The lights were bright, but not warm, as if someone had struck a match across his retina. The match had gone out, but the light remained, burning a hole whose edges were charred and still smoking.
Harry glanced at Hermione. The shadow along Hermione's profile stretched long, her eye sockets deep, her pupils reflecting the gray-black clouds churning beyond the window. Her lips were pressed into a thin, bloodless line. Her fingers curled, her nails digging into the cardboard cover and leaving several tiny pinprick marks.
The mist on the window had thickened. The warmth of the three of them breathing had condensed into a thin, milky layer of vapor on the glass. It blurred the sky outside, turning those roiling clouds, those gray-black, iron-like things, into a shapeless mass of gray that writhed slowly, with neither color nor boundaries clear.
Someone drew a circle in that layer of vapor. Not deliberately; a finger had brushed across it. The circle was not round, but flattened, like a squashed egg. It lingered on the glass for several seconds, then shrank, grew smaller, and vanished.
The candle in the library corner had burned down another inch. Wax dripped from the edge of the brass candlestick, hardening into a small puddle of translucent amber at its base. The color of the light changed, from warm yellow to a heavier orange tinged with gray, coating the three faces in a thin, chill halo. Outside, the sky had gone completely dark—not black, but a deep blue darkness, as though someone had draped all of Hogwarts beneath a vast sheet of unevenly dyed blue cloth. The clouds were still rolling, though their direction was impossible to make out, like porridge boiled too long, no longer stirred by anyone, yet still slowly bubbling on its own.
Harry's