The studio lights had the colour of midday. Too bright and steady. The anchor kept a smile pinned to his face while the red lamp above the main camera stayed lit.
Behind him, three screens ran on a loop. Grainy battlefield footage. A blur of men in uniforms. Then, sharp as a knife cut, a figure lifted a wooden stick and turned a berm into a wall that had not existed a heartbeat earlier.
The anchor let the clip run for half a second longer than he should have, then lifted his cards.
"Tonight, we are speaking about the leak," he began, voice trained to keep panic polite. "A new kind of energy. A phenomenon. And the reports that Alliance units are channelling it with wooden implements."
A producer in a headset made a chopping motion from the edge of the set. The anchor pretended not to see it.
A historian, retired from the British Museum, sat with his hands folded, posture stiff from a life of public lectures. His name tag read DR HUGH LANGLEY. The lower third called him "Former Researcher, British Museum." He had the look of a person who had spent too much time with dead things and was now irritated that the dead were talking back.
The anchor turned to him.
"Doctor Langley. You asked for this segment."
Langley nodded and reached for a folder. He asked for the images he brought, and the first one filled the middle screen.
A staff. Wood dark with age. Metal caps at both ends. A museum label in the corner.
"Staffs," he began. "Not walking sticks. Staffs as instruments. There are accounts, not myths, of court practitioners who used them as symbols and tools. Egyptian temples kept ritual implements for processions and rites. The Romans had augural staves and lituus staffs to mark sacred space. Medieval courts hired astrologers and alchemists. Elizabeth the First had John Dee, a man who wrote to her about numbers, navigation, and what he called angelic language."
He asked for the second.
A photograph of a sceptre, enamel and gold, held behind glass.
"And sceptres," he continued. "The royal sceptre is not only a decoration. It is a public statement that power is held, channelled, and sanctioned. We have sceptres from pharaohs, emperors, kings, and sultans. They come with stories of healers, saints, warlocks, whatever term the era allowed. Figures who could control fire, thunder, water, earth or any other element of nature. The words change. The stories repeat."
The anchor leaned in, eager.
"So you claim that the Alliance…"
Langley lifted a finger.
"My claim is that we have always had records of people who were said to do impossible things. Until now, historians have been told to treat those records as metaphors, propaganda, or superstition. Yet the Alliance footage shows people bending and changing the environment like a practical skill."
He let his eyes drift to the screen where the wooden stick flashed again.
"Which means either history was lying for thousands of years, or we were using the wrong category. If you want a simple summary, I believe the Alliance has found a way to replicate what those records describe. They have found a way to use what our ancestors, in their ignorance, called magic. The Alliance has developed a way to reach and use this energy source, which was recorded in the history of every civilisation ever lived."
One of the scientists made a sound that was half a laugh and half a cough, as if he had just swallowed something sour.
The anchor pivoted to the other sofa.
Professor Elaine Whitaker sat there, hair tied back, jacket too neat. She wore the expression of someone who despised television but also knew it paid for laboratories.
"What do you say to that, Professor?"
Whitaker did not smile.
"I say that the word 'magic' is a label for fairy tales. Science deals with constants. If it exists, it has rules. We can measure it. If we can measure it, we can identify, describe and make use of it."
She gestured at the paused frame behind her.
"That clip. The soil is compacted, then rearranged. That is not a mirage. That is material movement. It is not something I, as a person of science, can believe. It is most probably staged; the most expensive stagecraft ever attempted on a battlefield or out of it."
The third guest, a physicist with tired eyes, leaned forward.
"Look at the discharge patterns," he added, pointing at the screens as if they would obey him. "No muzzle flash from the rifles, no conventional explosive plume from the explosions, yet structures they clash with fall. Metals bend. A trench becomes glass. Do you have any idea of the required heat to do that? Something is depositing energy without a chemical source, and that sentence is not something any sane person will agree on."
The anchor cleared his throat, keen to steer them away from that troublesome word energy, which struck him as rather illogical. He prided himself on keeping the programme grounded and based on facts, and was determined to maintain that standard. The scientists' explanations, therefore, were precisely the sort of thing he found reassuring.
A voice crackled in his earpiece.
"Breaking. Feed from Africa. On the screen. Now."
The anchor blinked once, then lifted his hand as if he had planned it.
"We have a development," he announced.
The studio screens cut to shaky helicopter footage. Brown land, a line of vehicles, and then the sky filled with something that made the camera operator swear. The microphone caught it anyway.
Dozens of dragons, all made of blue fire, all moving south like a tide. The air around them shimmered. The ground beneath their shadows smoked.
The reporter's voice came in breathless, wind cracking every syllable.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is live. We are north of Timbuktu, over Mali, and I am looking at fiery structures that look like dragons, made of blue flame."
The camera swung, trying to keep up.
"They are at least sixty-five to one hundred feet long, with a wingspan over one hundred sixty feet. They are not aircraft; they are moving their wings to ascend and descend. They do not fly like planes or helicopters. They move like searching for something, and when they do, they are spewing fire over it, just like in the fairy tales we all read in our childhood. David," she shouted to her cameraman while pointing. "David, keep it wide. They're circling. They've picked a target; you can see them attacking by circling it while drowning the area in their blue flames."
A burst of flame dropped into an enemy position from three dragons. A defensive line turned into a black smear, then into nothing but ash.
"The UOA is firing," the reporter continued, voice tightening. "Small arms, heavy arms, anti-air. It is ineffective. Water trucks attempted to douse the flames, and the water vanished into steam before it reached them. Whatever this is, it is not burning like fuel."
The anchor stared at the screen. His mouth had gone dry. He forced sound through it.
"Are you in danger?"
The reporter did not answer the question directly. His helicopter banked away.
"I am keeping a distance. I am keeping all the distance I can. At this point, I do not know which nation on Earth could stop an attack like this. I do not know if any nation even tries. I only know that the ground where they pass becomes ash. We couldn't even approach, the sand turns into glass. The heat is unbelievable."
Back in the studio, nobody remembered to breathe.
Langley sat with his jaw set, not triumphant, nor was he pleased. His expression can be called vindicated. But it looked more like fear. This should not be real. All of this should have stayed in history books and labelled as metaphors. Not flying dragons to turn everything in their way to ash.
Whitaker's eyes shone with a hunger that was not moral.
"That is evidence we can work with." She said, voice low. "Not a story. Not a rumour. Not a video with questionable sources. This is live."
The physicist nodded as if he had been given a gift.
"If we can record the spectrum, if we can catalogue how that flame persists," he began, words gathering speed, "then energy storage becomes an old problem. Propulsion becomes a different problem. You could power a city without a supply chain. You could run desalination without fuel. You could launch without a rocket. If this can be controlled, if it can be commanded, it changes engineering from managing scarcity to managing risk."
The anchor tried to pull them back to something that would not panic the public.
"So, what do you advise governments to do?"
Whitaker's mouth tightened. Politics was not a topic scientists like to comment on, unless extreme stupidity endangers the planet.
Langley interjected to cover for Whitaker's silence. "Stop pretending it is folklore."
In the live feed, the dragons kept moving. They advanced. Every strongpoint they touched went silent. The camera caught armoured vehicles turning into slag, caught men running, caught men falling and turning to ash.
Then the line reached land that had nothing left to offer. Sand. Empty stretches. The dragons flared brighter for a moment, as if offended by the lack of targets, and then their bodies frayed at the edges.
One dissolved into sparks. Another folded inward like a ribbon of light. In less than a minute, the sky had nothing but smoke and the stunned buzz of the helicopter's rotors.
The broadcast cut back to the studio on a delay. The anchor inhaled, and it sounded like someone surfacing.
"We will continue the coverage," he said, and he could not keep the shake out of his voice.
--
Far from the cameras, Dragons and war, Corvus sat in the Nest with a report open on his desk and two more floating at shoulder height. Ink moved across parchment without a hand touching it.
A Knock came. Not a servant's knock. A trained one.
"Enter."
An aide stepped in, robes plain, eyes sharp.
"We let the Muggles record as you ordered, sir. The belt is clear. Captured witches and wizards are secured. Ministers Black, Volkov and Krafft left the scene. Following your orders, Lord Grindelwald and Lady Rosier are leading the attack."
Corvus did not look up.
"Send the captured magicals to the third team," he ordered. "All of them. Inform Uncle Gellert to hasten the bombardment and advance and clear the lands from Senegal to Djibouti."
Corvus raised his head to look at the aide. "Inform Aunt Vinda, I want ICW to be a thing of the past."
The aide hesitated.
"And the leadership?"
The aide swallowed. He looked into the eyes of the mastermind behind all the devastation. Corvus met his gaze; it had no warmth in it.
"Inform them that I want Akingbade alive," he said. "If anyone forgets that part, I will remind them. Personally."
The aide swallowed, nodded and left.
Corvus turned to his work.
He did not waste time on the world's hysteria. He allowed the 'leak' let the Muggle World discuss it, turn the idea in their heads. Familiarise themselves with the reality of people with supernatural talents. He did not care what they would call it; Muggles will find a way to explain things in a way to convince their own minds. Science, at its core, was the art of creating guesses with a logical basis and trying to dismantle them until they stand still.
If they want to argue it on television until their voices broke, he will applaud it.
As for ICW, it was over. They just have not realised it yet, and Akingbade the traitor will not be pleased when he finds out what Corvus has for scum like him.
He had a point to make, and he preferred that points be delivered in person. Especially to betrayers. Akingbade would not die quickly, and Corvus would make sure the lesson travelled.