If Memories Could Bleed

Sixth year, 1998.

A poet once claimed in the Muggle world that the world would end in fire, but that ice in the end would suffice. Hermione Granger had never been one to lounge about and argue the practicalities of both the reasonings but as the poet suggested she had enough hate and anguish within her heart to assume the world to end in fire. As it is the element that encompasses all, burning everything in it's path, and leaving nothing. It's destructive by nature, but purifying in it's defeat, the same could not be said for ice.

As a Muggle-born brought into the Wizarding World she had always assumed the world to end in fire and from her viewpoint (and being physically placed in such a setting), it did. The place she called home was burned to ruin along with the many people she called family and friends. The bread castle of Hogwarts was scorched and devastated, and the shouting and screaming of curses and hexes burned her skin, and singed her ratty and untameable hair. Though fire wasn't the only way the world burned.

Watching what held her captive in such a world, the people she knew and loved and those she knew nothing more than a name or an inkling of recognition to die didn't ignite flames inside her, like many assumed it would. Rather they stifled the flames and what was left of her innocence and heart. She didn't burn like the lion with rage, in crimson and gold like many presumed, but froze like the black lake across the courtyard, icy and cold. She did not burn bright and all at once like the Phoenix of the organization she was held loyal to—she became an ice sculpture, a hollowed girl staring wide eyed as the world fell to ruin around her. Hermione couldn't breathe.

She watched as the man they had strived so hard to defeat once and for all as he ended her best friends life in less than second. There was no grand duel, no luck or chance to help her friend survive such a gruesome death that screamed of irony and terrible poetry. It was over in a second, in a beam of that awful green light. The unforgivable curse that hard started their journey, shot forward, connected to his unprotected chest, and just like it had begun, it had all ended.

She couldn't remember screaming, she couldn't recall a single noise at all in that eerie clearing of death and destruction. Blood painted the stone steps, and statues that had been transfigured into soldiers by their Professors lay scattered in broken bricks around them. Burnt hair and the smell of rotting flesh clung to her nose from the wafting air in the makeshift infirmary in the Great Hall. Where the dead of their enemies and friends lay spoiling, where the injured tried to hold on a while longer. Though It was all for nothing—the drive to survive the hope to outlast the next few minutes—, because her best friend was dead.

Harry Potter was dead and Voldemort lived.

They had been on the run for weeks, hiding in any place imaginable with nothing but what they carried on them. Always on alert, always on edge. The lesson of constant vigilance stained like a tattoo to the forefront of their minds from the long-since deceased auror. It was ridiculous that a half year ago the man had been alive and yelling it at them, rather than laying somewhere lost in the vast forests in Britain. No one cared about the dead and half-mad ex-Auror's funeral rites—no more than any other deceased witches or wizards missed period of grieving and mourning. Everyone in the Wizarding World only had one goal in mind, which was to survive the coming days, to above everything else— stay alive. Celebrating the lives lived and the people they cared for dead didn't fit in the world they were stuck living in.

Following the death of Harry Potter, and the rise of the New Order for the Ministry of Magic, everything of any semblance of good fell to shambles. Blood-traitors like the Weasley's were killed on sight while Muggle-born witches and wizards were rounded up in pens to live out their days filthy and tortured. Despite having been ostracized from the Muggle World for years, Hermione found some odd similarities of the pens and lodgings they were entrapped in to those of Auschwitz and other Jewish death camps in the Second World War. They were marched in like prisoners and more often than not,
never returned home.

It was by chance that she had escaped the lines ups, only through her quick wits and grabbing hold of Ron and Ginny Weasley next to her did she manage to outrun those calling for her eventual execution. They had apparated instantly to the Forest of Dean and ever since they had been on the run. That had been two weeks ago. Evading capture had been easier the first time around the Muggle-born witch had to admit, at least then they had a goal in mind, a plan of sorts. The only plan the three wayward made siblings—brought together once by a mutual best friend–, had now was to stay alive and keep others that way for as long as possible. It felt stupid to dwell on the past when things weren't exactly well but better than the now, but with no hope and no drive to live—Hermione let the past settle the few happy feelings left in her bones.

Ginny Weasley had been inconsolable in the hours after their escape. Crying silently and letting only a few haggard sobs escape when she though neither of her companions would notice. She had loved Harry since she was a young girl, long before she even knew what love was. Harry Potter had been the light of her life, the love she never got to act on and her greatest what if. What if she had told him she loved him, what if she had kissed him the room of requirement when she had the chance? What if she had mustered up some Gryffindor courage to get the boy she had always fantasized and dreamt of?

Perhaps, it was the what if's that hurt the red-haired girl the most.

They had never stayed in the same place twice, foraging for food and stealing when buying their goods wasn't an option. It made Hermione sick to her stomach about the things they had committed, the death-eaters they had killed in wayward magic, but they were at war. War had consequences, tragedies and deaths— though she never thought she'd live to see the day she'd become a murderer nor a thief.

Perhaps, it was the foolish biases that Gryffindor's were unfathomably good, that they were the light, the warriors, the ones without a bad bone in their body. They weren't made to be killers, murders and thieves. They were brave and courageous, not cold hearted and blood covered that hid in the daylight only to emerge in the night. More than once Hermione found herself scrubbing her hands raw like the infamous Lady Macbeth to wash away the imaginary blood from her palms. Only twice did one of her companions realize it for what it truly was—paranoia.

They all had their own issues, Hermione with her conscience and Ginny with her never ending what if's. It was their spiral of grief, how they kept moving forward when reason told them to lay down their arms and wait for death. It was ironic that it was Ron Weasley who was the most level headed of their group, the one with the most unshakable resolve to fight and survive. The one not falling apart at the seams like he had the last time they were on the run. He wasn't absent of his grief though, he was more often then not staring longing into the night, speaking to the stars like they held the answers to his questions.

Hermione had always spat on the idea of greater forces, divination and seers. Though more than once she saw the red haired boy attempting to read the remnants of tea leaves in his chipped metal cup, or gazing at the stars. She never belittled him of his new found trance, or in the way his eyes glazed over and he muttered for hours on end about death omens and dark times ahead. If Ron Weasley found hope in the stars, she wouldn't break his spirit. Even if she thought it all to be nothing more than codswallop.

They could all use a little hope in such trying times.

They had made it a week without incident, the three of them battling the elements and dark wizards alike after their mounted heads. Rummaging through trash bins for glimpses at the Daily Prophet and other newsworthy items to stay in the loop of things. It was on the front page they found the rest of the Weasley's beheaded and mounted in the flickering backdrop of the main picture. 'BLOOD TRAITOR WORK OF ART FOR NEW MINISTER' read the caption, with the picture flicking from the wall to the grotesque man in front of it. Voldemort might have once been handsome and charming in his previous life as Tom Riddle, but reborn as the monster he was now was anything but.

Ginny had cried for hours while Ron stared dazed into his empty tea cup after cursing the entire forest aflame with a deadly bluebell charm. Hermione hadn't uttered a word at the picture, but silently was sick in the burning bushes as she recalled every Weasley jumper she had ever been gifted. Every act of kindness she had been given by the generous family.

It seemed only fitting that shortly after the news article that they were attacked not even ten hours later. That was the seventh time Hermione had killed someone, the killing curse coming a bit too quickly from her chapped lips. Ron had set three snatchers on fire, in response to Ginny being set after with a cutting curse. Even with all the dittany in the world Hermione wouldn't have been able to save the girl.

What hurt the most besides being unable to save her was not being able to bring her cold corpse with them to enact proper burial rites. Ginny Weasley was left cold and stiff in the unmarked clearing, and Hermione didn't think she could ever forgive herself for such a thing. Ginny deserved better— they all deserved better than this hell-scape they were trapped in.

Hermione cried for hours that night in the arms of her last living best friend. She cried for Ginny, the girl she couldn't save and could never repay for taking her loved one away. She cried for Molly and Arthur who had always been nothing but kind to her and opened their home to her on the holidays. She cried for Fred and George and the mischief and mayhem they never got to create in their far too short of lives. She cried for Percy and his obsessive work habits, and Bill's half-blood children that would never know him. She cried for Charlie who would never get married or start a family of his own and all the creatures he left behind to fight a war.

Hermione cried and cried until she didn't have a single ounce of liquid left in her body, and all the while Ron held her just as tight. He was the last of his family now.
When did the world begin feel so empty and cold?

It was a month past the death of Ginny Weasley, two months since the last battle and the world was dark and cold. Hermione no longer felt the anguish and guilt of the death following her like shadows. She had killed far more lives than she saved but it was survival. Survival of the fittest had taken on an entirely new meaning.

They were camped out in rural Whiltshire, a stones throw from where the vacated and decimated Malfoy Manor once stood. It seemed that even the Dark Lord was getting annoyed with the aristocracy that was shoving ideas his way. Though Hermione knew there was no love lost between herself and the youngest Malfoy heir she had felt a flickering of pain at the mention of his death. Suicide it was deemed, though Hermione presumed it to be of a more vicious nature. He had never seemed the cold and brutal type. The one to collapse in guilt from the lives he ruined and to pay them back in giving his own. It was far too cowardly for the proud Malfoy heir.

Others soon followed, many pureblood heirs all passing in their sleep or other deemed natural causing deaths—, their families following shortly after. Hermione half wondered if a second plague had caught them unannounced but it made no sense in the death toll. Perhaps, the Dark Lord had once and for all lost his mind, paranoia creeping up ever so slowly and rotting what was already dirty and blackened with sinful desires. Maybe, they had been double crossing the man, or maybe he truly did want the world to be nothing but his playground of chaos and bloodshed.

She didn't pretend to know the madman all too well anyway.

"Hermione," the sudden calling of her name brought her out of her gloomy thoughts abruptly. Not entirely sure how long her companion had been calling her, she glanced up at Ron to see him standing near the mouth of the closed tent flap. It was a little worse for wear than it had been nearly a year ago, with the once pale canopies now turning a muddy brown and looking burnt around the outer flaps. Nonetheless, it served it's purpose of sheltering them from the potential rains, biting winds and other elements they were subjected too in their evasion of getting caught.

She carefully stood from her leaning on an old spruce tree, taking care in tucking her erratic and matted curls behind her ear before half asking, in a way that no words were needed.

"Hmm?"

"We should be leaving," he said slowly, just as he magically shrunk the tent down to fit in his coat pocket.

The red haired boy was a shade of what he used to look like. The once hardened muscle on his shoulders had turned to nothing more than rails, every aspect of him bony and thin. Even his face had lost its roundedness and was now pointed and gaunt, his once bright blue eyes dull and with bruise like bags beneath them. Hermione knew she looked no better for wear, but just glancing at him was nearly painful. The war had taken everything from the both of them, leaving them nothing more than shadows of their once proud selves.

"Right, she mumbled, chewing on the corner of her lower lip and glancing to him unsurely as she began to ask, "Is everything—?"

"Packed and ready." He quickly supplied in answer as he walked slowly to her, as quiet as mouse in a loud floored home. Another thing that had gotten better with their time on the run was their ability to move around unnoticed and communicate with little to no words at all. Hermione didn't know whether it was a trait to be proud of or not, seeing as if only came to existence out of a necessity to stay alive.

"Thank you." She said softly, before holding out her arm to apparate them both to a new location. Hermione distantly thought of when they used to not go hours without arguments between them, when they had both been hard headed and stubborn with little understanding but still joint at the hip with Harry. She longed for those days and their old selves, now they were too quiet, silence filling most of their time spent together both. Far too broken and lost in their own minds to notice the chasm that had grown between them.

Once he had taken her outstretched arm, the familiar tug in her navel made the word spin past them in a second of bright and nausea inducing colours. In a second the world materialized around them again, their body's feeling stretched and molded oddly from the rushed wizard transport. The only difference being that instead of hunger pains greeting them miles away from where they once were, it was the onslaught of curses and hexes at their sudden arrival.

Hermione didn't know how they had found them but it took her a half a second more than it should of for her to dodge an oncoming hex as she dove towards a large boulder for cover. Ron had weaved to the side before shooting off a couple curses their attackers way in retaliation. She used the rock to her advantage as she threw curses and hexes overhead and used the rock for a sufficient cover as needed.

There were three in the barren clearing currently, not that it made the fight all that more even footed. Hermione had tangled with them before it would be only minutes before five more joined them in their apprehension. She half thought they could trace their apparitions which would make sense due to the tracing charms and residue magic within the transport that was held in the now corrupt  Ministry of Magic.

Though why they had waited for nearly a month to snatch them up was the more interesting question. But in the midst of battle she let logic fade from her mind as her instincts took control. She sent a quick Expelliarmus to the one dark cloaked wizard, and missed her mark by inches as they evaded and sent a coordination jinx her way.  Ron was taking on the other two, one that she knew personally as a death-eater and the other as a deflection to the other side.

The death-eater in question was Caulden Nott, the twice removed uncle of a boy who had been in their year at Hogwarts, the other a younger witch a year below them from Ravenclaw. The only reason Hermione recognized her at all in the dark robes was from the mahogany coloured hair that was held in tight plaits on her scalp and the upturned nose. Nadia Fawley, she had tutored her in Arthimacy once upon a time. 

The wizard she was facing herself was eerily familiar, though he, unlike his companions, had his identity concealed by the all too recognizable death-eater mask of silver and white. She didn't hesitate to send a few nasty curses his way, she could only smile a little when her stinging-hex managed to take land on his right leg. Though her joy was soon taken over with panic and fear as the all too familiar incantation was shouted to the left of her where Ron was taking on the other two. 

"Sectumsempra!"

She didn't know how the others could have known the dark spell, as it had been created by Professor Snape who had swore that he was the only one to have used it, excluding Harry, as he was the creator of it. Hermione couldn't help but dart her eyes, in Ron's direction to make sure such a curse missed, but in her half second of distraction, she was cursed in the shoulder by her least favourite Unforgivable.

Her mind went blank from worry to be filled with an unfathomable amount of pain. Burning filled her blood, ashes replaced her bones, her skin becoming that of imaginary ribbons as she screamed loudly— everything began to thrum with pain. Her nerves were on fire, her lungs were drowning and she didn't know when the pain would stop, if it would ever. Hermione Granger couldn't help but thrash on the ground as she tried to fight it off, despite knowing in the back of her clouded and screaming mind that it was useless to try.

She could have been under the curse for years or just seconds and she wouldn't have known the difference except that when the pain stopped the cackling and gloating began.

"Finally out of lives, Mudblood?" The dark cloaked wizard with the mask taunted breezily. Hermione could only cough and shake wildly after the onslaught of the torture curse. It didn't matter really she didn't have much to say anyway to the likes him, besides that he really needed to work on his aim.

"Oh Justice is sweet," Fawley remarked coolly off to her left. Hermione wanted to crane her neck to watch the younger girl, get a read on if she was entirely foe or part friend but her trembling limbs stopped her from doing so. It didn't reassure Hermione that she was even part friend when she sent a cutting curse off to her left, seconds after gloating.

"Diffindo!"

"I love the way they scream," Nott mused out loud with a throaty chuckle as Ron's scream came apparent to her ringing senses. Screams were good, screams meant he was alive and as long as they were alive they could get away. They had to get away. "—like music to my ears."

The sudden crunching of bone and the searing pain in her ankle was brought to her attention as she let out a ragged scream into the darkness. She remembered leaving their past campsite at sunset, so they must have fighting for at least twenty minutes for the stars to come alive in the night. Though laid back and trembling on the barren ground of the clearing didn't leave much room in her over filled mind to calculate much else.

Another silent casting of Crucio ended up on her person and she trembled and shook as she sobbed loudly into the night air, ignoring the resonating pain in her ankle as she thrashed violently before it all came to a stop. The second round had been weaker but not by much. A mild torture curse was still a torture curse, even if it was better than a severe one.

It wasn't only her screams that were painting the clearing with music of their cries of pain. The sobbing of Ron alongside herself, wormed their way into her ears as she panted fogging. Though her reprieve was short lasted when a swift kick to the side had her spilling onto her belly and crying harder. She wanted it to stop she wanted it to be the end of her pain she was tired of living in the endless circle of pain and torture repeating itself. She wanted to die and she wanted to die now. Hermione doubted Ron would be asking for anything different either as she heard the same cutting curse find their way into his person along with a deafening snap of what sounded to be his skull.

"Oh dear," the catty tone of Nadia spoke loudly as she exclaimed with an almost manic sound of glee in her tone. "—it seems the blood-traitor has taken quite a tumble, Granger. Good thing he has no use for his brain any longer."

She shrieked at the girl's words and tried to force herself up on shaking limbs only to get shoved hard into the dirt by another well aimed kick to her skull. Her head throbbed from the pressure, as everything became fuzzy and she felt the instant urge to vomit what little she had in her stomach.

"Pity at that," Nott hummed in amusement as he taunted wickedly in a tone that Hermione knew to have him smirking viciously down at her with crooked teeth on full display. "I was hoping to fetch a price for him. Maybe make myself a 'work of art' to add to the Dark Lord's growing collection."

The chilling laughter that echoed around her had her head searing with pain and her eyes becoming uncomfortably wet at the thought. The vision of the Weasley's family all mounted on the wall as a backdrop to the Dark Lord's coup acquired office in the Ministry had her overflowing with grief. They were a kind family, a good family and they were treated like some sick cannibalistic styled trophy's to a maniac.

"Oh look at her, Nott!" Fawley crowed with a sneer, "The Mudblood is crying!"

"No sense wasting your tears, love." The other deatheater purred, Yaxley they had called him, in such a way that and the once brave Hermione Granger cowering and shaking even harder than before. She didn't want to know what he would try if not for the others present. Likely similar to what Bellatrix had taunted her with. Passing her around as a cheap thrill ride for all the lower standing death-eaters to get a taste of the Brightest Witch of Her Age.

He added on in the same tone that had her spluttering out another cry as she flinched at his cold hand running alongside her chin and forcing her to meet his cold, green eyes. "There's no one left alive to care about you or your magic, sweetheart."

"Stolen magic, Yaxley." Fawley snipped coldly in correction. It was spoken in such a tone that had Hermione wondering how the witch could get away with being uncharacteristically rude to older and far more powerful men. "You know that Mudblood's have no magic of their own."

A groan from the left of her had Hermione wondering how Ron was managing in comparison to her. Was he thinking her weak and pathetic as she laid there sobbing and in pain, unable to move from both fear and her own shaking limbs? He had always held her in a stance of strength without weakness, all knowing and powerful, yet here she laid broken and knowing nothing.

The swift sounding jab of a wand had her wondering if this was going to be their end. With the three black robed wizards staring down at her like muck on their black soled shoes, when Fawley intervened once more, much to her chagrin. Hermione was getting admittedly more and more fearful of the young witch with a nasty taste for blood.

"Why make it quick, Yaxley?" The witch questioned and Hermione's heart nearly stuttered to a stop. She wouldn't take anymore. She couldn't, she was done. What more could this girl want with her? "...make her suffer for all the trouble she's caused us."

With her thoughts spiralling and her eyes brimmed with tears— blurry from her searing skull and the dampness that was beginning to leak from her cranium, Hermione missed much of the following words. She knew her head to be messed up at the time from all the kicking and the rounds of Crucio, but she could still make sense of her thoughts. If only the most basic ones, and them all being jarring and unconnected to the other, as if they were muddled by cotton. The only thing she was able to obtain was the sound of another spell being cast on her person and the sudden ice water that dosed her insides.

"Imperio."

She felt the addition of a nudge in her brain, the same one that had her reciting the alphabet backwards in her fourth year Defence Against the Dark Arts Class. Unlike Harry, she had never been able to throw off the curse or even become a smidge resistant to it. It wasn't from a lack of trying on her end but a simple truth. She had never been good at going against orders or breaking the rules.

'Sit up, Mudblood.'

The voice nudged in her head, and to her surprise she was able to resist it, only partially as she started to get up but froze half way. Her arms shaking and her limbs pulling at the strain of it in debilitating pain. Hermione's marginal refusal, though unspoken, was like a gunshot in the clearing as the words were suddenly spat out loud for all of those coherent enough to hear.

"I said," Fawley enunciated clearly with an edge bordering on annoyance, "sit up!"

The little refusal and resistance in her left instantaneously, as she was suddenly forced upright with her eyes wide open and her breathing hard. Everything ached as she was shoved upright. The crowing laughter from the three dark cloaked individuals had her shaking harder in her skin.

"There-there, Granger," Fawley cooed at her in spite. Now that she was forced to sit upright, Hermione could clearly see the manic glints in her dark lidded eyes and the vicious curl of her thin lips. She pointedly refused to look anywhere else but at the girl with her wand still raised at her.

Fawley however, didn't stop there with her taunts as she had Nott shove over the unconscious body of her mangled friend as she taunted cruelly, "Now why don't you take a good long look, hmm? A good look at what you caused..."

She felt her throat tighten as her eyes began to move on her own accord. Hermione didn't want to, the last thing she wanted to see was her last living friend in death's clutches, but she was useless. Absolutely powerless in the face of this curse as she was forced to see how bruised his body had become from their shoes and fists, the flesh of his arms turned to that of ribbons as they leak out crimson blood. Even his head and the choppily cut red hair was stained it's awful red colour.

Hermione was going to be sick if she stared any longer but she couldn't look away, as her eyes fell on the cold and dead blue irises that she had slowly grown to love. Their was no spark of life in them, just like there was no longer a steady rise and fall from his lungs. He was dead. Dead like all the rest of his family, like Harry and soon... and soon like her.

She wasn't aware that she was screaming, her heart pounding and her eyes burning with unshed tears. Everything hurt, not just on the outside, but the inside too— it wasn't supposed to happen like this. He wasn't supposed to die, none of them were supposed to die! Her throat was dry and cracking as she screamed bloody murder, letting all the pain fall from her dry lips like unwilling curses. It hurt, Merlin—, it hurt more than the Cruciatus Curse being held on her for years on end.

"See what you caused, Mudblood?" Yaxley goaded with his mask suddenly lifted and revealing a nasty set of burn scars up the left side of his face, leaving him with only the shadow of an eyebrow and his skin looking to be half melted off.

"Wasted potential, wasted magic on scum like him," Yaxley finished coldly, and kicked at Ron's leg with a humph of triumph. Hermione whimpered as the boy made no sound. Because he was dead—, because Ron was dead, because they had killed him in cold blood.

"Consorting with Mudblood's and Halfbreed's," Nott chimed in cruelly with a sneer, that made him look even uglier than he had before. Though with the little strength filling her gut with the return of her once burning fury, she went to reply only to fall back gasping as Nott continued cooly and otherwise undisputed. "Rumour has you loved him. Did you love him, Mudblood?"

"Stop," she gasped out, speaking for the first time since they had arrived at the clearing, though Fawley obviously preferred quiet victims. Victims who only spoke when spoken too, obedient play things. "Stop it!"

"Look at what your love has gotten you!" Fawley jeered with a smirk, her wand glowing faintly yellow with another Imperious Curse waiting to be cast. "Your best friend is dead, your blood-traitor boyfriend is dead. I wonder who else is dead 'cause of your love, hmm?"

Hermione felt like all the air had been knocked from her lungs as she struggled to breath. Was Fawley making her stop breathing, was this part of the Imperious Curse? She couldn't think much longer, her brain muddling faster than before as she felt weaker than ever.

The sudden beam of light hitting her again caused her to kneel over, as she was forced to once again raise her eyes to stare at Ron's lifeless ones. Pale blue now looking more similar to grey under the night sky. His pale skin looking closer to translucent in the absence of the full moon. Even his chaotic freckles across his face and brushed over his long and straight nose looked less dark, and more like the reminder of shadows. Ron didn't have the chance to look peaceful in death like Harry had once sprawled across the castle stones that were stained red. He looked surprised, caught off guard that he had been hit by a spell with his brow furrowed in the forever lasting picture of pain and suffering.

"Take a good long look Mudblood as it will be your last you know," Fawley sneered simply as she released the Imperious on Hermione. The dark witch let her fall forward in a puddle of shaking grief with now soundless sobs from her previous screaming and ragged shouting.

Hermione wanted it to end. She wanted the pain to be gone, and the suffering to end. Hermione wanted to die, she wanted to die right then and there. Where she could see Harry and all the Weasley's again. Where she might get to meet her old friends at heaven's white gates or purgatory's endless fields. She wanted the chance to apologize for not being strong enough, for not being brave enough— for failing to do the one thing asked of her. She was supposed to keep Harry safe and she had failed, she owed him an apology at the very least.

She never got to think much more of it as a sudden Flipendo had her sent flying back into the barren earth hard. It was then that the little flicker of fight left in her died entirely. This was to be her end.

She was only twenty years old, far too young of a witch to die and yet—, here she was. Hermione Granger was in the middle of a nameless field in a barren world wrought with chaos and destruction being pulled at the strings by a maniac who would never see the end of his reign. But despite the looming possibility of death and the downright cheerful jibes and cheers from her assailants, Hermione felt a semblance of peace when staring at the sky.

The stars were bright in the country side, dazzlingly and shining as they mapped out the world with their stories. She had just managed to locate the tail end of the Canis Major constellation, or more importantly to her the star Sirius, when the familiar glow of acid green snapped down into her chest. She didn't need to hear the incantation to identify the spell.

Hermione Granger died quickly and without pain, despite the tragedies of her short life in a flash green.