Date: July 25th, 2010, night/evening Characters: Harry Potter and open Location: Hogsmeade, Hog's Head Private/Public: Semi-public Rating: TBA Summary: Harry arrives Completion: In progress
((OOC:Hello everyone! I'm hoping it's okay I post my example as my first post (and if not of course I'll be more than willing to change it) and also am going to reassure everyone most of my posts certainly won't be this long or really repetitive. Thanks and apologies again!))
Harry....was no longer crawling. In fact, he was no longer worming his way through dirt and dark with the figures of Hermione and Ron struggling up ahead at all. Suddenly there were lights where there had been none, smells that bombarded him from all side, a temperature and shift in the world that took him completely by surprise that was like no magic he'd ever experienced before. He looked round, taken aback, disoriented with his hand diving into his cloak pocket purely on instinct. Standing there where seconds before that haunting chilling voice ran shrilling against the silence between the three; just moments ago taunting and ebbing into his mind. Leaving that aching silence from before suddenly vibrantly clear, those words as real as if they were being spoken to him again, "If, at the end of that hour, you have not come to me, have not given yourself up, then battle recommences. This time, I shall enter the fray myself, Harry Potter, and I shall find you, and I shall punish every last man, woman, and child who has tried t conceal you from me. One hour." And the long drawn out voice of Voldemort's last words as silence had finally fallen once more...
His voice was gone now though. And the sudden turn of events changed everything, all at once. Another surprise to be loaded onto the whole of what Harry was trying to come to terms with. As it was Harry's eyes traveled desperately around him to make sense of what had happened, what had changed, his gaze canvasing the growing darkness. Buildings spread out all along and around him, both shockingly familiar and in the shift, unfamiliar all at once. Feeling both real and distinctly surreal and the ground beneath him feeling for a moment as if the only thing that were assuring the boy he hadn't actually gone mad. He was, he deducted slowly, in Hogsmeade and with that realization instantly panic swelled inside of him. What was he doing here? How had he gotten here? He had no answers and that did not help. Fervently the boy raked through his brain for any memory, any clue, anything that could tell him the reasons to this question. But there was nothing. Nothing except, he recalled unwilling and without real pause, those cold hands of Severus as they'd latched onto him, eyes boring into him, his own face expressionless, a silvery substance filling the flask tucked away against his pocket...
And now instead here he was, impossibly. Here instead of where he'd had to be, here instead of the people screaming and shouting in his name...in his defense, for him, Harry, the boy who had lived while he struggled to make a plan. Thoughts he could not bare, not now, to think of. It left him with a thrill of sick at even the slip, a thought that he had to force away in favor of bringing the situation at hand to his mind.
"Hermoine." He hissed quietly in the open air of the dark, urging, desperate for response. "Ron." Green eyes turned, prowling on the spot; trying to catch some glimpse, some glimmer of his two companions, the two had just previous been crawling along before him...but he couldn't place them. In fact, he couldn't see anyone else around the darkened streets. He tried to remember, tried to think; tried to imagine what kind of spell or curse or magic could transport him like this but...no. His mind was refusing to lay to anything that could help him, anything that could give any kind of clues as to how he had been taken here in such a way.
He was pulled at that both unwilling and helplessly vivid to the last time he had been pulled away against his will to a location not of his choosing...a place cold and real and jeering in Harry's mind's eye. A face, just like Fred's, and that thrill of terror and surreality jolted through him in the instances his mind caught hold of Cedric's lifeless eyes. He tried to wipe it from his mind, looking more fiercely and despite himself slightly more pale, still beneath his cloak as he desperately turned his gaze at the place in question. Even while it made no sense, even while Harry knew they were back at Hogwarts hidden amongst the forest, awaiting him to give himself to Voldemort he still couldn't help the feeling that just beyond his gaze, hidden away in the shadows, the Death Eaters lurked. It was, with a surprising anger to replace doubt and grief, that Harry nearly wanted them to be. Nearly wanted, pulsing in his mind, if just for that image that still remained burned in his mind of the dead.
He had no time for this he realized. Harry held still, doing his best to push all of the thoughts away from his spinning mind. Taking the world around him in again. This was a different part of town, a ways away from the Shrieking Shack and as he forced himself to try and recall, try and place it all out against his head, there had been no port key that he could remember, no shrinking suffocating blackness of disapparating, nothing that the boy could accurately remember that could have left him from within that passageway, too slim and narrow to do little more than crawl, to appearing to the place he now stood; cloak still cast over his head and eyes narrowed and alert, still ready, awaiting attack at any moment.
As it stood he knew, he had to act quickly. There was no doubt in his mind of this fact. There was no time to waste, no telling how long it had been, moments, seconds, minutes dwelling on these things? He couldn't be sure but with rapid clarity Harry knew with every moment and every passing second wasted away time they needed. Despite the grief, despite the still freshly stabbing ache and numbness and unsettled shock that placed through him, every moment he stood debating and raveling out theories, he realized then, were preciously wasted seconds spent not at the castle rounding together something, anything, to finish off the very last of the six horcruxes, to finish their objective, to kill that great powerful snake...
Harry moved foreword. Footsteps as silent as possible, the silent rippling cloak wafting all around him, securing him, keeping him hidden from prying eyes. The boy so focused, so intent on his objective to reach the Hog's Head and the trap door that lay a path back to Hogwarts that he hadn't the time or focus for taking in the distinctly different aura the place held the farther he walked. To notice that no longer did fear and darkness seem to linger across the very heart of these streets, shops closed and shut and dark but vibrant with light and figures and voices. So distracted by the overwhelming whirlwind of events just prior to all of this Harry Potter did not take notice of even the most obvious of things that, not given his focus and the numb grief, he may have given first thought to this obvious flaw above all else. However it was really only just as the boy gently opened and slipped into the Hog's Head did he dare to skirt to the corners, look up to be sure no one there was paying him particular or clear attention and silently, carefully, slip off the cloak to tuck it against his robes. It was just then as green eyes searched for Aberforth Dumbledore did he really, really take in the place around him. And the people. People who were not students, at least not the scared and solemn faces he would have expected. As it was it was after night, he knew, and that meant the curfew should have been in place. In fact an alarm should have gone off at him even being outside, shouldn't it have? It was really only with these thoughts did he look passed the people and did Harry realize with a slow dread and a creep of shock and frustrating confusion that he simply did not have time for, that the place was startlingly different. Startlingly merry, normal, dank and...somehow things that had been there just hours ago were gone. Furniture and tables and the people that filled the room, he realized slowly and with a further dawning dread to add onto the shock, had changed, had been added, were...different.
Where was Aberforth? At that moment it was his only thought, his only one hope for sense as this certainly wasn't the scene he should have expected upon just recent evacuation of such a large number of students; not the lone dreaded terrible place swarmed with grief and loss and fear it had been not just hours ago, no, it was different now. So different Harry had to wonder to himself in the midst of it if he had in fact, somehow fallen into the swirling liquid he'd been handed by the white cold hands of Severus Snape not just minutes before...It was the only thing that might make sense. He stepped gingerly, bracing himself, into the crowd; covered from head to foot in dirt and grime and cuts and bruises and blood, hair still singed and that lightning shape bolt across his forehead vibrant in contrast to his flushed looking skin, alert, breath held, skimming heads desperate for the man to appear.