out of their hollows, and she laughs. By noon she will be back; by half-past one, she may have failed to convince Percy Weasley that a law does not need to be enforced–does not carry the weight of truth–just because it was written a long, long time ago. By half-past one, she may have failed to convince him to stay until the evening when the sun no longer obscures the stars. She may have failed to convince him to watch the comet that only comes every eight hundred years fly by.
Unbidden, the most terrible parts of the Edict of the Forbidden Muggle Arts, Codex XLII, come back to her. These are the parts that condemn her life's work to rubble.
Let it be known far and wide that all sorcerers, enchantresses, magical guilds, and arcane establishments are hereby sternly forbidden to embrace, employ, or mirror any contrivance, notion, wisdom, or creation begotten of the non-magical (Muggle) folk. Any edifice, mechanism, talisman, or craft of the mind discovered in defiance of the law shall be destroyed forthwith and without delay.
There is more. Of course, there is, but she pushes it out of her mind. What does it matter if the consequence is Azkaban when she knows she won't stand her ground? Knows, in an unusual lack of optimism and bravery, she won't because it won't matter. They will raze it anyway. She will start over somewhere else. Somewhere new. Somewhere far away from laws and their enforcers.