Disclaimer: The Harry Potter Universe is not owned by me. If it was this wouldn't be fanfiction, now would it?

I look at the pieces on the board,

Hoping that my next move,

Is not another step to an early end.

I hesitate, but make a move,

Ending another turn,

And starting another.

"Thoughts on the Great Chessboard" Ronald Weasley

The moon shone bright over the streets of Diagon Alley, and its twisting walkways seemed shine silver in the rain, which finally started to stop. The lamps seemed to burn with perpetual light, guiding the pedestrians to their destination. The wind howled over the usually noisy shops. What used to be filled with shopping families was now almost empty save minor villains, Aurors, and the occasional lonely shopper. The friendliness that was once found in this magical market was replaced by fear and suspicion. The shops were mostly boarded up; their owners had long abandoned them to flee the country. A small street near Knockturn Alley was littered with wanted posters of Death Eaters that had been blown off the walls by the wind.

A cloaked man and his companion appeared at the end of the street. He was a very youthful and strong man. His eyes were hazel, and had messy black hair, which was hidden within the hood of his cloak. The man traveling was a lean figure. His hair was brown and his eyes were strangely golden. While the cloaked man seemed of a serious nature, his partner was more easy-going. Despite their differences, they were the best mates. Some may have view this friendship as innocence and youthfulness, and that their adolescence protected them from the weariness and hopelessness of the war. However, those people did not realize that these children, these teenagers were plotting to turn the tide of the war in their favor.

The cloaked man stopped and picked up one of the posters. On it was a man named Serverus Snape and the deeds he committed. It explained that anyone seen helping this man would be arrested on the spot for treason. The picture showed a man who looked very unstable. The cloaked man's eyes seemed to flash in anger before he set his face in a mask and gave a mirthless laugh when he scanned over the picture. His companion stopped to look at what his friend was holding. He snorted when he saw the picture from a mixture of both amusement and disgust.

"Quite an... interesting way to illustrate what he's like, isn't it Matt?" asked the cloaked man.

The other man nodded and said, "You would think the Ministry would at least try to make sure the picture of a man they want to capture acts like what the original would act like."

The cloaked man snorted. "It would be throwing insults at me and cursing my family to extinction, by now if it acted like the real thing. But sadly, the Ministry rather him look like the Inferi than have him look like the former Hogwarts potion master."

"'Tis horrible," Matt responded dramatically, "At least now no one can confuse him for the git he really is."

"True, but no one will be able to recognize him now, either. Perhaps this is another one of their 'all Death Eaters are clichéd' ideas."

"Idiots, the lot of them." the man called Matt muttered, "Ok not all of them are idiots, James, but the vast majority of them are!" he added hastily after seeing the expression on his friend's face.

The cloaked man laughed a little. "Better idiots then mad men."

The wind blew harder and James drew his cloak around him tighter. Matt shivered a little and James looked at him with concern.

"You're going to catch a cold if you keep forgetting your cloak," he said with a touch of exasperation in his tone. They had been over this many times before.

Matt shrugged. "Lily will probably have a spare when she gets here."

James snorted. "You can't rely on her forever. She is my little sister, not your mother."

"And that is exactly why I have power over her," he replied cheekily.

"Right, not mentioning the fact that she could hex you to oblivion in a duel if she heard you say that."

Matt paled a bit. And James chuckled to himself for a moment. Then he looked up into the stars, not noticing that he was crumpling the Death Eater poster in his hand. His eyes sought out all the stars he knew the names to. Vega, Sirius, Bellatrix, Rigel, Spica... He dimly registered that the sky was much clearer after the rain.

After a moment of reflective silence Matt asked solemnly, "Are we really going to do this?"

Slowly James nodded. "We have to... it could be our only hope."

"And Lily? This is a war, James. What if something happens to her?"

"I wouldn't worry about it. She's probably the strongest out of all of us."

Matt was quiet for a moment and then shrugged. "I suppose you're right. She is certainly able to hold her own, duel or other wise."

James looked back at him and grinned. "Yeah. I still remember that magical incident when she was twelve. You had made her so angry. And then..."

"She set my hair on fire, yes, yes, I remember," Matt responded laughingly. "It took three weeks for it to grow back!"

"Actually four," interjected another voice. Both men jumped and drew their wands pointing to where the source of the sound was coming from. Only, there was nothing there. The disembodied voice laughed at their expressions.

"Honestly! You two should be more cautious!" It exclaimed.

"Lils! How long were you there!" said annoyed James, as both men put their wands back in their pockets. A young woman in a cloak appeared next to him holding an invisibility cloak in her arms. She handed it to Matt and pulled the hood of her own cloak over her head hiding her raven colored hair. She rolled her brilliant, green eyes in annoyance and then turned to her brother.

"Long enough, dear brother," she answered playfully, ''Long enough." She grinned fondly at her older brother. "What's that?" she asked, pointing to the poster in his hand.

"It's nothing," he muttered and tried to hide the poster.

Lily rolled her eyes again and tried to grab the paper out of his hands. "Don't play stupid, James! It's no fun trying to guess your "secrets" when you have them in the open like that! It can't be as bad as that picture I found under your bed in fourth year, can it? I mean, it's as if I'm-" she froze when she managed to wrestle the poster away from her brother and look at the picture. There was an awkward silence between the three of them. It seemed that Matt and James were waiting for some sort of explosion from her. Lily glanced up from the poster, and it looked like her face had darkened significantly for short moment. After the second passed though, her face was fixed with an amused expression and she smiled.

"I wonder how they got his picture to be like this. Who thought that hair could ever look that greasy!" She gave a laugh. Both men grinned at her, relieved that the expected explosion didn't come.

Lily shook her head in attempt to rid herself of her giggles, and looked seriously at the two of them. "Alright, enough of child's play."

James nodded and looked at Matt. "Ready?"

Matt smiled, although it seemed a little strained. "Always."

"You two know the plan, right? Knockturn Alley is a dreadful place, especially at this time of night." Lily asked.

"Don't need to tell me twice," responded Matt, a bit bitterly. James and his sister gave him a sympathetic look.

"We better get going, any longer and we might have to deal with something really nasty on our way to retrieve it." James said gravely. The other two nodded, as he drew his wand.

He took a deep breath and cast a glamour charm on himself. In a second he appeared to be a rather old man with a limp. "Lily, meet us there in a few minutes. We're going to need you to block the curses if there is a security system," he said. She nodded to him again. James looked over at Matt. Their eyes met for a brief minute and they both nodded at each other. Matt pulled the invisibility cloak over him, and before Lily knew it, she was alone on the sidewalk.

She gave a weary sigh. She hated days like these. Stupid days where they had to act like adults. Sure, on the outside she seemed childish enough. Happy-go-lucky, as Matt would call it. But her family deserved not to see her worry or fear or those other stupid things, and they deserved to see more than the shy indifference she showed to the people she didn't know or didn't trust. They were her family after all. Well, Matt wasn't technically her family, but it was close enough. Anyways they had more important things to worry about.

Lily looked down at the poster in her hand, and felt the heat of raw anger boil in the pit of her stomach, but it slowly diminished to a dull ache in her heart. Another man corrupted by blind faith. Another man lost in the heat of the war. Another man who had lost it all. The terrors she had seen flashed before her eyes. It would be easy to blame everything on him, but she couldn't. It went against her nature. Damn it, Dad. She thought, Why do you have to be so bloody noble, and then past all those ideals on to me?

She felt the familiar tingle at the edge of her fingertips that was begging to be released. She had a very strong urge to hurt something, to share with something a fragment of the pain she kept locked inside her. She looked to the sky and looked at the stars. Her eyes traced the patterns of the friendly constellations that dotted the night. It was a technique Uncle Moony taught her when she was younger. It was strangely, calming.

Those you love never leave you, Lily. They're all up there watching over us.

Lily took a deep breath and looked down to the picture she held. She was being stupid. Now was not the time for such things. She sighed at her ridiculous urge to burn the picture she had in her hand. Snape was just a marionette under the control of a puppeteer, as was everyone else. Nothing could change that. It was a mere game of chess to his master. It was just another way to pull the strings, to move the pawns. It was war. What else did she expect? All she could do was make her way along this game of fate and hope that she wasn't captured. That was all you could do in war anyway, or so she learned.

She glanced at her watch and blinked at it. It was time. She pulled at the hood, making sure it hid her face and turned towards Knockturn Alley. Before she left, however, she paused. She drew her wand and moved it over her shoulder in a strange, yet practiced pattern and kept the other hand griping the poster tightly. She focused on the strange tingling in the fingertips of both her hands and whispered, "Gelidus Flamma."

Lily gave a satisfied smile and let the wind take the poster from her hand. She watched it float behind her for a minute before she turned and left for Knockturn Alley. If she couldn't get out of the game, she thought as she walked silently, she could at least make sure she wasn't a pawn.

Behind her, the poster of Serverus Snape slowly dissolved into a bluish dust. It, along with the with the other posters of former Death Eaters, were burning in the strange, icy flame. "Cold fire", James had christened it. Passionate, yet fearful, many had believed there was no such spell. "It is believed to be the fire of Hades, himself. Dark Magic", Matt had once read in a book, "highly dangerous, because there is no way to extinguish it, other than the caster canceling the spell." Yet, as the blue flames burned over the parchment that littered the ground, turning the paper into to an delicate, icy pile of dust, no one could argue that it wasn't beautiful. As the flames disappeared, they left a chill, a small bit of sadness of a childhood lost, a bitterness of another happy ending destroyed in the midst of another war.

A/N: Ok the term Gelidus Flamma was found by me in the Latin Dictionary (Ah, google is a great friend). It literally means icy (Gelidus) flame (flamma, obviously). Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my first chapter.