Like hundreds of meteors, the legion of Nevernever pixies began to dive toward the eight of us, tiny stone-chipped spears betraying their intentions in the blue and green glows of their personal lights. A few of them wouldn't be much of a threat to a grown adult, but hundreds could do some damage. Maybe they were just trying to menace us back into the building, and maybe the fortune wards would intervene if their intentions were lethal, but it wasn't worth risking. "Confringo!" I shouted, launching a blasting curse to scatter the descending lines.
The explosion and shattering of the tiny faerie charge got my fellow students moving. "Fall back!" Oliver told the team. It wasn't anywhere near the distance from the Shrieking Shack to Hogsmeade that I'd tried to cover over New Year's, but we were only midway between the quidditch pitch and the castle gates.
"We should've kept the brooms!" groused one of the chasers, probably Alicia, as the team broke into a retreat.
"Or at least the bludgers," Ginny added.
Above, split by my blast, the attackers were regrouping, spreading out into two spreading arms of glowing lights with sharp weapons. It would have been beautiful, if it weren't so menacing, a ballet of bright jewels sweeping through the air. We weren't going to beat them in a sprint, and I couldn't hit them all myself. Sweeping my staff in my off hand as I held my blasting rod in my right, I incanted, "Flipendo!"
The knockback jinx seemed to work as well on pixies as it did on doxies, blowing another hole in the line as streaks of light were flung into the night. "Immobulus!" tried Ginny, having heard how the kids had dealt with the earthside pixies in Lockhart's class the previous year. Shouts of the two spells from the rest of the running quidditch players began to make more holes in the pattern of lights, alternately being knocked away or dropped paralyzed to the ground.
A few managed to dart through anyway, but so far tiny spears weren't enough to easily pierce quidditch armor. From the corner of my eye I saw Ginny use her seeker skills to actually grab one rushing attacker out of the air and fling it back away. I felt a couple fail to penetrate the protective enchantments on my coat.
"It's a lot, but it's just pixies," Katie suggested, as we'd covered half the distance and knocked a substantial number of lights out of the air.
"Now you've done it," George yelled. "Depulso!" he tried a banisher, but it wasn't much more effective than the easier knockback charm.
"Yep, we're doomed," agreed Fred. "Confundo!" he incanted, his wave of confusion sending several tiny lights off in erratic paths.
Through the holes in the pixie lines there was more movement against the foreign stars. Oliver was the first to work it out, "When they're right, they're right. Griffins, I think."
"Maybe they like to eat pixie?" Angelina joked.
Some days, I was really proud to be in Gryffindor. I bet nobody else's quidditch team would be able to calmly and jokingly flee from a fae invasion.
The brightly-plumaged fae-raised lion-birds did not, in fact, seem to be interested in the pixies. Instead, they plummeted like comets toward us. "Ventus!" I yelled, managing a torrential blast of wind that scattered the remaining pixies and fouled the griffins' dive a bit, forcing them to pull up. I couldn't keep that up all night. "Run!" I suggested. We'd made it to the main driveway down to the Hogsmeade gates and were close enough to the school now that I thought we might make it.
I was half-right. Seven athletes who hadn't just let loose a very powerful spell managed to cover the distance, but I fell far enough behind to be an issue. Long legs and a bit of cardio did not equal the grueling sports practice Oliver put them all through, even though most of it was flying rather than running. They probably thought I was right behind them, but I saw my roommate turn in shock as he hit one of the castle doors as two griffins landed in between us on the road, cutting me off.
"Harry!" he shouted, clearly trying to work out the best way to take out a griffin, who, like most dangerous magical beasts, were already tricky to affect with spells even without the extra boost they may have from their Nevernever upbringing. I was worried about the same thing, and cognizant that there were others above me probably waiting for me to be distracted.
What I didn't expect was another blur of less-brightly-colored plumage to drop into my opponents, letting loose a warcry. Bird-horse tore into bird-lion as one of the hippogriffs, maybe Buckbeak himself, assaulted the fae monster in a bloody flash of sharp beak and taloned hooves. Above, I heard similar cries as the rest of the hippogriff herd slammed into the still-flying griffins.
"Oh, right, hippogriffs are territorial against griffins!" Oliver supplied, shouting from the door.
I looked up to see if the others had it covered and noticed pixie lights winking out as well. Up above, translucent black horses were mostly visible as they eclipsed the stars. The thestrals apparently thought pixies were delicious.
But the arrival of our own herds of terrifying magical horses reminded me of their caretaker, whose small shack might not hold up to a continued fae assault. "Get inside!" I instructed Oliver, across from the fierce battle that was still in the way of my dash to safety. "I'll check on Hagrid!"
Clearly upset with me going off on my own again, Oliver rolled his eyes and reminded me, "If you die, 'Thilda's goin'to kill you. Good luck." He ducked inside, shutting the heavy front door with finality.
It seemed like, for now, the local fauna were coming out ahead in the battle as I ran toward Hagrid's hut across the grounds, essentially opposite the driveway from the quidditch pitch. But I figured we were just seeing the fastest flyers, and I had no idea if we'd soon be drowning in slower-moving fantastical beasts. Nothing else dove at me as I crossed the lawn at a jog, trying to keep from getting so winded I couldn't defend myself if something did come after me.
Fang, Hagrid's enormous black boarhound, was barking furiously from the hut as I ran up, and I saw the half-giant's bulk block the light in his window as he looked out to see me coming up. "Harry! Wha's goin' on?" he asked me, opening the door and poking his head out.
"I think we got sucked into the Nevernever," I huffed, slowing down to his door. I summed up, "Buckbeak's herd and the thestrals are fighting a bunch of pixies and griffins. We need to get into the castle in case worse shows up."
He looked like he was going to argue, but finally nodded and shrugged on his coat and grabbed his gear, including his handheld ballista. He banked his fire and stepped out into the night. "C'mon Fang," he ordered the dog, closing the door behind him. "Wards're suppos'ta keep hostile beasts out," he groused as we started to head back toward the school.
"Probably supposed to do a lot of things that don't work right when we get transported into the Nevernever," I shrugged. "Hopefully Dumbledore's up and figuring it out." He made a good point, though. If the creature-prevention wards weren't working, the fortune wards might not be either. Not that I took for granted that I was safe from getting killed at school, but it was something else to keep in mind.
We could still see an aerial fight above the grounds as we fast-walked across. "'Ey! Leave 'im alone!" Hagrid yelled at a griffin that seemed to be winning his dogfight, and let fly with a crossbow quarrel that could probably be used as a siege weapon. The surprised griffin crashed into the turf as a mangled wing was nearly torn off its body by the heavy projectile. "Hate t'do tha'," the giant gamekeeper grimaced, "But can't be havin' aggressive critters on the grounds."
Before he could get another bolt loaded or I could console him about the damage to the extraplanar wildlife, Fang whined at something behind us. I spun to see a patch of greater darkness roiling across the grounds in our direction, seemingly coming out of the forest and engulfing the hut we'd just left. It at least made me feel good about rescuing Hagrid. Within the writhing shadows, I could make out the grunts of animals sprinting across the lawn.
"Hobs," Hagrid said, slotting the bolt into place. "Think yer right, Harry. None outside o' African reserves fer ages. Big, nasty demiguises," he explained, "but they make darkness instead o' makin' themselves invisible." I didn't go to magical creatures class, but if I remembered right from my defense OWL study of hostile beasts, the nearly-extinct hobs' darkness was called "myrk" and they could basically control it to murder prey in the shadows.
And, of course, they were magic resistant.
Before we could figure out our tactic against a hidden number of assassin baboons, the cloud of darkness and sounds of running stopped. Stepping forth from the unnatural shadows, but still barely visible in the starlight, was an extremely handsome but short and stocky man in black leather armor. The pointed ears and beauty made me guess another sidhe, but not one I'd seen before.
"Ah. Fortuitous!" he announced, bracing an ebon-shafted spear with a sharp obsidian spike as the point. "Lefayson, I presume?"
Not sure if I wanted to get another pass for whatever my mother and godmother had gotten up to, I nonetheless nodded, "The same."
"Excellent. I hear that you've quite upset one of our queens." He smiled menacingly, baring teeth that gleamed white even in the extremely dim light. "I shall be quite happy to be the distributor of her ill will."
With that bit of parlay out of the way, he stepped back into the darkness, which once again began to charge.
So much for my mother's protection.