The atrium of the Ministry always felt small beneath the dome of the world. Today it felt like a stage. I stepped into the light and the noise peeled away as if someone had muted the world to let me speak.
"Ministry of Magic," I called, my voice carrying easily over the marble and the murmurs. "Come to the central atrium now and surrender."
The sound of the words traveled like an incision. Gasps ran the benches. Wands came up reflexively, a thousand small points of light. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement formed a perimeter, Aurors and hit-wizards circling with trained faces. Alastor Moody — grim, taut, dangerous — moved forward on instinct.
"Drop your wand and explain yourself," someone barked.
I didn't bother to look at them. I let the silence swell, let them feel how small they'd made themselves by confronting what they did not understand.
"Get him," I said to the man at my side. The command was a thread and the men nearest me became instruments. They moved as one, practiced, economical. The Aurors refused to yield; that was expected. They raised their wands and advanced.
I raised my own wand once. A shockwave of force rippled through the atrium — not to tear out organs or break bones, but to unbalance and disarm: a clean, surgical blow that sent three Aurors sprawling and their spells harmlessly splaying into the dome. Windows cracked under the pressure; glass rattled into a glittering shower. People ducked. Screams rose, short and raw. Order bent toward panic.
Moody stepped forward, brandishing his wand, his face a map of suspicion. The Minister arrived not long after, fury written across his features. He hurled accusations like knives; I let them pass as wind. The man had the look of someone who'd always assumed institutions would hold.
"Raise your wands," I said. The command was cold, precise. "Fight with everything you have. Let us see how deep your conviction runs."
They obliged. Cries filled the atrium as spells welded into the air. For a few minutes the room felt like a storm. I welcomed it. It let me demonstrate, with absolute clarity, the difference between theatre and inevitability.
Spells came at me like hail — stunning charms, jinxes and a scattering of shielding. I built a sphere above my head that drank their attacks, a living buffer that absorbed kinetic magic and folded it back into the air in confusing ways. The reflected spells found Aurors, bouncing like stones off an invisible lake. Men fell, not broken to pulp but stunned, incapacitated, their wands skittering from their fingers.
I walked through that field as if through mist. Any who stepped to block me found themselves met with precision counters — immobilising bindings, tendrils of ice that pinched the legs, nets of silencing runes. I did not want a massacre. I wanted a statement. The difference is telling.
Moody and several senior Aurors moved on me together from the flank. I did not glance. A small flick of wrist, and a wave of force flung them back as if the air itself disliked their motion. They hit the ground, winded and bruised, but alive. A theatrical moment, yes — and effective.
When I reached the Minister he was a man stripped of all theatre. He trembled in the wake of the sound I had made — of power applied in public, neat and overwhelming. I drew close and spoke without raising my voice.
"Your office is no longer safe," I said. "You will cede command to those who can keep the country intact. You will hand over authority for emergency measures, and you will placate the public. You will not die on this floor."
He glared, two small points of dignity left, and protest left his mouth like smoke. He tried to speak and the words came out thin. That, too, had been planned. I had prepared the necessary bindings — a set of calibrated Imperius-style bindings, legalistic compulsion woven with a show of restraint — not to torment, but to prevent the Minister from sabotaging the transition. The man was steadied, obliged to sign a temporary transfer of powers into a committee I controlled. It was ugly. It was efficient.
Alastor Moody rose and lunged again; I anticipated him. A targeted spell clipped his wand arm and knocked his balance. He recovered quickly — than man was iron — but he found himself hemmed on all sides as my people moved in with soft manacles that sapped wand use. No one was killed. No one's soul was ripped apart. The point was to take command of the Ministry intact, to make the institution speak with me at its head.
When the Minister's quill scratched the parchment, the atrium felt different. Gasps had become whispers. Accusations transmuted into stunned acceptance. The cameras were already live: my face filled every scrying panel as the man I had fashioned from public rescue, from research, from gifts and medals, took the public stage. I did not strike him down. I used him to seal the law.
Then, because symbolism matters more than the mechanics, I took a small, visible action: a ritual knot, bound in the ministry's heart, that locked the building to certain external actions unless the new committee consented. A legal leash. The crowd saw it and understood: this was control with bureaucracy and wards, not chaos.
I turned to Moody, who was fighting along the edges with that strange, stubborn anger that comes when a man knows he was bested by a plan rather than strength. "You may oppose me," I said softly. "You may fight in the streets, but the world will judge by outcome. I offer safety. He offers certainty."
His reply was a look that tried to sound like a promise. "We will meet again," he rasped.
"We will," I agreed. "And when that day comes, choose your side well."
We left the atrium with the Ministry stitched to my hand by law and rune. Behind us, men and women tidied, gathered the stunned, patched wounds, and counted costs. The headlines would print the next morning: Ministry Stabilised After Terror Incident; Emergency Powers Established. Whether they read it as rescue or coup depended on where they sat that day. Mostly, they chose rescue.
Power tastes terrible and wonderful at once. The thing I'd taken was not a throne carved from bones, but the quiet mechanism that made law move. With that in my hand, Dumbledore's protests would be a matter of public debate rather than a call to arms. He could shout in corridors and gather the faithful, but the law would be the thing people used to justify their fear or their comfort.
Outside the Ministry the city still burned in the small, bureaucratic ways of change: a poster here, a rally there. Inside my hand the Magistrate's pen still smudged ink, a simple instrument that now signed emergency directives.
I had not destroyed the Ministry. I had turned it. And that, in the end, was far more dangerous than any spell.