A/N: The challenge was to write for 30 minutes on a topic having to do with the Forbidden Forest.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter, Firenze the Centaur, Professor Dumbledore, and all their associates are characters belonging to J.K. Rowling. I claim no rights to them, their surroundings, or their situations. Much to my sorrow.
The Scent of Change
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Change was coming. He could smell it.
The centaurs of the Forbidden Forest did not foretell the future--not in the sense that humans spoke of such things. Firenze had no use for tea leaves, for crystal balls, for the reading of palms or of charts that purported to explain the night sky. No one could divine his own future, for no one being was important enough in the eyes of the heavens to influence events catastrophically alone.
Still, centaurs possessed senses which were keener than those of humans, and perhaps a few which their two-legged counterparts lacked altogether. There was much to be learned by simple observation and experience, if one had the patience and the discipline to pay attention--and was not distracted by a multitude of petty, manufactured concerns such as those with which the humans delighted to surround themselves.
It was amazing, really, that they managed to get through a day without running headfirst into their own mortality. Then again, perhaps it was the fear which preserved them. It was as well that human senses were less keen than those of his people, Firenze reflected, for they stank at all times of fear--of the unknown, of that which they could not control.
And above all, always and always, of death. The human preoccupation with the time, manner and means of their own ends was enough to drive a centaur mad. All creatures died; all strove, in their own fashions, to push back the day of their own extinction. That was nature. But only humans made an obscenity of death, proclaiming this inevitable passage to be not merely unfortunate or unpleasant to the individual, but wrong. As though any of them, as they themselves put it, would make it out of this world alive.
From this fear rose the threat of creatures such as Voldemort, the untimely deaths of unicorns, and the sullying of the Forest. From this, too, rose the disdain of centaurs for their wizardly neighbors.
Firenze looked more kindly upon them than most; few of his peers had troubled themselves to study the creatures, and so few of them had observed the second part of the equation. Admittedly it was far less obvious than their more unsavory qualities. Nonetheless it was there--if one had the patience. Which was rare even among centaurs. They were a very trying race, these men. But Firenze had watched, and Firenze had seen it.
Preoccupied though they were with scrabbling for just a little more life, a little more time, on occasion it would come to the attention of a human that they were not so alone in the world as they imagined. And when that happened--if one was speaking of a certain type of man--then, they were capable of the most extraordinary things.
Albus Dumbledore was one such man. Long ago he had come into the Forest and made himself known to Firenze, the only centaur curious or courteous enough to willingly speak with a human at length. Despite the jeering of the others, and the distance it placed between himself and his kin, he had never regretted making the man's acquaintance. More than once in the years since, it had proven fruitful for both in ways unexpected, and sometimes quite wonderful.
If a friendship was possible between two such vastly different beings, then Firenze accounted Dumbledore a friend.
Now, scenting change on the air, he fully expected that Albus would prove to be at the heart of it. Change clung to humans, following them around like a lost foal, and spreading like wildfire wherever they passed. Albus being the chief human in these parts, and a rather extraordinary human at that, it only stood to reason.
So it was with little surprise that Firenze greeted the sound of footsteps amid the leaves, and caught the strange but familiar scent--smoke and ink, lemon and lye and dead plant and animal; obscure substances which only a wizard could name, or would care to.
"Albus Dumbledore," he calmly greeted his friend, never taking his eyes from the night sky. "What brings you into the Forest this night?"
Dumbledore came up alongside the centaur, who noted from the corner of his eye that the weight of age and care lay more heavily on the old wizard than ever.
"Firenze, my friend," he said softly, "I have a very great favor to ask of you."