Magickal Mutants

The rain was pouring steadily down as the train pulled towards the Hogsmeade station. Steam whistled shrilly from the smokestack as the breaks were put on and the long chain of cars began to slow down.

Inside the last car, Harry, Ron and Hermione were all putting finishing touches on their Hogwart\'s robes, smoothing any wrinkles and tying their gold and scarlet ties around their necks. Harry had just finished tugging his tie straight when the train squeeked and came a stop.

All along the car\'s corridor they could hear the other compartment\'s doors opening and the familiar rush of new feet hurrying along the passageway. They sighed and, leaving their baggage to be transported to their rooms during the feast, left the car last.

Being sixth-years, they took the traditonal ride through what normally would have been horseless carraiges to the rest of the student body. But Harry saw the black carraiges pulled by bony, almost skeletal horses of black, with batlike wings just as dark in color as the rest of their bodies.

Thestrals, he thought, as the names of the strange looking creatures came back to him. He had begun seeing them only last year, after he had seen Cedric murdered at Voldemort\'s hands. They were harmless enough, especially during the Care of Magical Creatures class where HAgrid had showed them to class, or at least showed them to those who could see them. They had even helped him and his freinds get to the ministry last yeasrs when they realized that Voldemort was goinf to attempt to break into the Room of the Vale.

The carraiges pulled past the Hogwart\'s gates, tall black iron fences flanked at the gate by immense stone-carved winged boars. The wheels slipped slightly in a heavy, muddy puddle. Never before had the weather been this bad during entrance. Harry hoped the first year boats on the lake wouldn\'t capsize.

\"Harry, are you okay?\"

Harry turned to face the questioner. Hermione sat forward, her bushy brown hair brushed neatly back. Her eyes were bright as they looked at Harry with concern.

\"Yeah, I\'m fine\" he answered. Hermione scoffed at him silently, knowing full well that the statement was a lie, but desiding to leave the subject be until later. Ron was still busy stuffing himself with the treats Harry had bought on the train, oblivious that a question had even been asked.

The carraiges finally halted by the huge front doors of the castle. They all climbed out and ran as fast as they could for the doors. Vut even in the short distance from the carraiges to the doors, by the time they were inside they were all of them soaked and dripping from head to toe.

Professor McGonogal met them there, and with a quick wave of her wand hand, they were once again dry. Warmth from the Great Hall slowly seeped towards them from the open doors to the feast. grateful, they walked as slowly as their grumbling stomachs would allow, into the hall where they took their respective places at their House tables.

Harry was surprised, for once in six years Malfoy had not pulled some wise-crack statement. He looked towards the Slytherin table, and was surprised to see that Draco was not there. His eyes narrowed in concentration and confusion. What reason would Malfoy have not to be here? He didn\'t know why, but Harry immediatly went on guard. If Draco wasn\'t here, it was because his father, a Death Eater, knew that something was going to happen that he didn\'t want his son involved in.

Harry turned back around to face Ron and Hermione, who had seated themselves across the table from him. They saw his concerned looked, and both of them asked silently with their eyes. **What\'s wrong?**

Harry gestured back at the Slytherin table with a nod of his head, and then looked at them both and mouthed quietly, \"Malfoy\'s missing!\"

The pair looked where he indicated, and both got a sudden look of surprise upon their face.

\"Where is he?\" Hermione asked. Ron nodded and added a statement of his own.

\"If he\'s gone, what\'s been planned?\" he spoke for them all.

None of them had had a very good summer. after all that had happened last year, adding up to their major confrontation in the Ministry, and Harry\'s loss of Sirius, their homegoing had not been a cheerful one. And to top it all off, all summer long, there had been Muggle reports of strange phenominal crimes and thefts all throughout Britain. They knew full well that it was Voldemort and his gang of Death Eaters, attacking and killing helpless Muggles and any wizards that got in their way.

And now, after a summer of theses strange happenings, Draco was missing. They knew for a fact that he didn\'t get sick much, and with his father being who he was, head probably been helping Voldemort and the Deathy Eaters all summer long. His absence from school only perked their interest and their fear.

Their thoughts were interupted by a roar of applause at the Head Table as Dumbledore appeared from a side door and made his way to the Headmaster\'s chair. The Hall soon erupted into loud applause as he came to a halt. He rose his old frail hands in the air and the hall soon silenced.

\"Welcome, children, to yet another year at Hogwarts. In a moment, the feast will begin, but first there are a few start-of-term announcements to be made.\"

Harry looked around as the Headmaster walked. he looked back towards the entrance, and saw a shadow looking out at them from the edge of one of the huge wooden doors. As soon as Harry looked at whatever it was, it swirled and dissappeared.

Harry flashed around and tried to lock eyes with Dumbledore. He tried to relay silently his alarm and suddenf rustration. The Headmaster didn\'t look back at him, instead surveying the rest of the student assemblage.

The silence of the hall was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. All the students, new and old alike, sat listening in rapt attention. They all knew of the announcement he had made at the end of last year, when everyone had though him a lying old fraud. Now, with all the strange crimes, not even the Ministry could ignore Dumbledore now. He had been right when he\'d said the Dark Lord had returned.

Dumbledore nodded into the silence, and continued. \" As you all well know, this year has witnessed the return of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. My initial statements of this were ignored, and as a result, Voldemort...\"

At the sound of the Dark Lord\'s name, half the hall erupted into screams, and more than a dozen peopl clapped their hands over their ears as if to drwon out the fact that Dumbledore had said His name.

Dumbledore looked saddened for a moment, then he seemed to inwardly resolve something and loked back out amongst the frightened students.

\" If we are going to fight him and win, we must be able to speak his name fearlessly. As one of our own students put a few years ago, \'Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself\'. No statement could be more true. We must learn that VOLDEMORT...\"

He said the name loudly, and it echoed off of the stone walls and stained glass windows.

Harry, still uncomfortable about the shadow he\'d seen disappear into the darkened hall, kept looking around. He didn\'t know what had made him so jumpy, but then he\'d been nervous all summer long, expecting Vodlemort to find where the Dursley\'s lived on Number four and come after him.

Then he saw something that made his toes curl. As he was looking voer the Ravenclaw table, he saw movement underneath. Focusing his eyes, he looked harder between the press of shoe-shodden feet. A rat!!! And not just any rat. This was the nineteen-toed rat that he\'d seen every day for his first three years of magic schooling. Scabbers!! And, more recently known, Peter Pettigrew.

He stood up, and began crawling even as the crowd of students erupted into applause for the now finished speech. the students stood up, and Harry got a clearer view of the rat as cloaks lifted up oof the floor. It was carrying something in it\'s squeeky little teeth!!! It looked like a marble, but was glowing and throwing off bits of colored, yellowish light that were absorbed into the floor.

He shouted, trying to be heard over the din on clapping hands and screaming voices. It was to no avail.

Ron and Hermione saw him on the floor, and they, on the opposite side, could only kneel down to the floor and look. They both saw the rat, and it\'s spherical burden, and screamed, loud screams that were lost amid the din of applause.

Ron began crawling, under the table and towards the other end of the Ravanclaw table. He shouted to Harry as he passed him.

\"I\'ll chase him at you!! Try to catch him!!\"

Harry nodded, and as the roar of sound continued around him, he crouched even nearer to the floor. Ron crawled on further, past the rat, and when he was, he yelled and went after the rat on hands and knees,

\" Need not have us fear him. If we unite together, fight together, forgetting differences of blood of culture, he can be defeated.\"

Dumbledore sat down then, and seemed to notice the absence of the three yound wizards. He held his hand up for silence again, and the noise began to slowly die.

The rat, seeing Ron, had taken off in the opposite direction, directly into Harry\'s hands. He picked up the rat, unable to be bitten because the teeth were occupied with holding the glowing marble.

It was finally quiet enough to be heard over the few remaining whispers. Harry, nomatter how stupid he would seem, shouted at the top of his lungs.

\"Somebody help!!! We\'ve got Pettigrew!! He\'s come back!!\" The rat was squirming in his hands, nearly excaping, scratching deep furrows in his hands as he fought to escape. Harry yelled in pain as one of the swiped ripped into his fingers.

Dumbledore, Hagrid, McGonogal and Flitwick were all trying to run at the table, Flitwick being left behind by the taller, faster faculty. Both Dumbledore and McGonogal had their wands out, and were preparing to incantate.

Apparently, Pettifrew noticed this, and with a flisk of his little rodent head, flung the marble into the air, amist the still standing students and he was struck by the spells of both wands, and fell limp in Harry\'s grip.

Dumbledore and McGonogal reached him, and took the rat from him. Dumbledore, with a flick of his wand, brought forth from its tip what looked like ten feet of thin hemp rope, that wound themselves around and around the rat until all he was was a cacoon of hempline with a rat nose sticking from the end.

Harry scrambled back to the floor, looking for the glowing marble that had flung from Pettigrew\'s teeth. He didn\'t know where it had landed or rolled off to, and apparently none of the other students had seen it and were still staring open mouthed at Dumdore holding a rat tied up with ten feet of string.

Ron and Hermione were still on their knees, helping Harry to look for the flung marble. Everyone else was standing up. McGonogal had even gotten down on the floor to help them look, and Flitwick only had to walk along the table and he could see under it.

Harry with a sudden premonition, looked back up at the entrance, and gasped at what he saw.

McGonogal heard the gasp and looked up, and nearly screamed as she saw what Harry had seen.

A Death Eater, wrapped in swirling black robes and face completely hidden by a thick hood. The front doors of the hall were open, and the wet, rain-swirled wind was blowing in and making the Death Eater\'s robes billow.

McGonogal stood up, beginning a disarming spell.

\"EXPELIAR---!!!\" she began.

But before the spell could be finished, the Death Eater had raised his own wand and without a sound, flung McGonogal through the air and into the cobbled stone wall, where she slumped to the floor, unconcious.

Dumbledore had also raised his own wand, but the Death Eater flung it down before any spell could be finished. The wand flew through the air, and the Death Eater caught it midair, and put it in his robes. He raised his own wand again, and began a soft incantation that Harry couldn\'t hear.

As he finished the barely audible words, he raised the wand and flicked it towards the Ravenclaw table before swirling back out through the door.

Flitwick was running after him, raising his own wand and flinging curses and spells down the corridor. Harry looked back up at the Ravenclaw table, where the Death Eaters spell had landed.

One of the glasses of pumpkin juice was glowing with a pulsating light. Students with properly fearful feelings began backing away from it, and nearly began running as the glass goblet began to shake violently, spilling droplets of the pulpy pumpkin juice over the wooden tabletop.

Harry had a sudden premonition, then scoffed himself. He\'d been having premonitions ever since he\'d walked through the doors to the Feast hall. But a fear welled up in him as he watched the glass begin to shake more and more, until at last the goblet tipped over, spilling what was left of its contents on the table, and sending the marble rolling down one of the grooves of the table.

\"RUN!!!!\" he shouted at the top of his lungs, and at this, the entire assemblage began running towards the exit. theyw ere going so fast that there was a jam, and the flow of students slowed to a trickle as each person searched to save themselves.

The proffesors were all of them moving along the periphery of the mob, shouting in an attempt to nullify the sudden panic caused by Harry\'s shout. Their voices were drowned in the din of voices.

Harry, who had begun rushing to the doors as soon as he\'d thrown out the warning, had tried in vain to reach the doors, but in his rush and those of others, he had been knocked to the floor. Why did he have to sit in the front? He held up his arms in an attempt to shield himself from the rush on oncoming, stamping feet. He heard yells from other students who had been knocked down as he had. He recognized the high pitched squeaks of both Hermione and Ginny, and the familiar cockney cursing of Ron, as well as the slightly slurred speech of Seamus and Neville.

The rush had begun again as more people cleared through the door, but Harry was kept pinned to the stone floor as more feet ran past him.

He looked back towards the Ravenclaw table, and saw the marble where it had rolled to a stop beside a large plate of sheperd\'s pie. It flashes had changed! Now, instead of the steady, almost heartbeat like rhythm of golden light, it was pulsating faster. It reminded Harry of the blades of helicopters he\'d seen as a child. The light had changed, and was now throwing sparks of every hue down onto the table, where they ignited the dried wood and unused cloth napkins. The whole of the upper end of the table was nearly engulfed in flames.

Harry once again had a feeling to run, but he still couldn\'t shove his way up through the river of feet. Instead, he wrapped his cloak around him, still using his arms to block the press of legs. Still looking at the marble, he tried to inch his way along the floor.

The marble was going faster and faster, until in a sudden blink of an eye, all the pulsating light stopped.

Harry was confused. What the hell? Whose cheap idea of a trick was this? Especially with all the scares.....

Before his thought could be finished, the marble exploded. The end of the table was splintered up twenty feet into the air, and a violent circle of light flashed outward in a horizontal line. It looked like a sideways version of an atom bomb.

Seeing the way the light was moving, Harry stayed down, and shouted it to the crowd.

\"Stay down!! Don\'t let it hit you!!\" but his voice was as drowned in the cacophony as the proffesors\' had been.

Harry watched in vain as his warning went unheard and unheeded. He watched as the light, pulsating and bright, flew through the air hitting his fellow students. As each one was hit, they cried out and fell to the floor, lying lifeless and still upon the cold stone.

Harry\'s neck tingled as the light passed over him, but did not touch him. He felt strangely relieved and sad at the same time, knowing that he\'d had been spared whatever curse it had been, but sad that those who had been hit were now dead. Or at least he though so.

Then, as the light hit the walls, it rebounded, and the bits flung themselves through the air. Harry, in ad esperate attempt to hide himself, threw his cloak around him. The shattered bits of light hit him, and he felt pain flow like an electric buzz through his entire body. He tried to move, but he found himself unable to move, paralyzed and stuck where he was. The only thing he could move were his eyes, and as he looked around the room, stunned and helpless, the edges of his vision went black, and the colors began to shimmer and fade, and he was sucked into oblivion.