Follows on directly from The Only Other Sound

Approximately half past four.



The trees were still smouldering. The embers sizzling beneath the last drops of enchanted rain from his earlier spell. Magical fire could be extinguished in a snap if just a flame, but the blackened boughs about the clearing threw long twisted shadows in the rapidly disappearing daylight.

To his right was a mound of broken branches, brought down like a theatre curtain but with ferocious noise. Their breaking was simultaneous, showering splinters into the air above their heads before plunging the unidentified attacker out of sight. There, able to abscond. Budding branches and new spring leaves rustled in the breeze, while severed arms reached up into the grey sky beyond, as if onlookers frozen in horror at the scene.

The sharp crack of the wizard's apparition from just outside his garden gate sent startled crows up from their perches. His pale eyes surveyed the scene for onlookers, and satisfied he was for this moment alone, he drew his wand and summoned his happiest thought to his mind's eye.

The augurey patronus circled the trees and then shot away in the direction of the village in pursuit of Ravindar Singh, carrying the message Incident in the village: all students to return to school immediately.

Spectral messenger despatched, Ignan drew close to the centre of the scene, where the rudimentary coffin was thankfully, but obscenely, still in situ. His wand traced a line about the perimeter, a faint yellow glow of the ward shimmered over the scruffy grass and tree roots, ready to alert him of any arrivals while his attention was elsewhere.

It was pinewood, and barely big enough to take Grant at his judgement. It was hexagonal, with shoulders and no dressing. It was simple but recognisable. Whether it had been to induce fear or for use it wasn't clear. It was the only clear evidence despite the physical disruption, so he paused over examining it with magic in favour of examining the rest of the scene.

The earth ahead was churned and gouged, as if unseen claws of a giant beast had swiped the ground from up on high. It had opened up like a mouth to swallow Temple's race towards their assailant, and by the end of it, both Gryffindors had ended up in it.

He drew to the edge of it, his muddy boots causing the edge to crumble. The hole was an angry wound, now hidden in shadow. He lit the tip of his wand, holding it from one side to the next until something caught his eye. Not a tree root, something far too straight. Accio... wand?

It slid from the mud, a short, sturdy piece of oak. There was the slightest of trembles through his fingers as he caught it in his left, examined it in more wandlight. It looked familiar, perhaps a wand brandished in his classroom, and it was likely belonging to one of the girls - Grant had carried both to the hole had she not?

He stooped to wipe the worst of the mud from it on the his robes when a flash of light rose from the ward edge. The Professor slipped the found wand into the inners of his cloak and turned to receive the aurors arriving at the scene.

The woods were lovely, dark and deep, and if it wasn't for the faint yellow shimmer against the muddy ground ahead, it would be hard to know this spot from any other in the eerie twilight settling over the forest. Jonas had hardly been acquainted with the Forbidden Forest during his Hogwarts days, but it seemed determine to loom over his career as an Auror. At least this time, the call for assistance had not come with accounts of a ghastly murder[1] in the woods -- though with his daughter now a student herself, any report of trouble at the magical school seemed ever more portentous.

The flash of light signaled his arrival better than words ever could. Jonas stopped just inside the edge of the ward, at the perimeter of whatever Ignan Storm had chosen to demarcate.

"You're supposed to finish mucking about with the crime scene before you send for the Ministry," he remarked nicely, casting a sidelong glance at the old professor. Ignan Storm was a master of both sides of the course that he taught, but he'd earned polite respect from the Auror. Unlike Gwenna, who loved to imagine all sorts of conspiracies and had refused to let go of the Defense professor's supposed villainy, Jonas knew when to tactfully stop prying.

He returned his attention to the scene before him. Something had clearly happened here. The ground was roiled and churned, with some sort of gaping hole before him. Broken tree limbs stretched up toward the darkening sky, and the air smelled faintly of blackened wood.

"What happened?" Forehead creasing, Jonas looked back at the Defense professor. Storm, too, looked a little worse for wear than the stoic wizard normally preferred, his robes muddy and hair a bit unkempt. "Is everyone alright?"

1.	February 1, 2009 - the Great Escape

“Auror Trevelyan.” The Hogwarts Professor gave a respectful nod to the wizard after his remark. He glanced beyond the auror’s shoulders to see if anyone followed. Greyfriar must have been successful in selecting his werewolf sympathiser.

“What happened? Is everyone alright?”

“No wounds worse than Healer Prince can salve.” He shook his head slightly as he said it, but otherwise wasted no time in getting to the practicalities. Old habits died very hard.

“Two of our students were attacked here, by someone who took the face of another student.” He summarised, extending his wand and right to where the coffin was hidden in the gloom.

Lumos Orbis - a steady ball of light grew from the tip of his wand and ascended gently into the evening air like a helium balloon. He lifted his wand up until it reached ten or so feet above them and grew in size enough to drench the scene in a pale blue light. It lacked warmth of yellow light, much like the caster. Despite this magical light, shadows still hung like sleeping bats to everything beneath.

“Hogsmeade weekend,” he continued to explain. “Temple and Grier, students and werewolves, were in the village. They were approached by what appeared to be Feliks Spectre, another student, who led them here from that direction.” He gestured in the direction Jonas had arrived, from the village. “I was on patrol so pursued at a distance.” He glanced back to see that the auror was approaching.

“When I reached them, the girls were over here, ensnared in tenacious twine.” He gestured for Jonas to follow him into the scene. “Their mouths were cursed closed, and he had them here, beside this.” The rudimentary coffin[1] looked none the friendlier in the hue.

1.

Quote from: Jebediah Layton on January 12, 2021, 02:37:48 PM The wizard tapped the the bush with his wand. And then, abruptly, it was no longer a bush but a large tangle of Tenacious Twine draped over an oddly shaped pinewood box on the ground. A coffin. A child-sized coffin. …. It had been built to fit Greer but Lucinda might be able to squeeze in instead. It has a lid, which has been unseated, and it is empty.

The red-headed Auror listened intently, brows knitting and mouth pressed into a thin, firm line. Storm's former vocation showed in the professor's rapid-fire recounting of the facts. Two students, attacked by someone wearing the face of a third. That in itself was notable: the older wizard, after all, had had very personal knowledge of a Metamorphmagus.  If Storm presumed that the attacker had been in disguise, Jonas was inclined to believe his impression.

The spectral blue light followed them, casting an eerie tinge through the growing shadows as Storm led the way to the wooden box at the center of the scene. Jonas studied it silently, his expression steady. Two werewolf girls, Tenacious Twine, and a pinewood coffin -- yes, he could understand why the note that had been sent to Carstairs had drawn a parallel to the tragedy in Dumfriesshire.

Pausing, he glanced across the clearing, gaze playing across the scuffled mess of frantic footprints, fallen debris, and churned-up mud. On a Hogsmeade weekend, it couldn't have been too hard to lure two girls away from their classmates in the village. Out here alone, with their mouths hexed so they couldn't scream for help, it would have been too easy for things to take a turn for the worse.

"They're lucky you happened to be on patrol," Jonas remarked mildly, though he doubted it was luck.

Taking care with his bad knee as he picked his way through the mud, he stepped closer to carefully examine the child-sized coffin, painted a pale, sickly blue by the light of the floating orb overhead. "How long was he or she alone with them?" he asked, with a sidelong glance to Storm. "What happened when you reached them?"

“They’re lucky you happened to be on patrol.”
“It’s become a necessity since last year,” the Deputy Head responded grimly. The kidnapping of students from Hogsmeade had been near impossible to prevent owing to the skill of creating sweet samples into portkeys, but it didn’t mean a greater staff presence in Hogsmeade was futile. It was precisely incidents like today’s that he had hoped to prevent.

“How long was he or she alone with them?” The Professor’s pale gaze was cast upwards as he considered an answer.
“Between five and ten minutes conversation out of earshot at my reckoning.”

“What happened when you reached them?”

“I approached, same direction, but under disillusionment.” He traced a path less direct than the girls had been led. “And engaged with Spectre, or whoever was posing as him. They redirected their attention to me, and we exchanged spells. Their retreat was quick, I don’t believe they were prepared to see their plan through if interrupted. If they wanted to take the girls then they had opportunity, they were willingly following.” Idiots, the two of them.

“They retreated back into the tree line,” he gestured over to his right as they faced the coffin, beyond the pile of tree branches. “They set fire to that side,” he gestured to the opposite side of the clearing where the boughs and branches of the trees were blackened, and the ground was sodden from the rain. “And when I tried to drag them out they brought these branches down as one and must have disapparated in the next instance. There was no presence there when I sought it.” 

The thickness of the branches alone, and the way they had splintered in unison was a stark indication that this had been no first year in the clearing, but someone with talent.

“As for the mess over there,” he indicated the gouge in the ground between coffin and pile of branches, “the girls got loose of the twine, their attacker tried to summon it back. Temple, the idiot, made a run at them, and they near buried her in it.”

He could feel weariness edging in as he recounted the story again. His mind’s eye replaying Lucinda tearing across the clearing, enraged, and his own spell seeking to slow her down, only for the ground to open and her to fall headlong into the earth. Had the attacker been keen to take them, it might have ended in a much less favourable way.

“Have you seen anything like it?” He asked, aware that The Prophet had reported more than one werewolf-related incident under investigation.