TEIND
Author: ianthe_waiting
Rating: MA/NC-17
Warning(s): Dub-Con, hints of bestiality, non-fluffy pregnancy, gore, angst, major character death(s)
Summary: After encountering a strange creature in the Forbidden Forest, Hermione Granger finds herself swept up in a perversion of a fairy tale where 'once upon a time' is not necessarily concluded with 'happily ever after'.
Original Prompt: Possible AU. An adaptation of a fairy tale, any fairy tale you like! Can be completely AU, or can be worked in with the HP-verse. As closely or freely adapted as you like. I just ask for an adaptation of a classic fairytale, and not a contemporary one.
Author's Notes: This work of fiction relies mostly on the Ballad of Tam Lin, which has undergone several revisions through the centuries. Though this fic is loosely based on the Ballad of Tam Lin, there are allusions to other classic fairy tales and myth. Perhaps the most contained on-line source about the Ballad of Tam Lin is: /
Prelude – on the road to Elysium
The sound of birth, wet and violent, was followed by the strong odour of blood, and in the moonlight a babe gave its first cry. It was a weak, pitiful cry and the bodies assembled in a circle about the birth scene watched with pale eyes in a fascination unfamiliar to the humans in the middle of that circle. There were whispers from motionless mouths, a subdued excitement at the witnessing of a human birth—so novel, so barbaric, and so bloody.
Severus Snape stood nude and shuddering, not from the cold of a late October night, but from unadulterated hatred. Behind him, on the ground, was a woman who was clinging as tightly to life as she was to the child she had birthed. He would fight the pale creatures that blocked any route of escape, even if it meant he would die. Years ago, he would never willingly play such a role, but it seemed fate made Severus Snape forever the unwilling sacrifice.
The woman on the ground, Hermione Granger, was trying her best to swaddle her newborn son in the tatters of her once fine cloak. Her body was battered and bruised, and beside the slow and constant trickle of bloody afterbirth from between her thighs, blood oozed from wounds to her arms and back, face and neck. Hermione Granger was a mere shadow as her life ebbed, and it would not be long before death took her.
The only sound was the babe's cries, pained from birth and from the unnatural magicks that caused its birth, which caused sudden aging from seven months to a healthy full term baby. Had the babe been born without the magicks, there was no guarantee that it would survive, and the creatures whose enchanted circle surrounded the mother, father, and child were very interested in acquiring such a pure and innocent soul.
'Give us the babe…' a voice echoed on the wind, mingled with the ethereal twinkling of bells and the timbre of age. 'And you will go free, Severus Snape…'
Hermione cradled the child to her breast, bare and bloody from prior and unintentional violence. With one hand she clasped her son to her heart and with the other she grasped Severus' bare heel. At her cool touch, Severus glanced back to her pallid and sweaty face, knowing exactly what must be done.
Perhaps Hell would not be as terrible as he had imagined, and he would not be alone…
Hermione was dying and without her, the child would be motherless and alone. Giving himself to the creatures, fair and pale, would leave the child an orphan, and in giving the child to be the tithe to Hell would certainly damn him. Severus never wanted a child, and he knew that developing affection for one would take much convincing. All the same, the child, his child, was innocent while he…
"A trade," he muttered. "I was the one who was to be the tithe. I will go willingly in the place of the woman and child, but you must swear that neither will come to harm and after this night be unmolested by the Fae."
The assembly seemed to consider collectively, but it was the figure that sat above on a white horse that Severus addressed.
The Queen of the Fairies was as ancient as the hills that hugged the road, and as fair as the moon, but under the luminous, enchanted façade; time had made the Queen hideous and callous. 'Why would I want your soul when I can have one as pure as new snow and as precious as diamonds?'
"No!" Hermione screamed with a force laced with innate magic, and Severus was startled by the power of her voice. Even so close to death, a mother's protective instinct was strong, and in the corner of his mind, Severus was reminded of another woman, a mother, who had died because of his mistakes.
The Fae, trooping males and females clad in ceremonial garb, seemed to twitter in laughter though their mouths did not move. They found the mortal woman's magic amusingly thin, but knew in their age, not to underestimate witches.
"I will go, I am the Teind, my Queen," Severus announced, stepping away from Hermione's grasp to go to one knee in supplication.
Hermione crawled, trailing blood and gore in her wake, and with his child pressed into his back, wet and bloody, Severus allowed the woman and child to embrace him as tears fell onto his icy skin.
"You will not be the sacrifice again, Severus Snape. I forbid it!" Hermione hissed, the anger in her voice a palpable sting into his brain. "Better we all die!"
The circle broke then, Hermione leaning into Severus' bare back, the decision of the ancient Queen made. Before Severus could react, the Fae had taken Hermione from his back and the child from her arms. The shriek that alit the air sent shivers down his spine, and he looked to the mounted Queen for an explanation he knew would never come. With preternatural speed and the most delicate of magicks, the Fae wrapped him a black shroud, as they did Hermione, placing her body in his arms. The child was gone though its cries of forced separation were near.
Forced to mount a black horse that bent down to allow Severus to keep hold of Hermione, he saw that a procession was forming around him, and standing in the shadow of a tree, a male Fae trooper held his wriggling, newborn son.
"What have we done?" Hermione whispered weakly, her arms falling about Severus' neck as she watched her child over his shoulder disappear as the procession began to move with their mount in the middle.
Severus could not answer. He could only wait and see, and pray that if anyone was to be saved that night, it would be the child who was faultless in the travesty that was Severus Snape's life.