I own nothing, all characters and settings belong to JKR or Games Workshop, respectively.
Harry's attention briefly glanced up to the candles floating in the Great Hall. Had one of them just flickered? With a mental shrug he turned his gaze back to the head table and Professor - no, High Inquisitor Umbridge's speech.
Was that a faint shadow growing behind the head table? He nudged Hermione and whispered "Do you see that?"
"Shh, I'm listening!" she whispered back impatiently. "This might be important."
Harry sat back with a sigh. He didn't see how any of Umbridge's blathering about "Ministry Approved Methods of Education" and "Failing Academic Standards" could possibly be important, aside from the obvious excuses for a power grab. But, did it seem darker in here than it was a minute ago?
He stole a cautious glance up at the ceiling. No, the sky was as clear and blue as it had been earlier, although there was a faint hint of dark clouds around the edges of the rafters.
A couple of minutes later, as Umbridge continued to obliviously blather on, Harry was positive it was getting darker. The floating candles seemed to be dying down, lower than he had seen them burn since they had slept in the Great Hall after the Chamber was first opened. Another glance at the ceiling confirmed that, despite the continued blue sky, the shadows of dark clouds were crawling out from the rafters and twisting across the ceiling.
There seemed to be a tension humming in the air, and he could see a few of the other students glancing around nervously, although Hermione continued to pay close attention to Umbridge. In fact, since last he looked her way she had taken parchment and quill out of her bag and seemed to be taking careful notes.
The darkness seemed to be growing more quickly now, and he was starting to see hints of movement flickering in the corners of his eyes, although nothing was moving when he turned his head to look directly at it. It wasn't a calm or quiet darkness, but a hungry darkness that seemed to be full of invisible predators prowling for a chance to strike.
There was a faint pressure building against the inside of his skull, and he seemed to be hearing whispers scratching at reality at the edge of his hearing. They were too faint to make out any words, but the tone of the voices varied between sickly sweet to smoothly deadly to a harsh dangerous grating that was unpleasantly reminiscent of hearing the basilisk in the walls.
More and more students around the hall were starting to shake their heads sharply, as if to shake away an unpleasant thought, or rub their foreheads as if to dispel an oncoming headache. Not even Umbridge seemed to be immune, although she was continuing to tenaciously plunge forward with her well-rehearsed speech, her voice seemed to grow fainter and fainter as though from an increasingly far distance.
None of the other teachers seemed to be faring much better. Snape's expression had gone completely flat and closed off, while both Flitwick and McGonagall had started fingering their wands anxiously and glancing around. Only Dumbledore seemed unaffected, continuing to pay rapt attention to Umbridge with a merry twinkle in his eye.
The darkness was so thick now as to be almost physical, with the candles guttering so low as to be mere embers, and the sun only faintly glowing through the shadows across the sky. Hermione flinched with a gasp, and Harry felt an angry presence scrabbling at the edge of his mind before being deflected by a firm, friendly force that he realized abruptly must be the Hogwarts wards. Tendrils of shadow were arcing across the room like lightning bolts, and the whole scene was backlit by a paralyzing violet glow that seemed to be shifting through impossible colors.
Umbridge fell silent with a gasp as the very stones of the castle seemed to shift against an enormous crushing pressure with a harsh grating sound, and the entire hall seemed to flicker with glimpses of horrifying creatures, all gnashing teeth, lashing tentacles, and probing eyes, that appeared to be superimposed on his vision. Harry could feel the mental pressure building to a breaking point, until suddenly something snapped and the pressure was exchanged for an impossibly black smoke that made his skin crawl like a thousand window panes of shattered glass. For an instant, it was as if the room had shattered around him into a thousand splinters of fragmented reality, only to suddenly snap back to normality with the suddenness of waking from a nightmare.
As the smoke cleared and the candles flared back to their normal brightness, the whole room stared intently at the emerging figures of a small group of people standing in the center of the Great Hall, inside the fading blue glow of a runic diagram that seemed to have been etched into the flagstones.
Harry's eyes seemed to be drawn to the obvious and imposing leader of the group, an older man in a long black trench coat and boots, with a metal plate bolted to the side of his head connected via a loop of cable to some sort of red lens that replaced his right eye. When he spoke, his voice had a raspy quality that sized attention and sent shivers down Harry's spine.
"I am Inquisitor Lord Jeremias Agmyn, Watchful Revivificator of the Holy Locus." He raised his left arm, and an icon of a stylized "I" bisected by three parallel lines rose to hover above his wrist, spinning slowly to be easily visible from all directions. "I represent the Holy Orders of the Emperor's Inquisition."
His gaze fixed on Umbridge, and his voice took on a faint mocking quality. "Dolores Jane Umbridge, you stand to take up the position of High Inquisitor, Defender Against the Dark Arts. It falls to me to assess your suitability for this position, and, should you be found wanting, to pass judgment. In lack of more formal qualifications, your testing shall be via trial by combat."
As the apparent Inquisitor Lord finished his last sentence, he drew a sword from beneath his coat with a flourish, and with a twitch of his will a string of runes lit along the blade, giving it a hungry glow. His subordinates stepped back to create an arena around Inquisitor Agmyn and Umbridge as he leveled the sword in her direction. His voice was flat and steady, grinding out his words with the implacability of granite, as he seemed to swell with unseen power and menace. "Are you ready?"
Umbridge gaped at the man for a few seconds, her mouth moving soundlessly like a frog attempting to swallow a dragonfly, fumbled uselessly for her wand, then with a toadlike croak wilted to the floor.
Hermione set down her quill, which had paused in mid-air, and turned to Harry. "Well, he'll make an interesting DADA professor."
AN: This was just a plot bunny bouncing around in my head, what if Umbridge's ascension to the post of High Inquisitor attracts the attention of a very different kind of Inquisition than she was expecting….. I hope you enjoyed!