There was smoke in the air from the burning tents in the camps' centre. It drifted, thick and choking over them and Harry had to duck beneath it to breath and see. People were running all around him in every direction, screaming, shouting and crying.
Flashes of light cast eerie shadows against the veil of smoke and the dull echo of explosions rang over the roar of the flames. Somewhere in the chaos Hermione had lost her grip on his arm, but he could still hear her shouting at them to run to the trees he could glimpse across the next few lines of tents.
Something hit him hard in the side of the head and with a flash of white light everything vanished.
Harry's face was warm. Too warm. It was uncomfortable and he immediately tried to shift away from the heat. A wet, sticky something adhered his cheek to his shoulder, but it broke when he flinched back from the heat.
His glasses were still on his face. Harry was so surprised he could see he almost didn't notice the flames that were engulfing the line of tents no more than a few metres from him. He scrambled to his feet. Ron and Hermione were gone, but he hoped they had made it to the trees and were safe.
What caused this?
He doubted the fire had started naturally. It seemed unlikely in a camp full of magic users that a simple fire could cause so much damage and, being himself, he imagined there was probably a more sinister reason. This time, he hoped, it had nothing to do with either Voldemort or dementors. He had had enough of them for a lifetime.
Maybe a dragon, he decided. That would be preferable and explain the fires. Dragons were dangerous, but he reckoned he could distract a dragon easily enough and from what he knew they were only really dangerous when guarding their eggs. Harry had absolutely no intention of trying to steal a dragon's egg. He wasn't Hagrid.
It was horribly, unsettlingly quiet as he walked through the ruined camp. The fires had mostly died, but the ash and embers were still warm through the soles of his shoes and the charred remnants of furniture or worse crunched beneath his heels no matter how hard he tried to be silent.
There were shapes under the ashes and Harry tried very hard to ignore those that were vaguely humanesque. The fire had already passed over this part of the camp, anyone lying under the ash would be dead and uncovering them would only serve to give him worse nightmares.
There was a blinding flash of light and something hissed viciously over his head as he reflexively ducked.
Twisting about and slipping his wand from his sleeve he had just enough to throw himself out the way of two more sickly purple curses. He rolled in the ash, catching a glimpse of a thin, almost skeletal wizard, draped in black robes.
'Lacero,' the robed wizard hissed viciously and another purple curse flew at him. Instinctively Harry summoned one of the awful looking shapes out from under the ash into the path of the curse.
'I must remain unseen and behave,' the wizard muttered monotonously, seemingly to himself, but his wand snapped up to unleash another trio of curses that tore through Harry's makeshift shield and grazed his left arm.
'Expelliarmus,' Harry tried one of the few spells he knew that were useful for duelling. It ricocheted harmlessly of some kind of shield into the smoke.
'Stay unseen,' the wizard repeated more loudly, but in the same detached tone. His wand had trembled and his free hand came up to press against his temples so hard his knuckles turned white. 'No,' the voice of his attacker shifted suddenly, growing cruel again, 'the Dark Lord will reward me beyond all others.'
'Expelliarmus,' he repeated, hoping to catch him off guard. His opponent laughed with more than a hint of madness as the disarming spell failed again.
'Crucio,' he cried delightedly, releasing the crimson spell gleefully.
'I'm free,' he exulted as the curse tore past Harry's hair. 'When I take you to the Dark Lord I will be his most trusted servant, loftier than Lucius, greater than Goyle, better than Bellatrix,' his laughter warbled disturbingly.
He is utterly insane, Harry realised.
A second torture curse narrowly missed him, but the third caught him on the arm and he collapsed into the hot embers curling up around the pain.
'I am his most loyal follower,' the mad wizard laughed through a deranged grin. He raised his wand again, its tip glowing with sinister magic.
Desperately Harry slashed his wand at the Death Eater. His only desire to stop this madman from harming him again.
The ash swirled against the wind.
For a moment the laughing face of the mad wizard was unobscured, then a vast, ebony serpent lunged from the ash cloud, its fangs closing around the Death Eater's chest with a sickening crunch. The snake crushed the wizard into the ground beside one of the few lingering fires and vanished in an explosion of hot smoke.
The mad wizard didn't move.
Harry hesitantly approached, his wand outstretched and shaking.
The Death Eater's chest and robes were a ruin and Harry had to look away to avoid being sick. He gagged twice before stepping back and pressing his hand to his mouth. The ribcage of the wizard was shattered inwards on itself, bright, gleaming, points of bone poked sharply from the mess of black tatters and red something that the ash serpent had left behind.
Harry cast a desperate look around him hoping to glimpse another person in the smoke. A wizard or witch who would step up alongside him and reassure him by saying the snake was their spell.
Nobody stepped from the smoke.
He slumped down in the ashes facing away from the body, shaking but unsurprised nobody had come. The summoned ash serpent had looked far too familiar to be the product of any mind but his own.