After flying for some time, Oleandra realised she hadn't the faintest idea where she was. When she'd grabbed hold of Ginny mid-Disapparition, the risk of ending up in some windswept field in the middle of nowhere had barely crossed her mind, but now that she'd got what she came for, she'd very much like to go home.
That being said, that did not mean she was out of options.
The night sky was clear of clouds, which was a rather rare thing in the British Isles, so she could navigate her way home using the stars. And even though she didn't know how to Disapparate yet, Oleandra did reserve the option of using her Tree-Portation spell.
"Do you find it amusing, spying on people?" Oleandra snapped at the glittering constellations in the shape of hawk eyes in the black sky. "Bugger off, already, Heimdall."
With Odin, Baldr, and Freyja gone for good, the Aesir could no longer use the runes carved into Oleandra's, Daphne's, and Tracey's souls to seize control of their bodies. But that didn't mean the threat had passed— they still had an agent in Loki occupying Draco's body.
Come to think of it, could that Tracking Spell on the scrap of parchment Loki had used for their little game have been nothing more than a bluff? Oleandra wasn't sure. Every time she used runic magic outdoors, she could've sworn she felt a pair of yellow eyes boring into the back of her skull. Perhaps that was why Loki had this uncanny knack for finding her wherever she went.
As for using the Tree-Portation spell…
Even though the worst of the Aesir threat had passed with Odin's death, who could say what might happen if she used that spell again? Its sympathetic magic worked by likening the trees of the physical world to the metaphorical Yggdrasil that spanned all realms, allowing her to travel between trees within Midgard— but the World Tree was still Aesir territory.
Better safe than sorry, Oleandra decided, and so she stuck to flying eastwards, away from Cornwall and Devon and towards London.
After travelling for a while, she noticed something rather odd: the stars looked unusually bright. It wasn't that the Aesir were up to anything nefarious, though—they were no brighter than they might appear on a clear night at Hogwarts.
"Why's it so dark?" Oleandra muttered to herself, as she swooped down for a closer look.
All this time, she had believed herself to be soaring high above endless fields or forests in the middle of nowhere, when in actuality, she had already drifted over countless villages and hamlets. The real reason the stars shone so clearly was because of the absence of light pollution...
The darkness was deep and oppressive, just as one might expect on a Scottish night rather than here in England. Outside major roads or big cities such as London, the streetlights would turn off at night between certain hours, depending on where you lived— but it was not yet late enough for them all to be out.
It was as if someone had cut the power to the entire island.
It was not until two hours later— two o'clock in the morning, by Oleandra's watch— that she finally spotted a column of lights shining in the distance. Curious to know what was happening, she slowly descended, careful to hover just out of sight, cloaked in the black folds of Suit the Lethifold against the backdrop of the dark night sky.
"What the…?"
It was nothing more than a mundane traffic jam—the source of the light was a queue of cars, lined up bumper-to-bumper along the M3 motorway. Stranger still, the cars weren't alone: long columns of Muggles stretched along either side of the road.
But where were they all going at this ungodly hour?
Oleandra spotted entire families trudging along the side of the road: men joking and talking with one another as they walked, tired mothers cradling swaddled babes in their arms, children as young as six trotting alongside their parents…
It was almost as if they were being herded, but Oleandra could clearly see with her Mystic Eyes that they were not bewitched.
Oleandra discreetly landed in the woods next to the road, popped out from between the trees and joined the convoy on the motorway. Glancing around, she decided to approach a middle-aged woman pulling along three children of varying ages to ask what was going on.
"Excuse me," Oleandra asked politely, "where are you all going at this hour?"
The woman cast her a peculiar look, as if to say, who do you think you are, prying into my private affairs?
"Dunno about the others," she said with a guarded look on her face. "But we're going on vacation."
Oleandra gaped at her.
"And you decided to leave at this hour?" she asked incredulously. "On foot!?"
The woman peered at her with suspicion.
"I remembered I won an all-expenses paid trip to Ireland, so I'm taking my family," she said nastily. "But what's it to you? I'm warning you, my husband used to box, so don't get any funny ideas."
Oleandra looked around, but said husband was nowhere to be seen.
But the way this woman looked at Oleandra, it was almost as if she had caught sight of a suspicious stranger loitering in her neighbourhood, prowling the streets in summer to see if the inhabitants were away on holiday. Didn't she realise she was the odd one, dragging her young children about in the middle of the night?
Oleandra didn't press further, leaving the woman behind and moving on to a few other groups of travellers in turn. Each time, she asked what they were doing walking beside the motorway in the middle of the night— and each time, the answer was stranger than the last.
"Leaving from work…"
"Going to visit my cousin in Bristol..."
"Forgot I'd left my soup on the stove..."
And even:
"London's cursed, I tell you," one angry-looking man told her. "The proof is, everyone who's lived there in the last few centuries has died!"
Oleandra didn't need much more to guess the cause of the exodus. Someone had cast immensely powerful Muggle-Repelling Charms over each of London's boroughs, driving out every last mundane inhabitant in the dead of night, scattering them into the surrounding districts.
The Muggles were fine for now… but hard-headed as they were, there was only so long they could go on pretending their actions made sense. What would happen when they finally came to their senses and tried to return home?
They'd find themselves caught in a loop… but even if they managed to break free, where would they go, in the meantime? Where would they eat, or sleep? And what of the more vulnerable among them— the children, the elderly?
The metropolitan area's suburbs and towns ringing Greater London couldn't possibly support such numbers; the infrastructure simply wasn't built for it. And as if that weren't enough, it seemed like the electrical grid had gone down too, so what little food there was would soon spoil.
Oleandra looked eastwards grimly.
Without ever having to directly dirty their own hands, Voldemort's faction had condemned over seven million lives to death. The disorganised, scattered Muggles would perish from exposure, thirst, or starvation— forced to turn on one another simply to survive, or picked off by Dark Wizards for sport, one by one.
It was genocide, plain and simple— and the hapless Muggles would never understand how or why it had happened to them.