AN: So this is my first multi-chapter extension, and I hope that this will catch your interest enough as something applicable. Remember darlings, constructive reviews are fuel!

Disclaimer: I own nothing but my OCs and the totally AU plot I'm working with on here. If I did, more than a few things would be changed – and in no way will anything have run as long as it did! Plus, I'd be rich, but who cares?

This is Jade Celandine, I hope you enjoy!

Chapter 1: A New Home

I never thought that the life I had led for the past fifteen years would lead to this. To be honest, which I rarely am in my line of work, I had expected my death in this world to be something along the lines of getting caught doing something that my superiors might or might not necessarily be supposed to know about and getting 'taken care of', put out of the way; or maybe finally reaching the pinnacle of my skill and usefulness, and being executed for knowing too much. For someone like me, that is the highest possible complement.

But I wasn't going to die in this world now, wasn't I?

Going 'elsewhere' to save myself from what amounts to getting burned from the inside out from absorbing too much magic. Ha! Those purebred fanatics in their graves would be spinning from the irony.

Nonetheless, this little jaunt ought to be good for me; I can finally indulge my Ravenclaw tendency of allowing curiosity free reign over all natural reactions. Who knows, maybe I can even have fun.

(Chuckles) More than I already had, of course.

Kyra Maxims had been an infiltrator and saboteur working for the DA when the war ended, not that it had meant that her job was done in any way with its conclusion.

It simply meant that her work would be a little less invaluable to those who needed her services than it used to when everyone and her mother was at stake on the accuracy of her intelligence. But the operation became that bit more shadowy, that bit more ruthless, and the witch had relished in the way that every action made in the name of a purpose she believed in made her blood flow hot and eager.

However it also meant that the iron-clad alliances that once held fast through blood and enemy spell-fire bent and then broke under the relentless tides of politics and greed. The direct politician who you knew was doing his job was replaced with a more conventional lip-servicing statesman, and conventional lawmakers meant conventional laws.

Slowly, over the next decade, the spy found herself and her masters being effectively hamstrung, their concerns and opinions brushed aside as over-paranoid and irrelevant. They were the first who saw what the new era had birthed, and they were the first to accept that all that they and their compatriots had lived and died for was worthless in the face of it.

The witch was among the first batch of volunteers to test the ritual designed to take them away from their homeworld; she really had nothing to lose anymore.

And of course, thanks to excessive OCD on the part of the researchers, she lands in one piece. Praise the nature spirits for that.

Five years after her emergence from the ritually-powered wormhole, Kyra had settled down into an isolated valley and built herself a nice hut surrounded by gardens and the forest trees.

Living the life of a hermit was more therapeutic for the former spy than she had anticipated. Being free to indulge her fantasies for a garden Professor Sprout would have been proud of, to work and rework her magic in ways she had only once contemplated idly while casing a joint or trailing a target. However, there was a certain uneasiness that still came over her at times as a creature used to having her talents and loyalties placed firmly under the care of a master. War and its close companions had kept her busy and challenged, and her instincts sometimes betrayed her in a flash of light or a gust of scented wind.

But that was far from her mind as she tended to her butterfly garden and the insects she had specifically cultivated and crossbred for the care of the magical specimens, absorbed and peaceful in her work. Here it was no trouble for her fellows and few living friends to recognize why she had been initially put in Hufflepuff, to see compassion and tenderness carefully and usually hidden behind a calm and forbidding exterior.

Whoever said that intimidation was a tactic suited for either Gryffindor or Slytherin had clearly never met Kyra Maxims.

|0o00o0|

Two years after her initial settlement on the mountainside farm, the witch was growing increasingly distressed over the events occurring overnight in her gardens.

Well, distressed seemed a bit much. More like annoyed, really.

A great lugging bear seemed to have moved in overnight, stepping on her flowers and terrifying almost whole butterfly colonies away while trying to get at – presumably – her beehives which were properly spelled against such an invasion. Unfortunately, it seemed that her mild anti-wildlife wards had no effect on a creature of the hypothetical bear's presumed size, and all her other spells to mitigate the problem had done nothing to solve the situation.

Well, desperate times called for desperate measures.

And Kyra was nothing if not overly familiar with desperate measures.

One can imagine the amount of bejeezus shocked out of one Beorn of the Carrock's skin when he returned to his bear-nightly investigations on this new farm a week later only to be confronted by the surprisingly impressive sight of a polar bear standing her full 10 feet upright, placed in such a way as to protect the fragile hives of honey that Kyra had spent weeks cultivating. Hot or not under her fur, she wasn't about to let some oversized ursine fool around in her property to satisfy his appetites!

Beorn, of course, wasn't the type to take such a challenge lying down. He too stood to his full height – the witch inwardly quailed but kept up her defensive snarl – and looked down at the white bear from the suitably intimidating fourteen feet of difference between his head and hers. Kyra responded by smoothing out her features, positioning her paws in front of her like a meerkat and stubbornly keeping herself upright. Her hind legs were complaining and on the verge of beginning an insurrection.

The larger, older shape-shifter was suitably impressed by the display, and guessing that the gleam of intelligence in her dark eyes was all too similar to his own, he changed his skin back and grinned with excessive displaying of teeth. Then, unashamed of his nakedness, he walked away to his own home.

The animagus dropped to all fours with her own shock. And that had been that.

|0o00o0|

He and Kyra were thenceforth as amicable as two distant neighbours could be, having reached the sort of tacit understanding that comes between people who were alone and didn't like it despite the fact that it was completely in their natures. As the more well-known of the two, Beorn kept her abreast of any outside knowledge while the witch in turn kept his gardens from turning into a frightful mess while he was off in either shape. Truly, the horses and dogs could have taken care of everything on their own, but it gave Kyra a chance to admire the much larger and fluffier bees pollinating his clearings.

Sometimes one or the other would invite the neighbour to tea or some such thing. Being British, Kyra never passed up the chance and was often well-received with pastries and pies. Today she decided that it was her turn to invite the gigantic shape-shifter to take tea in her gardens (unfortunately her house was only sized to fit a five-foot-something witch), and brought some honey jars to sweeten the idea.

Wolves in those parts knew better than to accost the witch for her burden on the way to Beorn's house several miles away; more than a few had experienced the humiliation of having fur that turned all the colors of the spectrum every five minutes. Some, on her more vindictive days, were even turned neon pink! And that wasn't getting into the wolves she had actually killed before she got bored and started slinging hair-dye spells every once in a while. There was a time when the witch had visited the bear-shifter in sky-blue hair and blood-spattered robes and he had guffawed uproariously...

Meeting one of her neighbour's beloved ponies as she clambered up the slope, Kyra graciously accepted the offer of being carried the rest of the way as was her wont. She might not have been able to understand them as deeply or as thoroughly as the shape-shifter did, but she knew how oddly clever these animals were and treated them accordingly. An apple she kept in her basket for just such offers of service was given in thanks as the witch walked up to the door and knocked loudly.

"Kyra!" Said young(er) woman was promptly gathered in the gigantic man's arms and swung bodily around with a booming laugh. Kyra laughed with this more feral version of Hagrid even as she held her basket up for him to smell the tantalizingly fresh contents. "Well met, well met," the shape-shifter continued. "What brings you here? Come in!"

"I have come to extend a cordial invitation to take tea with me sometime this week in the gardens. I am afraid my home is much too small to accommodate guests, but the outdoors are quite wonderful this time of year, if I do say so myself," she announced.

"I'll not gainsay that," Beorn grinned. "Very well. Tea at a witch's house for high noon. I shall return with half the jars... and the toast to go with it, yes?"

"I keep telling you I am a hedgewitch, Beorn Bearskin," the former spy countered humorously. It was an old argument. "But here. Honey fresh from my hives near the herb garden."

"Ah, a wondrous concoction, Lady Kyra. Truly wondrous indeed." He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively while the tiny woman before his doorstep giggled sweetly. They said their goodbyes, trading yet more barbs and inside jokes as Kyra waved goodbye and went on back home. She did not Apparate, not only because she disliked the sensation, but because she had not travelled the mountains enough to do so. Besides, a half-decade of working only the smallest of magics to avoid detection by the greater powers of this world put her severely out of practice.

It also allowed her to meet some fourteen little people led by one grey big person running for Beorn's home like the wargs were after them.

Well. There were actual wargs after them. And orcs, too.

"Oh dear," the hedgewitch muttered, then reluctantly pulled out her wand and began casting misdirection spells on the pursuing party, adding a couple meant to completely screw over the wolf-like things' sense of smell or balance. Not enough to fall over, of course, that would cause an inexplicable commotion; just a teeny bit of reverse-controller-syndrome she had once experienced as a videogamer. She heard a certain bear howling in the night (and who knew bears could actually do that?), and promptly hightailed it back home.

Her direct involvement in the quest to the Lonely Mountain ended there.

|0o00o0|

Some months later and she was beginning to become continuously more and more disquieted by the news coming in through Beorn and his friend Radagast, a wizard as he was supposed to be. The former spy supposed that you couldn't really argue the proper definition of the word, seeing as she was the only one who would see the difference as she saw it.

The bear-shifter had confessed to an unusual emptying of the wargs on the mountain and the orc tribes that traditionally tamed and rode them during one of their monthly-weekly-anytime-really visitations and tea. His night-time wanderings had yielded fewer and fewer of the reprehensible things to properly tear to pieces and assuage his directionless anger, making his temper a bit more testy each time. The witch tried her best to relieve it with reports she refused to clarify of some pocket or other in the mountain territory he claimed as his, but the truth was that she too was getting steadily uneasy and irritated in general and around him in particular.

Kyra was thus unaccountably pleased when Gandalf the Grey, a wizard friend who had stopped over at one point apparently ("For a supposedly isolated bear-shifter, Beorn, you seem to have quite a few wizard friends," she teased him later) on the way to some mountain or other, returned to enlist the man-bear's help with an orc army apparently massing at the Lonely Mountain, wherever it was. Having been caught in the discussion as it was in the middle of tea, the hedgewitch promptly became part of it.

By decisively declaring, "He's going."

Somewhat bemused, the elderly wizard asked, "And you might be, young miss?"

"Kyra Maxims, Mr. Gandalf, at your service," she replied with a flourish and a seated bow. "I am a hedgewitch, and Beorn Bearskin's nearest neighbour around these parts. You are still going, Beorn," the witch added.

"Why should I concern myself over the affairs of Men, Dwarves, or Hobbits?" the overlarge man insisted on questioning, tugging at his impressive beard as he humoured the little witch. The thing was, he never quite got to test himself against the full strength of her stubbornness, and was going to have a grand old time trying to get his way. Trying, because of course no one had ever been able to out-stubborn a Hufflepuff.

"Because you have been irritable, grumpy, and all around acting like you've never quite gotten yourself awake in the morning and must constantly fight the urge to go back to bed." Kyra said all these with the tart tone she had begun to take up with him recently, adjusting her skirts so that her feet were tucked under her bottom as she completely disregarded conventional manners to reach over Beorn's massive table. "Honestly, it's been slowly driving me a little mad and if seeing you gone for a few weeks will stop that from happening anymore, I'll take it." With a crow of victory, the shape-shifter's neighbour snagged some honey for the toast she was hoarding aggressively from everyone bar the butterflies and Beorn himself. It was amusing to the other two men to see her comically struggling with a goat over the state of her cheese slices, which were thick enough to appeal to them both. Such epic sagas made for lively winter entertainment.

"So what of it?" Gandalf continued once the segment ended, "Will you be willing to lend your strength, if only for the moment? I promise you, the hordes will soothe whatever irritation Mistress Kyra seems to detect in you."

Determined to get her way, Kyra attempted to stare him down, inadvertently resembling a squirrel with her mouth full to the cheeks with honeyed bread. Her eyes were trying to blast the subliminal message, 'DO IT,' that made her look even worse despite the obvious 'or else' that every woman instinctively masters at the moment she needs to intimidate a man to her point of view.

"And what of you, sow? If I've been irritable, so have you," he riposted, drawing the Grey Wizard's attention away from him for a bit as the hedgewitch scowled blackly.

"I was not aware of there being another shape-shifter so close to the Carrock." Peering at the diminutive woman with curiosity and not a little suspicion, the wizard could not find anything that registered against his esoteric senses as amiss. It was probably a bit distressing to the old man, given that the Maiar were used to being capable of sensing what lay in the shadows of the world with some degree of impunity if not some accuracy.

"Of course not," she quipped. "Unlike either of you, some of us prefer a less exciting day-to-day life. Bear-skinned might I be myself, but I don't get troubled by intermittent Orc-raids, now do I?" The young woman gave the men a bland close-lipped smile and sipped her rosehip tea with all the poshness of an innate Brit.

"Now that bit of magic I will find myself interested in knowing, young lady." Gandalf leaned forward, scholastic interest written now in his features.

"Who said it was my magic, Mr. Greybeard? Some relations between supernaturally-inclined individuals are to be expected when they get along well enough," was the arch reply. "Besides, the fact I have an alternative shape does not necessarily mean that my relatives get one. It's a matter of aptitude, this sort of thing is."

"Well, that aptitude would certainly be of use to some friends of mine out east." The old wizard stroked his impressive beard coyly, reminding her of a somewhat spryer and more involved Dumbledore. Kyra hadn't liked him much. "More specifically, at Erebor."

"I was sitting here for that part, Mr. Greybeard," she informed him, then sighed and switched her eyes to her grinning shapeshifter neighbor. "Just let me grab some things and we'll be off."

It was just as well that she never entirely unpacked her compartmentalized, shrinkable witch's trunk.

A.N: Please, reviews are love! Just let me know what you think and I might find more time than expected to motivate myself into continuing this.