Spellweaver: Beyond the Veil
A Harry Potter fanfic
by EssentiallyRei
The Prologue
We all know the story of the famous Harry Potter defeating the evil Lord Voldemort.
That was thirty-five years ago. The year is now 2033. A dark cloud hangs over the city of London, rumbling and bubbling like a teeming cauldron. In the nearly abandoned streets below, a Muggle mother holding groceries herds her two little children forward, urging them to hurry into their flat as the evil cloud begins to flash within, trying to make it in before the terrible and timely thing that happens that has been happening everyday for three years.
When her children are inside, she looks up at the cloud with terrified anxiety before running inside the building herself and closing the door with a slam. You can hear her locking about three mechanisms, the last one making a magical click. Similar noises of similar locking mechanisms can be heard across the city as all clocks hit 3pm and Big Ben chimes three times.
First the cloud flashes white there; then it flashes blue there. The sound is thunderous but unnatural. Red and green are the last colors to flash before the cloud finally opens up in the center with a frightening and deafening crack. The now completely empty streets of London are filled with echo of wailing and the screaming of ghostly and tortured souls as they pour out of a yellow-green vein in the sky. Any who were unlucky enough to not make it inside, safe behind the magical barrier made by the Weasley and Weasley locking-mechanism, are taken into the numbers of the countless dead.
The scourge of the tortured souls from beyond the veil lasts a mere fifteen minutes before they return from whence they came. The veil then shuts itself and the evil cloud retakes its original form, remaining a heavy black omen over the unfortunate city of London. Yet London is not the only city in the world to experience this phenomenon. Every day at the exact same time, five minutes past three in London, five minutes past the corresponding hour everywhere else, evil black clouds that hang over large cities will open up and the dead will claim the physical realm as their own for fifteen minutes, also claiming the lives of those in their way, adding them to their ranks of lost souls.
The year is 2033 and a new Dark Lord has risen. One that has caused far more damage than Voldemort ever accomplished. The veil between life and death has been violated, which has brought light to the Muggles of the Wizarding World and its ways, but at the terrible cost of so many lives of Muggles and magic folk alike.