Other than losing all privileges to wander Manhattan without an adult, the rest of winter break had gone pretty well. Tony had just shaken his head at the kids getting into some other bit of chaos, had JARVIS update the Stark Industries security profiles to keep an eye out for signs of "Dr. Bighead," and flown out to handle a small armed standoff in Central America. He was back in time for Christmas.
Harry and Dean had flown back to London with the Grangers a couple of days before school started up. Well, Pepper had told Tony that's what was happening and faked it up in the system using the now-familiar process worked out with the Masters, while the five of them just stepped through from the New York sanctum to the London one. Master Kaecilius made a slightly negative comment about allowing parents to just use his sanctum as a highway, but didn't forbid it. Harry was slightly worried that increased SHIELD scrutiny should keep him taking the much slower route, but didn't bring it up if his aunt wasn't worried about it.
The kids honestly assumed that the Masters must have some kind of ongoing magic around traveling via portals that kept it from immediately being electronically flagged. The sorcerers used the internet, after all, and Dr. Bighead had seemed to think the world governments should be on top of that kind of thing. Or maybe his increased intelligence had just come with similarly-increased paranoia.
They picked up the Patils in Kamar-Taj, and spent a bit of time showing off for Master Rama what they'd been practicing. He gave them some pointers on things to improve and what they needed to self-study next. Then they went to the Grangers' to have a friends hangout and movie marathon, where Harry finally got to see the Kingo movies Parvati had been going on about.
Their friendship was still tense, but it was nice to be able to just hang out like old times.
And then they were right back to school in snowy Vanaheim. Harry was thrilled that he didn't have to be out in the winter wonderland doing Wood's constant quidditch practice, but could tell that Ginny was getting frustrated that since she did, it was cutting into her last few weeks of dating Harry before it would become Hermione's turn.
For some reason, most of their friends expected that to be the practical end of the "everyone gets to date Harry" experiment. Harry didn't see it, but was at least pretty happy about the amount of time he got to go about his business without Ginny attached to him like a pilot fish.
Harry's barely-concealed joy at having the quidditch practice time to himself was probably also part of Ginny's frustration. She couldn't even complain too much, because he was still graciously letting her borrow his broom.
The girls had, either accidentally or through some insight into the quidditch schedule, at least set it up so the next date swap was after the big Gryffindor vs. Ravenclaw match. Ginny wouldn't get the Hogsmeade weekend close to Valentine's Day the week after (not that she could even go to Hogsmeade), but at least she'd get Harry cheering for her as her boyfriend for her second quidditch match of the year.
Harry still thought it was a little weird that the teams only played three times a year. It wasn't like there was a ton else going on for entertainment, and the teams were practicing all the time anyway. They probably could have played several matches against each house. If he understood Earth school sports correctly, despite his lack of little league experience, they'd basically play a match every week or so for much of the school year.
For all that it was cold, this quidditch match was a lot nicer to watch than the last one. It wasn't pouring down rain, Ron and Harry were chatting amiably, and he'd done a careful inspection to make sure that Sirius hadn't sneaked in to watch again. Which was why he was surprised to see a group of Mindless Ones entering the field just as Ginny was making a break for the snitch.
Some of them were much burlier than the normally-lanky creatures from the Dark Dimension.
Ron had seen them too and asked, "Slytherin quidditch team?"
Harry nodded, "Slytherin quidditch team."
To the Slytherins' credit, they had actually put in effort on whatever skinlike gray coveralls they were wearing, and had lit their wands the right shade of red as they held them in front of their faces. It would have been a pretty cool convention cosplay group, or set of themed Halloween costumes.
But it wasn't very good for their vision, to be holding lit wands in their faces like that.
Draco almost managed to deflect the body bind spells Ron and Harry were throwing out, as the rest of the Slytherins went down first, wrapped in shimmering teal energy bands. From up above, Lee Jordan announced, "And Ginny Weasley gets the snitch again. Another nail-biter, friends, but Gryffindor wins it! And it looks like a bunch of wannabe Dark Dimension entities are down on the field. I assume Potter and Weasley couldn't tell the difference, because they were just as mindless."
"That's enough, Jordan," McGonagall took over the announcer's podium. "Whoever that is down there is losing points and getting detention. What a poorly-considered prank! Oh, and, yes, congratulations to both teams for a game well-played."
Harry was glad they hadn't been real Mindless Ones. Despite his continuing meditation sessions with Lupin, his astral projection still wasn't succeeding. He could get into a meditative state, quickly and sometimes with Lupin trying to distract him, but he couldn't quite figure out the step to actually project his consciousness from his body. At that stage, all he was really good at was making himself an easier target in a fight, though Lupin had some hope that the focus might make it harder for the thought-draining beings to affect him, maybe even to sense him.
He got done cleaning up faster than the rest of the team, who'd actually been sweating, but waited around at the exit to the stadium to do his duty and walk Ginny back to the dorms. He was surprised when Cho Chang, Ravenclaw's seeker, walked out alone without her own team, and gave him a rueful smile. "I'd thought I'd be better off not havin' to fly against you, this year. But your girlfriend's just as tough."
"She's only my girlfriend until tomorrow," he assured her, with what he hoped was a winning smile. Maybe it was just that she was a year more mature than his close friends, or how cute the hybrid Scottish/Chinese accent was on her, but Harry couldn't help but think that Cho was one of the prettiest girls at the school.
"What?" Cho raised an eyebrow.
"We're doing a whole weird thing where we rotate dates so we each get a chance to date everyone in the study group," he explained, ruffling a hand through his hair in annoyance. "It wasn't my idea."
"So you're not spoken for at Hogsmeade next Sunday?" she asked.
"Not if you want to go with me?" he offered, without thinking.
"Tis a date, Potts," she agreed with a beautiful smile, before breaking off to join a couple members of her team that were walking out.
Harry didn't even realize that the next weekend was supposed to be Hermione's turn with him until he was halfway back to the castle. He'd also been ignoring Ginny the whole walk, though she didn't seem to notice as she happily narrated her game success. He winced and started wondering how he was going to fix it.
He still hadn't figured it out by the time the team's victory party was winding down that evening, and Ginny had somehow finagled them to be sitting in a private location. Well, at least one where everyone else around them was focused on another conversation and not paying much attention. She gave him a pained smile and asked, "It's not going to happen, is it? Us being together?"
"I don't know, Gin," he began, then admitted, "I don't think so." He didn't feel up to articulating that, while he hadn't really figured out who he wanted to date, his second-tier friend's starstruck little sister wasn't it. It didn't help that they'd been raised so differently, and didn't have much in common or even to talk about. He didn't want to give her the false hope that things might change in the future.
"Can I…?"" she asked, leaning in for what was probably her goodbye kiss.
He let her. He didn't know what it was like for her, but for him it wasn't much different than kissing Lavender. It wasn't bad, but it didn't totally realign his feelings about how compatible they were.
She nodded after a moment and got up, taking his hand and leading him over to where Hermione was sitting, trying to work on her Cultural Studies essay while still showing willing to be at the party. "I'll let you two get started early," the young redhead told her, then let go of his hand and walked back over to where the rest of the quidditch team was still carrying on loudly.
"That good, huh?" Hermione asked him, as he took a tentative seat at her study table.
He shrugged. "Everyone seems to think we're… what's the word… inevitable."
"I know…" she glanced down a little shyly before covering with, "I don't know why they think that."
Having missed any meaning to the glance as he agonized over how to explain, he rolled on with, "Right? I was reading something about how kids that meet too early will never work out romantically, because their brains just mark them as siblings, you know?"
"I think that's only kids that were raised together from a very young age," Hermione corrected, having read something similar.
Harry just shrugged again. There was a moment of tense silence against the general backdrop of conversational noise. Upwards of seventy kids in an enclosed room could get loud, even without a good source of party music. He plucked up his Gryffindor courage and just said, "I… uh… I kind of accidentally invited someone else to Hogsmeade next Sunday?"
"Oh?" she asked, shocked by how the conversation had gone. It wasn't even a dangerous exclamation, just a genuinely surprised one.
"Sorry? It just popped up, and I wasn't thinking about schedules or anything." He tried to figure out what she was thinking, but whatever Soul Stone-powered empathy he could occasionally tap into had chosen this moment in particular to let him try to dig his way out of his own hole. Without an immediate reaction, he just said, "We could probably get together to go see Siri… uh, the dog… in the afternoon?"
"Yeah… okay," she said, a little absently. "Maybe so. If your date doesn't run long, or anything." She glanced around and her hands, outside of her conscious control, began to gather her books and supplies. "You know. I think I'm almost done with this essay, but I need somewhere quieter so I'm just going to finish in my room." She was off before he could even register that something was wrong.
He was starting to figure it out when all the girls in the study group seemed quietly, implicitly upset with him over the next few days.
"We tried to warn them," Dean commiserated the morning of the Hogsmeade trip. "We should have told them no instead of letting them push us out of the room."
"At least Ron and Lavender got something out of the deal," Harry nodded. Dean's recent period of "dating" Lavender hadn't put him in a great mood about the whole rotation, since she was still clearly hung up on Ron and only putting in a token investment to the other options.
"Maybe my set with Parvati will go better than yours did," Dean nodded. "I'll run interference. You better go see if you can get in a carriage with Cho?"
"Thanks, man," Harry nodded, as they split up at the school door. While Dean made for the rest of the study group, Harry headed to find the Ravenclaws in their helhest-driven carriages. "Hey, Cho?" he said, casually, finding them without too much trouble. They were in the coach with the giggling as he approached.
"Hi, Harry!" she gave him a beautiful smile that dispelled a lot of his worries from the last week. "These are my friends Marietta and Eddie. I thought we could all share a carriage an' then wander wherever once we get there?"
Harry nodded his agreement, pulling himself up and making polite greetings with the two other Ravenclaw students he'd obviously seen around but had never had an occasion to talk to, since they were a year above him. Eddie Carmichael turned out to be the top of his year, much as Hermione was for Harry's. Marietta Edgecombe was Cho's best friend, whose family worked with the Ministry on something related to transportation.
He didn't have much time to learn about them, but at least it made the small talk a little less awkward shoved in a carriage with two total strangers and one almost-stranger. "Huh. Where are all the shops?" he asked, as they pulled into sight of the town square.
Maybe it was just that winter was a harder time, but there seemed to be fewer than half the stalls they'd had on his previous two trips. Marietta explained, "Marauders. Lots of rumors about bandits and brigands roaming around. The train track is an easy thing for them to follow, too. I think people were probably afraid to travel here, in case they just got robbed."
"Wow. I know one of my friends, Lavender, mentioned that people were worried about that. But already?" Harry asked. "Shouldn't someone be doing something?"
Eddie was the one who shook his head at that and explained, "They're doing their best, but nobody thinks anyone will actually come this way. Hogwarts has more wizards in any one place than anywhere else in the world."
"Except maybe the Ministry," Marietta corrected.
"Probably even the Ministry," Eddie corrected back. "Around forty kids come through here every year. The most trained wizards there could be in the world would be on the order of four thousand. Probably a lot less, with the wars and people that go to Midgard after school. And we've got about three hundred of them. It has to be over ten percent."
"And a lot of the rest work for the Ministry!" Marietta argued back. "Though I guess most of them are pretty spread out working in various places," she relented. "Let's just say that the Ministry might have more wizards than Hogwarts, but Hogwarts has more in one place?"
"Agreed," Eddie nodded. "So, yeah, I'm not worried. You two have fun on your date. Come on, Mar," he said, hopping out of the coach as it had rolled to a stop at the edge of town.
"And now I've the famous Mr. Potts all to myself," Cho smiled. "Honestly, you're doin' me a favor, not havin' t'listen to those two argue all day."
"Are they not together?" Harry asked, remembering to do the gentlemanly thing and offer Cho a hand out of the coach.
"Hah! Even you see it, right?" she laughed. "They claim they're not… but…"
Trying not to be reminded about the pairing that his own friends thought everyone could see but the couple involved, Harry asked, "What do you want to check out first?"
The date through Hogsmeade was pretty sedate. They checked out the few stalls that were there. They tried to stay on the opposite side of the square from Harry's study group to keep it from being weird. They talked about interests.
Cho wasn't a big movie buff, and a lot of what she had seen was Chinese cinema that hadn't made it to the US. He'd maybe seen a couple of the really big productions that got a global release. She was really into soccer, and that was part of why she'd been so interested in playing quidditch, and Harry didn't know a ton about that. Almost at a loss, Harry mentioned video games.
It turned out that Cho was a real-time strategy and multiplayer online battle arena fiend. In addition to several Chinese-developed RTSes and MOBAs that he was vaguely aware of, she'd played several he had tried. By the time they were talking about the Starcraft scene in China, they'd gotten a booth in the tavern and were having an excited conversation with big hand gestures indicating troop movements and resource placement. He hadn't gotten around to trying the newly-released League of Legends the previous summers, but was seriously considering giving it a chance on his next break based on her loving testimonial.
The date seemed to be going pretty well. At least until the screaming started.
Before they could try to figure out what was going on, several of the school's prefects were entering the inn and yelling orders.
Gemma Farley, who they'd had as Snape's substitute, commanded, "Slytherins! Get outside and bring in any valuables from the stalls! Malfoy, get your muscle carrying anything large, right? Marauders incoming. A lot of them. Make it quick!"
Penny Clearwater, Ravenclaw prefect and Percy's girlfriend, separated from the eldest Weasley and ordered, "Apprentice healers form up! Anyone with a good summoning spell get ready to pull back casualties to the healers. Everyone else good at transfiguration, start reinforcing the inn. Oh, and conjurers, start making helmets and armor for the defenders that don't have them."
And Percy, as unclear as anyone how he'd wound up in position to lead an armed defense, simply said, "Everyone that wants to fight, come with me."
"No!" Cho said, as Harry didn't even hesitate to stand. Grabbing his hand she insisted, "The upper-years and professors'll handle it. You'll get yourself killed!"
"Haven't yet," he shrugged, dislodging his hand. "Like Eddie said, we've got the most wizards. If they're attacking here," he chanced a glance out of the window before someone began to transfigure it into solid wall and glimpsed a huge wave of movement outside of town, "they think they have the numbers. You could come?"
She shook her head sadly, and Harry realized the reason she was still playing video games when he was mostly over them probably had a lot to do with not getting that kind of thrill in real life. "I'll help in here," she said, a little lamely.
Nearby, Cedric Diggory, the Hufflepuff seeker, was asking some of his own friends, "Are we going to let Gryffindor go out there alone?" He managed to guilt several of the upper-years from his house into joining the crowd heading out.
One last glance at his date that had been going so well and Harry was out the door with them. Someone conjured a helmet for him, fortunately weaving itself around his glasses. One thing movies and video games didn't really stress was head protection that could conceal actor faces, but he was glad to have it. Though without hair colors to go by, it took him a moment to track down the rest of the study group, similarly adorned in whatever the nearest conjurer thought was an appropriate Vanaheim-style helmet.
"No Cho?" Dean asked, quietly. He'd been assuming, as Harry had, that she was planning to join the Masters after she graduated. She was Master Wong's cousin, after all.
Harry shrugged and just said, "Gryffindor pride."
Hermione, forming into the battle line gave a little smirk and couldn't help but mention, "Padma made it."
Beside her, their captive Ravenclaw said, "You're all going to get me killed."
As the square cleared of students and valuables behind them, the inn being transfigured into a fortress, Harry had to admit she might be right. Rushing down the train tracks toward the town was more people than Harry had seen in one place on Vanaheim. It had to be at least a few hundred brigands: enough to think they might overwhelm so many wizards.
On their own side, they had virtually every member of Gryffindor third year and up. They had the other upperclassmen that Cedric had managed to get to join the line. And they had the nonmagical townsfolk that had hastily armed themselves with shields and spears or swords, nodding in thanks as they received conjured armor and helms. There were maybe a hundred people formed up for battle on their side.
There probably should have been more adult supervision of the trip. None of the professors were in evidence. Harry figured that, certainly, they'd be along any minute except… "Are those the same trolls and jotun from first year?" he boggled, noticing a smaller horde of orange-furred warriors, a blue-skinned giant, and a few-dozen of the more-dangerous-looking brigands split off to run into the castle gate (open for the field trip).
"Guess they're still mad about Dumbledore trapping them in a desert for months," Ron figured.
"Wish we had that chess set," Harry agreed. That group had caused a problem for the whole school in their Halloween assault. Would they have more luck with additional aid and most of the students in the town?
And then the screaming main mass of the marauders was into town. Someone smart had transfigured picket spikes facing out, and small walls for the wizards to mass behind, before falling back into the tavern, which limited how quickly the assailants could come. But there were a lot of them, and many weren't even vaguely human. Who knew what resistances and weird abilities the various aliens had?
Wizarding war was chaos.
In theory, magic was a tremendous force multiplier. But the other side had a tremendous force. The battle was a few dozen half-trained wizards with no real experience in mass combat and a similar number of locals defending their homes versus hundreds of marauders that only had low-tech weapons but had been planning for fighting against magic.
The first marauder lines went down fast. So did the second. But then the third crashed into the impromptu barricades and started to try to flank through the town. Some of the students in the tavern seemed to be shooting at marauders trying to sneak around the back of the square, at least. But the enemy's large kite shields were annoyingly good against magical fire. And they'd brought archers, for all that it was hard for them to get a clear shot through the village at the defenders.
Harry's group was surprisingly effective. They'd been training together for years, after all. Diggory was also a competent field leader, managing his Hufflepuffs' natural tendency to work together. Percy was more of a bureaucrat, but he knew it: as the functional general of the students, Harry could hear him ordering other kids to follow the leads of the two groups that were cohering against the onslaught.
There would be time later to think about whether the enemies they were knocking down with blasts of orange magical light were people they'd killed.
After a few minutes, they thought they might hold out indefinitely. They were managing to knock down anyone that got close. The townsfolk had formed a shield wall to hold back the attackers while their spellcasters rained fire. But then they started to get tired, and defenders started to fall. First it was townsfolk, taking a spear to the shoulder or a felling mace blow to the head. Calls of "Healer!" prompted the downed warriors to get yanked back toward the tavern wrapped in teal light.
But even though they were triaged and likely to be saved by the magical healing, they left a hole in the line.
With their melee line faltering, Harry's group got tunnel vision on shooting hard at anyone that looked like they might knock out another protector, whips of light snagging axes before they could hew shields and polearms before they could reach over. Thus, everyone was surprised when Ron yelled, "On the roof!" and was suddenly diving through the air in front of Parvati, trying to throw up a shield spell against the sniper that had climbed up onto a house and was shooting down at them.
Ron's shield spell still wasn't very good. It shattered. He took the arrow in his chest that might have landed in Parvati's neck. Harry got his own shield up to catch a second arrow that might have hit Hermione and it held. Dean blasted the sniper off of the roof with an overpowered burst of orange.
"Heroes," Ron coughed out with a smile as the light of the summoning spell yanked him back to triage.
Harry wasn't so sure. Now that one of them had fallen, his friends were showing signs of panic. Seamus and Lavender looked like they wanted to break to run and check on Ron. Padma, who barely wanted to be there in the first place, had just seen her sister almost die. Dean was stone-faced at the realization that he'd very likely had to just kill a man to save his friends. Hermione and Parvati were doing pretty well, considering that they'd both nearly been shot with arrows.
Neville was surprisingly solid. "Form back up!" he yelled. "Harry, keep with the shields? Dean, blast any more archers on the roofs."
"You got it, Nev," Harry nodded, impressed. He'd have expected the normally-timid boy to have faltered first, but everyone, it turned out, was in Gryffindor for a reason.
The defenders were being ground down more slowly, now that the fight was real and everyone knew what to look for. They were taking out half a dozen marauders for every student whisked off to the healers. But they were getting tired, morale was flagging, and the mass of fresh attackers seemed infinite from what they could see between the houses.
"Why do they keep coming?" Harry yelled in frustration as he held his shield against the sustained fire from a pair of archers that Dean was trying to blast.
"They must have risked everything for this assault," Percy yelled from somewhere nearby. "They have to take the town and then the castle. If we can thwart them, we can break them!" He was clearly trying an inspiring speech. It wasn't very effective, coupled with the realization that the marauders weren't just going to give up and run away any time soon.
Things continued to deteriorate. Seamus and Parvati had to sit, too exhausted by the constant spellcasting to keep going. One of the Weasley twins would have lost an ear to an arrow if he hadn't been wearing a helmet, instead getting a deep gouge scored across the conjured material as the missile glanced off and dealt Percy a shallow wound as he stood behind his brothers. Cedric's team was fully focused on holding their left flank, where the marauders had finally cleared the transfigured barricades. More and more of the townsfolk were going down, almost beyond their ability to hold the front line.
And, in hindsight, it had only been a few minutes.
"Why don't any of the adults come to Hogsmeade?" Harry complained, rhetorically. It was too late now, to have a combat-capable teacher or two as support. Even if the staff was doing well at the castle, they didn't seem to be doing so well that they'd be able to get to Hogsmeade before it fell.
But, almost as if his annoyance had worked a summoning, Harry heard a loud barking and caught a black blur in his peripheral vision, as an enormous dog tackled an alien marauder with mauve skin that had sneaked far around the flank and was coming for Percy from behind. In moments, Sirius had twisted back into his human form, still shabby-looking but perhaps with only the natural level of madness in his eyes for a former Gryffindor charging an army.
"I need a wand!" the animagus yelled, looking over and sighing with relief when he spotted Harry's distinctive glasses through the press. "Ah, there's one!" he announced, snatching up the focus of one of the kids who'd dropped it before being pulled off to the healers. "I'll give it back after! Not a good match anyway," he continued talking while firing off a few blasts of turquoise energy and not seeming to love the resonance of the device. But it got the job done: two larger attackers who'd been charging the line were suddenly hanging upside down in midair, dangling by one ankle several feet off the ground.
For all that he was probably long out of practice, the addition of a fully-combat-trained adult wizard began to make an immediate difference. In one moment, he was shoring up the barricades and having them sprout nasty transfigured spikes toward the enemies. In the next he was wrapping enemies in chains of magic and using them to obstruct their allies. The ripple of realization that presumed-murderer Sirius Black was on the scene was followed by relief that the maniac seemed to be on their side.
"Nobody told me it would be a proper brawl," he said while walking over to support Harry's team, as if it was the most casual thing in the world. "Good to see you, pup! Nice shielding, you're improving."
"This was probably not what my aunt meant about getting into a spell duel with Sirius Black outside of the school grounds," Harry tossed back. "But I'll take it."
"But what about all these people?" Hermione warned. "If just being at the quidditch match was enough before…"
Sure enough, the fairly bright late winter day was starting to darken. There weren't even clouds, it was just like the light from the sun was dimming. Within a minute, they started to feel more than hear the arrival of the Mindless Ones, twisting into Vanaheim somewhere deeper in the village, and bringing the mental pall of their presence with them. Harry furiously ran through his meditation exercises so he could keep functioning.
"We're barely holding out against the marauders!" Harry warned him. "If they get here…"
"Hah! Marauders? They aren't worthy of the name!" Sirius barked, still all bravado. "Let me tell you about one of your dad and my favorite tactics. We called it, 'Let's you and him fight!'" With that, he went sprinting towards the Mindless Ones that were arriving around the buildings, toward a gap on the right flank where the attackers didn't want to mess with them either. "Hey, you one-eyed assholes! See if you can catch me!"
And with that taunt, he dropped back into dog form and charged right into the mass of the enemy army, dodging confused attackers and getting lost in the loose press of bodies extending out of town. Well, he was lost to physical sight, but the Mindless Ones turned their crimson gaze unerringly toward him, and began to stride forward into the ranks of enemy troops.
The students—who'd dealt with the creatures a couple of times already—fared much better than the unprepared brigands. An entire sea of warriors with the morale to throw themselves against wizards hoping for victory weren't actually prepared for seemingly-invincible creatures of pure dread sinking like a knife into their formation.
With a slow-rolling scream of horror, the marauder army began to break and run back into the foothills from which they'd emerged. All thought of victory was drowned in traumatic memories.
There were a few hardier attackers who didn't break, but they were easy enough to put down that most chose to follow the crowd rather than continue to stand against the now-numerically-superior defenders of Hogsmeade. The twins were sending the runners off with a whole host of embarrassing prank spells latching onto them.
As soon as it was clear that they'd basically won, Harry cautioned everyone, "You might want to sit. The adrenaline crash sucks." He demonstrated by sprawling on the uncomfortable cobbles of the Hogsmeade square.
Quite a few of the students were taking his advice. He watched everyone start to feel the post-combat exhaustion set in. With it, a whole host of thoughts washed across Hermione's face before she finally settled on, "Think you can get back to your date with Cho?"
Harry shrugged, recalling back to five minutes and a lifetime earlier how she had been too afraid to back him up in a fight. "Maybe. I don't know whether that's going to be a thing. We'll see."
"Oh?" she nodded, a weirdly-relieved look settling in as she relaxed a little more. "Yeah, I guess we will." Changing subjects, she said, "I hope Sirius is okay."
"I expect he is," Harry nodded. From their vantage point, they could make out the glow of red eyes still chasing something around the school's walls. "I hope the professors…"
"I think they've got it," Hermione agreed, as they noticed a few orange-furred trolls rushing out of the school gates, pursued by conjured stone golems reminiscent of the chess set that had trapped them in as guardians of the Soul Stone. Finally realizing they were sprawled on cobbles, she announced, "We should have found a more comfortable place to sit."
Coming from out of the tavern supported by Padma, Ron Weasley—torso wrapped in conjured bandages—complained, "Blimey. Is it over already? I was hoping to get some more shots in." That made him realize, "Hey… did anyone see where I dropped my wand?"