It was a cryptic thing - Hogwarts at night. Lanterns burnt low in the massive stone corridors, flickering here and there from the wanton titters and whispers of the souls that seemed to forever haunt the space. The low-hanging lanterns� flame-lit wicks, when not interrupted, cast the eeriest, most deathly faint light imaginable. Its fingers ever so lightly traced the cobblestone walls and loud house banners, all together avoiding the many moving portraits that littered the walls. Spells cast long ago deterred the light from interrupting the portraits' eerie, life like sleep.
Where the firelight failed to cast its yellow gloom, silver moonlight washed the castle�s interior. The blue moonlight crept in through the castle eves and overhangs, portal windows, and haunted gables. Whispey drafts, eerie noises and the hallow whispers of the long-dead lives that had whisked their way, chattering and careless, through the halls of Hogwarts School for Whitchcraft and Wizardry for centuries all culminated amidst the halls of the castle at night. Blue, smoke like ghosts in the shapes of their former human selves - the castle�s literally hundreds of apparitions and spirits - roamed the halls freely in the dark chill of twilight.
Whisping to and fro, not quite walking, and certainly not touching the ground, the ghosts hovered about to their nowhere destinations, the lot of them seeming utterly oblivious to the fact that they were indeed quite dead. It was only upon the occasional stir of the living that the ancient corridors of the castle would return to any hint of vacant normalcy... as if normalcy were
possible in a school where brooms took flight and students took on classes like The History of Magic and Transfiguration.
With the first sign of life, the ghosts would all but vanish - flitting off and away, melting into walls and whisking upward to hide amongst the ceiling�s blackened wood beams. Once gone, their blue-glow vapor tails were the only hint of their having been there at all - and even that meager bit of evidence would fade away within seconds.
The spirits were far more hasty then usual to get out of the way of the figure that prowled the hallways this night. The flustered body that strode down the cobblestone hall sent the ghosts reeling to make a speedy, almost panicked retreat. Though, grant it, this was nothing terribly unusual, considering the source. The ghosts knew good and well that it was far less then a bright idea to cross paths at this hour with a drowsy Severus Snape.
The Potions Master, ironically enough, looked to have seen a ghost. His attention wasn�t on the Hogwarts apparitions, however. Far from it. Barreling up from the dungeons, gasping for breath, his already sallow face three shades whiter, Severus Snape was all but in a panic. Trodding up stairs, his head swimming, he barely managed to juggle between his grasp on the
flickering steel lantern he carried and the death grip he had on the mark that was seared into his arm.
The pain was unbearable. Snape�s steel grip he kept upon his arm had send both hands completely numb, his veins bulging, his knuckles white. Just feet shy of the Headmaster�s office, he collapsed. The pain that struck him was so intense that it sucked the air out of him, and seemed driven to take his life along with it. Mind screaming, head reeling, Snape scrambled to
lean against the cobblestone wall, to lean into it. To cower. It was that last shot of pain that would haunt him in the months to come because, with it, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that the Dark Lord was on the rise. |
