Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

For readers who want sharp, Slytherin-cut menace from the start.

The Order betrayed her.
Her friends abandoned her.
Her enemies buried her.

But death did not claim her.

Something darker did.

Now Hermione Granger is no one’s savior.
She is the storm in the marrow,
the blade in the dark,
the witch who will grind kingdoms to dust.

And she is not alone.

Chapter Text

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Prologue

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They left her to die. But the ashes whispered: rise

When they chose my death, they spoke it like a verdict, smooth and practiced, the way a judge might read a grocery list. My name on their tongues tasted of ash and sanctimony. I could see it in their eyes as they pronounced the sentence: not justice, not necessity, but theatre. They had written this ending for me long before today; they only needed a stage.

I had never learned to pray for mercy. Mercy was a story we told to children. What I learned was how to take what was denied. How to hold breath under water until my lungs screamed. How to swallow pain until it became part of me. I didn’t believe in fate the night icy water filled my lungs at eleven and I clawed back to the surface, or the winter a basilisk’s venom told me the world had teeth while I lay paralyzed in a hospital bed listening to other people’s footsteps. I didn’t believe it the dozens of times the boy called Potter played hero with my blood, my ideas, my spells, and walked away with the applause while I lay behind him invisible and shaking.

I came closest to truly dying in a London café. Yaxley’s fingers were a vice around my throat, his breath sour against my face, the teacups and chatter dissolving into static. The air turned traitor and fled my lungs; the world blurred at the edges. And in that narrow tunnel where the last scraps of life slipped through my fingers, something colder than fear stirred and opened its eyes inside me. It wasn’t hope. It wasn’t light. It was the dark pulse of survival, older than spells, older than gods. It wrapped itself around me like winter and it never left.

That cold taught me its single law: death only keeps what it can break. It can take your breath, your blood, your name—but only if you give it your will. And I, Hermione Jean Granger, have never given anything willingly.

Now, as they gather in their chamber of false justice, their accusations still dripping from their lips, I feel that cold like a blade in my spine. It keeps me upright. It keeps me burning. Tonight will not be the performance they rehearsed. Tonight will be the inversion, the reckoning. Tonight I will not be their scapegoat. I will be their mirror, their monster, their blade.

I, Hermione Jean Granger, will be their executioner.

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Hermione's POV:

It was always dark now. Not night, not shadow—this was a darkness with weight. It clung like oil, crawling over skin and into lungs until even breath tasted rancid, like a swallowed secret gone sour. The torches sputtered along the chamber walls, coughing out thin, greasy threads of light that coiled upward and smeared the ceiling with black smoke-ghosts. The air was a graveyard of smells: rust and damp stone, mildew, old blood. The perfume of defeat.

This was no hall of justice. It was a tomb built for spectacle. Every echo off the stone mocked what we’d fought for, every footfall a hollow drumbeat of hypocrisy. They called this victory, but victory stank of bodies left in alleys, of shallow graves dug with shaking hands. The Order wanted “justice,” and Kingsley gave them a theatre of it—mock trials, swift executions, blood flowing slicker than anything Voldemort had managed.

The day they came for me had been scripted long before it happened. We had just destroyed a Horcrux. Ronald bloody Weasley at my side. The taste of dust still in my mouth, adrenaline still singing in my veins—then shackles, curses, a voice hissing, “Traitors must be dealt with.”
Traitor. The word burned worse than Cruciatus. They knew I wasn’t. But truth was irrelevant. What mattered was the performance: the “good” side displaying a corpse dressed up as justice.

For a month I rotted in a cell built to strip me bare. Chained and naked beneath a ceiling that wept onto me day and night until the dripping carved holes into my mind. Every drop landed with surgical precision: tick, tick, tick, a clock counting down to my unmaking. The stones sweated damp; mildew slicked my back when I lay too long against them. The smell of myself was a living thing—urine, blood, fear—an animal scent of prey penned for slaughter. They beat me until iron bloomed on my tongue with every swallow, until the world blurred into purple bruises and yellow rot spreading across my skin. The shackles gnawed my wrists and ankles until each movement was fire under the skin.

My magic, once a roar, had dwindled to a moth-wing flutter under my ribs. Thin. Starved. They smothered it with iron, bled it out of me one day at a time. They fed me like vermin—soggy bread, grey meat that crawled with maggots, food so foul it clung to my tongue even after I spat it out. I grew thinner than I had ever been, thinner than the days running with Harry and Ron when starvation was survival and not punishment.

And then the third night came.

My robes weren’t torn by accident. They were shredded by hands that knew exactly what they were doing. Fingers that lingered too long, nails scraping skin. His breath was sour with rot, his weight suffocating, his grunts hot and wet against my ear. He took what he wanted—the forbidden thing he had always craved but never touched. The one thing I thought was still mine.

When he was finished, I lay on the stone that stank of him, my hair matted with blood, sweat, and leakwater, my body broken in new ways. The cell reeked of his breath, his skin, his violation; the sound of fabric tearing echoed long after it had stopped. He left his filth behind to fester in me, a signature carved into a space he could not own. He stole the last shred of me, the final piece I clung to in the dark.

But they made a mistake.

They thought this would unmake me. That I would emerge hollow, silent, erased. That there would be nothing left but a shadow wearing my skin.

They were wrong.

I am not hollow. I am not nothing. Death only keeps what it can break.

And I am not broken.

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Morning was only a word. Down here there was no light, no sunrise, just the moment when the bolts scraped back and the world invaded my cell again. They came for me at that hour. The air shifted first, and I felt it on my skin before I even opened my eyes. It was wrong. Too thick. Too still.

It no longer stank of piss, shit, and rot — the familiar perfume of my cage — but of iron. Wet iron. Fresh blood. The scent was everywhere, seeping from the stones, coating the back of my throat. It clung to my tongue like a coin sucked too long in a nervous mouth, metallic and sharp enough to cut. Each breath filled my lungs with the taste of rust and copper until it felt as if I were drowning in it.

My stomach clenched hard, a hollow knot. Days without real food had left it thin and sour; the acid climbed my throat, hot and bitter, wanting out. I bit down on my tongue until I felt the skin tear and the copper bloom. The pain anchored me, held me in the present. I knew exactly what a gag would cost me.

A week.

A week in the black cell. No window. No torch. Nothing but stone so cold it numbed your skin and the sound of your own breath echoing back at you like someone else’s. A week of him slipping through the door at night when the guards pretended not to hear. A week of whispers poured into my ear, of taunts like oil, of boots scraping closer in the dark. Hands. Weight. Heat. Humiliation.

A week I would not give them willingly. Not for a single gag.

So I swallowed the bile and the blood and forced my body to move. I stood, wrists raw in their shackles, the metal biting like teeth, and let them drag me out. The corridor smelled of blood baked into stone, heavy as incense in a cathedral. I kept my eyes down, counting my steps, pretending not to see, pretending not to smell death itself drifting through the air like smoke.

Inside my skull the words repeated like a mantra: don’t retch, don’t stumble, don’t give them anything. Each footfall on the wet stone was a heartbeat. Each breath was an act of defiance.

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They dragged me into the courtroom like a spectacle, chains clattering against the flagstones, the sound echoing louder than it should have in the vaulted chamber. Every link was a drumbeat announcing what I was: prisoner, traitor, execution waiting to happen. The air was thick, stale, and reeking of sweat from too many bodies crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the pews. It smelled of parchment, dust, and the metallic sting of expectation.

They hadn’t gathered for justice. No, justice was a corpse they had already buried. They had come for blood. For a show. For the Golden Girl to fall from grace, stripped, silenced, and swinging from a rope.

Their whispers crawled over my skin as I was shoved forward, the words blurring into a steady thrum of venom: traitor… whore… Death Eater’s pet… Each hiss clung to me like gnats around an open wound. I kept my head bowed, not out of shame, but because I refused to give them the satisfaction of seeing fear in my eyes.

At the center of the chamber stood Arthur Weasley, gaunt and grim, clutching the edge of the bench as though even he wasn’t convinced he belonged in this farce. But I barely lingered on him, because beside him—smiling, gods, smiling—was Molly. Her mouth was curled into a predator’s grin, eyes sharp with malice, savoring the moment like a vulture circling fresh carrion. That smile would follow me long after this day, carved into memory deeper than any scar.

The rest of the Order arrayed themselves like judges, cloaked in sanctimony. Kingsley in his flowing robes of false righteousness, his voice already echoing in my memory, condemning me before I had spoken a word. Ron’s fists clenched at his sides, freckles drowned by rage and betrayal. Ginny, lips pressed into a thin line that might have been triumph or disgust—I couldn’t tell which cut deeper. And Harry. Harry, who wouldn’t meet my eyes. The Boy Who Lived, the boy I had followed into war, standing silent while I was dragged into slaughter.

Every name was a wound reopening. Every familiar face was a blade twisting deeper.

But it wasn’t enough to see them. I forced myself to turn, to scan the crowd packed in the benches, to look into the eyes of the audience who had gathered to see me broken. Familiar faces flickered out of the shadows: classmates I had once shared ink-stained tables with, parents I had seen in Diagon Alley clapping proudly at Quidditch matches, old neighbors who had smiled at me in the market. They were all here. And in their eyes was no pity, no protest—only hunger. The hunger for blood. For a witch stripped of her halo and dragged into their muck.

My past was here, watching. Watching me bleed. Watching me fall.

And I realized with cold clarity that my past hadn’t just abandoned me—it had brought me here. Every laugh in the common room, every handshake, every hollow friendship, had led me step by step into this chamber. Into this theater of betrayal.

I was not Hermione Granger to them anymore. I was the offering. The traitor. The scapegoat.

And in that moment, under the crush of their stares, I understood something so sharp it split me open: I had no home left among them. I had no past.

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Kingsley stood at the heart of the chamber like an executioner disguised as a judge. He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. He only lifted his hand and the sound died. All at once, the murmurs snapped off, chairs creaked into stillness, even breathing seemed to falter. It was a silence so sharp it cut, the kind that makes your ears ring because the absence of sound is heavier than noise.

They were holding their breath. All of them. As though even the act of inhaling might taint their performance of justice. As though life itself was something they had already denied me. I hoped they choked on it—their precious air—the way they’d tried to choke it out of me.

I stood between two Aurors, their grips iron on my arms, their wands like cold promises against my ribs. They weren’t guards. They were wolves on a leash, waiting for the smallest excuse to snap my neck, and I could smell the want of it on their skin—sweat, leather, the faint ozone of ready magic.

But I would not run. I would not fight. They would not get the spectacle they wanted—the frantic girl clawing for her life, the traitor begging for mercy. No, they would see me standing, silent, spine straight. They would see what they had made of me before they tried to unmake me.

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He peeled the papers apart like a butcher stripping a carcass and read the list with the calm of a man announcing the weather. Each syllable landed like a blow. I wanted to laugh until my lungs ruptured — to spit, to scream, to tear the parchment into confetti and shove it down his throat — but I held still, teeth clenched so tight my jaw trembled. I would play their part until I could carve my answer into them. They deserved more than words. They deserved blood.

“Charge One: High treason against the Wizarding World.” The phrase rang like a bell tolling death. Bile rose hot and metallic in my mouth.
“Charge Two: Collusion with Death Eaters.” Collusion. Friendship twisted into treachery. The name Malfoy made the accusation sticky and believable.
“Charge Three: Practice of dark and forbidden magic.” That one should have been laughable if the air hadn’t gone so thin. I imagined the walls snickering; I imagined the whole court choking on the absurdity. I pressed my tongue against the bite of my teeth until salt of blood filled my mouth.

He kept going, each indictment another smear of black paint over everything I’d stood for: endangering the Chosen One, sabotage, accessory to murder. The words slithered together, a single rope meant to hang me. The more he spoke, the harder my heart hammered with a cold, bright hunger—not for mercy, but for the kind of dark magic that would make men like him crawl. I wanted power not to be adored, but to be feared; not to be praised, but to break them.

When he spat the final charge — “moral degeneracy and treachery” — it landed like spit on my face. Their laundry list of sins blurred into a single, roaring insult. I felt every contemptuous eye on me like a brand. I kept my silence because silence is a blade in its own right. Let them dress me as their scapegoat. Let them parade me as a warning. I would stand stone-still and let them believe they had won — and remember this moment when I came for them.

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Kingsley had barely drawn breath to continue when Molly Weasley rose, her chair scraping back across the stone with an ugly screech that set my teeth on edge. She didn’t wait to be called upon—of course she didn’t. “Do not forget about the other crimes as well,” she said, her voice shrill and certain, slicing the silence like a blade.

Her eyes found mine, sharp and fever-bright, and she held me there, pinning me to the spot as though she’d already strung me up from the rafters. I stared back, unblinking, my fury rising like bile. I wanted her to see it—that I wasn’t broken, that I would remember her face when the ashes cooled. She smiled, the smallest twitch of her lips, and my nails dug crescents into my palms.

Kingsley, ever the dignified executioner, inclined his head in her direction. A signal. Permission granted. And then the charges spilled out again, dripping from his lips like liturgy, like scripture written in rot.

“Charge One: Aiding and Harboring Narcissa Malfoy.”

Lies. A venom-soaked lie. I had done no such thing. My stomach churned, and I had to bite down on my tongue to stop myself from spitting the truth back at them. They didn’t want the truth. They wanted a villain.

“Charge Two: Conspiracy to Protect Malfoy Heirs.”

That one hit harder. My chest tightened, a bitter ache clawing at me. Draco. Gods, Draco. Friend, sometimes something more, always something they never understood. He hadn’t asked for any of this. He hadn’t carved the Dark Mark into his skin, hadn’t chosen the father who had. He didn’t deserve to be hunted like a dog. And for that—for seeing him as more than a name—I was condemned.

Kingsley’s voice droned on, rolling out one falsehood after another, each accusation punctuated by Molly’s smug little nod. My rage coiled tighter with every word.

“Charge Seven: Endangering the Order and Harry Potter.”

Bull. Fucking. Shit. My jaw throbbed with the force of the words I swallowed. If not for me, Potter would have been dead ten times over before his precious prophecy was fulfilled. I wanted to laugh in their faces, to scream at Harry across the chamber, Tell them! Tell them who saved your life! Tell them whose hand dragged you out of fire again and again! But he kept his head down, silent, complicit.

The list went on. Ten accusations in total, each one another stone on the pyre they’d built for me. By the end, my whole body trembled—not with fear, but with the effort of holding myself still. My tongue ached where I’d bitten it, blood sharp and metallic on my teeth. I pressed harder, harder still, until I swore I would split it in two. Better blood in my mouth than words they would twist into a confession.

They wanted me to plead. They wanted me begging. They wanted the Golden Girl to die small and pitiful, stripped of dignity.

But I was not small. I was not pitiful.

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This was the final straw. The moment my silence cracked like glass. I lifted my head at last, slow as a blade being unsheathed, and let my gaze crawl over every face that had gathered to see me fall. Kingsley, standing like a statue carved from hypocrisy. Molly, all smugness and venom, her smile a wound she kept reopening. Ron, Ginny, Harry—each of them a ghost in the gallery of my betrayals. I looked at them all. Really looked. And I felt something in me shift.

I decided to speak. My first mistake.

The word barely left my mouth—raw, broken, but mine—when a voice from the gallery snapped Silencio! The spell cracked through the chamber like a gunshot. My throat seized, my tongue went dead. My voice—my last weapon—ripped from me mid-breath.

I stood there, gagged by magic, the echo of my silenced word ringing louder than any sound could. My eyes swept the crowd, and every single person I landed on shrank back, but not enough. Not enough to undo what they had done. Rage burned up my spine like fire, and I wanted to spit it at them, but there was no spit, no words, nothing but the hollow ache where my voice had been.

I glared until my vision blurred, until the faces of my accusers melted into one monstrous smear. And in that blur I saw the truth: even this small defiance had been a mistake. They would not give me a fair death. They would not give me the dignity of being heard. They wanted me silent, voiceless, an image, not a woman.

I forced myself to breathe, shallow, through my nose. I still had my parents, I told myself. They were on the far side of the world, blank-eyed and living a life that did not include me. But they were breathing. They were safe. And that was mine—still mine—even here. They could strip me of my magic, drag me out of the Wizarding World, hang me from their rafters, but they could not erase that heartbeat of love that existed beyond their reach.

I stood taller. Even without a voice. Even without a wand. Even with their spell still choking me. My silence became a blade, honed on every betrayal in this room.

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They dragged me from the podium in the center of the chamber, shackles clattering against stone, and shoved me onto a bench beside others already condemned. The air stank of sweat, iron, and despair, thick enough to choke on. They called these proceedings trials, but there was no justice here—only ritual slaughter dressed up as law. Every face in the crowd leaned forward with the same hunger: to watch us burn.

The doors groaned open again, the same doors I had been marched through not long before, and the sound made my stomach twist. Out stepped Narcissa Black Malfoy, her spine rigid even in chains, her face pale but proud. Behind her came Lucius, gaunt and hollow-eyed, dragged forward like a shadow of the man he once was. My eyes searched instinctively for another blond head, but Draco was not there. Relief and grief twisted together like barbed wire in my chest—I did not want him to see this, not ever.

They forced Narcissa to her knees beside her husband. Something about it was wrong, staged, a cruelty beyond necessity. She did not resist, only lifted her chin as though daring them to look into her eyes and see her dignity, unbroken.

And then Molly Weasley stepped forward.

My insides turned to acid. The bile that had been climbing my throat for weeks, simmering in the pit of me every time I smelled her perfume of sanctimony and false grief, rose hot and choking. She held her wand like it was an extension of her hate, like it was justice itself made flesh.

There was no pause. No trial. No voice of judgment but hers.

I saw her wand rise, saw her lips form the words, and then the chamber filled with green. The flash was blinding, terrible in its beauty, the color of life stolen mid-breath. Narcissa crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut, falling into the dirt as if the world had simply rejected her existence.

Gasps rippled, but they weren’t horrified. Some faces lit up with grotesque awe, their mouths parting in something close to adoration, as though Molly’s act had been holy. My stomach heaved. My hands shook against my chains.

Tears burned my eyes—not because Narcissa was saintly, not because she was faultless, but because she had been condemned by lies, slaughtered in spectacle, and the world applauded it.

And in that moment, beneath the weight of my silence, I knew this chamber was not a court at all. It was a temple. And what it worshiped was blood.

Lucius’s collapse cut through me like another blade. The sound he made—half a keening, half a broken prayer—tore loose something I hadn’t known was still tethered inside. I wanted to scream until my lungs split. I wanted to tear Molly from the dais and rip her throat out with my bare hands. The name swam like venom in my mouth: Molly Weasley. She would die for this. She would hang for what she’d done to Narcissa, and I would make sure of it.

He lurched forward toward Narcissa’s fallen form, fingers outstretched, and the Aurors yanked him back with the efficiency of men used to breaking spirits. He stared over them all—over the crowd, over Molly, over the bench where I sat—and his eyes were emptied of everything but a cold, bottomless grief. It was a grief that ate him from the inside; it was a dark that matched the one in my chest and somehow made me feel smaller and more furious all at once.

Memories unspooled without warning: the manor’s corridors, the weight of whispered bargains, the quiet calculations that had kept Harry in ignorance. I felt again the slick mud underfoot, the lie I’d worn like a bandage—the Mudblood scar that had long since faded from my arm—an emblem of a deception I’d been forced to clutch. It had been a lie to protect. A hoax to shield. And now that same lie lay buried under their righteousness, smeared across the stones like wet paint. The Order preached justice while they staged murder, and the realization burned me colder than any curse.

They had made monsters of us all—of her, of him, of me—and the thing I wanted most was not mercy. It was retribution. It was the slow, poetic undoing of every smug face in that room.

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I didn’t know I was next until the first hex slammed into me. It hit like a hammer, knocking the breath out of my lungs and ringing my bones. Then another. And another. Each curse landed in a steady rhythm, like someone drumming on my skin with fists full of fire. My scream rose automatically but went nowhere—Silencio still sealed my throat. The sound died inside me, trapped, until it became a pressure in my chest, a howl I couldn’t release.

I forced myself upright, knees shaking, shackles rattling like tiny bells of defiance. If Molly wanted to kill me, she would have to watch me crawl to her feet and bleed there. I began to walk toward her one step at a time, slow and deliberate, as her spells carved into me.

Flagellum. Again and again. Invisible lashes ripping across my arms, my back, my thighs. The smell of scorched fabric and skin rising with each strike. Of course it was her favorite. It had been his too, the one who crept into my cell at night with hands like claws. That didn’t surprise me anymore. Violence has a lineage.

Another hex hit—a Cruciatus this time, a flash of white agony so pure it left me blind for a heartbeat. My muscles locked, then convulsed. Her voice reached me faintly through the ringing in my skull, and I thought, Twisted. Sick. This is who she is. The realization didn’t shock me; it only solidified like ice. The cruelty wasn’t random. It was inherited, practiced. She had passed it on like a dark heirloom.

The more the curses tore through me, the more I felt my strength thinning, bleeding out with every impact. My vision swam. My knees buckled. I dug my fingernails into my palms until skin split and warm blood slicked my hands. It was the only thing I could do—the only proof that I still belonged to myself, that pain was still mine to choose.

Right before the blackness closed in, I tasted iron thick on my tongue, felt the slick wetness of my own blood pooling in my fists, nails buried so deep in my palms they’d broken skin. Through the haze, Molly’s voice rose above the ringing in my ears, clear and venomous, her words carved for the crowd as much as for me.

“She chose the side of Death Eaters. She chose Narcissa Malfoy. And for that, she chose to betray us all.”

The chamber stirred with murmurs, a low tide of approval and disgust, their faces blurring as my vision swam. My chest burned with fury I could no longer voice, my silence stretched like a shroud. And then the weight of everything—the curses, the hunger, the betrayal—dragged me down.

The last thing I felt was the blood dripping between my fingers, hot and real, as the darkness folded itself around me like a coffin lid.

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The first thing that returned was smell. The cell reintroduced itself before my eyes even opened. Damp and metallic—the familiar stench of dripping water and old iron. The stone beneath my cheek was so cold it burned, leeching warmth from my skin until it felt like I was lying against a corpse. Above me the ceiling wept, one fat drop at a time, each impact on the flagstones a slow, cruel metronome. And under it all, stronger than anything else, was the smell of blood: my own, stale and thick, woven into the mortar like a signature.

I shifted my lips. A dry crackle. The Silencio was gone; someone had lifted it when they dumped me back here. I drew in a breath that scraped down my throat like glass and let it out in a shudder. Sound came back in a ragged whisper. My chest hitched. My body was failing; I could feel it in the marrow. Each beat of my heart felt like a hammer striking thin metal. The tremor in my hands wasn’t nerves anymore—it was the collapse of a system pushed past its edge.

Part of me didn’t even blame it. This meat, this bone, had endured weeks of starvation, curses, fists, humiliation. My skin was a patchwork of bruises and burns. My magic was a frayed thread flickering under my ribs. And for what? A trial that was never a trial. A public murder disguised as law. A woman I had once respected wielding the Avada Kedavra as if it were a mother’s lullaby.

Molly Weasley. I still couldn’t make the image fit the name. Her wand. Her voice. That sick green light. Maybe it was for the best that I was dying. Maybe my body understood what my mind refused—that there was nothing left to return to.

But another part of me—the part that had always survived—kept whispering names. Ginny. Ron. Harry. I had felt her loathing for me years before this, a scent under her perfume of sugar and virtue. Even as a Muggleborn, even as a girl she had invited into her kitchen, I was a better witch than her children combined, and she had known it. Perhaps she had always been waiting for the moment she could make me small, make me punished, make me gone.

I lay there on the freezing floor, cheek glued to the stone with my own sweat, and the memories clawed up from the dark like things with teeth. First year: the chess board, my calculations, the troll in the girls’ bathroom. I almost died under its club, and Harry received applause. Second year: basilisk venom in my veins, the hospital bed that smelled of bleach and fear, the photo of Harry smiling with the sword. Even when I turned myself into a cat to save him, he walked away with the glory, and I received nothing but scars. Again and again, my hands were the reason he survived, but the world cheered only for him.

Every breath tasted of stone and blood and injustice. I pressed my palms flat against the floor, feeling the grit of dried salt and the tremble of my pulse in my wrists. I was back in my cell. But I was also somewhere else—inside a catalogue of betrayals, each memory heavier, sharper, dragging itself across my skin.

I stared up into the black above me, but it wasn’t a ceiling anymore. It was a void—pure, unbroken nothing—stretching outward without end. Not shadow. Not night. A kind of emptiness that swallowed even thought. The damp had eaten whatever texture the stones once had; they dissolved into a smear of darkness so complete that looking at it too long made my eyes water. There was no up, no down. Just the void.

I had never prayed to anything. Not to gods, not to fate, not even to magic itself. Prayer felt like surrender, and I had built my life on taking what others wouldn’t give. Whatever happens, happens. That had been my quiet creed. The world is teeth. You bite back or you’re eaten.

For the most part, it had proven true. The troll in the girls’ bathroom—that ridiculous, filthy creature swinging its club—was proof enough. I had been eleven and clever but not invincible; one wrong move and it would have crushed me like an insect. If Ronald hadn’t managed that spell—if his wand hadn’t chosen that one moment to obey—he and Harry both would have been corpses on the floor. And if I hadn’t been there? Harry would have burned himself out before he even began. He would have died, again and again, for lack of someone to drag him out of the fire he lit around himself.

That was the rhythm of my life: me saving him while he collected the glory. Me taking the blows, the venom, the risks, while the world crowned him hero. And all the while I told myself it didn’t matter, because survival was its own kind of victory. Because I didn’t need gods, didn’t need fate, didn’t need anyone to see me.

But lying there on the cold floor, the smell of mildew and blood closing over me like water, staring up into that ceiling-void that wasn’t a ceiling at all, I felt something shift. My body trembled, the shivers coming from somewhere deeper than the cold. My lips parted before I could stop them.

I began to pray.

Not with words. Not to any name. A raw, silent plea rising out of me like smoke, curling up into the black where no one was listening. It wasn’t hope. It wasn’t surrender. It was a whisper from the part of me that had been ground down to bone. Let me live. Or let me rise. Let me make this mean something.

The void above me didn’t answer. Not yet. But it felt closer, as though something vast and unseen had tilted its head and was listening.

“If you are listening,” I rasped, the words scraping raw where Silencio had torn my throat, each syllable a sand-grain forced through a splintered mouth. “If anyone—anything—is listening… I beg you—help me burn these fuckers to the ground.”

The first tear cut a hot line down my cheek, salty and shockingly real against the chill of the stone. I tasted metal on my tongue and the old, acrid sting of fear, and my mind ran through a roll call of faces that should not have been dead: Lupin’s kind eyes, Tonks’ stubborn grin, Narcissa—proud even in chains. Each name lit a flare behind my ribs. They did not need to die. The thought came like a whetstone against bone, until the ache inside me sharpened into one bright, terrible purpose.

“I will do anything,” I whispered again, the plea more animal than prayer now, a bargain spat into the dark: I will trade you what you ask—take my soul, take my nights—if you only let me burn them. The second tear fell and hit my shirt with a soft, wet sound. It felt obscene, obscene to beg, obscene to hope, but the chest-cold in me had nowhere else to go.

The cell answered. At first it was only an impossibly small change: the black above me seemed to deepen, as if the void had inhaled. Then the stone began to hum — a low, subterranean vibration that warmed the soles of my feet and crawled like an insect up my calves. The hum threaded into my bones, and where it touched, heat bloomed. Inch by inch some presence moved along my skin, not seen but intimate, a pressure like a hand sliding over a bruised place to measure it. I had no name for the feeling; it was older than words, older than the tidy labels of our laws.

A smile crawled across my face the way a blade slides free—slow, inevitable, and with an edge. It was the first honest smile I had allowed myself since Hogwarts. Not triumphant. Not cruel. Not the small, polite curve I’d given to teachers and friends. It was a smile that tasted of coming storms.

Then the wounds began to close. Not gently. Not kind. A roaring heat clawed along the torn places on my body, a pressure that felt like burning and breaking and knitting at once. Pain flared so bright that I screamed—stuttered, spasmed, and howled—but the sound died into the stone; the Silencio had gone, but rage and power braided into a new language that did not need a mouth. The agony settled and thinned, and the rawness beneath it rearranged into something else: energy uncoiling, threads of strength rewinding themselves through muscle and marrow. What had been weakness pooled out of me like dirty water; what remained tasted of iron and intent.

I gagged on the change: pain became strength; fear became hunger. The anger that had been molten under my ribs now beat steady, a drum calling a charge. I felt my mind shift with it—not just a readiness to survive, but a telescoping of intent so sharp it cut. I would not crawl away. I would walk forward. I would make them kneel in ash.

A sliver of glass lay in the corner of the cell, a shard scavenged by some previous prisoner’s fingers. I had thought of using it before, for simple ends, for the private erasures that people keep when there is nothing left to lose. Today the shard was not for surrender. I hauled it close and held it to the weak light that leaked through the bars, and in that trembling mirror my face returned to me—changed.

My brown eyes had become a hard golden-hazel, bright as coin metal but hollowed at the edges, like a well dug down into something hungry. The pupils were the same, but the light within them was not: it flickered with an inward fire I had never owned before. My skin, once mottled with bruises, bore new markings—runes that had bloomed along my arms in twisting scripts I did not yet know how to read. They were black at first, then embering to a dull, tiger-stripe glow, as if a language burned just below the surface and wanted to be spoken.

I studied each rune as if it might tell me the mechanics of revenge: what binding meant, which words to whisper, what price would be required. The shapes curled in alphabets I did not recognize, but they thrummed with promise. Understanding tugged at the edges of my thoughts like the first pull of a net. Soon, very soon, the meanings would come—and with them a particular, delicious knowledge: how to repay betrayal in full.

They wanted me dead. They staged my end with pomp and perfidy, certain their ropes would find my neck. They failed. And in the slow uncoiling of what had wrapped itself around me in the dark, I felt the shape of my answer tighten into something cold and precise.

What I had been given—stolen, perhaps, or earned in the space between life and the thing that took pity on me—was not salvation. It was a tool. It was a blade. What I would do with it would make them wish, in their last moments under my hand, that they had never raised their voices in judgment.

“I do not break. I burn.”