Author's Note: Here is yet another revision. Fair warning: you will probably recognize Greek mythology, Celtic mythology, lotsa mythology. So yea, I borrowed stuff. Title has been changed, as well as a few other things. Feedback would be much appreciated!

Disclaimer: I own nothing

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The Knight with Dented Armor

By: Lady NeverAfterNon

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It was on days like this, smelly and back breaking days complete with threats of losing dinner, that she wondered how she ever got into this mess.

It wasn't like she was a trouble maker who went looking for these sorts of situations. No she'd been a good kid. How had she possibly been stuck into this misbegotten wannabe fairy tale in the first place? She could remember a time in her life not so far ago when she could practically taste University in her future. Now she mainly concerned herself with whether or not she'd eat. It was like she'd been sucked into one of her thick books on unfortunate damsels in dire situations and no one had thought to tell her.

Fairy tale or not, she was stuck.

Hermione Granger often likened herself to Cinderella, only without the handsome prince. While a handsome prince probably wouldn't have solved things exactly, it would have given her a happy ending. Happy endings didn't seem to be in her future no matter how hard she wished for the. That was complete bollocks as far as she was concerned. In the normal fairy tales fair damsels always had their wishes come true. Always, and usually in the form of some devastatingly handsome man, which which brought her back to the heretofore missing prince. For now she was still stuck in a vicious cyclone of suspicious fairy tale redundancies. She had the filthy clothes to wear, the dirty soot stained bed next to the fireplace to sleep in, the slightly psychotic relatives...everything but the damn prince.

And why couldn't she have a prince? Every fairy tale had princes! It didn't even have to be a prince, maybe a duke or something. Hell, she'd even take the baker boy.

The baker boy was certainly rather cute in a odd sort of lopsided bean poll way, but Ron Weasely unfortunately only had eyes for that Petunia girl.

Honestly, Petunia Dursley had a neck like a weasel and a face like a horse. The pairing was to be expected though. Petunia put out and while she didn't have much in the way of brains, she certainly knew how to hold a boy's attention. Hermione didn't see herself as horribly bad looking but she knew she had impossible hair, and her penchant for reading books that were bigger than her head was generally considered unattractive by boys her age.

She acknowledged the fact, she just didn't have to like it.

To put a long story short and plainly, life sucked.

This was especially driven home when her uncle made her scrub the potato cellar or wash his dirty socks. It made her cringe just thinking about it. It was on days when she could count absolutely nothing good that had happened to her within twenty four hours that that she rued the day she ever set eyes on the backwater village of Nozamot.

Well, she amended, it wasn't like the village itself was all that horrible.

It was stuck in the lower foothills of the Northern Mountains, and while it wasn't a huge town, it did have its high points. The houses were small and stuck close together but it was a good deal cleaner than the city she'd grown up in. The mountain was deliciously cool in the summer with miles and miles of shrub flowers and stunted trees. In the winter, while it wasn't warm, it was astonishingly beautiful. The sun shone on the show like thousands and thousands of diamonds and Hermione knew that if she could patent a spell to imitate the effect of sun on snow she would be a wealthy witch indeed.

No, it wasn't Nozamot itself that was the source of the problems, it was her barmy relatives.

Before coming to live in Nozamot, Hermione had lived with her parents far to the south in a prosperous little city on the coast. Both her parents had been dentists, so they were quite well off.

Hermione had enjoyed the best teachers and tutors her city had to offer and she'd continually astonished them with her brilliance. She knew it too. She'd practically counted the days and months and years until she could go to University, and she kept a careful list of potential schools on her desk. She had had anything she could ever want, as well as freedom to roam the immense city library when ever she pleased. Indeed she'd almost lived there, but the librarians had drawn the line when she had asked to set a sleeping bag up in the stacks.

At any rate her parents had often had to show up after hours to prod their daughter into coming home to sleep and eat.

The little city was quite prosperous, and an excellent place for a little girl to grow up.

The wharf side market was by far the pride of the entire city. The city was built on the edge of a giant natural harbor, which allowed ships to make a safe port. So, naturally, all walks of life inhabited the city. Merchants and traders brought their goods from all around to barter and to sell. The market was always alive with color and life and she never tired of skipping out after her homework was completed to wander around the bazaars with her mouth open in awe. Even now, stuck in Nozamot, she still had dreams of the many times she'd tried to stow away on a ship, craving some new adventure. Her parents had always come and hauled her off, but she'd still never forgotten the sense of possible adventure.

Well she certainly had more than a taste of adventure now, and it wasn't at all what it was cracked up to be.

Every Friday, when work and lessons were over, she and her parents would enjoy dinner at the wharf, and then go down the seashore to wade, have water fights, and look for shells. It was an excellent place to grow up. She had parents who loved her, a comfortable house, books by the millions, and excellent dental care.

Hermione lived a blissful, happy existence until the summer of her eighth birthday. That particular summer had been unexpectedly dry, one of the driest on record, and it only took a few series of random moments of misfortune and accidents to start the worst fires in the entire history of the city.

Three quarters of the city was burned to the ground. The citizens did their best to save their neighbors, friends, and family, but many died. The bodies were measured in the thousands, and days and days after the embers had died, one could still hear the screaming. Hermione's parents were among the many that lost their lives on that sad October morning. Even the little girl herself had not escaped unscathed.

Part of the burning wall of their home had caved in, and had pinned her beneath it.

She had managed miraculously to pull herself from certain death, and to stumble outside, but the burns on her back developed into thick ugly scars that resembled a spider's web. Surviving that fire, it was then she discovered she was a witch. She remembered the horrible burning, and the terror and pain- and then everything was quiet. She was standing alone in the blaze but the fire was tame and did not hurt her. It danced around her like a puppy, urging her to play. She'd laughed, held out her hands and clapped happily.

The fire had done as she bid and moved around her in brilliant orange streamers, guiding her this way and that through the house. She remembered with perfect clarity the exhilaration at the power running through her veins.

And then she saw the burned bodies of her parents.

Over the next few years that followed, she was shunted from orphanage to orphanage. No orphanage director wanted to directly cast her out onto the street, on account of her late parent's great respect in the city because of their successful dentist practice. But no one wanted to keep her either.

'She was an odd one, that Hermione Granger. Somphin' off bout' er' an' we always knew it'

The whispers followed her where ever she went.

Her scars frightened the other children, as well as the mysterious rumor of her survival, and in order to hide their fear they would torment her mercilessly. They would dance behind her and pull her hair, calling her a witch and other worse, more creative things. They would desecrate the few books she'd been about to salvage from her own home, leaving her to mend them as best she could. She lived as a shadow of her previous self - hiding her burn scars and trying to keep herself alive.

She continued this miserable existence until she was ten.

Then, two years after the fire and the death of her parents, her father's half brother arrived from far to the north in order to take her in. In the beginning her orphanages had written to him continuously as she'd had no other living relatives. After six months of no reply to the numerous letters they'd had to give up.

So it was quite a shock when out of the blue a tall weedy looking man in his late forties drove up in a shabby old carriage demanding to see his young niece. Hermione had never seen her uncle, but she was ready and willing enough to go with him.

After two solid years of either being treated like dirt or like a plague victim, it was a relief to again have someone that wanted to properly care for her.

So she readily agreed to go off with him, and once the papers were all signed she left without a second thought. He didn't talk much on the long journey, only to say that his estate was quite a long way to the North, and that it would take them almost a month to reach it. Hermione thought nothing of this, and contented herself with reading in order to pass the time on the trip.

Only when they reached the drab and miserable little village of Nozamot did she begin to think something amiss. When the carriage stopped in front of a rundown mismatched cottage, and a scruffy young woman with a pudgy and angry face that looked like a potato came out to meet them, did her spirits plummet completely.

Her uncle informed her with a self satisfied smirk and no little amount of malicious glee that he really was indeed her uncle, and it had seemed fine luck that her orphanage had sent it's letter when it did.

"Cause you see my dear, that my poor wife and I are getting on in years, and we really do need someone to look after things as we've retired," he'd said laughing at her and showing off every single one of his shiny brass plated teeth.

She certainly hadn't said anything at the time, though her uncle had discovered the remains of a mouse in his baked potato that night.

Look after things had been the polite term for slave labor. In order to 'earn her keep' Hermione was forced to do chores from dawn until dusk, and to cater to her aunt and uncle's every whim.

Often she was forced to retire to her potato cellar without any supper, cliche as it sounded. Over time her hands lost their softness, and the slim fingers that used to carefully turn the pages of her beloved tomes with reverence now struggled to get past the first few chapters if she even had time or light to read.

She developed muscle though, which before in the city would have been alien too her. It was the only weapon she had against her relatives. Her aunt knew that if she was too awful, that her niece would just flat plain refuse to do absolutely anything. Still, it was a pretty miserable way to live.

Then came the fateful market day, the next turning point in the young witch's life. Hermione used to wonder whether markets were evil omens for her. Bad things seemed to happen to her where markets were concerned. First, the fire in the market in her old city, then...Yolande. She still hadn't figured out whether Yolande was good or bad, but at least she stood up to Hermione's relatives.

When she was thirteen Hermione bumped into the cranky old woman in the market and that was when things started to look up.

Yolande recognized the untapped witchling power buried in the young girl's soul and took Hermione under her wing. After her aunt and uncle would go to sleep, she'd sneak off to Yolande's snug cottage that smelled cats and old people, and Yolande would teach her the art of herbs, how to cook (and to subtly poison her aunt and uncle if necessary), medicines, and a few white magic spells.

Hermione discovered that magic was like air to her, and she didn't know how she'd ever existed without it.

Her first mastered spell had been a small flame spell, and she used it to set her uncle's trousers on fire. She'd been given a week in the cellar for that but it had been worth it.

It was the influence of Yolande, the cruel stupidity of her aunt and uncle, and the simple indifference of the villagers that Hermione developed her cynical attitude towards life. Life in Nozamot taught her quite plainly that people were cruel and horrible, and true love was a cold lie that little girls were taught in order to make them go to sleep at night. She privately reflected later, that if she'd not met Yolande, she probably would have gone insane and murdered everyone.

On top of the magic lessons and the cooking and the occasional fencing lesson, Hermione quickly formed a friendship with the grouchy, crass old lady, and it was first spot of happiness in her sad little existence. Yolanda wasn't the best role model, but the old lady kept her alive and kept her sane in a rather psychotic world.

Hermione's life continued to be uneventful and boringly predictable, that is, until the dead started shadowing the village.

It would be little things at first; forest animals would show up half eaten and dogs started to go missing, but it became very real when little Colin Creevy, the basket weaver's apprentice stumbled into the middle of Town Square and proceeded to try to eat the people setting up for the days market.

That's when life really got interesting.

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To be continued...