Keeper of Eden
Hermione Granger and the Keeper of Eden
Prologue "Missing Children"
Curious that all she could have come to love should vanish in the face of evil, torn aside and left ravished – abandoned bodies and tattered textbooks – Hogwarts in flames. Curious that the war was over and she should feel nothing but a deep, unsettled hatred that surged and flooded through her veins.
What had she been fighting for? Without Harry and Ron beside her, Hermione knew not—because the two of them had meant everything. To be left standing and existing in their absence was a sin.
She pulled herself from the grass, her broken wand clutched between loose fingertips, and faced the bloodstained horizon; the remainders of Good tottered against one another, a mess of shattered hearts and cracked hopes that magic couldn't heal. In the past she would have imagined a scene filled with relieved tears, but standing there and observing the Eden she'd believed worth saving, she felt nothing but a sense of injustice—and the beginning of an unfinished story.
Her Eden had never been this: watching old students stumble and fall, sobbing against one another as they counted the bodies of friends; smelling nothing but the charred flesh of curses gone too far; and realising there would be no Hogwarts after all that had come to pass. No! Her Eden had been alight with love, with her two treasured companions – her two men – faithfully standing beside her, content in the knowledge that there would come a greater happiness in time, filled with wisdom and warmth, and all in Dumbledore's name.
She staggered towards Ginny, one body amongst many in the verdant grass, and slumped to her knees. Her head bowed – she traced a fingertip over the redhead's cheek, following the whisper of a lingering tear, dedicated in her passing to The-Boy-Who-Lived, The-Boy-She-Loved and The-Boy-Who-Died.
So much had gone wrong. So much destruction, and blood, and death - how could she have ever believed the three of them were to come back from this? How hopelessly naïve she'd been.
"There's one more thing I can do," she half-cried, half-laughed – and it was an echo-filled laugh, thick with miserable mirth - against her fallen friend's cheek. "One more thing I could ever do." Withdrawing from her side, she tucked a hand inside the innermost pocket of her robe. Her fingers grazed the small hourglass pendant she'd kept on her person since Third Year.
"Perhaps this'll be our little secret," whispered Hermione.
In granting her possession of a time turner, Dumbledore had listed a number of rules she was not to break: Do not attempt to change the fates of those who have already died. Do not attempt to change the outcomes of events that have already come to pass. But great Dumbledore would never know; she wouldn't tell a soul.
Time travel with a time turner was a one-way trip, after all; she would rather love her important people from a distance, across even the barriers of time, content in the knowledge that they'd be alive once again in the future, than to live a life unfilled with hope and reason, treading through her ages without conclusion or respite.
She pressed the hourglass into the palm of her hand and squeezed her eyes shut tightly. She would return to a time before Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley. She'd save the lives of all those she had loved so desperately – and in doing so, she would stop Lord Voldemort from ever arising.
How many twists? How many hours? She held her breath and let her hands turn.
One last great adventure, she told herself, and then she'd rest.
That afternoon Hermione Granger vanished from the battlefield. In the aftermath, those who remained assumed the last of the Golden Trio had died and mourned her as a beloved hero.
But she lived on…