The Price
Disclaimer: I do not own any recognizable person, place, or theme.
It had begun innocently enough. At the beginning of the seventh year of my eldest's attendance at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the muggles began to notice the disappearances between platforms nine and ten at Kings Cross Train Station in London. At first it was just an amusing oddity for them, until they began to put two and two together. We were different, we were cursed, or perhaps blessed; and, as is often the case with human nature, we became feared for our gifts for the beautiful and terrible things they caused; things that no muggle could ever truly understand. They began to fill in the gaps in their memories, to peel away the excuses made by obliviation squads, excuses that never quite fit. Then, the witch hunts began.
Unlike those in medieval times, however, the muggles had learned through testing of captured magical beings how to find others and bind their powers before disposing of them. The worst were the children who couldn't fight back. It became law that all newborns would be tested for "impurities" and those found with magic were "culled for the betterment of the species." In their lust to destroy all that they did not understand, the muggles committed the most heinous of acts that, in the end, poisoned the Mother, Earth…Gaia, to the point that not even the combined powers of the remaining magical beings could save her.
It is now that I make one last desperate act to save those few that survived the culling and the Mother that gave us all life. I am calling upon the magic, not of the Mother, but the Father, the Black God who watches over all Mothers from the heavens above, to stop the destruction that took my family and countless others. And so I lay in the radioactive remains of Hogwarts, at the center of a pentagon drawn in my life's blood waiting to die so that I may bargain with Death himself.
The light is blinding, as I open my eyes in the hereafter. There is nothing but light, no ethereal Kings Cross, no meddling former headmasters, only light. My first thought is that it is rather ironic that the Black God should reside in a place so white, but as soon as the thought appears, a voice cuts it off:
"Well, little child, I see you have finally entered my domain."
"Please, the Mother, Gaia. Please save her."
"Save her? Youngling, as every day has a beginning and an end, so do all things save me. Even the Mothers. Only I am eternal."
"Please, I will do anything. Name your price."
"Anything? You would risk, never reuniting with loved ones or being at peace, never being truly free for a dying Mother that you have never heard?"
"Yes."
"Very well, for eternity you shall live never to truly die, never to pass on to the hereafter and dwell with those who came before. You shall live where you are needed, a balancer, a keeper of worlds. This is the price to be paid."
I will never know why he considered my plea, far less accepted it, however, the Mother lived and flourished in a new era of peace and prosperity.