Luna thought about the Dark Lord's diary nearly every day in the weeks following the visit to Whitby Abbey. She did her best to heed Professor McGonagall's advice, but not thinking about something so monumental was easier said than done. It was like asking a witch to go to Diagon Alley and not look at Gringotts while it loomed constantly overhead. The specter of the black book appeared vividly in her mind's eye, its parchment pages filled sometimes with Ginny's handwriting and sometimes with fragments of Tom Riddle's body, flashes of eyes and hands and his heart, which Luna always imagined was hairy like the warlock's heart in The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Luna tried anything she could think of to occupy her mind with something else, anything else. She tried to remember the fairy stories her parents used to tell her at bedtime; she alphabetized the plants and herbs in the Circle gardens; she made up combinations of wand woods and cores to test with Ginny, anything to resist the urge to go to or even think about the diary's hiding place.

When she could not shake thoughts of the diary, Luna grew reclusive for days at a time. She shut herself in the laboratory or retreated deep into the fields around the Circle to avoid everyone, but Professor McGonagall in particular. When Luna was forced to be around other people, she kept her distance and assiduously avoided making eye contact. She had no idea how Legilimency worked, but her instincts told her that it must have something to do with physical proximity and eye contact. If someone were reading her mind, would she be able to feel it? It couldn't be a searing pain, or everyone would be able to instantly tell what was happening to them. Perhaps it was more of a soft ache, a slight pressure in her head as if someone were thumbing through her brain like the pages of a book. When she occasionally got headaches, was it because a Legilimens was invading her thoughts? The idea that at any given moment she might be having her mind read without realizing terrified Luna.

Eventually, however, it grew easier. Luna didn't think of the diary for a few days, then a few weeks, then a few months. Christmas came and went, and the Circle of Peloresow rung in 1994 with great fanfare. The next time Luna thought of the diary was in February, on her twelfth birthday, to be precise. It was a year to the day since she had entombed Tom Riddle's cursed diary with the bones of Eva de Braose.

She was still wearing the paper birthday crown Noura had made for her when she entered the chapel, and it would have remained on her head as she descended into the crypt if a gust of damp wind had not nearly blown it off her head. Swearing under her breath, she folded the crown and tucked it into the pocket of her robes.

She did not bother bringing Ermintrude's so-called Eternal Flame Matches this time. The crypt was still dark and cold, but she did not take out her wand to cast a wand-lighting charm. Luna had learned that if there was anything dangerous in the crypt, it would be there whether it was light or dark. She fumbled through the pitch blackness to the back corner of the room, where the founder's tomb lay.

"Hello, again, Eva," Luna murmured. She ran her hands over Eva's features which had been roughly and somewhat shoddily rendered in unyielding stone, yet still felt so human: her rounded chin, her stout hips, her bejeweled hands laid as if in eternal prayer over her soft stomach. Just like she had a year ago, Luna thought she detected a small smile, a slight upward curve at the corner of the stone lips.

She felt her way to the back of the sculpture and found the small hole she had discovered a year ago. Her fingers fumbled in the dark for a few moments, and it felt like the cavity was empty. She was paralyzed by fear. Had the diary been stolen? Who could have possibly discovered its hiding place? Had the cursed book somehow engineered its own escape, or communicated its location to Dumbledore or the Death Eaters? It did contain a portion of the Dark Lord himself, with all his cunning and evil. Oh, Morgana, how was she going to tell Professor McGonagall she had lost the diary?

But then Luna's fingers suddenly found purchase and slipped from rough stone to smooth leather, and the diary was in her grasp. It was clearly the same book, but something about it felt different. There was still a darkness buried deep within its pages, but she no longer felt angry and frightened merely from holding it. Luna lifted it up and down in one hand to test its weight. It felt lighter than she remembered. Less burdened, perhaps.

"Have you done this?" Luna asked Eva. The statue continued smiling enigmatically. Luna slowly bent down and peered into the interior of the sarcophagus itself. It was a deeper, more velvety darkness inside the tomb, and she couldn't see anything at all. Last year she had been so frightened of the dark crypt and focused on finding a safe place to hide the diary that she had not dared to give the inside a proper look. But now she pulled out her rowan wand.

"Behave now, you," she chided it, before muttering "Lumos. Lumos!" On the second try, a dim white light sputtered to life at the tip of her wand. Luna crawled on the stone floor of the crypt and contorted her neck so she could poke the wand through the small hole in the tomb.

The stone on the inside of the tomb was even rougher than on the outside. She could only see a small sliver through the gap, but she got the impression that beyond her small flickering circle of light there was a vast cavernous space. The air smelled musty. Luna repositioned her wand to get a better look. That was when she saw Eva's bones. The skeleton looked so small and fragile in the hollow emptiness of the stone vessel that had been built to guard it. It seemed silly to build a tomb so large and grand when in the end, it would hold only dust. It was almost tragic in its futility.

Luna extricated her arm and clambered to her feet to examine the diary again. It puzzled her, and Luna liked puzzles.

"So you're still in there…" Luna trailed off, flipping through the diary's pages, "And the only thing that's really changed is that you've been in there with her," she gestured towards the bones of Eva de Braose. Could magic linger in a witch's bones after she died? Even hundreds of years later? Could Eva's bones have been changing the nature of the diary, neutralizing or destroying its evil magic somehow?

Luna did not know how she would even begin researching such a thing. At the moment it did seem like the only possible explanation. Then she remembered what Professor McGonagall always said: if something seemed like the only possible solution, it was probably because you wanted it to be the right answer. There was always another possibility, even if it was not as neat or interesting or exciting. So her theory about Eva's remains was one logical explanation. What were others? Luna fiddled with the stump of flesh where her left pinky finger used to be. She had performed a powerful binding spell on the diary, after all. Maybe it was her own magic and not Eva's that had wrought this change.

What else? Ginny was always quick to remind her that she could be imagining or exaggerating all of her "magical aura sensing mumbo jumbo," as she called it. Could Luna be imagining the change in the diary? She put the book down on the effigy, balancing it on Eva's feet. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what the diary had felt like over a year ago. Evil, dark, cold, menacing. It had reminded her a little of holding her blood knife. Exciting, powerful, but always with the awareness of its ability to cause violence and pain. Always a reminder of all the blood that had been shed.

With this fresh in her mind, Luna reached for the diary again. She kept her eyes closed and tried to focus on the experience of touching it, comparing it to her memory of the last time she had held it. Luna ran her fingers over the cover, the spine, the pages. The effect was immediate. It still felt dark, certainly, but not nearly as menacing. The interior pages were cold to the touch, but there were patches on the binding that felt warm. In some places the grain of the leather even seemed softer.

It was as if the forces of warmth and light had slowly been waging a war with the darkness of the diary over the past year. The sensation of holding it reminded Luna of holding a wand that did not belong to her: she could sense its power, but also its conflicted nature. It was weaker, some of its potency leeched away over the past year. It was at odds with its current owner. It yearned for its true master.

"Another year older," Luna mused, flipping through the pages of the diary. Now she was not much younger than Tom Riddle must have been when he created this wretched thing. How had he managed to do it? It couldn't have been an accident, surely? People often said that they poured their soul into their diaries, that it was a piece of themselves walking outside their body.

Luna was seized by a sudden terror. Could Ginny writing in the diary for a few months be enough for the diary to permanently possess her? She had never been the same after being possessed by the Dark Lord. Was it because the diary had stolen a piece of her and secreted it away in its pages? There was another hypothesis, that a piece of Ginny now resided in the diary with the piece of Tom Riddle. Could that be why the diary was changing? Ginny had an infamously iron will, but was it strong enough to change the Dark Lord's diary?

Be reasonable, Luna reminded herself. Loads of people kept diaries. Some people had been writing in their diaries for years and years. Surely the mere act of writing in a diary could not produce such evil, at least not accidentally. But if the diary had possessed Ginny and controlled what she did… Ginny had said herself that it could have forced her to do anything. So maybe it was possible. But why? What could possibly be the benefit? If Ginny had indeed been compelled to give part of herself to the diary, it only seemed to be weakening the diary itself.

Luna felt her heart hammering in her chest. The thought that Ginny might never be free of Riddle made her want to scream. She was suddenly aware that she was underground. Her breathing became shallow and irregular. The walls were closing in. Her chest tightened and it felt like her throat was closing up. She ran towards the staircase, and then realized that she was still holding the bloody diary and had left her wand behind. Deep breaths. One thing at a time. Put the diary back in the tomb. Grab her wand. Say goodbye to Eva. Then go upstairs.

She collapsed panting in the chapel, savoring the taste of fresh air and the sensation of sunlight on her skin. Deep breaths. What would Professor McGonagall say? It's good when you know what you don't know. Is it possible that part of Ginny was still in the diary? Yes, but she didn't know for sure. It might be Eva's bones, or her own binding spell, or something else entirely.

What did she know? The diary was safe. Safe from whom, she also did not know – Professor McGonagall, Dumbledore, or the Dark Lord himself. But it was safe. And it was changing. She didn't know how or why, but she didn't need to know that just yet. What was important was that something was happening. The evil was beginning to seep out of the diary somehow. At least it was not becoming more evil. Less evil was good, even if she did not understand it.

"Happy birthday to me," Luna whispered.

The snowdrops bloomed, the daffodils began to grow, and Noura planted the basil and marjoram in her herb garden as winter slowly thawed into spring. The rowan wand now lived in a shoebox beneath Luna's bed at the Circle. After much research on Ginny's part and even more experimentation on Luna's, the two girls had crafted a new wand for Luna. This time they used wood samples and core specimens from the crafting tables in the laboratory, ultimately selecting pine wood and dragon heartstring for the core. The new wand was very pale, nearly white, with a thick and knotted handle. It was certainly not as beautifully crafted nor as reliable as a wand from Ollivander's, but still a considerable improvement from her rowan wand.

Wand magic still felt unnatural to Luna, but the pine wand at least worked most of the time, and she could participate in spell practice at the Circle without worrying about explosions and other magical catastrophes. She and Ginny had also selected pine wood in particular because it was known for being the wand wood most receptive to nonverbal magic. Pine wands apparently enjoyed being used for experimental magic, so maybe this new wand would take a liking to the old ways.

Luna now proudly carried her pine wand with her everywhere, even to Circle gatherings that did not require wands. Professor McGonagall nearly blew a gasket when Luna had poked a hole in a seventeenth century tome about alchemy when she tried to turn a page with the tip of her new wand, and Mrs. Weasley constantly chided her to put it away at the dinner table. True to form, Luna's parents were much laxer. In fact, they were proud of the improved craftmanship and magical ability Luna had demonstrated in making her second wand, and were particularly gratified by their daughter's choice not to purchase a commercially-produced wand.

Xenophilius capitalized on his daughter's newfound interest in wandlore by enlisting her to research the Elder Wand. Luna did find that she was much more interested in the Deathly Hallows research now that she had a better understanding of the complexities of wandmaking, how it was both an art and a science.

For a few months, Luna had been working on compiling accounts of every confirmed or possible sighting of the Elder Wand and arranging them chronologically. Eventually, she planned to create a timeline and map that could be used to track the wand's owners, location, and movement over time. She often placed her new pine wand on the desk and caressed it as she read and wrote, pretending it was the Elder Wand of legend. Luna never tired of feeling the handle and the somewhat clumsy carvings she and Ginny had managed to achieve on the surface of her new wand.

Luna had been conducting the research more or less independently, and she had interpreted her father's instructions somewhat liberally. Inspired by Professor McGonagall's constant championing of the forgotten women of wizarding history, Luna had begun scouring unconventional sources, looking for traces of the lives and wands of women, people of color, Jews, Roma, and anyone who was usually on the margins of history. Luna mostly skimmed or outright avoided the usual history books about the Hallows which had mostly been written by eccentric men like her father. They tended to repeat the same few facts and myths over and over again, anyway. Once you had read one, you had read them all.

Instead, Luna had been reading compendia of primary sources, court trial transcripts, saints' hagiographies, censuses, Hogwarts yearbooks, diaries, memoirs, and myths and legends from all over the world. And she had discovered that there were countless stories about an all-powerful wand made of elder and the people who were willing to kill for it.

On that particular day, Luna was reading a book of primary sources about witches in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. She skimmed nearly every record in the book, from dowry contracts to recipe books, searching for any trace of elder, or even any wands that were purported to be extremely powerful. In the process, Luna ended up reading quite a lot of boring tax records and wills, which she skimmed once before moving on. There was often something interesting enough to compel her to read the passage a second time. Occasionally, there was something fascinating.

She was reading the diary of a midwife and cunning woman in Italy when she came across something fascinating. The entries in the diary were brief, and the tone was abrupt. The midwife, who had never bothered to record her own name, seemed to have a shaky grasp of spelling, grammar, and style. Her book was purely functional rather than personal, used only for jotting down brief accounts of what had happened each day – births, deaths, symptoms, remedies. There was one entry that was longer than the others, however, and the case seemed to have puzzled even the midwife. Luna read it several times but still only had the faintest idea of what had transpired.

Someone named Stefano had started acting strange – the English translation said he had "defiled and destroyed himself," and Luna had no idea what the meaning might have been in the original Italian. Stefano had been terrorizing the village by stealing, destroying houses, and torturing families. The village priest thought he was possessed and had attempted to perform an exorcism, which proved unsuccessful. Many people in the village wanted to kill him, but some feared that the evil spirit possessing him would continue terrorizing the town even after the host had been killed.

Stefano's family had come to the cunning woman's cottage and begged her to help. She had never seen anything like this before, and Stefano would not allow anyone to come near him, so she could not even examine him. She tried burning purifying herbs and burying a witch bottle under the hearth of the family's home to no avail. Finally, she used "mother's milk to heal the tear." The entry ended abruptly, with no more detail about the treatment, why it had worked, or what had happened to Stefano.

What could it mean? Luna read it many times until she understood the meaning of all of the words and most of the sentences. But she still did not understand what had actually occurred. What was wrong with Stefano? Did mother's milk mean breastmilk? Could that mean Stefano was a child?

"Obscurial?" she scribbled in the margin.

Luna nearly reached for The Encyclopedia of Magical Maladies and Afflictions to look up Obscurials before checking herself. In the first several weeks of her Elder Wand research, she had been unfocused and easily distracted. Every small detail that caught her attention, every name she did not recognize, had compelled her to stop whatever she was doing and find the answer. She learnt many interesting things about herbs in Siberia, wandlore in Central Asia, and funerary rites in Romania, but she did very little Hallows research. Xenophilius called these rabbit holes, and he said they were the bane of every researcher with a curious mind and a wandering eye.

Luna put the book down and tried to remind herself that she was doing this research to learn about the Elder Wand, not Obscurials and Italian midwives. Her father had told her to keep a list of topics that interested her, so she'd never have a shortage of rabbit holes in which to burrow whenever she had a spare moment in years to come. Luna dutifully added this one to her already long list, noted the citation, and dogeared the page in the book. Her list already nearly filled a page. At this rate she would be plunging down rabbit holes until she was ninety-nine years old.

Luna took a sip of her tea and dutifully but reluctantly turned to the next document. She spent the next half hour reading boring receipts from abbeys and awful, horridly long lists of witches who had been burned at the stake. But then the word "wand" stood out on the page like a beacon, followed soon by "elder."

"Aha! Finally!" Luna grabbed a sheet of parchment and began noting down the relevant information. She had created a template for this purpose, in the hopes that having the information consistently formatted would be useful later when she assembled the timeline. Merlin, bibliographies and consistently formatted information? She hardly sounded like herself. Ginny would die of laughter.

"The name of the owner was Ysabel…with a y… no last name, alright," she muttered to herself, biting the tip of the quill as she scribbled, "The location was Toledo, Spain. The year was…1483. Circumstances: A woman named Ysabel was tried by the Spanish Inquisition. She was accused of being a witch and a crypto-Jew. Ysabel was said to possess an immensely powerful wand made of elder, which her neighbors called the Stick of Death!" Luna underlined this enthusiastically before continuing to copy from the book.

"Ysabel used the Stick of Death to slaughter animals in the Jewish way…make a note to look that up later, is that just like kosher? It was said that her stick of death could instantly remove all the blood from the bodies of Ysabel's victims. When the Inquisition visited her home, she also used black magic to make a plate of vegetables appear to be pork...was this Transfiguration?" more frantic scribbling, "so the inquisitors would be fooled into believing she was a devout Christian. When she was discovered, she cursed the inquisitors and the neighbors who had betrayed her. Go, Ysabel…" Luna turned the page, eagerly reading on.

"Ysabel was found guilty and she was burned at the stake. The elder wand was seized and…destroyed. No, that can't be right!" Luna dropped the quill and a large blot of ink bloomed on the page.

Luna read the transcript again. An immensely powerful wand made of elder, it said. It could be another wand, she supposed. But it was even called the Stick of Death, just like the Elder Wand was sometimes called the Death Stick. It certainly sounded like every other sighting of the Elder Wand she had found so far. But if Ysabel's wand was the Elder Wand, that would mean that it had been destroyed by the Spanish Inquisition in 1483! It couldn't be. The wand had been reliably traced well into the seventeenth century, at least.

In fact, Luna was sure there were other sightings in the fifteenth century. Maybe the timelines matched somehow. Someone must have traveled to Spain and rescued Ysabel's wand. She began rifling through the stack of papers where she had been recording the other accounts.

"1363…1402…1482. Wait. In 1482, the Elder Wand was in the possession of Godelot in England. And he had had it for several years at that point. And he still had it several years later when his son murdered him and became the master of the wand. So how could Ysabel have had it in 1483?"

Luna's head spun with the implications of what she had found. It simply could not be right. Her citation about Godelot must be incorrect. She must have transposed a date. Luna checked for the name of the book where she had gotten the information about Godelot and began wading through the piles of books in the study.

There was very little order in the Lovegood library; most of the books seemed to organically arrange themselves into loose stacks that abided by no coherent organizing principle. It was neither chronological, geographical, alphabetical, nor topical. The books shifted with the research interests of the father and daughter, and anyone was wont to pick up a book at any time and put it down somewhere else entirely. Xenophilius and Luna joked that they had a fairy librarian who liked to keep them on their toes by moving things around just when the Lovegoods became familiar with the current order of things. In the present arrangement, Abogard of Lyon's treatise on weather witches rubbed spines with books about ancient Egyptian magic, moldy Divination textbooks, and almanacs because Xenophilius's latest obsession was weather magic.

Luna thought she remembered leaving Hallowed: A History of the Masters of Death in a stack of biographies and books about magical archaeology but could not find it. Xenophilius must have moved it, and she spent several minutes shifting books and checked under the desk, behind the doors, and even in the fireplace, where the fairy librarian had seen fit to hide books before.

"Dad, do you know what happened to Caradoc Cadwallader's book?"

"What's that, sugar plum?" Luna's father emerged from behind stack of books that was taller than he was with a roll of parchment flung over his shoulder like a scarf and a quill between his teeth.

"Hallowed by Cadwallader. I need to check a citation."

"Ah, I think I might have used good old Cadwallader to prop up my typewriter the other week, let me see here…ah, yes!" He came back with the book in hand. It only looked slightly flattened from the weight of his magical typewriter.

"Thanks," Luna turned to the appointed page and made a small grunt.

"No, Godelot did have it in 1482. Then how…?"

"Godelot? Yes, yes, he had it in the fifteenth century. Why did you need to check that? That's well-trod ground, very reliably verified, the provenance only starts getting shaky with Arcus and Livius. But you know all this, surely!" He said this as if it would be absolutely mad for the daughter of a preeminent Hallows scholar not to have the timeline of Elder Wand ownership memorized. And he was right; Luna had internalized the traditionally accepted chain of ownership. But now, she was questioning everything.

"Well, I thought I might have written the specific date down wrong. But I didn't, it's 1482. Except I've found this other reference to a powerful elder wand in Spain in 1483. But the dates don't match up at all, and I was trying to figure out how they might."

"Spain? The Elder Wand has never been in Spain. Surely your other source is wrong, and not Cadwallader?" the quill dropped from her father's mouth and clattered softly to the floor.

"Well…" Luna had not told her father the new direction she had chosen to take her research. She had to approach this delicately, she knew. She did not want to alienate her father and invalidate years of his hard work.

"So, I read Cadwallader and Madden-Billingsley and all those other blokes. And they did a good job, don't get me wrong. But it seemed like they were all just citing each other and relying on the same few sources over and over again. And I figured for something as major as the Elder Wand, there had to be other sources, right? It's an all-powerful wand! Other people must have been writing about it. And people outside western Europe, too. It's not like there's some kind of rule that the Elder Wand can only be in England and France, right? So I started looking, and it turns out there are tons of stories about powerful elder wands in all sorts of places. Spain, Russia, Denmark! And I haven't even really started looking outside Europe, either. I'm sure there must be more."

"And what exactly are these sources that we've been neglecting?" Xenophilius sounded defensive, apparently resenting the implication that in a few short months a twelve-year-old girl had made a discovery that centuries of Hallows scholars had missed.

"Well, all the things that aren't big grand histories written by historians and bards or whoever. Other things, things where a powerful wand of elder might be mentioned in some other way, just mentioned in passing. Like a will, or a diary, or…or a court trial! Here, just look at this!" Luna opened the Mediterranean book to the page about Ysabel of Toledo.

"It was called the Stick of Death!" Xenophilius's eyes widened.

"Yes, but keep reading."

"Destroyed?! It must have been a different wand, then."

"Well, maybe. But with that logic, maybe the Peverell brothers' wand was a different wand from Godelot's wand," Luna began shuffling through the stack of papers where she had recorded the other sightings. She had not been looking closely at the dates to see if they overlapped, but perhaps now was the time to start compiling her timeline.

"Or the date on this Spanish document could be wrong!" Xenophilius insisted.

"Well, the volume was edited by a famous magical historian," Luna said. She didn't want to add and not a conspiracy theorist like all your other books, but the implication was there. "But I guess it's possible," she conceded.

"But look! Here's another conflict. A Russian chronicle says that a Chinese magician killed a prince for an all-powerful wand made of elder. That was in 1657, but Barnabas Deverill had it then, didn't he? And he had it until Loxias killed him, which was in the 1660s, wasn't it? So how did the wand end up in China?"

"There's no record of Barnabas going to China…." Xenophilius muttered.

"Yes, exactly. And no sources say that he lost it and then somehow got it back before Loxias killed him. So how was the wand in two places at once?" The Elder Wand was purported to be the most powerful wand in the world, but Luna thought it was safe to say that being in Britain and China at the same time was beyond even its abilities.

They cleared the floor of books and spread out Luna's papers, arranging them chronologically in the rough timeline she had been imagining for months. They found conflict after conflict, dates when multiple supernaturally powerful elder wands were reported thousands of miles apart. There were even more cases where there was not a direct conflict, but an unlikely jump in ownership and geography, such as the single year in which three sightings of the wand were reported thousands of miles apart, with the owners having no discernible connection to one another. Time and time again, the wands were in the hands of women, gypsies, Jews, Muslims, exotic foreigners from parts unknown, nameless criminals, illiterate people, people who were burned at the stake, people who were buried in unmarked graves. People who would have disappeared from history entirely if they had not been mentioned in some will or tax record or story that happened to be written down by someone literate or rich who deigned to notice them. The forgotten.

Xenophilius was uncharacteristically silent for several minutes as they worked, marking conflicts with a big inky asterisk. When they finished, they stood back and surveyed the timeline. Over a dozen asterisks.

"But…but out of all these stories, who had the Elder Wand?" Her father's voice trembled.

"They all did. They all had elder wands."

"But the Elder Wand. The one that Death gave to Antioch Peverell."

"Who knows. Maybe the Peverells weren't even the brothers from the legend after all!"

"No, no, it cannot be." This was too much even for the open-minded Xenophilius to bear.

"C'mon, Dad. The only reasonable explanation is that there was more than wand. Maybe there was originally the one that Antioch Peverell had, but the stories must have spread all over. People started imitating it."

"But…but the very foundation of our endeavor is the quest for the Elder Wand! Do we just give up?" Luna did not know if she had ever seen her father so distressed.

"We could try to figure out which out of all of these were the one true Elder Wand," Luna gestured at the dozens of crumpled pages arrayed in front of them.

"Or we could do what the other people who wanted the Elder Wand did: craft our own."

"Do I have to? I was sort of hoping to get back to Hallows research with my dad. We've made some breakthroughs lately about sightings of the Elder Wand in America…"

"Who are you and what have you done with our Luna? Yes, you have to. We're one person short. Besides, it's our solemn duty to keep you from burying your head in those damn books," said Ginny. She tried to thrust an old racing broom into Luna's hands, but Luna backed away and crossed her fingers in front of her as if she were warding off a curse.

"Remember when she used to hate reading?" Lavender said with a hint of nostalgia in her voice.

"Those were the good old days!" Ginny slapped Lavender's hand appreciatively, "Now she's queen of the books, and I foresee that she's too good to play a game of pickup Quidditch with her little minions," she did her best impression of what they all called Luna's prophecy voice.

"I'm not queen of the books, I just realized that if I want to get anything done, yeah, I'll need to do a bit of research. Isn't that what you told me about wandlore? And besides, I've never liked Quidditch," Luna protested.

"Fair enough," Ginny raised her hands defensively, "but I still think it wouldn't kill our fearless leader to let loose once in a while."

"So do we have enough people or what? I'm pretty sure I could bully Sylv into playing, which means Caroline will want to play as well. We could have beaters that way," Rania observed as she stretched, her head appearing upside down between her legs. She shifted and bent to touch her toes.

"Luna's in, so two more would make it uneven again. We don't have enough people for beaters, but we'll do four to a side, two Chasers, a Keeper, and a Seeker. I'll captain one team, and Parvati the other," Ginny said rather bossily, but Luna knew better than to tease her. Quidditch was one of the few things Ginny took seriously.

Parvati and Ginny, the two strongest flyers, took it in turns to claim their teammates. Ginny inexplicably chose Luna first, probably out of some misplaced sense of loyalty. Luna tried to tell her that she needn't have bothered. Luna did not care who won either way, and she was almost guaranteed to be more of a liability to her team than an asset. But Ginny just told her to be quiet while she considered her other choices. Ginny ended up rounding out the team with Rania and Vicky Frobisher, while Parvati's team included Padma, Aviva, and Lavender.

"Right, team, what should we call ourselves?" Rania asked after the teams had broken into circles at opposite ends of the field.

"Well, it's got to alliterate, obviously. The Peloresow…something with a P," Ginny said.

"Cornworthy is less of a mouthful," Rania pointed out.

"The Cornworthy Cockroaches," Luna suggested. Vicky giggled, but Rania and Ginny glared at her.

"Oh, come on. You Quidheads can still have a sense of humor, can't you?"

"What about the Cornworthy Calypsos?" Rania suggested, evidently still thinking of a discussion they had last week about women in mythology.

"Brilliant! In the spirit of the Holyhead Harpies," declared Ginny, who idolized Gwenog Jones.

"So obviously Vicky, you've got to be Keeper. I'll be Chaser. Rania, would you rather be Chaser or Seeker?"

"Oh, please don't make me be a Chaser," Luna muttered. She knew enough about Quidditch to know that they had the most to do with all that passing and chasing and scoring. At least being Seeker mostly involved flying around aimlessly waiting for the bystanders to remember to enchant the flying apple which stood in for the Snitch during their pickup games. And catching an apple that had been enchanted with a mediocre flying charm was much easier than catching a real Golden Snitch.

"Quit your whinging. You'll go where your captain tells you to go," snapped Ginny.

"I'd rather be Chaser anyway. It's more exciting," Rania shrugged.

"Ha!" Luna cackled, breaking out of the team huddle and fetching her broom.

"Fine, looks like you get your wish after all, you can be Seeker. So, what's our strategy?" Ginny pulled Luna back into the circle by the scruff of her collar.

"Strategy?! It's pickup Quidditch!" Luna grumbled, "Once the positions are decided what else is there to strategize? Let's just get this over with."

"Maybe we should have let her sit out after all," Rania said, turning to Ginny and raising her eyebrows.

"Honestly, the ticket to the Quidditch World Cup is going to be wasted on you, Luna," Ginny tutted in disappointment.

"You've been talking about nothing but stupid Quidditch and the stupid world cup for weeks. It's starting to grate. You're just lucky I'll still play with you at all," Luna crossed her arms.

"She's right, you know!" Sylvia called from the sidelines, where she was braiding Caroline's hair.

"Thank you, Sylv! See, Sylv likes Quid and even she agrees."

"I'll play if you want, Ginny!" Caroline cried, "Just once Sylvia finishes my hair."

"Yes, Ginny, why don't you let Caro play? She'll be much more enthusiastic than me," Luna batted her eyes innocently and Vicky broke into a giggling fit again, but they were silenced by a glare from Ginny.

"Don't ruin this for me" Ginny hissed at Luna before raising her voice, "No, we're fine! Thanks anyway, Caroline. Besides, you said you'd plait Sylvia's hair after she did yours."

"Anyway, yes, Luna, we ought to have a strategy. Vicky's a really good Keeper so I don't think Rania and I need to be all that defensive. It's a shame we only have these old Comets, but we'll just have to be as fast as we can. Rania, remember that Parvati always forgets to check her left blind spot when she's turning, so that's the best way to get the Quaffle off her. Luna, make sure you keep track of the score so you're strategic about when you catch the Snitch."

"Do you mean the flying apple?" Luna smirked.

Parvati's team decided to call themselves the Peloresow Phoenixes. Vicky and Padma took their positions in front of the trees that were serving as makeshift hoops. Parvati and Aviva were the Chasers for the other team, and Lavender was their Seeker. Sylvia served as referee and tossed the Quaffle into the air. Parvati got possession of the ball almost immediately and all four of the Chasers were off, flying in complex patterns as they maneuvered to steal the Quaffle or prevent the other team from stealing it. It was dizzying, and Luna and Lavender stopped their brooms side by side to watch the spectacle.

"I'm glad I'm just the Seeker, I'll tell you that much. I don't know how they do it," Luna whistled, all mockery gone from her voice as she watched Ginny fly nearly upside down in an attempt to get the Quaffle off of Parvati.

"Go easy on me?" Lavender smiled.

"No need to. I suck at Quidditch," Luna said.

"Yeah but you're, you know…you. You're amazing at everything," Lavender said. Luna shifted uncomfortably and flew away to circle the other team's side of the field for a while.

Luna tried her best to keep track of the game, at least at the beginning. Both Keepers were strong and could deflect most shots with little trouble, so after a few minutes the game had devolved into the Chasers doing laps of the field, taking turns making shots and failing to score.

"Well, I'm already well bored." Luna flew up to Lavender and hovered in midair beside her.

"Should we remind Sylvia and Caroline to enchant the apple?"

"Psh, the less I have to do for this stupid game the better in my book," Luna puffed out her cheeks and then released the air slowly through her lips.

"We could play a game," Lavender suggested.

"I think technically we're already supposed to be playing a game," Luna grinned.

"Ah, but what about…" Lavender wriggled her fingers and tried to make her voice sound prophetic and misty, "What about a game within a game?"

"You suck at that," Luna chuckled.

"Yeah, I can't do the voice like you can," Lavender conceded.

"But a game within a game sounds…intriguing," Luna said, doing the mystical voice much more successfully. Both girls laughed.

"Oi! Less chatting and more flying, you two!" Ginny called from the other end of the field. Luna and Lavender rolled their eyes and flew in different directions for a few minutes before gravitating back towards each other.

"So, what shall we play?" Luna asked.

"Hmm. I spy would be boring…." Lavender trailed off, drumming her fingers on her broomstick as she thought.

"Yeah, considering being Seeker is just a jumped-up game of I Spy," Luna agreed. "Oh, what about word association?"

"Yeah, brilliant! You go first."

"Quidditch," Luna said.

"World cup," said Lavender instantly.

"I'm surprised you didn't just say 'boring,'" Luna commended her.

"Well, I don't think I find it as boring as you do. And the cup's only a few weeks away. No one talks of anything else, so no wonder it's the first thing that popped into my head," Lavender shrugged.

"True. Your turn."

"Hmm. Caroline."

"Bloody pest," Luna said without a moment's hesitation, which set them both giggling. Luna could practically feel Ginny's eyes boring into her like razors from across the field, and she preemptively pulled away from Lavender and began flying in circles. Lavender took the hint and did the same, and soon they were circling each other and calling questions and answers back and forth across the field.

"The Circle," Luna offered.

"Family," Lavender said at once.

"That's so sweet. You didn't even hesitate" Luna smiled.

"Ginny?" Lavender asked.

"Best friend. Luna?" Luna asked.

"Wonderful. Oh, whoops!" Lavender collided with one of the tree goalposts and entangled herself in the branches.

"Are you okay?" Luna sped closer to Lavender and pulled her loose, then held the battered old broom in midair as Lavender clambered back on.

"Oh, yeah, I'm totally fine. See, I told you I was worse at Quidditch than you! Serves me right," Lavender rubbed her arm with a rueful smile.

"It's your turn, I think," Luna said to break the silence.

"Oh, right! Uh…prophecy."

"Wrong," Luna said without thinking.

"Wait, what?" Lavender halted, and her broom made a groaning sound of protest. Luna soared at least ten feet past her before realizing her friend had stopped. She circled back and hovered near Lavender.

"It was just the first thing that popped into my head," Luna shrugged.

"But…what do you mean? It's not like your prophecies have been wrong. Have they…?"

"I mean, all prophecies can be wrong. Prophecies are just like…like a flash of what might happen. The future changes all the time."

"Well, yeah, I guess that's true. But your prophecies are different. You've never been wrong, not about anything important. And we all do what you say because of your prophecies. Because of your mum's prophecy. "

Luna suddenly remembered what her mother had said that day at the loom, about Lavender losing faith in her.

"Oh, no, no. I didn't mean it like that. I don't know why it popped into my head. You know how mad I can be sometimes. It must be the wrackspurts."

"But.."

Luna didn't like the way Lavender was looking at her.

"Oh, look, Sylv and Caro finally remembered to enchant the apple. May the best Seeker win!" And Luna sped away before Lavender could say anything else.

AN: Thanks so much for reading! I seem to have settled into a biweekly posting schedule, so here's hoping I can keep it up. Next chapter will be the Quidditch World Cup, which I'm really looking forward to. Comments appreciated, as always! :)

Also, I know a lot of people are moving away from FFN due to the increased ads, so just putting it out there that I also post this story on AO3 under the same username.