Donald lowered his hand, his face grim.
One important reason he had been so eager to capture Jack Graves was that he feared Jack would fall into Vaughan Weasley's hands.
As an Auror captain, Jack knew many secrets of the old families.
If those secrets were exposed to Vaughan Weasley—to the International Confederation of Wizards—he did not dare imagine the consequences...
"Damn it!"
Watching Vaughan idly play with his wand, Donald could only curse under his breath. There was nothing else he could do.
Vaughan shook the wand twice, transfigured a clump of dirt into ropes that bound Donald, then stopped paying attention to him and turned his gaze toward Jack Graves.
Reflected in his pupils was Jack's struggle against Oliver and the others, along with the mushroom cloud frozen behind him.
The time-freezing effect of the alchemical artifact had created a strange spectacle of halos, layer upon layer.
But in Vaughan's eyes, the true state of that space-time was far less docile than what visible light portrayed—wave patterns representing electromagnetic radiation were violently oscillating in minute amplitudes within that region.
Frozen time could restrain the movement of macroscopic fields, but in the microscopic world, photons did not move linearly. They moved through "transitions."
They jumped from one "coordinate" to another, without any linear, continuous process of movement!
So, in essence, photons should not possess the concept of "time," and naturally would not be constrained by it.
The reason they appeared frozen at this moment was not because they had truly been stopped. Rather, an immensely powerful magical force had distorted space-time, causing the photons to continually transition back to their starting points!
Thus, in Vaughan's field of vision, the "light" within that space-time was actually undergoing an abstract, repeating cycle!
"Photon geodesic motion... or rather, curved motion. Muggle