Chapter 5:

Witnesses to the Impossible

Albanian Auror Gur Duka sat playing chess with Officer Zaimon Nano. The two were stationed on forest watch near the outskirts of a wizarding nature sanctuary for griffons and snidgets, the last breeding population of the latter.

Their partnership was one of many programs meant to develop cooperation between Muggle and wizarding nations, especially those that shared borders. In their case, it was working out fairly well.

The biggest hiccup they had was Zaimon's being appalled at how secular wizards in his supposedly Islamic nation were. Learning that many of his fellow wizards and witches of the region more often wore crosses instead of hijabs was born from him not knowing the wizarding half of Albania formed long before the Ottoman invasions. Despite this initial cultural shock, their friendship was quick and long-lasting. It was hard to hate somebody different from you when you both spent most of your days in the gorgeous wilderness of the Mediterranean playing board games and sharing a love for books all day.

"I still do not understand how seven hundred years of incorporating Muggleborns hasn't resulted in at least a few mosques in wizarding Romania," Zaimon said, as he took Gur's knight with his queen, leaving her open to being taken by three of his pieces at once. "I mean, even eleven-year-olds when adopted sometimes keep their parents' faith."

The Romanian wizarding government still hadn't told their Muggle counterparts the truth. They were working from the assumption that wizards in Islamic countries adopted Muggleborns into their families. They inferred from this that they did it at the age of magical maturity, eleven.

The fact of the matter was, they outright kidnapped them days after they were born, leaving dying homunculi in their place. Said children seldom even knew they were Muggleborns in the first place, raised no differently than children born to wizarding parents. It was called the changeling policy. Non-Muslim countries used to have them too, and some very poverty-stricken African and South American countries still do practice it. It was much more common back before Christians went through that whole Enlightenment thing and stopped burning Muggles they thought were witches. Muslim parents continued to prove a threat to their wizarding children's lives well into the twentieth century, and they only put an end to their changeling policy with the breaking of the Statute of Secrecy.

It was a secret that pretty much everyone over the age of thirty at the time was made to swear an oath of secrecy over with the end of the Statute.

"I don't know what to tell you without starting a fight. The history of Islam, and the Prophet Muhammad, is very different for magicals. Our books on the topic weren't censored by, admittedly overzealous, wizards who wanted to hide our existence from Muggles," said Gur.

That got Zaimon's attention.

"Are... are you telling me there are lost books or sections of the Holy Quran, Tawrat, Zabur, and Injeel?" he asked.

That was not the reaction Gur was expecting.

"Um. Yes, but we are forbidden from sharing too much of our culture with you until at least two generations of peace between us has passed," Gur explained. "When you are eighty, and we have all proven to be able to get along, we will share everything. Just stay alive until then, yeah?"

Zaimon opened his mouth to answer, only to be smacked in said mouth by a ball of yellow and black. His coworker reacted by flinching back and blinking away his surprise, before they both looked down onto the ground of their firewatch porch to see what it was.

It was a siskin, and the poor bird was flapping its wings wildly as it tried to find its feet.

Zaimon began laughing at himself while Gur reached down and, gently, cupped the poor thing with both hands before lifting it onto the ledge, where it flew away southward. He then blinked away his own surprise, as Zaimon had, at receiving a bird to the face.

"There are a lot of birds flying above the canopy today," he told his companion.

And indeed, there were hundreds flying towards the coast. Maybe there was an algae bloom and word got around about all the dead, rotting fish that were up for grabs?

Then another bird almost clipped him in the face with its wing as it flew straight through their firewatch tower. It was an Egyptian vulture if ever he'd seen one.

"Um. Gur?" he heard Zaimon say from behind him.

When he turned around, it wasn't Zaimon's finger pointing upward that drew his gaze to the sky above. It was the sky above that did that.

Birds. Lots of birds. ALL of the birds! Tens of thousands of them were flying high and fast. The nearer ones were following the vulture and siskin southward, but he could see the dark specks in the sky went eastward, westward, and even northward. Away from an unseen area beyond the mountain at the edge of their purview.

He had never seen so many golden eagles, Egyptian vultures, tits, cormorants, warblers, or any of the other species whose songs he woke up to every morning out here. Many hundreds of pixies, thousands of snidgets (possibly the entire population), and several families of griffons fled with them all.

There were black clouds following the birds, much more slowly, and it took him an inordinate amount of time to realize they were insects. Flies, mosquitoes, termites, ants, bees, and so many beetles. They were all fleeing.

"I may not be a wizard," said Zaimon. "But even I can feel that."

He pointed northward, in the direction all of these flying creatures were fleeing from. And only then did Gur turn his focus to the epicenter of this avian stampede. What he felt was akin to a black hole against magic and nature itself. Something fucked up and WAY beyond their pay grade was happening out there. Something beyond either of their understanding.

He felt the structure he was standing on shake, and glanced down to see that a bear had rammed into one of the legs of their firewatch tower. It didn't even shake off the haze it must have felt from the bump, merely charging on in the same direction as the birds and insects. The bear was not alone, flanked by roe deer, lynxes, and chamois on all sides. With his attention now directed downward, he saw the entire forest was alive with stampeding animals, from the lowliest vole to the mighty bear. All of them were running away from whatever that feeling was.

"I am possessed of an overwhelming intuition that we should be running in that direction," Gur told his Muggle friend, pointing southward towards the sea.

"What? And abandon our post? We could be court-martialed for that!" Zaimon objected.

Just then, a pillar of indescribably transparent gray light reached into the sky just beyond that mountain to the north. It was akin to light made of glass. The world-rending kaboom followed a few seconds later, and the shockwave of it knocked them both onto the floor, making the firewatch tower sway and creak along with the many trees around them.

Gur and Zaimon shared a glance.

"Right," said Zaimon. "Running in that direction it is."

Xavier picked his sorry ass off of the ground with unexpected difficulty.

While his body was, mostly, invulnerable to damage, his mind was not.

Excessive damage could break him apart enough that reforming would take time.

Similar types of damage could also put his mind into shock. It was only after centuries of practice and discipline that he was able to make it through that initial blast and bear-spell Voldemort used without needing to take a few minutes to recuperate. But he was building up a tab that would have to be repaid with every hit he took.

"How long can you keep this up, Peeves?" Voldemort goaded from above. "With your companion serving as a paper tiger down below, you're on your own!"
"Grrr. Argh. Roar," he heard Dorcas say in a deadpan.

She still talked in her own, sickeningly girly voice despite now boasting the body of an absurdly tall African man.

Of all the members of the Ascendant, Dorcas was the one Voldemort knew the least about, save maybe their eldest member. This was because the two were never allowed to work together. But he was correct. Being a vampiress, the bright sunlight was putting her at a disadvantage. She could survive walking into it for a few seconds, before she would have to use up another heart switching to a new body. She was understandably unwilling to burn through twenty of those per minute.
But she could do a few things he was clearly unaware of.

Just then, the earth and trees he blasted into the stratosphere began to come back down. Large splinters of wood, entire branches with leaves still on them, rocks, sand, and so much ash. A hailstorm of fallout, thankfully non-radioactive as annihilation didn't have that side-effect, bore down on them and dimmed the sky. Hot, steaming rain of the vaporized liquid joined it.

As it all began coalescing, the sunlight dimmed significantly.

As Xavier expected, the dimming was sufficient for Dorcas to step out of the cover provided by the trees.

The battle was no longer one-on-one.

Notes:

Okay. So, I have some explaining to do.

First, neither Quirrel nor Wormtail ever found Voldemort. So he remained disembodied, parasiting off of animals for an additional four years. (This story takes place in the summer after 4th year.) That extra time made him accustomed to this state of existence, and allowed him to begin experimenting.

As for animal magic, that is easier to explain. The mutation that makes Muggles give birth to witches and wizards is not unique to humans. Animals go through it all the time! And when two of them mate, you get a new magical species. But as with human magic, the magic is unique to each animal. Human spells are very suited to human needs or nature. Snakes' magic is unique to them, suited to venom, antivenom, shedding and repairing skin, and all kinds of stuff like that. But being animals, they don't have these advanced human brains to really harness and master this magic, using it instead instinctively as defense mechanisms.

Now, Voldemort stumbling across these "wizard animals" and possessing their bodies? He can. He hasn't yet, but he could. He is already a master of human magic and parselmagic. It's like an instrument. Once you master one, learning a second is much easier. After that, a third is easier still.

Thanks as always to my patrons whose continued support allows me to keep writing. And of course to readers like you, whose continued feedback keeps me motivated.

This chapter was edited by chatGPT.