Next chapter at 300 comments! Dedicated to dracossluttywriter
   — TWs for gore, death, torture, character distress.

AFTER THAT; THERE WAS NOTHING. White noise blared a deafening symphony of silence.
Seven clawed herself back to living, stuck somewhere in that wicked limbo, that unending purgatory lost in all the places between life and death.

Bodies burned, sending up billows of black smoke that curled through the empty night sky. No glass ceiling remained, long lost in the devastation of the explosion. The only evidence of what it once was being the litany of glass daggers, some standing upright as they protruded from the backs of those who lay. Flames lapped up the corpses, most dead but some still dying, groaning, moaning as their flesh was slowly devoured.
  The smell stung her nose and made her sick — throwing up all her hope until her lips were bloody and ravaged with bile.

  Others tried to stand on broken limbs; arms and legs jutting out at inhuman angles as they collapsed back into the fires with the pale white gleam of their bones peaking through all the places where skin should be.

And there, in the centre of it all, was Seven; sat wide-eyed and sick. Fire ate away at her clothes, her shin scorched at the fiery kiss, but she hardly felt it. She didn't feel anything anymore.
She was numb as she watched a woman trying to free herself from the fire, her desecrated fingernails finding no purchase on the marble floors, no matter how she clawed.
  The woman didn't scream, Seven doubted she had the strength to. Blood pooled rapidly around her in the place where her legs should've been but weren't. This was pain beyond felt — beyond comprehension.

Seven looked away. Silence blared, a wicked thing. Suffocating. It felt like the quiet was forcing itself down her throat, its hands around her neck, screaming into her, filling her all the way up but the sound had no place to go.

Maybe she was screaming, if she was she couldn't hear it. That would explain the hoarseness in her throat and copper on her tongue.
  Nothing but a husk, Seven sat there stunned, trying to piece together the shattered fragments of her mind. Everything was scattered. Everything was lost. Nothing remained.

  She put the flame out with her palm — the one gnawing at her leg. Not because it hurt, but because she thought she should.

  Then movement caught her eye.

  Crawling from the ruins like some wicked ash-inflicted nightmare, was a woman. Her dress torn and her dark hair matted with blood and dust.

  Bellatrix Lestrange; the name came instinctively to Seven despite being previously lost.

  The Sin rose shakily to her feet, making little effort to step over the dead and the dying as she shuffled towards the outside. Where there had once been walls Seven could now see the trees beyond. The night was cloudless, and in the distance, stars cried muted light like tears to the undying. Nature mourned this slaughter, distasteful as it was.

  Bellatrix hesitated, head tilted up to bathe in the pale blood of the moon. Without her mask she looked hardly a woman at all; there was no femininity in a creature so malefic, so innately cruel.
  And as if sensing that she was being watched, the Sin turned.
For a weightless moment, both women stared at one another, defenceless if not for their hate. Seven readied herself for a fight. None came, instead, Bellatrix only grinned and then set off into the night.

"Wait..." Seven called after her, tasting blood as she spoke. — But the Sin had already disappeared, swallowed up in the blackness and headed towards the maze.

Seven's legs were uncooperative, her right shin particularly so. When she looked down she saw it was horrifically burnt, charred and with a large part of the flesh eaten away. She didn't feel it though, not yet at least. Soon she would, when the adrenaline — or shock — or whatever force keeping her going inevitably ran out.
She tried to stand. She fell. Weighed down by her outfit that had transformed back into her original dress after the explosion. Whatever magic Luna had used to create it had failed — or maybe, it had only been used up and expired.
How else had she survived the explosion when so many others had not?

The explanation for Bellatrix's survival was easy enough to explain. She was a Sin, a Horcrux, they couldn't die unless by basilisk venom, fiendfyre, the killing curse, or, the hands of another Sin.
  Seamus Finnegan had infused his bombs with fiendfyre — or so he said. Evidently not, or else they'd all be dead. Seven mentally added his name to the long list of people she'd kill if she ever got the chance.

Reaching under the tattered hem of her dress, she was grateful when she found the familiar handle of her dagger; made from fragments of the sword of Gryffindor. Her wand was what she really wanted though and she dreaded the idea of trying to face a Sin without it.

Hopelessly she glanced around. Fallen bodies, fallen beams, bricks, burning wood, fire, ash, dust. Not much beyond that.

"Accio." She pleaded to no reply, "Accio."

She fell again when she tried to stand, her dress like a lead weight; thick with ash and soaked through to the bone with blood — some her own, most not. At least her whatever wounds she had were hidden for now — she could worry about those later.
With unsteady movements Seven freed her dagger, holding the gleaming blade up to the light of the flames for a second, then she began hacking away at her dress.

The job was quick and poorly done, but by the time she was finished, she could stand, looking like some kind of fire-damaged fledgling.

  Smoke raged in thick, grey coils throughout the ballroom, cloying and catching in the back of Seven's throat as she tried again between coughing fits, "Accio..."

  It was no use, she needed to get out whilst she still could.

  Unlike the Sin, Seven was careful where she stood as she limped through the gaping ruin, stepping over anything that looked like it could've once been a person, no matter how charred.

  "Accio!"

  At last, something rustled and then a second later, her wand hurtled towards her. She caught it just in time, filled with a renewed sense of purpose as she stepped out into the open air.

  Her lungs pleaded mercy, never more appreciative of fresh, untarnished oxygen and the night was dark and long. Where there had once been celebration, now silence raged. The only light was in the distance, far off — there, two torches burning at the mouth of the maze, open and waiting, hungry for her blood. She could feel it, that horrid feeling that hung about the air.

  Something was wrong.

  She spun around, wand raised. And then she heard a scream — his scream. A cry so gut-wrenchingly raw and sick with grief.
  Her heart broke as he cried out her name, over and over and over again. She pictured him searching for her body amongst the fire and rubble, when all that remained were a few scraps of emerald fabric, burnt and torn.

  He mourned her, and she hadn't even thought of him.

***
QOTD- What's gonna happen next?;) id love to hear your theories! And as always - if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask!