~Written for The 2017 House Competition~

House: Ravenclaw

Category: Drabble

Prompt: An injury

Word Count: 900 exactly

WARNING: this is a bit of a grim one. A hint of darkness and morbidity and insinuated minor character death. Not quite M rating, I don't think, but this is just a precaution.

~Scars of War~

He came out of nowhere. Teeth bared, claws extended, his eyes glowing in the darkness.

She didn't stand a chance. Like so many others, it was over the second he struck.

The Battle of Hogwarts was mayhem. It had started out as impossible and grew more impossible by the second. The Death Eaters battered at the castle's defences. Spells erupted along the stone walls, crumbling the brickwork like dust. The very ground seemed to shake beneath the assault.

And that was before their defences fell.

The night-darkened sky was alight with enchantments. Red, white, green, gold – a myriad of colours that crashed and burned and showered sparks onto the courtyard, the grounds, the fighters below. Spells illuminated dark-robed figures and scrambling students, fleeing Order members, professors and all those in between.

Suits of armour creaked to life.

The castle groaned in protestation, trembling upon its foundations.

Invisible shields from professors and foundations alike springing into existence, only to splinter and falter.

There were creatures, shadowy and twisted and indiscernible. There were ghostly conjugations – spells or ghosts or something in between – and it was terrifying. And the noise. Explosions were one horror, but the screams. The crying. The gurgles of pain that fizzled into nothingness or –

Or worse than that, the absence of sound entirely. A sharp blast, a flash of green, and nothing but the thump of a body hitting the ground.

The younger students had been evacuated. Through the Room of Requirement, through the Hog's Head, and away. She hadn't run. In the midst of utter terror, heart seizing in a tug-of-war between adrenaline and stark panic, she asked herself why. She'd asked herself time and time again.

Why hadn't she run when she still could?

Why hadn't she run?

She fired with desperation at a Death Eater, robes billowing black and ominous. Her spell struck, and something like triumph, something also like fear, coursed through her. Then she was running, was fleeing, and turning and firing again. Anything to fight – to flee – to win because that was what they had to do.

To fight.

To win.

That was all she knew anymore. Somewhere she'd been struck, she could feel it as a burn down the length of her arm, but she couldn't think that. She couldn't let herself. Once, such refusal of acknowledgement would have been impossible. A forgotten once, and at that time the greatest threat she'd ever faced had been a glaring Potions professor.

In the spread of the courtyard, amidst, fighting, firing, blasts, terror so tangible she could smell it, he came for her. Why her she would never know, but like a magnet drawn to a lodestone, his yellowed gaze fastened upon her. His yellow eyes glared, but he smiled. She caught a glimpse of him, and she was frozen, a feeble rabbit caught in the glaring hypnosis of a rattler.

Sounds collided around her, spells clapped and echoes rebounded. And she stared. The wand in her hand was useless; some innate part of her knew that much.

Then he charged. Like a beast, he leapt in strides as much as he bounded on all fours. He crashed through a staggering Death Eater. He soared over a body – a dead body, dead – and skidded before leaping forth once more.

Half a step backwards was all she could manage. Half a step, and then he was upon her.

The ground was hard. Her head cracked. The weight that landed upon her chest forced her breath loose. The shrill scream that demanded to be liberated was silenced. She was crushed, beaten, slammed, and somewhere she noticed that her wand was flung from her grasp.

The werewolf slashed at her face with dark claws stained bloody black in the spell-illuminated light, splitting skin. Teeth gnashed, a sharp tear ripping at her chin, her throat. She couldn't see. She couldn't hear but for a discordant chorus of shouts and magical blasts and the thump-thump-THUMP of her heartbeat all too loud in her ears. And then –

"NO!"

A voice screamed, a saviour, and in the blast of a colliding spell the weight was suddenly gone from atop her. The claws stopped clawing, the teeth stopped gnashing - her breath stuttered, but the heaviness, the creature, was gone. She blinked, stared, couldn't see. Everything felt – was – distant, her fingers a light-year away yet still closer than her toes, the sky a sheet of blackness. Or were her eyes closed? She didn't know. The battle still raged, she could hear, roaring through the ragged stutters of her heartbeat. Or was the roaring simply her ears?

Something… something hot stung her cheek. Hot and dripping and… and torn. A feeble voice whimpered in her head, a voice far quieter than the terror and the panic and the urge to fight or run or both. A voice that quavered, sobbing that her face, her face, had been ripped to shreds, an injury the likes of which she'd seen all too much of since the battle had begun.

And that battle still raged. Distant now, but continuing. That feeble voice, through the thumping and the blasting and the heat that welled into something that was far worse than simply heat:

How… how ugly… such a scar to the face will be…

Lavender Brown gasped. When her breath released, it was in an escaping exhalation, and none in the chaos heard its final warbling sigh.