Hello Everyone! I know it's been AGES! Since I have posted anything to . But here is a brain child that I've been working on for sometime. This is AU, and is kinda slow at the moment. This is SLASH! Severus Snape with an OMC. Don't like it? Don't care. Feed back is always appreciated and as always anything that you recognize is the property of someone else. Please enjoy, I have several more chapters already written but there are two I have to tackle before I can post them. The first fifteen chapters or so are sort of "background" knowledge. Little snippets (that ALL ended up longer than I wanted originally) that give you important little clues to where I'm attempting to take the characters that are oh so familiar.

And with that, on to the beginning!

P.S. The title is a working title, if anyone has a better idea I'd love to hear it.

~LittleFuzzBall

Unspeakable Change (Prologue)

The Department of Mysteries had been founded so very long ago that even those whose job it was to remember such things, had forgotten. It was remembered that the Ministry of Magic had been formed, at least in part, to conceal the existence of the Unspeakables. Those noble elite who resided, down in the lowest levels of the Ministry shrouded in secret. It was here that the greatest minds for every known subject, and some that were not so known, gathered and studied. Researching the wonders of the universe and creating new ones. These discoveries were housed alongside the Ministry's census records in the very bottom most level of the ministry simply called the Archives.

Here among thousands of years of history and knowledge the secrets of the Unspeakables were kept in a slim simply bound blue notebook without title. Within it's pages was contained a spell that when activated would designate the next man or woman who was destined to attain the most coveted title of Head of the Department of Mysteries. A simple quote annotated in the front of the cover gave both a warning and a promise. "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster and, that when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." No author was listed, nor when the quote was written but it's wisdom had guided the head of the Department of Mysteries through the last century which had included two great muggle wars, two Dark Lords and Albus Dumbledore.

Contained also, within the book's covers, was a list of the branches and divisions housed within the Department. One such division was ominously called the Shadow Guard. This was the only division listed within the books pages that was not accompanied by a description of the duties and responsibilities. Many had assumed that this was because the division had been closed before the book had been authored and so it was unknown what precisely was the purpose of the Shadow Guard. The knowledge fell to the head of the Department to bear the understanding that the Shadow Guard had been born to fulfill those tasks that were considered covert or heinous in nature. The Shadow Guard existed outside of the arm of the law and their sole responsibility was first to protect the wizarding world from all threats both foreign and domestic. The Shadow Guard could have prevented Grindelwald and Voldemort except that at some point at the turn of the century the Shadow Guard had ceased to exist without explanation.

Rumor was that in 1918 that the last team of the Shadow Guard had been betrayed by a fellow Unspeakable denied entry to their ranks and like rats, they had been hunted one by one and exterminated. Thirteen men and women who had been trained to be nothing more than the shadows that creep across the floors each and every day simply turned up dead with no explanation as to how they had arrived at the state. No two of them had been killed in the same manner and it was agreed upon that the person who had stooped to such terrible measures was akin to a rabid dog, to be put down like one when he or she were caught. The search had gone on for longer than most had thought it would but as no proof of these events had ever been found, and the journals that each was required to keep had never been recovered, the search was eventually given up. One would think that such a mysterious end to the premier assassins of the turn of the century would have raised more questions, yet the Wizarding World has a habit of taking horrible unexplained mysteries that they should investigate to the furthest of their ability and forgetting about them entirely.

Still the world continued to revolve around the sun and soon days turned into weeks and weeks into years. Then the Dark Lord Gellert Grindelwald rose to power with his talk of freedom for witches and wizards, of an end to the International Statute of Secrecy, of wizardkind ruling over the inferior muggles. Hundreds of witches and wizards rallied before his banner and to his mantra "For the Greater Good". Those who supported his cause were drawn into acts of extreme violence by his charm and his powers of oration. Such a powerful terrible distraction allowed the Shadow Guard to simply fade into history without any recourse for the heinous actions that had been taken against them. Seasons upon seasons passed with little impact in the world but life was going to change, some change had already happened. Soon after the entrapment of Grindelwald within the walls of his stone fortress Nurmengard in 1945, Albus Dumbledore arose to become the embodiment of all things Light to the Wizarding World; cementing the thought that all the Wizarding World needed was a savior to protect them from the evils of the world. During one interrogation, Grindelwald admitted that most of the plans of his domination of the Wizarding world had come from the brain of Albus Dumbledore, a fact that the Ministry silenced. It was struck from official records, the Auror's who had heard Grindelwald's words had been obliviated and a campaign was begun to ensure that every witch and wizard knew the name Dumbledore and knew that he was their hero.

Things would be quiet for a time after that, until Tom Riddle took up the mantle of Grindelwald's mantra and began a much bloodier more terrorizing quest for the greater good of wizarding kind. Little did anyone know that a set of mistreated, misfit teenagers would be the spark that would bring the attention of the department of mysteries crashing into the past in a last ditch effort to stem the rising tide of malicious slaughter thus commencing a set of events that had been foretold a thousand years ago.