After the boat docked, the hazy light that had veiled the true face of Avalon Island the whole crossing began to dissipate around them.
It was as if someone had taken a dry cloth and wiped clean a pane of fogged glass—the mysterious Avalon Prison revealed itself, little by little, layer by layer, before the young wizards.
And as their view cleared, Harry's tightly pressed lips parted, bit by bit, just like the other young wizards crowded around him, his eyes were brimming with thick, honest confusion at what actually lay before them.
Like a continuous, bland, gently rolling plain, the island lay spread out before the Hogwarts students, stretching further than any of them had expected.
On the island, the level ground had been carefully divided into neat square plots of farmland, planted through with wheat—a crop that had absolutely no business appearing ready to harvest in this particular season at all.
Close by, golden wheat ears swayed gently back and forth in the breeze drifting steadily across the island. Flocks of small birds swooped low over the fields in loose formation, and after a hasty peck or two at the grain, were startled off again at once by the scarecrows standing in the fields, swaying stiffly back and forth and rattling their crude wooden limbs against each other.
But the land lying farther off, past the cultivated squares, was bare and black, as if it had never once been properly tilled or planted at all.
Harry sniffed at the air experimentally. The fresh, clean scent drifting through it, grass and turned earth and something faintly sweet underneath, left him feeling, strangely, a sudden rush of pure, unearned contentment.
'This... this was Avalon Prison?!'
Had it not been for the low, two-story building standing at the island's very centre—sizeable, and built from a grey stone—Harry might almost have believed Professor Watson had simply brought the whole lot of them out on some pleasant country outing instead.
The scenery here, honestly, lost nothing at all even compared to Ottery St. Catchpole, where Ron's family lived out in the countryside!
But Professor Watson did not answer the whole wave of bewildered, questioning looks turned toward him from every direction. Instead, he leapt off the boat first and tossing back over his shoulder only a brisk "Disembark and form up," strode ahead toward a small group of people already waiting for him on the shore.
Those people clearly weren't wizards, Harry thought, studying them from a distance—their plain dress and manner looked much more like the ordinary villagers he often saw wandering about Hogsmeade on a market day.
But he knew that they couldn't possibly actually be ordinary villagers, not out here.
Those plainly dressed, entirely ordinary-looking people carried about them a particular air Harry recognized somewhere at the back of his mind, though for a moment he genuinely couldn't place exactly what it was he was sensing.
"They're like Professor Rahansen—"
Luna's offhand, dreamy remark, tossed out as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, snapped Harry to sudden understanding all at once.
"They're... oh, they're the kin of Professor Rahansen and Roya!"
Harry blurted the words out loud in his surprise, rather too enthusiastically—and then Hermione's heel came down hard on his own foot, a clear warning to keep his voice down.
One by one, the young wizards re-formed their line properly on the open ground near the shore, then stood watching, eager and wide-eyed despite themselves, as Professor Watson conferred with the "natives" gathered there.
"The theme of this field trip is a visit to observe a day in the life of the prisoners of Avalon Prison—"
A good while later, Professor Watson walked back toward the assembled group, smiling as he addressed them all properly.
"Remember what I'm about to say very carefully. Keep good order at all times. Do not speak to the prisoners without express permission. Is that understood by everyone?"
The students answered back in a scattered, somewhat half-hearted chorus of assent, still too distracted by their surroundings to muster much enthusiasm.
In the shuffling crowd, Hermione found Nott of Slytherin with her eyes—the anticipation obvious across his face was nearly spilling over into something like excitement.
There was no clear, proper path laid between the shore and the distant grey building, they realized; they had no choice but to make their way, with some difficulty, along the narrow, weed-choked ridges running between the cultivated fields.
And every single time they passed close by a field, the scarecrows standing within it—hollow black sockets standing in for eyes, a thin slit for a mouth splitting the whole crude face open—would slowly turn their whole stitched bodies to follow the line of students as it advanced past, letting out cries as eerie and unsettling as a startled jackdaw bursting suddenly overhead without warning on a night thick with fog.
Even under this field bathed generously in bright, cheerful daylight, the sound of those scarecrows tracking their progress was enough to raise a cold sweat down the length of Harry's back!
Those scarecrows are absolutely not ordinary—
Neville's low, careful murmur beside him put into words exactly what had already been sitting on Harry's own mind.
"Don't forget—Professor Rahansen can control plants."
It wasn't only the scarecrows unsettling them, either. Even the deep blue sky stretched wide above carried some faint, nagging wrongness to it.
Harry couldn't say exactly where the problem actually lay but every single time he tilted his own head back to look at the sky for more than two or three seconds, the back of his scalp began to prickle sharply and go faintly numb.
Clearly, the same powerful warding magic that blanketed the whole lake surrounding the island existed thickly here on ground as well,.
Every young wizard on the visit was eager to see the actual inside of Avalon Prison as soon as possible, and so the whole line advanced at a brisk, steady pace.
Within half an hour, the column—stretching out now several hundred feet along the ridges had reached the very foot of the towering grey walls.
What lay before them now, spread out at the wall's base, was a giant courtyard.
The grey perimeter wall itself stood taller than even the strongest giant might manage to climb, and going by the flickers of strange, restless light that kept passing over its rough stone face like something alive beneath the surface, the massive boulders making up the wall unmistakably held powerful magic of their own within them.
"Ahh!"
Just as Harry was studying the wall's strange surface up close, a sudden scream cutting sharply through the air without any warning startled him into a violent, full-body shudder—and in the very next instant, more cries rose up one after another all around him!
Harry looked up toward the very top of the wall, stunned by what he saw there—and, in the same breath, felt a rush of deep gratitude that Ron wasn't here to witness this sight for himself.
An Acromantula, easily the size of an African elephant in its sheer bulk, had appeared perched atop the wall at some point without anyone below noticing.
As if drawn in helplessly by the promise of tender, appetizing flesh gathered so conveniently below, the eight glinting emerald compound eyes of the grotesque, ferocious-looking spider blinked in rapid sequence with hunger.
The two terrible black pincers clicked away sharply, again and again in quick sequence—and in an instant the exact sound carried Harry straight back two years, to that terrible night in the Forbidden Forest when he and Hermione had chased down the fleeing Peter Pettigrew through the dark.
Hisss—
Even the boys among them who prided themselves most on their composure found themselves sucking in sharp breaths at the sight.
The young wizards' obvious, spreading terror only further provoked the massive spider above them. One long, jointed leg after another came probing out slowly over the top of the wall from behind it, testing the air, and along its sharp, glistening mouthparts, drool reeking faintly of rot dripped down, running in rivulets along the grey stone beneath.
"Get back—"
At the very head of the long column, Bryan came to a stop. His casual, almost offhand glance thrown back over his own shoulder toward the wall struck the enormous spider like an actual, physical blow!
BANG!
The giant Acromantula let out a shrill, agonized shriek at the impact, its many legs going limp and useless beneath its bulk all at once, and it dropped heavily, gracelessly, back down onto the ground somewhere behind the wall, out of sight.
Nott, whose mood had been steadily brightening the whole way there across the fields, went white at the sudden sight of the spider—his entire body was swaying dangerously now where he stood.
"Come on, then, let's go in and have a proper look—"
Brace patted the shoulder of Theodore, who looked as though he'd just lost his own father to the wall, and said it with a small, sympathetic sigh, steering him gently forward.
"Restrain yourselves, all of you. Do not provoke the guardians of this prison under any circumstances—"
They walked on a while further along the long, curving sweep of the round wall, and Bryan stopped again after some distance, turning back to address them all, calm as ever throughout,
"The guardians of the prison—"
No one among them was left wondering, any longer, just what exactly these particular "guardians" might turn out to be.
Further ahead along their path lay a sparse, scattered grove of tall oak trees.
The moment they stepped into the shade beneath the trees, more than a few of the young wizards began to shiver.
Bright sunlight sifted down through the tangled leaves and branches overhead, casting shifting, restless patches across the ground below; the grass beneath their feet was a clean, freshly washed green.
And yet, however tidy and clean this forest appeared on its surface, it was steeped underneath in a deep, creeping chill.
Harry did his level best to keep himself well clear of the trees themselves as they walked; every single trunk and leaf here seemed to radiate some sense of danger.
Professor Watson pressed on ahead of them all, leading the column toward a drawbridge-style gate set deep within the trees, and here the young wizards laid eyes on Acromantulas once again.
This time, there were a good twenty or more of them gathered close around the gate.
These particular spiders were somewhat smaller in build than the single massive one they'd already seen atop the wall, but every one of them still gave off a restless, agitated air.
Even so, the moment they caught sight of Professor Watson approaching, the whole cluster of spiders settled down and behaved themselves. Two of them immediately began working with skilful precision, at a crude wooden winch device using their legs, lowering the drawbridge-gate into place.
And once the students had finally passed safely through the gate, it swung immediately shut behind them with a heavy, final thud, sealing the way back.
"This is simply..."
The sight now spreading out before them left Cho Chang of Ravenclaw trembling from head to toe, unable to finish the sentence.
Tears welled up in her eyes as she curled herself in tight against Cedric's arms for comfort, and Cedric could only hold her close, unable to summon a single word of reassurance.
The corner of Harry's mouth twitched at the sight spreading before them all. He no longer had to wonder, even for a moment, where the whole Acromantula colony that had once ruled unchecked over the depths of the Forbidden Forest had all gone.
Fully several hundred Acromantulas, by rough count, roamed across the wide sandy stretch of ground lying between the perimeter wall and the pentagon-shaped main building beyond, and when thousands of glinting green compound eyes turned toward the newly arrived students all at once in eerie unison, more than a few of the students simply crumpled straight down to the ground on the spot where they stood—and of those still managing to remain standing, most could no longer manage a single further step forward.
"Th-they—"
One of Ginny's own roommates dropped straight down, crouching low on the ground with her head buried in both hands, sobbing out garbled, half-formed words between breaths.
"We—we don't want to be eaten—"
"Don't worry yourself, Miss Hepburn—"
Professor Watson gave a small, casual wave of his hand, as if shooing away a flock of chickens from a garden, and the gesture alone drove the nearest Acromantulas back a little further away from the crowd.
"Under normal circumstances, they aren't permitted to eat people."
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