“Those in favor of the goblins’ peace plan, raise your hand!” the chief warlock asks the judges.

  Twenty-four hands are raised. For so many in the room, their hope for peace is about to die, but wait until the gavel falls to express their resentment of having endured 15 hours of debate and seeing the Wizengamot finish it just as divided as it began.

  Our only hope for peace now lies in there being at least 2 abstentions. If there was a tie, the Chief Warlock casts the final vote, and the Chief Warlock appears to be favorable, or else there just wouldn’t be a 15-hour special session debating it in front of the entire British wizarding community as well as ICW delegates! Thaddeus muses as the entire wizarding world holds its breath within Courtroom 10, while preparing his notes to hand over to his brother for safeguarding. But as the moment of truth nears…

  “Those in favor of rejecting the goblins’ peace plan, and abandoning British wizarding claims to New France, raise your hand!”

  Here 26 hands are raised, including the minister’s. With this final count, the gavel falls in front of thousands of mortified wizards inside a room whose enlargement charms included Sonorus charms:

  “By twenty-six votes to twenty-four, the goblins’ peace plan in New France is rejected, and all claims to wizarding New France are now considered relinquished! This session is now concluded!” Hesphaestus strikes the gavel, itself enchanted with another Sonorus.

  “I hope the Ministry is ready to face the consequences of continuing the rebellion, in blood and in New France!” Urg shouts, while the crowd leaves the room in a disorganised fashion.

  Thousands of wizards race to the exits, as much as it is possible to do so given the exhaustion endured through a 15-hour session, and some of whom were awakened only by the sound of the gavel falling.

  Yet it’s then that they all realize the gravity of the situation: war is going to continue unabated, New France is declared a wizarding no man’s land, and goblins, along with werewolves, were denied one last chance at official recognition, albeit limited to New France. That the Wizengamot preferred to abandon an entire continent to maintain the purity of wizarding society at home.

  As the throng of exhausted wizards return home, many of whom are disappointed, the delegates, frozen in place for a bit, finally leave the room, only a bit after Hesphaestus does.

  At the exit of Room #10, Hesphaestus himself stands in front of the 3 delegates:

  “You’re under arrest for having unduly breached national security by virtue of having attempted to negotiate a peace plan giving non-human beasts rights in New France!” Hephaestus then turns to some security guards still around. “Throw them into a cell!”

  “Minister, you committed perfidy on these representatives! They went here to negotiate peace in good faith, the Wizengamot obliged them under immense public pressure, even going so far as to order Room number ten magically enlarged, and spent fifteen hours debating it in good faith, only to squander the Wizengamot’s goodwill after the plan was rejected?” Thaddeus accuses Hesphaestus of having committed perfidy, before turning to his brother, notes on the session in hand. “I want you to keep these notes safe, these represent the truth that I fear the Ministry will try to suppress!”

  The ministry’s security guards escort the three to the nearby detention area. The two goblins are then thrown into a cell, and Thomas, in a separate cell owing to his werewolf nature.

  The next day, Hesphaestus, shaken by having spent 15 hours debating of a peace plan with what he deemed to be “savage beasts”, issues a set of new orders to the Daily Prophet to have it cover that session not as a last-ditch attempt to restore peace, but as a failed attempt by savage beasts to destroy wizarding supremacy via diplomatic means.

  And also issue a new decree regarding werewolves already in Azkaban, under which all werewolf inmates are to be deported overseas (the decree will still leave out any mention of New France, even though it’s where they will end up) starting on October 26, with safety instructions to be relayed to the Interceptor’s crew to ensure safe passage of the werewolves during full moon.

  I guess, I have no choice but to ferry prisoners and supplies to Azkaban once every two weeks using a different ship each time… if that’s the price of keeping Britain safe from werewolves, so be it, and starve the goblin inmates, too… Hesphaestus muses, as he signs another decree ordering the commutation of the sentences of all werewolves currently in Azkaban to life banishment from Britain. However, I must also issue orders for the guards of Azkaban not to feed goblin inmates.

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  In the meantime, goblins held in the Ministry’s holding area would be ferried to Azkaban on a prison ship rented out for a single rotation to ferry inmates and supplies from and to Azkaban, while the Interceptor is at sea, laden with werewolf inmates bound for New France, exhausted by their incarceration, proving unable to transform while at sea.

  On October 26, just after Thomas returns to his human form, his jailers bring him out of his cell, while still reeling in from the pain, and exhausted from his transformation.

  “It’s time to get out of Britain; the ship for New France is departing soon…” a jailer announces to Thomas, while he’s chained. “I’m afraid the minister has ordered the deportation of werewolves currently in the Ministry’s custody while you were in wolf form!”

  Thomas is brought out of the cells of the Ministry’s headquarters and onto a chimney bound for Hull, where the Interceptor, which otherwise looks like a merchant brig like any other, is about to dock, already loaded with dozens of werewolf prisoners in the lower deck.

  When Thomas arrives onboard the brig, he leaks the news to the rest of the inmates, who are clearly tired from their failed transformation within the walls of Azkaban:

  “New France could have been ours to administer four days ago, if only two more people voted for it rather than against it!” Thomas announces to the inmates, after the crew seals the hold’s hatch.

  “New… France?” a tired inmate, broken by years of incarceration at Azkaban, asks.

  Thomas realizes that no one at Azkaban, not even the guards, was aware of the peace plan’s existence, while the ship leaves port and sails north, to be clear of Scotland, not suspecting that, in London, every werewolf onboard would be declared “died at sea” a few days from now, when the ship will leave British home waters.

  So as the ship sails into the Atlantic for the weeks to follow, with its logs showing that it carries a shipment of mentally ill prisoners. However, the crew decided not to feed the inmates to prevent, during full moon, their transformation, and hence ensure the safety of the Statute as well as the crew’s at sea.

  Yet, even with magic, the captain, and only wizard onboard, feels like the race is on to offload the prisoners in New France before the St. Lawrence River’s waters freeze and, as he arrives at Percé on November 30, 1760, not knowing that the Interceptor carries the seeds of the foundation of what is to become an independent wizarding Canada.

  Closing notes: After the arrest of the delegation, the Wizengamot turned increasingly hostile to Gore, even as the Punnet-led peace faction accused Gore of perfidy.

  However, the perfidy accusation resurfaces in 1764, which sees him be re-elected by a narrow margin, thanks to the fragmentation of the public opinion, and he’s accused again of such in 1770, causing his defeat, along with the public being tired of his brutality. Which saw Azkaban become a graveyard of goblins.

  In 1771, Gore was convicted on charges of troubling the peace and perfidy, causing him to be sentenced for life in Azkaban.

  Chroniculus Punnet, a younger brother of the Wizengamot peace faction leader, begins teaching History of Magic at Hogwarts in 1761, a post he held after the death of his predecessor, Garius Tomkink, in a battle over one of Hogsmeade’s mills, as a concession to the peace faction in the face of the growing unpopularity of the rebellion in the eyes of the public.

  Chroniculus went on to teach until 1793, whose firing under Unctuous Osbert marked the beginning of a centuries-long intellectual atrophy in British sociopolitical interest, due to his successor, Cuthbert Binns, instead delivering a sanitized version of the material. However, his career ended through the issuance of what would become known as the Impossible Assignment, which was about the failure of the New France plan. He also cast Geminio on all copies of the five students who attempted it, and kept the originals as family heirlooms.

  Chroniculus’ firing in 1793 also led to the resignation of Thaddeus from the Wizengamot, whose resignation warned him of possible consequences of British blindness.

  The most famous 2 students attempting the Impossible Assignment, Alejandra and Nurcan, went on to become Minister of Magic in Spain and Vizier of Magic in the Ottoman Empire respectively.

  As for the rebellion, Vargot was killed in 1762, decisively defeating the goblin rebels; however, ten years of war caused a massive death toll of 632 wizards as well as economic damage from constant attacks on mills. And also caused the British werewolf population to shrink to the single digits by 1762.

  Speaking of werewolves, the exactions committed by the Gore administration caused the British lycanthrope community to bleed its vis viva white, either through exodus to Muggle colonies or in battle, leading to centuries of social fragmentation and destitution.

  But, while Britain ensured that, by rejecting the New France plan, Canada became independent on the wizarding stage, Britain’s isolationism blinded it to the possibility of multi-species governance since Canada actually granted a seat on its wizarding ruling body specifically for werewolves.

  For generations of British goblins, however, the spectacular failure of the New France peace plan poisoned the diplomatic well, and caused them to resent the Ministry for centuries after the fact.

  And Maximilian Crowdy succeeded Gore as Minister for Magic in 1770, where he pursued the non-intervention policy in the colonies of his predecessors (especially Gamp and Gore). He famously “sat this one out” (the American Revolutionary War) in 1777 because Britain had yet to fully recover from the goblin rebellion.

  In 1778, a rich wizarding merchant in Philadelphia commissioned a goblin goldsmith, to make a golden snuffbox, ostensibly as a gift to Crowdy for continued British wizarding neutrality, but the goblin infused it with Muggle poisons such as arsenic and lead. Usage of the snuffbox continued for three years, at the end of which Crowdy dies in 1781, via gradual use of the snuffbox.

  His successor, Porteus Knatchbull, ordered the snuffbox to be stored in an archive vault of the Ministry as part of a cleanup of his office. He never suspected that the snuffbox was a delayed response to the humiliation endured in October 1760.