The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix Part Three

Where There is a Gurg

The muggles call Dunlewey a ghost village. When they visit, they see the ruins of a village, stone homes wasted by time, roofless and empty. They're easily distracted by an old church - one of the most popular tourist attractions of the area, according to muggle guidebooks.

Often, they're confused by the time they leave, talking about their brilliant holiday and the pretty sights they saw of the mountains and the Poisoned Valley, minds filled with folklore about giants, and a feeling like they'd had a lovely time, despite not having done much while there.

Disillusionment charms are funny like that.

Beyond the outer edges of the "ghost town", the actual village of Dunlewey lay, a bustling wizarding village that wizards in the area referred to as Dunlewey Proper. Dunlewey Proper was a small village town, a square with a small shop of wizard books, a potions shop, and a small market where one could buy everything from a ham to a novelty muggle clock radio to doses of pepper-up potion and back again for twice the price of anywhere else they might buy those things but the breaker was that they didn't have to leave the Proper for it and many of the residents simply didn't fancy venturing off. It had been a shock when Sean Buckner had taken a job in London. He was labeled a bit of a weirdo for going to that muggle-filled city when everything he could possibly want was right there in Donlewey - or else could be ordered in by the market within a day's time at most.

There were loads of places to pitch tents though, right at the foot of the mountain an Earagail and overlooking the beautiful Poisoned Glen and the valley nestled there. Sean had made many a friend-turned-pen-pal that way when he was a youngster, playing in the grass beyond the edge of his grandmum's property with the kids that had come on holiday with their parents. It was there, in fact, that he'd once met a boy named Martin Jenkins, a yearly regular holiday-er, who had become his best mate. They'd written letters for nearly six years before attending Hogwarts together and both being sorted Hufflepuff... 

Funny enough, Annie Buckner was thinking precisely that moment about her grandson when he was a wee thing running about in those fields as she stood in her back garden, looking out at them and sipping a cup of hot tea in the mid-morning when the giants came to Dunlewey.

Annie stared, wide-eyed and unable to believe what she was seeing, her jaw dropped as the larger-than-life man came up over the mountain, climbing over it like a child coming up over a fence, and she gaped as his footprints left craters in the glen, the sheep scattering every which way. Young, for a giant, he wasn't nearly as imposing and huge as he might've been once he was fully grown, but the ground shook behind him and a moment later, the peak was crested by a very large giant with thick and wildly untamed copper-colored hair and beard. He wore an earthy-green tunic, girded up with armor of bronze, great jewels glittering from all across the breastplate.

"Baby Jaysus and the donkey," Annie gasped. She dropped her teacup and it smashed on the stones at her feet.

It was absurd, it was something out of a fairy tale book, out of a mythology and folklore, not something that you see in 1979. Not something you see in real life at all.

Yet...

Annie Buckner stared in horrified awe as the ground shook beneath her feet even from the distance she stood at to the giant, her heart pounding, as she watched him coming forward toward the Proper. It was like an earth quake, a great rumbling sound as boulders and stones rolled down the side of Earagail and crashed into the valley, trees breaking at the foot of the giant, clearly a Gurg.

Everyone knows that where there is a Gurg, there is coming soon an army.