The arena had seemingly been built overnight. In the Valley outside of Hogwarts grounds proper, past the newly-built village for international guests from the gates, a tall row of stands had been raised, tiers of seats, row after row after row, the majority of the construction in wood with accents in painted ceramic. Or, "arena" perhaps wasn't the right word — there was only a single long row of stacked seats facing a seemingly innocuous patch of forest, which would presumably be the field for the Task. Normally duels were held in flat, open space, but Dorea guessed they'd decided a varied environment would make the event more interesting.
Leaving the Castle, Dorea had immediately spotted the stands from the main doors, a rectangular blot on the edge of the cleared space around Hogsmeade — which was odd, because it definitely hadn't been there yesterday. They must have done the construction under attention-diverting wards, though Dorea couldn't guess why they'd bothered. Susan had said that the details the Champions had been given were limited, they wouldn't get a complete explanation of what the Task would entail until just beforehand. Maybe the stands had been built in secret so the Champions wouldn't be able to tell where the Task would be taking place, so they couldn't strategise ahead of time?
Classes had been cancelled for the day of the Task, so the morning dawned slow and lazy, undercut with a tense anticipation. They'd been told breakfast wouldn't be starting until nine this morning, but Dorea had still woken up at her usual time, so she went up to the common room to wait it out. When she got there, she wasn't entirely surprised to find that most of her year were already up too — she'd guess Liz's friends, at least, had had about as much trouble sleeping as Dorea had. (They might be on the outs these days, but Dorea still didn't like watching Liz fight, couldn't help worrying.) The voices around them were sharp and loud with excitement, but Dorea's group were quieter, nervous, their conversation about pretty much anything but the upcoming event.
Oddly, Draco was audibly anxious — and doing a terrible job of hiding it, he was trying to act normal but his voice kept cracking (it was very funny) — but Dorea guessed she shouldn't be surprised. Liz and Draco did spend a lot of time together these days, with the quidditch team, and Draco did attend every single session of the duelling club. Sometimes she even spotted them hanging out in the library, most often with Vince and Greg (who actually weren't that bad, once you got to know them), and Millie and Susan and a couple of the Hufflepuffs, and often even Hermione and Lily. Which was a bloody strange group, Dorea had hid around a corner and watched them for a while once because, just, what the hell, right? Granted, Draco wasn't nearly as bad as he had been back in first year, but still.
Dorea was pretty sure Liz and Draco were actually friends now — which was kind of funny, because she was willing to bet Liz hadn't even noticed.
A bit before nine, Professor Sinistra ducked her head in and said that breakfast was on, so pretty much the entire house went up at once, the dimly-lit underground corridors ringing with hundreds of footsteps and chattering voices. Word must have been sent to the different common rooms all at once — Slytherin arrived in the Great Hall at more or less the same time as Hufflepuff, they hadn't quite all found their way to their seats yet when Beauxbatons and Durmstrang showed up, Gryffindor and Ravenclaw not arriving until some minutes later. The rooms the foreign students had been given were in the lower levels of the east wing, further away than the first underground level but not nearly as far of a walk as up to the towers, they had to wait for the Gryffindors and Ravenclaws before breakfast actually appeared on the tables.
Pretty much their whole study group gathered at one of the Hufflepuff tables, the only notable face that was missing was Liz herself. Before each Task, the Champions would be removed from the student population to wait out the clock in a secret, protected place — if a Champion was sabotaged somehow and prevented from participating in a Task at all, the Goblet wouldn't usually punish them for it, but better safe than sorry. Snape had come to find Liz shortly after dinner on Thursday evening, and she hadn't been seen since. Though, that itself wasn't unusual, Liz had been around rather less often over the last couple weeks. Dorea had assumed she was just taking more mental health days — and she was doing that too — hadn't learned until Liz showed up at Potions one day after not being in Transfiguration that she was exploiting Champions being excused from classes and exams to study what she liked on her own time. Things that would be useful for the Tasks, yes — supposedly Sirius had even started coming over to give her more duelling lessons — but also other subjects, though she was rather cagey about what she was studying exactly. Not seeing her at all for a whole day and a half would be somewhat unusual, but Liz not being around sometimes was just normal these days.
This time, they were also joined by the rest of Liz's duelling team — the only one Dorea really knew at all was Katie Bell, she hung around sometimes these days — all of them already dressed for the Task in duelling gear, trousers and jackets and boots and arm pads. (The latter were enchanted for protection, but not very thoroughly, mostly just to brace themselves against falls.) Chelsea Andrews and Oz Bagshot (both fifth-year Hufflepuffs) were actually wearing the team's uniform, but the others had other duelling clothes, Susan and Prince's actually looking rather nice. Their friends had also joined them, including the entirety of the Gryffindor quidditch team (the Weasley Twins being their usual obnoxious selves), altogether their group taking up practically the whole table. But, like, half of them were Hufflepuffs, and it wasn't like they were supposed to stay in their house tables anyway, the Hufflepuffs in particular prone to spreading out all over the place, so nobody complained about it.
Dorea noticed there were clumps of people at the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons tables who were also set up in duelling gear — though the Beauxbatons group seemed too small, joined by a collection of people wearing similar-looking plain dresses. Very plain, actually, little more than formless shifts, and there were even a couple boys wearing them, which was odd, but okay. She wasn't the only one to notice, when the topic came up Susan explained that the transformation veela and lilin did was less like animagi and more like wilderfolk — namely, their clothes didn't come with them. It was possible to enchant things like wand holsters to readjust to the changing size of a limb — they were probably wearing theirs around their thighs, because going over a wing was a bit much — and you could modify clothing to come through it, it just required lining all the hems with fibres made from the wearer's hair or fur or something. Cat and dog wilderfolk and the like did that all the time — Susan wasn't sure how you'd do it with feathers, but presumably they knew what they were doing. The ones in the shifts must be planning to use their transformed shape in the Task, their clothing so simple because the required modifications could get very tedious to do on anything too involved.
Right. That was all sort of strange — especially after it occurred to Dorea that they must all be wearing no underclothes whatsoever, just that one layer and nothing else — but it wasn't really her business.
The Great Hall was rather noisier than usual, ringing with the excited chatter of the students, the tense energy on the air thick enough it was making Dorea a little jumpy. Dorea had long ago finished eating, sipping at a cup of juice, when the Headmaster stood up. They would be leaving in another ten, fifteen minutes or so, but those participating in the event would be going ahead of the crowd — everyone go ahead and follow Liepiņš down to the arena, and meet up with your Champions. There was a smattering of goodbyes and good lucks from their table as the duelling team all got up, Susan and Katie mobbed in brief group hugs (by the Hufflepuffs in their study group and the Gryffindor quidditch team respectively), Bagshot was pulled into a lengthy snog by who Dorea assumed was his girlfriend (vaguely familiar by sight, but she couldn't think of her name), dragging on and on, drawing whistles and laughter from the crowd. Bagshot was rather red-faced by the time he was released, his teammates descending on him with a storm of teasing, joking back and forth and shoving at each other as they made toward the doors out.
That seemed like it would be terribly embarrassing to Dorea but, well, Hufflepuffs.
Not long after that, it was time for the rest of them to leave. It was bloody chaos, practically the whole room standing at once and swarming for the doors, took ages to cram their way through the Entrance Hall and out onto the grounds. Naturally, since this was Scotland in mid-November, it was a cold, grey, dreary day. It'd actually snowed last night, but it was warm enough that it'd melted not long after sunrise — which was typical, they did see a fair bit of snow in Hogsmeade Valley (last year it'd snowed in May) but it rarely actually stayed on the ground for very long, too mild to accumulate very much. Not that it was really that warm, Dorea would be surprised if they got as high as ten degrees the whole day. The sky was hidden under a layer of grey clouds, relatively little wind but the air thick and damp, Dorea felt a few prickles of raindrops before she'd hardly even left the steps. It didn't look like it was going to rain hard, most likely, but it would probably sprinkle on and off all day — pretty typical for November, really. The Hogwarts students had all known what to expect, and had dressed accordingly, but it didn't take very long before some of the Beauxbatons students looked completely miserable. They must all know warming charms, but those didn't really help with the wind, or the rain...
Since shuffling them all into carriages and down to the stands would take forever — also, they definitely didn't have enough carriages for everyone — they walked the whole way instead. Dorea wasn't sure how far it was, maybe a couple kilometres? The walk downhill from the cliff edge, along the gently curving dirt path to the gate, took maybe ten minutes just by itself. It was maybe another ten, fifteen minutes from there to the village, but they didn't go that way, taking a turn off on a path that hadn't been here a year ago, leading down to the international village.
Instead of just tacking it on to the edge of Hogsmeade, they'd put the new village on the other side of the train station, presumably so they didn't get in each other's way during construction and the big events coming up. The place had been built mostly all at once on very short notice, all the buildings relatively simple, blocky constructions, all wood and slate in the same style, almost even identical, with very little decoration...though not none, it was clear people had made little extra touches here and there, either the builders or the people occupying them at the moment. From here, Dorea could see there was a square in the middle, ringed by public buildings — she spotted what was definitely a grocer's, and that was maybe a pub or something — houses spread out in neat, orderly rows around it. There were individual houses yes, most modest single-storey things but a few larger, maybe enough space between them to put little gardens for vegetables and herbs and the like, but there were also terraces here and there, which was unusual for magical Britain, and even what were definitely blocks of flats in a few places. Meaning this little addition to the Valley was much denser than Hogsmeade itself, even while covering a smaller footprint (at least for now) it could probably triple the population of the Valley all in one go — it was a good thing the Ministry had decided to sell the properties off after the Tournament was over, then, it was hard enough for people to find proper housing in this country.
They didn't actually go through the village, Báinfhéigh, Aritsa, and Barthe at the head of the group leading them in a little loop around. Passing by, there were more people in the streets than Dorea would expect, packed in the walkways and in the square chatting. After the group of students passed, glancing over her shoulder, Dorea saw that the residents had started to move, following down the path toward the arena. She guessed they'd been told to let the students go first, the organisers trying to fill the stands in something resembling reasonable order.
Another good five minutes of walking after the edge of the village — the cleared space around Hogsmeade was far larger than it truly needed to be, they used to have farms and stuff around here — they were finally coming up behind the stands. There were big signs pinned up on the struts, pointing down at the various staircases, the directions in a mix of English, French, and presumably whatever they spoke at Durmstrang. (It looked vaguely Scandinavian to Dorea, so that seemed a good guess.) There were special seats reserved for officials (including high-ranking Ministry people and all the Wizengamot families) and Order of Merlin members, which wasn't really a surprise. The Champions' families were also apparently supposed to go that way. Toward the ends on either side were the sections for guests, and more toward the middle — surrounding the officials' seats, separating them from the guests — was where they'd put the students. An amplified voice (Báinfhéigh's, probably) said they weren't organised by house or school or anything, they could sit wherever they liked, so they just went ahead and did that.
As they approached, the space ahead of them slowly eaten away as the front of the crowd started filtering in, there was a little debate in her group about where they should sit. Some of them thought it was a good idea to be toward the front, closer to the action, but others argued that as far back as possible was better. Unless they'd completely cleared the section of the forest the event was taking place in, there'd be a lot of underbrush and trees and stuff, the higher they were the more likely it was they'd be able to find an angle where they'd actually be able to see anything. That made sense, so, after going up the first flight of stairs — the construction looking kind of cheap and basic, but the steps didn't shake in the slightest under the weight of hundreds of passing feet, Dorea didn't feel it sway under her at all — they took a corner and continued further up in the opposite direction, the staircase tucked into the superstructure right under the seats overhead, surrounded by a forest of support pillars and crossbeams.
Glancing around, Dorea noticed that many of the struts had strings of runes carved into them — the materials might be simple wood and ceramic, but she was willing to bet this thing was a lot more durable than it looked.
She was starting to feel rather nervous after a bit, as the ground dropped further and further under them, the skeletal construction thin enough to allow a clear view through the stairs below, the crowd spreading out underfoot, far enough of a drop that falling would be a bad idea. Not that she thought she was in any danger of that happening — the railings on either side of the stairs were tall enough, the web of posts and struts dense enough she probably wouldn't even fall very far — just, she didn't like heights, okay. She was getting kind of twitchy, just trying to keep moving, forcing herself to take slow, deep breaths, when they finally reached a landing, the staircase reversing direction and tunnelling through the underside of the stands, bringing them out into the open air again.
The stairs dumped them pretty close to the top of the stands, the seats spreading out to both sides and dropping in tiers before them, row after row after row. The slant was steep enough that it still felt high, but the floor was solid enough she couldn't see through it at all, and there were occasional walkways stitching through the seats, complete with handrails — if she did fall, assuming she didn't just hitch on the bench right below her, she wouldn't fall very far. (It was fine, really, there was no reason to be nervous, she was being silly.) They weren't the only people to get the idea of going near the top, some dozens of students had gotten here ahead of them, they had to walk a little bit further before finding an open patch big enough for their whole group to fit. They didn't spread out on a single bench, instead dividing themselves across multiple rows, making more of a square — it'd be a lot harder to actually talk to each other if they were all in one long line, so.
Once they'd settled in, it was time to wait. They had nearly half an hour before the event itself was scheduled to start — which was a little tedious, but Dorea guessed it might take a while for everyone to find their seats, with all the guests from all over showing up. At least it wasn't seriously raining or anything, she guessed this would be tolerable.
Dorea was not at all surprised when, barely five minutes after they'd sat down, she noticed that Hermione had already pulled out a book. Because of course.
"So, the play area is that whole square, you think?" asked Michael. He'd ended up right next to her, with Tony and Justin and Wayne nearby — their study group was mostly girls, and she'd noticed the boys tended to blob together whenever feasible. Except Neville, he always stuck close to Hermione or Lily. There were rumours floating around that Neville was dating one or the other — most often Hermione, because it was more scandalous that way (Lily might be a poor commoner, but she was still a pureblood) — but Dorea was pretty sure that was just girls making things up to entertain each other.
And also maybe a little jealousy — Neville was, ah, starting to grow up, let's put it that way...
"What square?"
"See, right there." Michael pointed down toward the nearby patch of forest the stands were facing — partially cleared away, the underbrush gone and with a few completely open patches here and there — trying to lean a little closer to Megan to give her a better angle. Not that that was going to go very well with multiple people between them, he was practically ending up in poor Justin's lap. "That blue shimmer there, see it?"
"Oh, I see it." She hadn't until Michael had pointed it out, it was pretty subtle. A faint blue-white glow, fading in and out — she'd guess the changing density of water and dust on the air as the wind shifted caused a slight alteration of the resistance in the environment, creating greater or lesser inefficiency, resulting in the bleed-off dimming and brightening and dimming again in patches. As ephemeral as it was, Dorea had to watch carefully for several seconds before she could make out the square Michael had seen. Well, a rectangle, technically, about twice as long as it was wide, framing the narrow rocky stream running through the centre, the ground rising in little hills further from the stream. Not high enough to hide their view of the stream from here — though people closer to the bottom might have trouble seeing anything — but there were taller hills to the far-left and the near-right, the stream making a sort of S-bend between them. It was hard to get a sense of scale at such a shallow angle, but the "play area" was wider than the stands, maybe...a quarter kilometre deep and a half wide? Something like that.
Dorea would say that was bloody huge for a duelling event, but she guessed there would be forty-five people out there, and presumably they expected them to be running around in the forest and trying to hide from and ambush each other, so that sort of made sense. Still seemed like a bit much, but whatever.
There was immediately a bit of discussion then about what exactly they expected the event to be like — they knew there would be duelling, but beyond that they didn't really know much. There was a big cleared area right in the middle of the arena, the largest in the whole space, which would probably be most convenient for so many people to fit in at the same time, but they also expected some people would want to go to the hills, to hold the high ground. (That wasn't as important in magical duels, especially since people could cast magic on the high ground itself to all kinds of effects, but it did still help.) Pretty much everyone agreed that Liz wouldn't bother with any of that, and just go straight to the open space in the middle — she could be very blunt and straightforward just in general, nobody expected her 'battle' planning would be any different — but Diggory was more cautious, he might have brought some proper strategy in. They also knew some of the people on the team would be on brooms, but beyond that nobody really knew enough to speculate with any confidence, it was mostly just gossip.
Some of the Huffelpuff girls were getting kind of giggly about seeing Diggory perform (innuendo entirely intentional), which was a little silly, but Dorea had absolutely no right to judge them for it — she hadn't quite gotten over her pointless thing for Adrian, and he was on the team, so, she got it.
They'd been talking in circles for a while, the stands filling up around them, when out of nowhere there was a familiar voice coming from right behind her. "Hey mate, mind budging over?"
Frowning over his shoulder, Michael said, "I think you're a little old to be sitting here, mate."
"Ach, kids these days, no respect..."
"It's fine, Michael, let him in." She couldn't say she was surprised Sirius had decided to come over — or that he was trying to put himself between her and a boy, for that matter. (Michael was nice, and nice-looking, but there wasn't anything going on with them, but then Sirius might not realise that.) Leaning around Mandy, "Is there room over there, can we..."
Michael glanced between Dorea and Sirius a couple times before he twitched, rearing back a little. "Oh shite! I mean, er, sorry, Lord Black, I didn't recognise you." A bit sheepish, Michael nudged at Justin, started opening up space.
"And now you're insulting me, kid — hearing 'Lord Black' puts me in mind of my grandfather, and he was a stuck-up twat, I'm far too cool for that." As Sirius climbed over the bench to sit down, there was a little bit of scandalised tittering at him calling Arcturus Black a stuck-up twat. He'd been a huge racist bastard in private — he'd refused to recognise her parents' marriage at all, and according to Sirius had actually threatened to have Mum killed before Dorea could even be born (and thereby sully the Black name with her very existence) — but in public he'd been a generally well-respected if somewhat ambivalent figure. And, well, Noble and Most Ancient House, one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, not generally the sort of person you heard casually insulted in public — and especially not by his own grandson. "The kids still say 'cool', right?"
Dorea rolled her eyes. "Yes, Sirius, the kids still say 'cool'."
"Good, good. Getting old is a bloody tragedy, but if I somehow turn square I might have to just give up on life."
Her grin audible on her voice, Hannah said, "The kids don't say 'square' anymore."
"Oh no, I can feel my cool dad points fading away! How about this, it's bloody cold out, so I brought warm butterbeers." Sirius pulled something out of his pocket and set it down on the floor between his feet, a wandless snap of his fingers expanding it out into a sizeable ceramic box — the sort of thing meant to transport meals or drinks for picnics and the like, the inside would be expanded and temperature-controlled, who knew how much stuff he'd crammed in there. "You can all have one, but you have to say Dorea's dad is cooler than mine first — I can hardly let them go for less, in this economy, I don't make the rules..."
Their section was then a bit of a mess, as everyone reached around for bottles with repeated calls of Dorea's dad is cooler than mine — which was very silly, but Sirius could just be like that sometimes (or all the time). They even got a couple from outside Dorea's group of friends, which Sirius mostly just thought was funny, standing up to dip in a bow before tossing bottles over. (How many did he have in there?) When Hannah and Tracey's turns came up, he actually turned it right around on them, all, sorry Dorea, but they win this time. Hannah and Tracey's fathers had both died in the war, going down like bloody heroes, whereas Sirius just got himself locked up in Azkaban like an idiot, they were way cooler.
Dorea didn't think Hannah's dad had gone down like a bloody hero, really more a senseless tragedy than anything — her grandfather had been a top wardcrafter with the Department of Public Works, and her father had been kidnapped and tortured in an attempt at leverage, executed when her grandfather refused to give the Death Eaters a backdoor through the Ministry's wards. His body had been found one morning in Diagon Alley, in pieces, hanging from multiple lampposts, twisted into some sick attempt at artwork. (Hannah's grandfather himself would eventually die as well — he'd been attacked in his workshop, so he triggered the killswitch he'd set up to prevent his work falling into enemy hands, destroying his workshop and everything and everyone in it, taking multiple Death Eaters with him, which was more stereotypically heroic, Dorea thought.) The whole story was horrifying, and not really comparable to Tracey's dad, who had actually died in battle. But she guessed it was the principle of the thing, the details hardly mattered.
Handing Dorea her butterbeer, Sirius asked if he was cooler than Richard — Abby had definitely traded down as far as husbands go, don't you think? She rolled her eyes and snatched the bottle away, and didn't answer.
(Sirius was rather more handsome than Richard, if in a vaguely androgynous sort of way, and obscenely wealthy, and probably more entertaining to hang around with, but Richard was a lot less...unstable, and could actually take things seriously to save his life. Personally, Dorea would probably find being with someone so up all the time bloody exhausting, but for Mum she suspected it was a wash.)
Sirius kind of monopolised the conversation around them for a bit after that, which nobody really minded, because he could be entertaining. Most of her friends hadn't actually known that he'd been coming by Hogwarts to give Liz lessons, snuck away somewhere on the grounds — Liz didn't tend to volunteer information if she wasn't asked first, Dorea had actually learned of it in a letter from Sirius. According to him, Liz had improved significantly just since they'd last seen her fight in July — he claimed she might even be better than he'd been at her age, which was slightly absurd, since Dorea knew he'd started learning to duel at the age of seven — and he suspected being a Seer would be an advantage in a big fight, since she'd at least get a split-second's warning of which direction danger was coming from, which wasn't something the rest of them had thought of. He couldn't say whether Hogwarts would win, since he didn't know enough about the other teams, but it should be an interesting show at least.
No, he hadn't brought snacks too, they wouldn't be out here that long — with the way combat magic worked, often even a small advantage in skill was enough to knock out an opponent almost immediately. It was pretty common for duels to hardly last longer than ten seconds, and having big groups didn't actually drag it out that much longer, since then you had the additional complication of maybe being hit by spells aimed at someone else, it quickly became a mess. Dorea had actually noticed that, at the tournament over the summer — the team matches tended to last longer than the one-on-one matches, which could often end in a blink, but they hardly ever lasted for even a minute. Sirius expected both filling up the stands and filing out afterward to take significantly longer than the event itself. Which seemed rather tedious, but oh well.
Thankfully, by that point they didn't have much longer to wait. There was an odd shimmer in the air, nearer to the ground in the open space between the stands and the warded-off rectangle — just as the chatter around her picked up, people pointing at the distortions, they abruptly resolved into about a dozen enormous flat rectangles several metres to a side, each displaying an image of Director Zabini. They looked almost like the oversized projector screens from the cinema, even in similar proportions, though the colours in the background faded a bit toward the edges, a featureless grey blur making a thin edge all around. There was also something funny going on with the perspective, the shapes and angles not looking quite right, but Dorea didn't have the vocabulary to describe that sort of thing, not a camera person. This was interesting, Dorea had never seen anything like this before in the magical world. Mages had had photography for over a century already, but video cameras were a very new development, only invented in the last decade or so — she'd heard there were experiments in making simple films and maybe a sort of magical television, but they were very much still experimental at this point. (According to Dora, the biggest problems came down to the storage medium, for reasons Dorea didn't know enough about alchemy to follow.) Obviously, since capturing and reproducing video wasn't really done, they hadn't any means to display these videos, so—
Oh! Actually, when she thought about it, Dorea had seen something like this before. In their first Runes lesson last year, Babbling had shown them a sort of dramatisation of the original invention of runic magic (or the graphic arts, the term Babbling insisted on using) in ancient Egypt, projected on a very similar sort of display (though smaller in scale, to fit in the classroom). In an odd inversion of how things usually went, the magic-raised people had actually been more impressed than the muggleborns, since that wasn't something mages saw every day and the muggleborns didn't know enough about magical society to realise it wasn't ordinary. That hadn't been done with real video, obviously, since the events depicted had happened five or six thousand years ago — Babbling must have crafted a (highly detailed) illusion and stored it in a reservoir, from where it could be projected onto the display. With what little Dorea knew of the topic, what Babbling had done was much easier than capturing and reproducing real-life video...also, her presentation hadn't had audio. The form her projection had taken was very similar to these displays, was the point, maybe Babbling had helped set them up.
Her voice projected by some enchantment built into the stands, a buzz vibrating up Dorea's spine from the bench, Zabini welcomed the students and guests to the First Task. Zabini moved right into an explanation of the rules without any further dithering. The Champions had been told it would be a duelling event, the Junior and Senior Champions from each school paired together and told to gather thirteen teammates. What they hadn't been told — Zabini drawled, smirking — was that it was a little more complicated than a straight fight. Each team had been given a flag, and the game would only end once one of the teams had gathered all three together (or else when nobody was fit to continue). Of course, that would be much easier to accomplish if the other teams' fighters were knocked out first, but they didn't need to eliminate their opponents, so long as they got their flags.
So, it was kind of like an extremely violent version of capture the flag, then. Odd, but okay.
The teams were allowed to fortify a spot to hold their flag, to make it harder to steal — once they were let into the play area, they'd be given ten minutes to prepare before the starting bell went off. Any offensive spells cast in that time would result in the offending player being disqualified. Players would also be removed for using forbidden spells — the competitors had been told the specifics, but they were too lengthy to get into now — crossing out of the play area, receiving serious injuries that required immediate medical attention, or certain kinds of ignoble conduct, such as cursing a stunned player to force their removal. They'd put the same emergency stasis wards over the play area as they had in professional duelling, so anyone who'd been seriously injured would be able to be safely removed — unless something went terribly wrong, this event should be perfectly safe.
The actual removing would be done by the Hogwarts elves, who would be in the arena keeping an eye on things. They were also responsible for the recording — Zabini asked for a cameraman to show himself for the audience, the image panning down to reveal nearby a little elf holding a boxy ceramic contraption, waving sheepishly up at the audience. Zabini claimed the displays and the sound projection worked through omnidirectional illusions, you should only hear the audio for the display you were looking at, which was a neat trick. Now that Dorea was paying attention, she noticed that all the displays were tilted at a convenient angle for her, presumably everyone saw them slightly differently depending on where they were sitting. (Illusions were very cool sometimes.) There wouldn't be time in the moment to consult with the judges and decide whether a player deserved to be removed (or if an injury was serious enough), but the elves were reasonable, honourable folk — and could also be very serious about hospitality, so wouldn't favour Hogwarts — they could be trusted to take care of all that on their own.
Zabini then moved on into a quick introduction of the headmasters and the judges' panel — the students already knew all of them, obviously, but some of the guests probably didn't. Also, Dorea had a feeling Zabini might be stalling for time a little bit. The chattering and excited giggling in the students' section keyed up as Zabini went on, clearly not bothering to pay attention. But it wasn't too much longer before the majority of the displays blinked away from Zabini, showing a crowd of people walking over a patch of green-brown grass, the stands visible rising up in the background — the teams were finally starting out toward the play area.
There was a bunch of cheering from the crowd, sudden and sharp enough Dorea winced, Zabini cut off her monologuing to wait for it to die down a bit. The teams had sort of blobbed together, not bothering to keep themselves separate, everyone in duelling gear in a variety of styles — save for the handful of veela and lilin in simple shifts, of course — some with brooms carried in the crooks of their arms. There were three flags poking out of the group, hung on simple metal poles, each in the colours of their respective school, glinting metal thread around the edges to improve visibility. Dorea couldn't pick Liz or Susan out of the crowd at all, which wasn't really a surprise — they were the youngest people out there, and both rather short.
(Purebloods did tend to be — just look at Sirius, Dorea was slightly taller than him now — so Susan being tiny wasn't a surprise, but Dorea had expected Liz to sprout up a bit as they got older, and it didn't look like she was going to. Maybe Lily had been pretty short too, she didn't actually know...)
The group came up to the shimmery wardline, and then stopped for a moment, Zabini making a few final comments — it didn't sound like anything important, Zabini was maybe having a little too much fun playing game show host. There was a flicker on the wards, abruptly turning more visible — still transparent, but now looking more like a shield charm, the blue-white colour constant — as a big square patch opened up in front of the contestants. There was a deep low bong, echoing through the stands under her like a drum, and the game began.
The pack of students rushed forward, the gap wide enough to prevent any bottlenecking. Once they were through the wardline, there were flashes of gold-white and black-purple flames, and as many as half of the Beauxbatons team just disappeared. Dorea had known veela and lilin could teleport with some kind of fire magic — it was magically more similar to house elf apparation or that shadow-walking thing vampires did, and therefore much harder to ward against than standard apparation — but she hadn't thought they'd be allowed to do it in the Tasks. That didn't seem quite fair, did it?
...Though, when she thought about it, that seemed kind of silly. The human contestants weren't forbidden from using whatever innate magical talents they might have, obviously, and veela and lilin had used their fire magic at the duelling tournament over the summer. She guessed she just hadn't thought about it that hard.
Besides, maybe it wasn't unfair — only a couple seconds later, a series of familiar popping noises were projected through the illusion, and a handful of Durmstrangers disapparated out of the group. By that point, one of the elven cameramen had found where the Beauxbatons contestants had ended up: they were on top of the hill at the near-right, a pair of them already working at fixing their flagpole into the ground. The far-left hill was more uneven and rocky, but this one had a nice flat patch on top, room enough to move around and maybe conjure up some fortifications. The Durmstrangers had obviously had the same idea, the advance teams already in a sort of stand-off — they weren't allowed to use offensive magic yet, so they could do little more than square off against each other and talk.
"Hey!" Sophie yelled, pointing at one of the screens showing a dramatic, off-kilter angle of the stand-off. (Elves made pretty creative cameramen, turned out.) "They're cheating!"
"What do you mean?"
"They knew what hill they wanted and went straight there — the field is supposed to be a surprise, how did they know where to go?"
...That was a good point, actually, Dorea hadn't thought of that. She wasn't sure exactly how the fire-walking thing worked, but the Durmstrangers at least shouldn't have been able to apparate straight there. Line-of-sight apparation required being able to physically see where you were going — Dorea could see the top of the hill just fine from here, but from down there they wouldn't be able to see the ground they were aiming for. The only way they could have gotten there was if they'd already been there before. Both visiting teams must have had the location leaked to them somehow, had come to stake out the field ahead of time.
Not that there would be any consequences for the cheating, it was hardly even discouraged. As Sirius said, "This is the Triwizard Tournament, love — everybody cheats. It's tradition, you see."
"Well, that's stupid. What's the point of having rules if everyone is just going to break them anyway?"
"Roper, you're such a Hufflepuff sometimes it actually hurts," Tracey drawled. "Obviously having rules to break makes it more fun."
While a round of playful barbs and teasing went back and forth, Dorea shared a quick glance and eye-roll with Mandy before turning back to the screens. Beauxbatons and Durmstrang might be cheating, but it didn't look like Hogwarts was. Several people had lifted off on brooms just inside the wardline, looked like a mix of Hogwarts and Durmstrang people — Dorea saw Cedric and Victor Krum, obviously, and that was Miles, the Slytherin keeper, but she didn't see Adrian — while the rest of the Hogwarts team, accompanied by the remaining foreign students, just kept walking toward the centre of the field. As they slipped into a line of trees, Dorea could make out the people around the Hogwarts flag talking and pointing (no audio, the camera maybe too far away to pick up what they were saying), by the look of it discussing where to go — she'd guess the field was entirely new to them, so they didn't have a set plan like the other two schools.
In fact, she saw an exchange between a few Hogwarts and Beauxbatons students that she was pretty sure was the latter teasing for the former for not cheating like everyone else. Because of course.
Oh, there was Adrian — he was at the middle of the Hogwarts group, carrying the flagpole, in the middle of a tense, animated conversation with Liz and Susan (enough of the pack gone they were visible now), Katie Bell, and Alex Ingham. She'd expected he'd be in the air with Cedric and Miles and the others — he was probably the most graceful flyer on the team, only Liz and now Draco posing any real comparison — but maybe he thought he'd do more good on the ground. Or, Adrian's trio at the duelling tournament had included Ingham (Dorea didn't know if they'd started duelling together before or after they'd started dating), maybe he thought they'd be more effective teaming up, that would make sense. Whatever, not really important, she guessed...
(Dorea tried not to be jealous of Ingham, and mostly succeeded, because that would be very silly. Honestly, if her frustrating crush on Adrian could just stop, that'd be great.)
After a bit of walking, the Hogwarts team (and hangers-on) reached the stream, out in the big cleared patch in the centre of the play area. There were a few seconds of muttering and pointing, and the older students — Adrian and Ingham, and a couple others Dorea couldn't put a name to (NEWT students, not Slytherins) — started transfiguring a bridge across the stream, the stones stretching up and arcing across. Over the next minute it was widened out into a sizeable platform over the water, Katie, Bletchely, and Andrews coming up behind the older students and transfiguring the stone into bronze as it settled into its final shape. Liz, Susan, Bagshot, and Prince came up behind them, crawling about on their hands and knees and chiselling runes into the surface with transfigured tools — that wasn't a method they used in Runes class, the tools seeming a bit awkward in hand (especially with Bagshot), but conceptually it wasn't anything special, same as any enchanting.
By that point, the apparating Durmstrangers had already popped over to the opposite hill, having given up on their preferred spot — the veela and lilin had gotten there first, so. The Beauxbatons hill now had a ring of fencing close to the flagpole, the defenders waiting outside of the ring, a second ring of fencing surrounding them. Dorea assumed they'd put trap hexes or something in the fences, but she'd missed it. The Durmstrang hill was still in progress, a couple people digging trenches here and there across the uneven top of the hill seemingly at random, one girl conjuring animals one after the other — big predators, mostly wolves and lynxes. (Controlling that many animation charms at once probably wasn't possible, Dorea had no idea how that girl planned to get them to attack enemies but not her own team.) The trenches were being filled in with...something (Dorea couldn't tell what they were doing from here) and then covered up, maybe some kind of pit trap? With an illusion overtop, they were pretty much invisible, which would be a neat trick if everyone hadn't just watched where they put the things...
Except the other competitors couldn't see the screens, obviously. The people in the air could theoretically watch from above, but this whole time the competitors on brooms had been manoeuvring around each other, taunting and making reckless close passes — after a few seconds watching, Dorea noticed that the Durmstrang people kept cutting anyone off from getting too close to the hill, probably trying to keep their preparations hidden. Before too long, they were joined by some of the veela and lilin, in bird form, which was kind of wild. They were huge, wingspan probably a bit wider than their arms spread out — Dorea would guess the bones were at a pretty similar scale, but then the feathers added like an extra foot — bodies from beak to foot easily as long as they were tall, just, big person-sized birds. They were somewhat misshapen, their bodies too long and narrow (less like birds and more like people), but were actually surprisingly pretty — the veela feathers were bright white and gold, almost seeming to glitter in the sunlight, the lilin in deep rich blacks and violets. Their wings weren't beating nearly fast enough to actually keep them aloft, almost like they were floating more than flying, light and graceful and...
Well, almost eerie, but not really in a bad way, if that made sense? She didn't know what to call it. They were surprisingly pretty, that was all.
Despite the disadvantage of not having prepared in advance, it looked like the Hogwarts base would be finished in time for the bell, flagpole fixed in the middle of a rectangular platform over the water, bronze dully gleaming in the muddy November daylight. While Dorea hadn't been watching, sections of the platform had been vanished away, leaving a web of metal struts with no solid floor, presumably to make it more difficult to fight on — the defenders would have the same problem, of course, but she guessed they could just fire spells at invaders from the shore. None of the defenders were on the platform anymore, in fact, all of them having retreated to solid ground. A group of them — including Liz, Susan, and Katie Bell, of course — were facing off with the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students — Dorea recognised both junior Champions among them — while the others were picking rocks out of the stream bed, carving runes in them, and...tossing them back into the water? Setting some kind of traps, presumably, though Dorea couldn't guess what that was supposed to accomplish...
"Oh, honestly, Liz..." Tracey groaned, sounding very exasperated.
A little startled, Dorea glanced at the screen showing the face-off — had she missed something already? The group seemed more animated than last time she'd looked, a lot of yelling and laughing, even a little shoving between the Beauxbatons students. Interestingly, Liz's face had gone very red, looking rather flustered, though Dorea couldn't guess what might have caused it. "What happened?"
"The red-headed girl—" Cæciné's lilin friend, Sirius meant, Torralba. "—is playing with Liz, I think. You see, a distracted enemy is a slow, careless enemy — and, you might have noticed, Liz can be very distractible." There was a mix of scandalised or amused titters at the suggestion on Sirius's voice, because of course. "Saying this about one's goddaughter probably isn't polite, but sometimes I think that girl really needs to get laid."
That got a mix of reactions from their group, a couple of the girls a little offended on principle — no, Sirius, saying that about one's goddaughter was not 'polite' — but Daphne, ahead of Dorea with Tracey and Padma, turned around to give him a sunny smile over her shoulder. "It's on my to-do list."
"Ha! I bet she is." Oh wow, what a funny pun, Sirius, good job. "All luck to you with that one, I suspect you'll need it. Liz is so stiff and standoffish sometimes, I swear, I don't where she gets that from — James and Lily weren't like that at all..."
Sirius was maybe forgetting about the abuse, Dorea suspected that had something to do with it — obviously, acting out must have had unpleasant consequences when she was little. A lot of the peculiar things about Liz came down to that, really. Sometimes she wondered how much of Liz's cold, creepy moments were just, you know, Liz always being like that, for the obvious reason — in which case, making judgements about her over trauma-induced surface-level stuff would be kind of awful — but it was hard to say.
(Of course, having been abused as a child wasn't an excuse for some of the more questionable things she'd done, but Dorea did wonder.)
Their group was wrapped up with Sirius telling stories about Liz's mum — apparently the Lily Evans and the Cassie Lovegood used to sneak out to the Forest in the middle of the night to run around with the wilderfolk and try to ride unicorns (could you even do that?) and shag each other silly, which was not something Dorea had known about before — the only exceptions in earshot being Tracey and Daphne, the former having pulled the latter into a whispered conversation — if Dorea had to guess, Tracey was suggesting Daphne shouldn't talk about Liz like that in public, because she definitely wouldn't appreciate it (even Dorea knew that, and she wasn't the one dating her) — when the starting bell finally went off. Dorea had been watching Tracey and Daphne, a little bemused, she twitched at the noise, the flashes of light on the screens in her peripheral vision, looked up to find several of the images there had already devolved into a complete mess.
In the air, the veela and lilin were casting shocking volumes of fire, much of the displays focussed on them completely taken over with gold-white and black-violet flames. A shimmer of shield charms held it back here and there, the flash of spellglows from retaliatory hexes, but it was bloody impossible to see what was going on, a bright colourful swirling mess. After only a couple seconds at least one contestant was already going down, the twigs of his broom alight with dark lilin-fire — the boy actually threw himself away from his broom well before he reached the trees below, probably to get away from the flames, a hastily-cast charm smothering the ones crawling up his trousers before he finally dropped out of sight. That had been Miles, Dorea was pretty sure. Hopefully he'd managed to catch himself before hitting the ground — Miles was a bit of a jerk, yes, but she didn't want him to get hurt...
Come to think of it, maybe Adrian wasn't in the air because he didn't want his broom to get damaged? The Bletchleys could afford a replacement without any trouble, but the Puceys were commoners...
The ground fight was a mess, the stand-off between the junior Champions (and teammates) vanishing in an explosion of fire and spellglow, dazzling the eyes, Dorea couldn't see anything there for the first few seconds. The older students, toward the edges further up- and downstream, were more visible, fighters dancing around, countless spellglows zipping back and forth. The spellfire was so thick that it was impossible to dodge all of it — avoid a spell coming from the opponent you're facing, and you might dodge right into a spell aimed at someone else — people already dropping in the first couple seconds of the match. A couple Durmstrang students went down in the first spell exchange, but only one of them was popped away (the others must just be stunned); a Hogwarts student — on the senior duelling team, Dorea was pretty sure, but she didn't recognise him by sight — took a pretty nasty cutting curse along one leg, but he rolled under the follow up spells, casting healing charms at his leg before popping up again, even as Roger Davies took a blasting curse of some kind in the shoulder, spun around with a sickening splatter of blood, he was popped away practically before he hit the ground; a Durmstrang student's shield was shattered by multiple spells, vanishing in a crackle of lightning and multicoloured flashes of light, by the time the image resolved again the elves had already taken him; another Hogwarts student dropped (stunned), the stunned Durmstrangers were revived, one of them setting Alex Ingham on fire with some kind of hex as he got back to his feet, but she just flopped backward into the stream (that had to be cold), firing off a wide orangeish arc curse at the whole opposing group as she fell, Adrian following it up with something that caused a big damn explosion, Dorea didn't know, that side of the fight disappearing in a cloud of dust...
By that time, the middle part of the fight was clearing up. There was a wall of bronze that hadn't been there before, waist-height and wide enough for multiple people to hide behind — Katie must have conjured that in an instant, which was very good for someone who didn't even have her Transfiguration OWL yet — the metal seeming to glow a little from the heat. Which was about to suck for everyone else, because Katie and Bagshot were transfiguring it, the metal splitting apart and reforming into discs and spears. Cæciné took a shot at Bagshot while Torralba moved for Katie, trying to interrupt them, Delacour (Cæciné's trio partner, not the Champion) and Hannasdottir (and a couple foreign students she didn't recognise) tied down by Susan and Andrews (and the rest of the Hogwarts team), but Prince intercepted the hex meant for Bagshot, and—
A bloody fist-sized hole was suddenly punched through Torralba's chest, she staggered to her knees, a follow-up hex slashing into her shoulder and pitching her to the ground — an elf popped her away a second later. Liz was standing where Torralba had been a second ago, seemingly having appeared out of nowhere. Liz tossed an arc hex of some kind at Cæciné, forcing her to abandon her assault on Bagshot and Prince to block it, and then sidled around a hex from a Durmstrang student coming at her back — without even looking, must have felt the magic coming — her wand swinging in a curve over the ground, a six-foot-tall wall of ice blinking into existence, blocking the camera angle Dorea was watching, a half-dozen spellglows pounding into it, throwing off puffs of steams and big chunks of ice. Cæciné, Delacour, and Hannasdottir whirled around to face Liz, she blocked the first hex, and then quick-stepped out of the way of the rest — one of them was a fire spell, the burst of flames crashing against the ice wall with a blinding burst of steam.
While Liz landed by Hannasdottir and one of her teammates, Cæciné fell into a rapid-fire exchange with Prince. In seconds, Prince was down — he'd stepped into a curse meant for Bagshot, for some reason — and so was Hannasdottir's friend, but before Hannasdottir's curse could reach Liz she disappeared again. Susan and Andrews abandoned their duel with Delacour to back up Bagshot — opening with a volley of spells that forced Cæciné to retreat several steps, pushing her back from Bagshot and Katie, Delacour was turning toward the exposed Hogwarts people focussing on their transfiguration when there was a blur right in the path of his first hex, Liz appearing again. Her wand whipping around in a little twirl, she deflected the hex up over her shoulder — there was a little surprised gasping and oohing from the crowd at that move, which was deserved, she was only fourteen, where the hell did she learn that?! — the wand movement transitioning right into a blasting hex. Delacour blocked it, the hex exploding blinding bright against his shield...which, that was probably supposed to be bright and loud and distracting on purpose, because it hadn't even cleared yet when Liz was suddenly behind him. A bludgeoning hex hit him hard around the hips, shoving him forward and arching his back at an awkward angle, Liz rearing back for a second before a harsh jab of her wand cast a sodding bolt of lightning, striking Delacour straight on and sending him tumbling a few metres, an elf popping him away practically before he'd stopped moving.
...Well, Sirius hadn't been kidding about Liz being significantly better than she'd been over the summer, had he? Her trio had lost against Cæciné's, but it'd barely been thirty seconds and Liz had already taken out both of Cæciné's partners, smoothly enough to make it look easy — she had help, but still.
There was an ear-ringing shout of "NOW!", the voice magically amplified — loud enough Dorea might actually have heard it without being reproduced by the illusion spells built into the stands. The Hogwarts students all hit the ground, some of them even abandoning half-cast curses to do so. At the same time, the bronze Katie and Bagshot had been working was all banished out to rocket across the field, so fast they were little more than blurs of motion. Not seeing it coming, some of the foreign students were hit directly, stuck with spears or just hit hard and knocked to the ground — some managed to shield the hits, but those lucky ones were then hit with secondary spells, must have been layered into the conjurations, the bronze dissolving into spellglow, the shields shattering, and then exploding into fire or lightning or rains of scattershot hexes. Some managed to avoid getting hit — Cæciné simply dodged a spear aimed at her and ducked under a disc, an older Durmstranger noticed the bronze interacting with his shield quickly enough and dove out of the way — but at least a few people were down.
Around the same time, there were bursts of gold-white and black-violet flames on the flag platform over the stream, a group of people appearing around the pole — Dorea quickly spotted Fleur Delacour among them. They apparently hadn't expected the treacherous footing, staggering a little, one falling all the way to hip-level before she caught herself...and then the traps were set off. In a ring around the flag, the water suddenly surged upward, enveloping the Beauxbatons students and abruptly crystallising into ice. A veela (Delacour) and a lilin vanished in pulses of fire (the ice cracking and misting), but the other three were too slow, a flash of blue-green spellglow running up the ice in a wave. The ring of ice melted, dribbling back down into the stream, leaving three unconscious bodies laid out on the bronze web.
Considering they hadn't had time to prepare, Hogwarts was doing surprisingly well, actually. The group at the stream had been outnumbered at first — most of the team had stayed to defend their base, about ten people, while everyone from the other two teams not in the air or at their base (or Delacour's little strike team) had come to meet them. Dorea hadn't counted, exactly, but she thought it worked out to as many as half of the opposing teams put together, meaning the defenders had been outnumbered two to three. The Hogwarts team had lost people, down to Liz and Susan, Katie Bell, and Oz Bagshot. Of the older students, who'd faced the lion's share of the attackers while Liz and Susan's team prepared the bronze trap, only Adrian and Alex were left standing, both visibly injured.
Of the roughly fifteen attackers, only Cæciné, Hannasdottir, a single Durmstranger, and a pair of Beauxbatons students were left — down to five, one third of their original number, and now slightly outnumbered by the defenders. Neat trick, that.
But they weren't going to hold the advantage on the ground for very much longer: the air battle had gone terribly for Hogwarts. Dorea was just checking in now, and the only Hogwarts student she could see up there was Cedric — he was being pursued in a wild high-speed chase by Krum, dodging a hail of conjured bludgers and tangles of wire and the rare spellglow, by the look of it he wouldn't be able to hang on much longer. But Dorea expected there was no shame in losing in an aerial fight against the Viktor Krum, people who followed these things would probably consider even holding on as long as he had to be impressive. A couple of veela had teleported over to the Durmstrang base, as they began their attack Delacour and the survivor from the strike on Hogwarts appearing on the ground to back them up — Delacour's lilin friend almost immediately fell into one of the pit traps, but the defenders looked like they were being quickly overwhelmed, Beauxbatons was probably about to win that fight. The remainder of the fliers from both teams were in a running fight, sniping at each other...
...while making an angle straight for the fight at the stream. They'd arrive soon, and when they did Hogwarts would be on the back foot again.
Liz, Susan, Katie, and Bagshot all immediately leapt on Cæciné, presumably hoping to knock out the biggest threat while they still could. Surprisingly, it seemed even Hannasdottir and the Durmstranger were helping, one of the remaining Beauxbatons people dropping from an unexpected curse in the back. Up to this point, it had looked like Durmstrang and Beauxbatons were cooperating — it was generally thought that the host school had an advantage, so it was common in group events like these for the visiting schools to team up to eliminate them — but now that Hogwarts looked to be in trouble it seemed that truce was done with. Cæciné was practically a blur, twirling and twisting around incoming spells, her wand swishing around to deflect one after another after another — one deflected curse went on to hit Bagshot in a burst of fire and a splatter of blood, he was popped out — and somehow still managing to cast an occasional spell herself, though rather weak-looking and wildly aimed.
Adrian and Alex finally limped up to rejoin the fight, coming in behind the Durmstrangers, dropping both of them before they could hardly react; at the same time, Cæciné's remaining teammate went down, but not before he managed to get a spell off at Susan, some kind of cutting curse slashing into her side and setting a stripe of her clothes on fire in its wake. Susan tried to douse the flames, but they kept spreading, unnatural green and blue, she toppled to the ground, and was soon evacuated by an elf.
And then Cæciné was the only attacker left, surrounded by Liz, Adrian, Katie, and Alex. She held on surprisingly well four against one, even managing to tag Adrian with something — the hit wasn't bad enough to knock him out, but he was now even more injured than he'd been a second ago, one shoulder slumped and limping. But before too long, she was overwhelmed, multiple hexes falling on her at the same time, Dorea didn't even see which one did it, and she was gone.
There were cheers from the crowd as the Hogwarts team finally won the fight at the stream — actually managing to beat literally the best youth duellist in the world while they were at it — but it was immediately interrupted by gasps and shouts and moans. Dorea glanced around the screens and quickly found Cedric, tangled up in conjured wire, clothes torn and stained with blood in stripes, pierced with long narrow spears in the shoulder and the thigh, falling limp. He was already unconscious, she thought, must have also taken a hit in the head — the elves didn't wait for him to fall all the way, plucking him out from mid-air, taking his broom with him but leaving the wire to continue down to the trees below...
Dorea belatedly realised the screen she'd been watching from had been viewing Cedric from a high angle, the camera above him. "Wait a second, how are they filming this? Are the elves on brooms or something?" Did brooms even work for elves? Supposedly most things didn't...
"Oh, they didn't need them, elves can fly."
She jumped, whipped over to stare at Sirius. "What? Really?"
Hesitantly turning her way, trying to keep one eye on the screens, Sirius gave her a crooked, bemused sort of look. "Of course? How did you think they keep all that gold shite way up on the ceiling in the Entrance Hall all clean and polished?"
...Well, she hadn't given it any thought, honestly. Or how they dusted all the ridiculously detailed light fixtures at Ancient House or Ravenhome, it, just, hadn't occurred to her...
The Hogwarts team hardly had a second to take a breather before the fliers were falling on them in a wave of fire and spellglow, enough that the screens focussed on them were completely washed out with light. By this time, the fight at the Durmstrang base was over, Delacour cutting down and summoning the flag to herself with a couple charms — she'd lost the last member from her team and one of the fliers, the survivor already turning off toward the middle of the field. Krum paused for a moment, slowly turning in the air, before turning toward the fight at the— No, he was aimed at the Beauxbatons hill, actually. Moving slowly, his wand in motion as he conjured things around him, stone and metal, balls and spears and discs, set somehow to float along in his wake, and more and more and more...
The dust was starting to clear at the Hogwarts base — Adrian and Katie were both gone, leaving only Liz and Alex, a handful of Durmstrangers abandoned their brooms and a couple Beauxbatons fliers switched back to human form to surround them, pressing in. A few of the attackers fell, one of the veela still in the air even shot out of the sky, the fight too much of a chaotic tangle to say for sure which way the spells were even coming from. It looked like the foreign students were sort of working together to fully eliminate the Hogwarts team, but it wasn't like Hogwarts was a threat anymore so they were also taking shots at each other, it was kind of a mess. The way Liz kept quick-stepping around, appearing and disappearing seemingly at random and firing off spells at people from unexpected angles, the remaining veela and lilin popping around in bursts of fire, really wasn't making it easier to make out what the hell was going on. Dorea had a feeling the fight was probably even more confusing for the people in it.
Krum, a huge cloud of conjured objects floating behind him, suddenly accelerated to full speed — on a Firebolt, so that was pretty damn fast — making straight for the middle of the Beauxbatons hill. The veela that had been at the Durmstrang hill with Delacour apparently saw him coming and teleported over, but he was too late. Little more than a narrow smear of colour, streams of fire and spellglows coming nowhere near him, he approached within metres of the fortifications before abruptly turning straight upward — tagging the flying veela as he passed without slowing down. (Dorea had no idea how he could aim while moving that fast, that was ridiculous.) All the conjured stuff didn't turn with him, but continued straight onward, pummelling the Beauxbatons base. Some objects were redirected, seeming to spang off of wards or shield charms, but others tore right through, striking the ground so hard they threw up clods of dirt and grass. Both rings of fences were shattered into pieces, in a few places bursting into unnatural pinkish-white flames as the contained enchantments violently fell apart. The pair of defenders were caught in it too, each struck a half-dozen times before being popped out by the elves.
The flying veela was teetering in the air, injured, hadn't quite recovered before Krum came looping around again, stunning him with an almost casual-looking hex in the back, the veela crashing limp to the ground. Krum didn't bother setting down, instead simply sidled up next to the flagpole and removed it by hand in mid-air. He wrapped the Beauxbatons flag around his waist, twice, knotting it in place, before flying off toward the Hogwarts base.
So, Krum had destroyed whatever defences the Beauxbatons students had put up, as well as eliminated the three defenders — single-handedly, in seconds. Yeah, Dorea was going to go out on a limb and suggest the famous quidditch star was maybe a little more than just a stupid jock.
At some point, Miles had come stumbling out of the forest into the central clearing — he had survived his crash landing toward the beginning of the match, it seemed, scratched and bruised, limping but still standing — at around the same time Krum was attacking the Beauxbatons base Delacour appeared near the main fight. There was an amplified shout — Dorea only knew it was Delacour because she happened to be looking at the right screen at the time, saw she was holding her wand to her own throat. There was a brief pause, and then a ring around the main fight was suddenly on fire, a mix of veela gold and lilin violet, crackling electric interference popping off where the colours touched. (Light and dark magic sometimes did funny things when you put them together.) They only held it for a second, though when it was lifted the grass was left burning, thick smoke half-hiding the crowd — also, a single flailing figure that Dorea was pretty sure was Liz, wreathed in bright veela-fire. The way she kept moving around, Dorea guessed a wide-area trap like that was about the only certain way to hit her. Liz was only left burning for a couple seconds before she was downed with a follow-up hex, some merciful soul putting the fire out before the elves came around to pop her away.
"She's going to be feeling that when she wakes up," Sirius muttered, a grimace on his voice. "Light magic toxicity is not pleasant."
Oh yeah, Dorea had forgotten about that for a second...
Alex and Miles fell pretty quickly after that, the entirety of the Hogwarts team eliminated, leaving only the eight or so survivors from the visiting schools left. The fight continued to be a disorganised, confusing mess, their numbers gradually whittled down — Dorea couldn't even tell where the hits were coming from half of the time — before long reduced to only Delacour, two fliers (one in the air and one on the ground, her skimpy little shift slashed and dirty), and a single Durmstranger. Hemmed in with veela fire, the Durmstranger was on the back foot, in serious trouble...and then Krum showed up, the flying veela pummelled with a thick hail of conjured objects — Dorea was pretty sure she saw a wing snap at an unnatural angle, the veela letting out a piercing scream, that had to hurt — the fighters on the ground distracted enough that the Durmstranger managed to hit his underdressed opponent with a nasty curse, the shift quickly reddening in the seconds before she was popped away. Krum gracefully dismounted, knocked out the injured veela with a swirl of his wand, and then the remaining pair of Durmstrangers advanced on Delacour, coming in at right angles from each other.
Of course, positioning didn't really matter when your opponent could just teleport around at will. The fight from there was rather like watching Liz duel sometimes, one of the participants popping here and there seemingly at random, firing off a couple hexes before disappearing again, almost impossible to keep track of where she was and where the spells were coming from. She said almost impossible, because somehow Krum and his partner were actually managing to keep up, turning on Delacour with twin streams of hexes practically before the flash of fire had even finished. Veela did have pretty noisy auras, maybe they could simply feel her coming? The duel was very fast-paced, spellglows flying from wands one after the other so quickly they couldn't possibly be using the incantations, all of them dodged or blocked, Krum and Delacour even managing to deflect one away now and then.
A hex aimed at the ground sent the Durmstranger reeling, struck by a hex before he got his feet under him again. He was bleeding — some kind of piercing curse, Dorea thought — but he wasn't down for the count, flailing to cast healing spells on himself as Krum laid into Delacour with a heavy deluge of curses to keep her busy, spellglows exploding against shields and the ground or the trees or the bronze bridge behind her, bright and loud and intimidating. He quickly adjusted every time she moved, once when she put the injured Durmstranger between them Krum himself apparated off at an angle he had a clear shot, the fight hardly interrupted for an instant. And then the Durmstranger was on his feet again — staggering a little, hugging his side — and the return hexes from Delacour fell to a trickle, too busy blocking and dodging to hit back.
After what had to be a whole couple minutes of this two-on-one battle — which was slightly absurd, duels at this skill level only very rarely lasted this long — Delacour appeared right behind Krum, holding...something in one hand. It looked like some kind of crystal, white-gold material glinting in the wan light, formed into a short spear, her hand held at an angle to stab Krum in the back. Moving too quickly, Krum barely had time to begin to turn before the blow was already coming in at—
Delacour abruptly froze stiff, blue fingers of electricity crawling over her head to toe, a strangled cry wrenched out of her throat. But it only lasted a second before she was released, and Delacour fell limp to the ground, unconscious — the golden crystal spear rolled out of her hand onto the ground, and then dissolved into bright veela-fire, the grass moodily smouldering.
While the cheering from the Durmstrang section picked up into a deep roar, Krum reached under the flag wrapped around his waist, pulled away a thin metal hoop that must have been hidden under there, held it up for a moment. An enchanted trap of some kind, maybe, set to stun anyone who tried to hit him from behind? The metal dissolved into nothing with a tap of his wand — conjured, presumably he'd prepared that before the starting bell — and Krum stopped over Delacour, fiddled with the knots for a bit before roughly pulling to release the Durmstrang flag from around her hips, hard enough Delacour was flopped over face-down.
The surviving Durmstranger had limped over by then, the two of them faced the Hogwarts base, debated with each other how to approach it for a moment. Krum summoned his broom, floated up over the stream. Rather than step foot on the web of bronze, and risk what traps might still be in effect, Krum hovered a few metres off, them simply cut through the post with a hex and summoned the flag up to himself. Lazily drifting down — not using his hands to fly, occupied removing the flag from the pole — he returned to where the other Durmstranger was waiting, handed him the freed Hogwarts flag. While he laid it down on top of Durmstrang's, Krum unwrapped the Beauxbatons flag from around his waist, then dropped it on top of the other two.
As soon as all three flags were in contact, they burst into multicoloured sparks — with a low boom of an unseen drum, a stream of light streaked upward, a dozen metres in the air exploding into a cloud of glittering rainbow sparks, like an unusually colourful and eerily silent firework.
And so Durmstrang won the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament.
So, that went well. Or about as well as Liz could hope for, anyway.
I've been feeling terrible for no apparent reason lately, so writing is going to continue to be a bit slow for the time being. Generally, writing 2.5~4k a day is pretty normal for me, but these days I'm lucky if I manage 1.5k, and that's when I'm not too tired to write anything at all. Or spend all my energy gardening. Or I'll get distracted with some other project, of course, my brain just won't shut up sometimes — a bit ago I spent like a week obsessed with a conlang for a fanfic I'm never going to write, it's super frustrating. Next scene is mostly just the mostly-healed Champions getting their scores, and going down to the party in Hufflepuff, so it shouldn't be too long until that's finished. I actually considered waiting until I had it before posting this, but it's been a couple weeks, so I thought I'd throw a bone to my poor, neglected readers.
In case anyone's wondering, I am still working on First Contact, it's just been as slow-going as everything else lately — it doesn't help that I changed my mind about what I was doing partway through scenes at least twice, ended up deleting maybe 10k words. That shit happens sometimes. It's only at maybe 30k words atm — which is more than I expected by this point, I got a little carried away with background and setting description — and I think it's going to run closer to 120~150k total, so I really can't guess when I'll have it finished.
But whatever, who gives a shit. See you all next time.