[4.51pm]
Time had a way of both crawling and whisking by. The twenty minutes of mass panic since the initial eruption felt as though it'd been growing for hours, while benches and signposts were reduced to dust quicker than Marlene could blink an eye. She was sure that at some point other members of the Order had begun to arrive - she'd caught a flash of hair that she thought she recognized, a coat that could only possibly belong to one person - but couldn't pinpoint the whens and wheres of their arrival, nor was there time to worry about that. There were hexes traveling from all angles, screaming children who'd lost site of their parents in the rush, grey haired women who'd cast their wands and walking sticks aside in favour of attempting to dig their husbands out from under the charred rubble, refusing to leave their loved one's side, danger be damned.
Marlene wished there was more she could do beyond sending out defensive hexes and casting protective shield charms at those unable to do so for themselves, knowing that bringing any unnecessary attention to herself beyond what she had to in attempts to keep safe would be dangerous not only for herself, but for the Order. Of course, she couldn't hold herself back from firing a particularly nasty stinging hex at one of the Death Eaters who was steadily approaching a little girl with brown braids whose mother, maybe sister, was laying unconscious in the snow a few meters away. Yelling at the girl to run (and oh, that she did, disappearing out of the fray and towards her house on Asphodel Avenue), Marlene took off in the other direction, knowing well enough that it wouldn't be smart to still be standing there when the Death Eater regathered his senses.