Nothing but wreckage and rubble. Nothing left of what the Order had fought so long to rebuild. Nothing but destruction. Nothing but blood and crushed stone. Nothing left.
Harry stood on the edge of the Forbidden Forest, clutching his chest and breathing heavily. All around him were cries and yells and the agonized screams of the dying. The sky was obscured by multicolored smoke, and the only light came from the intermittent fires blazing in the rubble, casting sharp shadows onto every surface.
Only the skull like form of Lord Voldemort's pale visage was visible to Harry, whose vision was reddening with his own blood, which trickled past his eyelashes. The flames cast Voldemort's pointed features into sharp relief.
Death Eaters, students, and Order members looked on, as, for one moment, the battle halted. They stood, two enemies, eyes locked, hatred flowing between them in an almost visible fashion.
Harry looked up into the gleaming red slits with pained defiance still in his face. He knew this was the end. He could taste it coming. There, curtained in green smoke, stood his enemy, the one who would destroy him. The skeletal figure raised his wand, eyes burning with excitement, and shouted, in a high, cold voice, "AVADA KEDAVRA!"
Harry caught a glimpse of the stars over the hill as some of the smoke parted. They had never looked so plentiful or so beautiful. They were vast beyond numbering tonight, and each one gleamed with a divine radiance beyond description. They called out to Harry, they reached into his being, where, deep within him, something clawed at the walls of his mind, trying to escape.
The green light hit Harry square in the chest and he stumbled backward. He looked at Voldemort for one last long second, delighting in his look of complete shock and horror, and then felt all of his senses shut down. The deep, inky darkness enshrouding him was heavy and like nothing he'd ever known. Where was he? What was he? He existed. That was all he knew for now.
To the few shocked onlookers who were still alive, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger among them, huddled together in a soul-crushing embrace under a fallen battlement, Harry seemed dead and gone. When Hermione's shocked eyes darted up to Voldemort's, however, the look of deep fear on his face, reminiscent of his encounters with Albus Dumbledore, betrayed his own terrifying knowledge.
"Oh, Harry!" she whispered agonizingly. She wanted to believe it, but she didn't know how she could.
Ron and Hermione lay there, hour after hour, holding each other like they never had before, trembling. Neither could find a sound that would convey their pain, but each silently allowed a steady stream of tears to cascade down their faces, cutting through the accumulated dust that had settled on their skin.
They heard the screams, the curses flying, people running, and bodies thudding to the ground as the night wore on. They lay, shaking, as Ministry defense squads arrived, led by Aurors and Order members, barely disbanding the Death Eaters. When they were pulled from the wreckage they knew it would only be a matter of time before Voldemort was back on the scene with an even worse array of Dark magic. There was no time for crying, only time enough to search for survivors and to make their way into hiding.
The scene passed like a dream for everybody involved. Arthur Weasley shepherded stunned students and his own family into emerald green flames as everybody made their way out by Floo powder. Nymphadora Tonks sorted through rubble and flames with a look of silent shock on her face, magically shifting rock and earth, turning up little more than mangled bodies. And Remus Lupin crouched over Harry's body, his face wrinkled into an expression of pain that looked as though it would never leave.
The smoke cleared, dawn began to break, and the castle was deserted. What survived of Hogwarts was caked with dust and devoid of all life. Classrooms lay empty and deserted, the four-posters in the Gryffindor dormitories were cracked, their sheets scattered, and paintings lay about the floor, their inhabitants gone, the empty frames reflecting the barren lifelessness of the castle.
All the quirky personality of Hogwarts School was gone. The staircases stood still, and the ceiling of the Great Hall was now just a ceiling. As Voldemort strode through the doorless entry of the entrance hall, a look of demonic focus adorning his face, it seemed as though the castle so many had once called home, as well as Harry Potter, were now both, unbelievably, dead.
Harry Potter, however, knew otherwise. Existing in insubstantial darkness, free of mortality but imprisoned by something much more powerful, Harry knew. And his barely present essence was sustained by one piece of knowledge: Voldemort knew, too.