After what had felt either like a fraction of a second or like a millenia – she could not tell which – Lily fell face first on the cold floor. She cursed under her breath, climbed back on her feet, and took a paranoid look around the room. She found herself standing exactly where she thought she'd be – on the other side of the archway, in the empty chamber – yet somehow she felt startled, as if this was not were she really ought to have been.

Taking a deep breath, she willed herself to calm down, but she could not fully shake the feeling that something very strange had just happened. It was almost as if she had passed out and regained consciousness within the few seconds it had taken for her to fall and land. Surely that couldn't have been it?

"Why did I fall down in the first place...?" she asked herself, and glaced back at the eery archway. There was nothing there for her trip over, nor did she recall stumbling, like she had spontaneously fainted mid-stride. Yet, her head was spinning and her heart was racing, and she felt as though her spirit had just left and re-entered her body.

"What did you do to me...?" she whispered, but the strange archway gace no answer to her question.

Minutes passed. Lily checked her body thoroughly, but she could not find anything wrong with herself – aside from the few bruises she had gotten when she had hit the floor. Once her head stopped spinning, she started feeling perfectly fine as well. With no explanation to what might have come over her, she decided to leave the room and find Marlene. The fight was not over yet.

She went closer to the door, amplified her hearing with a spell, and listened carefully. She couldn't hear the two Death Eaters anymore. In fact, she couldn't hear anything. All the screaming, the shouting, and the general roar of the distant battle had ceased.

Next, she opened the door and took a tentative look outside. It was dark and quiet there, and suddenly she was struck by the horrible sense that she was the only person left alive in the whole building.

When she stepped outside, she could not help by feel like she was entering a world that was entirely different to the one she had left behind.

"Marlene? James? Moody? Anybody?"

Lily wandered around the Ministry of Magic half-shouting and half-whispering the names of her friends. No one answed her. She only saw more dark and empty rooms around her, and the only sound she heard came from her own footsteps.

Stranger still, all the windows, statues, and doors in the entrance hall were intact, although the place had been completely wrecked just moments ago. She doubted that the place could have been repaired so soon, even if she had somehow missed the end of the battle. It was like it had never even happened.

"Don't be stupid, Lily," she told herself when her vivid imagination conjured up increasingly more terrifying explanations to the questions on her mind. "They can't have all simply vanished, and they are not dead. If they were, there would be blood and dead bodies everywhere."

She took a closer look around the hall just to make sure that she was telling herself the truth.

"Now, use your head," she continued. "Whatever happened here, it must have happened to me, not to the others. They're safe, and I'm just... lost. All I need to do now is to figure out what went wrong so that I can fix this. Maybe I should go back to that archway, and..."

Lily had to cut her monologue short, for the silence had just been pierced by a ghastly, inhuman howl. Gasping, she turned on her heels and saw two hooded figures emerging from the shadows. They drifted towards her across the marble floor like dark clouds riding on a storm wind.

"Dementors!" she exclaimed, feeling how crippling terror struck her in the heart like an arrow. The air around her suddenly felt freezing.

She knew that it would not take long for her to become completely paralyzed by fear and despair, so she quickly pulled out her wand and shouted, ""Expecto Patronum!"

The familiar shape of a silver doe leaped out of the tip of her wand and protected her from the hunger of the dark creatures. They hissed and retreated back into the shadows. Lily thanked herself for having taken the time to master the difficult spell, and she seized her chance to flee.

She ran for the exit, left the building, and Disapparated on the other side of the city just to be safe. There, she collapsed on the pavement and covered her face with her hands as all of her worst memories invaded her mind. She thought about her mother's death, about all the fights she had had with her sister, and about the time she had fallen out with her best friend Severus, and for a moment all she could do was to sit there stirring like a spooked little animal.

Soon enough, the effect of the Dementors began to wear off, and she managed to push all the depressing memories away.

"Focus," she commanded herself. "Where is everyone? Why are there Dementors at the Ministry? And why were they attacking me...?"

It made as little sense as anything else that had happened to her so far. Dementors were supposed to be under the Ministry's control. They were not allowed to touch anyone but wanted criminals. Why had they come after her like they had wanted to suck her dry?

Lily was still freezing, and suddenly she realized that it was no longer because of the Dementors.

It was snowing outside. Snowing. She was sitting on a cold, wet pile of dirty snow in the middle of June, shuddering in her breezy summer dress and thin overcoat. People on the other side of the street were wearing thick winter clothes, and the buildings around her were covered in Christmas lights.

"What the..." she began out loud, but never managed to finish her sentence with an appropriate expletive, as her mind finally provided her with a reasonable answer to all the questions she had just asked herself.

Somehow, someway, she must have traveled in time. She couldn't fathom how or why, but she clearly wasn't where she was supposed to be

Then where – when – was she now? It was obviously Christmas, but what year was it?

"Excuse me," she asked the first person she ran into in the street – a young man who looked like he might have just come from a party. "Could you tell me what day it is today?"

"Oh, it's Sunday. The twenty-first," he replied. His gaze swept over her inappropriate attire, and she hoped that he wasn't going to ask her where she had gotten the idea to wear summer clothes in midwinter.

"Ah. Cheers," Lily thanked, smiling awkwardly. "Er, I know that this might sound a little bit crazy, but could you also tell me what year it is?"

He stared at her. "You don't know what year it is?"

"Look, I'm not going to lie to you," she continued with a smirk. "It's just that I've recently traveled in time, but I'm not sure whether I've come to the future or to the past unless I find out what year it is now."

"Yeah, I hate when that happens," the man laughed. Just as Lily had hoped, he seemed to assume that she was only joking.

"It's 1997. December. Does that help you?"

It did. But it also made her feel like she had just been shot through the stomach with a cannon ball

"Yes, thank you. You've been very helpful," she replied in a shaky voice and quickly walked away. She was shuddering again, but this time she could not blame it on the cold.

It appeared that she was in much deeper trouble than she could have even imagined.