A/N: The challenge was to write a ficlet in 15 minutes with this picture as inspiration.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter, Severus Snape, 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.
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Once, he had called this place his home.
Once, it had been a fertile place. Green and lovely. Once towers had overlooked the spot where he sat, casting long shadows over the fields and courtyards where children had run and laughed. Or sat in thought. Or tormented one another for their own amusement. Children did that...the grounds, had they been able to speak, would have had more than a thousand years' of such simple, mundane tales to tell.
Once a lake had lain somewhere off to his left, and the towering hoops of a Quidditch Pitch had been just visible over the furthest spires of the castle. Many times of an evening he had watched the young men and women on their sleek racing brooms, whirling and dodging, an elegant impromptu aerial ballet, occasionally punctuated by the impact of a Bludger. Rude things, Bludgers. No artistic sensibility whatsoever.
Once, the undisputed master of labyrinthine stone corridors deep below the ground, he had tried with grim perseverance to stuff a little knowledge into heads already chock-full of every sort of inanity, while overhead his colleagues (more patient and optimistic than he) had smiled and sighed and said Worthy effort, Mr. Potter, and Very impressive, Mr. Weasley, and That's all right, Mr. Longbottom, we'll try again tomorrow...
Now, he sat at the edge of a gaping chasm and stared into the emptiness, contemplating the end of an era.
True, Voldemort was dead. Here, in this place, the scourge of the Wizarding World for more than fifty years had met a well-deserved and very final end.
And all that it had cost them was the accumulated dreams and aspirations of a millennium.
"Was it worth it?" he asked the old witch at his side, who peered at him sadly over the frames of her square spectacles, and had no answer.