The Upper Ward, Hogwarts Castle, Scotland.

A castle blazed, spires and towers now pyres and scorched stone, a bridge crumbled beneath the blows of a giant, even as the Last Lions made their stand. Dumbledore fought fiercely by his side, proud of the Scion Longbottom, whose form now took that of a monstrous bear. As the battle ebbed and flowed, the trickle of students fleeing from the burning lower citadel to the Old Keep of Hogwarts dried up. A crash of the arcane battle magicks, and his heart as stone, Albus Dumbledore brought the new citadel crashing down about the heads of the besiegers.

A flash of light from his wand as the rearguard fell back, watching as another of his old students, another failure, another wizard masked in silver and swathed in black robes was flayed by the claws of his gargoyle. The Old Keep and its entrance to the Chamber of Secrets might yet be the salvation of his students. He watched as Katie Bell fought in the name of Harry Potter, even wearing his old Quidditch jersey as she disembowelled a Death Eater with a dark cutting curse and smashed another over the head with a rock, as Seamus Finnigan made a smart comment before throwing sparks from his cigar onto a trail of moonshine Everclear, flames racing towards a string of explosives along the bridge.

The Great Hall, Balmoral Castle, Scotland.

Frowning, having been roused from her bed in the early hours of the morning, the Queen entered the Great Hall with suitable dignity, and spotted the Queen's Wizard awaiting her, stood beneath the dais at the end of the hall. He looked tired and haggard, his grey robes singed and bloodstained, all the weight of the world bearing down on his shoulders as he sank onto his knees before his monarch.

"Your Majesty." he rasped; "Hogwarts has fallen."

"How, Lord Dumbledore, how?!" demanded the Queen; "I have heard nothing of this from the Ministry, nor has the Prime Minister."

"We came under siege a week ago, they burned Hogsmeade and allowed refugees from the village to enter Hogwarts. Then simultaneously they breached the protections and infiltrated the Old Keep. Traitors in the Lower Citadel caused it to fall. We drove them back from the Old Keep but the Lower Citadel was sacked, burned and collapsed." Dumbledore explained, exhaustion seeping from ever pore; "Sundering the bridge between the two fortifications allowed enough time to evacuate my students. Casualties among staff and students are high, my own men too. The Ministry is gone, traitors in every level, and a puppet Minister."

"This is not good Lord Dumbledore. What would you have me do?" Elizabeth asked.

"There are no conventional ways left to us to take this war, all that is left to us are... distasteful." Dumbledore sighed.

"Speak plainly, and rise." the Queen ordered.

"There are arcane powers, primordial and ancient, still in this world. Some more destructive than others... all have been, for want of a better word, leashed. Be it by contract and agreement or by force." Dumbledore groaned as he stood up; "I would release the Wild Hunt, and turn them on the murderers who have burned my school, butchered my charges and betrayed my country."

"Explain the Wild Hunt, Lord Dumbledore." was the sharp command.

"Spectres of long-gone spirits, neither ghost nor living,, with the ability to interact at will with the physical world. I do not know what they once were... human, elvish, dryad or naiad, nereid or sprite. They are a fae folk, and wrathful in the hunt, and can be appeased by a sacrifice of blood and magic."

"A sacrifice?" asked the Queen with a raised eyebrow.

"They are given form by magic, such a sacrifice has before been used to summon the Hunt." Dumbledore explained; "Yet it must be done in the right place."

"And where is that?" sighed Elizabeth, tiring of the man giving her a question with every answer.

"A place known in our tongue as the Eagle's Fort. The last resting place of perhaps my second greatest failure." Dumbledore seemed to crumple slightly at this. "I had hoped perhaps to never return their and hide from my mistakes. I can prepare us to travel there immediately."

"Do so." the Queen ordered; "I shall accompany you, and one bodyguard. Sergeant McCabe!"

"Ma'am?" a tall, close-shaven Scotsman poked his head around the door.

A deep valley, falling away from peaks on each side, the tallest of them a great volcano, silent for thousands upon thousands of years. Dumbledore stared up at the great towers and bastions adorning the peak, visible above an ascending slope a mile deep with thick forest. A flash of a memory went through him. Phantoms of battle around him, he remembered the agony as he was banished into the flames of a fireplace, one Cruciatus curse burying itself in the tiled Ministry wall above him and a second landing on him.

The cry of pain, then a roar of defiance. Harry bursting from his hiding place, curse after curse flashing across the Atrium, and the flash of a sword as he severed Tom's left arm, only for his largest failure to spin away, a jagged spear of ice lancing through Harry and then the awful sound of his protégé's last gasps of air as he collapsed to the floor. The dull tread of boots as Harry's fighters laid him to rest, broken sword on his chest, in the cold tombs of his ancestral halls, the boom of the gates slamming behind them with dreadful finality.

Brushing away the memory, Dumbledore flicked his wand and levitated a bound Death Eater in his wake as he approached the barbican as the base of the path up through the forest, up the slope to the castle. Sat in the saddle atop a monstrous black horse, utterly motionless, was a figure, tall and swathed in black, with a blood red cross on his front, while smoke-darkened chainmail glinted dully beneath gaps in the fabric. Yet what was most horrific was the figure had no head.

"What devilry is this?" whispered the Scottish soldier, levelling his rifle at the figure.

"No devil my friend. Perhaps a being to be pitied." Dumbledore sighed; "He was once a great crusader, a soldier of repute in the Holy Land, though a cruel one. When captured, Saladin personally beheaded him, and send his body to Jerusalem and his head to Damascus. Another crusader, a man from the House of Potter, gave him a cursed half-life, bound to the Potters, headless and only able to sense physical things with some strange magic. Nameless, save for being the Headless Horseman, once he was Raynald de Chatillon."

"That's a truly horrific fate." the soldier commented, slowly lowering his rifle.

"There are many fates worse than death, and one such befell the Horseman. He cannot hear the birdsong, nor the magic of music, no food has passed his lips for eight centuries. The warmth of flesh nor the pleasure of good company are meaningless to him, no art to please the eyes." Dumbledore explained the horrific fate; "Eternal service, or until head and body are reunited, and the head was destroyed, the fragments scattered. Perhaps the most merciful thing is that all emotion has been stripped from the Horseman and so he does not understand that he suffers."

"This Potter was not a particularly nice person." noted the Queen.

"In that family's halls, stern justice and a firm hand were wielded, but mercy and forgiveness would not find repast, and with all such families, some members took it a little further. What black magic created the Horseman I cannot fathom, nor do I wish to."

With that grim pronouncement, they each mounted the riderless horses behind the Horseman, McCabe helping the Queen onto her horse before taking his own place, one horse carrying, like a sack of grain, the stunned and bound Death Eater. Without further ado, the Horseman, with a great deal of force, jerked his horse about and set off up towards the castle.

The ride lasted an hour, fraying nerves as the distant howl of wolves and the rustling of trees disturbed the three conscious, human riders, cold wind brushing them and an eerie feeling of being watched followed them to the castle gates. A bear-like man, clad in chainmail and ornately stitched leathers, greeted them there. Thankfully of intact mind and body, Cedric the Saxon helped the Queen from her horse as the others dismounted.

"Dumbledore, far too short a time since we last met." the low, sarcastic growl of the Saxon intoned, never having forgiven the elderly mage for ending the Potter line. "Give me one good reason not to carve you limb from limb and feet you to the wolves."

"That there is a still greater enemy out there, and I wish to avenge your fallen master, and redeem myself." Dumbledore replied.

"Oh?"

"I wish to summon the Wild Hunt."

Cedric's expression could be described as carved from granite.

"Then you will want the grove. You know the ritual?" he asked.

"The life of an enemy, magic of a mage, and blood of a royal, bound together with wild magic to create a compact with the Hunt and release them throughout the land which owes allegiance to the royal, life to give them form and magic to feed them." recited Dumbledore.

"Raynald, you are dismissed." barked Cedric, earning a mocking bow from the Headless Horseman who then rode off, his stallion kicking up showers of sparks off the stones of the courtyard. "Come."

Tall standing stones, wreathed by trees, mostly oak, formed a circle about a stone table, where lay the remains of the Death Eater, stripped of flesh and blood, leaving only dried and shrivelled muscle, and the bones. The terrifying wind shredded him, and then from this bloody tornado stepped the first spectre.

A figure of perhaps six feet in height, added to by a helmet, plumed with braided red and white horsehair, the face the helmet being the maw of a dragon, steel brushed with gold. His body was adorned plates and scales of metal laid over ringmail and a crimson cloak swirling about him, gleaming longsword lay in one hand and a great spear, carved with runes of power in the shaft and the blade, sat in the other.

"Why have you called upon the Master of the Hunt?" the low growl of the summoned demanded.

"To form an agreement with the Hunt. The lives of every one of the marked brethren of the sacrifice are yours to do with as you wish." Dumbledore stated.

"The lands that are the domain of the Royal House of Windsor, your hunting grounds." the Queen chimed in with her part of the ritual compact.

"You... Albus Dumbledore... I know your face..." the summoned being stated, stepping from the stone table and thrusting the spear into the soft loam as he advanced on the mage, then suddenly swung out and seized Dumbledore, then with a smooth motion, drew a dagger across Dumbledore's right cheek. "Our pact is sealed in blood." he stated before whispering to the mage in a low, dangerous tone; "Do not forget what you did to my blood kin."

Terrible blasts of horns trumpeted around the castle, a pale horse emerged from the mists surrounding the grove, nuzzling against the Master of the Hunt, snorting flames as its rider pulled himself into the saddle.

"Cedric." the Master of the Hunt; "The hounds still yet live?"

"Aye, kuning." replied the Saxon.

"Loose them, and bring my colours. The Hunt rides at sunset." the Master commanded.

At sundown, looking down from the gates, Dumbledore, the Queen, her bodyguard and Cedric watched as, with a blast on his horn from horseback, the Master summoned the Hunt. First, joining the dozens of wolves that had gathered to him, thousands of spectral hounds emerged, then horseman after horseman, horsewomen joining in equal numbers. Then the fae folk, wild women of the forests and sea. Roman cavalrymen congregated about the Master of the Hunt, one carrying the Sixth Legion's standard, and then...

Dumbledore raced down the stairs to the edge of the courtyard, though he went no further for fear of being carried away with the Hunt, but he need not have gone any further, for his target rode over, an expression of wild joy on his face, unburdened and unwearied by war.

"Harry." Dumbledore nearly fell to his knees at the recognition on the face; "Can you ever forgive me?"

"Albus, I have nothing to forgive you for." he chuckled, deep and booming; "I made my choice. The afterlife is a good one, the fae folk welcoming, especially to the valorous slain! Take back your castle, lay the enchantments deep with the blood of those who laid waste to it, go forth and fear no evil! Look to your hall ten years hence and my line will continue!"

Drawing deeply from a crystal flask of some flame-coloured liquid, Harry's laugh rang out once more as his spectral horse's hooves clattered against the flagstones, spurring it towards the gate, forest green cloak billowing from him to reveal swords on each hip, unbroken, and a coat of chain beneath. With a last blast of a horn, the Wild Hunt thundered across the drawbridge and vanished into nothingness.

"The Hunt, the Hunt, gather to the banner!" a last cry echoed off the silent towers of the castle.

"What have we unleashed..?" the Queen whispered as the spectral hunt vanished.