Emma Potter; Going to War

123: The Tree

I lay facedown, listening to the silence. I was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there. I was not perfectly sure that I was there myself. A long time later, or maybe no time at all, it came to me that I must exist, I must be more than disembodied thought, because I was lying, definitely lying, on some surface. Therefore I had a sense of touch, and the thing against which I lay existed too.

 Almost as soon as I had reached this conclusion, I became conscious that I was wearing my torn, dirty clothes. Convinced as I was of my total solitude, this did not concern him, but it did intrigue me slightly. I wondered whether, as I could feel, I would be able to see. In opening them, I discovered that I had eyes.

I stood in the middle of a gray field with a smooth surface. I was facing a magnificent tree that was engraved with the name Emma. A silver clock was embedded in the center if it's trunk and the hands had stopped turning at 4:33. I  heard ticking and when I gazed up I saw thousands of of pocket watches hanging from the branches on glittering silver chains. 

The field stretched out for miles around her and was home to dozen of of other white trees, but none of them had as many pocket watches as the tree with my name. In fact, most of them were bare. 

As I gazed across the land, I noticed a bright sun hovering over the horizon to her right and a massive full moon hovering over the horizon to y left. Between us was the most spectacular sky II had ever seen. There were hundreds of orbiting planets, thousands of spiraling galaxies and millions of twinkling stars. Everything was so vivd, the entire celestial bodies gave iff a hynotic chime--I could hear the stars as much as I could see them. 

I wandered through the field, exploring the peculiar place. Something felt oddly familiar about the strange land--like a part of me had always been there. I wasn't worried or scared as I walked around. Because for reasons unknown to me, I knew I was perfectly safe. 

All the trees stood at different heights and each of them was engraved with a different name. Their trunks were also embedded with silver clocks, but unlike the clock on my tree, the others were working and moving at different speeds. Some of the names I recognized, like Harry, Zoe, Draco, Nicholas, Ron and Hermione--but there were engravings I didn't recognize, like Remus Black, Sophie and Scorpius. Curiously, the mysterious names belonged to smaller trees that hadn't been plants and their clocks were frozen at 12:00 as though their hands hadn't started yet. 

I felt a piercing gaze on me, I turned sharply to meet the black eyes of Severus Snape. 

"Ms Potter." His voice was soft, and lacked his usually curt tone. "Let us walk."

I followed.  Snapes long greasy hair and beard, the piercingly black eyes: Everything was as I had remembered it. And yet. . . 

 "But you're dead," I said.

"Yes," said Snape matter-of-factly. 

 "Then . . . I'm dead too?"

 "Ah," said Snape, turning to face me. "That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, Ms Potter, I think not." 

 We looked at each other, the dead man still calm. 

 "Not?" I repeated.

"Not," said Snape. 

 "But . . ." 

I raised my hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. 

"But I should have died — We didn't defend ourselves! We meant to let him kill us!" 

 "And that," said Snape, sagely "will, I think, have made all the difference."