Harry Potter and the Wrath of the Horcruxes
Chapter 7: The Dark Times Return
Harry kept in touch with Ron, Hermione and Neville throughout the rest of the summer, but when it came time for the yearly book list to arrive by owl… nothing came. Harry wondered if maybe a conspiracy was at hand, and somebody was stopping his mail just like Dobby had done just before his second year. So he wrote to his friends, and they replied by saying that they had not received their lists either. Harry's parents were also perplexed by this oddity, and said they had never known such a thing to happen when they had attended Hogwarts.
Nevertheless, Harry was able to keep this in the back of his mind, until one night when he was lying on his bed in the dark, and suddenly got a strange twinge that things were not right. Without even waking his parents up, he jumped into his clothes and dashed out the front door, only to run smack into Ron, Hermione and Neville.
"You lot! Do you mean that -"
"We felt it too, yeah," Hermione said. "We've got to go see what's going on."
So they prepared to Apparate. As they felt the familiar yet always unpleasant sensation of compression, they at once realized that they could mysteriously Apparate directly into the Hogwarts grounds, which was highly unusual, because normally they would have to warp to Hogsmeade, being the closest to the castle, since it was supposed to be impossible to Apparate anywhere closer to Hogwarts. Their sense of urgency increased tenfold.
When they opened their eyes, they found themselves staring at the worst, and most nightmarish sight Harry could ever have imagined since his eleventh birthday: before them was several acres of blackened ground and an enormous pile of miserable-looking ashes in the center, and though this was all at first unrecognizable, the gargoyle statues flanking the road were unmistakable.
Hogwarts had been destroyed.