Dark Mark

The Dark Mark is the sign of Lord Voldemort: a green skull with a serpent issuing from its mouth like a tongue. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire introduces it when the symbol blazes in the sky over the campsite after the Quidditch World Cup, and the panic around him tells Harry most of what he needs to know. During Voldemort's first rise, more than a decade before, his followers cast the Mark into the sky above the sites of their attacks, so that the skull glittering over a house came to mean the worst news a wizarding family could receive. Thirteen years of peace have not dulled the reflex; for the generation that lived through the first war, the shape alone brings the fear back whole.