Chapter one

It was hot. There were roaring dragons made of fire everywhere. In the centre of the room was a girl coughing, the smoke hurt her lungs making it difficult to breathe. She could vaguely feel the fire burning her but her mind seemed to be blocking out the pain. She collapsed to the stone floor knowing this was the end, the ceiling wasn't going to hold for long and there was no way out. She smiled. It was finally over. Valkyrie was complete. As she lost consciousness she made one last wish. "Take me home."

Professor Severus Snape was bored. The students had all just returned after the Christmas holidays, which was a pity. His job would be much better without the brats. Currently Dumbledore was giving his start of term speech but no-one was really listening. They were all too busy catching up with their friends. He was just looking around the Great Hall, listening to Dumbledore finish up his speech when it happened.

A bright orange fireball of fire dragons appeared in the middle of the room, right in front of the teacher's table. Something dropped from the fire onto the floor and the fire went out. The student all jumped up and started screaming. Snape trusted Dumbledore to calm the students down so grabbed his wand and went to see what it was that had appeared. He went around the table and approached the unmoving mass on the floor. As he approached he was horrified to realised it was a person. Most of her clothing had burnt off and her hair was short and looked like most had burnt away. He wondered what had happened to this woman. As far as he knew the Dark Lord was lying low as the ministry were happily oblivious to his return so it couldn't be him behind this.

Snape snapped out of his ponderings as he noticed the students trying to get a look at what had arrived. He took off his outer robe and covered the woman up. He saw Dumbledore frowning at him, probably confused by his actions. He mouth across to Dumbledore that it was a body. Dumbledore ordered the prefect to take all the students to their common rooms and said a teacher would be along soon to tell them what was going on. The students slowly left the room clearly discussing their theories of what had just happened. Well, when he said the students left he meant all but three. Potter and his two sidekicks approached Dumbledore trying to find out what was going on and for some reason Potter appeared to think he should be involved in the investigation.

Snape decided he had had enough of these three students getting involved in things that didn't concern them so quickly walked them all to the door sent them through and then warded the door so they couldn't come back in or listen to what was happening. McGonagall complained that it wasn't necessary to be so brisk with them but Snape wasn't worried. He just replied that they had more important things to worry about like how a body got into Hogwarts.

Dumbledore agreed with Snape and also added that he thought the fire dragons had looked like fiendfyre so there was clearly someone willing to do dark magic involved. Snape commented that they were lucky the fiendfyre hadn't spread. Dumbledore came up with some hypothesis that the fiendfyre had died out because it was so far from the person who cast it. The teachers all then approached the body carefully holding their wands out in front of them. Snape warned the teachers that it wasn't a pretty site and was badly burned but everyone still gasped when Dumbledore pulled back the robe to reveal the body.

Umbridge then got really self important and started to talk about contacting the ministry and bringing aurors in and who knows what else. One of the other teachers then commented about them not even knowing what had happened yet. Arguments started flying around between the teachers but both Dumbledore and Snape ignored them. Snape asked Dumbledore what he thought had happened and if he thought the Dark Lord was behind it. Dumbledore said he didn't know what had happened but it was unlikely to be Voldemort's work, not that that was much consolation. Dumbledore bent down and examined the body. He pointed out that other dark curses had been used on the body. He was just pointing to scars indicating a particularly nasty curse on her stomach when she opened her eyes!

"I know I'm dead and all but did you really need to be the first person I had to see?"

This story has been stuck in my head for a while so I thought I may aswell attempt to write it.