In London, United Kingdom, on Level Nine beneath the Ministry of Magic, in the Department of Mysteries, a huge, muffled boom came from the Death Chamber. Scalding gray smoke and dust surged out of the violently billowing Veil like an avalanche. The terrifying shockwave kept reverberating through the room, sharp whistling sounds tearing through the air as space itself seemed to warp again and again. Huge cracks split open across the walls and floor, the entire room shook with it, and shattered bricks and stones clattered down to the ground.
Some skeletons and fragments of Inferi, reduced to powder by the high temperature and shockwave, along with black skeletons wrapped in rotting skin and Dementors in black cloaks, were rolled out of the Veil amid the billowing smoke and dust.
Then hurried footsteps sounded in the now-empty corridor. The instant Saul Croaker, the Unspeakable left behind to guard the British headquarters of the Department of Mysteries, saw the scene inside the room, his pupils shrank. The heat that still washed over him made him raise an arm at once; the wide sleeve of his wizard robe shielded his face as he hastily shut the door again.
When everything inside the room had finally settled, Croaker, now treated, straightened the wizard hat that had gone askew on his head before opening the door to the Death Chamber.
The hall was already a complete mess. Aside from the rubble and smoke scattered through the room, the walls and floor, split with countless cracks, were revealed in all their battered state.
The Dementors, their bodies as ragged as ever and their rotting hands still pierced and torn, were existences beyond life and death, so aside from being blasted out of the Veil by the shockwave, they were actually completely unharmed.
And when these