Harry Potter and the Second Prophecy

Chapter 1 - A Lady's Handbag

As she raced headlong through the trees, Camilia found herself praying to the God whose existence she'd always denied: Please, God, let this be just a bad dream. Let me open my eyes and find myself back at the home, tossing and turning in my bed. But the eight-legged monsters behind her were no dream, and the bones that had hung from the cloud-like webs could have been those of nothing other than homosapiens.

Her prayers did nothing to stem the panic that had gripped her as she thought to herself, They're gaining, but her legs could carry her no faster, and it was quite an effort to see through the darkness of this overgrown forest, to find her footing amidst the underbrush, and to keep from colliding with trees, thorns, and branches alike.

Camilia's life was not flashing before her eyes...and she took this as a welcome sign that she was not destined for death. Instead, her mind flashed to the start of this "vacation" the home had sent them on and the bus ride through London after their arrival at Heathrow. She'd been sitting alone, as usual, toward the back of the bus, headphones on, Slipknot pumping through the earpieces. Some would have called her a bitter, angry teenager, she knew, but she also realized what most adults had forgotten by the time they'd reach a point to criticize: all teenagers are bitter and angry, and eventually she'd outgrow her Slipknot faze. In the meantime, why not relish it? Perhaps the next time she became angry, she'd be able to make something strange happen again and prove that she was possessed of some sort of telekinetic power. Not two weeks before, one of the older boys at the home had been picking on a child she had a particular fondness for, and the next thing she knew, he'd been thrown against the wall and had blacked out from the force of it, even though no one had touched him.

The bus had pulled into King's Cross station, and the tour guide and orphanage employees clucked at the youths to get their attention, attempting, albeit futilely, to line them up along one of the station's outermost walls for a headcount. Camilia ambled from the bus to a spot further down the wall, assuming that the space between her and the guide would be filled before long by a mass of twelve to seventeen year-olds. She donned her backpack, slumped against the wall, and waited for her name to be called, only turning her music down enough to barely hear what was going on around her.

After she'd been counted and her name checked off, one of the home's employees ushered her into the station. It was enormous. All around her were people, passageways, and baggage, and it would have been easy to lose sight of her group had she not been being carefully watched by one of the employees who had always seemed to fear her a flight risk. A ticket was shoved into her hand, and she was directed along with her group down another corridor to the boarding area.

Then it hit her: she felt light, floaty, as though her mind had temporarily left her, and all that remained was a curious inability to focus. She staggered sideways, trying desperately to shake it off, to clear her head, and as soon as she did so, she felt an alarming need to find a restroom. She knew quite clearly that if she did NOT find a restroom, there would be quite the mess to clean up, so she stopped the employee nearest her and informed him of her need, pointed to a restroom she couldn't remember having noticed before, and made a beeline straight for it. The employee, whoever he was, she could never remember their names, yelled at her to be quick and come right back, but her need was so overwhelming that his words seemed inconsequential.

She burst through the entrance into the ladies' restroom and hurried for the first stall, but just as she reached it, Camilia realized the need to relieve herself had somehow disappeared, as had her sudden bout of "fuzz-brain." She looked around the room feeling rather silly, and then, as she turned to leave, she noticed something out of the corner of her eye that made her turn back to the sink: someone had left their purse on the counter.

Normally, Camilia wanted for nothing. The home took good care of all the state's wards, and all their needs and many of their wants were met. Camilia knew she was lucky to have been placed in such a home, as many orphans were placed in situations far, far worse, but nonetheless, she had always been excited at the prospect of easy thievery. She liked to blame her shoplifting tendencies on having grown up without parents to teach her properly, and though she knew it to be the lamest of excuses, it eased her guilty conscience every time she stole a lipstick or shoplifted a sweater or lifted a wallet. She looked around, checked for cameras overhead, wondering if England had the same "no-security-cameras-in-bathrooms" standard that most places in the states had, and slunk over to the counter, convincing herself that she'd just peek inside the purse, maybe to see who might have left it behind. She reached for it...

And felt the oddest sensation; what seemed like a giant hook grabbing her right behind her belly button, and she found herself racing through the air, up through the building, out into darkness though she knew it was still day, guessing that this was God's way of scolding her for wanting to swipe the handbag, and then she was brought down again, descending at a ridiculous rate through what appeared to be a giant forest, and then was slammed into the ground in a clearing in the trees, her legs buckling under her, her body collapsing onto the dirt.

Amazingly, she found, she was not hurt. Shocked and bewildered, of course, but not injured. Her knees were sore, her clothes were dirty, but she was otherwise unscathed. Even her CD walkman had survived! Most unfortunately, however, she was hopelessly lost in a place obviously miles from King's Cross. Next to her lay the purse she'd grabbed, and, hoping that though she cared not repeat her journey she could just grab the purse and be right back where she'd started, she reached for it once more. When nothing happened, she scooped up the purse and began rifling through its contents. It contained various random objects: a sock, a crochet hook, a plastic cup, and an oddly colored lollipop, but nothing of any real value.

She continued to root through the purse, and then, at the very bottom, she found a note on a small piece of parchment, written in black ink in an old-fashioned hand. It had been folded over once, and the front read:

Camilia Pritchard, Witch

The Forbidden Forest

Perplexed, she opened it, wondering what sort of joke this could be that would have her in a place someone had nicknamed the Forbidden Forest, holding a note with her name, having the audacity to call her a "witch." The inside had one word scribbled on it in the same hand:

Run.

She looked up at the trees, finally taking the time to examine the clearing in which she currently sat, and no sooner did she do so than she heard it: a hissing and clacking, drawing, it seemed, ever closer. Camilia did not turn to look for the source of the noise. Instead, she thrust the note into her jeans pocket, ripped her walkman from her clothes, flung it into her bag, and was already running at full throttle through the forest as she finished zipping up her backpack.

After what seemed like days but could only have been perhaps a minute, she slowed her pace and began to look around. She could see another, smaller clearing ahead, perhaps a quarter-mile away, and began to make her way toward it. The closer she came to it, the more intensely she could smell what could only have been the unmistakable stench of rotted meat, but her curiosity got the best of her, and she continued. She was perhaps ten feet from the edge of the clearing when she saw it: what appeared to be a giant mass of spider webs draped across the trees on the opposite side of the clearing, riddled throughout with sharp, sun bleached bones. Human bones. She stopped dead in her tracks, the bile rising in her throat. As she stood staring at the bones, she heard a gentle "clack" immediately to her left, and slowly she turned.

Camilia was face to face with a spider.

It took a moment to register what it was she was looking at, and then another moment to register that, if she was indeed face to face with the monster, the sheer size of the creature must be...

She darted, but felt something soft grasp her right shoulder, and as she reached to brush it off, her hand stuck to it. It's a web, she thought miserably. I've been caught by webbing shot at me by a horse-sized spider. And as she contemplated this, still running, she was overwhelmed not by terror, but by revulsion. Her free hand reached for her backpack, swept it from her shoulders, and managed to use it to take with it the webbing. She flung the pack as far from her as she could, and continued to run with all her might, looking back only once to find that the giant spider had suddenly multiplied into perhaps a hundred of all sizes, each rushing toward her, each with clacking jaws, and each hissing and spitting webbing in her direction. So much for a group vacation to the British Isles.

And then, she noticed the hissing and clacking had ceased. She was surrounded once again by silence, trees, and an eerie darkness. She took in her surroundings as one plotting the safest course back down Everest, knowing death is a possibility, but that not making the attempt would be certain death. In the end, she gave up and reached back into her pocket for the bizarre note she'd shoved into it before making her mad dash. This time it was different...this time the front stated:

Camilia Pritchard, Witch

Edge of the Forbidden Forest

Hoping for further enlightenment as to direction, she opened the note once more and found a similar message:

Keep Moving.

She did not wait this time to find out why, but immediately began sprinting into the trees, and had gone perhaps a hundred yards when the sound of an angry, barking, vicious dog met her ears. She turned momentarily to see whence it came, and was plagued once more with a terror she had never known: she was being chased by the largest wolf-like creature she'd ever seen, but it was running after her on two legs.

Her speed increased, as did her desperation, and just as she thought her lungs about to rupture, she burst from the trees onto a large patch of grass and saw that not a hundred yards in front of her were...greenhouses. In front of...a castle? Castles and greenhouses, however unlikely, were unavoidably peopled, so she ran toward the nearest greenhouse with all her might but knew she was destined to fall short; she could almost feel the breath of the man-wolf on the back of her neck.

Camilia did the only thing she could. She came to a screeching halt and turned to face the creature on her tail, throwing up her hands at it in a motion to hold or ward it off. A massive surge of blue light burst from her hands and drove the man-wolf into the air so that it fell a few yards from her. She began quickly to back away, shocked at what she'd just managed to do, when the man-wolf rose to its feet and started toward her again, enraged by its inability to enjoy its perceived lunch. She put up her arms once more and a giant shield of a similar blue energy surrounded her just as the creature pounced, knocking her backward, but managing to keep the clawing, furious fiend six inches from her flesh. It seemed to her as though she were a woman in a shark cage in the open sea, wondering if the walls of the cage would hold, watching the great whites snap their jaws and butt at the cage with their enormous, hungry snouts.

Just as she was beginning to believe she could hold off the man-wolf not a moment longer, she heard shouting. A young, dark-haired man holding a long stick, wearing what appeared to be a billowing set of black choir robes, came running toward her and the creature from the nearby greenhouse. He yelled something she could not understand, perhaps in Latin, and the man-wolf flew backward once more...but this time, it turned tail and ran headlong back into the forest.

Camilia's shield of blue light disappeared as quickly as she'd somehow conjured it, and the young man was now standing over her. His eyes were so green, she momentarily felt lost in them...and then Camilia fainted.