A small breeze gently but steadily playing with his beard, Albus Dumbledore stared at a bare patch of ground ten feet in front of him. His lavender and maroon robes gently moving, he paced slowly around this spot, his normally twinkling eyes piercing the air in front of him. His brow was furrowed in concentration, and the wand held loosely in his right hand was near constantly moving, swishing and swirling as the headmaster muttered incantation after incantation. For the past four hours, ever since he felt the slow buildup of magical energy in the Hogwarts courtyard, he had been casting more and more complex diagnostic spells to determine what was happening. When he couldn't, he began creating powerful wards around the space that the energy emanated from.
Now, though, Dumbledore began to slow his walk. The magical breeze that had been slowly growing the power built had died. Chuckling to himself, Dumbledore finally admitted that he was completely stumped. He let his wand hand slowly drop to his side, just now noticing the exhaustion that came from four hours of constant high level magic use. The power within his well warded circle was no longer growing, though it had begun to throw off visible light. Arcs of green and yellow, blue and purple and red magic crackled intensely, colliding into each other as they swirled around in a circle three feet wide and seven feet high. Dumbledore raised his left hand towards the energy, feeling happier than he had in some time. There was some of the phoenix's song in the sounds that slowly began to come into hearing, as if from a great distance. The strangeness, the absolute insanity of what was happening in front of him was one of the things he loved about magic. The sound swelled, and he heard the roars of lions and the hissing of snakes harmonizing, which surprised him as much as anything else.
In a flash of fire just above his head, a familiar sight soared onto his shoulder. Fawkes looked at him, head cocked to the side, them began to trill along with the phoenix song in front of him. Laughing in delight, Albus turned back to the magical energy, which had seemingly become solid in the time he had taken to look at his familiar.
In a great burst of emerald green and red, the energy burst through the wards he had set around, pushing Albus and Fawkes back a few paces. Bringing his wand up again, he looked to see what the magic had wrought.
Standing in the middle of swiftly diminishing arcs of energy was a young man in his late twenties, who was staring at the headmaster. His dirty, torn, and scorched robes were nearly falling off his athletic frame. Disheveled black hair fell to just above his collar, nearly obscuring his face like a filthy curtain. Peeking through were a pair of the greenest eyes he had ever seen, and tears seemed to fall unnoticed as they observed the headmaster in front of him.
Laughing happily for reasons he had no way to fathom, the old man said the first thing to come to mind. "Would you care for a lemon drop?"
This seemed to shake the man from his silent reverie. Clearing his throat, he simply said, "Yes please," before dropping to the ground in a faint.
Dumbledore tried to bring down the wards he had erected, before he realized that the surge of energy from the man's arrival had somehow shorted them all. Rushing forward, he started casting diagnostic spells on the prone body as Fawkes sang a calming song from his shoulder. The third he tried showed that all the man suffered from was acute physical and magical exhaustion. Letting out a breathe he hadn't realized he had been holding, he unconsciously brushed the dirty locks from the young man's face in a grandfatherly gesture. Looking into the young man's strangely familiar face, he saw something as strange as any other strange thing that had happened that day. On the young man's forehead was a faded scar in the shape of a jagged lightning bolt.
Looking at the phoenix on his shoulder, Albus Dumbledore smiled. "Oh, Fawkes, I do love a mystery."
A/N This is my first attempt at writing a fanfic, so aat advice and criticism is welcome. Thank you for reading.