Work Text:
There was a woman screaming close to him.
She was in the underbrush. Behind the trees.
Harry had a job to do. He had death to meet.
But the woman wouldn’t stop.
When he got to her, he realized that it wasn’t a woman at all.
It was a fox, almost.
But only almost.
Its limbs were rangy and crooked.
Its eyes were so pale they looked nearly white.
Its fur looked bleached. Not the healthy orange of autumn, but a strange, yellowed pale.
When it opened its mouth, it sounded like a woman shrieking. Or maybe a child.
A teenager, perhaps.
Hogwarts students are told not to go into the Forbidden Forest.
The acromantula brood was slaughtered in the battle. The centaurs receded to such depths as to never be heard from again. There are no giants in the forest, and any werewolves have since grown up and began their own lives.
It is not for these threats that they are warned.
It is said that if one curious soul is particularly unlucky, they might see it, at the edge of the Forest, at dusk.
Its body is slightly too long. The jutting bones of its hips and shoulders are too angular. The span of its antlers is enormous, as though it too is another gnarled wych elm amongst the legion into which it disappears.
Its eyes are forward-facing.
It is not a deer.
Beside it, the almost-fox screams.
Harry Potter has never left the Forest.
But whatever is left behind wants to.