Around the great crowd of Hogwarts students who had just arrived in a tumbled heap, several dozen grim-faced wizards in standard-issue black robes stood in an alert perimeter with wands drawn and watching the whole gathered mass of children warily.
Harry glared over at the wizard who'd issued him that sharp warning a moment before. He had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that if he so much as twitched a muscle now, the man would attack him on the spot without a second thought.
Even with Professor Watson standing right there!
These wizards, radiating a hard, iron-blooded intensity that seemed to press against the whole gathered crowd, instantly cowed the young students into stillness—even the most unruly of them fell quiet in the presence of this group.
Where on earth had the Ministry managed to dig up a squad like this?!
The students whose parents worked at the Ministry stared at the guards in shock too, utterly baffled as to who exactly these people were.
"No need to worry, everyone—"
Bryan strolled forward through the crowd with an entirely calm expression, drawing a folded piece of parchment out from inside his robes as he came.
"Mr. Watson—"
The wizard who'd warned Harry seemed to be the one in charge of the group. He told the others tersely to keep a close eye on the children for the moment, then walked over to meet Bryan himself.
Unlike most Ministry officials, who couldn't help but turn a little fawning and eager the moment they laid eyes on Bryan Watson in the flesh, this particular black-robed wizard's expression remained carefully, formally respectful throughout—but there was a clear wariness still sitting in his eyes.
Attentive students like Hermione noticed it too, watching closely from where she stood—some of these black-robed Aurors actually still had their wands trained on Professor Watson.
"This is the visitation permit, signed by both myself and Minister Bones—"
Bryan handed the folded document over to the wizard approaching him without any concern.
Harry noticed that after the wizard glanced it over carefully, the tension in his face genuinely eased by a fraction—though he still wasn't fully relaxed.
"My apologies for the delay, Mr. Watson—"
The lead wizard made no immediate move to hand the document back to Professor Watson. Instead, he shot a quick glance sideways at the men beside him, and a whole array of specialized Dark-detecting instruments—Honesty Probes, Secrecy Sensors, and other devices Harry didn't recognize at all—was brought forward by the others.
Under the startled, curious gazes of the young students crowded behind them, the guards ran every single one of these detection devices carefully over Professor Watson in turn, one after another.
Only once they'd fully confirmed he really was, in fact, who he claimed to be did the assembled guards let out something like a breath of relief and step properly aside, the wands were lowered at last.
"Under the regulations you and the Ministry established together, sir, no wizard is permitted to carry a wand into Avalon Prison, so—"
the lead wizard added expectantly.
A tense, uncertain atmosphere hung heavy in the morning air—the guards and the visiting students were all on edge in their different ways, though Professor Watson himself remained easy-going and unbothered throughout the whole procedure, as though none of it troubled him in the slightest.
"Of course—"
Bryan handed over his own wand with a smile, without the slightest hesitation or reluctance, then turned back to face the students, who had by now gathered into something resembling a rough, uneven line behind him.
"Everyone, please cooperate and hand over your wands when asked. You'll have them all back safely once the visit is over."
This particular step took a fair amount of time to work through.
The guards checked each individual student carefully with the Dark-detecting instruments as they collected each wand in turn, working down the long, winding line.
"This place is really strict, isn't it!"
When it came to Alicia Spinnet's turn—Harry's dependable Gryffindor teammate—she couldn't help but remark on it aloud, a little startled by the thoroughness.
"Where you're about to visit, miss, is the most heavily guarded place in the entire European wizarding world—"
Having already thoroughly checked Professor Watson himself, the guards had loosened up somewhat in their manner by now, so the wizard checking Alicia simply smiled at her protest, unbothered by the comment.
While waiting his own turn in line, shuffling forward a step at a time, Harry finally had a moment to take in his surroundings, looking around properly for the first time since landing.
They were standing inside what looked like a barbican of some kind—three sides enclosed by tall wooden walls, with the one open side forming a kind of natural "harbour" facing out onto water.
"I'm going to make Ernie owe me a Galleon over this!"
Harry heard Seamus whispering excitedly to Neville nearby, unable to contain himself,
"I called it, didn't I!!"
Still taking in the wider scene in genuine astonishment, Harry turned his attention back toward the harbour—behind the tall wooden wall facing it, standing at some indeterminable distance across open water, stood a single tree so tall its very top vanished entirely into the clouds above, lost from sight.
Moored there at the water's edge, rocking gently on the small ripples, was a single-decked oaken boat.
The vessel itself was large and rather strange-looking up close—just a flat, open expanse of bare planking, with no cabin structure of any kind and no sail rigged anywhere on it.
Out toward the middle of the open lake, where the water caught and scattered the pale light of the sky above, a single dark speck flickered faintly into view and then out again, too distant to properly identify.
About half an hour later, give or take, the guards finally finished checking everyone in the long line.
Without much further exchange with the Hogwarts visitors, they simply bowed formally to Professor Watson, gathered up the whole collection of confiscated wands into a secure case, mounted the broomsticks set off to one side of the barbican, and flew back up onto the high wall to resume their watch from above.
Whew!
Harry let out a breath without quite meaning to—it wasn't until the whole guard detachment had left, lifting off into the grey sky, that the oppressive weight that had been pressing steadily on his chest finally lifted at last.
"Oh, so they're not going to 'escort' us all the way to the prison itself, then, Professor Watson?"
The Weasley twins perked right up at that realization as well, with George watching the departing wizards patrol the high wall above with obvious interest, clearly cataloguing everything he saw.
"Their jurisdiction only extends this far, and no further—"
Bryan said with a chuckle, watching the guards settle into position.
"They're not actually permitted to set foot anywhere beyond this point, by the same regulations that took your wands."
"Are they all Ministry Aurors, then, Professor Watson?"
Seeing that questions clearly weren't off-limits tonight, and thoroughly curious himself about who exactly these people were, Harry raised his own hand to ask as well, unable to hold the question in any longer.
"That's right, yes, they do all belong to the Ministry."
Bryan gestured for the students to begin falling back into a line.
"After the Battle of Diagon Alley, a group of Aurors who'd distinguished themselves particularly in the fighting that day were selected out from the rest. After they were each consulted on the matter and agreed to it themselves, they became the guards of Avalon Prison."
Of course!
Harry's mind brightened all at once with sudden understanding.
No wonder these particular men had carried that sharp, tough, unyielding air about them from the very first moment—they were Aurors who had actually lived through, and survived a brutal war.
Then the whole line fell in behind Professor Watson and began boarding the waiting boat in an orderly file, one student at a time.
Judging purely by its outward size, the boat was reasonably large, certainly, but nowhere near large enough, by any ordinary reckoning, to properly ferry across nearly half of Hogwarts's entire student body at once.
But once the students actually started boarding, they found, one by one, that their worry on that score had been entirely unnecessary after all.
As more and more students climbed carefully aboard in turn, the surface of the deck itself seemed to expand quietly right along with them, stretching to accommodate each new arrival—by the time the very last student had finally boarded, the bare planking beneath everyone's feet still had room to spare, more than enough space, in fact, for every single person aboard to lie down flat on their backs without feeling remotely crowded by their neighbours.
Once they were all aboard and settled, Professor Watson let the students move about the expanded deck freely, no longer holding them to strict formation.
But Harry and Hermione, still serving as prefects for the day, found they still had duties to see to—they had to keep steadily reminding the scattered Gryffindor students to stay reasonably quiet and keep some semblance of order among themselves.
"Notice that, Harry?"
Only when they happened to end up standing near each other for a brief moment amid all the milling about did Hermione tip her chin meaningfully at Harry, gesturing silently for him to look up at the sky.
"What?"
Harry looked up obediently at the sky above, clean and clear as a pale grey-blue backdrop stretched wide, his eyes a little unfocused at first from the effort.
But a second later looking at it, it clicked into place all at once.
It had been raining back at Hogwarts when they'd left the castle grounds, and yet here, wherever exactly "here" turned out to be, the sky showed not a single trace of gloom or cloud cover anywhere—they must be very far indeed from Hogwarts.
Except—
Harry glanced toward the far horizon again, following the light, and made a small, startled sound of surprise.
They'd set out from Hogwarts sometime around half past five in the morning, and even counting the considerable time spent being thoroughly searched at the shore just now, it couldn't reasonably be much past half past six by now.
Harry checked his wristwatch to be sure, and sure enough, that was exactly right.
But here, wherever they'd actually landed, the bright, full daylight already sitting on the horizon looked like something you'd only see well after eight o'clock on a warm summer morning.
"It's really warm here, isn't it—"
More and more of the young wizards scattered across the deck were starting to notice something was off about their surroundings now, and in the middle of quietly keeping order among his own house, one student's offhand comment made Harry pick up on the strangeness himself too.
The air itself wasn't precisely hot, exactly—more within the range of pleasantly warm but the heavier clothes everyone had worn specifically to guard against Hogwarts's usual damp chill were now making them all feel faintly overheated standing about on the open deck.
Could it possibly be, Harry wondered suddenly, that Avalon Prison wasn't even located in Britain at all?
The thought flashed through Harry's mind and just then, the whole deck shuddered beneath his feet.
They were setting off.
————————————
For More Chapters; [email protected]/FicFrenzy