A/N: Look up 'First time two Iron Age Trumpets played together in 2,000 years' on Youtube. It was responsible for part of this.
Notthill Hall, near Chester, England.
Izar Nott, the Lord of the Nott family paced the courtyard at the front of his mansion. At dawn that morning, they were awoken to a terrible sound, the clear, metallic cry of a war trumpet, the deep rumble of a carnyx. Their sound, one that induced a shivering, instinctual fear had continued through the day without respite. Long, terrible wails of the war trumpet, the thundering, shaking roar of the carnyx, oh how they had come to loathe that sound which put every hair on end.
Every effort made to locate the infernal horns was without success. Even enlisting the gatekeeper, Idris Tonn, a descendant of a bastard line from the Notts, had failed. And the horns had sounded without interruption. And now, as the last vestiges of twilight vanished into the night, they were joined by something else, the short blasts of hunting horns, sharp and rapid.
Then he spotted something that chilled his spine. Moving quickly down the drive towards the gatehouse was a stream of fire, like someone had set afire to the very earth itself. Izar hastened to muster his servants and family, but it was already too late.
Idris Tonn heard the thunder of fast-moving hooves on the track leading up to the gates which marked the boundary of the Nott estate. He hastily threw on his robe, descending the stairs and picking up a lamp from a hook in the porch. Lighting it with a tap of his wand, he hastened onwards.
He was running through the front garden towards the gatehouse when he was finally able to cast light from the lamp onto the gates. There he saw riders on horseback throwing loops of rope over the top of the spiked bars of the gate, and more flung four-hooked grapples. Then, as he watched, the riders spurred their great steeds away, and with such force, the iron gates were ripped from their hinges, allowing a great mass of horseman to thunder through, burning brands held aloft.
"Hey! Wait-" the gatekeeper began to yell.
Once, twice, thrice he felt agony as arrows buzzed out of the morass of horsemen, spinning him around with their force. Barely noticing as the lamp fell from his hand, blazing oil spreading about his feet, Idris Tonn felt arrows, more than he could count, plunging into his back. An all-encompassing agony spilled through every bone in his body, then slowly he grew numb. As they thundered through, many of the passing riders hurled their brands onto the thatched roof of the cottage, setting it well alight, ignoring him and charging towards the mansion.
Falling backward onto the wall surrounding his garden, the shafts in his back snapping, he saw a horseman ride up, surveying his broken form. Without word, the figure stepped from the saddle and walked over. Without hesitation, an armoured boot drove Idris onto his front, breaking off more arrows. The last things the gatekeeper saw were the blazing gatekeeper's cottage and then his flint wall as his face hit it. Then he knew no more as a battleaxe descended on him with dreadful finality.
Izar and his somewhat elderly father, Elizar Nott stood and fought in their courtyard, having watched as the gatekeeper's cottage became an inferno. The spells and enchantment that were meant to defend them now doomed them, for they could not create any means to escape the grounds of their mansion, and were encircled by the thundering horses of this strange cavalry.
The horseman flooded into the courtyard, arrows and spears thrown, swords and axes swung, arcane spells blasting into stone and flesh alike. At the heels of their warhorses came a huge pack of wolves, some but spectres, others as solid flesh as those who they tore into. The horses themselves were of the size of draught horses, tall, thickset and powerful, as hot-blooded as Arabians. They reared, planting their great weight through iron-shod hooves, others driving spiked forehead-plates with enormous force. The wolves tore men from their feet, jaws clamping over throats, limbs ripped from bodies, teeth sinking through flesh and muscle, crushing through bone, turning fighting men into nothing more than a meal.
Soon father and son found themselves against the great doors to their home, fighting back to back. A horseman clad in armour, alike to a dragon, broke through and charged. Elizar Nott snapped off two killing curses with skill, speed and accuracy. The horseman merely let loose a chilling, hollow bellow of laughter as they passed straight through him and his mount. Then the charging horseman drove his spear straight through his stomach, nailing him to the wood behind him. The bars across the inside splintered and the doors swung open, admitting the horsemen who stormed through.
Soon only four remained in the courtyard, save for corpses. The man encased in armour that gave him form like a dragon stepped from his horse even as another of the spectral horsemen also dismounted. Elizar managed to gasp out a few words, even as he held the spear driven through him in a deathly grip.
"What are you?!" he rasped around a mouthful of blood.
"I am named Lucius Artorius Castus, known as Arthur, I was once a soldier in the service on the Roman Empire. Now I avenge what your ilk have done to my line." the dragon-helmed man replied. "Now I am the Huntmaster, my kin by blood and sword the Hunt, you the Hunted."
The armoured man and Elizar simply gazed on as Izar, deprived of his wand, fought on with a rapier, against the second horseman. They were well-matched as swordsmen, the reach of the rapier countered by the fast and powerful parry of the bastard sword, the power of the bastard sword matched by the speed of the rapier. Then, without warning, a thrust of the rapier passed right through the spectral swordsman, who swung his sword down with both hands, a stroke which cut from shoulder until it stilled itself, halfway through a rib, with the edge cutting into a lung.
The swordsman pulled back his hood of chainmail, revealing his face.
"You!" gasped Izar Nott as he desperately tried to hold the wound closed, even though he was half split open; "You're dead."
"As are you both." Harry replied coldly.
"Welcome to the end of your line." Arthur, the first Potter, added as the screams from inside the mansion suddenly ended and the orange glow of flames began to spread.
Harry stepped back, drawing his bloodied sword from Izar Nott, drawing it down to open the wound further. His ancestor drew a gleaming longsword and plunged it into the younger Nott, then with a vicious twist, pulled it out, disembowelling him, then swung around and sliced his head from his shoulders with a smooth blow, well-honed edge severing bone, muscle and flesh without great effort. Arthur stepped away from Izar's headless corpse and over to the dying Elizar. He simply jerked the spear out of the door and pulled it from the Nott Patriarch, twisting it a little to tear open the wound.
The two men, one a Praefectus Legionis of the Imperial Roman Army, and one a young wizard, cut down in his prime, now huntsmen of the Wild Hunt, watched as the last remnants of the Nott family were wiped from the face of the earth. The last thing Elizar Nott saw was the bodies of almost every being who had lived in their hall impaled on stakes surrounding his blazing hall as spectral figures drifted from it, riding into the night.
Only the young and the innocent were spared the agony of impalement. Their spirits though, were carried off with the hunt, and with every pace that the horses put between them and the dying patriarch, the less he recognised them. The magic of the Hunt had claimed them, leaving their mortal forms to join the others on the stake. And those bloody horns never stopped their awful dirge, even as Elizar felt himself hoisted up by one of the horsemen, and felt that final agony.
Lord Voldemort appeared between his Director of Magical Law Enforcement, Pius Thicknesse, and the Officer for the Muggleborn Solution, Lucius Malfoy. The acrid smell hit him him as he surveyed the smouldering ruins of Notthill Hall. A ghastly sight greeted him in front of the scorched mansion. Lining the last few yards up to the courtyard were stakes, stood fifteen feet high, and on them were the bodies of every living being that had resided in the hall.
"Lucius, my... friend..." Voldemort intoned silkily; "I trust you have a ready explanation as to why such esteemed contributors to the cause find themselves so... inconvenienced?"
"My Lord, I can only explain how." Lucius Malfoy replied, then hastily continued as Voldemort twitched; "We found the gates had been forced, the hinges broken on one, the other was pulled from the gate pillars hinges and all. The gatekeeper was shot full of arrows and beheaded, his hovel burnt to the ground. Whoever attacked left no footprints, but they came up here. Lord Nott and some of his family or retinue fought and died in the courtyard as there are bloodstains on the stones. Many of the impaled bodies have wounds suggesting cutting curses or something similar. A few of them have no wounds except from the impalement. The fire raged until well after dawn, fuelled by some kind of blood magic."
"As thorough as ever." commented Voldemort, before turning to face his lieutenant, fury welling in him at the loss of a prominent member of The Cause, and useful financial supporter; "And Lucius... CRUCIO!"
Releasing the curse after a few long, agonizing seconds, Voldemort cast the writhing Malfoy patriarch from his mind as he admired the handiwork of this unknown enemy. Such casual savagery, and the competence to massacre a family down to the last servant. While it might have been more effective to leave one alive to tell the story, it also preserved the secrecy of this new factor in the war. The impaled corpses were a story in themselves. A family with century after century of history, wiped out to the last man, woman and child, not even the illegitimate bastards left alive.
And not one of their own fallen left behind.