The next day at noon, Hogwarts Great Hall was at its liveliest.
Four long tables were laden with roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, large platters of boiled carrots and roasted potatoes, and steaming Pumpkin Juice in golden goblets.
The students sat in twos and threes, their knives and forks clinking against their plates, their spoons stirring the soup, and the buzzing of their conversations mingling with the steam from the food in the air beneath the dome.
Harry was sitting in the middle of the Gryffindor Table, and he had eaten less than half of the roast beef in front of him.
He didn't sleep well again last night. As he tossed and turned, he kept hearing something making a sound deep inside the wall, intermittent, like something crawling and rubbing back and forth behind the bricks.
He stuck his fork into a piece of beef, picked it up and put it down again, showing no appetite whatsoever.
Ron sat next to him, devouring the third piece of Yorkshire pudding, his mouth stuffed full so much that his cheeks were distorted.
"What are you spacing out about?" Ron asked indistinctly, pointing with his fork at Harry's plate. "Give it to me if you're not going to eat that beef."
Harry pushed the plate towards him. "You eat it."
Hermione sat opposite them, a book on Charms open in her hand, flipping through the pages and sipping soup as she did so.
She was clearly completely absorbed in the book and didn't even hear the people next to her talking to her.
Just then, a strange sound came from outside the windows of the Great Hall's dome.
At first, there were only a few sporadic flapping sounds, as if something had hit the glass.
Then the sounds increased and became more frequent, as if someone had released all the birds in an entire forest at once.
The students sitting by the window were the first to react and looked up.
"What was that sound?" Seamus swallowed the bread in his mouth and frowned.
"Um... it should be an owl," Dean said.
"So much?!"
The windows in the dome were pried open from the outside, and several grey-brown owls squeezed in, flapping their wings as they flew downwards.
Before they even landed, more owls had already swarmed in from behind them.
The scene looked like someone had disturbed a giant hornet's nest.
One, two, five, ten—within a few seconds, dozens of owls poured into the Great Hall through the windows of the dome.
They had letters and packages of all sizes tied to their paws, some were carrying brown paper packages in their mouths, and some had heavy boxes hanging from their feet.
They hovered and swooped above the four long tables, feathers and dust swirling and falling in the candlelight.
The previously buzzing voices in the Great Hall suddenly changed tone.
"What the hell?" Fred looked up as an owl flew past his ear, nearly knocking over his Pumpkin Juice.
"Today isn't mail delivery day."
Before he could finish speaking, a second wave of owls swarmed in.
This time there were even more, over a hundred, densely packed in the space above the Great Hall, their flapping wings causing the nearby candles to sway precariously.
They had even more things tied to their claws than the first wave. Some owls were even dragged erratically by the excessive weight of their packs, flapping their wings and barely maintaining their balance.
The owls began dropping packages and letters down.
They accurately found their respective targets; some dropped the letters on the Ravenclaw Table, some on the Hufflepuff table, but the most concentrated drop-off points were on the Gryffindor and Slytherin tables.
Envelopes and packages clattered against the plates, and several glasses of Pumpkin Juice were knocked over, spilling golden liquid all over the table.
"What's this for?" Neville frantically caught a package that almost fell into his soup bowl; the package was so heavy that he nearly dropped it.
Just as the students were frantically opening letters and dodging owls, a piercing sound rang out from the Ravenclaw Table.
"Go home! Don't stay at Hogwarts!"
The sound was a woman shouting at the top of her lungs, so shrill it sounded like someone had a gong pressed against their ear and banging it.
Everyone in the Great Hall could hear it clearly.
Then came a second sound from Hufflepuff's direction, even louder than the first.
"Stay away from that first-year Ginny Weasley!"
Then came the third tone, the fourth tone, the fifth tone...
One after another, Howler exploded on the long table, the red envelopes shattering into pieces, the sounds inside sounding like screams amplified dozens of times.
"Don't go near that abandoned toilet!"
"Stay away from Ginny Weasley!"
"Quickly bring your younger siblings home!"
" Hogwarts is no longer safe!"
The Howler exploded one after another, their sounds bouncing back and forth beneath the Great Hall's dome, merging into a massive, indistinguishable cacophony.
The students covered their ears, some crawled under the tables, and others held up their backpacks to hide their faces.
After all the Howler had finished, the Great Hall was quiet for two seconds, and then everyone started talking.
What happened?
Who sent that Howler?
Who is Ginny Weasley?
Why should we stay away from the restroom?
My family didn't send me anything like that.
Percy, who was sitting at the middle of the Gryffindor Table, had already stood up.
His face was more unpleasant Harry had ever seen; his usually serious expression was now extremely grim.
He clutched a Howler, which had just been triggered in mid-air and was addressed to an unknown recipient, and his gaze swept quickly across the Great Hall.
Fred and George sat diagonally opposite him, and their expressions had completely changed.
They lost their usual cheerful demeanor, their movements froze, and they didn't touch the plate of Yorkshire pudding in front of them that they usually fought over.
Fred's hands were on the table, and he seemed to be Petrificus Totalus. George's eyes were filled with disbelief, and he sat frozen in his seat as if struck by lightning.
Ron sat next to Harry, his fork still stuck in his Yorkshire pudding, but his hand had stopped moving.
" Ginny Weasley..." he repeated the name softly, his voice carrying a tension Harry had never heard before.
Harry felt something sink down in his stomach.
Ginny Weasley.
Of course he knew Ginny.
The lively little red-haired girl once peeked out from the crowd at King's Cross Station and noticed that he often blushed.
She just enrolled this year and is a freshman in Gryffindor.
"Why—" Harry was interrupted by Percy before he could finish speaking.
Percy strode over from the other end of the long table and slammed the crumpled letter in his hand in front of Ron: "Mom and Dad haven't written to us."
Ron looked up, his expression shifting from tense to confused. "What?"
"Look at these Howler," Percy said in a low voice, his gaze quickly sweeping over the students around him who were discussing the matter.
"They were all sent by other people outside."
"None of them were sent by my parents."
Fred and George exchanged a glance.
"They couldn't have missed the book," George said, his tone serious.
"If anyone knows anything about Ginny, it must be them," Fred added, his tone equally serious.
"But they didn't send any letters," Percy repeated, his tone puzzled. "Not a single one."
Ron's face grew paler and paler, lost in thought.
Harry glanced at Percy's ashen face, then at Ron's increasingly uneasy eyes, and the feeling of unease in his heart grew stronger.
The sounds he heard last night, the low, malicious whispers from inside the walls, suddenly seemed to have a vague purpose.
"Let's look at the book first," Harry said.
All eyes turned to him.
" Hermione's family sent her a copy." Harry gestured with his chin toward Hermione. "The other Gryffindor have copies too. Let's see what's in it."
Percy paused for a moment, then nodded.