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.
Like Dunlewey, there was a fairly well-thriving wizarding community in Letterkenny. Disillusionment charms had been put on several storefronts in the town, and many muggles found large sections of the place repellant because of the charms protecting the wizards there. It was on the northwestern front, facing the direction of Glenveagh that the wizarding areas were concentrated. In fact, all around the range of mountains known as the seven sisters, wizarding communities had grown up in efforts to contain the giants that lived in the peaks.
It was this magical community that saw the arrival of twenty aurors and the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Mad-Eye Moody, when they apparated along the outskirt of the town in a great band, each about fifty feet away from the next, creating a chain of defensive presence.
Among them were both of the Prewett twins, standing fifty feet apart. To Gideon's right was Edgar Bones, and to Fabian's left Mad-Eye Moody. They stood, poised and ready, wands drawn, listening - waiting for the Earth to shake.
In Dunlewey proper, a similar line of aurors had appeared, these appearing closer together than the line in Letterkenny, with a bit less ground to cover but closer to the known sighting of the giant, Frank Longbottom stood in a cluster with McKenna Alliston and Harry Underhill, their wands likewise drawn and prepared - but unlike the aurors at Letterkenny, these had a sight to behold. The giants had left their footprints traipsing through the valley at the foot of Earagail, headed south east in a diagonal path that would cut between both Dunlewey and Letterkenny, toward the border of Northern Ireland.
Quickly, Underhill sent a patronus to Mad-Eye, updating him of the trajectory.
"We follow the footprints until we find ourselves a giant," Underhill commanded and he called names of the aurors, spreading them out to create a search party line to cover the span of the giant footprints to allow them to keep precise track of the direction they had gone.
Frank Longbottom's mind was whirring with nervousness.
He glanced at McKenna. "What a way to kick off after our inauguration, huh?" he asked her.
McKenna laughed dryly, "I was thinking the same thing. At least you don't have to do it in a skirt."
"I pity you, I really do."
McKenna laughed, "At least if I'm killed I'll look good doing it." She raised her wand.
Chase Volsung was frustrated. He glared at his trial summons, sent by owl that very morning from the office of Harry Underhill, as authorized by Mad-Eye Moody. He was requested to appear in the hearing for the trial of Sirius Black the following week in order to testify to the fact that he had received a report from Cecelia Leonard accusing Remus Lupin of being a werewolf. The request was then that he would share the subsequent dropping of those charges and to cite the provided testing results showing that Lupin was not infected with Lycanthropy. The owl had come along with documents signed by no fewer than three mediwitches who had analyzed the blood test results, and a license of clearance signed by Minchum himself.
Volsung grit his teeth in irritation.
He didn't know what, precisely, but the whole thing seemed suspicious to him and, far from ready to drop the charges against Remus Lupin, Chase Volsung wanted to investigate further. He'd argued his points to both Underhill and Mad-Eye, but he'd received no response back from either department head until he'd received this - the summons and paperwork clearing Lupin from accusation.
Not right. Chase shook his head. It stank of pushed paperwork, of some sort of deal having been made under the table. Usually it was Chase himself that collected paperwork from the mediwitches to clear accusations of lycanthropy, and he often was given the opportunity to be present during the reading of results. Usually he himself carried the license to the Minister's office to have the document signed.
But he'd been involved in none of those usual steps in this case.
He muttered to himself as he shoved the paperwork about the trial back into his inbox, not wanting to deal with it at the moment. He pulled a different case file out, tearing open the manilla envelope and looking through paperwork and photographs at the information on a man in Leeds that had been accused.
He looked up as two lads entered his office. One he recognized and the other he didn't.
"Morning, Sean."
Sean Buckner nodded his greeting in return, looking quite the nervous part.
"Mr. Volsung," the other lad spoke up - he wore a pressed auror's uniform, the top four buttons of his oxford under the vest undone, his collar bone showing... Chase couldn't help but think what a tosser this one looked - full of himself enough to leave so many buttons down, and with his hair all perfectly windblown as it were. He also had that rather self-important air about him that Chase Volsung hated seeing in aurors who thought themselves better than other Ministry workers. This was only exaggerated by the boy's use of his name instead of sir as he ought to have been calling Chase. Despite being within a year or so of each other in age, Chase was fairly certain it was still protocol to refer to one another as sir unless addressing a subordinate. "I'm James Potter, Mr. Underhill's assistant. Mr. Underhill has sent me to tell you that there's been a sighting of giants in Ireland and he's in need of the big irons."
At these words, Chase Volsung snapped his focus to business at hand rather than judging the lad.
"Pardon?"
"Giants in Donegal!" Sean said, cutting in again, "Right near by to Dunlewey Proper, in the Poison Glen!"
Chase raised an eyebrow. "Bit cliche, isn't it?"
"Honest, though! Seen it with my own eyes, in my picture portal, haven't I?"
Chase Volsung had seen Sean Buckner's picture portal more than once and admired it while waiting arduously for stacks of paperwork to be copied over. Sean was, after all, the quickest and most thorough copier in the Ministry and it wasn't only Annalee who had found the boy's services worth the walk - although others admittedly only found it worth the walk for the services, not the visit or the view.
"You're serious?" Chase said, raising an eyebrow.
"Yes, sir," James answered, and some of his hair fell over his forehead as he said it, giving him a classic playboy look that irritated Chase all the more. "Underhill's already gone to Donegal with half the Department."
"Blazes," muttered Chase, pushing himself up from his chair. He'd never had to use the big irons before. He walked across the room and waved his wand, drawing it from his sleeve, and the wall seemed to swing open, revealing a large storage closet of weapons, chains, whips, nets, and various other devices for capturing, trapping, and otherwise detaining hung on the walls. Chase disappeared inside.
Sean and James looked at one another.
A moment later, floating out ahead of him, the cuffs nearly as tall as himself, there came a pair of handcuffs made of thick iron, hanging in the air by magic.
James stared at the cuffs in awe. He'd heard of giants all of his life, of course, but never had he actually imagined just how large they would be until he saw the circumference of the irons meant to go 'round their wrists. It suddenly occurred to him, rather stupidly, that giants were... well... giant.
"Blimey," he whispered.
How they made it to St. Mungo's in such record time is a mysterious miracle of magic and physics that Remus Lupin could never explain, no matter how many times his brain spun 'round and 'round it, trying desperately to balance out.
He fell into a chair in the waiting room, nerves shot nearly as poorly as his knees, and he double forward, his back torturously tight. The moment the Knight Bus had arrived, mediwitches had rushed to the curb, Ernie must have warned ahead they were on the way for they had a bed propelled forward by the locomotor which they quickly slid Dorcas Meadows onto, and they'd rushed her, and Lily, who Dorcas refused to let go of, directly through. Remus had been left behind, shouts of promised updates being called over Lily's shoulder as she scampered to keep up with Dorcas and her team of mediwitches.
It occurred to Remus how mental anyone going into the medical field must be - how could they deal with this sort of stress everyday? This was the second major medical moment he'd sat in a waiting room for this month, and he was quite tired of it, honestly. Nerves of steel, that's what they had to have, and he had a newfound respect for Emma Vance, which he made a mental note to tell her of the very moment he saw her next.
Which, it turned out, was near to immediately.
"Remus?"
He looked up, "Well bugger me, I just was thinking of you."
"Of me?" Emma asked, stepping into the waiting room. She held a cup of tea and wore training robes of cream with pin stripes in a muted pink salmon color. "Is Sirius alright?" she glanced around nervously.
"Oh yes, yes, he's at home, I'm here with Dorcas Meadows."
"Oh! Finally having the baby, is she?" Emma lit up with excitement.
"Yeah," he said, "Nearly had it on my living room floor, then nearly on the Knight Bus, and luckily we made it here somehow or another."
Emma couldn't help but giggle at this, "Oh you must have had a right fit."
"Less of one than Lily and Sirius," he said. Then, "Em, I don't reckon you could get me something for a splittin' head ache and back ache, could you?"
"Here, lean forward." She waved her wand, tracing it along his spine, and he felt the muscles loosen up with a sensation like a spool of thread unwinding and he gasped with relief.
"Oh thank Merlin!" He grinned, "What was that spell? Could use that, I could."
Emma laughed, "Oh no, you could do damage without being properly trained at it. Just floo me up anytime and I'll stop in and get the knots out."
"Thanks Em." He didn't want to say it wasn't likely he'd be flooing her morning after a full moon to get the knots worked out, though.
Emma nodded, "Alright, dear, I gotta run, but I'll pop back if I hear anything on Dorcas."
"Thanks," he said, "Hopefully Gideon will be along soon. Sirius was sending a patronus to let him know what's on."
"Excellent!" Emma smiled and waved as she left to get back to work.
Remus was thankful for the loosened muscles in his spine and he leaned back in the seat, waiting nervously, keeping an eye on the entry to the hospital, waiting for Gideon Prewett to arrive...
But a good deal of time was passing, slowly and yet also all at once, and there was still no sign of Gideon.