I'm so sorry this is so late!!! We just attempted to get a new desk for me so my comp got disconnected for a bit, then my little green book got lost. That's where I wrote this thing. Well, news, news: There shall indeed be a contest! Entries are to be sent to my e-mail, rules will be posted at my ending author note! So, onward! (And for the one reviewer who was wondering, Harry probably wouldn't have left Ron during such an emergency, but he still had to tell Dumbledore, and he felt he couldn't wait just for Ron to get up.)
"So your awake NOW?" muttered Harry to Ron darkly, glaring at him from under his dark eyelashes. Ron sighed; Harry's early morning grumpiness was making itself present, again.
"I'm sorry, mate! I was exhausted from all that bloody potions homework! I really just didn't want to do anything at the moment and—"
"It's alright, Ron." Harry cut him off, more subdued than before. Ron made a point of looking at his sneakers as his blush slowly crawled down his neck. A tapping of a fork on one of the crystal water pitchers from the staff table brought welcome distraction.
"Calm, calm everyone." Asked everyone, "If I may ask for all of your attention? As you have been informed of already, Hogwarts in grave danger. Voldemort has gathered his troops for an attack against us. From what we've gathered, it is a retrieval mission. For what, we do not know, what ever it is though, is powerful enough to conquer, or destroy, the world. How such an object came to be on our grounds I do not know. But it is here, and now we MUST defend it to keep it from Voldemort's clutches.
"But, saddest to say, seventh years, is that we must also depend on those of you able, to fight with us. Their numbers will be too great of us instructors to face alone, and with you as the most experienced of the students..." Dumbledore trailed off so the students could finish his thought on their own. Eventually a Hufflepuff raised a delicate hand.
"Can't we just apparate or portkey or even FLOO to someplace else? Somewhere safe?" She asked, her brown eyes pleading, open, and above all, scared.
Dumbledore's brow crinkled in remorse for her, but told her truthfully: "We have wards against doing those things here. Maybe if we'd had an hour earlier notice, we'd have had been able to get to the village and away—but as it was, we could only get one owl to the village before the death eaters managed to take hold of the woods..."
His answer was met with silence. Utter quiet. One or two people shifted uncomfortably, then one girl began to cry, a high wail from the Ravenclaw table. It started a chain reaction, and next he knew, Ron was comforting Ginny on one shoulder, and for some reason unknown to himself, Parvarti on the other. Most of the seventh years were shifting about in disarray, wondering what they were supposed to do.
"We'll do it!" said Fred, standing to face the professors.
"What do you want us to do?" chorused George imitating his twin's pose.
McGonnagle gave both a relieved smile. "We need seventh years to help Professor Flitwick with a barricade around the school. I you helped with that it would be wonderful." The twins nodded at her and headed for the doors when Flitwick left his chair and motioned for them to follow. Then Fred motioned for them to stop.
"Well?" He said, turning back to the rest of the students, "Are any of the rest of you coming?" With jerky actions, a dozen or so more students straightened up and trekked with the twins out the doors.
Ron could feel his heartstrings pulling at the two, and Lee Jordan shivered as he shut the Great Hall doors.
It was quiet. The assembled students in the Great Hall were either silent and fidgeting, or silent and staring blankly at the stones across them or beneath their feet. Ron gazed out at the soon-to-be-battlefield through magicked looking glasses, the real Mad-eye Moody strictly believed in showing exactly what was going on to the younger students, when before his eyes settled on the two head seventh year warriors. Fred and George. It seemed as though their display of pulling others into helping somehow had them pegged as leaders. Ron wasn't sure as to if this was good, or very, very bad.
Without sound, they were readying the wall barrier, checking it, and using tricky flicks of their wrists to set more stones in place. Ron's heart strained to reach them, and Cho Chang spun about next to them. She seemed to have seen something.
"Harry." Ron said, calling his friend over with a whisper in the tense Hall. His and Harry's eyes met and Ron pointed to shifting darkness beyond the foreboding trees. "They're here." Harry nodded grimly and with a fierce blaze in his eyes turned to Dumbledore and Snape, both of which were muttering under their breath at some maps spelled to show the battleground and it's current status.
"Get everyone to their positions!" he yelled at the pair, startled out of their reverie. "The death eaters are here, no more preparations can be made!"
It was as though all the tension had dissipated, to nothing. Worry still coated everyone in the room, but determination to stay alive drove the fear away. Tear tracks dried with tears halfway down red cheeks.
A torrent of shouts from outside the walls made Rom focus his attentions to the mirror. The death eater's curses were flying like muggle bullets across the grounds, only a few were stopped by the barrier. Ron was far more occupied with two red heads apparently shouting orders he couldn't hear.
Fred and George were alternately ordering others around and bellowing curses and hexes with the best of them, hauling up their frightened peers from where they'd fallen in shock, putting wands in their back into their hands, and setting them back to work. Sometimes healing those hit, or back to fighting again.
'Such beautiful flashing colors,' Ron thought. 'I never knew things so beautiful could be so violent.' As his sense of hopelessness grew, so did his philosophical thought. 'It looks like chaos down there, but looking at it, there is an order to it...Fire, duck, fire, shout, fire, fire, scream.'
The battle raged for what seemed eternities. The echo of fighting engulfed the Hall while the image of blood spatted the mirror. Violent pictured swam in his consciousness, mostly of the battle before him, but some seemed a little, off. Tinted brown as if with age. Weapons mixed with wands, swords, axes, pikes, lances, crossbows, and arrows. More modern artillery of guns and missiles, bombs, and dynamite appeared in his vision, showering fire on the soldiers below, around, about them.
Ron felt it, like a pulse beneath his skin.
The order of chaos o the ground began to beat to it.
Then the coherent screams of death registered. Most pleading to God for answers, all a part of the odd pulse.
'You know,' Ron thought calmly into the whirlwind of images attacking his mind, 'We always seem to be searching for a way out. We fight, find peace, fight, find peace. Never ending warfare. One giant huge circle.'
The pulse became a heavy bass beat, and Justin Flitch-Fletchly fell to his knees, clutching his head.
'We always go in circles, don't we?' Ron thought, all his confused emotions congealing into a single statement. 'Humans dance around in violent circles trying to find an end we have no hope of ever reaching, because we're all in never ending hoops, and all we wish for is it's end.' With a bitter laugh, Ron ended this line of thinking. 'Ironic that all we want for is life, yet we yearn for its end.'
Like a heart monitor's flat line, the beat suddenly stopped ending. It was just one, long, drawn out crescendo.
And Ron became aware of power. His power. A sweetness bordering on pain. Justin rose from the ground, knees shaking and trembling in the shoulders.
Ron looked into the mirror again—to the ghost like picture that was the reflection of everyone watching the images it projected. On his own forehead was a blue white blazing dot.
His pupil.
He had jumped.
Yeah, I stopped it a little sooner than originally planned, I thought it would be a good spot. Ron jumping to the legendary level seven just seems to put me in a writing mood. So here you go! Partake in the contest!
Rule 1) have fun with it! As long as no Mary sues show up, you'll do fine!
Rule 2) I don't care how long it is as long as it's all in one piece!
Rule 3) Please make sure you leave a name with your entry! I would hate not knowing who to give credit to!
General info: submit entries to my e-mail, , also on my profile. Put something I would recognize as an entry in the subject bar. All entries will be given due consideration, no matter how bad your spelling is! I will fix little things like that! As previously stated, I don't expect too many, so if you enter with a serious attempt, then you have a good shot at winning. The winning entry will be posted, along with the author's screen name, and then the 'official' ending of mine will be posted after it! Thank you all who participate!
I will wait for however long I feel I must, if the winner isn't posted, you can still enter!
