𝐎𝐑𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐎𝐔𝐒 || Harry J. Potter [DISCONTINUED]

Chapter 14 ✎

"Hey Harry, you both had the same lifestyle! Lived in a cupboard!!"
________________________

Third Person POV

Fang started barking loudly at the door as Harry grabbed a lantern and prepared to follow the spiders.

Worried that Fang might wake everyone at the castle with his deep, booming barks, Ron hastily fed him treacle fudge from a tin on the mantelpiece, which glued his teeth together.

"Ron!" Jilly scolded, but couldn't contain the chuckle that left her lips.

Harry left the Invisibility Cloak on Hagrid's table. There would be no need for it in the pitch-dark forest.

"C'mon, Fang, we're going for a walk," said Harry, patting his leg, and Fang bounded happily out of the house behind them, dashed to the edge of the forest, and lifted his leg against a large tree.

Jilly took out her wand, and murmured, "Lumos!" and a light appeared at the end of it, just enough to let them watch the path for signs of spiders. Harry did the same.

"Good thinking," said Ron. "I'd light mine, too, but you know- it'd probably blow up or something..."

"Let me feed you some treacle fudge so you won't say a spell to accidentally blow our faces off." Jilly mocked his earlier actions.

"Haha very funny." Ron said sarcastically.

Harry tapped Jilly and Ron on the shoulder, pointing at the grass. Two solitary spiders were hurrying away from the wand light into the shade of the trees.

"Okay," Ron sighed as though resigned to the worst, "I'm ready. Let's go."

"You do realize this isn't a war-"

"Oh, shut up..."

So, with Fang scampering around them, sniffing tree roots and leaves, they entered the forest. By the glow of Harry and Jilly's wands, they followed the steady trickle of spiders moving along the path.

They walked behind the spiders for about twenty minutes, not speaking, listening hard for noises other than breaking twigs and rustling leaves.

"Um, before we go any further, there's this spell, it goes like this." Jilly did a wand movement, teaching them a spell, that little did they know would save Ron's life later. The spell was Arania Exumai.

When the trees had become thicker than ever, so that the stars overhead were no longer visible, and Harry and Jilly's wands shone alone in the sea of dark, they saw their spider guides leaving the path.

Jilly paused, trying to see where the spiders were going, but everything outside her little sphere of light was pitch-black.

She had never been this deep into the forest before. She could vividly remember Hagrid advising her not to leave the forest path last time she'd been in here. But Hagrid was miles away now, probably sitting in a cell in Azkaban, and he had also said to follow the spiders.

Something wet touched Harry's hand and he jumped backward, crushing Ron's foot, and knocking Jilly clean off her feet, but it was only Fang's nose.

"Sorry!! What d'you reckon?" Harry said helping Jilly up.

Ron, whose eyes he could just make out said, "We've come this far."

So they followed the darting shadows of the spiders into the trees. They couldn't move very quickly now for there were tree roots and stumps in their way, barely visible in the near blackness.