Three Days Later,
St. James's Park,
London
Whooping cries of exhilaration split the tranquil silence of the night as several teenage boys skateboarded down the formerly peaceful pathways of St. James's Park. Their parents thought them asleep in their beds, and they were riding high on the exhilaration of freedom and disobedience. Their leader was a tallish boy of about 15, his brown hair painstakingly gelled and styled, his black jeans artfully torn, exactly the right amount of a rock group's band shirt showing from under his immaculate leather jacket. His lips were quirked in the self-assurance only a 15-year-old boy who believes he is the object of every woman's desire can muster. Blissfully unaware of precisely how obvious it was that he spent hours every morning making it look as though he didn't care how he looked. The boy's shouts stopped abruptly when, while judging the distance for a particularly foolhardy stunt, he noticed a hunched figure moving through the trees toward the towering facade of Whitehall.
"What's the matter, John?" The boy's friends were quick to notice his sudden silence. Something about it worried them: John was never silent. Even in class he was always grinning and making sardonic commentary under his breath, no matter how frustrated it made his teachers.
"There's someone there." Even hunched over in the dark of the night, the figure was still enormous, easily the largest person any of them had ever seen; as one, the boys stepped closer, trying to see the features of the giant. It was concealed by the darkness between two lampposts, each step was accompanied by the loud sound of something hard impacting on pavement, and a dark mist seemed to be spreading out along the ground before it. The boys looked over at each other nervously, was the figure wearing hobnailed boots or something?
"Does... Does that sound like a horse to you?" Tyler asked his friends, running a nervous hand through his untidy blonde locks. His other hand tugged nervously at his blue denim jacket, as if tempted to pull it tighter around him like a blanket.
"Mate, just because your little head got all the brains, that doesn't mean you shouldn't at least use your eyes. Do you see a horse anywhere, Dumbarse?" Peter tried to maintain a casual tone as he bantered with his friend, but the slight tremor of his voice belied his attempts. Despite being the tallest of the group by a head, Peter always carried himself hunched forwards, as if trying to hide among his shorter companions. To compensate for his spindly frame, he made adept use of his biting wit to ensure he stayed one of the tormentors rather than the tormented.
"At least I get to use my lower head sometimes, 'Millimeter Peter'." Tyler teased back, momentarily forgetting the figure still advancing toward the group.
John hadn't forgotten about the figure though, and he stepped forward to make the challenge his adolescent pride demanded, "Hey, Mister, what're you doing out here this late?" The figure made no response to the query, continuing it's slow progress, drawing inexorably closer to the pool of light cast by the nearest lamppost. The boys felt the first prickles of fear raising the hair on the back of their necks. Some vestige of the days when their ancestors had cowered away from predators at every turn warning them not to disturb whatever hunter they had stumbled upon.
After a few moments, the complacency of civilisation banished the warnings of the past and John called out, voice shaking, but filled with bravado, "You here to report us, Mister?" The boys laughed among themselves, each trying to pretend they weren't terrified. Then the figure stepped forwards into the light, and the boys screamed, all pretence forgotten in the face of the creature before them. The monster straightened, looming high, higher over their heads, it's crest moving upwards toward the bulb of the lamppost, nearly seven meters off the ground. In the seconds before the crest punctured the glass and extinguished the light, the boys saw four wickedly sharp blades appear in the creature's quartet of arms, then, with a screeching of shearing glass and metal, darkness consumed the boys and the monster. Moments later a blinding flash of bone and crystal silenced the boys' screams, and their bodies fell to the floor, each slashed into two pieces.
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Tyrant Rising
Fanfiction(HP/40k) A savage beating by Vernon unleashes Harry's latent magic, transforming him into something not of this world. Over twenty years later, something has begun to stir in Wizarding Britain. Already locked in a seemingly endless war between light...
