The four boys stood openmouthed in the clearing, staring up at the early dawn sky. There, where the majestic castle should have been standing, was nothing but a cerulean sky dotted with faint stars.
"Maybe we got out of the forest on the wrong side," Sirius said quickly.
"Yes," Remus said hopefully, "Maybe it's right behind us."
The boys turned around, frantically gazing behind them where, once again, there was only the sky.
"W-what are we going t-to do?" Peter stammered, "Are we lost?"
No one answered. They were all frozen, paralyzed in disbelief and shock, their minds all avoiding the question which presented itself urgently now. Each of the boys was slowly calculating the loss of something very important, the loss of not only a school but of a million other things. No more would they be able to spend their weekends down by the lake, their nights in the forest, or their afternoons by the Quidditch pitch. There would be no more Library, no more common room, and no more Great Hall. Every teacher was gone, as well as every student that had gone to school with them and would go there in the future. It was unbelievable. It couldn't be gone.
"Is it…really…?" James began.
"It…it might not be. We might just be…somewhere else," Remus said slowly, forcing his brain to work rationally after his shock.
"Yeah, we're somewhere else," Sirius announced, "That has to be it."
"Then what should we do?" James asked, "How'll we get back?"
"I guess we should figure out where we are," Remus said, "Though how we are going to do that I have no idea."
"What? What's going on?" Peter cried. "Where…where did the castle go?"
"It didn't go anywhere," James said irritably, "We're just somewhere else."
"But how did we…?" Peter began.
"That's what we're trying to figure out," Sirius said shortly.
Peter nodded slowly, trying to understand what was going on but he was unable to. His attempts to make sense of what was going on kept pushing him deeper into confusion. The others, after recovering from their shock, thought of the problem as well but were having better luck with it than Peter.
"We have to figure out where we are," Remus said slowly, "Then we could figure out what happened."
"There's a road over there," James pointed out. The light of the approaching sun revealed things that the boys had not previously seen.
"Let's follow it. We might find a town… or some people or something. We could get an idea of where we are from there."
Silently, Remus nodded and James and Sirius began to walk towards the road. Peter, whimpering in confusion, followed behind James. Remus trailed behind them.
Music drifted lazily out of Rosalind Mc Kay's car radio. The song was soft and instrumental, encouraging her contemplative and slightly melancholy mood. She was driving home from her son's house and was very sorry that she had to leave his house, warm with his company, and journey back to her own, empty house. Her house was much too big for her to live in on her own, but she refused to move. Her four sons had grown up in that house, and she did not want to disturb it. She missed her sons, the youngest of whom had moved out of the house several years earlier. She loved them dearly and wished for them to stay with her forever. She hated for them to leave but knew that she could not rightly make them stay forever. She had kept her sons' rooms exactly the way they had left them, and did not throw out any of their old things, though she definitely could have used the extra space that throwing them out would bring. She would not disturb the memory of them once living with her and sharing her life. Leaving their things there made her feel both content and lonely. Knowing that their things were safely in their places reminded her of the way things used to be, which filled her with happy memories, but they also made her feel alone. Yet she could not part with them. Driving along the highway, heading for her home, her mind was only focused on when she would visit one of her sons again and when they would all come back to their old house to visit her.
In her musings, she almost did not see the four boys walking along the side of the road. They were all young, still teenagers, and they were all alone. How could any decent mother let her son wander around the side of a highway, Rosalind thought critically. Where were they going? Where did they come from? Did they have no one who cared enough about them to drive them to wherever they needed to go? It was quite frigid outside, and they had no coats. One of them didn't even have a sweater on. Her motherly conscience begged her to pull over and give the boys a ride. After only half a moment of contemplation on the subject, she smoothly pulled over beside them.
"Would you like a ride to where you are headed?" Rosalind said hopefully. She saw the boys better now and took a moment to judge whether they were being treated well enough or not. They didn't look as if they were being starved; one of them actually appeared to be overfed. Rosalind, searching through her brain for every type of maltreatment she could think of, found nothing particularly horrible about the way the boys appeared to be treated, though one of the boys looked a little sickly and was wearing torn clothes and another, as she had noticed before, had no sweater on.
The boys looked up after hearing her question and exchanged meaningful glances with each other as if deciding whether to take her up on her offer.
"Yes, thank you very much for offering," said the slightly ill-looking boy with light brown hair.
"No problem at all," Rosalind responded brightly.
Tentatively, almost as if he was afraid he would scare her away, the brown-haired boy opened the door to her car. He and his companions slid in quickly and the final boy, the over-fed looking one, closed the door lightly.
Rosalind pulled away from the side of the highway and continued her drive back into town.
"Where are you boys headed?" she asked.
"Uh… No where in particular," a boy with incredibly messy hair and glasses said, "Just into the nearest town."
"By the way," added another boy with clear grey eyes and dark hair, "What is the name of the town?"
Rosalind was rather taken aback that the boys were walking to a town that they did not know the name of, but told them anyway. Her motherly heart filled even more with concern for their safety.
"How old are all of you?" she asked.
"Sixteen," answered the brown-haired boy politely.
"Do your mother's know where you are?" She assumed they were not brothers; they didn't look like they were and they all were the same age.
"Uhh… Yeah. They do," said one of the boys slowly.
"And they didn't offer to give you a ride?"
"They think it's uh… good exercise," said another, but Rosalind was not convinced.
By now they had reached town, which was a very short drive from where the boys had been but would have been a very long walk if Rosalind had not picked them up.
"Here you are boys," she said genially, pulling up to the curb in front of a quaint bookstore.
"Once again, thank you very much," the brown-haired boy said, before opening the door gingerly and sliding out.
"No problem boys, none at all," she replied as they filed out of her car.
The boys walked over to the sidewalk and were walking away from the car. Rosalind watched them go through her rear-view mirror, her motherly conscience still not satisfied. But there was nothing else she could do to help them. She did not even know who they were and where they had come from, but yet she was determined to help them and they seemed as if they needed help.
"Wait!" she called out of her car suddenly.
The boys turned around, slightly shocked that she was still there.
"If you ever need anything," she said, getting out of the car to meet them, "Feel free to call me." She scribbled her phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to them.
"Thanks," one of the boys said, taking the paper.
"You don't have to be thankful," Rosalind said simply before she walked back to her car and drove away, her mind still on the safety of the four roadside boys.