quick warning before i thrust my steaming pile of word-shit onto you
this story has so far been completely restarted four times, each time become exponentially more complicated with more ideas being set up for much later down the line (hundreds of thousands of words, most likely) ive written like easily 100k words in scrapped versions already (the longest was 50k and it had just gotten to Hogwarts aha)
ive got for you a nice and thick AU with some overdone cliches, some fuckin with time, magical creatures/races, and magic in general, and lets not forget a little extended universe ive been coming up with that will end up popping up a little bit
lots of OCs being cycled in and out, might make pairing Harry/OC, we'll see
ive bumped time forwards about 20 years, made Hogwarts start at 12,
things to look out for: some juicy gore and violence (mmm), SEX?! (maybe), and worst of all, bad language (gasp)
Summary: In the year 1801, a group of demonologists and summoners proposed a hypothesis on what they called 'The Beyond', which described the existence of several diverse planes of reality separate from their own. 200 years later, Lily Potter revisits their research and, with her sons and an ill-timed ritual, sets into motion events that will change the multiverse irreversibly. Massive AU.
Prologue
In some unknown corner of the world, four men sat around a square table in an empty, circular stone room. A blonde, two brunettes, and a redhead, all of slight build and subaverage height. The torn and burnt remains of a newspaper rested on the table.
The blonde stood suddenly, roaring out in anger. His chair clattered to the cold stone.
"Albrecht," one brunette sighed.
"Nein!" he snapped, beginning to pace back and forth. "All of our work, Oswald! All of it, for nothing?!"
None of the men responded. For a moment, the only sounds were that of Albrecht's shoes against the stone and the swish of his long, half-tattered black cloak.
"We are doomed."
They all turned to the redhead, whose already pale face was becoming bone-white.
"What are you on about, Pritchard?" the other brunette asked.
"The Heir," Pritchard said as though that explained everything. Albrecht understood immediately, stilling where he stood, but the others shared confused masks.
"Scheiße!"
"We failed, Randolph," Pritchard said morosely.
"What?" he said, falling back in his seat. "No." He shook his head. "No, it wasn't our fault!"
"It doesn't matter."
"It was that bloody pigeon-livered bastard of a Minister!"
"He is right," Oswald whispered, absently pushing his round glasses up his nose. "We made that deal, Randolph, and we did not hold up our end. We are dead men walking."
All four men stilled as they felt it at once.
A pressure built in the room, and the temperature dropped to where their breath hung in white mist before their lips. The shadows of their table and chairs lengthened, and a ring dangling on Albrecht's neck lit up with an eldritch green glow.
The shadows whispered a haunting melody, gentle as a winter breeze.
"He's here," Albrecht whispered.
In an instant, every color drained from the room to a tiny ball of light by the doorway, leaving only black and white. Then, they flipped and the ball of dark grew into a vertical slit, like a gash torn into space and time. Flickers of red appeared at its edge, then, with a thunderous blast of noise like a thousand cannons going off at once, it was over and he was there.
The huge figure with its dark wings and horns blocked the doorway entirely. His white grin, with fangs sharper than any mortal being's, offset the raging maelstrom of his furious power that filled the room.
"You have failed," the Heir said, his voice deep and rich.
They could not have moved to respond, but that did not matter.
"Goodbye."
The grin slipped from his face and the power shifted, becoming hungry as it tore through the room, atomizing all four men in an instant, before continuing through the entire building. When it was over after mere seconds, the Heir floated above the gash in the Earth where the building once stood. He swept his hand aside, and the ground flowed like water, forming a grassy hill and leaving no trace of what had once been.
Lily set down the book. 'The Beyond' by Oswald H. Neumann, Albrecht Wolff, Randolph Hoffman, and Pritchard Weasley, was a thick tome, fourteen hundred pages in length, hypothesizing about the existence of what might be several separate planes of reality, pocket dimensions, or parallel universes. Despite the epic length, due to the fact that much of the evidence to support their hypothesis came from a demonic entity known as The Heir, much of the book was focused on the home dimension of demon which it called Hell. There were a few references to the serene beauty of The Undertow, the unspeakable horrors of Carn'elcarix, and a plane named The Deep Dark, of which the demon refused to speak further on, as even he feared what dwelled there, but overall, the book was incomplete.
The book ended rather suddenly, going from one page extrapolating on what might be found in an opposite dimension from Hell or Carn'elcarix, to a single message on the next, scribbled in heavy-handed font so unlike the neat handwriting of the rest of the tome:
We have failed in our task. The Heir will not allow us to live past the week. If you are reading this, let not our efforts die by the will of those that would suppress the truth.
Using her credentials as an Unspeakable researcher, Lily had been able to find that the four men had simply vanished from the record sometime in the year 1801. There was a record, an excerpt from a newspaper, about how a demonologist, two summoners, and the country's leading arithmancer were declared criminals and a manhunt for them was started based on the claim that they had been caught attempting to summon an army of demons to overthrow the Ministry, then they simply disappeared.
Lily ran her hands over the rich cracked leather of the book's cover, inlaid with gold and mother of pearl. The Beyond had never been officially published, and only somewhere around the order of fifteen copies were produced. The information it held was classified as Summoning Magics, belonging to the Black Arts, and being caught practicing or even learning such information was an instant life imprisonment if not death penalty in any ICW sanctioned nation.
The other book on her desk, a significantly thinner book covered with a plain white plasticy material, contained knowledge that was not even officially classified, as far as Lily knew. The runes it contained were finicky and rumored to be inordinately powerful, as they seemed to be able to draw power from other dimensions. It was significantly more legal than The Beyond, as Lily had taken it straight from the Department of Mysteries. Knowing she was short on time, the redheaded woman turned to her two beautiful baby boys and steeled her nerves.
The wards rang out like a gong as Lily Potter began her greatest work.