The "Windows" Series

I climb, wearily, to the top of the old staircase. The stones are worn through centuries of use. A millennium has passed and still these walls hold true. Ten centuries of students have traversed these halls. Ten centuries. But no more.

No more will the cavernous halls echo with the chatter and laughter of younglings, their minds brimming with light and knowledge. No more will the fields below be host to scores of students and their mentors. No more shall the green ones come, wide-eyed, across the lake. Green, like I, seven years ago.

And I climb to the top of this mighty, once-proud castle. This place that I, like countless others, have called home. This place that holds many secrets in its deep, slumbering belly. This place, haven of generations, home to seekers of knowledge. This castle, old and true, my inheritance.

I climb these stone steps that I have climbed many times before. And I step into the light. The red light of another dawn. The last dawn that many will see. I step into the light and walk to the edge of this tower, the tallest tower. And I look down. Down to the once-blue lake and the once-green field. Down to the grounds that I have walked on for seven years, never thinking that I would one day see them like this.

The fields are no longer green. They are brown and dead. The grass withered like the trees in the once mighty forest. Lifeless skeletons. The ground is blackened and scorched. And runs red with blood.

Blood of foe. Blood of friend. In death, we are all equals. The blood runs red, as all blood does. The broken and bloodied bodies of the fallen litter the field. There will be no mourning. No marked graves. This evening, as evenings before, we will sleep with the stench of a mass funeral pyre invading our dreams. The bodies in the lake, bloated and green, will be left to rot there. The ground will be, in centuries to come, a black field of white skeletons.

But now. Now the corpses of those I have loved and those I have hated lie there. There in the new day's sun and already I can see the flies beginning to swarm.

The flies and the maggots and the creeping scum that feeds on the carrion of humans.

And those others.

In the middle, where the carcasses lay thick, there is a tangle of red and white. A moving mass of living bodies. Bodies, once the symbol of hope, now the sigil of the dark. The doves dive at the spilt entrails of the dead, chattering and squealing and squabbling. They eat. They feed. They tear at flesh and peck at eyes, each fighting for their share and more. Doves. Their once white feathers slick with blood and dirt and faeces.

And here, on the battlements above the killing fields stand our answer. A thousand crows, standing silent witness to the carnage that has taken place. A thousand stolid, unfearing crows, their wings as black as night, their eyes as bright as the sun.

And above us all, the sun rises past the leafless, black branches of the forest. The fierce, burning, crimson sun. It is large and red and burns brightly, and yet the warmth is little. It is the glaring glow of a dying sun. A dying sun over a dead world.

We have won this battle. And with it, the war. But at what cost? For all things have their price. And the price of life is, perhaps, the most expensive of all. All things have their prices. And that price must be paid.

It is true - we are but brief mortals, wandering this plane with no purpose and no hope. And we are none of us long for this world.

I sigh and turn away. The few of us that are left, beaten and broken though we may be, must leave this place.

And never again will footsteps echo in these ancient halls.

Harry Potter,

3^rd May, 1998