Chapter 1 – Sonata

June 2nd, 1898

"Don't think that I'm happy with this just because Basil approved of your dastardly little experiment. This is nothing short of a disgrace!"

"Oh, shut it, would you? He's going to be here any minute."

There wasn't a single person on the docks, and few would have been surprised at the sight – it was a quarter past two in the morning, and there was easily half an hour to and from the minutes before people would normally be found crowding about the docks. Be it the fishermen or the cargo haulers, no one was there, save for the odd Confunded night watchman or three.

"Remind me again why I was assigned to aid you in your… misdemeanors?" sniffed Professor Aiphos. "I could just leave you for those Muggle barbarians called the Aurors and tell Basil you tried to double-cross me."

Williamson rolled his eyes. "You can't and you won't, because it is the Headmaster's will within reason, and your contract binds you to those, so kindly shut that pox-ridden hole in your face before I find someone to stick his dick in it, would you?"

Aiphos' haughty expression could have easily frozen over the waves lapping at the pier's barnacle-encrusted pillars, but fortunately, nothing of the sort happened. As fate would have had it, a ship was approaching in the distance, the blaring of its foghorn echoing across the miles of open water, its silhouette barely visible despite the lighthouse barely a mile away to its starboard side.

"Perfect timing, as always!" Williamson chirped happily, smacking an unconscious watchman upside the head. "Come on, Professor – time to go!"

With a crack, the two men vanished, only to reappear in the ship's grand ballroom, four miles away.

"So, are those the instruments?" Aiphos asked, smoothly drawing his wand and sealing off the ballroom from within. "Let's make this quick."

"Do you really have to state the obvious?" grumbled Williamson, as he led the sulking professor over to the bandstand at the front of the room. "Alright, I have the trunk here, so if you'd be so kind?"

All it took was a handful of spells, and within thirty seconds, the number of instruments on the bandstand doubled. Where there had been two violins, a viola, a cello, and a double bass, there now was a grand total of ten members of the violin family on the stage.

"Now, into the slots, and mind you we want the originals," said Williamson, brusquely. "Gently does it!"

Sighing, Aiphos flicked his wand, and the five original instruments jumped a foot into the air, and flew towards the battered old travelling trunk which Williamson had opened and placed at his feet. As they drew closer to the pinewood case, they shrank, and neatly fit into it, settling down within velvet-lined slots barely a fiftieth of their full size.

"The harp ought to be in that closet over there," Williamson said, pointing towards a white door next to the bandstand. An Alohomora later, he nodded. "Aha, two harps! We'll take both of them."

"How is this not theft?" the huffy Charms professor asked, even as he replicated the two harps and summoned the originals into Williamson's trunk.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Williamson let out a frustrated groan. "We're replacing them, that's why. With a war on the horizon, they won't miss them, anyway."

Aiphos gave the man beside him a curious look. "The Muggles are going to war?"

"Possibly," the lanky Squib shrugged. "Either way let's take the originals to the school, shall we? They'll be used better at Hogwarts than here, anyway."

With a snap of two clasps, he locked the trunk, and they Disapparated, leaving the ballroom as it had been save for a slightly loose string on the duplicated cello.

xxx

June 9th, 1898

"- so we still need percussion and woodwinds," frowned Williamson, as he pored over a list of instruments he, two fellow Squib musicians, and some shanghaied Hogwarts professors had substituted for magical copies in the Muggle world. "The saxophones are on their way, but how's progress with the double reeds?"

"Difficult," sighed his diminutive Chinese friend, Kai. "We woodwind folk tend not to leave our instruments out unguarded, you know?"

"And where is your oboe?" demanded Ernest, crossing his wiry arms across his chest. "Last I knew, you played one, didn't you?"

"Why, you-"

Before the oboist and timpanist could get into another one of their never-ending arguments, Williamson got between them, and whistled shrilly.

"Come on, lads! We're this close," he held out his thumb and forefinger just an inch apart, "to having the full instrumentation for our orchestra, and all of them authentic versions, at that."

The three of them looked over the list again, snatching furtive glances at the copies of the pilfered instruments placed on their stands towards the far end of the classroom Fronsac had offered as their audition chamber. So far, they had managed to lock up the pilfered instruments in a closet which the Headmaster himself had enchanted, and so only copies made it into the audition chamber.

Eight violins, six violas, four cellos, two double basses, and a harp for the string section. Four trumpets, two tenor trombones, a bass trombone, and a tuba for the brass section. And of course, the piano at the fore of the duplicates, which were more or less arranged in their planned orchestral layout.

Large, empty squares drawn out in chalk indicated places for instruments they hadn't managed to appropriate yet. The number of those squares was certainly not pleasing.

"You think the stiffs over at Queen's Hall would notice if we… visited their homes?" Ernest mused thoughtfully.

Kai shrugged. "Obliviate works better on Muggles, anyway."

xxx

June 16th, 1898

"Easy does it… there!"

And with those four words, it was done. The contrabassoon sat snugly on its stand, despite its weight and the jury-rigged stand.

Really, they had remembered everything, except to also copy the stands. But it wasn't a big problem, since, well, the instruments were all there at Hogwarts, and that was what counted.

Or at least, they hoped so.

Williamson, Ernest, and Kai stood back to admire their handiwork – the finished instrumentation for their proposed Squib orchestra at Hogwarts. It was barely a chamber orchestra in terms of size, but it was theirs. Fifty chairs in all, excluding the conductor, and they had managed to work in room for two saxophones and a euphonium, to boot.

"We are going to make this work," Kai said, pride evident in his voice.

Ernest grinned. "The Hogwarts Chamber Orchestra."

"Well then, gentlemen," Williamson nodded, wiping the sweat off his brow, "let's get those owls out, shall we?"

xxx

24th June, 1898

"IF I MAY HAVE YOUR ATTENTION?" Ernest thundered, effectively shutting up the mob that had gathered at the grand foyer. "Thank you. Now, we shall be getting you all to the audition hall, and I'm expecting good behavior from all of you."

"Or we'll find someone to turn you into strings for the violins," added Kai, causing some of the eighty-something Squibs before them. "Now, line up in threes, and we'll be off."

As they led the group of potential musicians up the stairs and through the labyrinth of corridors that was Hogwarts, Williamson didn't miss the occasional looks they got as they walked past the lecture halls. Some were curious, some were encouraging – complete with friendly waving by more than a few students as well as faculty – and some were downright disdainful.

He sighed. Really, was it too much to ask for? For the Squibs to be given a chance to prove themselves equal to those who weren't doomed to live out their lives as prisoners of their birth?

It didn't take long to get to their makeshift audition hall, and they managed to get the teenagers seated in two rows along both sides of the corridor with only the most minimal hassle. From there, the three of them proceeded to take their seats in the medium-sized, window-less room, before calling out the first applicant's name.

"Aaron Kasdan!"

The door was opened, and a lanky lad just past his fifteenth birthday – if the letter was to be trusted – stepped in, curiosity evident in his eyes even through the thick mop of silver that practically draped itself over his head.

Williamson decided to start the audition. "So, we understand you've got some experience with a bassoon. Mind demonstrating what you know to us?"

"The bassoon's over there, and feel free to adjust the reeds as you usually do," Kai said, eliciting a nod from the teenager.

He proceeded to pick up the instrument – a beautiful maple specimen courtesy of the Queen's Hall orchestra's principal bassoonist, although he didn't know it yet – and inspected the reeds, nodding ever so slightly. With a grace they wouldn't have thought his gangling limbs capable of, he seated himself in front of the sheet music prepared, and looked over to the three musicians.

Ernest nodded, and the teenager began playing.

Whatever the three of them had been expecting of a bassoonist whose only lessons had been from his grandfather, it certainly hadn't been any better, nor had it been anything worse. Mercifully, the boy proved to be competent enough with his instrument of choice, and he managed to make it through the audition piece with barely a handful of mistakes and minimal abuse to his examiners' ears.

The trio of examiners let out an audible sigh of relief as he left the room. Surely if the first candidate could produce decent music, the next two days wouldn't be quite as bad?

Eight minutes later, when Ackley Nessler had completed his audition on the cello, the three of them weren't so sure whether they would make it past all eighty-four candidates in one piece.

xxx

30th June, 1898

Seen on the large notice board outside the Great Hall, four days after the auditions for the Hogwarts Chamber Orchestra:

'It is our distinct pleasure to announce that the following individuals have demonstrated the skills and/or knowledge as required for acceptance into the proposed Hogwarts Chamber Orchestra. Successful candidates have been listed according to the sections for which they auditioned, and are listed within by alphabetical order.

'We shall be announcing a second list of names by owl within seven days, being that of individuals whose talents were clear, yet whose musical knowledge was insufficient for a direct qualification as one of our orchestral musicians.

'Thank you for your co-operation and patience.'

First Violin: Delilah Octavius, Gregory Frobisher, Leroy Turner, Wilhemina Engelhart

Second Violin: Barton Huxley, Flint Borish, Jordan Ritter, Nina Steelnova

Viola: Abigail Fender, Edward Ernstwhistle, Eli Rosenbaum, Kurt Ziering, Pauline Earhart, Samuel Rosenbaum

Cello: Lorelei Kostovich, Olga Arsonyev, Roger Griffith, William Holden

Double bass: Tang Fan Shui, Yuri Gregorovich

Flute and Piccolo: Gaston Maupassant, Jillian Kirrin

Clarinets: Paul Prendergast, Quentin Boxhall

Saxophones: Anthony Schumacher, Hayden Selwyn

Oboe and Cor Anglais: Forsythe Sheedy, Hunter Abrahams

Bassoon and Contrabassoon: Aaron Kasdan, Lawrence Gast

Trumpet: Artemis McKinnon, Engelbert Harding, Michael Elias, Ursula Woolsworth

Horn: James Philbert, Timothy Kirrin

Trombones: Chandler Schlossman, Ian Wormwood

Euphonium and Tuba: Lowell Woolsworth, Herman Pascal

Harp: Julian Timmerman

Piano and Organ: Darcy Morgan, Nathan Oak

Timpani and Percussion: Alistair Prewett, Charlie Karas, Evelyn Bones, John Rommel, Lucy Greengrass, Martin Ottoman, Matthew Stemple, Simon Mouskori

xxx

1st September, 1898

"- with distinct pride and curiosity that I am going to officiate the Hogwarts faculty of music!" announced Headmaster Basil Fronsac, to thunderous applause. "In that capacity, will our three honorary music teachers, Messrs Williamson, Kai, and Ernest please stand up?"

The applause tapered off somewhat, almost as if on cue, as Fronsac continued, "Now, while they will be holding classes twice a week each, I shall make it known here that their primary purpose within our hallowed halls is what some might deem a higher calling than just teaching."

He swept the audience with a steely glare. "As some of the long-term boarders might have observed, these three gentlemen shall be training more than fifty Squibs the art of music, towards developing our very own Hogwarts Chamber Orchestra. Membership is not open to the rest of the school at present, although I understand they are working towards this end by… was it 1901, Williamson?"

Upon Williamson's nod, he turned back to face the two thousand, four hundred and fifty three students assembled for the Sorting feast. "We members of the faculty will not stand for any bullying or bigotry towards the Squibs in our midst. Hogwarts has always welcomed those who pursued knowledge into her halls, and all of us should, whatever society may say, adhere to that noble principle.

"And I believe it is time for bed! Goodnight then, students, and for the first-years, don't worry too much about the roaring just now – it was just the chimaera the fifth-years will be handling tomorrow morning."

xxx

27th September, 1898

It didn't take very long for the faculty and students of Hogwarts to get used to the Squibs' presence within the school. After the first two attempts at Squib bullying ended up with one of the bullies being hog-tied and used in lieu of a snare drum during music practice, as well as a stern reminder by Headmaster Fronsac that the caretaker had been authorized to whip bullies, the would-be concert musicians were, for the most part, left alone by the school at large.

The fact that the musicians had been allocated a separate corner of the castle to live and practice in helped, too.

One of the oldest and least used parts of Hogwarts was probably the Southwest Tower. It was directly between the Ravenclaw and Gryffindor towers, and mainly consisted of large, empty chambers which, ironically enough, had been intended by Rowena Ravenclaw to be used as a conservatory. So the members of the Hogwarts Chamber Orchestra ended up going about their daily routine surrounded by their music, the Ravenclaws' polite curiosity, and the Gryffindor's friendly insistence that they play something much louder.

So while the castle's residents – Peeves included – settled down and started enjoying the melodies echoing through the corridors of the Southwest Tower, the three men who had started the entire project found themselves getting steadily more worn out as time went by.

"Good morning, everyone," yawned Ernest, as he took his seat alongside the other music instructors. "Sorry I'm late – was up late working on Rommel's timekeeping."

"It's alright," nodded Williamson. "So, everyone, let's begin. I believe it's Potts' turn to start today, so we'll start with keyboards and work our way through the rest as usual."

Professor Brian Potts shifted about in his seat and harrumphed. "Their piano work and progress are fine considering they were clueless to start with, although why you insist on me teaching them the organ is beyond me."

"Just the progress report, Potts."

He shrugged. "Same as the piano, but much slower. I'd say once they get the gist of the piano, they'll just need to get used to handling the stops and manuals."

Kai crossed off a point on his list of meeting minutes. "Very well, then. Violins?"

"Cellos are doing surprisingly well," said Professor Humphriss, "although we're a little shabby on the violas, and that Oriental dwarf you have on the contrabass is… problematic."

"How so?" Williamson frowned. "And do you have to refer to him as that?"

Humphriss sneered. "I can tolerate Squib musicians, Williamson, but the yellow dwarfs are a stretch. He seems proficient enough at the basics, but probably couldn't play a decent marcato to save his life."

Ernest gave the strings professor a level glare. "Are there any other problems with his playing, Clifford?"

Taking the violist's haughty sniff as his cue, Kai turned to Catherine Furlong. "And what about the woodwinds?"

Furlong briefly glanced at a piece of parchment her section-mates had prepared, and smiled. "Progress is astonishingly good, although we really need to work on intonation for the saxophones. They've got power but not feeling, you know?"

"We've seen a similar issue with the trombones, here," chimed in Professor Elliott from the brass section. "Horns seem to be having a little problem with embouchure, but beyond that, we haven't seen anything that can't be rectified with time."

"And that just leaves… percussion," Kai nodded, marking his list for the last time and folding it over. "Zachary?"

The cadaverous man rocked in his seat, rolling his eyes. "Hard to say, really – your percussionists are all scarily inconsistent. Some days they get it all perfectly done, and some days they screw up the quaver passages of Confringo."

Williamson laughed. "You're mad, you know that? Ernest suffers with that one, and you're faulting the students for messing up?"

"My students, my standards," was the chilly reply. "You wanted the best, so shut up and get them in shape."

"I believe we all know what to work on for our next meeting, then," Kai intervened before the two men could start another one of their notorious arguments. "Breakfast is in the mess hall, and see you all in a month!"

xxx

13th October, 1898

The recently-christened Hogwarts Conservatory looked like a war zone.

People were passed out all over the floor, their instruments either on top of them, beside them, or in some particularly alarming cases, underneath them. Moaning and groaning filled the air, and feeble cries for water or help punctuated the miserable symphony.

At the end of the corridor, Williamson, Kai, and Ernest sat in a row, breathing hard.

"Remind me again why we're doing this?" Kai muttered, nearly dropping his oboe thanks to his hands shaking.

"Take them on a run around the entire compound, he says," Williamson whispered. "It will be FUN, he says."

"Oh, can it, you two!" snapped Ernest. "At least now we know how unfit they are, right?"

"Sod off."

"I second that."

xxx

31st October, 1898

Hogwarts had long been renowned throughout the magical world for its Halloween banquets, and so Fronsac had decided to showcase the new faculty to the delegations from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang during the 1898 Halloween banquet. Towards that end, he had requested that they prepare a series of simple performances to be presented throughout the course of the six-hour feast.

"Nothing difficult, he says," grumbled Williamson, as Kai helped him tie his bowtie. "A string quartet, perhaps, maybe accompanied by a piano? Bollocks. We aren't ready, and the old man knows it."

"There, there, mate," Ernest said cheerfully. "At least now we get to show the school that all those hours of practice weren't wasted!"

"And maybe they'll start staying awake during our classes," Kai pointed out.

Twenty minutes later, in the Great Hall, the three of them stood before their audience, feeling the collective pressure from more than three thousand pairs of eyes.

"Alright, on three?" Ernest casually asked, tightening his grip on his drumsticks.

"Three," nodded Williamson, as he leaned into his cello's familiar embrace.

Kai remained silent, his lips already wrapped around his oboe's reeds.

The count expired, and the three of them burst into a merry rendition of Clarence Gougin's Burlesque Bats. Cheers and applause came from the audience, as the jumpy little dance tune resounded throughout the hall, even as food appeared on the eight House tables and those two reserved for the guests. When the ditty ended, there were good-natured calls for 'More!' and 'Bravo!', which didn't seem to ease the minds of the string quartet meant to take over for the next song.

"Just relax and you'll be fine, alright?" Williamson hurriedly reassured the four students, as they tuned their instruments and took their seats.

Kai nudged Yuri the bassist. "You will not try to saw your instrument in half with the bow, understood?"

Ernest settled for clapping their violist on the back so hard that his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.

And so the feast went on.

xxx

The Halloween performances had ended with a forgivable number of mistakes on their students' parts. True, there had been moments where Ernest had been gritting his teeth as John muddied up the snare cadence on Blundering Bludgers, and Yuri had indeed made more than a few heads turn when he played his bass at a most unwelcome fortissimo, but lights out that night saw three very relieved Squibs unwinding at their quarters.

"You think they're ready to start on the orchestral training?" Kai asked, as he pocketed his reeds.

Williamson nodded. "I'll get the house elves to clean out the big rehearsal hall first thing tomorrow."

xxx

13th October, 1899

Orchestral practice was an entirely new kettle of fish for the musicians of the Hogwarts Chamber Orchestra. Individually, the sections were respectable, and some of them could work together decently enough. However, it seemed that as soon as the entire orchestra was assembled, even tuning their instruments led to all sorts of conflicts.

Strangely enough, Headmaster Fronsac appeared to enjoy their practice sessions. The elderly wizard attended their evening sessions almost without fail, and sometimes even fell asleep to the dissonant argument between two or more sections.

It didn't take long for the three most ambitious Squibs to ever walk through Hogwarts' hallowed hallways to wind up having a cup of tea with the Headmaster, and it was during one such session that he finally revealed his reason for attending their admittedly less than satisfactory practices.

"Music," Headmaster Fronsac had said, stirring his tea, "is an untamed, raw form of magic. Being immersed in it, or close enough to it, tends to give these tired old bones a good tuning, so to speak."

And then he had made them all wonder about his potential senility.

"Anyway, does an orchestra have bagpipes in it?"

xxx

27th September, 1901

Polite applause filled the Great Hall as Wilhemina Engelhart, the Hogwarts Chamber Orchestra's concertmistress, crossed the hall and stood before the assembled musicians. She bowed to the audience and gracefully turned around to face her peers. All it took was a nod to principal oboe Forsythe Sheedy, and the orchestra started their last round of tuning before the night's performance.

Their premiere performance.

A single, piercing A-note echoed within the Great Hall's ancient walls as Forsythe supplied his colleagues with an acoustic point of reference for their instruments to be tuned, and his playing remained unaccompanied for all of three seconds before the rest of the instruments joined him.

For many in the audience, the act of tuning up itself was an intriguing sight – contemporary magical musicians usually relied on spells and potions to ensure perfect tuning for all performances. Merely seeing the Squib musicians physically adjusting strings, skins, and tuning slides brought about a whole lot of hushed words and curious whispers, which abruptly ended once the tuning was done and the orchestra was silent once again.

Once more, the audience applauded, but this time, it was Williamson who was crossing the hall, decked out in his conductor's outfit. He stepped up to his conductor's podium, and bowed to the audience. The applause intensified, but he didn't miss the deadpan looks he was getting from some of the Ministers seated in the front rows.

So their interim headmaster had decided to invite the Ministry's dogs to the concert, after all.

He shrugged, and turned to face the orchestra. Fifty pairs of eyes were trained on him, and the weight of their collective focus seemed to press down on his shoulders like a giant's hands.

Exhaling quietly, he nodded, and the musicians assumed their ready positions for the first piece they were to perform for the night. Lifting his hands, he said a silent prayer to whichever higher power which may have been listening to him.

Three flicks of his baton started it.

It was horrible.

The first four notes of Beethoven's famous Fifth Symphony shattered the silence percussively, loudly, and with a ghastly dissonance which betrayed the orchestra's inexperienced sound. As the beats went by and the musicians audibly struggled with the increasingly difficult passages, Williamson felt beads of sweat forming on his brow. Beethoven's Fifth was meant for a full-sized orchestra, and the relatively small Hogwarts Chamber Orchestra just wasn't generating the raw power needed for the magnificent work.

Frantically, the strings managed to polish off the crescendo's complex chords, and when the under-sized horn section – supported by the saxophones - sounded the following six notes perfectly as requested by the score, the very atmosphere in the hall seemed to change.

Williamson was as baffled as anyone else in the hall, albeit a great deal more relieved, as the orchestra carried on playing with a sudden level of relaxation and clarity that he had yet to see or hear in any of their rehearsals. The strings were all beautifully resonant, and the woodwind harmonies were just as easy on his ears.

Briefly, Headmaster Fronsac's parting words echoed in his mind, and it was then that he finally understood what the wizened old Ravenclaw had meant by them.

xxx

"… and as requested by our respectable interim headmaster, we are pleased to bring you for the second half of our performance, Anthony Hoffstetter's 'Triwizard Medley'," announced Williamson, causing a significant number of the more musically-inclined in their audience to gape at him.

As he turned, he could practically feel the heightened tension around him. It was perfectly understandable, given that Hoffstetter's orchestrations were always notoriously difficult to play, and that no orchestra had managed a professionally acceptable rendition of the Triwizard Medley.

Some said that the medley's horrifically difficult composition was a sign of Hoffstetter's respect for the three Champions who had perished during that ill-fated Triwizard tournament. Some said it was his way of representing the unbelievably challenging tasks which had been set down for the Champions – surely retrieving a clue from a sinking ship and escaping from the whirlpool which was sinking it, climbing a near-vertical cliff face while dodging all manner of obstacles, and then trying to race against a volcanic eruption to obtain the Triwizard cup were beyond the capabilities of mere students. And of course, some said that Hoffstetter was simply a sadistic bastard of a composer.

The main difficulty of the piece lay in the exquisite passages and wildly fluctuating dynamics demanded of the string sections, and the punishing wind parts. But while Interim Headmaster Harrold hadn't been wrong about the composition's challenges when he had strong-armed Williamson into playing it as the encore, the good conductor had known exactly what he was doing when he said his orchestra would take it on.

With a slight grin, Williamson cued the orchestra into the first measure of Hoffstetter's masterpiece.

The tubular bells chimed out a hollow, sinister-sounding solo passage, not unlike a clock striking midnight. Slowly, ever so softly, the strings slithered into the picture, creeping in on numerous feet marked pizzicato. A crescendo gently built up, as the woodwinds, led by the clarinets, added to the web of tension being woven by the strings.

Explosively, the lower brass jolted the audience out of the strings' tense grip. The euphoniums supported the tubas in growling out the ominous leitmotiv which had been the downfall of so many principal bass players, and the saxophones supported the horns in their lower register as they dismissively bulldozed through the audience's defenses with a brazen forte that spanned four measures.

The brass assault ended just as abruptly as it had begun, giving way to an ethereal harp passage. By then, the audience's entire attention was on the orchestra, and most of them seemed to be in a state of shock.

A glockenspiel's notes rang out crisply in tandem with the harp as the Yule Ball started, and the strings slid easily into a waltz, accompanied by graceful ripples across the piano's keyboard. Williamson and the orchestra were visibly focused on the music, and yet seemed to be an island of calm in sea of bated breaths they had churned up.

When the waltz wound down a palpable atmosphere of dread oozed into the hall heralded by plucked cello and bass strings that echoed like a nightmare brewing in the bowels of the ocean. The timpani rumbled like rolling thunder, and the snare drum started a delicate, sporadic rhythm sounding like raindrops on a rooftop.

Cymbals crashed together with a tam-tam behind them, yielding a deafening thunderclap, torrents poured forth from the snare drum, and the first task commenced.

xxx

The woodwinds were whistling like wind in a valley, and the marimba gave voice to pebbles falling hundreds of feet to the ground. Occasionally, a handful of hesitant notes trickled into the mix from the piano, skipping about the octaves as deftly as an afterthought.

It was then that the boulders spawned from the bass drum's resonating head rolled down the cliff face and broke the Durmstrang Champion's right arm. The three Champions clawed their way up the rocky face, even as bloodthirsty woodwind birds and swarms of bees from the Himalayan foothills woven together by the strings tried to dislodge their grip and send them plummeting to the ground. Behind the basses, the chamber organ churned out a series of wailing chords that accented the zoological assault.

The orchestra, already in a musical frenzy, probably wouldn't have stopped playing even if Williamson had tried there and then.

xxx

For the third task, people had complained that the Tournament was too difficult, and that all three Champions had already had close calls with Death no less than four times each during the first two tasks.

Most unfortunately for the Champions, magical contracts and the need for entertainment ensured that they wound up facing the only force in magical history up till then to have killed all three Champions in a single blow – an active volcano.

Sulphurous gases hissed out of the fissure vents surrounding Mount Etna by means of controlled rolls on the suspended cymbals, and the bass drum agreed with the timpani in that an eruption would be taking place in the near future.

Ashwinders, fire crabs, and other flame-resistant creatures had been let loose in the subterranean tunnels around the volcano, and so there was a living wall between the Champions and the Triwizard Cup, suspended high above the roiling lava in the sweltering heat.

The Hogwarts Champion had been all but savaged by an enraged fire crab set on him by the Beauxbatons Champion.

Durmstrang's Champion got severely burned by streams of volcanic gas that mysteriously chased him down.

When the Beauxbatons Champion made it to the cone of the volcano, and caught sight of the Triwizard Cup, she hesitated. Surely it would not be that easy to just Summon the Cup?

And then the lava itself rose up like liquid Fiendfyre between her and the Cup.

Panicking, the girl cast what would turn out to be her last spell: a Flame-Freezing Charm.

The magma solidified with a slurred duet of bassoon and bass clarinet, and almost instantly started to shatter, its intrinsic heat being too much for a mere Flame-Freezing charm to handle. High, piercing notes cut through the orchestra's dense sound just like the cracks on the magma's surface, followed by a frantic crescendo as the exploding lava column took the life of the Beauxbaton's Champion.

Cymbals clashed together, the brass roared, the woodwinds shrieked, and all the stops were pulled out on the chamber organ as Mount Etna itself ended the Triwizard Tournament of 1784. Furious burst of magma spewed forth from the two percussionists on the cymbals, the very earth around the volcano shook under mallets, and the lower brass sang maniacally of the Champions' fiery deaths.

There was a heavy silence in the hall when the eruption tapered out in the form of a strained diminuendo.

Slowly, almost mournfully, the waltz from the Yule Ball was played on the glockenspiel. A lone oboe cried out several times, finally giving way to the strings.

A pregnant legato was sounded, followed by silence.