The day that Dumbledore left the young babe Harry Potter at the door of the Dursleys changed the history of the world. In one timeline the night was warm enough for him to stay out on the doorstep until morning so that he could be discovered by his aunt in the morning when she went to get her daily supply of milk, however sadly this timeline was different… it was harsher.
The toddler was not out on that stoop for more then thirty minutes before Mother Nature began her attack. The icy winds bombarded the child with relentless ferocity, and the cold stung him like no other, even snow began to fall on that arctic November morn.
The child was lucky. He was one of the few that were born with magic, an ethereal element that was somehow able to defy the laws of what was possible, and even those that had it failed to even so much as scratch the surface of what it could do. It was this magic that saved the young babe from a fate that not even the most courageous of men would dare brave.
His magic warmed his body and warded off the cold that would have surely killed him, but it wasn't enough. Petunia the boy's aunt did not come to collect her milk that morn as Dumbledore had expected. The cold and snow had prevented her from doing so, and Vernon Petunia's husband had taken the day off to relax with his wife and spend time with his son.
This presented a problem. A wizard (a person that could harness the power that was magic) could only use so much magic at a given time, and the warming of Harry's little body was using magic, and at the rate that it was going he was bound to run out of magic and die. The magic that coursed through his body did not want that. It was not sentient at least in the way that humans thought of sentience, but it was Harry's magic, and it wanted its "host" to survive, so it did something that was thought impossible.
It began to change his body into something that could survive the cold that was threatening to kill him. His skin began to take on a leathery quality, his eyes became serpentine, horns grew atop his head, his fingers and toes became clawed, his hands lost their thumbs, and finally two small wings grew from his back. Little Harry Potter had become a black skinned dragon.
In order to recover and regain the magic that had been consumed to ward off the cold and cause the transformation Harry drifted off into a very deep sleep. He was awakened sometime later by a scream, and he looked up to see a horse-faced woman looking down at him with fear in his eyes. He was still a babe and thus didn't understand what was going on.
The woman was his aunt Petunia and she had finally left the house to get the milk that had been left there the morning before which she had neglected to go get when the snow had fallen. When she stepped out the door and onto her welcome mat to get the milk she was surprised to find a basket with a bundle and letter inside it, but she decided to forgo the letter and instead she moved the blanket that had been wrapped around the bundle and moved it back so she could see what was in the basket.
She let out a terrified scream when she saw that it was a lizard like creature that she immediately recognized as a dragon from one of the books that her sister had tried to show her when they were kids. She shook her head and clamped a hand over her mouth. It wouldn't do for anyone to see her standing on her doorstep screaming.
She had to do something about the dragon. She knew that she couldn't kill it because it was resistant to damage, and she didn't want to wake the neighbors up with the sound of a gunshot in the morning, so she went back into the house and grabbed the keys to the car. She picked up the basket and put it into the car before getting in herself and driving off.
She until she found a spot that was close to the woods, and parked her car before getting out along with the dragon and dumping it unceremoniously out of the basket and into the trees. The shock of being thrown once again awoke Harry who had gone to sleep once he figured that the woman was not going to hurt him.
The young dragon looked around for a moment before scampering around for a place to rest. The basket was no longer a viable option in his mind due to the fact that people could pick it up. He needed a place that he could rest in and be away from the world so that no one would disturb him.
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Ron Weasley was the second youngest of the Arthur and Molly Weasley's seven children, and he loved to hear stories about heroes, but his favorites were those about knights that fought dragons. The dragons were almost always evil. They liked to horde treasure and kidnap princesses, but the knights would always ride in on their horses and defeat the dragon and save the day.
Ron desperately wanted to be a knight, so one day he asked his mother a question that changed his life. "Mum how does someone become a knight?"
Molly Weasley smiled at her son's infatuation with knights. He was the only one out of all her children that was interested in heroes like that besides Ginny but she was only interested in Harry Potter. The twins only cared for pranks, Percy simply wanted to be successful, Charlie wanted to play Quidditch or be a dragon tamer, and Bill wanted to be a curse breaker.
"Well Ron if you want to be a knight you would need to get some weapons and armor."
"How would I get that?" he asked. His mother didn't catch the tone of his voice that hinted at more then simple curiosity.
"You could buy it from Diagon Alley, but you would need a job and some money for that." After that Ron didn't ask anymore questions about knights. Instead he asked if lunch was ready.
Latter that night when the entire family was in bed Ron slipped out of his room and grabbed a small black cloak with a deep hood that his mother had given him for the cooler winters before taking a pinch of floo powder and throwing it into the fireplace. The flames turned green and he stepped in after while quietly saying the words Diagon Alley.
In a whoosh and flurry of soot Ron appeared in a bookstore that was located in the alley in question. He quickly made his way from the store and into the alley proper from there he made his way to Gringotts.
The reason he did this was simple. Ron had been to Gringotts with his mother at least five times in his five years of life and he knew that the bank was run by Goblins, and he had learned from his brothers Charlie and Bill that the bank had dragons in it.
The bank luckily for the young boy was open all hours so that those who could not come by light of day still had a way to access their money for whatever purposes that they saw fit. Ron walked into the bank at a brisk pace, and was not shocked to find that the reception area was empty save for a single goblin who was sitting at a booth looking over something.
Ron walked over to the booth. The goblin looked down at him through a pair of sharp looking glasses that it was wearing. "What do you want child?" the goblin asked in a tone of annoyance.
"I wish to become a knight, and I was wondering if Gringotts could be of help." The goblin looked surprised at this. There had been no knights to come from the wizards in hundreds of years, and none had come to his nation for training in such an art.
"What is you name child?" Ron blinked at the question. Goblins didn't bother with a wizard's name unless it was for something of importance.
"Ron Weasley." The goblin nodded.
"If you truly wish to become a knight then you must forsake the world that you have come from and embrace the one that you are about to enter." He pulled out a dagger that was reamed with gold and the blade shined of silver. "Is this what you wish young Ronald?"
Ron only nodded not trusting himself as he looked at the gleaming blade. "Well then from this moment on you are Blood-Silver son of me Sliver-Dust and knight in training." Silver-Dust took the blade and cut Ron's wrist with it, and the boy knew no more.
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Hermione Granger stared at the wall in her room. She didn't know what was going on but she was going to find out. She knew that she was different from other children her age. She was six but she enjoyed reading books that would make any other child her age cringe. She was already able to do multiplication and division and was moving on to algebra.
She was much smarter and more mature then her peers, and now she had one more thing to add to the list of things that made her different. She had come home from school feeling frustrated, and her parents like always were at work. She wanted nothing more than to get a huge bowl of ice cream and just gorge on it, and the second that the door to her house closed the ice cream that had been sitting in the fridge came shooting toward her. She caught it deftly and stared at it.
She didn't know what she had done, but she had to try to do it again, so she focused on sending the ice cream back to where it came from, and like she had imagined it would the ice cream once again floated into the air and made its way back into the fridge which closed with a small thud.
This was not something that happened everyday, and it proved that she Hermione granger was indeed the freak that all her peers thought she was, but her analytical mind would not leave it at that. She could not simply be some freak that all her classmates were allowed to wail on because she was different.
There had to be a reason for the difference, and as she lay in her room watching the ceiling the difference came to her. She remembered a book that she had recently read. It was called the Lord of the Rings. It was a fantasy book about a war between several different races and beings, and among those were the elves.
They were human like creatures that differed in only a few ways i.e. they had pointy ears and they were unnaturally beautiful. The thing that most set them apart (at least for Hermione) was that they seemed to be more naturally perceptive than humans, and that they could harness magic to help them in combat.
For a while she lay on her bed and pretended that she was in fact an elf, but she let that thought slide. She wasn't an elf she was a human albeit one with a weird ability, but that was nothing. She went to bed berating herself for harboring such feelings.
The next morning her parents once again left out early to get to their dental practice. She awoke and began her daily routine of getting out of bed and taking a shower. After her shower she took a look at herself in the bathroom mirror to get ready for the day, and what she saw made her blood run cold.
Her findings the day before were untrue she was not an elf, but at the same time she was not human. She was something else. Her skin was dark almost a purplish color, and her ears were pointed. Her bottom incisors were jutting from her mouth slightly and were barely visible underneath her upper lip. Her eyes were steel grey.
Seeing herself in the mirror Hermione knew that she had to get away. There was no way that she could go to school looking the way that she did, but she also knew that if she stayed at home her parents would see her and she didn't know what their reactions would be. They might even call the police, and who knew what would happed to her if she were to be captured.
So it was with a heavy heart that Hermione Granger wrote a note that she attached to her parents bedroom door. She was running away and never coming back.
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Two days Hermione had spent running. She had wanted to put as much distance between herself and other people as possible so she had run to the closet forest and went as deep as she could go. She had never been in the forest before and she didn't know how to survive in it, but she had to.
She needed a safe place and that was the safest place that she could think of. As she wondered through the forest the pain of hunger began to hit her in force. She had managed to stave off thirst by drinking from rivers and creeks, but she had been unable to find a meal. She knew that she could eat some of the creatures that lived in the forest but the thought of eating an animal something that was living didn't sit well with her, but in the end her instincts won out.
She took out the kitchen knife that she procured from her home before she left and crouched low listening for the sounds of wayward animals. She heard a twig crack under the weight of an animal's hooves or feet and looked up to see a deer.
She held her breath. She knew that deer could easily spot a human, and she was hoping that she was not that easy to see, because if she was her meal was gone. However to her luck the deer didn't notice her and it came closer in search of its own meal, and the second that it was within reaching distance Hermione grabbed the beast by the throat and stabbed it with the knife. The deer wailed and thrashed and tried to dislodge its attacker, but it was to no avail and after a few more pitiful struggles fate claimed the beast.
Hermione looked at her kill and wished that she had a fire when all of a sudden she felt a tingling in her hand and she looked to see that it was engulfed in flames. Her first reaction was to try and put it out, but then she realized that her flesh was not burning. She simply chalked it up to another one of her abilities.
She used her new found flame power to cook the meat that and sat down to a meal of deer. After eating her fill she grabbed the carcass with surprising strength and began to look for a place to put it. She found the perfect place; a small cave that was hidden within a grove of trees on a rocky hill. She went into the cave.
As she entered she heard a low growl before she was hit by something and pinned to the ground. She looked up to find that she was pinned by what could only be a dragon.
"Who are you?" the beast spoke in a gruff voice
She was shocked by the fact that it could speak, but she knew it would do her no good to stay silent for too long. "I have no name." she lied. She didn't know why she did that but she felt that it was for the best. "I am simply a traveler looking for a place to store my meal."
The dragon snorted and flames came from its nostrils. "If you have no name then no one will miss you." The dragon took a breath and Hermione knew that it was about to kill her with a blast of flame.
"Please don't kill me!" she shrieked "I'll do anything you ask me if you let me live!" the dragon watched as she begged pitifully.
"You could do something for me?" the creature asked incredulously "You are a pitifully weak creature there is nothing that you could do that I could not."
Hermione began to sweat she needed someway to ensure that the creature would not kill her. An idea quickly popped in her head. "If you don't kill me I'll become your vassal."
The dragon raised an eyebrow. He had never had another living creature of intelligence present themselves in such a way but who was he to deny someone who was willing to throw themselves to him like that. "Fine I will take you up on your offer. You will sleep here for the night and come morn we will discuss the terms of your continued existence."