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“Lils, are you close?” panted the wizard in front of him.
Dust was thick in the air, and he could see the splash of spellfire in every direction around him, but little else.
“One minute!” came the sharp, possibly panicked reply of a witch.
In every direction was the confounding chaos of battle: his Death Eaters behind him, the enemy before him, rocks and shrapnel and wreckage everywhere around. He was thriving.
“I can’t hold him off much longer!”
He frowned at the statement, made by the wizard, the enemy in front of him. It was a face he recognized, the Potter Heir, someone he’d already offered to join his revolution once before, one who’d had the gall to turn him down.
And now, here he was, thinking that it was through his own battle prowess that he was still alive? What a pathetic wizard. If Lord Voldemort wished for someone to be dead, then they would be dead, and no amount of stupefies or expelliarmuses could change that fact. He should have been grateful to have been noticed at all.
“Siri!” he shouted again, growing ever more frantic in his casting. Honestly, it was like his spell knowledge never made it past that of a Second Year. He wasn't quite sure that any vindictive streak or nascent sadistic tendencies were enough to make up for the sheer laziness of mind and spirit that he was showing.
“It’s hard enough reading Aunt Cassie’s notes in a library, Prongs. This isn’t the kind of runeset I’m willing to rush!” came the voice of another wizard.
Honestly, this was getting ridiculous. If they’d only put as much energy into their spellwork as they were into whatever silly trap they thought they were making, this whole thing could have been over by now. Imagining their faces as they broke when he escaped their trap was the only reason he allowed this farce to continue as long as it had.
“Any day now!”
The wizard faltered, stumbling over nothing. It was most likely he was sagging in his exhaustion, and Voldemort didn’t bother to hold back a sneer. Honestly, this was getting ridiculous. Was he overpowering his protegos as well? The lack of finesse was staggering, but even a mediocre wizard should still have a robust well of strength even a hundred spells into a duel, if only they managed their resources precisely.
“Done!” came the triumphant cry of the witch, now standing somewhere to his left rather than his right, and Voldemort’s face broke into a smile. Finally, they would see how futile it was to resist.
Except then the moment froze.
The dust stood still where it was, suspended, and what should have been momentary flashes of spellfire, darting from wand to target, were instead balls of light, hanging still as well.
And then the ground beneath him lurched, and he felt a tug in his gut not unlike that of an especially poorly made portkey, and the world spun away from him.
Blast it all.
He stumbled and sprawled flat on the ground after what was by far the roughest landing of any magical transport he’d ever experienced. Unfortunately this included the time he’d escaped a pack of vampires in South America by apparating himself blindly across half the continent into what turned out to be a ravine along a river it took him a solid month to even learn the name of.
He drew in a breath and shook himself off, standing even as he found himself rather puzzled at his situation. He’d been portkeyed away from the battle, that was clear, likely in some sort of experimental ritual that had never been tried. But the lack of wizards close by to attempt to detain him made him less certain as to the rest of his situation.
If he knew anything about the fools who opposed him, he knew they would never let him escape what they saw as justice. But if they weren’t here to attempt to capture or kill him, then where were they?
He let himself feel, his magic spreading out away from himself, growing ever more certain that the distance he’d been thrown was not far. The air still smelled like Scotland, and the magic beneath his feet still felt very much like home.
And yet, it wasn’t quite the same.
The trees looked different in a way that almost made him wish he’d studied Herbology more seriously. Or maybe even muggle Botany, given the muggle nature of the forest that surrounded him.
No, nothing was worth putting himself through that.
He frowned, not recognizing the feel of any nearby towns or magical hideaways, meaning that this was somewhere far more remote than he’d known still existed anywhere in the British Isles.
He sighed, deciding to take a risk.
He gathered his strength and spun hard on his heel, giving the task far more magic than what should have been necessary to return to Hogsmeade. If he was indeed still in Scotland, the distance couldn’t have been far, but he was wary of the force he'd need to puncture through the sorts of wards that could be hidden and yet laced through the area into which he’d been dropped.
Except, instead of landing right back in the thick of things, nothing happened at all. There was no drain as he butted up against a clever ward, no sensation that he was both where he was and where he wanted to go, nothing at all.
And wasn’t that a conundrum.
He wracked his memory, struggling to recall if he’d ever heard of such a thing happening before, but his study of apparition had not needed to be extensive after he so easily passed his Ministry Test.
His readings had all been brief and thoroughly sanitized, Ministry-distributed pamphlets and books sold by the dozen both in Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley, had no personality, no first-hand accounts of what it meant to push the boundaries of what the magic could do. No discussions or treatises on how apparition was an art nor the ways it could be mastered, so unlike the kinds of books he’d so easily found on Potions and Flying and Enchanting and every other magical subject he’d ever studied.
No, the only thing he could recall about this feeling was the footnote at the end of the Ministry pamphlets that had been distributed at the end of his first class in the subject; the sure claim that trying to apparate to somewhere that didn’t exist was simply impossible.
That might be a problem.
He tried again, thinking of his private hideaway in Ireland, and then again, aiming for the Malfoy home. He tried to get to Hogwarts, to London, to the seaside caves he’d once discovered as a child, and then to several dozen more places he'd been to on his travels, but again and again, he found himself thwarted.
Night was starting to fall, and he found himself dreading what that would mean. He had no resources, no food or shelter, nowhere he could run or hide or even research what had been done.
He had only himself and his wand.
Grudgingly, he decided to climb one of the trees, one that was thick and tall, if only to see if his eyes could inform him of where he was better than his magic could.
It was painful, slow work, and he was almost glad to be doing it alone. It had been many, many years since he’d last climbed a tree, and he was embarrassingly out of practice at it.
At long last, he was above the treeline, up high enough to spot a hill in the distance. There were more of those strange trees as far as the eye could see, though he thought they grew thinner beyond the hill to the North. Away from the thick vegetation of the forest floor, he thought he could smell the salt of the sea vaguely to the East, and he wondered if making it to the coast would tell him any more about where he’d been brought to.
The sun setting over the trees to the West was a blazing red, and yet certainly different from the sunsets he was used to. If only he could pinpoint how.
He heard a roar off in the distance, and then the thunder of something ambling on four legs as steadily as a large beast could move, and was almost as relieved as he was resigned to discerning which dragon sanctuary he’d been brought to, when the animal crested the hill and he laid eyes on it.
It had four legs like a dragon, and was certainly large enough to be an adolescent dragon, but the rest of its features made his stomach sink in pure disbelief. No dragon was without wings. No dragon had so long a neck, nor so long a tail. No dragon would so calmly stand on a hill and eat grass, especially not when such a presumably defenseless human was well within range for it to see and smell.
He hadn’t been traveled in space by that blasted ritual, it seemed, nearly so much as he’d been traveled in time. He rather hoped it would not be the work of a lifetime in getting himself back.