Foreword:

I've been itching to do this for some time. With the sheer amount of bigotry that existed in the HP universe against non-magical and mixed-magical beings (even against fellow humans!), I'm surprised that things hadn't devolved into open warfare in the streets between purebloods and muggleborns. This story explores what would happen had that come to pass.

As per usual, I am merely playing in the sandbox that is the Game of Thrones and Harry Potter universes (Multiverse? There's more than one!). I do not hold claim over the original source material and characters. Only the original characters and storyline belong to me.

Warning #1: Does contain Femslash, though not of an explicit nature. I see no literary value in wasting words in vulgar scenery. There are videos if you must satisfy your more carnal needs. But if you are still offended by this sort of relationship, you have been warned.

Warning #2: Harry Potter in this story is dead. And is certainly not coming back. So is the Weasley clan. I prefer to touch more on minor characters with less developed characterisations, as this gives me more latitude to develop them in different ways.

Warning #3: There will not be any White Walkers, Wights and other kinds of high-fantasy elements from the Game of Thrones universe. I personally found the use of high fantasy elements distasteful and distracting. When the premise of the series starts with low fantasy intrigue, swordplay and battles, and suddenly you throw in high fantasy elements almost like a deus ex machina, it tends to be a little jarring and disorienting. I think the introduction of magic here will shake things up enough without those elements in play.

Three years.

It had been three long years after the fall of the Dark Lord in Britain. Five years after long, bloody years of warfare in the shadows had started, which had claimed countless lives both magical and non-magical, human and non-human. Years in which the sapient magical creatures of Europe fought alongside their human peers, in the hope of building a brighter future. A future in which man and goblin, veela and merman, centaur and elf, could all stand side by side as brothers and sisters in pursuit of the common good. A future in which prejudice of both bloodline and species could be cast aside in favour of co-operation. A future in which all could prosper and thrive until the end of time itself.

The hope for a better future had died with the end of the war. The honeyed words of the wizards and witches that enticed the less fortunate of their society to their aid? Empty words and hollow lies. The wizards of ancient blood were so fickle with their loyalties. They would agree to everything to secure their own properties, their livelihoods, their wealth – when it suited them.

More than one cynical goblin elder had said that the only thing that a head of an ancient wizarding house would not agree to give to protect his status was his heir; and even then, they would do anything short of giving up their magic to steal everything back once those were secure.

One year ago, that sentiment had proven true.

Fleur could recall that day vividly. She stood there in the Rue de Magie in Paris among crowds of other witches and wizards on the day before Yule, observing the news astral projector that was set up in the square. They all waited with bated breath as the International Confederation of Wizards – or ICW, as it was more commonly known – called a vote on the future of wizardkind. A vote on a law that would bind wizards and witches of non-magical or mixed-blood birth to established wizarding families of good standing, supposedly to better integrate into wizarding society.

The truth, however, could not be further from that. The subtle wordplay within the laws would reduce wizards of non-magical birth to little more than the chattel of wizards of older and more established families.

Wizards and witches with partial magical creature blood all consigned to more or less the same fate, regardless of how old or powerful their families were previously.

And the less said about those without any human blood, the better.

Gabrielle clung onto her arm tightly with a white-knuckled grip. Her fear was clear for all to see. Fleur gently wrapped an arm about her sister's shoulders, giving the willowy girl a reassuring squeeze. Inwardly, however, she knew that it was a futile gesture – the ICW was largely populated by those who would see the law passed – to panic and lose her head would do her little good.

Be unshakable as the mountain in the face of adversity, her father had always reminded her. For there was nothing worse than fear and doubt among one's own family. Swift as the wind to respond to their needs. As tranquil as the forest when making decisions. And to strike as fiercely as flame when an opportunity arises.

Wisdom that had served the man well - until his assassination by pureblood supremacists on the way to the Paris branch of the French Ministry of Magic.

The time for the motion had come to pass. One vote for. One vote against. Five votes for. Two votes against. Eventually, the motion to pass the law had gone ahead with little more than one-fifth voting against the bill.

Unwilling to share what power they had amassed over the past centuries, the wizards had quashed any hope of reconciliation with the rest of the magical creatures of Europe and elsewhere with that one motion. Those born to non-magical parents – Magiciens nouvelle, as they were referred to in France – erupted into furious riots throughout magical Paris. Centaur tribes in Macedon, their homeland, shot dead hundreds of wizards that had come to their ancestral grounds with pacification devices within weeks after the law had passed. The Veela clans retreated into their eyries, questioning what needed to be done to ensure their freedom and survival, as the wizards and witches worked tirelessly to bring down the ancient wards defending their homes.

Thankfully, the goblins were quick to engage the war machine that was the Goblin Nation. Having the most developed arsenals among all the non-human races that were part of the magical world, they managed to buy more time for those that were marked for slavery. Yet even they could not match the humans' sheer numbers and willingness to invoke the most terrifying of magics in their quest for supremacy. Little by little, the goblins were pushed back. Gold, silver and gems, once treasured beyond all else, seemed so very worthless when none could trade them any food or supplies from above ground. And thus, starvation and wounds wore them down as surely as a river would carve down the mightiest of mountains.

After all, what were casualties to wizards? Especially if those casualties came mostly from the muggleborns and mixed-bloods that had been coerced into servitude. The elder families could not possibly care less. After all, their sacrifices were made for the greater good of the wizarding realm.

Sometimes Fleur wondered how things may have turned out if Potter had lived. That 'little boy' was a figurehead among those who followed the Light. With his victory over Voldemort, he had secured his place as a legend among wizards and witches. His kindly disposition and humility only helped to improve his standing in the sight of both those with creature blood and the magiciens nouvelle. He had worked alongside wizards, witches and creatures of all kinds to secure the victory over evil; werewolves, veela, goblins, elves, centaurs and giants, to name a few.

Perhaps he could have convinced the wizards and witches to see the light. Perhaps he could have convinced them to see something other than their own interests. Perhaps he could have wielded his reputation to dissuade them from imposing hegemony over all magicals, sapient or otherwise.

Perhaps that was just Fleur trying to fruitlessly convince herself that such a future could even exist. That any future could exist, once open war broke out and the non-magicals took notice.

And the non-magicals certainly took notice when the goblin clans around the world drowned the streets of cities with human blood, magical and non-magical both in the bloodiest Halloween offensive of all time. Across Paris, London, Beijing, New York, Berlin, Delhi, battles and streetfights erupted; the simultaneous carnage was too much for the already-overworked Obliviators to silence completely.

Outraged and horrified beyond imagination at what they saw as indiscriminate slaughter, the non-magicals engaged their own armies to eliminate all threats within their borders. A witch hunt greater than any that the world had ever seen had started. Advances in technology and surveillance, things that the British wizards had thought so little of, proved to be the undoing of all. There was nowhere to run when a bullet could strike faster than any spell travelled. Nowhere to hide when thermal cameras and radar revealed all. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were mobilised to exterminate the threats hiding in plain sight. Americans, British, Germans, French – the entire non-magical world practically united to eradicate what they saw as an insidious threats within their borders.

Notice-me-nots and muggle-repelling charms, once thought wholly effective against muggles, did not work at all against cold and unfeeling electronics and cameras. Within a month of the non-magicals' entry into what was previously a purely magical civil war, both the French and British ministries had been razed to the ground by bombs and airstrikes. Noxious gases pumped into the tunnels and warrens of the goblins systematically eliminated entire clans one at a time. The bows and arrows of centaurs did little when faced with the machineguns that the tanks and armoured vehicles possessed. Dragons, near invulnerable to spellfire, proved very much vulnerable to heavy rods of metal travelling at many times the speed of sound.

Come the start of December, even Hogwarts castle had come under siege by the British army.

Desperate calls for help had fallen silent two weeks after that. The last that anyone had heard of Hogwarts was the sharp staccato of gunfire tearing apart its halls – and then silence.

Fleur saw the writing on the wall even before the start of hostilities. Her close friend and confidante, Hermione Granger, had outlined several hundred ways that a disaster could come about once the Statute of Secrecy could no longer be upheld. The question of whether the Statute would fall apart was not if. It was when. And when it did, Fleur decided that she wanted – no, needed – to escape with those that she cared for, and any of her allies. There was simply no chance of survival once open warfare erupted. The magical world had thought its skirmishes against the Dark Lord a war when only a few thousand had perished over the course of those few years of terror. The muggles called a six-month campaign causing nearly a million casualties a battle. Simply put, the magicals simply were not prepared for a war, in the truest sense of the word.

Thus she drained the Delacour vaults to build an escape mechanism on an unprecedented scale and ambition. Transdimensional transportation was something that had only been theorised by the most radical of wizards and witches. How multiple universes could exist simultaneously, overlapping the same space in different times, she did not understand exactly. That thinking, however, she could leave to Hermione and the rest of the most brilliant allies she had. If there was anyone that could finally crack the puzzle and finally make the theory a reality, it was her most brilliant friend.

Her trust had proven well-founded, as the brilliant witch burst into her room one day, wearing only a towel after a bath and declaring that she had finally thought of how it could work.

The muggle theory of space-time had played a part in her thought. Tearing a hole in reality by creating a single point of infinite mass – a singularity – would weaken the barriers between worlds sufficiently for realities to meld together for brief moments at a time. A sharp spike of magical energy, of sufficient magnitude, could then tear a portal between realities, after which a powerful stasis charm could hold it in place. A vessel of sufficient durability could then be propelled through the portal in the brief moments that it existed, before the stasis charm broke and space-time would resume its usual ebb and flow.

It was, however, only a theory. A theory that still had many flaws in it; she could not predict where they would land, when they would land – or even if they would ever land, as the portal may well open up in the middle of the sea, or in the air. Many insisted that this was the idea of a madwoman; that it could never work, and that it would lead to their deaths. Fleur simply shot back that when the alternative was certain death at the hands of the muggle military, she would prefer to die while trying to escape with a tiny chance of success, rather than suffer a certain death while cowering in a corner.

On the eve of the winter solstice, when the magical energies of the Moon and the Earth were at their peak, she felt most confident of their escape. Outside, on the grounds of the Delacours' ancestral eyrie atop a mountain in the Alps, sat the vehicle that would carry them to the land beyond. A tower of marble and goblin-steel rose up above the snowy plains, many times taller than the tallest spire of Beauxbatons. Countless tiny windows studded its surface, each one glimmering with candlelight. Each one indicating the presence of a family under her care. Six arms, each as wide as a Quidditch pitch and three times as long, lay evenly spaced around the central dome. In them were stored various seeds and seedlings, from plain potato and humble barley to majestic Wiggentree and all-curing dittany; creatures of the sea, land and air, from the most adorable little Puffskein to the most ferocious and gigantic Hungarian Horntail (tamed, of course); books and grimoires on all subjects under the sun; and enough potions ingredients to make the most discerning potions master weep with joy.

The Ark, some had dubbed it. A vehicle to take them to a future, wherever that may be. A vehicle bearing the hopes and the dreams of an entire generation. The wishes and the aspirations of many disparate races, united in a common goal. The message had spread soon after construction had started. Though only a small fraction of the magical population heeded the word, and a smaller fraction still made it through the muggle blockades, there were still sufficient numbers to fill nearly every space aboard.

And as Fleur finally emerged from the eyrie's gates, trudging through the ankle-deep snow towards the Ark, she regarded the towering construct before her with trepidation. In each one of those numerous glimmers dotting the central spire of the Ark was a family. People that had placed their trust in her, that believed in her, to lead them away from the fires of war. Taking a deep breath, she exhaled raggedly and clenched her fists.

Or rather, tried to. A small, gloved hand had taken her right in theirs, giving it a gentle squeeze. "'Ermione," she spoke, her French accent returning in a moment of anxiety. "Ees it ready? Ees ze Ark ready for zis...journey?"

"As ready as it can be, love. I've done the arithmantic calculations dozens of times, triple-checked the runic ritual circles. The goblins are watching out for enemies, both magical and muggle. If anything happens, they will buy us time,"

"Non-magical," snapped Fleur, stopping in her tracks and spinning around to glare at her partner. "Stop using zat derogatory term, 'muggles'. 'Ave zey not proven zat magic ees not everyzing? That zey, wiz numbers and ingenuity, can overwhelm even ze most well-guarded of maisons-forte?"

"I know, Fleur," Hermione replied exhaustedly. "Don't think that you're the only one that's lost friends to them, love. I might not have liked Ronald much after the Second Blood War, but did he deserve to be shot to pieces in front of Fred's shop when the British Army raided Diagon Alley? Merlin, I was lucky to escape that with Tracey and Daphne. Who knows what would have happened if Daphne wasn't carrying her family's emergency portkey,"

The thought of Hermione being riddled with bullet holes horrified Fleur. There was nothing more terrifying to Fleur than the idea of such a brilliant mind being extinguished by such barbaric methods. She wrapped her arms around the tiny younger witch, bringing her into a warm embrace. "Je suis désolé, mon amour," she muttered, "I...I 'ave no excuses, except for one zat you 'ave 'eard many times. These past few months 'ave been...'ow do you say eet...'Ell?"

Hermione snorted in amusement. "Language, Fleur. But...that sounds about right. Still, what's gotten into you? You've always been so sure of what you do, Fleur. Why hesitate now?"

The blonde veela hung her head in shame. "I do not know, 'Ermione. All zis time, I was certain zat I was doing ze right thing. Zat I would be taking zese people to a new, brighter future. A future without ze threat of a Dark Lord, oppressors, or non-magical armies. Now...when I see zose candlelights," she spoke, raising a hand to point at the glimmering lights dotting the side of the spire, "I see the lives in my 'ands. Zey believe in me, zey believe in what I do. I believed in what I did. But when I see this, I cannot 'elp but wonder. What if I fail? What if zis all fails?"

"We will come up with a plan to deal with it. And if not..." Hermione trailed off, looking for words to convey what she needed to say, "Well, at least we've tried. Would you rather wait to be shot by the French army when they get here?"

"No. Merde, certainly not,"

"Of course not. Now come on, let's get to the launch matrix. Someone-" Hermione said, fishing out an ornate key that she wore as a necklace and glancing at Fleur's own, "-has to start the Ark. And I can't do it alone, Fleur,"

"Oui. Of course, I shall be wiz you. Every step of ze way,"

At the very top of the Ark's central dome was a hemispherical room. Countless runes crisscrossed the marble floor, the pattern of a runic pentagram inscribed into it from glass wall to glass wall. Daphne Greengrass, the blonde Slytherin that forsaken her pureblood heritage, stood on one of the pentagram's points. Chiron, the wise head of the last centaur tribe in Europe stood on another. And on a third one stood a winged woman with graceful features and sharp, eagle-eyed eyes – a Sylphid, Fleur reminded herself, though she knew not her name. All were looking expectantly at Hermione and Fleur as they entered.

"Daughter of flame and air, and daughter of earth and water," Chiron greeted them, his voice a rumbling baritone. "Mars is exceptionally bright tonight. Jupiter rises in the east, and Venus sinks below the horizon. Our time is short, and the fires of war are looming on the horizon. We may tarry no longer,"

"Indeed. We are behind schedule, Granger," said Daphne, her voice as cold as the winter winds. "My contacts reported that the French army was on the move six hours' flight from here by broomstick, and that means that they are not far off. Either we leave now, or they will discover us and strike first,"

The Sylphid woman did not speak, but radiated a biting wind. Her meaning was quite clear.

"Then we have no time to lose. Prepare the runic ignition keys. Does anyone have any questions about the ritual?"

All of those gathered shook their heads, and then turned to face Fleur. "Zen we shall begin. 'Ermione, you will begin,"

The brunette scholar nodded and assumed her position on one of the pentagram's corners. Muttering a complex incantation, she pointed her wand at the center of the gathering and fired off a silvery bolt of pure magical energy. Instantly, the runic matrix lit up like the sun; tremendous waves of magical flux surged through the tiny dome, heating up the room like a furnace. Fleur felt her face burn with heat; sweat poured out of her every pore from the unbearable temperature. For a veela that was accustomed to throwing fireballs, such heat was incredible. She could hardly imagine how hot it must have been for the others, who could not use cooling charms for fear of disrupting the ritual.

"Now, Fleur!" barked Hermione, prompting the blonde veela to add her own energy to the matrix. One by one, the gathered magicals combined their own power to the pentagram. When Chiron added his, a pillar of white light blasted upwards and tore the night sky in half.

If the non-magicals had not known they were there, they certainly did now. Between the blinding light and the vortex of pure darkness that was tearing a hole into reality, there was no hiding where they were, and what they were doing. "Madame Delacour! Muggle aircraft are heading towards your position in great numbers!" a crackling, gravelly voice came from a comm-orb on the wall, "We'll try shooting them down, but you have less than five minutes!"

"We have left the ground!" cried out Daphne, as a powerful jolt rocked the Ark beneath their feet. Slowly, surely, the Ark crept higher and higher, towards the gaping time-space wound in the sky. "Granger, if this doesn't work-"

"It will!"

"-I'm going to hunt you down in the afterlife, bring you back to life and kill you again!"

"Hush, children of earth and water. We are together in this. The stars align, and the Fates are with us. This cannot fail,"

The sylphid in the room emitted a soothing, cool wind that helped to calm them some. Though Fleur's heart still pounded at a million miles an hour as she continued to channel her energies into the ritual; though she stared forwards, unblinking, into a chaotic vortex that led to Merlin knows where; she knew that there was little choice now. They had chosen their actions, and committed to it.

She was leading them towards a future. What sort, she did not know, for she could not see through the swirling void before her eyes. But if one thing was certain, it was that she had led them this far. She had a vision, a dream; and many had believed in it. The many people in the Ark trusted her to lead them to this dream, wherever and whatever it may be.

She was a leader now. And a good leader needed to be as unshakable as the mountain, and as tranquil as the forest.

She could not fail them.

A/N:

Thus begins the journey into the unknown! Bending the laws of physics with magic and science, this cannot possibly end well. But what little choice do they have, when the alternative is to await slaughter while staring down the barrels of guns? Stay tuned for the next installment of Exodus!