Before The Cresendo
Severus’ wand slipped into his fingers within seconds, ever ready. If the horrible aura around him was not clue enough, the murderous gleam he could see in Riddle’s eyes definitely was: someone was not going to return home tonight.
And he’d make sure it wasn’t his apprentice.
“He hasn’t left the wards yet,” Riddle spat at the Aurors, and then, a few notes short of slipping completely into Parseltongue, “I’m ssure of it. Get him before he doesss.”
“Y-yes, Lord Riddle,” they rejoined.
Severus melded into the rest of the crowd, casting a quick disillusionment charm to avoid notice. Only then, when he had pulled away from even the crowd, and was heading towards one of their discussed exit routes, did he pull out the notebook he had given Harry for communicating her status to him. The pair had cost him a hefty sum, but Severus was not one to buy items only to let them sit on shelves in disuse. This would likely make her more safe, so used it would be.
He first searched for any message she might have sent, and was rewarded with a rather unpleasant one, handwriting shaky and clumped as though she'd written it without looking—
Animagus and signature detecting wards. Can’t make it through. Suspect am not in the right mind.
The words felt strange, a dull roar in his ears for all that he’s never heard them aloud.
Harry couldn’t get through. It wasn’t a simple matter of her getting delayed as she made her way to the edge of the wards, though that was dangerous enough.
No, instead, she couldn’t make it past the wards. She suspected something might be wrongwith her mind.
The fact that she even wrote that much to him seemed concerning, because it was the sort of thing he’d expect her to normally hide. Then again, she had never been one for following expectations. Severus tried to tell himself he was being overly concerned.
He failed. Utterly, miserably, failed.
He reached the first exit point they’d discussed, and she wasn’t there.
Merlin help them, he thought, and ran.
The world looked like a black vacuum with strange spots of light shining painfully at the oddest of places. Harry couldn’t make sense of it.
She just wanted to get out of here.
She’d managed to get a shaky message to Snape from the notebook through muscle memory alone, though she couldn’t attest to how readable it was and what he could do anyway.
Her magic tried to help her, giving her a vague sense of her surroundings, but that only told her that she was in a clearing about fifteen feet away from a large mass of plant life that must be a part of the Forbidden Forest, and that, for now, she was alone.
That would have to be enough.
She stumbled closer to the forest, her detection-proof invisibility cloak wrapped around her, hoping to avoid someone bumping into her still very much solid body while she was incapacitated and identifying her.
A few deep breaths and an uncomfortably fetched Calming Draught later, Harry set her magical sensing to examining the wards once more. She’d have preferred to take a Wit-Sharpening potion as well, but with the damage done to her mind unknown, she didn't know how it would react to her altered mental state.
I should have brought a potion for something like this, she hissed at herself, never mind that I didn’t expect it and I couldn’t find a potion for something so vague. I should have invented it if it came to that.
But Riddle hadn’t even given her the time for that.
Gasping for breath and control again, she redirected her focus on the results of her magical scan of the wards.
They were too layered. It wasn’t possible for her to break them, not without several days of time and a lot more energy.
She couldn’t lea—
Harry smacked her arm. Of course she would leave. Snape would kill her if she didn’t.
If she couldn’t break the ward, she would simply get around it.
It was only a matter of how.