Postbellum
It’s strange that my memories of the battle are so vivid, but my memories of what came right after are blurry. The other resistance fighters came into the field, and at some point Mom and Dad must have found me and Clea. I remember Mom hugging the two of us as tightly as she could, Dad rushing in a second later to cradle us all in his big arms. I remember whispers and looks of awe and shock directed at me, but I was too numb to everything to even notice. I remember crying, shutting my eyes tight and pushing my face into Mom’s chest. I was so tired after it all ended that all I could think about was the pain. Someone carried me to a car, and about half an hour later I was sleeping somewhere, though it wasn’t my house.
I remember the next day much more clearly. Mom cleaned me up and tossed out the ruined and bloody California hoodie, giving me a new set of clothes to wear. After that, we drove as a family to a park somewhere, where a mobile clinic – one of several – had been set up to give medical attention to the people of Salem. I had sustained minor internal injuries and bruises, but I had gotten off lucky. Many people were crippled for life, or worse. I remember hearing the agonized voices of some of the victims at the clinic, but Mom and Dad had hurried me away before I could see anything too gruesome.
We went to visit the families of Silas and Peter next. When we arrived at Silas’s house, his dad took one look at me and then gave me a big hug. He said something about how I’d kept his son safe, and thanked me from the bottom of his heart. I barely heard him. I didn’t register anything until I saw Silas’s face, but even then, all I felt was silent relief that he was okay. We sat together in his bedroom for a little while while our parents talked, but we said very little. A few minutes later, we were off to Peter’s house, where his parents also hugged and thanked me, even more profusely than Silas’s dad. Peter hugged me too, and though he didn’t cry, I could sense his feelings. I did cry, though. I cried and cried and didn’t let go of him for several minutes. Even when I was done crying, I didn’t have anything to say, and neither did he. The nightmare we had been through together was beyond words.
For the next week or so, I didn’t leave my house. Mom or Dad would go out into the city on nondescript errands while the other parent stayed with me and Clea. Mom used her magic to effortlessly repair the damage to our home, but nothing felt the same anymore. I tried to distract myself with my usual video games and television, but my mind was always somewhere else. I couldn’t enjoy Halo or Super Mario Galaxy after what I’d been through. My life had been changed forever by what I’d witnessed that day. Every night I had dreams of Emma and Summerroot and Shichang and Nick and Blair and Darkanoss. Sometimes I was so afraid of sleeping that I opted to stay awake, staring at the dark ceiling and drowning myself in my thoughts. More often than not, I slept in Mom and Dad’s bed, because they were the only thing left in the world that made me feel safe.
* * *
Minutes after the Battle of Salem ended and the Limbo cloud lifted, the U.S. military invaded and occupied the city. Martial law was temporarily instituted, as the world outside struggled to comprehend what had transpired in this little Montana city. From their perspective, for just under nine hours, Salem had been enveloped in an impenetrable dome of clouds. When the clouds dispersed, they found a city half-destroyed and filled with dead and injured civilians. Relief organizations sent their aid to Salem, but most of the aid was reserved for muggle citizens. Thousands of people had died, most during the initial attack on the city when the Death Eaters had swarmed everywhere, indiscriminately rounding up and executing innocent muggles. It had been dumb luck that my friends and I hadn’t witnessed these genocidal acts; we had stayed away from the downtown area where most of that activity was taking place, and by the time we got to the university, the bodies had been removed.
The mass media went into a frenzy. The anti-wizarding cabinet had a field day with the events of the battle, perpetuating the narrative that it was the wizards of Salem who had committed genocide against innocent non-magicals. Violence against wizards and witches spiked in many cities across the country, though my parents sheltered me from this knowledge. Salem was kept under the close watch of the government for about a month, and the surviving magical citizens were placed under particular scrutiny. The mayor of Salem had been one of the victims of the war, so he was temporarily replaced by some nameless military official. When the heat died down and the military occupation ended, a new mayor was named: Thomas R. Griffin, a former city council member. Griffin made it his primary focus to ensure that the non-magical denizens of Salem felt safe, even if it meant directing funding away from programs designed to help the magical soldiers who had fought in the battle. He made no secret of his dislike for wizards and witches, but this attitude was generally tolerated by the fearful populace.
The Death Eaters were gone. They had all died, many under mysterious circumstances. When I heard this news, it bewildered me. I knew that Miles and Rodney hadn’t been killed when we fought them, yet their bodies burned away just like Nick and Darkanoss. The Death Eaters in the stadium killed themselves willingly, too. The mainstream news deemed it a mass suicide, and labeled the whole battle a terrorist attack perpetrated by a violent wizarding cult. Wizarding authorities, on the other hand, were baffled by Darkanoss’s motivations. They had no idea how he had summoned the Limbo cloud, or gained the allegiance of the exiled Dementors. If his goal had been to erode the camaraderie between muggles and wizards in Salem, then he had surely succeeded. I didn’t see too much of it directly, but I heard a lot about muggles accosting wizards in public across Salem. One time, someone threw a tomato at our car window as we were driving through town. But the Aurors believed Darkanoss’s plans were more complex than stirring up anger. He had wanted Salem. But why?
What baffled everyone even more was the fact that I, a mere twelve-year-old boy, had managed to defeat Darkanoss. The attention I received after the battle was completely new to me, and at times overwhelming. Some people compared me to Harry Potter, echoing tales of how the young Boy Who Lived had defeated Lord Voldemort thirteen years ago. But I wasn’t like Harry Potter. In fact, I had absolutely no idea how I had managed to defeat Darkanoss. The more level heads in the wizarding world said it was a fluke, or attributed it to the unmatched potential of the Rebirth Generation. But neither of those explanations felt right, either. Something strange had happened when my wand connected with Darkanoss’s. I had sensed something, but I couldn’t tell what. Either way, I didn’t like all the attention. My arrogant younger self had once thought that fame would suit me, but I soon found that I hated nothing more than the nonstop onslaught of reporters asking for my story.
Another unusual thing that happened after the battle was that the media tried to minimize the role of the Reborn. While my defeat of Darkanoss was lauded as a heroic act, the fact that there had been other Reborn who fought and died in the Battle of Salem was generally not spoken of. I later learned that somewhere around twenty Reborn had died, including all of the ones who pledged their loyalty to Darkanoss. Twenty children, dead, because of Donovan Trackwell and his Death Eaters. Among these children, I would later learn, were some of the ones who fought by my side on that terrible day. Sophie, Kyle, and Eric – the three kids who stayed behind while the rest of us fled to the Limbo cloud – had all been killed by Nick and his Death Eaters. As it turned out, Liam and the other kids from Summerroot had been teleported to East Salem, where they’d holed up in an abandoned building and fought for their lives until the very end of the battle. Liam survived, but I’d heard a few other kids had died there.
The people who had taken shelter in Lynnville were the only ones who had gotten out unscathed. It turned out that the vast majority of fighting during the battle was on the wide road leading from Salem to Lynnville. Darkanoss and his forces had set up camp in the mountains northwest of Lynnville – the same spot where they took us when they captured us at Shichang – and advanced southward in an attempt to break the defensive lines around the shelter. But the wizards of Salem had fought back bravely, though many of them were captured and sent to Shichang. When Silas, Peter, and I freed the adults being kept prisoner, the Death Eaters had to defend on two fronts, giving the Lynnville resistance the advantage. Darkanoss and his forces had retreated to the university stadium, where the battle ended. Against all odds, the resistance had been victorious, but the cost was so high that it hardly felt like a victory.
Life changed for me after the battle. When the summer ended, John Proctor Middle School didn’t open again, out of muggle parents’ fears of letting their kids go to school with wizards. The muggles went to other schools, and the wizards were all trained by parents in community classes, held at the same farm south of Salem where we’d first attempted our Patronuses. I took these classes with Peter and Silas, as well as Liam, and some of my other friends who had all been in Lynnville during the battle. I tried to downplay the fact that I had been the one to defeat Darkanoss, especially since this fact seemed to earn me some envious resentment from the kids who hadn’t fought in the battle. But if they had been through what I’d been through, I’m confident that they wouldn’t have bragged about it, either.
I sometimes think that if that had been the end of it all, then maybe one day I might have recovered from what happened. I would still be haunted, but I would eventually learn to cope, to come to terms with my violent past. I could have grown up normal. Maybe I would still be something like my younger self then, still carrying some of that confidence and bravery I used to have. But that never came to pass.
Because that was not the end of the Phoenix War.