This street had been Ivana's whole life. It was where her parents bought their first home in the city, to give her a chance at a good education. This was where Hana had so often bossily demanded to play with her, her best friend since age four. And where Marko had given her those flowers she'd kept in a glass vase, until she had them pressed and framed to preserve their appearance.
Now the frame was burned, the flowers turned to dust, and their home among the many riddled with holes small and large. The brick house of a family friend had a gaping wound in the second floor. And the graveyard in which Marko lay was desecrated with fire for no reason beyond simple cruelty. How was it that a life of joy had turned to such indescribable horror in so little time?
A sharp intake of breath from her side was the only indication she received of Luka's pain, and she forced herself to loosen her white-knuckled grip on his hand. Her mouth was too dry to attempt an apology, but the nine-year-old made no other acknowledgement of it as they followed her father through an alleyway. He'd grown what felt like years in the past few months. The communist-era tenements loomed over them as they shuffled through the wreckage.
"Hajde!" said her father, waving them into the old corner shop she used to buy Coca-Colas from. He ushered her, Luka, and her mother inside. Ivana tried not to cry as she glimpsed how ghostly pale her mother's face was.
The war was supposed to be at its end. The governments were said to be stripped of their leaders, coups upon coups leading to a complete breakdown of communication, leaving only splinter factions. By whom she didn't know — her father thought it was the Americans, her cousin seemed to think it was the Russians, but nobody actually knew. There were so many rumors. (Ivana preferred the one about the pale angel come to smite the attackers, black-haired and green-eyed.)
What sounded like violent ripping echoed through the night sky, sounds she had come to associate with artillery rounds flying overhead, followed by the sharp cracks of their explosions. Her father pushed them back into the building, urging silence. They stayed still, not daring to breathe too loudly. These moments of peace between the distant pops somehow seemed worse. Ivana glanced at Luka, hating the wide vacant look in his eyes, and asked him if he was okay. He nodded silently.
When nothing more struck the nearby streets, her father led them out again, leading them toward the western outskirts of the city. Few people were left in this area, and those who remained rarely went out except during the black of night.
Somewhere an artillery round exploded, so far away she didn't even feel it. And then another, muted and sounding a bit off, as if it exploded from far above her. She glanced up toward the sky, her frown deepening, and saw some smoke rising from nothing some hundred meters above the ground. Strange, but she kept moving.
But then, as they passed another block, all sounds of artillery and bullets ceased very suddenly. They waited in the shadows for a minute, then two, until her father held a finger to his lips and left them to peer around the corner. He muttered something to himself, then came back and gestured them along, westward.
The desolate streets seemed far longer and emptier than they did during daytime. The ruins of makeshift blockades from the initial days of the invasion slowed them down, and they had to avoid the taller buildings, not knowing if there were snipers in them. With how heavy the bombardments had been, it was unlikely those teetering apartment blocks housed riflemen still, but Ivana had heard of a few people come to regret such presumptions.
A hard rough voice cut across the silence.
"Stani!"
Ivana's heart dropped through her stomach, and she, with her family, turned sharply to stare in horror at the five soldiers pointing rifles at them.
"Ne mrdaj!" said the one who had already spoken. "Dođi ovamo. Polako, sada."
Her father stepped forward first, holding his hands up. "Samo želimo da odemo. Molim te, pusti nas. Molim te! Nismo —"
"Začepi jebote!" said the man. "Dođi već ovamo, jebote."
But her father did not come, as the man had commanded. Maybe it was in the expressions of the men, but her father seemed to know nothing good would come out of this. He whispered to Ivana and her mother, to get behind him, to get ready to run, to leave him behind —
Then a shot rang out in the quiet air, the shock of it rippling through every fiber of Ivana's skin. It seemed time had slowed just for this moment, as if this was the climax of her life, and she watched her father's torso jerk, and him fall to a knee, a hand jumping out to catch him from falling flat on his face.
Her mother's scream came faint to her ears. Ivana stared, uncomprehending. Behind her, Luka let out some shaky gasp. The men with the guns moved toward them, yelling something that Ivana could not even think to begin to understand. Her father fell the rest of the way to the ground.
Then everything went completely silent. The approaching steps of the soldiers ceased, her mother was no longer screaming, and her father was staring ahead with a shock Ivana had never seen in his eyes, his hands shivering as he clutched at his wound.
She followed his gaze.
Before the men, a few feet above them, hovered five rifles. They hung in the air eerily, unmoving even in the wind, as if they were suspended from reality altogether. The men stared up at them with eyes blown wide open, and a deep horror slowly seeping into them.
A whooshing sound swept over them all from the east, and turning her head Ivana saw a gust of wind blow up dust toward them. As it settled, she caught only a glimpse of black-haired woman brandishing a polished stick before the men cried aloud and clutched their heads as they fell to the ground.
Ivana did not breathe. She didn't dare to.
The woman spared the men no further glance as she walked swiftly to her father, who stared wide-eyed on his side, clutching his wound. She twirled her stick in a loose circle and an ethereal cat burst forward and circled them, bringing with it a warmth that she hadn't truly felt since the beginning of the war, like how she felt sitting before a fireplace in the winter, with the sound of Hana's pig-like laughter in her ears, and the sight of Luka's smiles, and the sensation of Marko's touch.
The ghostly feline slowed to a stop right before Ivana, whose mind seemed to have come to a complete halt. As the woman knelt beside her father and moved the hand covered in blood, Ivana saw the green eyes. She could not breathe: the black hair, the green eyes, the fierce beauty — the angel was real.
Prayers began spilling from her mother's mouth, and tears from her eyes.
Her father trembled on the ground, but kept his hand away, revealing the bullet wound. The woman put the end of her stick — a wand!— near the hole in his skin, and the blood vanished.
Then the skin began to heal itself at a pace that made Ivana wonder if she too had been killed, and these were the final delusions of her dying mind. And before she could think further on it, before she could think anything, her father sat up like a man half his age, his shock still present on his face, as if he'd never been shot at all.
Her mother began sobbing, her revenant mutters turned incomprehensible. The soldiers were silent, staring up at the sky with blank eyes, but still alive.
Suddenly the spectral cat darted off, to a side street, then right through a building's wall —
A moment later some kind of Land Rover sped around a corner. It somehow missed all the debris, and managed to squeeze through a gap between a concrete wall and a battered shipping container that should've been far too small to fit through, before braking to a stop nearby. Ivana spied a large dust-covered red cross on the side, breaking up the forest-green of the vehicle.
A figure stepped out from the driver's seat, dragging a large sports bag behind them, dressed in dark clothes and wearing a drab olive helmet with another red cross on it. Briefly Ivana wondered if he was carrying a hand grenade, but no — in the slightly less dark clearing, it was revealed to be a glass bottle with some dark fluid within. He knelt down next to Ivana's father, ignoring the slight flinches from the rest of them. He unstoppered the glass bottle, which spelled faintly of copper.
"Popij ovo," the man said, in very stilted Bosnian, like he was simply reading aloud from a tourist handbook. Her father made a slight face even as he forced it down. The man dug inside the sports bag and handed him a plastic bottle of water, unsealed. "Popij," he said again.
The medic stood up, ignoring her father's thanks, and turned instead to the green-eyed woman.
"I don't have any room left in the back," he said, and though Ivana didn't understand a word he said, his stress was evident. " The artillery from earlier hit an apartment, brought it down."
The woman already had a frown on her face, but whatever he said turned it into a scowl. "What the hell is wrong with these people? I've crippled them in every way, and it's still not enough."
"Cut off the snake's head, only for it to be a hydra."
"Let's just get this one out of here," said the woman, gesturing dismissively at Ivana's family. "I'm going to do one more sweep of this town, then we can Obliviate them all and go home."
A moment of silence stretched between the two of them, neither quite looking at the other, and Ivana and her family wondering if they should make any sort of noise at all. Eventually, the medic spoke, still staring past the woman and not particularly focused on anything.
"I hate this place," he said, and unlike his earlier attempts at Bosnian, this seemed well-rehearsed, perfected over hundreds of utterances.
The woman turned her dark look in his direction. "Then go home. I never wanted you to see all this."
The medic ignored her, sighing, and turned back to the ambulance. "You can handle this family, then? One more person can ride shotgun if they need to, but I don't think they'd want to be split up."
She didn't answer at first, instead glaring at the side of his head. Then she said, "Yeah. I'll take them to the camp."
The man gave a tired nod of acknowledgement before picking up the bag and tossing it into the cabin, and pulling himself in after it. The engine sounded muffled, as though it was only heard behind a thick curtain. He didn't even bother to look in the mirrors as he reversed at reckless speed, barely avoiding the piles of rubble, spun the car around in a more dramatic turn than was necessary, and sped off. Even as she watched, the forest-green paint seemed to bleed away, leaving only shades of grey, same as its crumbling surroundings — but perhaps she was just seeing things in the darkness, and it turned a corner before she could take a second look.
The woman rubbed at her eyes for a moment, then looked down on Ivana and her family with an emotion in her eyes that Ivana didn't understand. Ivana wondered if she was an angel or a witch, for no angel would be accompanied by an automobile like that, surely.
Then the woman said in sloppy Bosnian, "Ja ću uzet dva od ti prvo. Ja imam dobro mjesto — za sve vas. Samo mogu uzeti dva odmah."
Her father immediately took Ivana and Luka by the wrist and pulled them forward. Ivana stumbled at the sudden movement, but she didn't resist. Her mind was a jumbled mess, filled with anxiety and a screaming bewilderment, again wondering if her eyes were to be trusted. Another part of her, though, simply wanted nothing more than to let this angel or witch take her to safety, wherever that might be. She glanced down towards her son, whose eyes were no longer dull and glassy, but filled with childlike wonder. For Luka, then, if not herself.
"Sada, molim te!" said her father; his own mind regarding the woman was clearly already made up.
She held out an arm and told Ivana and Luka to hold on tightly. Ivana glanced at her father. There was caution somewhere behind the fear and relief, but he gave her a nod and she grasped the woman's forearm, and told Luka to do the same.
Ivana gave her mother a last glance, and tried to not worry about how utterly stunned and frightened and awed she looked. Then she closed her eyes.
Her arm jerked forward, pulling the rest of her body, and then jerked back, putting her right back into the position she was already in, as if she hadn't moved. Ivana's eyes opened. She was still clutching the woman's arm, harder than was probably necessary. They were still in the same clearing as before. Nothing happened. She let go of the woman's arm.
The woman frowned, and then her black hair began to change, slowly fading away into a pale blonde, and her eyes into an icy blue. She held up a few strands of her hair with her fingers, then let them go.
"Took them long enough," she muttered, then she sighed. "Whatever." She twirled her wand again, letting the spectral cat shoot somewhere eastward, then looked at the four of them. "Trči."
Her father must've seen the resignation and apprehension in her eyes too, for he got them all on their feet and ushered them westward.
Before they could move more than a few steps, however, a human shadow appeared in the gloom of the alleyway they'd planned to cut through. Coming to a halt, her father pulled them in a different direction, apparently sensing danger, but stopped just as quickly, for two other figures appeared in the shadow of an apartment building. They were about the age of Ivana's father, with greying hair and weathered faces, but with a grace and fluidity in their movements that belied confidence and training. Her father pulled them down to the ground next to a dust-covered car and hushed them.
Three more came from another street, totaling six altogether. None of them looked at Ivana or her family, but at the witch. Most of them remained in the darkness, waiting, keeping cover behind rubble and debris, while one continued forward, until he stood some twenty meters from the woman. He was darker-skinned, dressed in a dark purple robe, and wore a turban. A wand was in his hand. He called out to the witch.
"You have been very difficult to pin down," he said, and though Ivana could not understand him his voice was soothing, almost melodious. "You have slipped through our fingers time and time again. I must commend you on your skill, at least."
The witch stayed silent.
"Three weeks we've been following you," he continued easily. "My colleague here was so certain the trap he set in Goražde would finally catch you. It was a clever bit of spellwork," he said with a glance at one of the men behind him, who scowled. Then he turned back to her, and his tone was a little more serious. "I understand what you're doing, and why. It is a terrible feeling to sit by and watch war ravage a people, to see its innocents suffer and do nothing."
The witch still did not speak, and simply stood there, her eyes on the man. Her posture and sharp focus reminded Ivana of a cat readying to pounce.
"I have seen the kindness in your heart," he said. "That is why I am speaking to you now, instead of the alternative. I do not wish to come to odds with you. Though you and I might disagree on the Statute, the Confederation has been trying to better the world for a long, long time. We have learned to do so with caution and subtlety… and we have learned this from experience." A silence hung in the air for a moment. Then he finished, "With your permission, I am willing to write a letter of recommendation to the Confederation for the courage, skill, and heart you have shown over the past weeks. I promise you, your efforts would go a longer way if you were to work with the Confederation, with all the intelligence and resources at its disposal."
And finally, the woman spoke.
"But first, I turn myself in with my wand," she said, and whatever she might have said, Ivana thought, it came with the distinct tone of someone who did not quite agree with the gentle words of the man.
He gave a small smile. "It's nowhere near as humiliating an experience as you suspect. Simply procedure, I assure you."
The woman closed her eyes, then sighed.
"No."
The man in the turban watched her for some time. When he spoke, there was a genuine grandfatherly undertone of concern in his voice. "Are you certain? My personal feelings aside, you have broken the Statute, and we cannot simply let you go. I was being truthful when I said I do not wish to come to odds."
"It's a nice offer. Convincing, even." She shook her head. "But I've broken the law so spectacularly" — she laughed a little to herself — "I really, really doubt it'll end well for me."
"Not so spectacularly as you might suspect," he said gently. " We were impressed by your diligence in covering your presence here… rumors remain, but that is all they are: rumors. But even if so, that which is broken can be mended. Can it not?"
The woman gave a sad smile. "I like you, if you're being honest, and I believe you are. But it's not up to you to decide my fate." And even from this distance Ivana could see the regret in her eyes. "I promise not to use any serious curses if you don't."
Another man stepped forward with a growl, his countenance that of a grizzled veteran. "We're not here to hurt anyone," he said, "but you'll put that wand down if you want any chance of walking free after this." The turbaned man closed his eyes with a short sigh.
The rest were waiting in darkened shadows of buildings behind her, surrounding her from three directions. They all seemed relaxed, as though they'd done this plenty of times before. But the witch tensed and seemed ready for attack.
The first flash of red came from behind the woman, entirely absent of noise, but she was already stepping out of its path as if sensing it — then the street around her seemed to shatter into pieces, and a thousand shards of concrete rose into the air around her as she twisted and fired a swift spell toward her first attacker, who just barely materialized a silver mirror-like shield before him.
At the same time three other lights shot at her, each of them failing in the floating field of debris. A great force exploded from the wand of the man in the turban, but rather than blowing the fragments away, they simply spun around the woman like a child's mobile above a crib gone out of control.
The next few spells blinded her, and Ivana turned her head, catching only flashes of light that seared her eyes even through her eyelids. Something like a clap of thunder forced her eyes back open. They regained focus just quick enough to see one of the wizards get blasted backward, hit a car with his legs, and cartwheel through the air out of view.
A sickly yellow light caught her attention as it zigzagged through the debris, and the woman spun on the spot and deflected it with her wand, sending it hurtling toward the sky. Another spell shot at her from the other side, and she did the same there — but that seemed all she could do before the next spell darted toward her. She blocked it too, but her footing slipped for a split-second, and an overextension of her arm upon the next block nearly put her off balance.
Somewhere in the chaos another of the wizards was thrown, flipping more times than Ivana could count, but he got back up after a moment.
The witch whipped her wand to seemingly no effect, then with another flick the flying rubble coalesced into the forms of a dozen concrete birds and the ground swallowed the woman whole; at the same time the birds shot toward the attackers, two for each of them, coming at different angles —
And then the witch sprung up some ten meters away from a manhole cover, which along with a spell was flung toward one of the wizards who could not defend himself from two concrete birds and a flying metal lid; the spell shattered his shield, and the manhole cover smacked him in the chest, putting him on his back with a horrible gasp. The stone birds kept him down.
One of the streetlamps that had survived the months of conflict reeled back and tried to pick up the woman like a giant metal appendage, but its grip slipped upon an invisible shield and then splintered into pieces. The fragments began to glow — by the wand waving of one of the wizards, Ivana thought — and fell back downward onto the witch's shield like a meteor shower, and the shield, along with two other spells clashing against it, shattered spectacularly in an array of colors. The next spell smacked her right in the chest, and she hit the ground hard.
Ivana gasped, and the spellfire ceased. A brief silence reigned, eventually broken by the wizards' wary footsteps, two of them approaching the unconscious witch and two hanging back, while the turbaned wizard disappeared to recover his injured ally.
The two furthest in the back were then pulled upward and away as easily as if they had been lifted behind the neck by hooks being reeled in by giants. The two approaching immediately spun back around, dismissing the unconscious figure for the fading illusion it was — but they saw nothing; the other two had vanished utterly.
One of the wizards grimaced, his hand flying to his temple, and called out to the others, "She's a Legilimens!"
"Who the hell is this?" said the second.
"Enough!" said the first. "You're turning against your own kind, and for what? Muggles flailing in the mud, murdering each other because they worship a different prophet? Because their parents came from a different spot of land?"
The wind blew. As the wizard spoke, his comrade had not been idle, littering their surroundings with low walls and other fortifications, many more of which Ivana was sure existed, even if they couldn't be seen to her eye.
The witch's whisper swept around them: "Don't speak to me about betrayal. These are your fellow humans. I will not watch families die for the sake of laws made by cowards."
"Keep her talking," said the second as he began slowly sweeping his wand around, a look of concentration on his face.
"Cowards, are we?" the first growled. "I would admire your desire to make right, if not for your refusal to learn from those far older and wiser!" His voice had grown to a shout. "Don't be foolish, girl. You're mistaking caution and practicality for inaction and indifference."
The witch's voice came back harsh and bitter. "Don't preach pragmatism to me while the very family behind you owes their lives to my defiance of your laws."
"Found her!" the second wizard whispered, and in a swift motion he pointed his wand toward a nearby rooftop and a cloud of silver dust shot out with startling speed and immediately covered the upper half of the building, giving a chrome coating to the windows and walls, and the previously-invisible figure on the roof. She quickly stumbled away from the edge.
"Eyes on the sky, Hawkins — she's got a broom —"
The second wizard followed quickly with a spell aimed at the rooftop: there was a flash of light, and without noise, the bricks slid out of place as though the mortar had dissolved, and the top two floors of the building was being deconstructed into its component parts. Ivana's throat clenched with horror as the woman briefly lost her footing under the suddenly unstable rooftop.
But the witch did not fall with it. Instead she rose into the air, her silver form floating eerily before the dark sky.
The two wizards raised their wands high and spell after spell shot toward her, bouncing off an invisible shield surrounding the silver figure. Ivana lost count of how many spells were thrown at her, but as the number climbed, a crackling sort of energy seemed to surround her.
Then it all exploded, a red lightning bursting around her, the light streaking toward the sky, to the sides, and some toward the ground, which the wizards shielded themselves against; the witch dropped suddenly, disappearing into the rubble of the roof. Then Ivana caught a blur through the windows below, as if she was flying through the floors —
At the same time the entire apartment block began coming apart around her through the spellwork of the two wizards — no, four, for the man in the turban had returned with his companion — and each piece of the building was being disassembled individually — bricks, pipes, wires, furniture, all of it. It was almost as though she were watching a video of the apartment being constructed, in reverse, sped up a thousandfold.
As it happened the turbaned man waved his wand like a conductor, each movement conjuring panes of golden ethereal glass that quickly but carefully constructed themselves into a shimmering dome around the building, if it could be called that anymore. And, slowly, but inexorably, the dome began to constrict, leaving less and less space within, while the density of the shield seemed to thicken.
Finally, the deconstructed building parted in half, revealing in the middle the witch, standing in the middle of the dome, still covered in the shiny dust as she cast spells at the dome in an attempt to break through.
"It's over," called out the second wizard. "You're good, I'll give you that, but you weren't going to win against so many of us. You were lucky that Aman here" — he gestured to the man in the turban — "is a complete softy inside."
The witch raised her wand to the sky, then, and the clouds above darkened and gathered together, then began lighting up. She was conjuring a storm, Ivana realized. Lightning flashed with a ferocity that frightened her. In the moment of building power, Ivana glanced beside her: her mother had fainted in her father's arms, and her father was silently praying, beholding the sky in awed terror.
Then the witch whipped her wand downward, and a great bolt of lightning exploded upon the shield dome, scattering electricity everywhere: among the wizards, through the alleys, on either side of Ivana and her family.
The light blinded Ivana more than any other flash yet had, and the sound deafened her. For several seconds she could not make sense of anything, but then her vision came back. And the magical dome remained, undamaged.
The witch stared around her, then in what was clearly a display of bad temper, cursed and angrily threw her wand down on the ground, where it bounced. The gathered storm began to fall upon them as a gentle shower, while distant thunder continued to rumble.
"Well, that's that," said a wizard.
"John," said the turbaned man to the third wizard, "if you could bring down the Anti-Apparition charm… So that Deacon can bring our friends here…"
Ivana watched as the turbaned man and the veteran approached the shield, which crackled with static electricity with their approach. It was barely the size of a small house at this point, giving the woman no room to move or hide in.
"This is humiliating," said the witch, throwing her hands on her hips.
"Done," said the third wizard to the fourth. "Deacon?"
The fourth wizard nodded in acknowledgement, took a couple of steps as if running up to something, and then spun on the spot. What might've been a graceful pirouette turned into an awkward stumble, as whatever he planned on doing obviously didn't work.
They all looked at the witch, whose wand remained on the ground, whose lips were widening in a delighted grin, then at each other. They jumped back into formation, their eyes scanning their surroundings. It was then that, with a sound rather like a jet engine screaming overhead, a wave of noxious black flame burst into existence above them, snaking down and attaching itself to the street. Ivana recoiled, clutching Luka tighter to herself as the infernal flames radiated darkness in the way earthly flame emitted light; the concrete beneath blackened, then rapidly turned bone-white where it didn't melt and run, as though its horrible touch bleached reality itself of color.
The wizards' pointed their wands and water spewed forth from nothing, but it was all banished back to nonexistence as soon as it neared the fires. Even the rain, growing heavier by the moment, seemed to vaporize before it could fall upon them. The ring of flame began to constrict, and the wizards took stumbling steps backward to flee the intense heat. Oddly, Ivana felt none of the heat herself.
"I have not seen this accursed spell in fifty years!" shouted the turbaned man, his composure shaken. He glanced back at the witch. "Stop this madness! Your comrade will destroy this city!"
Ivana didn't hear what the witch said to him in the frenzy of all the shouting, but whatever it was didn't comfort the man, who went back to casting shields against the flames. They halted them for a moment, before they were torn apart. And it was not a sophisticated destruction: biting, gnawing, grinding the magical shields into sharp silver splinters, it carried with it a visceral sense of malice.
All the while, the ring of fire had shrunk threefold, forcing the wizards to retreat toward the very dome they had created to entrap the witch — who leaned against the dome with her arm upon it above her head, a distinct air of nonchalance in her posture and expression. The flame slithered ever closer like a serpent, its tongue flickering at the wizards and tasting their fear. Any hard-earned advance by the wizards was small and fleeting, their victories smothered by the cloying smoke.
The veteran twirled his wand at the ground below him, and the earth rose, lifting him up — the witch dove for her wand, and suddenly the rising wizard hit his head on something invisible and fell back down, his tower of concrete and dirt breaking apart around him. Soon enough, they were all pressed up against the golden dome, unable to make any movement for fear of coming into contact directly with the fire, which reared over them like a cobra, seeming almost eager to devour them, if not for some invisible leash keeping it in check.
"Bring down the shield, Aman," yelled the witch. "It's over!"
The golden dome encasing the witch suddenly shrunk. The wizards immediately stepped into the space it opened up. Then again, the dome became smaller, and again, the wizards retreated. The fire pursued eagerly, not giving them any room to breathe.
"Call off the fire!" shouted the turbaned man.
"You kill me, it kills you," screamed the witch, slamming her fists into the dome's wall, and it shrunk again as her arms were upon it, throwing her back before the flames obscured her. "Get rid of this fucking shield!"
Ivana didn't see exactly what happened, with the movement of the fire blocking her view every other second, but as soon as the golden dome dissipated, the man's wand flew out of his hand. Three other sticks leapt from their owners', and the black fire pulled back. The turbaned man fell to his knees, his hands shivering as he stroked his beard.
"You said no serious curses," he said shakily.
Slowly, the witch got to her feet, holding up a finger. "One: you ignored me." She held up a second. "And two: my friend wasn't privy to that little discussion." There was a moment of silence. "For what it's worth, I told him to never cast that bloody spell. He probably just assumed the worst and reacted."
"Find better friends, please," he said, and the witch gave a startled laugh. "Sane wizards do not use spells invented by a madman that are just as likely to kill themselves as their enemies. Where did he learn such magic?"
"Probably my father's library," said the witch. "If it makes you feel better, he has a history of making bad decisions."
"It does not."
"Just saying, it's nothing personal —"
Their words were cut off by a groan, and everyone turned to see an apartment block in the background teeter and fall. Black flames ate away at its foundations, melting steel and warping stone, and it shattered like porcelain as it crashed into the ground. Dust billowed out, and within its haze the black flame thrashed still, as though seeking escape from whatever will kept it in place.
"He's losing control!" the turbaned man hissed, as his comrades' eyes widened in dread.
Cursing, the witch snapped her wand toward the wizards and bound them in chains, then turned her wand toward the growing inferno. A great stream of water surged out with the intensity and volume of a dam bursting: it surged toward the fires like a serpent, undulating, crashing into the burning area like a tsunami. But it twisted and turned itself around, not spreading out as water did, as if trapped within an invisible bowl the size of a small stadium.
The water boiled as it attempted to drown the fires, pockets of superheated steam struggling to escape the immense pressure of the maelstrom around it. The witch muttered under her breath, chanting some sort of invocation, directing the water in sweeping movements of her wand, the motions heavy as she struggled to contain the immense mass of that whirlpool.
Eventually, the torrent crushed the hellfire in its maw with a truly awful howling noise. Ivana jerked to her feet, picking Luka up with her, and her father too stood with her mother in his arms, as the water began to form rapids in the streets, carrying smaller chunks of concrete with it, the artillery-shattered drains unable to keep the streets clear.
The witch's elbow pulled back, then she shot her wand arm forward and a white light darted at the mass of water: it froze completely, an enormous colosseum of ice. She followed with a purple spell, which collided with the mountain of ice and split off into filaments of light through the cracks, drawing a circuit board throughout; and with a high, resonant note, the sculpture shattered into a million slivers of crystal which tumbled down the ruined streets.
Looking at the site of the destruction now, Ivana could only swallow painfully. An entire city block had been brought low in mere minutes… what would've taken concentrated artillery fire hours. These people, this witch — they held the power of gods in their hands. She had a sudden urge to sob.
The witch dropped her arm with a sigh and muttered something as she rubbed her face. Shambling footsteps drew Ivana's attention to a small side-alley, from where the gloom the medic emerged, looking world-wearied as he dragged his feet towards the woman. He too carried a wand, tapping restlessly on his thigh as he glanced at the captured wizards.
"Fucking asshole," said the witch, punching him in the arm. Then she leapt at him, wrapping her arms around him in a tight hug, murmuring something Ivana couldn't hear.
When she let go, he rubbed his shoulder and turned to the wizards, who glared at him. "Sorry about that."
"Get this over with!" said one wizard.
"You want to Obliviate them or the muggles?" said the witch to the medic, gesturing with her wand but her eyes still on the devastation that lay before her.
"I guess Obliviating those guys will be a little more guilt-free… especially since they hate me now." He handed the witch a small, children's backpack, featuring that blue steam engine that she could not quite recall the name of. "Supplies for them. Since we're leaving anyway…"
The witch sighed, before turning to Ivana and her family. She clutched Luka tighter to herself, while her father's jaw set, staring up at her. The woman's visage softened as she walked to them, and she knelt before them.
"Sve će biti dobro," she said, and after handing over the small backpack to Luka, she raised her wand at Ivana and everything went dark.
The blackness swirled, like ink in water, and Albus Dumbledore pulled himself up from the pensieve.