One week into fifth year, in the small hours of Monday morning, Lavender Brown had a very strange dream.
In the dream, Lavender saw an unfamiliar room, full of peeling paint and broken furniture. A large starry cage floated in midair like a parody of a chandelier; inside was a horrid, gargantuan snake, coiling restlessly, its tongue tasting the air. To one side of the cage, two men stood facing each other, wands raised.
Lavender had never seen the man with vivid red eyes before; his eyes were much larger than human proportions warranted, with vertical pupils like the snake's, and they stood out against his skull-white skin. Furthermore, the man had two deep pits where his nose ought to have been, adding to his skull-like appearance.
The other man Lavender recognized immediately as Professor Snape. At first, Lavender felt a surge of unexpected relief; Snape was the only familiar fixture of the strange surroundings, and in comparison with the snake and the red-eyed man, he felt like a beacon of safety.
But something was wrong. Snape wasn't sneering or snarling; instead, he was watching the man as though he had seen Death itself lurking in his face. As Lavender watched, the strange man's wand slashed through the air. The enchanted cage with the snake inside it rolled down to cover Snape. A twisted hiss broke from the red-eyed man's lips, and as if in obedience, the snake's mouth opened wide. Snape's yell turned into a terrible scream as the serpent unfolded its long fangs. The scream echoed on and on; the fangs bit into Snape's neck. Snape fell to the floor.
"I regret it," said the red-eyed man, but his high, cold voice didn't sound as though he were sorry about anything. He left the room, taking with him the snake in its cage. Snape slumped sideways, and everything went dark.
Into the darkness, Lavender heard her own voice, small and shaken, asking, "When will this happen?"
As though in response, another shout rang through her mind; she recognized the voice as Harry Potter. "HAGRID, NO! HAGRID, COME BACK! HAGRID! HAGRID!"
As Harry shouted Hagrid's name for the last time, Lavender jerked awake. She scrabbled under the bed for her wand, the cool wood familiar in her hand."Lumos,"she whispered, her voice wobbling slightly.
The wandlight revealed the quiet drapes of her four-poster. Lavender threw them back. The Gryffindor girls' dormitory lay silent before her in the predawn. Parvati rolled over. Hermione murmured something about dogs, or was it logs? There were no snakes in sight; no red-eyed men who spoke to them; no one bleeding on the floor. Lavender closed her eyes again, but she could still see Snape collapsing when she did that, so she opened them again. She wished the Gryffindor beds hadn't had red drapes.
There was no chance that Lavender was going to be able to go back to sleep right away, so she got out her dream journal for Professor Trelawney and wrote down everything that she had seen and heard. Once that was done, she looked back over the week of dreams she'd already recorded. In comparison with this one, all of them felt vague and faint, like a ghost beside a living body. Lavender didn't need Trelawney to tell her that this had been no mere dream. What she had just seen had come from outside herself, and it had had the insistence of a message.
Lavender put the journal away and stared up at the bed's canopy, unwilling to let her wand go out yet. Her heart was racing, both from fear and from a strange feeling of urgency. Lavender had often daydreamed about having knowledge of the future simply come to her, instead of having to try to wrestle knowledge from uncooperative omens in Divination class. Now that this had happened, however, it unsettled her deeply. When she was the one trying to see what the future held, the future was small and controllable, a thing to be studied. A future that came to her without her looking for it, however, could no longer be fully within her grasp. Lavender supposed that the things she had tried to predict in the past had not been in her command, either, but somehow seeing this vision was more unnerving than trusting her Divination skill.
It didn't help, of course, that its contents were so horrifying. Lavender had no liking for Snape, whose teaching was usually careless of his students' feelings; but even if she had hated him with the strongest hatred in the world, she could not have wished such a terrible fate upon him. She had always been afraid of snakes, and the snake she had just seen made all the others she had ever met look like mere earthworms.
Why did I have to see that?Lavender wondered, but she already had a horrible feeling about why it might be. One didn't show someone exactly when and how people would be in mortal danger unless one wanted the watcher to do something about it. But what could Lavender do? She had no Healer training, no expertise in snakes, no ability to fight skilled murderers… and that red-eyed man was clearly a powerful wizard, to control snakes. Very powerful and very cruel, by what he had commanded that snake to do. There was only one wizard Lavender could imagine who would fit what she had seen…
No. She wasn't going to think about that right now. Lavender squeezed her eyes shut and took deep breaths until she stopped feeling sick.Think practical,she thought;think small. He was gone at the end, and the snake was, too. The important thing is to learn what to do for a snakebite.
The thought calmed her, and with the calm, a person came to mind. Professor Grubbly-Plank. She taught Care of Magical Creatures; she would know what to do about snakebites. Lavender resolved to ask her at breakfast.