A/N: Finally, here it is.

The Snow Queen: Day Two

No straight lines

The first rule of camouflage- no straight lines. Straight lines aren't natural ones. When running around in a natural environment, straight lines are a dead give-away.

The second rule of camouflage- the terrain dictates everything. What dress you wear, what equipment you use, how you move, how you hide and why is all influenced by what helps you blend in best.

The third rule of camouflage- your eyes are useless. Sight is second to sound, smell and instinct. After all, you cannot hide from things you aren't aware of.

This is the start of the second day of the second task of the triwizard tournament. The three main contestants are asleep as dawn breaks. Rose Snow is awake and alert, combing the ruins of an old inn for useful items. Hermione Granger, Cho Chang, Hannah Abbot and Gabrielle Delacour are sleeping off a night of intense terror in a heavily warded storage room below the dungeons in a castle a long way from home. The Wizarding World is waking up to a day that'll herald the changes to come.

It's daybreak in the Sacrifice Zone. And things will never be the same again.

Rose was loading her weapons. The Bone Sword was in a shape-adjusting scabbard around her waist. Her uniform was once again immaculate and re-adjusted to fit the environment better-gone were the greens and blacks, in came the whites and browns of a wintertime forest. Her backpack changed colour as soon as she'd put it on to adjust the straps to fit her new gear.

It'd snowed the previous night. She loaded the bullets into their respective magazines. The short patrol she'd made just before dawnbreak showed tracks made by large animals in the snow. She re-assembled her pistol by candle-light, not trusting open windows enough to perform this task in the guest rooms. The tracks were all heading in the same direction-stampede? Herd behaviour? Impossible to know without Hermione or someone else with local knowledge around. She slid the magazine into the pistol and checked to see that everything was okay. She was working at a disadvantage here. She picked up the bolt action rifle she normally favoured over the semi-auto/full-auto rifles when scouting and cycled the bolt, checking the feed and making sure it didn't jam. She needed to get intelligence. She holstered her pistol and loaded the magazine into the rifle's box feed. She had to find the others today.

Rose Snow stood up, cradling the rifle across her chest, stamped her boots on the rotting floorboards and grinned. Today was going to be fun.

Fleur was the first to wake up. Veelas were sensuous, passionate creatures that, when flying off the handle, tended towards destroying everything around them. Everyone pictured them as being creatures of fire whereas, in reality, this wasn't the case. Veelas were a magical species that'd been created in the deepest depths of ice-age Siberia. Their descendants weren't beings of fire. Their heritage was one of ice and fire-fire gave them food, ice gave them comfort.
And the dilapidated tower the three'd taken shelter in was freezing. For a Veela, this was almost as good as waking up on a soft, plushy, emperor-sized bed-blissful, sensual and oh so good. Fleur drifted back from the land of nod on a cloud of happiness.

She looked at the others and gasped. She was fine. Fire or ice barely affected a Veela. But Cedric's lips were starting to go blue. Viktor was shivering violently in his sleep. Her companions were freezing to death. "Putain." She exclaimed.

She went to Cedric first. She tried shaking him awake, but stopped when she tried shoving him and felt her feet give away from underneath her. Yesterday's damp had turned into ice, sticking her fellow competitor to the floor. She shivered in dread as to what his back looked like right then. She brought her wand up and cast a weak warming charm at him. His body went rigid under the unexpected heat and he cried out in pain without waking, which woke up Krum.

The burly professional Seeker started violently and fell back onto the floor as his body was pulled back by the robes that were still stuck to the iced-over flagstones.

Cedric finally woke up and hugged himself. "What. The hell." He stated, teeth chattering as he hunched over in pain. "Which one of you hexed me in the back?"

"No magic." Krum ground out as he muttered out healing & warming charms on both himself and Cedric. "Heating Vard failed."

"Really? When did it fail?"

"About an hour ago. Longer and ve'd be dead." Viktor stated.

"Oui." Fleur nodded. "It was close."

"Damn." Diggory hissed as Krum's episkey repaired his ravaged back piecemeal. "How did that happen?"

"The floor." Fleur said slowly. "The ward didn't stick to the water coating the surface. Probably failed ven the ice set in."

"Okay, I can see that." Diggory said. "So who's got their map handy?"

"Pourquoi?"

"Because it's daybreak. Best to start early."

"Attends. Viktor?"

"Yes?"

"You're a girl." Fleur stated quite seriously. Cedric did a double-take and fell over laughing.

Her hair was a mess. Funnily enough, that was all she could think about, all she allowed herself to think about as she woke up. It'd been a bad night. Wherever she was, it had more monsters and dangers in it than she'd encountered in her five years at Hogwarts. Considering her history, that was saying something. Her nightmares, though, took the cake. Why didn't she just dream about cakes eating you instead of the other way around like normal people? But no, of course she'd just dreamt about memories instead. The sad thing was that she couldn't tell the difference between her nightmares and her memories anymore.

But that wasn't important now. What was important was the state of her hair. With the wards she and Cho'd cast last night and the warm little room the four escapees'd found themselves in, there was literally no danger to spend time emulating Lav-lav and Parvati at their shallowest. She sighed and started casting cleaning & beautifying charms on herself in the dark. She was going to have enough problems as it was. Facing them whilst looking like exactly how she felt struck her as slightly dumb. So she indulged herself as she let her mind wander.

Let's face it, she was stuck in a bind of her own making. Turned out that, when there were sections of an old magical castle that were left alone & unguarded when they were supposed to be shut down tight, there was a reason for such a state of affairs. She hadn't thought like a witch. True, thinking like a witch would've killed her more than once over the years, but this was one of those times where thinking that unguarded tunnels were an oversight rather than a decision to actively avoid dangerous areas (probably a standard assumption in the wizarding world as evidenced by the total lack of corpses littering the third floor corridor in her first year) had almost killed a bunch of kids as well as herself.

So she was in an awkward position (in more ways than one thanks to that damn knot in my hair) and the people she thought she'd been saving from a fate worse than death were now stuck with her in a monster-infested hellhole.

She transfigured a pebble into a hairbrush and ran it through her hair with steely determination. She had the means, she had the knowledge and she had the drive to get out of this. But how could she do it with three other girls tugging along? Her mind raced as she put her much-vaunted brain to work.

She could freak out later. If there was a later, that is.

The swampland was a beautiful and terrifying thing that day. An early onset of spring (or a temporal misalignment, hard to tell with magic) elsewhere had caused fresh water to cascade down from the distant mountains. There wasn't a lot of it, but the swamps were on a natural plateau that caught water as it flowed farther down into the valley and, therefore, received the lion's share of the fresh springwater. As a result, where once small ponds littered the space between trees now sprouted strange sculptures made of ice from water freezing as they come into contact with obstacles. Tree trunks morphed into pillars, bumps became stalactites and once dry ground was covered with a layer of thin, brittle coat of frozen water. It wasn't smooth by any means. If anything, the ice magnified any imperfections on the ground, turning bumpy ground into an obstacle course that was as deadly as the cold itself.

In the damp, dark landscape underneath the forest canopy, ice glittered like a million diamonds in the scraps of sunlight making it through the snow-thickened covering above, every lethal shard as beautiful and enticing as the most exotic of jewellery. It was also silent. Not a word, not a bird, not a rustle. The animals had fled the colds in favour of the richer, softer ground on the valley floor.

The frozen world was nowhere near as white as it should be, though. The waters had been muddied, corrupted by the soft grounds and bacteria, darkened by the taint of rotting vegetation and leaking magics. The result was ice painted in mottled browns, yellows and greens, water crystal matrices infused with the debris of the area they'd travelled through before arriving at the swamp and freezing.

In this world, the thump of a boot and the absurdly clean yet assymetrical pattern of a wintertime forest camouflage outfit stood out like a sore thumb. But that wasn't news to Rose. Winter landscapes were her favourite battlefield. It's in the name, after all-Snow. The avatar of winter, of cold, of death travelling on silent winds. To be a Snow is to know, intimately, what your namesake represents according to Grandfather. So she'd learned. She'd learned in the icy wastelands patrolled by ancient machines. She'd learned in the seasonal tundras that seemingly bred bandits, rebels, dissidents and criminals. She'd learned in the endless patrols around the northernmost Dissident containment camp, making sure that those that threatened Panem met their end on the snow fields and in the cremation ovens as they were meant to. She hadn't been born a Snow, but she'd learned.

The weather was cold, turning every inhaled breath into a sensation of sharpness, restoring her body even as she felt the icy chill settle in her lungs. The very air tugged at her skin, making her feel every blocked pore, every dirty crevice her thorough cleaning had failed to reach that morning. The lump of wood & iron in her hands was freezing her hands even through the gloves she was wearing. Her every sense was dialled up to eleven, her eyesight crisper behind the frosted glasses, her sense of smell sharper, her hearing surpassing even her own lofty standards. Not a thing moved without her knowing it. The cold was hers. Wherever it touched, wherever it went, she could follow. Whoever it touched, wherever they were, she could touch too. Her boots made nary a sound as she carefully threaded a path on the thickest patches of ice. Her winter camo was artificially dirtied, turning the pristine white into something that fit the swamp itself. She moved like she belonged. More, she moved like she owned this ground. And she did.

But she was scared.

There was something, some unknown entity in the bushes watching her. She couldn't hear it, smell it or see it, but it was there. Or so her instincts told her. And her instincts were never wrong.

She brushed her hand across her brow, dispelling the sweat that she'd felt accumulating there before it, too, iced over. What to do, what to do. Breaking stride-going either slower or faster before normal, non-hunted her would- would be a dead give-away. Similarly, sticking to the path she was on was just begging for an ambush. But would that be such a bad thing? Yes, yes it would. Ambushes were survivable if you knew what to look out for. She didn't know what to look out for. Ergo, sticking to her previous plan and carefully making her way through the maze in front of her was suicide. She needed a new plan. Which meant taking out her wand again. Which meant letting go of her rifle. Which was probably suicide.

Eh.

The rifle felt odd as it rolled up against her shoulder. Cold, hard and yet warm and inviting. The wand may choose the wizard, but a good rifle loves everyone. It's just not very forgiving. She reached inside her left jacket sleeve and withdrew the length of Elder from its jury-rigged sheath.

Hello. The grumpy-sounding voice echoed in her head. Got something that needs blowing up again?

"No." Rose said sheepishly. "I have a problem."

So you need a brain instead of muscle memory for once. Interesting. And what would that 'problem' be? The voice of Miss Blue added with audible quote marks.

"Something's stalking me. Has been since I left the inn, I think. I need your help." She whispered.

What is it? The voice said, suddenly all business. Rose kept walking as if nothing was happening, hoping against hope that the stalker wouldn't notice her getting distracted.

"Don't know." She said. "Just know that it's not human."

Can you see it?

"No."

Hear it?

"No."

Feel it with your magic?

"What?" She whispered in bewilderment. "How can I do that?"

Well, you already are. You're just not aware of it.

"Oh, right. I'll go with no then."

Has it made a sound to give it away? Anything?

"Uhh, no."

Then how do you know it's there? Blue asked, amused by the paranoia of the girl.

"Instinct. I know it's there, because there's somewhere around here where something should be, but isn't, you know? I can't explain it better than that."

Eloquent.

"Fuck you too."

Awww diddums. Well, there is one kind of animal that I can think of that elicits that kind of reaction, but you won't like it.

"What is it?"

Demiguise. It's a Demiguise.

Breakfast in the Great Hall was a muted affair. Normally, the whole thing would be a rather boisterous affair replete with tall tales and discussions taking place between friends. Today, though, Hogwarts got its first taste of an entirely muggle phenomenon, namely the relationship between children and television sets.

The live stream of both contestants and the environment they found themselves in was shunted off into a corner of the large Mirror put in place behind and just above the professors' dining table. Maxime, Dumbledore and the other judges were off doing their thing, leaving their underlings to maintain order and keep school children from being too childish. While this would normally be a tall order on the level of herding cats from the back of a tractor, today they had little to do but watch the hundred-odd children as they gawked at the giant screen. They were currently enjoying a replay of yesterday's events-Rose's brush with the Praxis, the Trio doing what wizards did, the running commentary of Lee Jordan as he waxed eloquently about everything from the general state of society through to Rose's use of firelegs.

It was all very exciting to those watching-and a little boring to those watching the watchers. Minerva paid little attention to them. She'd visited enough muggle families in her day to recognise the enraptured look on her charges' faces, though it was fairly disconcerting the way her mind kept thinking about how their blank stares were directed at her. Overall, about a three out of ten on the Hogwarts' weirdness scale in her professional opinion.

Severus was busy coating his toast with that weird butter he made for himself over summer, its rainbow-coloured surface shimmering in the early morning sunshine. Apparently, it contained all the nutrients and magical augmentations a wizard or witch needed to get through the day, all kept compact enough that two slices of toast meant you could skip lunch and dinner if needs be. No matter what anyone else said, though, Minerva would never touch the stuff. After all, Pomona was still working off the excess fat one of Severus's faulty batches had cursed her with. And Minerva was too proud a witch to risk her waistline on a dare. It just wasn't done that way.

She sipped her cup of Lady White tea with relish. Oh, this was truly the nectar of the gods. Much better than that coffee stuff most of the students and house elves swore by.

One of her cubs lost the glazed look on his face. Who was it-ah, wait, red hair, freckles, looked vaguely familiar. Was always late in her class. Come on old girl, think! It can't be that hard-right, Weasley! But which one? Oh wait, there was the other one. A twin-twins! That's right, Fred and George! Unforgettable, those two. Troublemakers of the finest sort. Now why were they staring at her-the screen in horror? Wait, there was another, this time one of the Durmstrang students that hadn't figured out the colour coding scheme probably. They were meant to eat with the Slytherins, not the badgers. Odd that. He was staring at the screen like it'd killed his puppy. Murmurs started spreading through the ranks. The odd shout could be heard from the tables. Uh oh. Danger Professor McGonnagall, danger! She stood up, putting her hands out in that calming gesture of hers that worked nine times out of ten-and was summarily ignored.

What was going on?

Against her better judgement, she turned around to see what was bothering her students and stumbled. The picture revealed a ruined room that'd been charred and battered by what seemed to be a dragon. Four figures ran away from something that seemed to be all tentacles, firing spells behind them as the thing's mouths opened and cried out in a ghastly shriek made up of pain and hunger. There was a caption underneath the picture-hostages in peril!

Minerva saw red. There were two Hogwarts students and one Hogwarts alumnus participating as hostages in this task. Three people she knew and cherished, even if she sometimes had trouble remembering their names. Fighting for their lives. In Albion. Because of her boss.

Albus and her were going to have words when he got back. Oh yes indeed.

"So how are we gonna do this?" Cho asked the room in general. Hannah was now awake and enjoying a cup of conjured coffee, Gabrielle was busy clutching to Hermione's leg like it was the last steady hold she had on reality and Hermione was working her way through her coat's wards and enchantments, re-casting wards, correcting flaws and generally making sure the day's activities, whatever they ended up being, didn't cause it to fall apart at the seams.

After a lengthy silence, the bushy-haired Gryffindor looked up. "What?"

"How are we going to do this?" The surly Hufflepuff asked wearily. She was only on her third cup of conjured coffee, after all. It took time to work. "Since you're, you know, action girl and stuff."

"Wait, me?" Hermione asked in wry amusement. "You're seriously considering asking me for advice?"

"Yes, you jumped-up bookworm, you. Since you got us into this mess-"

"Hey!" Cho snapped. "What she means to say is that you have saved us from a gruesome fate, for which we thank you." she stated edgily whilst staring at Abbot, who just sighed and rolled her eyes. "and that we now need someone to save us from a worse one. And, well, you've got experience with this stuff. As you are a, you know, a Gryffindor and all."

"Oookay. Why thank you Cho, Hannah." She said, beaming at the two. "First time anyone's thanked me for saving their lives-"

"Happen often then?" Hannah sniped from her corner.

"No, generally only once or twice a year." Hermione admitted, leaving Abbot blinking and muttering 'is she serious' at Cho, who nodded. Ravenclaws kept abreast of their own, no matter what house they happened to be in. "Anyway, thank you, but are you sure? I mean, I've got a plan, but it isn't a particularly good one."

"That's all right." Chang said happily. "See, I don't have a plan either."

"And neither do I." Hannah admitted in a pained voice. "So tell us about this grand plan of yours, Granger."

"We keep on going."

There was a minute's silence at the words. "You know," Cho said "you didn't have to lie about having a plan-"

"But that is the plan!" Hermione exclaimed, wounded at the insinuation. "It will work, you know."

"Let's go farther down, they'll never catch us there!" Hannah said in a mockery of Hermione's slightly nasal voice before laughing. "Because that worked so well yesterday."

"Well it did!" Granger snapped at the black-hearted & gold-plated bitch. "Or are you still sitting in your cell, waiting for them to come for you, huh? Why do you think they only chained your ankle to a wall?" She snarled. Gabrielle squeezed her calf muscle hard at the tone. "Ah! Desolee ma cherie, mais je suis en plein milieu d'une discussion ici. On parlera apres, d'acc?"

"D'acc." The little girl answered in a whisper.

"Come off it 'Hermy'. We're here because of the tournament, of course." Hannah stated with confidence.

"Oh yeah? Are we really? Then explain why they thought that locking us in a dungeon, alone and without the ability to defend ourselves using magic. Because that's an explanation I'd love to hear."

"Look, guys-" Cho began, but stopped as Hermione made a swiping gesture in her direction.

"I don't give a shit about your problems Abbot. I don't care about your petty delusions about being safe in this fucking world just because you have good looks and a gift in charms work. What I care about are facts. Facts like the odds of all the hostages being female being close to nil. Or do you really think that you're worth more in dear Vicky's eyes than his own little brother? Or that Fleur has a ton of close friends that won't cause half the shit-storm that endangering both the heir apparent and the heir presumptive to the Delacour clan for the purposes of a fucking game? How about this one-we were all alone in the dungeons. Fact. We couldn't use magic. Fact. We were defenceless against anyone with a wand and the motive to use it. Fact. Now consider these facts, Hannah Abbot, and ask yourself what the odds are of you, the pretty little Hufflepuff, being rescued before one of our lovely abductees decided to have a little play time with you. Consider how likely it is that someone would have heard you screaming your lungs out before they were finished with you and decided to dump you on the lower levels if they botched the subsequent obliviation. Consider the facts, Hannah, before running your mouth off again, you stupid fucking bitch." Hermione said in an ironclad voice.

Cho sighed. "Alright, then, now that that's sorted, can we get back on topic here?" She looked at Granger. "Hermione, you said your original plan was good. Can you elaborate?"

"Well, it's like I said yesterday-there are tunnels leading outwards on the lower levels. If we can get to them and make our way through one of them, we're bound to get out by the end of the day."

"The only problem with this being the monsters, I'm guessing." Cho said sarcastically.

"Well, not really. All we need to do is torch the corridors ahead of us with a directed incendio. That should take care of the nasties."

"Hmm..." Chang tapped her wand against her chin. "Alright Miss Granger, it may not be much of a plan, but you have my backing. And you, Gabby?"

"Oui M'dame." The girl said quietly.

"Three out of four. Not bad. Guess that's us sorted then. When are we leaving?"

"Well, there's still the enchantments I intend to cast on you guys to keep you moderately safe and Gabby's carrying harness to figure out, but that should be it. Give me an hour?" Hermione asked.

"An hour? You got it Granger. I'll just go and comfort Hannah while you sort out Gabrielle." Cho said.

Hermione stole a glance at Abbot and sighed as she saw the horror-stricken look of realisation on the girl's face. "Right-o. Snap her out of it. You've got about twenty minutes, okay?"

"That's all I'll need, don't worry."

"-you stupid fucking bitch!"

Minerva sighed at the shocked look on Fudge's face. "B-but..." The Minister of Magic sputtered. "But we'd never-" and then stopped.

Alastor Moody grinned in approval at the mirror. "I like 'er." The grin turned into a smirk. A moody smirk was not a pretty thing to see. "Good at DADA too. Can I 'ave 'er?"

"No Moody, bad Moody!" Nymphadora 'don't call me that' Tonks said with a mock scowl. "Only one partner per Auror, them's the rules."

"'Oo said anything about that?" He asked quizzically.

"Well..." Tonks said, shrugging.

"Nah, lass. I want 'er as an apprentice."

"What?" The metamorphmagus squeaked. "Why her and not me?"

"Less work lass. She's got good instincts that one. May only take ten years to knock the edges off. You, it'd take forever. Literally."

"Knock it off minions." Amelia Bones slurred grumpily as she sipped her tea with a frown. "I'm not in the mood."

"Mugged Dung again Boss?" Moody asked.

"If you were anyone else Alastor..."

"Good thing I'm me then." The Master Auror smirked again.

"Shut up. Anyway, you've probably guessed why we're here." She said, waving at the big screen.

"Damage control? Please say it's damage control." Fudge whined. "My office is up to its ears in howlers already. And Albus is being his usual bloody self."

"Trouble in paradise Corny?" Moody stated archly.

"Not a word more out of either of you." Bones stated, pointing at Moody and his partner in crime...fighting. "This is serious."

"Indeed." Fudge intoned. "My approval ratings've dropped by five points in the past hour alone.

"Boss?" Amelia said carefully.

"Yes?"

"It's not that type of delicate. Now, how many of you have been briefed about the site the hostages are kept in? Minions excluded, of course."

The other figures sitting around the round table were silent. Minerva raised her hand, eliciting a raised eyebrow from Madame Bones. "Professor?"

"I do Albus's paperwork. Snuck a peak is all." The deputy headmistress admitted.

"Alright. Care to do the honors then?"

"No." She said flatly. "Not on this one."

"Wise choice professor." Bones cleared her throat. "Anyway, for the erudition of the rest of you lot, I could give you a rather lengthy & pointless run-down of the details, but brevity, I've found, has always had a clarity of its own." She sighed. "The location where the hostages are held isn't just in Albion. It's in Morgane Le Fay's eternal tomb."

The silence that followed that statement lasted for a while. Amelia just smiled. "I thought so. I'll just go ahead and send as many Aurors I can spare then, shall I?" More silence. "Good, thank you. Now then gentlement, this was a fun little gathering and all, but I have to be going. All that pesky work stuff to do, so few minions to shunt it off onto. Minions, Boss, to me. We have work to do. Goodbye gents, professor."

And, with that, Amelia walked out of the room. McGonnagall found it all rather amusing. Now, to find Albus and give him what for...

Patches of dry land started to peak out of the sea of ice the swamp had turned into. The slopes started to get steeper and steeper. Glimpses of forest started to peak out of the marshy landscape. Small rivulets started to become more prevalent, getting bigger and more violent as the ponds got smaller and smaller. Rose was coming up to a spot on the map designated as the 'waterfall wall'. The end of the marshlands were in sight. Normally, this was a cause for celebration, for a well-earned pause.

Rose didn't give a shit about pauses anymore. She ran.

The sun was mounting ever higher into the sky. A dense layer of fog pervaded the undergrowth while misty curls of water vapour steamed off the ice. Down in the valley, it'd dissipate come midday. Up on the plateau, it was only getting started.

She needed to beat the fog. If it got too thick, she was dead. Because if it got too thick, she'd never see the demiguise coming. Not that she would, but chances were that they'd use the fog as a distraction to get close enough to do whatever it was they did. Time to forget stealth. Forget sneaking around the obstacles. Forget catching your own food, finding shelter for the night and getting a relaxing sleep before going off and rescuing Hermione. Forget the training, the years of fighting alone against the world, where stealth and surprise won the day. Forget it all. Because now, her enemy was a master of stealth, hunting and human behaviour.

Because she was being hunted by a pack of Demiguise.

Demiguise are legendary beasts. Said to exist only in myth, coming across one was almost a guaranteed death sentence. They were said to be cursed wizards from the dawn of time, driven insane by isolation and invisibility, forever walking the earth without ever truly dying.

Rubbish of course. They weren't cursed. They wanted immortality. And they got it.

Demiguise fur hides its bearer from death. Ever thought of the consequences of that? As long as you wear the fur, Death cannot see you. And what Death cannot see, Death cannot claim. You are, as long as you wear the fur, technically immortal.

But here's the caveat – that which cannot die, can never truly live. And that which you cannot see, cannot really understand, you cannot interact with.

A Demiguise was human once, long ago. They remember every second of being human, for it's the last true memory of life they ever had. After transforming, they lived in a state where only those who'd become like themselves could interact with them, but nobody else. Tortured by the very means of their immortality, they slowly lost control of their cognitive functions and truly became human animals, things that had the aggressive instincts of a human with none of the limiters to stop them doing what they wanted.

There was only ever one case recorded of a wizard killing a Demiguise. That wizard was Ignotus Peverell. The results are a bit skewed, though-while only one Demiguise had ever fallen at the hands of a wizard, hundreds of cases of wizards & witches being found eaten, skinned alive or worse are attributed to the beasts.

And she was being hunted by a fucking pack of the bastards. Her rifle was useless in this situation-how can you keep the target at range if you cannot see it? How do you kill the invisible with a rifle? It was dead weight, but she didn't ditch it. Useless against silent, invisible hunters it may be, but they weren't the only beasts out here. Centaurs, Werewolves, Acromantula had crossed her path in earlier months. The rifle worked just fine against them.

So she ran. The fog was closing in. If it got too thick, she'd have to slow down. If she slowed down now, there were few doubts about how the day'd end for her. She needed to get out of here, find an easily defendable space and prepare for yet another last stand. Typical. She just hoped it didn't turn out to be hers this time.

Finally, she hit the forest line proper. Her breaths came in ragged chunks. She'd have to slow down soon. She followed the deep roaring noise coming from her left, ever deeper into the dark forest. This wasn't like the swamp-the swamp, for all its murky glory, let some light filter through. This section of the forest was just dark. Rose slowed, sighed in frustration and started filtering through the vision options on her specs. The forest turned all the colours of the rainbow as a combination of thermal, magical and light amplification charms kicked in, rendering the world in a sharp contrast of psychedelic colours. Huh, well that was new. Now, to test it against daylight. She turned around and looked at the swamp she just traversed. There it was, in the strange hues a kindergarten student on a sugar high'd pick to colour it in.

Well, that and a huge number of blurry outlines slowly and patiently moving towards her position. Rose turned around, ran and started to grin.

Gotcha.

Dungeons, as a rule, don't get much in the way of light. Being underground, the sun couldn't touch them. Being in a keep, under a heavy layer of stone & rock, meant that the more common varieties of naturally occurring glowing fungi didn't flourish there-lots of water, but not enough in the way of useable bacteria to feed off.

So it would come as a shock to many wizards & witches that their ancestors had come up with an extremely efficient means of lighting up the lower levels of a dungeon; fireflies. And not the muggle variety either-these fireflies glowed all year round. A single one only gave off a weak source of lighting, barely enough to match the flame of a matchstick. But in packs, they lit up the dark & gloomy corridors like the sun. They were also pretty much self-sustaining. A little bit of shit here, moss there, maybe the carcass of an unlucky prisoner or two every couple of years and they were all set to last forever. Alternatively, rats or other, dumber insects worked just fine.

The Aurors were aware that they'd attracted an audience back home. Their charges had absconded in the dead of night, blasting their way down below the dungeons in a blaze of furious magic that'd barely rated any attention at all from the guards on duty, focused as they were on patrolling the outer battlements looking for trouble.

The damage they'd done, though, hadn't escaped the Auror's notice, however. The Mausoleum was, despite its modest outwards appearance, built along the lines of a massive hall roughly the size of Hogwarts itself on the ground floor, the entire structure lined with vaulted beams that criss-crossed the hall from one side to the other in eternal remembrance to the witch who'd sacrificed her life severing the kingdom of Albion from the world around it. The beams were made of what appeared to be a mix of marble and solid silver, but were in fact composed of heavily enchanted Mithril and mineral crystals spun into a mesh overlaying a core composed of solid carbon. This was the true achievement of the mausoleum-each of those beams was a marvel of magical engineering, capable of bearing loads unheard of on earth itself. They were, each of them, the size of a muggle skyscraper and twice as sturdy. They'd stood for close to a thousand years and bore silent testimony to the skills of the generations that built & set up magical Britain in its golden days. Unbreakable, it was once thought. They were tasked with holding up the mausoleum, containing its runic wards, protecting the burial chambers from intruders and showing off the awesome power of magic for all who made it this far.

Only, the beams had started to crack.

Nobody noticed anything at first, really, the guards on duty being too focused on their jobs to pick up on the odd fissures steadily snaking their way up some of the massive pillars, the groans echoing through the vast chamber, the rumbles starting to build. Until the captain looked up and saw the dark lines spreading and groaned. After all this was over, he and Granger were going to have a talk about blowing up valuable landmarks close to the heart of the wizards' culture. Not that he didn't sympathise (muggleborn Aurors tended to dislike places that reminded them of Malfoy Manor. Shocker), but really.

But, first things first, he needed to go and retrieve the hostages before it was too late. Something told him that, should she somehow manage to penetrate the actual burial chambers of Morgane La Fey, that nothing much would matter to him or his aurors anymore on account of the castle collapsing on top of their heads.

And the girl was well on her way to doing just that.

So he raced down through the dungeons and onto the lower levels, Granger's backpack and other odd bits & bobs the Auror guard had confiscated prior to shackling her to the wall, trusting his enchanted map and the damage left behind by the awesome foursome to catch up with them.

He enchanted the fireflies to float in front of him as he ran, hoping against hope that they weren't too far ahead.

"You will not be talking about this ever again. To anyone. Understand?"

"Yes, Viktor." Two voices said in a monotone, desperately trying to stave off the boredom that hiking their way down a strangely well-maintained trail was bringing them. The only sounds they'd heard so far came from the local birdlife. Not a single monster was to be seen anywhere since they'd set off a couple of hours ago. It made Viktor nervous. And when nervous, Viktor tended to babble. A lot. Which drove Cedric round the bend something fierce.

"Alright, I will trust you with this for now. We should probably find somewhere to sit down for lunch and check our progress. We've got to reach the hostages by tomorrow if we're to get back before our time's up." he uttered in that curt, emotionless burst that made his babbling even harder to endure than the Hufflepuff Hymn, which consisted entirely of 'uhhh... ummm... what, can you repeat that please?'.

"Why by tomorrow?" Fleur asked, her interest piqued despite the well-concealed spike of unease that'd been skewering more and more of her patience in the last hour.

Cedric sighed, checking the time on his watch for the umpteenth occasion since waking up that morning. His big toe hurt. His balance was out of whack. Probably still frost-bitten from this morning, much like most of his face had been. He tried his best to stop thinking about it. "Because," He said slowly "we don't know what awaits us when we reach them. Do we have to fight our way out with them? Are there riddles to solve if they are to be freed? Is it an execution or a birthday party that we're walking towards? We don't know. That extra day will come in handy... if we can get to them by then, that is. Hey Vicky!" he intoned playfully. "How far until we can stop for a rest honey-buns?"

Viktor's scowl didn't scare Cedric. Honestly. No matter what Fleur had to say when she'd stopped laughing herself silly. "Fuck you, Badger Queen."

"Hey, I'm not the were-girl here, girl." Damn, this was fun. Even if it was a bit scary. Actually, it was plenty scary, the way Viktor pinned him with that glare of his. But still fun.

Krum sighed. "Not that far, actually. We should be getting close now." Fleur just kept giggling.

Cedric smiled to himself and went back to checking out the surrounding area for threats. Oh, how he wished he'd mastered that hyper-sensory charm in class! He hated having to rely on Fleur to sniff out any unseen threats to their well-being. Most wizarding naturalists knew that there were plenty of creatures that had the power of invisibility, but they were far too good at evading wizards and magic in general, so he only knew of one possible invisible threat to the group-other than a cranky Rose. He hated having to rely on Fleur. The Veela was just so... so... flighty. He giggled involuntarily. Damn, pull yourself together Ced! He actually found that funny! He-ah, hang on, that looks like the clearing Krum had talked about. "Hey guys! This the clearing?"

Krum agreed while Fleur darted in, eagerly looking for a spot to park her sore rump on for an hour or two. Walking was exhausting. Fighting Dragons was tiring. Who knew? She sure did now.

"Can we stop for a while?" Cho asked. "I need time to recoup after that last corridor."

"Yeah, that one was a doozy." Hermione agreed absent-mindedly as she leant against a handy wall and shook off the numbness left behind by overly frequent casting. "What was that ward anyway?"

"Trip ward." Hannah whispered as she glanced around fearfully, her lumos just spreading more shadows around rather than illuminating anything useful. "You trip it, it trips you back. Usually has something nasty for you to trip into as well."

"Yeah, that pit of congealed tar looked nasty." Cho said, shaking out her wrists in cadence with Granger.

"That wasn't tar." Hermione noted. "I took a close look at it. It was pitch, with a fire spell overlaying it. If you'd tripped into it and broke the surface, the embedded incendio would have set anything in the hole on fire. And pitch sticks."

"Eurgh." Gabrielle said. "C'est horrifique."

"Yep!" Hermione agreed.

"How do you know that, Gr-Hermione?" Hannah asked.

"Malfoy." The girl growled. "Tried something similar, except it involved both pitch and bubotuber pus. Claimed it was a prank and got off, the bastard."

"Ouch." Chang said. "That sucks."

"Yeah." Granger agreed. "Especially when he mysteriously fell into his own trap the next day. Too bad someone'd disabled the spell trigger beforehand."

"Wow, way to go you!" Abbot exclaimed.

"While a nice attempt at sucking up," Hermione said semi-teasingly, "I can definitely say that it wasn't me that pushed him in."

"Well no." Cho agreed. "Why push when a tripping jinx works so much better?" She snorted at the wry look Hermione threw her way before the bushy-haired witch started giggling. "Right."

"Anyway, much as I hate to interrupt this break of ours, but we need to get going." Hannah said.

"Oh?" Cho said, looking at the other witch oddly. "And why is that?"

"Because I'm hungry and there may be some food in the kitchens."

"Hmm, okay." Hermione said. "So we're travelling deep inside the castle of doom, gloom and monstrosities. We're not that far ahead of things, which means we need to hurry if we're going to make it out of here alive. And now we need to find the kitchens in the off-chance of finding anything edible where everything tells us that this part of the building hasn't been occupied for centuries. How are we going to do that? Ideas?" She shook her head at their faces. "Honestly, if you know something I don't, I'm all ears. Pretty hungry here too, indeed hungry enough to test Gamp's Laws of transfiguration."

"Well…" Hannah said. "This is presumably a magical castle. What if we tried to find a house elf?"

"And because old magical castles had quarters specifically to house house elves-" Cho's eyes widened. "That's a brilliant idea Hannah! It's-"

A muffled roar interrupted their tirade with a hammer blow.

"Well shit." Hermione summarized the group's feelings. "Any ideas about what that was?"

The veela was debating with Krum about whether or not they should try a different path before it started snowing again like it had the night before. The sky was currently clear, but all three knew that that would change extremely rapidly once they hit what was left of the enchanted Orchards. Weather & temperature regulation spells were notoriously long-lived, often lasting for a lot longer than the environment they were cast in. A number of Oases were originally magical farms that had paid a little bit extra for spellcasting. The resulting charms had been operating since before the last ice age. This made old orchards such as the one they wanted to cross extremely dangerous, since they were a popular refuge for many a magical creature and, therefore, prime hunting grounds for magical predators. Once they hit the area, there was little doubt that rain and other nasties would ensue and they should probably prepare accordingly.

"And I am telling you, just confringoing our way through is not going to work." The blonde girl sniffed, clearly not impressed with the Bulgarian's reasoning abilities. "It takes far too much power to cast that spell that many times that quickly, power we'll need when the predators come looking for us."

"Predators will be a non-issue out there if we clear a path this way." Krum said, waving a hand in irritated dismissal. Fleur sighed inwardly as she silently bid him to carry on with his argument. "For one thing, the loud noise, the shockwave and the shrapnel should be enough to deal with any stray animals."

"Yeah, but here's the thing, Viktor; we'll be hit by shrapnel too if we do this." Fleur frowned. "And wood splinters hurt, I can tell you that."

The Bulgarian Seeker sneered at her. How cute. She sneered right back. "Are you a witch or not? Shield!"

"Uh huh." she said skeptically. "Because Protego does such a good job at stopping small objects going really fast."

"It's wood shrapnel! Easy to stop, easy to deflect!"

"No, Viktor, it's nowhere near as easy as you think it is. You're thinking wood splinters. I am thinking what's left of a small tree, hitting us at close to the speed of sound, while on fire. The drain from the shielding spell would be immense."

"Use the protego aegis then! Perfect for this kind of thing!"

"NOT THE POINT VIKTOR!" She breathed. "The point is that, confringo or protego, we'll exhaust ourselves if we even get halfway through."

"Then what would you suggest, princesse?" He bit out, his temper being frayed by the confrontational blonde. Clearly, she still underestimated the potential he saw in this group. To him, they not only could, but would make it across without issue. If he'd listened to her suggestions yesterday, they'd all be dead.

"What about flying?" A small voice asked from his spot on the ground. Cedric looked at the two of them. "Why don't we just fly over? And before you ask-" He said, raising his hands in anticipation, "I've got a broom with me."

"Ah oui, great idea Cedric!" The blonde false-cheered. "And 'ow are we going to fit three people on one sports broom, eh?" She smirked at the stricken look the Hufflepuff gave her. "Thought so."

"It is quite a good idea." Krum ventured, stroking his chin. "But it will be crowded, yet could be done with sticking charms, and it leaves us at the mercy of airborne predators. Well done, Cedric."

"Yes, well done at suggesting something that could get us killed."

"Oi! Calm it, you!" Diggory shouted, pointing a finger at her. "All we've gotten from you for the past ten minutes is bitch, moan, but I don't wanna! Well little miss French bitch, either you come up with a plan of your own or you SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

The echo bounced across the clearing, the words still clear in the dead silence that came afterwards. Cedric, clearly panicking at his own behaviour, Krum, staring at the Hufflepuff in astonishment, and Fleur, regarding the two of them with a considering gaze.

"Okay, my suggestion is zat we 'ave one of us mount ze broom, reach a spot on ze far side of ze forest and apparate back 'ere to side-along ze two of us." She said carefully, a small smile forming on her lips even as Cedric's blush turned his head purple.

Krum just whistled. "Wow. The Slytherins warned us not to anger the Hufflepuffs, but wow."

"I agree." the Veela said. "Eet ees distrurbingly close to ze feeling of being attacked by a duck... and losing."

Somehow, Cedric's blush got darker. Krum just laughed.

Rose panted as she broke through the tree-line at a dead run, sword out and dripping with black gunk. Tangling vine. Bubotuber bushes. Venomous tentacula. Strangling weeds. Man-sized venus fly-traps. Plants that could kill you and-the insects that lived off them. That hadn't been fun. She didn't dare draw her gun in the forest for risk of the noise attracting any more predators her way and the knife wasn't large enough to act as a machete, so sword it'd been.

She staggered as her head swam from some of the more vicious toxins she'd been both hit by and covered in. This wasn't good. Not good at all.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood to attention as her metabolism went into overdrive. She felt herself lurch and fall to the ground, her breath coming in short pants now. Her limbs burned and shook uncontrollably, sending spasms of pain ripping through her system.

Slowly, ever so slowly, she brought her right hand under a modicum of control, reducing the agonising contractions into a gradual twitch even as the left side of her body started to go numb. Reaching into the right hand pocket, she withdrew a syringe filled with what Hermione'd called 'just in case' potions, a battlefield concoction a dude named Lupin'd come up with during the last civil war these guys'd had. Unlike a bezoar (a stone lifted from a goat's stomach. Eww), this dealt with any wounds as well as poisons working through the victim's system. She didn't want to use it. She only had three of them. But she couldn't move or feel her legs anymore, which meant that it was either this or death.

She lifted her twitching right hand up to her mouth, plastic covering the pointy metal bit first. She bit on the cap, taking it off. She then put her thumb on the stopper at the other end, letting the twitch throw some of the precious liquid onto the grass-which started to smoke. Huh.

Then, she aimed the syringe towards the side of her torso, roughly where she thought her kidneys were, and jammed the needle into the soft tissue. Her hand twitched, making the needle move around as she slowly injected the concoction into somewhere she hoped would turn out to be useful even as she moaned in pain.

It worked. Fabulously. All her nerve endings suddenly caught fire as a mix of blood & bile started to pool in her mouth.

She tried screaming, but only managed a pained gargle as her internal juices went down the wrong way.

Blaise paled at the sight. "What in the world was that?"

"That, oh best beloved," Daphne intruded snidely. "Was what happens when you take on some of Sprout's nastier beasties without the right protections."

Malfoy smirked.

The first sign that something had just gone badly wrong came from Fleur. Her and Krum were sitting tight, both sets of eyes scanning the dense underbrush that ringed the clearing for any hidden threats. Krum was getting bored; Cedric had come and gone twice in the past hour, reporting in on any suitable landing sites he found during his airborne scouting sortie. Both he and Fleur had vetoed the first two and given a probable maybe on the last one he'd found, provided that he could find a trail close to that point they could use until nightfall. Now all they had to do was wait.

It was hard going. And boring as hell. The best he could do was a bare skim of the underbrush, what with the tall grass within the clearing probably concealing more immediate dangers for the two. Fleur was slated to go first and secure their landing site for them while Krum would cover their departure by setting the clearing on fire after leaving. The last thing he wanted was having to run from that strange... thing that had pursued them the day before. So here he was, trying to keep as much attention on the area around him as he could, knowing that he would have to be alone for around fifteen minutes when Ced came to pick up the French Veela, so he should probably get used to it.

A soft hiss drew his attention to the Veela. Fleur's eyes were wide even as her nostrils started flaring. This was not good. "Can you smell it yet, Viktor?"

"No" the stoic Bulgarian stated flatly, wand already twirling into an ever-ready duelling configuration Headmaster Karkaroff had taught him on the sly. "What am I looking for?"

"Death." The blonde half-human stated weakly. "The stench of Death."

"Okay." He said, opting to move his hands into a position that allowed for a fast-cast of the Avadas. A Kedavra or a Mortiis every one and a half seconds was not something to sneeze at. He looked around the glen, the cheerful greens surrounding them at odds with both the clouded sky and the suddenly silent forest behind the shrubs. It was as if the whole area started holding its breath. He sniffed at the air, looking for that sickly-sweet smell that spoke of silenced screams and forgotten graves. There! A bare hint of a scent, more mould than rot, but there nonetheless. "Smelled it. Direction?"

"Upwind from us." she stated, gulping. "Won't be long now."

"Agreed." He held his breath, listening for any tell-tale signs that whatever was coming their was about to attack. Instead, he heard-clanking? "Heard something. Sounds like metal."

Fleur nodded, having evidently heard the same. Clank. "There!" She shouted, pointing her wand at a dark patch of forest. Clank. Viktor spun around, facing the direction he'd heard the sound come from.

He and Fleur were back to back. Krum frowned. "Pincer. Coming from both sides." Clank-kank, came from both his left and right, the sound of metal on metal growing louder and more frequent by the minute. "Sorry, was mistaken. Coming from everywhere. Ideas on what they could be?"

"Non. No metal beasts I know of hunt like this."

"Too far north anyway. Metal animals die from exposure up here. What could it be?"

"Let's wait and see."

"Agreed."

Neither wasted the time they were afforded by the slow pace of the attack. Fleur dug up the earth around them with a twirl of her wand, giving the two magicals a sand bank to shield themselves with should any projectiles come their way. Krum transfigured the tall grass into rows of silver & wooden spikes, plucking them out of the ground and planting them into the pit the Delacour girl dug out. Fleur hit the sandbank with an overpowered compression charm whilst piling more and more dirt onto the shrinking mound, Turning the sandbank into a ring of dense stone. Krum hit the now-bare glade outside of their mini-fortress with layers of prank curses and sticking charms. Nothing caught out in the open should be able to move for a few seconds, more than enough for the stout bulgarian and the nimble avatar of nobility to cut them down.

The noise of metal hitting metal became a dull roar as the two worked frantically to prepare themselves against the unknown foe. Fleur sweated despite the cold weather. Krum's frown of concentration grew ever more intense as he worked, layering ever more devious and vicious magics one on top of the other even as he ran through and discarded a number of possible warding schemes that could help defend the pair without boxing them in against this unknown enemy. He just prayed that whatever it was didn't turn out to be a Shoggoth, a monster made of tarnished liquid metals that preyed on anything in its path, magic or not. He'd seen one once. He never wanted to see one again. He started working faster., vowing to kill himself if his fears turned out to be true.

Finally, a figure could be seen approaching them through the underbrush. It was... human? The darkened silhouette sure seemed to indicate this, even as the faint image resolved itself the closer the figure got. Fleur decided not to wait to find out what it was. "Reducto!" She yelled, the ball of spellfire streaking across the clearing at dizzying speeds. The spell collided with the target's head, resulting in the head disappearing with a loud SPLAT and the corpse of the humanoid falling to the ground "Ha! Va te faire foutre, sale fils de pute!"

"Nice shot." Krum said, whistling quietly. "Colourful language too."

"A lady is allowed 'er occasional foibles." She sniffed.

"Okay, me dumb Georgian. Me no know prissy French manners. Confringo!" BLAM "Me hit target with crude barbarian spell." He said, waving his hand towards the gap where a large tree used to stand.

"Reducto! You shall learn, paysan. Zey all do. Reducto!"

The spellfire stopped as the number of moving silhouettes dried up. The two combatants breathed a sigh of relief, using the seeming lull to gather themselves and pick out what other defences they should use, now that they had an idea what what they were fighting looked like. At least, that was the plan before the sound of rustling reached their ears.

A headless shadow stood up, followed by another. Followed by one skewered by a piece of wood as long as Viktor's arm. While they stared at something that simply should not be possible, the dozen attackers they'd felled had stood up and started hobbling their way into the clearing.

The first of the assailants stepped into the light. It looked like a human male, clad in anachronistic Roman armour, Gladius in the hand that hadn't been blown off by Krum's enthusiastic use of explosion curses. Only, where Krum expected to see bloody meat and bone sticking out of the spot where the thing's shoulder used to be, he saw a thin layer of skin burnt off, revealing a doll-like wooden joint sitting underneath it. The splintered wreckage was reforming in front of his eyes, the sap leaking out of the wound turning into new would centimetre by centimetre. Viktor's brath hitched. It couldn't be...

"Vickie!" Fleur said, her tone one of near panic. "What are zose... things?"

"They're wood puppets. Fire. Use fire. Incendio noctem!" Was all he said, his wand unleashing a stream of black fire that hit the three closest to his position. The wooden puppets shrieked with such a shrill intensity that Fleur fumbled her own flame curse, sending a stream of plasma at the point behind the targets she was aiming for. The forest lit up as the trees caught fire.

"Mon Dieu!" Fleur whispered as the flames drove away the darkness. Hundreds. There were hundreds of them, slack faces and eyeless sockets showing the wood behind the skin masks the puppets wore. The icy thrill of fear wound itself down her spine. They were all looking at her, their wooden gaze silently staring out at her even as they slowly shambled into the glade, their clothes sporting small fires from the nascent blaze they'd been walking through. The slack of the skin masks were as deceiving as the skin covering was. Beyond the expressionless, saggy flesh lay a malevolent intelligence her talents at evaluating emotions & intentions in others were sensing. Those faces hid the hate, such anger at these puny things that had dared trespass in its domain and would pay for that as others had before. Screw fear. She was sure that what she was feeling was terror. Pure, painful terror. "Incendio!"

Cedric knew that his friends & fellow contestants were in trouble the moment the smoke cloud started to rise from the green carpet zooming past below him. Not that he could do much but fret for the ten minutes it would take before he could get back and help them. He'd expected something like this to happen out here sooner or later really, but not at the point where he'd have to either take to the air or risk apparating onto a killing field.

The Weasley Twins could be real chatty when it came to the things those two had come across during their less-than-legal romps through Wizarding Britain's last magical wildlife preserve. There had been one outside of Cardiff, but that stretch of forest had been swallowed by muggle suburbia a couple of decades ago, which meant that all those magical creatures native to the Isles could only really live in peace in the Forbidden Forest, or the Dancing Forest as the locals called it. Which meant that every single nasty in the magical creatures books eventually wound up in this place. Though the forest was huge thanks to the space expansion ward, that didn't mean that the odds of not encountering something incredibly lethal were about as slim as a muggleborn's survival chances at a Death Eater revel.

And the stretch they were currently in was the worst part of said forest. The worst part, as a matter of fact. Apparently, prior to the nineteenth century, a bustling little community composed mainly of squibs and muggleborn had settled in the area, trying to eke out a living far from the oppressive government of the day. It'd been established for centuries, until one day, according to rumor, a wizard cut down a tree he wasn't meant to. The entire settlement vanished shortly thereafter, lost in the depths of the forest they were now tasked with traversing. Odds were that the things that were attacking them now were what'd caused the small village to die off without a trace.

He just didn't expect it on day two, though. Which was why he was now zooming at close to two hundred miles an hour towards an ominously orange-glowing cloud of smoke, his booted feet almost skipping across the forest canopy, he was flying that low. He just hoped that it wasn't Acromantula. There were always one or two of them that specialised in shooting websilk at airborne targets, trapping the prey and knocking them out of the sky in one go. Ending up as a spider's dinner after all this effort learning how to survive out in the Forest would be... embarrassing.

Probably not as embarrassing as being killed by Snow herself (and wasn't that as un-Hufflepuffish an attitude as Cedric had ever embraced, but it was a justified one), but still embarrassing.

Scratch the acromantulas, he just hoped that his friends hadn't run into the Girl Who Lived To Scare The Shit Out Of One Cedric Diggory. He'd seen her performances and, while she was nice enough in person, he'd heard enough to know that, if she thought they were a threat, she would gleefully butcher them all without a second thought. Even if he ended up as spider shit, at least those eight legged bastards left something that could be buried. He wasn't sure that Rose would be as mindful as they were when it came to that.

His quidditch instincts made him duck for some reason. He was almost thrown off his broom when a black blur sped through the sky where his face would have been otherwise, the high-pitched ululating wail making him pale and quake in his mud-covered boots.

Harpies. The Cheetah of the skies. Stun their prey with hypersonic shrieks, gut them on their way down and drag the splattered carcass back to their communal nesting grounds for munchies. It didn't help that they could easily outrun his broom in a straight line. There was only one thing he could do.

He pulled the broom's nose skywards, trusting the Nimbus's saddling charm to keep him from falling off during the vertical climb. Fast on the dive they may be, but Harpies were notoriously slow when it came to climbing higher and higher while the broomstick just kept going at the same speed. The world around him turned from a green-blue-grey horizon to a greyish-blackish blob that stretched as far as the eye could see. The air started getting rarer, his uniform heating up as the temperature got colder. He started panting, the sudden heat and lack of oxygen reminiscent of being trapped under the heavy wintertime bed-sheets Hogwarts provided. The adrenaline that the initial awareness of being under attack provided got ramped up as his breath started growing more laboured, his panicking body forcing his brain into a state of frantic panic it took all his rudimentary occlumency skills to defeat. He levelled out.

The grey cloud of smoke was the size of a small inkblot from where he now sat, his conscious mind evaluating what to do now even as his spine melted into his pants when it realised that the only thing between a live Cedric in the air and a flat pancake of the-meatbag-once-known-as-Diggory variety was a piece of wood with bristles at the end. Long practice helped with suppressing that instinct, even if the addition of things trying to claw your eyes out made it a tad harder than it should be.

He ducked on instinct once again, feeling a talon break the skin on his back as another black blur sped past with a screech. A pair of Blood-red wings unfurled from the creature that was part shapely female and part avian (and wouldn't Fleur be pissed at the similarities there), the short body supported by a wingspan twice as long as a human was tall. Well, at least he now knew where the magical paralysing scream came from. Even from all the way up here, those looked like an impressive set of lungs. Quite large, in fact. And those nipples were nice and perky, too. Wait...

The teenage boy shook himself, hoping to throw off the confusing messages of pain, panic & arousal wrestling for priority. Now was not the time to fantasise or, indeed, curl into a ball and start whimpering. His friends needed him. Besides, he doubted that that had been the only winged bitch hanging around using the clouds as cover. Time to bail. Now, how could he get out of this mess-the smoke cloud. He would aim for that.

His hind-brain quailed in fright as his broom pointed downwards at such a steep angle. For once, he agreed with his instincts. This was the most terrifying time he'd ever had on a broom. His stomach bottomed out as his broom started its journey earthwards, to the sound of furious shrieking from above.

It was a sight straight out of the works of Dante. Bosch would have painted it, had he been into painting famous last stands. Snow-covered trees could be seen in the distance. The vibrant green clearing had disappeared in a haze of fire and a puff of smoke, leaving behind a glade painted with the dull browns of baked earth, the smoky greys of ash and the oily black of burning greenwood. Blotches of hissing pus formed around the puppet husks, the magical resins fighting a losing battle against the enchanted flames coursing through the charcoal blocks littering the area. The fire coursed farther through the forest behind the blackened stumps of murdered trees, hungrily feeding off the mulch and twigs dropped by the hulking behemoths whose bark split open, leaking sap that screamed when the flames came for them.

The signs of the battle were spreading, filtering ever deeper back the way the contestants had come. In the centre of the inferno, two figures kept shooting off multi-coloured flame jets, desperately attempting to hold back the army shambling towards them.

Viktor was truly worried now. The defensive perimeter he and Fleur had established was working, but being eroded under the steady influx of puppets. The forest was on fire around them. The enemies were still coming. Everything was on fucking fire. He breathed deeply, the bubblehead charm flickering unsteadily as the oxygenation functions were taxed beyond their incanted limits. If he let the bubblehead drop, he'd be dead by asphyxiation in minutes. If he kept it up, he faced magical exhaustion within the next fifteen. So he had a twenty-minute timeframe in which to survive and come up with a solution. Fucking fun.

Fleur would probably hold out for a bit longer than he did, her more efficient casting skills compensating for her lower magical capabilities quite nicely. Krum, on the other hand, was a powerhouse, as the sheer number of confringos and incendia Maximii he'd thrown around could attest to. Huge magical reserves to draw from, sturdy tanking a specialty, just don't ask him to cast fiddly little charms with it. Unfortunately, the bubblehead charm was plenty fiddly and, therefore, more magically exhausting to maintain than even Fiendfyre was to him. Unfortunately, it was the only way he could survive for as long as he had in this version of Hell he'd landed into. Fifteen minutes left. Fleur whimpered behind him. Huh. Maybe he'd be the last to die after all.

Something touched his shoulder from behind. He looked behind at where he thought Fleur was, nodded once and then turned back to blasting puppets with sticky flame curses. He then did a double-take once his brain realised that it had, in fact, not been Fleur who'd tapped on his shoulder, but a weary, battered and coal-faced Diggory grinning tiredly at him. "Aren't you a sight for sore eyes." he said to the other boy, chuckling manically as relief set in. "What's Fleur doing?"

"Repairing my broom. Ran into some Harpies on the way back." The Hufflepuff replied as he silently tossed incendios down-range like they were going out of fashion. "She knew how. I didn't. We traded places."

"Harpies? They still up there?" Krum asked, worriedly scanning the sky for any sign of the hated birds. Georgia was infested with the damn things, so much so that you didn't dare go flying without back-up in that area.

"Lost them in the smoke column." Diggory grinned. "Don't think they appreciated crashing into the middle of the fire, though."

"Hah! Keep casting. Hey Delacour!" he shouted, drawing the Veela's attention. "Move it, will you? Otherwise we all die down here."

"Va te faire, salopard! I am working as fast as I can!"

"Then work faster." The burly Bulgarian said. "I am getting tired."

"It's okay, I am almost finished. Engorgio!"

"Huh? Why did you cast that, Fleur?" Cedric asked, shielding his face from the glare of the fire raging around them.

"Because there won't be enough space for all three of us otherwise."

"All three? But that broom's only meant for two people! And we agreed that we should apparate out!"

"Oh, don't worry Cedric. Both me and Fleur are too tired and leaving one of us behind would be condemning him or her to a painful death. This way, we don't need to leave you behind after all!" The cheeky reply came back.

"Oh ha, ha. Very funny." Was it Viktor, or did Cedric grow a sense of humour overnight? Krum wasn't sure at this point.

"C'est pret! Let's go!"

Rose silently picked her way across the forest floor, trying to balance setting a fast pace against being as silent as she possibly could doing so. She was also sweating bullets, her jacket long since banished to the confines of the hyperdimensional backpack lest the sweat-soaked garment actually ice over in this bitterly cold, frost-logged environment. That potion she'd taken earlier may have saved her life, but it hadn't been kind in the process.

It was one thing Rose had had herself rigorously prepare for when it came to the 'sacrifice zone'; temporal fluctuations caused an abrupt and often non-sensical formation of large pockets of weather. It was why the Forbidden Forest had gained the moniker before a Goblin column of refugees came streaming into the area during the second world war, killed off the vast majority of sapients that lived in it-and then died under mysterious circumstances. It danced to its own tune, setting the seasons with the frenzied chaos that you either incorporated into your own jig around the forest or got out of the way of. Okay, so it wasn't the best of metaphors, but it worked for the dead people, so Snow was willing to follow along with it.

Rose was nervous. And angry. And elated. All at the same time. Which made her all hot and bothered in a good way.

She was being hunted again. By something or things that were far more intelligent than any animal had any right to be.

The Demiguise were back.

They were better than her peers had ever aspired to, maybe even as good as she was. Now that the initial fear had worn off (thanks to actually being able to see the enemy) and thanks to having almost died at the hands of the flora, she could appreciate being able to at least enact her revenge upon the fauna. Her mouth tasted the blood and ash of a large fire raging somewhere close by, the familiar taste of Death in the air barely covered by the scent of the forest. Her brain pounded away inside her skull, nauseous residue from the potions and instincts screaming for the blood of these things that had dared try to equal her in a game she'd long since mastered. She honed in those instincts just as Sarge taught her to, but it was a near thing.

Her brilliant green eyes seemed to have acquired a distinct shade of sickly red as she used skills that had gone unused in months. The uniform white of the forest around her warped into hues of blue and mottled green, her own body an amalgam of greens, oranges and blood red now that she'd had to either discard her jacket or pass out from heat stroke, showing that she was radiating more heat into the environment than her body should be able to generate without killing her. She chanced a look behind her. There, moving stealthily from tree branch to tree branch, white, vaguely humanoid shapes stalked her in complete silence.

She chanced another look without her glasses-enhanced vision. Nothing.

Rose grimaced. If these were the ambush predators Miss Blue described, that meant that they would be attacking her the second they sensed weakness. They used infrared vision, probably related to hers somehow, but more developed if they could actually communicate using heat signatures. She couldn't shake them, the body heat and pheromones she gave off when getting excited prevented that. She would eventually tire out too much to continue, meaning that she would have to fight a pack of demiguise whilst exhausted if she tried. Running, as had been abundantly demonstrated before, didn't work. She frowned.

She had to outsneak these freaks. Outwitting prey was easy. Doing so with a predator was decidedly not as easy. She started stroking the shaft of her rifle in cogitation. What could she do? She took a chance when coming across a nearby clearing, unsheathing her sword whilst digging the map out of her trouser pocket. Weary of any further attacks, she scanned the tree line intently for any sign of movement in the upper reaches. Satisfied, she disengaged her magical vision and took a look at the piece of parchment. Fixing on her position, the map then proceeded to show her the most direct path forward. Yes, luck was on her side. That would do nicely.

If there is one thing that sets the wizarding world apart from any other culture on earth, it's that its history is a lot closer to the surface than it is in any other culture. It's hard to obscure and rewrite history when the memories of the people that lived it are still hanging around and talking to people centuries, sometimes even millenia, later. They live in a society where the major events in their history are potentially a flubbed dimensional alteration spell away, where they could potentially still be alive two centuries in the future and where illnesses of mind and body are, normally, incredibly easy to deal with.

It should therefore come as no surprise that Harpies were still feared centuries after their last brush with magical society. Their blood-red wings, shapely bodies, sharp talons and razor-sharp teeth had seen many a mage being torn apart by the fiends. Their speed, vicious ambush attacks from above and paralysing scream did nothing to help their image as a purely dark creature. Many a budding Dark Lord had made the mistake of trying to recruit them only to end up as fodder for their chicks. Even Herpo The Foul, their rumoured creator, had shunned away from bringing them into his beastly army.

But there were ways of fighting them.

Beneath the stormy clouds of Scotland, a broom raced across the sky, seemingly trapped between the Dark Orange thunderclouds above and the suddenly white landscape underneath. One figure was leaning into the broom, his back bleeding away liberally as he tried to coax the protesting enchantments into giving him more speed. He was exhausted, the constant adrenaline rush, the wound that wouldn't stop gushing his lifeblood all the way down his pants and the concentration that boosting the enchantments with his own magic required leaving him perilously close to the point of exhaustion. His companions were no better, already drained by the horrors their little stratagem had unwittingly unleashed upon them being dogpiled by the magic sustained blasts of kinetic impact spells and bone-breaker curses they now unleashed on their angry foes. They couldn't communicate between each other, the noise-cancelling spell, while vital, curtailing any orders, warnings or tactical advice they could possibly give the others. They just had to trust one another. And hope it'd be enough.

Krum smiled as yet another pile of red feathers and dying female humanoid disappeared beneath the forest canopy. Fleur unleashed an air barrier above his head, causing the diving Harpy to run into a solid wall and splatter the three of them with blood & viscera. Cedric kept up the frantic search for a new landing spot, wiping the ash & grime raining from the sky now off his prized lucky goggles. There! He elbowed Fleur in the ribs, silently screaming in pain as she instinctively slapped him in the back for his pretense and pointed at something closing fast. A church spire. A pat on the back was the only acknowledgement he could receive. He still wished he could have heard her say 'well done'. Being told that by a Veela was very uplifting after all. It was a guy thing.

So they'd found the kitchens. Auror Captain Andrews frowned, having finally caught up with the group just as they walked through into what the crude map on his map identified as a pantry, what would he do now?

Well, he was a Gryffindor, even after all this time. He stepped through the door and found a wand sticking into his lower back. Just as planned.

"You've been following us for a while now." Hermione Jane Granger, suspected Dark Witch and scary-sounding enough to be confused for one except for the whole him not being dead yet thing, whispered in his ear. He stilled, careful not to make any sudden movements as the other three girls appeared from behind a table at the far end of the room. "What I'd like to know is why."

"Well, a few things. First, you forgot your gear in your mad dash to escape." He said, tugging at the backpack slung across his shoulder. "Second, to actually brief you on why you are here. And third, to assure you that we mean you no harm."

"Right. As if I'd believe that." Granger stated. "Cho, Abbot, come and pat him down please-no sudden movements or you're dead, by the way. Gabrielle, Cherie, va te cacher quelque part pour le moment, d'accord?" The captain looked on as a small, blonde-haired chit nodded and took off for the far side of the room.

"I figured that." Andrews stated as he shifted around. "My wand's in a wrist holster on my left arm, by the way."

"And your backup? Where is it?" The girl hissed, digging the wand into his lower back.

"Right boot… You know, I can't wait for you to meet with Moody. Something tells me you'll get along like a house on fire."

The witch sighed. "Why does everyone say that?"

Andrews shrugged. "I like Vimes. The character really speaks to me, you know."

"I'm sure he does. Make sure to check his inner leg too, Hannah." Granger stated, snorting at the look the Abbot girl gave her (and him, but mainly her) at the order. "And no, you cannot molest him. Technically, he's the enemy unless he comes up with a damn good explanation."

"Okay, so my name is Johnathan Andrews, I'm an Auror captain currently assigned to guard the hostages for the tri-wizard tournament-which is you, by the way-and also tasked with ensuring your well-being until the designated participants get here."

"You've done a fine job of it so far 'Captain'." Chang remarked snidely as she extracted the second back-up wand from his inner trouser pocket.

"What can I say? I'm just gifted that way." The captain shrugged.

"Alright, that's about it, I think." Hermione stated as the two witches finished patting the Auror down a second time. "Go sit at that table-no sudden moves, mind-and talk. Cho, cover him while I inventory my gear please."

Andrews sighed. It was going to be a long day. Then again, he was technically with the hostages, which could be considered progress. Yippee.

Rose trudged on under a burning sky, the snow of ash and the flickering orange-red sky telling her that it wasn't just the burning rays of the sun that were lighting up the way for her. She sped up slightly. Twilight was fast approaching, and if the Demiguise were ever going to make their move, it would be after sundown.

The bastards hadn't let up. They'd been trailing her for hours, one team relieving another relieving another. She knew that she couldn't really shake them, but that hadn't stopped her from trying. She'd gone off the path, climbed steep mountainous hills and crossed a number of iced-over rivers in her quest to escape the invisible enemies trailing her. Always, there would be another team waiting to trail her wherever she emerged. She felt cheated. The wand had never mentioned that they could do that. I didn't know. The hoarse whisper came to her. This is new. Unexpected. Bad. She snorted. Bad was an understatement.

She'd put on a heavy winter coat once the situation settled, the heat that came from fear and excitement fading with the acquisition of a plan. That, combined with her cross-country trek and copious short-cutting through dense underbrush and over tricky hillsides had left her feeling the strain of her day-long walk. She was sweating and, without the heat, that sweat eventually turned ice-cold, making her irritable and drowsy. And the fucking weather just got worse with that fucking firestorm raging somewhere close by.

She was close, she knew it. But she was also cutting it far closer than she had any right to. She wasn't Captain Panem after all, she needed to rest, and soon, damn the consequences.

Which is when she saw the outline of a church... and a broomstick she'd seen Cedric practice with sometimes. They'd had a broomstick with 'em all this time. She could have stayed with them and hitched a ride. It just wasn't fucking fair.

"Are you sure about this?"

The church wasn't nearly as grand an affair as it had appeared to the exhausted trio's eyes. The outside had looked much the same as when the town had been abandoned, its all wooden frame standing as impassive and permanent a statement to the ingenuity of medieval craftsmen as the day it had been built. The inside, on the other hand, was a different story. Where once lush tapestries had dominated the ceiling, depicting whatever sacred events the local religion had worshipped, now played host to fraying bits of cloth held up by old spiderwebs. The inner wall, while still carved out of stone, now had ice crystals growing over centimetres-thick moss, their combined appearance one of a ruined temple than the inside of a still-standing structure. The pews, not benefiting from the building's enchantments, had rotted away to piles of meal covering the stone flags.

And, where an altar of obsidian still stood in defiance to the entropy around it, three figures could be seen crouching over a hole in the floor.

All were dirty, bloodied and weary from their day. None of them could truly walk at that point anymore, conjuring mats and sleeping bags out of the rusting hulks of metal artifacts strewn around the focal point of the cult's worship, that black slab of volcanic glass that, while majestic, did nothing to assuage the lingering paranoia of being attacked.

And yet... there was optimism there as the blonde woman looked at the burly man who'd just finished carving a set of runes into the stone hidden beneath a loose flagstone.

"Yes. Remember the instances where Runes & Arithmancy overlap? There's a connection in there somewhere." Krum said excitedly.

"I know. It's... a nice little tid-bit of magic I learned in third year." Cedric rattled out, a pale & exhausted face shivering through the fever his infected back had acquired.

"Can it. It's not just a tid-bit that we're looking at here. This could mark a new step in the field of magical mathematics." The blonde said as she finished examining the markings.

"Uh-huh. Yes, I am sure that it's great and all, but so what? The connection is obvious."

"I agree with Cedric. Look, I know that the runes look incredibly simple from an Arithmancers' point of view, but why is this such a revolutionary idea? It's nothing new, you know."

"It's not the runes aspect that I'm thinking about here. You know how difficult it is to craft spells and make them work as intended, right?"

"Uh-huh."

"Well, that's because the vast majority of the spell does not even touch upon the spell itself. In fact, spells generally follow the eighty-twenty rule."

"Eighty-what now?"

"The eighty-twenty rule. Twenty percent of whatever you're looking at tends to be as valuable as the remaining eighty percent. In the case of spells, roughly eighty percent of the spell is designed to stabilise and contain the remaining twenty percent." Cedric interjected.

"But why?"

"Well, mostly because that's what's needed to stop the spell from backfiring on its caster. Strip all the containment, direction and security magic off the spell itself and you're generally left with a big ole blast of energy waiting to happen."

"Okay. So what you're saying is that, without those safety spells, you just get a big boom."

"Uhh, not quite. How do I say this, huh... you still get the advertised effects, but it hits everything within range rather than what you're aiming for. Say, for example, that you did this to a colouring charm. So you take the charm to make something look hot pink, say, strip it of all its protections and then cast it. What happens?"

"It blows up, according to you."

"Right. Yes it does. But it still turns things pink. Everything hit by the magical blast turns pink, in fact. Including you. And because you probably cast the charm with the same 'strength' as a normal one, you also happened to make it four to five times stronger in the process. Meaning that you turned your entire room hot pink rather than whatever it was you were aiming for." Krum resumed.

"Ah, I get you now. That sounds superb."

"Except it isn't. Imagine doing something like that with a reducto. Or a severing charm. You'd tear everything within range, including yourself, to shreds."

"Ah. Right. But what does this have to do with Runes?"

"Runes don't have these security features included. And yet, these runes work perfectly."

"What?"

"That was my reaction too! When I analysed that rune stone's arithmantic output, all I got was the pure, underlying Block Transfer equation for the spell rather than the equation plus the massive jumble of security junk functions I was expecting. And, yet, it still works!"

Cedric looked closer at the stone now. "Mithril." He breathed. "I've never seen so much of it. A warding stone's worth of that stuff here…"

"And how does that help us now?"

"Well, thanks to the wards that I've carved into the stone, we still had enough space left to carve two spells into the stone. There's a wide-area lumos and a standard heating charm applied to it now."

"Ah, great. Nice to know we won't freeze to death. So what are we waiting for?"

"Well, there's a small chance it might, uh, explode."

"How small a chance?"

"Single digit percentile at worst. I'm fairly certain it won't blow up in our face when we activate the stone, but we shouldn't try turning it off and on again."

"Right. Hit it."

And so Krum did, activating the warding stone with a tap of his wand. "Shit."

"What?" Fleur asked.

"The stone only has enough power to power the spells. The wards themselves are long gone." He drooped. "Magic has changed too much since those days. They will never work now."

"Well, at least we got something out of it." Cedric reassured the other man. "Nothing to it but to ward a small area for ourselves."

"Again? We have to cast more magic?" the blonde girl cried out in frustration. "And we just wasted an hour getting this thing to work. Putain!"

Cedric dug himself deeper into his conjured sleeping bag. He was still waiting for the healing potion to kick in. He really wasn't in either the right shape or the right mood to calm the furious Veela.

A profound silence enveloped the trio as they mentally prepared themselves to further tax their depleted magical focus. All four contestants were outstanding in their own right, even if Rose's expertise seemed to be murder. The amount of magic they'd performed on that day would have had most wizards on their knees. And now they were about to try and cast protection wards around the church without losing either their magic or their life. They needed a miracle.

Unfortunately, their prayers were answered.

A large bang echoed through the church, startling the group into panic mode. What was it now? Would they have to fight a troll, a giant? They looked over the top of the altar, the tip of their wands glowing with reluctant anticipation of yet another fight. What they saw was their fellow contestant, frantically sealing the door behind her and casting spells at the walls and ceiling. "What the fuck do you idiots think you're doing?" The girl screamed at them. "This whole building just lit up like a fucking christmas tree! Are you trying to get yourselves killed? An-oh wait. Why do you all look like shit? Did something happen?"

"Y-you could say that." Great. Just fucking great. First the Puppets, then the Harpies, now her. Cedric was starting to severely doubt that he'd see the sun rise tomorrow. "What about you?"

"Demiguise." The word hung in the air as the horrified trio realised just why the Snow Queen looked like she'd run into a monster. She hadn't just run into one, it seemed. "They're after me. And, since you were so fucking nice to turn the only decent shelter in this shit-hole into a beacon, they're now after all of us! And you, badger-boy!" She said, raising a familiar-looking broom up in the air. "Why the fuck would you leave a potential escape vehicle just lying in the fucking street?"

"Wait, wait. Back up there. Demiguise?"

"Yeah, a pack of them. Maybe even the whole goddamned tribe."

"Oh great." Krum's frown grew markedly. "And because they hunt using heat signatures, then they'll be heading right here."

"Yeah."

"How long?"

"Five minutes."

"... On est foutus."

"Not quite." Rose stated grimly, shrugging off her bag. "See, I've got a plan."

They'd done the best they could on such short notice. Cedric, having gotten some firearms instruction on the bushy-haired friend of Rose's insistence, was handed the pistol she'd carried. Fleur took the sword ("A monody bone-sword! Aren't they extinct" "Probably are now.") and Krum just glowered at Rose when she tried to hand off the combat knife to him.

Rose, on the other hand, headed straight for the altar, waving her strange-looking wand in order to turn it sideways. She then laid her rifle against the side of the dais and went digging in her backpack.

"Right. So Cedric, I am going to open the doors while Krum and Fleur conjure the sticky glowing powder. You are to fire at anything coming through that door. Once your pistol is empty, you are to retreat to my side in order to reload. The rest of you are to stand behind me and cast spells the second Cedric's clear. Nobody crosses my field of fire until I say so. Understood?" She said, retrieving two sturdy-looking boxes out of her bag's endless recesses.

He just nodded at the girl. She seemed to know what she was doing, having taken the five minutes to re-arrange debris and give the group a clear field of fire. Krum had repeated his prank charm trick while Fleur had evanesco'ed as much of the garbage as she could. The lumos spell was hanging in mid-air, having been moved by Cedric into the centre of the church. In the charmlight, the trio took a moment to admire the scintillating glass windows that showed pictures of serenity high above the future killing field, filling their hearts with beauty even as they mentally prepared themselves for another slaughter. Rose, on the other hand, spent her time fiddling with a strange-looking metallic goo-gaw before attaching one of the boxes to the thing's underside. She grinned as she did so. Cedric didn't ask.

Finally, thumps started echoing against the church door. Their only exit was cut off, no backing out now. The demiguise would never have tried this if it had just been Rose they were gunning for. But the prize of four magical humans rather than just the one they'd anticipated was too juicy a kill to pass up on.

Rose racked the slide on the machine gun, pulling back the bolt and shoving it into place with a practiced hand. She was grinning as she put herself into position, the heavy weapon resting on top of her bag with the butt nestled in a comfy position against her shoulder. She dug out her gnarled & ancient-looking wand, pointed it at the door and whispered alohomara.

The rusted lock holding the door in place shattered under the Demiguise's fierce strength, the clang of metal on stone loud enough to give both groups pause. The door opened. Cedric aimed his pistol. Rose looked down the iron sights and activated her IR vision. Point blank range. Just as she liked it.

A hoarse shout in an unrecognisable language came from the two spell-casters, the conjured cloud of glowing dust blasting the first wave of invisible monsters back a step.

Cedric saw a glowing figure rush through the opening, stumbling on some unseen jinx of Krum's. Snap. He missed. Seven rounds left. He saw another figure approaching more cautiously and took the time to aim. It was hideous. Few wizards ever truly saw a Demiguise with its fur on, the required revelo variant far too complex and draining to ever allow a normal wizard to cast it at the beast if it's moving. Rose didn't move an inch.

Its body was that of a large, barrel-chested Ape, the fur covered in glowing dust wriggling around all over its body. Its feet were more like elongated hands than what Ced saw with his socks off, with large tufts of fur lodged between the toes. Its face was feral, two unseen eyes leaving an empty space through which you could see the dust on the other side of its head. The snout looked like a squashed birthday cake, its one nostril giving the whole thing the appearance of a cancerous anus. The thing's teeth weren't teeth from what Cedric could see. They looked more like gills he'd see when gutting a fish. He took all that in in the second he used to aim. It would stay with him for the rest of his life. Snap. He hit it in the snout, dead centre. Its head snapped backwards, the bluish ichor that the thing had for blood and a black lump of stuff spraying out the back of its head. A loud roar went up from the dark gloom of the snow-covered town. "Here they come!" Rose cried out, a mad cackle escaping the girl's mouth. And she was right. They were coming.

Rose aimed carefully, the weapon in her hands looking deadlier and deadlier as the seconds crawled by and the trio launched spell after spell, bullet after bullet.

Then Rose pulled the trigger. And the gun roared.

The three mages paused in shock as the weapon raked the entrance once, twice, three times. In less than a second, the weapon in Rose's hands had turned the entranceway into a mix of blood, guts and soggy fur before the girl re-centred her sights on the entranceway once more, the smirk twisting into a feral snarl as the machine gun took on the appearance of a metallic dragon. The smell of Cordite filled the air along with the moans of the not-so-dead monsters littering the front of the church. "Three second cool-down!" Rose shouted to them. "Keep casting!"

The trio nodded, their ears ringing with the report from the gun, and laid into the entrance with a series of blasting curses, splattering the first row of rotten pews with yet more blood and bits of Demiguise and keeping the others from entering.

"Cease fire!" Rose shouted. She then aimed at the entranceway and let loose again, emptying the box of ammunition into the darkening courtyard beyond. She smirked in satisfaction as nothing else came through the door. "Right. That should keep 'em out for now. Ced, Fleur, keep lookout. Viktor, help me pack this bad boy away." The trio nodded, Cedric and Fleur casting layered revelio charms as Rose fussed with the weapon whilst giving Krum a crash course in how to take care of a gun.

In the silence, the groaning coming from the ceiling was quite loud. At least, loud enough for Rose to hear as she finished dumping the box in the bag. "Upper floors!" She shouted as she dove for her bolt-action, working the bolt as she ran. "Concentrate on the upper floor! Ced, you're with me-if they're coming from up there, it's possible that they'll also try from the front again!"

She was right. More demiguise poured through the front entrance as the other two finished blasting the upper level to rubble. At the same time, Cedric was frantically firing into the horde of incoming monsters, Rose firing almost as fast as he was despite the size of her weapon. Fleur loosened the Bone sword strapped around her hip while Krum fingered his wand grimly. A strange lassitude overcame the Hufflepuff champion. Nobody'd ever survived a Demiguise attack this strong. Hell, it'd been centuries since someone managed to kill just one of them. He was sure these creatures wouldn't let this slide. He kept firing.

Fleur and Krum backed up their two friends, casting spells at the monsters the two in front of them missed. Snap Snap Click! was heard from Ced's side, his already pallid face turning a deathly shade of white. "Rose! I'm out!" The girl didn't stop reloading her gun, merely nodding while pulling the bolt back to show she'd heard before firing once more. Crack! "Do you have more ammo to give?"

Crack! "Not right now!" Crack! "Shut up and start casting!"

"Okay!" Cedric said over the din of the dead and dying beasts littering the doorway, hitting stones and walls close to the beasts with reductos while Fleur shot fireballs at the creatures and Krum just cast as many blasting curses as he could.

Meanwhile, Rose was in a fugue state. Fire, five rounds, pull bolt back, push bolt forward, aim, fire, four rounds, push bolt- ran through her mind over and over again. These weren't monsters she was firing at anymore. It was the blonde stick-lady shouting at her for not doing the dishes right. Fire. The blonde pig that relentlessly hit her whenever others weren't watching. Fire. The Fat Man. Fire. Cato. Fire. All her enemies, memories come back to haunt her, taunt her and kill her. No ammo left. No time to dig any out of the pack. Fix bayonets. Kill them. Gut them. Prove to them you are not scared. Prove to them that you are not a slave, that you will not cower and beg for your life. Kill them! Prove them wrong! Show them how a warrior dies! Kill!

The first notion that the others had that something was about to change was a strangled scream coming from Rose. She rose up, her rifle with a blade attached to the end of it pointing at one of the approaching monsters. With a cry of incoherent rage, the 14-year-old jumped at the massive Demiguise, a roar of "Charge!" barely audible underneath the bellow of one that seeks murder.

Fleur took that as her cue, switching her wand to her non-dominant hand and drawing Rose's bone sword with one quick movement, her avian features breaking through thanks to the fatigue and anger at these things that wanted to eat them. Krum and Cedric looked at each other, nodded wearily and took the flanks, facing the dozen glowing beasts with the wary acceptance that all would be over, one way or another, quite soon.

While the enchanted flames roared to either side of her, Rose gutted, punched, bit and smacked the butt of her rifle into the main mass of creatures, gaining a myriad of nicks, gashes and open wounds for her trouble. She screamed in rage at the host even as the terrifying appearance of a transformed Veela rained fire and sword down on their beleaguered foe.

The beasts had lost many of their number that day. Too many fathers, sons, mothers and daughters had braved the hall, looking for the easy kill of a bunch of exhausted mages. Instead, they found spears that spewed fire and death. They found a floor that would eat your feet while a flame would engulf you. And now, they found the enraged monster with black hair slick with their blood tearing at them with a spear of her own. They saw a bird-like creature screaming at them while tearing their throats out and setting them on fire. The saw two tired mages who yet held their ground against the horde. And they broke. And fled. It would be the last any human ever saw of the demiguise colony.

They would never forget this day.

As the last of the glowing figures receded into the distance, Fleur limped towards the door. She hadn't come out of the battle unscathed, none of them had. But for her, transformation was not just a figurative pain. The rage and anger full transformation brought on was due to the sheer agony of having bones and limbs reform almost instantaneously, the pain coming gradually to the fore over time in order to fuel whatever need for which she transformed. But she would pay for it tonight. Oh yes, she would pay. Yet, right now, the high of survival worked in her favour. She limped to the doors, deliberately not looking down and not listening to the squelch underfoot lest she cap the night off with a nice vomiting session. The doors, battered and broken as they were, still shut with a BANG. A quick coloportus later and she was drifting back towards where the others lay around the altar, the blood, viscera and spent shell-casings surrounding them deliberately ignored in favour of the glorious bedding they now lay down upon. Krum was just staring at the ceiling. Cedric, ever helpful, passed a bottle of some potion or other to Fleur. She looked down at herself. Her travelling robes were now just so much tattered rags. She was covered head to toe in Demiguise blood, Veela blood, Harpy blood, mud, ash, water, grime and a dozen other unnameable and probably magically resistant substances she would have to wash off the old-fashioned way. Just like Cedric. Just like Krum. She felt horrible. Unclean. Dirty.

And Rose... back when the fight had finished, the three of them had thought her dead. There was simply no way someone could survive with those wounds on her. And yet here she was, the worst-looking of them all, a dozen potions dribbling out of her mouth along the blackish red ridges her blood had taken after she'd bitten her tongue in battle. Her uniform, which had been brand new back when she'd seen them last, was now little more than a bra and tattered pants. The black & blue bruising indicated that she had broken her left shoulder somehow. There were cuts everywhere, to the point where it looked like someone had done a piss-poor job trying to flay the girl alive, some stab wounds still carried the bony, serrated edge of the spear in them and Fleur was pretty sure that she could see Rose's teeth through the hole in her right cheek. But, despite all this, the girl was grinning. Gleefully. The Veela felt a sense of horror well up in her. How can someone surrounded by all this... Grin?

The girl just looked up at her, glowing green eyes sparking in recognition of Fleur's emotions and just said two words; "We won."

And then she stood up. The day was not over yet. She still had a mountain to climb. Dimly, the group noted the way her wounds seemingly healed themselves as she limped to her backpack.

Hermione looked up in worry. "Gabrielle?"

A/N: And there you have it. Not all of day two, but the rest can be worked into day three anyway, so no dramas. I hope you liked it. After this, it gets better-as in worse, tenser, more dramatic and a whole lot more horrifying. Here's hoping you'll enjoy it.