re-loaded to smooth out some incongrueties with chap. II

She was hollow.

And the drums were beating again.

Wild and heathen.

Stirring and alluring.

Their pulse was thrumming through her veins, working her driven senses until she was on overload.

It was a delicious torment as it had been every single time. The humming energy made her feel as if she would burst any moment with divine and unadulterated ecstasy. Everything and nothing ran through her veins at that timeless moment when pain coursed through her. Just as last time, the delicious and utterly desired release arrived, and she had finally known peace as her silenced screams were shredded from her shadowy soul and were pieced simultaneously until she was utterly whole again. It was something so ethereal and benign that she felt compelled to experience it over and over again until she would plummet into a delirious fever. Splintering Deaths and bleeding moons didn't matter anymore. Everything seemed so far away and unreal. Nobody could touch her here.

Not here.

Not where the morn collided against the dusk and everything was left in an unholy and dim stillness. In here, the dreams were whisked away as if a deep breeze had blown and purified her very core, replaced by piercing nightmares that made you shiver and want to scream unrelentlessly.

The clutching fear had vanished. The void that tore her apart from within was vanquished. Her haunts were quieted with the divine presence of a single Rose. A blooming touch kept her alive for the rest of her tormenting life; her only company her condemned soul.

And she wanted to stay here. She wanted to stay here so very badly, wanted to sway to the rhythm, to that guttural beat that activated her every nerve and made her feel vibrant and alive. She wanted to be free of every single restraint for the first time in so many, many years… And she wanted to respond to that unrelenting call that promised so many things yet untold. It was like a siren call, something that she wouldn't be able to resist for long and that drew her to it so unbearably that she knew that if she didn't yield soon she would be broken forever, destroyed with no remedy but normality. Fucking normality… It was as if the magic that ran through her veins had been triggered to its maximum capacity, and she couldn't deny the sweet power that promised to course through her if only she surrendered to its bittersweet call, its entrancing lullaby. It called her with all its fury to embrace her birthright, her heritage. It promised to fulfill her, to take this state into permanent residence within her, to never leave her alone again. It promised a sweet and tantalizing future, full of raging storms and whispering nightmares and full of the darkest, deepest secrets…

It promised redemption.

And she knew that as long as she didn't abstain from accepting it, she would be a fixed part of this unworldly puzzle, and nothing else would matter, because everything would be alright, they would take care of her, they would embrace her and never deny her. They would make it all go away…

And it didn't matter that she didn't know who were they, because they yearned for her…and she was needed.

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With a gasp she woke up once again to that overwhelming sense of power that flared in the walls of her body, devouring sanity and reason. Her eyes were wide and alert, her pupils almost slit, observing every strand of energy that emanated from her own body as she managed to wake her brain.

Her blood appeared to be boiling as it sped through her veins and thundered throughout her body. Her senses were sharpened almost painfully to their climax as she was able to hear and feel, see and smell every single little drop, and her eyes ripped through the seamless stitches of darkness as if they didn't exist.

She felt a purring of some unknown and powerful magic deep within her as it unwound and stretched, trying to reach the vaguest corners of her body that she had ignored they existed. She felt how it fought and battled to resurface and be in charge once again. For her, it was a losing battle, and for once in her lifetime, she succumbed. Panic surged with a blast inside her as she somehow felt like she was waking up yet again. But this waking up was so right. She was in a totally different world. Planes above planes were revealed to her as if they had always existed in her line of superfluous vision, and she saw what others only occasionally saw and then discarded for nightmares. She saw the demons and she discovered the world.

She took a few minutes to admire her new perception as she turned around to look at her sleeping companions and saw black beasts hovering most of them, waiting to attack and destroy, but she wasn't helpless, but she wasn't sure she wanted to help them either…

Driven to it, and not questioning once what she was feeling, she lowered her gaze to her pallid and trembling hands. Wisps, however dim, of a faint reddish glow trailed behind as her fingers wove through the air, intoxicating the room with their ethereal aura. They simply appeared to belong there, as if they should have been there all her life…

Everything fell into place, and she wasn't alone anymore.

It was only logical for her to be surrounded by a red hazy mist that enveloped her entirely and lifted her off the floor a few feet as it wrapped its inviting coils around her still childish body, brushing her tenderly and lovingly as a mind-numbing alteration began to take place with a mother's gentle and loving care.

A black flash happened at the back of her mind, and she knew, she knew.

She felt powerful then as she saw the undulating wisps of telltale magic emerge, floating from her after she was deposited safely once again to the floor. One knee folded beneath her and her blood red hair fell like a curtain across her features as her face bowed. And she saw the natural occur as she instinctively wrapped her hands around her wooden bedpost and wild red waves emerged from her thrumming fingers and pulsating body…

She lost control.

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The fire had hit quickly and furiously, sending all the Gryffindor inhabitants screaming and yelling towards their common room where rapidly everyone was soon assembled. The roaring flames were devouring everything that was upon its way with no apparent mercy and no evident intention of stopping any time soon. It didn't quench under the huge amount of water the teachers had summoned, nor with the numerous shouted "Finite Incantatem"'s that were cried.

Its heat was beyond unnatural.

Scorching didn't even begin to describe it.

Smokeless and not the typical reddish orange color of fire, this phenomenon was getting everyone a bit anxious. Nobody had ever seen a fire that was like spilled blood and seemed to have a will of its own as it whipped and cracked through the air with renovated vigor. It seemed to eat the oxygen away.

Worried grimaces were starting to appear in the wizened old faces of the teachers as they found no visible way of immediately stopping the furious deafening flames as they slowly but surely advanced with firm step towards consuming everything. The students were just standing there sweating profusely, fear evident in all of their faces as they realized that the bedrooms were all but gone, and that this nightmare wouldn't be ending anytime soon.

What would be happening to them?

What would be happening to Gryffindor?

All lions were staring at the flames, despair clearly written in their faces. Fear had brought them more together than they had ever been. Anyone who sported the red and golden colors could depend in everyone present. Tonight there were no differences, everyone was united.

Everyone was in danger.

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Ginny Weasley's face was a complete blank as she gazed with entranced eyes the livid flames that devoured everything surrounding her. She simply stood in the middle of the room, not as much as a single ash touching her china skin, with her porcelain hands lying at her sides, clenched into tight fists that made her drip blood into the clean circle that had formed around her. The bed poles had long ago been incinerated. The first second, in fact.

She hadn't known she had so much fury pent up inside her.

She had burned Gryffindor down! The scandalized tone of her mother amused her.

A little crooked smirk tugged at the end of her lips as the astonishment she had been feeling at the beginning of this entire odyssey dissipated and a sense of triumph overrode her. She felt a surge of liberty so pure in its bliss that she closed her eyes and sighed as she tilted her head, feeling the sizzling heat surround her.

Never had she been so attuned to her surroundings, every crackle resounded in her ears like a mellow harmony that she didn't want to ever end. The waves of energy pulsating off her in this very second were liberating, enthralling, addictive. She wasn't about to go back to the restraints that had tied her so effortlessly for so long. She wasn't about to return to normality. Fucking normality. Where everyone was the same color, where everyone acted the same, talked the same, pretended to feel the same. She wasn't willing to stop them anytime soon.

Let them all burn.

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Harry Potter nudged Ron in an urgent manner.

"Oy, what the ruddy…?" the redhead cried as he felt Harry's elbows slamming into his ribs…hard.

"Shut up! Not so loud," Harry hissed.

"What the hell is up to you?" Ron asked a bit irritated as he continued to stare at Hermione, besotted.

"I'm looking for your sister, you bloody dimwit," Harry answered disgusted, trying to ignore the smoldering gazes Ron was sending to their best friend.

Ron turned a bit red as he snapped out of his grotesque reverie in time to realize what Harry was saying, but he seemed to control himself just in time. "Don't mess with my sister, Potter," he growled.

"What?" Harry looked puzzled for a second as he took those moments to realize what exactly Ron was talking about. "Not like that, you arse. How can you even…? Ugh, what I'm trying to tell you is that…Oh forget it. If you're so much of an idiot to think that I would ever look at your sister in that way you are sorely mistaken. And I do think you are too much of an idiot, since, apparently, you haven't noticed that your darling sister is actually missing, or have you seen her recently, hmm?" Harry asked with an arched eyebrow as he crossed his arms and waited for Ron's flustered reaction. Sometimes he wondered if Ron would even notice Ginny if she didn't date the few folks she actually talked to.

Somehow, he doubted that.

"What? Ginny? Sure, she's…she's around…Somewhere," Ron answered distractedly as Hermione had chosen that moment to pick up her hair and fan her sweaty self with her hand and Ron was positively salivating.

"Ron!" Harry said exasperatedly as he tried to stop the bile that was rising in his throat. "We need to talk to McGonagall," he continued, still waiting for some kind of reaction from the redhead. "Now." Harry took Ron by the collar and literally dragged him away to the general opposite direction from Hermione, who was still staring at the fire, completely lost.

"Huh? Wha—what? Harry! Let go!" Ron cried indignantly. Finally he seemed able to snap back into it as he yanked himself free from Harry's grip and managed to pin him with a compromising glare as he adjusted his robes and brushed dust off them.

Not that it helped.

"Weasley, your sister's missing, has been for the last twenty minutes at least. Hell, I don't even know if she evacuated the fifth year's dorm. We need to find McGonagall and inform her of the situation. What if something happened to her?" It was amazing really, how Ron could change colors in record time. He was red in a matter of milliseconds, his eyes narrowed as he stared Harry down.

"You been looking for my sister then, eh?" he growled out.

"Stop, just stop! You're being pathetic and ridiculous, you know it. By Merlin, your sister's missing, you big fat asshole! Wake up!" And then Harry stormed off.

"You're still taking too much interest, Potter," Ron muttered grouchily as he scuffed his shoes in the floor and then made his way through the crowd to run after Harry.

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"And when do you say was the last time you saw her?" Professor McGonagall asked shrewdly, her narrowed eyes trained on the Golden Boy who just wouldn't die.

"This afternoon, ma'am. Claimed she wasn't feeling well and went up to take a nap, but she didn't come down to dinner, and her roommates told Ron that she was so deeply asleep that they didn't want to bother her," Harry answered deftly under McGonagall's scrutinizing stare. She was anything but proper at this moment with her disheveled hair and stained robes, the brackets of her mouth strained, but her stare could still cut through ice, and it could certainly still cut through Harry.

"And why are you informing me of this until now, Mr. Potter?"

"Well—I"

"We wanted to be sure, Professor. We didn't want to alarm you and the others by reporting something that could be false," Ron interjected panting as he finally arrived.

It was Ron's turn to find himself leveled with the Professor's gaze.

And to his credit, he didn't squirm…

Much.

"Your sister is missing and you 'didn't want to alarm me and the others by reporting something that could be false'!" she asked unbelievingly.

At Ron's gulp and trembling nod she got a look in her face that suggested strangling.

"Mr. Weasley, we are about to move all the students to the Slytherin dungeons if this fire isn't controlled soon," she paused to stare pointedly at the flames that refused to be kept at bay and were advancing steadily downward to where they were.

"The Slytherin dungeons!" Ron cried in a choked voice. "I will never set foot again in that filthy place as long as I live. Better dead than being around those filthy poofs who have a broomstick so high up their as—"

"And it seems it won't be contained any time soon, so I would suggest that you dedicate your remaining time here searching for your beloved sister if you know what's best for you, Mr. Weasley." McGonagall interrupted as she continued as if she hadn't heard the Weasley's explosion, acknowledging it only with a faint narrowing of her eyes. "Professor Snape has been considerate enough to give us sanctuary there. We all know how reserved Slytherins can be, and this is the ultimate gesture of kindness. And I trust you to be able to behave like the young man you supposedly are," she added, the statement directed to both of them. "When we leave, this House shall be sealed behind us, no one will be able to come in or out. We hope that we can find the source behind this hell sometime, but until then, sealed." She stared at them with penetrating eyes, as if waiting for them to react. After a while of total silence except for the rumbling of flames she arched her eyebrow and pointedly started talking again. "Well?" she asked. The two boys turned to look at each other, each shrugging imperceptibly. "Don't you have a relative to search for, Mr. Weasley?"

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