Summary: In a war filled world, hope has almost lost it's meaning. In a desperate attempt to escape Voldemort's reign, Hermione gets sent back in time with the mission of changing the future for better. Posing as the Dark Lord's daughter and with the help of an unexpected ally, would she be able do it? Or would she became lost in the maze formed by politics, betrayals and love? Nothing is what it seems to be, as Hermione will soon discover. Not even the Dark Lord.

Disclaimer: This story was inspired by dullastack's "Prodigal daughter". Thank you for allowing me and Zana20 to use this idea ^-^

Warnings: Violence, angst, humor, bashing, swearing, Grey/Dark-ish Hermione!, and even a dash of slash

Pairings: onesided HG/SB, HG/RAB, - more undecided pairings

"talking"

'thinking'

/mental speach/

$parseltongue$

Emerald eyes, filled with maturity, knowledge and pain well beyond the young man's age, brightly shone in the dim-lit room as he impassively stared at the glowing runes drawn on the floor in the form of a circle, a circle that pulsated with ancient, forbidden magic.

"Has Percy completed his mission?" the owner of said eyes asked, in no more than a whisper, as he turned from the circle to meet the bottomless dark orbs of his companion.

"Yes, sir," the other responded warily, his swarthy face contorted in the most closely resemblance of compassion his kind could accomplish. The goblins weren't, after all, known for their kindness.

"He managed to infiltrate the Unspeakable's quarters successfully and obtained all the time-turners residing there. But sir, the sand it's barely enough for one person," the goblin bluntly informed knowing that the other, his Leader, will understand what that meant .

A flash of something passed trough those brilliant green eyes, before a look of grim determination took it's place.

"I see," the man simply stated, the emotionless mask back in place. "Make the proper arrangements then and summon the volunteers. Also, tell Severus to prepare the required potions. We must be ready to do the ritual tomorrow, on the Halloween night, when the magic forces are at their peak. It must be done, no matter what. It's our last chance. "

The goblin nodded curtly, his posture speaking only of the respect he held to the one standing in front of him. He knew what it must have cost the young man to take such a decision, the pain it must have brought him. The fact that he put his personal feelings aside spoke greatly of the level of maturity he achieved. They couldn't have chosen a better leader.

Though young, the man was the commander of hundred of armies made of magical creatures and wizards alike. He was the only defense left against the Dark Lord now, all the others having already long fallen in front of their enemies' forces. The ministry, with their fervent denial, was the first to be defeated followed by many others.

But not him, not their leader.

With a fierce courage, similar to that of an warrior goblin, he plunged forward despite the odds being against him. Forced to grow up early, he willingly took on the heavy burden of leadership when he was barely a teen, a mere child at whom the adults blindly looked up for guidance, thinking he had all the answers.

He strove to not disappoint them.

Always trying to lessen the others burdens, when his was the heavier. Always trying to heal and help everyone while himself suffered in silence, never once complaining for the unfairness of it all, for his ruined childhood or messed up destiny, shaping himself into the perfect warrior, teacher, leader.

It figured that when he finally snapped it wouldn't be for his sake but for that of another.

The goblin still remembered the day when his kind approached the young man for an alliance, more than five years ago, after the attack in which half of his people lost their lives at the Dark Lord orders.

He could still feel the surprise he felt then, when the leader easily accepted to take them under his protection despite the fact that they hadn't given any help to the war till then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He soon learned that it was so for the young man.

He recalled the hope and happiness, brought forth by the plan made using the ancient ritual discovered by the goblins, burning brightly in those emerald orbs. Soon followed by outrage when he discovered just what the ritual entailed and the fact that he wouldn't be able to carry the burden of it himself, that it would have to be placed upon another person shoulders, not his own.

He firmly refused to even consider the idea. He couldn't allow such heavy expectation to be place on the shoulders of someone else, to let them suffer the same pain as him. It was unacceptable.

Or was until the situation got worse.

With the Dark forces gaining power, with the innocent victims growing larger in numbers with each passing day, being massacred with no mercy, and with them becoming fewer, they were soon left with no other alternative. Especially since Voldemort started to use nuclear bombs and biological weapons to kill the muggles en-mass. It was fitting, he stated cruelly, for the filth to die by their own makings. Truly, it was an miracle that London was still standing when other places were simply wiped out from the face of the Earth.

It felt as if the apocalypse had arrived.

It reached the point when even if, by some divine miracle, they managed to win over the Dark Lord, it wouldn't matter anymore. There were too many loses already.

That was when she decided that enough was enough. She agreed to undertake the ritual, despite their leader's protests which fell on deaf ears. She was just as, or more so, stubborn than even him.

When he realized that she wouldn't change her mind no matter what, for the first time since the beginning of the war, their leader broke. He cried, not for himself but for her and for where the path she carved for herself will lead to.

The goblins couldn't, wouldn't, think less of him because of that.

More so when, after that, he evolved further, pushed himself harder and one day announced that, even though he couldn't be the central key of the plan, he could still tag along and help her along the way.

Now, not even that was possible.

Still, looking at the determinant young man standing in front of him, the goblin could easily see why magical creatures which waged war between themselves before, stood now united under his guidance.

"Sir?" the goblin question, with a gruff voice, snapping from his reverie. "Should I inform the miss?"

Pain filled orbs closed themselves briefly before opening to show a new fire burning within their depths.

"No. I would let her know myself."

...From the ashes of time...

The black clothed figure surveyed the surrounding area, taking in without batting an eyelash the rising smoke of the burning buildings, the muffled cries of the hidden survivors and the metallic smell of blood in the air.

War.

Death.

Destruction.

They were simple words, so easy to utter. Too empty, too hollow to fully show the true meaning behind them. The pain and the suffering caused by them. The misery. The unending anguish.

Such feelings could never be expressed in words, the way they felt couldn't possibly be conveyed so easy . It was just one of those things that held a message so profound, held such a pure state of truth, that, when revealed, it simply lost it's true significance. It's worth and truth could not be found through simple analysis, couldn't be wrapped by simple words. What gave it truth and meaning was the emotion; the burden of some kind of wordless knowledge that could only come through what was done, felt.

And believe it, she knew.

Trying to ignore the world around her, the figure continued to move swiftly trough the ruins of what once was known as Muggle London.

However, she was still aware.

Aware of the fearful stares that watched her from the surprisingly still standing buildings, of the anxious flicker of a curtain every time she passed by . Aware of the fearful, shining madness of the eyes locked on her, an unknown factor, a potential danger to their lives.

She steeled herself though, forced down mercilessly the waves of pity that threatened to arise. She couldn't help, was helpless herself and knew that she will be crushed if she allowed those feelings free reign. The pain of seeing the survivors reduced to fearful cowards, barring their teeth and living like animals, too terrified to move from their own houses, will simply destroy her. And, though she couldn't bear to see their haunted faces, their accusatory expressions, she couldn't allow that to happen. Not when it was still hope. Not when there was the littlest spark of light shining in these dark times.

She owned it to all those who lost their lives fighting to also continue battling in their stead.

Ten years.

Ten long years since the revival of the monster responsible of all this horrifying nightmare has passed, since the world became colored in blood, smelt of fear and was filled with painful moans.

Her eyes become solemn and forlorn, as memories, ghosts of her past and present came to haunt her again and she felt her lips curl lightly into a somewhat cold smile, desperate to fight back the tears that threatened to spill.

Wickedness. Cruelty. Malice ...

The war truly brought out the evil in man. It tore people apart and put them back together differently. It happened to her after all and, after a while, it stopped mattering who she was fighting with, it became a habit and she was able to look at battlefields covered in blood and filled with bodies without feeling anything at all. She simply became numb.

Too often she found herself wondering just how had Harry managed to maintain all of his feelings without going crazy from the pain. How exactly could he shoulder the weight of every death and still go on when he witnessed even more of the war atrocities than her?

She asked him once. He said that someone had to. Typical of the foolish young man she thought of as her best friend. He and Ron were the only reasons she managed to keep her sanity for so long.

And now she had the chance to repay them. The chance to change everything.

It was by mistake that she discovered about the goblin's plan, really, seeing that she only heard about it because she happened to pass by when Harry and Severus were discussing it in a heated argument. It was pure luck that Severus, reaching his wits ends trying to convince their stubborn leader about the benefits of going through with the ritual, revealed everything to her in an attempt to gain an ally to side with him. So he to told everything about the plan which was fairly simple, at least in theory, if she was to be honest.

They wanted to send someone in time to change the entire future, using an ancient ritual discovered by the goblins which allowed one to travel up to fifty years in the past. Before the things got bad, before even the bloody prophecy was made.

She had to admit though, that the whole-time traveling thing made her highly skeptical in the beginning. As such, before she agreed with anything, she approached Ragnuk, the goblin's king and the proposer of the plan, for some background information. One could never know too much and she was a firm believer of the idea that knowledge equaled power. It was what one did with said power that mattered though.

She found the old goblin easily enough, in the left wing of their secret base, buried under a pile of paperwork seeing that the goblins were now in charge of managing their resources.

His swarthy face, full of wrinkles, was scrunched up in concentration as he studied one of the documents, and she couldn't help but think that he made quite an odd pictures with his short form dressed in a gold and red suit, with his crunched back and with his monocle gleaming eerily in the light of the candles.

Sensing her presence he lifted his pure black eyes from the parchment and, quite rudely, told her to say what she wanted or take a hike because he was busy. So she did. Everyone knew that goblins were never the ones for patience, after all.

"As you should already know," the goblin started explaining with a sneer, more than a little irritated for having to spell everything out to a foolish with, "the time-turner was created back in the 18th century by a German wizard."

"The time-turners were highly protected then, not used as toys like in these days (honestly, giving them to children so that they could take more classes)" the goblin mumbled under his breath, making her smile somewhat sheepishly back. "The Ministry speculated then, wrongly of course, that one who possessed a Time Turner and use it to travel in the past, could use the information they had about the future to change everything as they pleased. It created quite a panic, I must say, " the goblin continued with an almost smile, reminiscing how the wizards appeared to be headless chickens with the way they were reacting. "There were countless articles in magazines about those new devices, multiple theories and the such, they were talk of the town as some would say and, when the truth came out, many were disappointed. The past couldn't be changed."

"This truth was clearly explained by Novikov with his self-consistency principle. Seeing the look on your face I take it you have heard about him?" the goblin asked at which he received a nod from the young women.

"I can't say I'm surprised considering your personality and heritage, " the goblin continued nonchalantly making her stiffen somewhat, "but it will make things easier to explain."

"Igor Novikov was a Muggle theoretical astrophysicist from Russia, who back in 1980, developed this fascinated theory, that was fully supported by a mathematical model and accepted worldwide as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture. Of course there were other hundreds different theories about time-travel running about even then, but this one was special. This discovery solved not only the problem of paradoxes in time travel , like the grandfather paradox, but also showed that there is only one time line and that multiple alternate timeliness simply do not exist."

"Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time traveling, one way of explaining why history does not change is by saying that whatever has happened was meant to happen from the beginning. A time traveler attempting to alter the past, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his role in creating history, not changing it. Simply said one cannot change the past with a time-turner, because the past is already written," the goblin said, leaning back in his chair.

Before the goblin could continue she gave a frustrated sigh.

"So many years have passed since I learned about the possibility of time-travel ad it's still gives me a headache", she stated before fixing the goblin with her eyes.

"Tell me sir, are you familiar with law of conservation of energy,? It is one of empirical law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. A consequence of this law is that energy can neither be created or destroyed: it can only be transformed from one state to another. Also Albert Einstein's theory of relativity showed that energy and mass are the same thing, and that neither one appears without the other. And that is why I don't get it!" she finally exclaimed, looking ready to tear her hair out from frustration.

"How it is possible for someone to travel in time when the whole time travel idea violates those basics of conservation law of energy. By sending some mass of energy – the time traveler- back in time it will increase the amount of energy that exists at that point in time, wouldn't it?

To say that she almost had a heart attack when the goblin started to laugh, will be the understatement of the century.

"You can not always apply muggle logic to magic", the goblin said, after chuckling a little more at the girl's freaked out expression. "Logic and magic simply do not work together but to answer your question, no, it would not.

"You see," Ragnuk continued, "the magic consider the Universe not as a closed, but as an open system, because magic flows in and out through it bringing both mass and energy with it, varying the quantities so that a balance could be maintained. As such, the muggle energy conservation law would no longer apply."

"However, no matter how interesting this debate is, we are getting further away from the real point of this discussion. Tell me, have you ever wondered why the time turners are under such heavy security in the Department of Mysteries when they are given even to children to use? Because it isn't the time turner that it's guarded but what it's contained within it- the sand which, though harmless in small amounts could be disastrous if someone who knew how to use it got their hands on a more higher quantity", the goblin said, his voice deadly serious.

"The goblin nation has always been fascinated with time-travel and the ...opportunities... one could have if such thing was possible. While studying the time turners we quickly discovered that what made them 'tick' was nothing more than the sand contained by them. It was unlike anything we ever seen."

"The sand had been under many test but the only things that we could discover was that it was an organic substance unique in the world and it's origins."

"The sand had originally been inside the trunk of one of the oldest pureblood families who became extinct in the last centuries. As there was no heir left to claim it, the trunk and the other belongings of the family were confiscated by the ministry and sold in an auction where it was bought by the inventor of the time turner."

"However, the goblins refused to give up on their research," Ragnuk said proudly, straightening his back slightly, "and we are glad to say that our efforts were repaid in the end."

"As it happens, during our travels in Egypt, while trying to recuperate the gold that was rightly ours and which the ancient Pharaohs stole from our nation, we came across the tomb of a high priest. In there we found the most fascinating parchments which, after translating them, we discovered to our great surprise that they explained in great detail the properties of the sand we studied for so long. We found that the organic matter was called – in a rough translation- ash of time and it was a key element in the Ritual of Thoth."

"Thoth?", the young women inquired. "Wasn't he the Egyptian god of wisdom and astronomy?"

"And also time," the goblin added after a nod. "It seems that Thoth used the ash of time to delete the whole world, which was facing then it's extinction, and start anew. What we plan on doing too, it's also exactly that. We want to give this world a new chance for a future," Ragnuk solemnly stated, his black eyes appearing to look straight into the young woman's soul.

After that he proceeded to go into the ritual technicalities, explaining in great detail what it entailed and leaving her head spinning before she took her leave.

The thing was that the plan was truly the last option, something they should resort to only when there wasn't any other alternative, when they had nothing left to lose. The reason for that was simple - by sending someone so far in the past they had to sacrifice the world as they knew it. With the ritual everything will be deleted and from the moment the time traveller started his or her journey the future will be rewritten, the world as they knew it will not exist anymore.

That was why no wizard, no matter of their allegiance to the Dark or the Light, had never tried to meddle with time and change the future.

The cover story they created was the most important part of the plan though.

The time traveler had to have some kind of protection from the Voldemort of then which will surely not take kindly to one meddling in the affairs of what he considered to be his country. Not to say that the last part of the mission- which consisted in killing the Dark Lord- meant that the assasin had to, somehow, get the Dark Lord to let his guard down around him so that he could be able to the deed. Failure was not an option, not even once.

When, after reading the files that they stolen from the Unspeakeble's which contained extensive information about the past of Tom Riddle aka Lord Voldemort they discovered that he had a child with one of his lovers and that both mother and child have died in childbirth, they came up with the solution.

Using the sample of bloods that the goblins got from both Riddle and his mistress , which was easily explained by the fact that everyone who got an account at Gringotts was forced to donate one when they reached majority so that the vaults could be keyed to only them, they developed a plan in which, by using an adoption ritual, someone will be made, both genetically and magically, into Riddle and his lover's legitimate child.

From then on the time traveler will proceed to take the place of the dead child and worm his way into the political circles of the time, trying to change everything for better. He will be provided all the necessary papers by the goblins in this time so that not even the goblins of the past would be able to detect the forgery.

It was a well thought plan, their last hope in fact.

The thing was that Riddle had a daughter. As such the person who had to go in the past had to be a girl. And there weren't many girls around who could be trusted with such a burden, who could accomplish such a heavy task successfully. In fact there was only one.

She. Hermione Granger.

Well, at least Harry will be accompanying her, she thought trying to cheer herself up. Honestly, she shouldn't have to deal with this. Carrying the future of the world on her shoulders wasn't for her. That was usually Harry's job.

As she snapped out from her musings, sighing deeply before ducking in a shabby looking alley, Hermione made her way to the apparition point, which was hidden behind some trash baskets, that will transport her to the secret base. Wrinkling her nose slightly at the awful smell, she got in place and, in an soundless flash, was gone.

Opening her eyes, which she unconsciously closed while apparating – and god she really detested the feeling of being squeezed through a tube- she found herself in a huge, underground chamber in the middle of which a glowing circle made of runes could be seen.

"Hermione, you're here", a warm but tired voice said and, turning around, she was met the brightest pair of green eyes she had ever seen.

In a flash she threw her arms around the neck of the man's whose eyes belonged to, giving him a tight hug.

"H-hermione...c-cant breathe!", the young man struggled to say as the young women tightened the embrace even more before, reluctantly, letting go.

"Sorry, Harry" Hermione sheepishly said, although she wasn't sorry at all. "It's just that i missed you so much! It's been months since we lost seen each other," she explained with a huff, a hint of worry perceivable in her voice.

Harry's eyes softened slightly at that, the pain in his eyes becoming more intense, guilt swimming inside the emerald depths.

What kind of man had he become, willing to let his friend carry such a burden alone?

Alas, he didn't had a choice. Steeling himself he turned towards his friend who was still muttering under her breath.

"Hermione," he said, and although he tried to contain it, a tinge of pity crept into his voice. "We need to talk."

As chocolate orbs studied the face of the young man's serious expression, Hermione realized with dread that she wouldn't like what she would be told. She wouldn't like it at all.

...TBC...

AN/Hey guys^-^ My second fic! Yay ^0^ I'm really excited to see what you all think about it and I really hope you liked this prologue. My wish is to make the story into something that everybody can enjoy, so please, if you guys have any suggestions, don't hesitate in giving them to me. I appreciate all the help I can get ^-^

Till next time,

Sara Blake

Ja ne.