Minerva McGonagall was shocked.
Not by the event itself. The attack on Hogsmeade Station had been unforeseen, but only because of blindness on the part of those who ought to have foreseen it. In retrospect, it was something they should have counted on and planned for. As it was, they'd managed to rally together, drive the Death Eaters away, and get the students up to the sanctuary of Hogwarts... but not before four students had been killed. All four were Muggleborn females – their bodies were lying on pallets in the hospital wing now... four bright, promising young women, gone in an instant and a flash of green light.
That was certainly shocking. But somehow, in the way that tiny things somehow tend to be more disturbing than large ones, not as much as the fact that Albus Dumbledore was rattled. He was sitting in a chair, facing the girls, eyes closed and hands visibly trembling. Nothing ever worried or frightened Albus... not that he let it show, anyway. He was the rock on which the little community of Hogwarts was built, and he was very much aware of it. Minerva knew, perhaps better than anyone else alive, that things did worry or frighten him, and worried or frightened him deeply, especially in these terrible days, but he knew he couldn't let it show. If Albus didn't know what to do, nobody did... and things would quite simply fall apart.
Now he was very visibly worried and frightened. Minerva was almost certain she knew why... and it had little directly to do with the retroactively predictable attack upon the Hogwarts Express.
"Have you notified the families yet?" he asked. His voice, too, was shaking.
"No, Professor," replied Minerva. "I expected you'd want to wait."
He nodded and, Minerva followed his gaze as he opened his eyes to look over the girls. None of them had ever been terribly remarkable. Ravenclaw's Nadia Bell was mousey-haired and grey-eyed, took notes in six colours, and had the tidiest handwriting of anybody Minerva could remember teaching, but wasn't really very good at magic. Her favourite subject was History of Magic, and Minerva had always privately suspected that Nadia would grow up to teach either that or Muggle Studies. Now here she was, dead only days after her fifteenth birthday.
Hufflepuff's Jessica MacGregor had been plump and unattractive, with uncontrollable sandy blonde hair and big blue eyes that could fill with tears at the drop of a hat. Her handwriting was an unreadable scrawl, and her favourite subject was Care of Magical Creatures, though she was at the top of her class at Charms. Minerva had always found her overly-emotional nature and habit of humming off-key during exams terribly annoying.
Slytherin's Verona Ash was technically a half-blood. Her mother was the unfortunate squib scion of the not-very-prominent but still pureblooded Micarelli family. Maria Micarelli had married a Muggle policeman, and Verona had inherited from her mother's side both her dark Italian looks – she was easily the prettiest of the four casualties – and the magical ability that had apparently skipped a generation. Although a talented and ambitious student, Verona had been lonely and friendless in Slytherin, where many of the other students refused to associate with her on account of her magic-less parents. Her best – and only – friend had been Lily Evans of Gryffindor.
And by some terrible coincidence, it just so happened that Lily Evans was the last of the four. She had limp red hair that she'd always kept in two skinny, uneven braids and gray-green eyes that were usually directed at the ground. Lily was gifted at Charms and Transfiguration, but so painfully shy that Minerva couldn't remember the last time she'd said a word in public. The only person Lily ever seemed to talk to was Verona... the two had been inseparable. Apparently, they still were.
Minerva glanced at Albus. She had a good idea what he was thinking... it was impossible not to think about that damned prophecy. Minerva had always had her doubts about it, and now, looking at the four bodies, it seemed downright impossible. Surely, a prophecy like that required superwomen... not these four eminently ordinary little girls.
Albus glanced up and met Minerva's gaze, then sighed heavily. "Well," he said, "I suppose somebody had best contact them, and preferably as soon as possible. Dead bodies," he added dryly, "rarely improve with the keeping."
This sudden burst of dark humour was even more shocking than his very apparent worry and fear... Albus' sense of humour was frequently odd, but never in poor taste. He was plainly very concerned indeed.
"What did the scroll say?" Minerva asked. The scroll on which the prophecy was recorded, in tidy handwriting that might have been that of Godric Gryffindor himself, was kept in a carefully sealed drawer in Dumbledore's office. Whoever wrote it had put charms on it so that it could not be copied or memorized, although it was possible to remember the gist of it... and Minerva had not seen it in a great long time. She couldn't recall the details.
"That four girls would die, and their deaths would awaken the guardians of Hogwarts," said Dumbledore. The girls had died hours ago, and there was no sign yet of any guardians awakening.
"Nothing more specific?" asked Minerva.
He shook his head. "I suppose we shall have to simply wait and see. One tends to assume that when a prophecy and the attendant instructions have been passed down for a thousand and one years, they have been preserved for a reason."
A thousand and one years – that was right! It was 1974. Hogwarts had been founded in 973 AD, in September... a thousand and one years ago, exactly.
Albus sighed again. "Owl the parents, Minerva. They'll be upset enough that they were not immediately informed."
"Yes, Professor." She nodded. She picked up her skirts and headed off to her own office, to work on what she rather suspected would be the four most difficult letters she would ever have to write.
It was nearing midnight when Minerva gave up and put down her quill. She'd written drafts of her letters to the Ashes, Bells, Evanses, and MacGregors... several, in fact. The first had sounded too formal to her, the second too mushy, the third too much like newspaper obituaries, and finally she decided that she was just going to have to stop for tonight and piece together the best bits tomorrow morning, after she'd cleared her head with a good night's sleep. Right now, however, what she needed more than anything else was a good lungful of fresh air.
With that in mind, she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and headed down the steps to the back courtyard. She wasn't sure what had made her choose that particular place to go walking... but once she arrived, she realized that the idea of 'guardians' must have been preying on her mind, because there, on either side of the back gate that opened onto the Forbidden Forest, were the trees.
The trees; four of them, so ancient that they were all long dead. All that was left were their skeletal trunks, but they were allowed to keep standing more or less because they always had... nobody wanted to remove something that was so much a part of the landscape of Hogwarts.
And for some reason nobody could remember, they were called the Guardians.
There was a story that each of the founders had thrust his or her wand into the ground on this spot, and the magical wood had sprouted and grown within seconds into these magnificent trees; the one traditionally associated with Gryffindor was an oak, Hufflepuff's an apple, Ravenclaw's a willow, and Slytherin's a yew. All were so large that although they were dead, their titanic branches were still strong enough that younger students could climb them. Minerva wondered what they had looked like when they were alive... but then again, perhaps they never had been. Maybe they had always been as they were now... sleeping guardians, waiting for the right time to be awakened.
As Minerva stood looking at them, the clock at the front of the school began to sound midnight. She shut her eyes and counted... nine... ten... eleven...
But the chime for twelve didn't come.
She opened her eyes and looked around, wondering if she'd made a mistake about the time. Was it only eleven? No, it couldn't be – she distinctly remembered hearing the little clock on her desk chime eleven an hour ago. The Hogwarts clock ran on magic; it had kept perfect time ever since it had been installed, over four hundred years ago... but now there was only silence.
But, Minerva realized, it wasn't just the clock that had fallen silent. In fact, there was no sound whatsoever... it was as if something were sucking all the noise out of the air – she couldn't even hear her own heartbeat, although she could feel that organ thumping against her ribs. This had to be magic! Was something...
Then there was a rustling. Minerva blinked and looked up at the trees, and saw to her surprise that the long-dead Guardians were putting out leaves; red and orange and yellow ones, which after a moment turned green, then curled up into buds.
They were going through the seasons in reverse, she thought... and then the trees began to shrink. Before long they had shrunk from giants to saplings, then to sprouts, and then they were gone. A moment passed, and then there was a sort of soundless explosion, a burst of silent air as waves of coloured light flashed over the ground – red, green, blue, and yellow. Then darkness and silence returned.
A moment later, the last chime sounded. Minerva looked up again...
The trees were gone.
A chill passed up Minerva's spine – the deaths of four girls would awaken the guardians. Well, something had just happened to the trees that bore that name. But if they'd awoken, then where were they now? What did a thousand-year-old dead tree become when you woke it up?
She had to tell Albus about this.
Minerva pulled her shawl close around her shoulders and headed back inside as briskly as she could walk – which was surprisingly fast for somebody of her age. She climbed the stairs and let the back doors swing soundlessly open ahead of her.
And there she came face-to-face with a breathless Poppy Pomphrey.
"Oh, Professor McGonagall!" the mediwitch exclaimed. "I was just looking for you! The most incredible thing..."
Minerva's heart jumped into her throat. "What is it, Poppy?"
"The girls!" Madame Pomphrey exclaimed. "The four girls who died today... Professor, they're alive!"
