Hi everyone!

I hope you`ve all had a nice Christmas and New Year celebrations! :)

I`ve been busy again with all the planning for my semester abroad and am working on my stories again now. This is something new I`d like to try as it`s been on my mind for a couple of weeks now and I finally managed to write it down.

This is sort of the prologue and it`s rather short, the other chapters are going to be longer, promise! ;) Basically, this story is going to be a "Reading the Harry Potter books"-story which I have wanted to do for a very long time but never knew how to start... So, yeah...

I hope you enjoy reading the first part and let me know what you think! :)

Being Head of the Department for Trans-Dimensional Travel was by no means an easy task, that much had been obvious from her first day after being promoted. What the lower employees of the Ministry of Magical Death thought to be an exciting job full of fascinating meetings and stories of the deceased who passed through the barriers or retrieving wanderers gone astray, was nothing more than a lot of paperwork and little to do with travelling. In reality, Elena Hopkins had spent over ninety-five percent of her ten-thousand years as Head of the Department filling in a vast amount of different forms and writing reports that were stored in the archives. Each case had to be treated differently and each file had a little flag attached to it that, depending on the case, was either green, white, red or black.

The green files were the easiest ones and, luckily, the most frequent ones. They belonged to souls who accidentally ended up in the Between but had legal clearance to pass through the final barrier.

A white flag meant that the traveler had been selected to work for the Ministry but those cases were extremely rare given the long "life" span of the current employees and did not land on Elena`s desk unless there was a problem at the gate.

Files with a red flag attached to them always meant a lot, a lot of paperwork and were directly connected to long and exhausting court trials that awaited criminals. Unfortunately, there had been a lot of red flags as of lately. An unusual occurrence that Elena had reported to her immediate superior, the Minister, himself.

A slight fluctuation in red flags was considered normal as the number of criminals among humans varied within each generation. The drastic rise in the twentieth century, however, drew the attention of everyone at the Ministry when the number of reported deaths went up in an equally fast fashion.

Elena thought of the massive file of the man who was now known as Lord Voldemort, a name that instilled so much fear in peoples` minds that no-one even dared speak it out aloud.

A shiver ran down her spine when she remembered the first time she had met him in the Between; a mere shadow of his former self after suffering his first defeat by the hands of a little boy, but still powerful enough that even the most vicious souls avoided him.

The Ministry had not been able to bring him through the barrier and so the scheme of his rotten soul had spent almost fourteen years in the darkest corner of the realm, desperately clinging to whatever living form it could reach.

Creating a horcrux was considered one of the most disgusting things and major crimes in society; splitting one`s soul into six parts, however, was beyond everything Elena had ever witnessed. No wizard, no matter how powerful and evil the spirit, had dared take this final step so drastically far that their own body resembled more an animal than a human being.

There had been plenty of emergency meetings of the Ministry representatives and all of them had come to the same result; Voldemort had to be stopped at all costs. His mere existence was against every natural order in the cosmos and threatened to create more chaos than could be dealt with.

Death, as much as people feared it, was part of the circle of life and an unavoidable necessity to establish a balance between the living and the dead. Some lives were shorter than others, deaths of a more or less evil nature occurred but everything had its order; even if people mourned the tragic loss of their loved ones, the time of every death was predicted by one of the many diviners working for the ministry and was, once registered, final.

Now, however, wizards and witches came to the realms who died long before their predicted times, their deaths causing utter chaos in the realm of Death.

Elena sighed and wearily eyed the pile of papers on the desk in front of her. The overtimes alone were a nightmare! And, as if that weren`t already enough, they were running out of staff! Too many souls to register, too many to bring through the barriers and too many to keep track of!

Another sigh escaped her lips, a sound that had become more and more frequent as of lately. She didn't need a lot of sleep, which was one of the many benefits of being dead, but even the Undead had their limits.

Crack!

Elena almost jumped out of her skin when the Minister suddenly appeared in her cramped office and sat down on the chair opposite of hers.

"Minister Evreux!" She exclaimed after regaining her composure. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

The elderly man twirled his navel-long beard in his boney fingers, the only sign of nervousness displayed on the outside while watching her intensely with his black, sparkling eyes.

The Minister was not an overly friendly man, even though his long beard and round glasses gave exactly that impression. Elena, however, was not fooled by his appearance and always maintained a neutral expression whenever he was around, or, in other words, she didn't like him very much.

"I`m afraid, Miss Hopkins, things don't go according to plan," the Minister said, stilling his movements.

"I am aware of that, sir," she answered with a nod.

Evreux shook his head. "That's not what I meant, Miss Hopkins. Matters have taken a turn for the worst… I… We cannot wait any longer. The boy must know the truth or this war will be lost…"

"Sir?" Elena asked bewildered.

"Severus Snape was reported dead at exactly 8:30 pm this evening." He stood up and walked over to the lone window, then turned around to face her again and clasped his hands behind his back. "Unless we act immediately, the prophecy will not be fulfilled. Harry Potter must know the truth about what has to be done and what was done in the past, otherwise a disaster beyond our imagination will occur. You know what to do, Miss Hopkins. Do not disappoint me."

With that, the Minister disapparated with a loud Crack, leaving behind a speechless Head of Department.

You know what has to be done.

Yes, she knew. What she was about to do was forbidden under normal circumstances and it was dangerous, very dangerous. If she failed, Earth would delve into chaos, bringing the Ministry of Magical Death down to its knees as well.

For Elena Hopkins, Head of the Department of Trans-Dimensional Travel, was about to take down the wards that protected the dead to bring Harry Potter and his friends to the Between.