Hermione's first impression on coming out of the apparation was that that was the smoothest, least uncomfortable time she'd ever had of it. She hadn't been apparated very many times, but it always left her nauseous and dizzy, except this time she'd hardly even noticed it. Most people didn't have eleven hundred years to perfect it, she guessed.

Her second impression was relief that she'd put on a jumper — it was far too bloody cold for summer.

Over the last couple days, she had looked these things up, and apparently the temperatures up here in July tended to be between ten and sixteen degrees. She didn't mean a normal low, that was the range between the lows and highs — the temperature was very consistent, only swinging by a few degrees over the course of the day, but it was bloody cold. She'd checked again this morning, and apparently today's high in Kirkwall (the largest town in the Orkneys) was right around the low in Oxford, which was ridiculous.

Looking around, she found she was in what looked like a little fishing village — though, an old fishing village, the kind of thing she'd find in a book or an historical film or something of the like, so it must be magical. (They did seem to be behind by centuries in some ways.) A couple dozen tiny little circular buildings, mostly made out of stone, the shaped bricks with an odd reddish tinge to them. Some kind of sandstone, she assumed, the cliffs cupping the village against the shore were the same colour. Weirdly, the peaked roofs were covered in what looked a lot like slate tile, but the colour and texture didn't look quite right. There were two larger rectangular buildings, made out of the same materials but obviously intended for a different purpose, but all the rest were probably single-family homes — none of the shops and the like Hogsmeade had, just a place people lived.

The hard stonework might have looked plain, but everything had been painted with curving, twisting lines in bright colours, banners hanging here and there, vines crawling up walls, it was actually sort of pretty.

The little village sat in a break in the cliffs, harsh reddish stone rising to both sides, here crumbled apart to descend into a beach for whatever obscure geological reason. Docks spread out from the beach, most of them empty at the moment, equipment scattered here and there Hermione was too ignorant of these things to identify. At one edge of the square they'd appeared in was...well, a shrine of some kind, she guessed — above a few little bowls filled with flickering flames (clearly magical) kneeled an approximately life-sized statue of a woman, hair (painted gold) drawn into a tight plait flopped over one shoulder, a long dress (painted green and blue) pooling around its legs but arms left bare, that and its unpainted face revealing the local reddish stone, cradled in its hands a crude drinking horn, water bubbling up to spill over its fingers and trickle down to the ground (clearly magical). Strips of cloth decorated with complicated, colourful patterns — looking like scarves too thin to really be useful, but painstakingly embroidered by hand — had been thrown over the statue, criss-crossing each other wrapped around its shoulders, presumably for some religious purpose she couldn't guess at.

"Get a good look around," Lilly was saying, "the most the Lady there. This is a good place to remember and apparate to."

"Oh, um." She guessed it would be, from what she understood of how apparation worked — the more distinctive a place was the easier it was to envision that place in particular the easier it was to get a sense of that place above any other, reducing the risk of splinching. The problem was, "I don't know how to apparate. And, who is that, the statue?"

Belatedly releasing her arm, Lilly frowned down at her. Confused, Hermione thought. "I know I knew how to apparate already when I was thrown back — I remember because nobody else had even seen it before, Helga always called me a cheater when I used it sparring."

...Helga? Like, Helga Hufflepuff, Helga? It had been a rather common name... "Yes, well, apparation hadn't been invented yet in the Ninth Century, had it?" If she recalled correctly, it'd been invented in the 13th Century, but hadn't become popular until the 16th or 17th. "Sirius taught you over the summer, in case of emergencies. Which was technically against the law — you need a license to apparate, and you can't get one until you're seventeen."

"A license?" Lilly scoffed. "That's the stupidest crock of shite... Fuck that, remember it anyway, I'll be teaching you later." Okay, then. "The statue, that's our landvættrin here." At Hermione's confusion, she added, "Like a nature spirit...kind of, I guess. It's hard to explain."

"Sort of like a nymph?"

"More like a genius loci, if you know what that is." She did, vaguely, an ancient Roman idea, a guardian spirit of a particular location. She knew absolutely nothing about them, though, just that they'd existed...and possibly actually exist — some scholars speculated enough accumulated magic could create a pseudo-consciousness attached to a ward system, like how Hogwarts seemed to be almost alive sometimes. Usually it was just myth, though. "The name translates to 'lady of mercy', who is also valkyrja, I think they're the same person. Come on, it's this way."

Lilly started leading her through the village, towards the (Hermione glanced up, spotted the sun) northeast, slipping through the houses. Before they'd gotten very far, Lilly was held up by a call from an old woman, maybe seventy or so (though she was most likely a mage, so closer to twice that), wrapped up in shawls almost entirely hiding silvery hair. They had a brief conversation — Hermione didn't understand a word, it was all in Norn — finishing with Lilly's hand on her arm, the woman smiling and nodding, and then they were off again.

"What was that about?"

"Healing potion for her great-grandson — he has a condition, but his family can't afford to go to an apothecary. No matter, they do teach basic scrying at Hogwarts, right?"

"Er, no, not really." Of course not, their Divination Professor was a useless drunk.

Lilly forced out a breath in a harsh hiss. "Useless pricks. I'll be teaching you that first, then."

Outside the village, a thin trail had been beaten into the earth. It didn't look like it'd been put here, carved into dirt and stone all at once, instead gradually formed by the passing of thousands of feet over the course of centuries. Lilly led the way down the trail, picking up a rocky incline toward the top of the cliffs framing the little harbor the village sat in. The wind picked up once they were up the hill a bit, Hermione's hair whipping around her head, which quickly became very cold. She didn't have to say anything, Lilly just gave her a quick glance, and with a flick of her fingers the wind seemed to bend around her, a bubble of stillness following her as they walked. It was still far too cool for being the middle of July, but it was much more manageable without the breeze off the ocean tearing into her.

Lilly hadn't included herself in whatever this magic was, her hair and the hem of her dress still fluttering freely. And this dress wasn't any more concealing than her previous one, the material far too flimsy to be that insulating — she must be doing something to keep herself warm, some kind of obscure storm-walker witchcraft, she'd be freezing otherwise.

All the while as they walked Lilly explained why divination wasn't a complete useless subject, and how it was a travesty Hogwarts didn't teach it properly. Seeing the future was a crapshoot, yes, but looking toward the past was far more reliable, and could be very useful for any number of reasons. If nothing else, it could be used to determined what had actually happened at a particular time and place, which had obvious applications when it came to criminal investigations.

Apparently, the DLE was explicitly barred from using these techniques, due to laws the Wizengamot passed centuries ago. Lilly claimed they'd done so to cover their own arses, which wouldn't surprise Hermione, exactly.

Scrying the present was also more reliable than divining the future. There were things like feeling out whether someone was lying, for example, but farseeing could be used to observe any location, anywhere in the world at any time, which also had all sorts of possible uses. (Though most wards on private property blocked scrying, out of privacy concerns.) In much of the rest of the world, people were taught to do apparation in conjunction with farseeing — observing the place they wanted to go to exactly as it was at that moment and sort of mentally placing themselves there. Once they got the hang of it they obviously didn't need to keep including the scrying bit, but it was a useful crutch for beginners, or even more experienced people when apparating to a location they were less familiar with.

Hermione was certain that wasn't how it was taught in Britain. Which Lilly clearly thought was very stupid, shaking her head and muttering under her breath.

After a few minutes walking, they came to an orchard. The trail continued on through a bare strip, weaving between the trees, but the rest was filled with underbrush, a near-solid wall of green, only tiny channels here and there where somebody might be able to slip through with some difficulty. Hermione didn't know enough about botany to recognise anything, really — except the roses, obviously, and she was pretty sure the larger white blossoms up in the branches were apple.

Actually, there was rather more flowering going on than she'd expected, the greenery liberally dusted with streaks of white and red. That didn't seem plausible for this time of year — in fact, she was pretty sure those other white ones, somewhat smaller than the white apple blossoms but larger than the bunches of more white flowers she didn't recognise, were cherry, which she was certain were supposed to bloom in the spring. But, coming around a bend in the path, suddenly the flowers were all gone and the branches were weighed down with fruit instead, in some places more ripe than others but definitely out of season.

There must be magic involved, because that just wasn't possible. Pretty, though, not denying that.

Eventually, after passing through another blooming patch, the walls of green fell away. Looking over the cliffs, the sea below stretching away to the south and east, stood a small collection of buildings. One was very similar to the houses back in the village, a circular hut made of stone bricks, one nearby looked very much like an outhouse. Another she couldn't guess what it was, a long vaguely triangular structure, like two walls just propped against each other, a glimpse inside showed something hanging in strings from the ceiling, maybe a couple casks on the ground — a storehouse of some kind, maybe? The last was larger, more like the rectangular buildings back in the village, the door an open frame, bits of the wall knee high missing here and there.

Hermione froze at the edge of the clearing, blinking in surprise. There were ducks. Just, dozens of the things, wandering around — most of them white, some speckled with darker colours here and there, they were all over the place, quacking and squawking, picking at the grass, napping in bunches on the roofs, some taking off into the trees, or circling over the edge of the cliffs, just...

Ducks. What the hell?

Also, there was a single sheep just standing in the middle of the yard, munching at the grass. Lilly didn't blink twice at all the ducks everywhere, but she did seem surprised by the sheep. "And who are you?" she muttered as she walked up to the thing (her accent slipping even more obviously northern-sounding), ducks edging away from her as she passed, a few irritably flaring their wings with rustles of feathers. She cast a charm of some kind with a flick of her fingers — Hermione had no idea what it was, but she did feel it, an almost audible snap ringing in the air, the nearest ducks squawking.

(...Could ducks feel magic, if it was powerful enough? Huh.)

The sheep edged away a little as Lilly approached, but not enough to stop her from grabbing at a leather collar around its neck, gently yanking it around. There was some kind of tag there, Hermione saw, dyed cloth stitched with a few colourful beads. "Oh, not so far from home, then."

Before Hermione could ask what the deal was with the sheep, or why the hell there were ducks everywhere, a figure came tearing out from the trees, sending startled ducks into flight. They skidded to a halt halfway to Hermione and Lilly, letting out a soft "eh!" A girl, maybe eight or nine, dark-skinned with gleaming black hair, wearing what Hermione recognised as magic-made false-silk trousers and tunic in blue and green — finely embroidered details stitched along the hems gold and orange, the design identical to the one on Lilly's dress, she noticed — a cloth belt of some kind tied over one hip, the beaded ends fluttering in the breeze.

She silently stared up at Hermione, dark eyes blinking. Hermione was going to go out on a limb and guess Lilly didn't have guests over very often.

Lilly waved the girl over, saying something Hermione couldn't begin to guess at — by those odd hard, gulping consonants she assumed it was...whatever Lilly had called it, an American Native language Hermione couldn't even pronounce the name of. The girl skipped closer, Lilly spoke again, this time in Spanish. "I've told you about Ik'ay before, my tataranieta." Assuming she'd understood that anyway, her Spanish was really not very good — she didn't recognise the last word at all, probably great-granddaughter or something of the like.

Ik'ay frowned, trying to look all serious about it, but her lips were twitching. "Chozna!"

"Como sea, a kind of nieta, anyway." It sounded like Lilly had gotten the number of generations between them wrong — by the way Ik'ay pouted at her, this wasn't the first time she'd been corrected. (She had to be doing that on purpose for some reason, Lilly wasn't that stupid.) "Ik'ay, this is—" She hesitated for an instant. "—Maïa, an English friend of mine."

Hermione opened her mouth to question the use of Maïa but caught herself, decided against it. Presumably, "Hermione" would be difficult for a little girl who didn't even speak English — all of her French cousins called her Maïa for that reason, even her aunt Tienne still couldn't quite get her real name right.

Her nose scrunching a little, Ik'ay said, "She's too joven to be your friend." What was... An initial H-sound in Spanish was from an initial Latin Y, right, so... Wait, was that young?

...Well, she wasn't entirely wrong, was she?

Lilly scoffed, said something Hermione didn't catch — in the American language again, she thought. Then in Spanish, "Be nice, girl."

"Yes, abuela," Ik'ay chirped, with a falsely innocent smile. Was that grandmother, there, abuela? She thought it might be a cognate of aïeule... (Also, it was a little surreal listening to a child call Lilly grandmother, wasn't it?) Turning to Hermione, speaking careful and proper, "Hello, Maïa, my name is Ik'ay. Pleased to meet you." And then she...dipped into a curtsey, pulling out out the hem of her tunic like she would a skirt and everything.

Choking back a giggle, Hermione smiled down at the girl as steadily as she could. "Hello, Ik'ay. Pleased to meet you." She was mostly sure she'd pronounced the name right. "And no, I'm not too young, your grandmother is too old."

Lilly made a face at her; Ik'ay's nose scrunched up again. "You talk funny."

"What did I say about being nice, Ik'ay?" Glancing over at Hermione, she muttered in English, "It wasn't a bad attempt, only you're nasalising the vowels." Oh, crap, they didn't do that in Spanish did they...

Before Hermione could decide what to say, or even if she should say something, Lilly and Ik'ay were babbling over the sheep in Spanish. It sounded like Ik'ay was being told to lead the sheep off to whoever it belonged to, one of their neighbours, and then come back and get a...something, Hermione had no idea what pescado was — something food-related, most likely. And then Ik'ay was trotting off to the north, gently dragging the sheep after her by the collar, before long disappearing back into the brush.

"That cheeky brat," Lilly muttered as soon as she was out of earshot. "A child so young has no business being so sarcastic, honestly."

Hermione smiled. "Yes, well, presumably it's genetic."

Lilly scoffed, shaking her head, but lead Hermione toward the big rectangular building without a word. The inside was a single long room, the ceiling criss-crossed with heavy beams propping up the roof, a couple pillars here and there — the first wood she'd seen here, actually. The middle of the room was dominated by an overly-long table lined with a pair of benches, enough space to accommodate fifty people, easy. There was what was clearly a kitchen area on one side, counters and cabinets and bottles and jars and baskets. The fixtures were very old-fashioned, the sort of thing that wouldn't seem entirely out of place in some period drama, the heavy stone and iron wood stove in particular very rough and ancient-looking. The middle of the wall on that side, breaking the kitchen area in half, was an absolutely enormous hearth, taller than Hermione and several feet deep, the wood fire fitfully smouldering within looking almost comically small in comparison. There were pots and pans and the like hanging on the wall above and around it in a variety of sizes, some looking normal but others ridiculously large, as well as some equipment Hermione didn't recognise, long bars with some kind of articulation on the ends, notches worked into the stone of the hearth that seemed connected to—

Oh! They were spits, some kind of primitive machinery built into the hearth to rotate roasting meat over the fire. Looking around, the hearth that was equipped to prepare much larger portions than Lilly could possibly need, the huge table, this place had clearly been designed to accommodate dozens of people at once, an old-fashioned feast hall like. But, Lilly was mostly living on her own out here — Hermione wondered how long it'd been since she'd actually used any of this.

It smelled sort of odd in here, a faintly green, tangy, slightly sweet mix of scents (probably from food stored in the kitchen area), and also a less pleasant, musty sort of thing she assumed was from ducks staying too long in a (mostly) enclosed space. And there were ducks in here, waddling across the floor — more of the local reddish stone, polished smooth from centuries of being trod on — a few perched on the rafters, little bundles of feathers napping here and there. The ducks were still weird, she didn't know what was going on with the ducks.

Which, well, there was no reason she couldn't ask, was there? Lilly made straight for the stove, filling the inside with a wandlessly-conjured handful of fire, with casual ease that was honestly a little intimidating. Lingering awkwardly a couple metres away, not really certain what she should be doing with herself, she blurted out, "Why all the ducks?"

"Why not?" Lilly plucked an old copper teapot off of a shelf, started filling it from one of the casks, what appeared to be water streaming out of the tap. "Feathers, eggs, meat. There was a time chickens were uncommon, most of all in the north, we raised ducks instead." Waltzing back to the stove with the now-filled pot, Lilly gave her an almost rueful smile. "Chicken still tastes weird to me, all bland and dry and ech."

...Now that Hermione thought about it, she had been aware duck used to be more common, but had trailed off around the time of industrialisation...though she didn't know why that was. "How do you keep them all here? Wouldn't they fly away?"

Casting some kind of magic on the stove, her clenched fist twitching a little, Lilly shook her head. "They're bound to the wards. They can fly wherever they like, but they'll always be compelled to come back. It's simple blood magic, only takes a few drops in their water as chicks, it holds the rest of their lives."

Hermione was pretty sure that was illegal dark magic, but she doubted Lilly cared. Not that she really thought the Ministry would either — after all, they were only ducks. (Also, she doubted anyone at the DLE wanted to risk annoying 'the North Wind' by trying to prosecute her for anything unless they really had to.)

"Go ahead and sit down if you like." Lilly tipped up to her toes to pluck a basket off of one shelf, a pair of sizeable ceramic bowls from another. "It's going to be about an hour before dinner is ready. That," she said, nodding at the pot on the stove, "will be...shite, I don't remember what the word in English is. I know people say herbal tea, but that's a stupid term, it doesn't even have tea in it."

Hermione smiled. "Tisane."

"Right, that's it. If that doesn't sound appealing, help yourself to anything in those casks over there," waving with a knife she'd acquired at some point, "they're all labeled...though not in any languages you can read, now that I'm thinking. That one's rosewater, cider, wine — not grape, cherry and whichever berries I had leftover at the time — and that last one's mead. Be careful with the wine — that shite will fool you, it's stronger than it seems."

She's making tea (or not-tea) with rosewater? Weird, but okay. "Did you make all of those?"

"No, I trade for the mead — there's not a lot of honey made up here, you know. The rest, sure."

Meaning she did make the cider and the wine, then. Hermione might have to try the cider later, just out of curiosity. Taking a seat at the end of one of the benches (because what else was she supposed to do?), she said, "Thanks, I think I can wait for the herbal tea."

In the middle of coring a cherry plucked from the basket — that's what the bowls were for, apparently, the fruits going into one and the pits into another — Lilly scowled. "You're trying to hurt me, with that."

"Maybe a little bit."

"Such cruelty, why do I bother," said far too lightly and casually to actually care. (Also, it would be a silly thing to make a big deal about anyway.) For a moment, Lilly continued coring cherries, the movement swift and smooth and easy from countless repetitions. "You still have questions, Hermione."

Well, yes, of course she did. How could she not? Her best friend had been thrown a thousand years into the past, and now she was here, and she'd lived a long and complicated life in the meanwhile. She had questions about all kinds of things, from what the adoption of the Statute of Secrecy had been like to live through, to how she'd gotten wrapped up in Grindelwald's revolution, to her family in America, to what the Founders had really been like, to why the hell she'd spent centuries being a literal pirate...

"You can go ahead and ask."

The problem was it wasn't as simple as just go ahead and ask, was it? Lilly was not Beth, she was almost painfully unfamiliar at times — not so different she was unrecognisable, familiar enough to hurt a little. Not being the Beth she remembered, she was also less predictable than Hermione would like. She had no idea how Lilly would react to some of the questions she had. Also, she kind of just didn't know where to start? With eleven hundred years of history, there were so many things Hermione could ask about...

Just starting from the beginning would make sense, right? Assuming Lilly even remembered very well, that had been a long time ago. If she'd forgotten most of her first time through the 1990s, it stood to reason she'd also forgotten much of her early years in the past. That was still the logical place to start, yes, that was probably best.

But first, there was something she'd been wondering about, ever since she'd learned just how far back Beth had been sent. "How are you still alive? I mean, that sounded more accusatory than I meant it to, but..." Honestly, some degree of accusation was probably fair. All magic had a cost, and immortality was one of those things that tended to have a very severe one — from the stories she'd heard over the years, human sacrifice tended to feature. "I mean, you must have done something, I know you're not a metamorph..."

Lilly smirked. "Worrying I did something distasteful, hmm? Sacrificed innocents in some unspeakably grisly ritual, maybe?"

Hermione felt her lips twitch — perhaps with a shade of relief, honestly, the sarcastic melodrama on Lilly's voice suggested whatever she'd done wasn't so bad. "Not to put too fine a point on it..."

"Sure, don't fret, I didn't steal a life for it." The pot was steaming now, so Lilly picked a covered ceramic pitcher off a shelf, scooped into it a bunch of green and yellow and red flecks of something stored in a large jar, then emptied the pot straight into the pitcher. The pitcher went onto the table near Hermione, followed by a few mugs and peculiar ceramic spoons. Lilly suddenly hitched, as though remembering something, muttered to herself under her breath (Norn, sounded like), flitted over to the shelves to return with a glass jar filled with some kind of reddish syrup. "It'll get stronger the longer it sits. I don't think this needs to be sweetened, but I don't know if you will agree — modern people put too much sugar in everything. This is the mildest sweetener I have, but it's a berry syrup, it does have a flavour to it. Taste it before you put it in anything.

"So. What I do, to not have died long ago." Lilly sauntered back to her cherries, leaning back against the counter and picking up her knife. "I don't remember this well, mind, but I did write about it. We'd gone through some hard years in the Valley, but time came the fighting was over." The Valley? Did she mean Hogsmeade Valley? was she talking about the Founding of Hogwarts? "There were several years of only...life. I was with friends and family — adopted family, I mean, and no children of my own, though all were expected to help out — and things were good. By the time I was...oh, a few years after thirty, I think, it occurred to me that I was going to live out the rest of my life there, and one day I would pass, a thousand years before I was born.

"But I yet remembered where I came from, then, and that I... That damn stupid prophecy, I thought, if I was to defeat Voldemort, if I was meant to, but if I wasn't there, nobody will. And you will all suffer for it — you and Ron, Sirius, Gin, Luna, Katie and Angie and Alicia, Neville, even Lavender bloody Brown, all of you will be left to him. Anyway, I know now that's not how prophecies work, but... I refused to accept that."

Hermione's lips curled with a sad, helpless smile — that did sound like Beth, apart for decades by then and still worrying about them...

"I already knew being sent back here wasn't possible. Sylvi hadn't ever heard of time travel before I explained what happened to me, and Wynn did look into it a few times over the decades, but, no. I asked Helga if there were any way to preserve myself somehow." ...She did mean Helga Hufflepuff, right? "I thought, maybe I can be put in some kind of stasis and stashed away somewhere, to be revived when it was time. That was... There were risks, in such a project. But Helga had a different idea, and we worked it out with Wynn and Sylvi's help.

"It's called a phylactery." Lilly looked over her bowl of cherries, nodded to herself, took up the one with the pits and walked over toward the door outside. Probably going to throw them to the ducks.

While she was away, Hermione poured a little bit of the brownish-red tisane into one of the mugs — none of the little bits of leaves or berries or whatever was in there came out the lip, there must be a screen built into the cover. It was still steaming hot, but not so bad she couldn't take a careful sip. Oh, wow, that was more flavourful than she'd expected, though she couldn't say what it was exactly. There was a bit of herbal sharpness to it, sure, along with a tartness that must be from a berry of some kind (Lilly apparently grew several). It wasn't sweet, exactly, but she didn't think it really needed any sugar added either, it was fine as it was.

Though, it was strong enough already, so she filled the rest of her mug. Lilly was walking back inside as she set the pitcher down, after a bit of flitting around in the kitchen sat across from Hermione at the table. She still had her knife and a couple bowls, but this time with a couple parsnips and carrots, set into peeling. At least, Hermione thought those were carrots — they were purple, bloody weird...

Before Lilly could get into her story again, Hermione asked, "Is Ik'ay all right, you think? Only, she's been gone a while..."

"She was held up at the neighbours' for a bit — I think she was trying to wheedle sweets out of Fríða, but it doesn't work well when nobody speaks the same language. She's on her way back now." At Hermione's frown, Lilly smiled, one finger lifting from the handle of her knife to tap the side of her forehead. "I'm scrying her, I know exactly where she is and what she's doing." Well, she had said scrying was useful, she guessed. That was...slightly creepy, honestly. "In any case, phylactery.

"It's blood magic, dating to, oh, the old Brahmins, perhaps. The idea has been around for three thousand years now, possibly longer. You take a sample of someone's blood and preserve it in a device. This device is designed to anchor the person to the sample within it, and... Well, esoteric blood magic stuff. Entirely prevent aging, to say it plain.

"So far as methods to achieve immortality go, it's not perfect. It only holds as long as this device survives, so it has to be stored somewhere hidden, protected. If someone gets their hands on it, they can do all kinds of nasty curses on you, so. It interferes with some kinds of healing; on the other hand, it grants an immunity to many blood-mediated curses. For a woman, you can't bear a child, which requires changes in the blood this device prevents.

"It does stop aging, but that is the only protection it gives. I can die like anyone else, from violence or privation or accident...though I am immune to many sicknesses, not all of them." The parsnips and carrots peeled and cut, Lilly set the bowl aside and poured herself a mug of her tisane. "It's not considered a truly reliable method. Something can go wrong with the phylactery itself, or you can just get yourself killed, be it from a random accident or someone taking you out — immortals do tend to make enemies. In truth, I'm the most long-lived user of this method I'm aware of, ever, something always goes wrong in time. But it is certainly the most ethical method, I think."

Oh. That...didn't sound bad at all. Hermione had been worried it would turn out to be something awful, but that seemed perfectly fine, really. In fact... "Is that something anyone can do? It doesn't sound like anything more than normal enchanting — complex enchanting, sure, but."

Lily was smiling, a sardonic slant to her lips. "It's very finicky, a novice will only mess it up. Ask me in a decade or two and I'll make you one — you don't want to be sixteen forever."

"What, really?!" It seemed...kind of absurd, that Lily would, just, make her ageless if she asked. On the one hand, that did sound like the sort of the thing Beth would do if she could, but on the other hand, it just didn't seem quite right, almost...cheap, somehow. Immortality really shouldn't be that easy. Of course, she would ask, who the hell wouldn't, she was just saying.

Lilly lifted one shoulder in a lazy shrug, as though they weren't discussing anything of importance at all. "Sure. You won't be the first person I've done it for over the years."

"...Nelinha?" She was pretty sure Lilly's wife was dead, but now that Hermione thought about it she wasn't certain that'd ever actually been specified...

"No," she said, shaking her head, "she didn't want to outlive our children. And only one of them took me up on it, for the same reason — Chab'ja' is, shite, two hundred and fifty years old now." Her lips tilting into a smirk, "She's an author, getting into science fiction these days."

There was something sort of funny about a woman two hundred fifty years old writing science fiction novels, given science fiction definitely hadn't existed in the 18th Century. The novel itself hadn't really either, for that matter. "Is she any good?"

Lilly let out an amused snort. "Well, I think so, but I'm biased, aren't I? She is my daughter, you know." Right, of course, that was a stupid question... "I have a few of her books here, but they're all in Ch'orti'. I know some have English translations, though, remind me later and I'll find you copies."

"Right." Hermione had drained her drink by now — it was different, but not bad — but the rest still in the pitcher was probably far too strong for her now. Seemingly reading her mind, Lilly got up, refilling the pot and setting it on the hob. But she didn't come back right away, pulling down a couple of pans and another woven basket. Hermione tipped up a little to see, and oh, those were dried chili peppers — she'd probably gotten them so Ik'ay would have something familiar all the way over here in Scotland. Or Lilly just liked them herself, she guessed. "Don't worry about me, by the way, I can handle spicy food."

"Oh." Lilly blinked. "Good, I forgot to ask."

"That's careless, given how infamously bland English food is."

"It's not so bad, truly. But that may only be because you've been stealing people's food after conquering them."

"Hey, curry's pretty good, we couldn't just leave that there."

"Oh sure, with everything else you were stealing, you may as well take the food. Can't say the English didn't need the help figuring this shite out, you know."

"Not a fan of the Empire, I take it." Hermione didn't disagree, of course, she just... Well, Lilly's history showed what seemed like conflicting tendencies when it came to the appropriate use of force and coercion, and she didn't really know how to come out and ask about that sort of thing.

"I don't approve of empire in general, but the people who decide these things don't ask me for permission, do they?" Lilly scoffed, shaking her head to herself. "The way modern people talk about the noble English race and our great enlightened civilisation or what have you is always funny to me. It was truly not that long ago, on an historical scale, that the people who in time became the English were a bunch of separate peoples who all hated each other, warring against each other all the time. Didn't seem so noble or enlightened then. People talk of England like it's some great monolith that's been around forever but it's not really that old — I remember the first King of England, the petty bastard."

Yes, but that didn't really mean anything, did it, she's over a thousand years old. "You met Alfred the Great?" That was just...absurd to think about.

"What? No. Well, I may have at some point, but I don't remember Ælfræd. I meant Æðelstan — that man was such a prick. When he died Godric wanted to take a trip south to piss on his grave."

A shocked laugh was yanked out of Hermione's throat, harsh enough it almost sounded like a cough. "Ah, I never read anything of Ædelstan being that...controversial, in his own time."

Pouring a trickle of oil over the parsnips and carrots in one of the pans, LIlly turned enough toward Hermione to visibly roll her eyes. "And sure you don't. Much of what is written of rulers is to their aggrandisement, at the time as well as their ancestors centuries later. And when we're talking of back then, the number of people what even knew their letters were not many, and the papers that are likely to survive were kept in monasteries or the libraries of the wealthy, or the like. People who, these rulers are their patrons, it isn't in their interest to annoy someone who has power over them. And people centuries later, well, they want to feel good about their own self, their history as a reflection of them, so they aren't like to reproduce anything that makes them uncomfortable. Pretty lies were written down then, and pretty lies were recreated later, because that is what people want to say, and what they want to hear.

"Even so," Lilly drawled, smirking over her shoulder, "I don't think anything you've heard before sounds as Godric was a man who may piss on the grave of his own king. It's the same thing, with him."

Well, none of that was really a surprise, still... "That's Godric Gryffindor, right? You knew the Founders personally? I mean, I figured you must have, you as Lizbet of, er, Scathaclan are remembered as one of their knights..."

Lilly winced, probably at what Hermione realised had been an absolutely atrocious attempt at the Gaelic name. "Scáthachluain. And yes, I did. My memory is fuzzy now, it was so long ago, but I wrote of them, so." She shrugged.

"Oh, come on! What were they like?"

"Nothing like what you think." The pan was hot now, sizzling and spitting. Lilly walked over to the casks, drawing some liquid into a cup, tossing it into the pain, exploding into boiling instantly, steam flying into the air — that hadn't been the same as the water cask, but... Was Lilly cooking with hard cider? Huh. Raising her voice a little over the noise, Lilly said, "Godric is the closest, I think, but anachronistic in how you think of it. Sure, he was concerned with honour and justice and the like, but when he thought of these words, it was a very Saxon idea of honour, and a very Christian idea of justice. Many people portray him in...chivalric terms, but those ideas didn't exist at the time. So, he's spoken of with the right words, yes, but these words mean different things to people now.

"The rest...aren't so good. Wynn, I can near see where the modern idea of her came from, but only nearly. Helga and Sylvi are entirely wrong, they were truly nothing like how they are remembered. Sarah hates this, you know. Oh," Lilly chirped, shooting her an almost apologetic look, "he was Silvahárr of Syltheris then, now she calls herself Sarah Selwyn — she teaches wardcrafting and cursebreaking at Miskatonic, she was off somewhere for a bit but she returned to the position a couple decades ago now, I think."

Hermione was vaguely familiar with Miskatonic — it was a magical school and research institution in America, with an absolutely horrendous reputation in Europe for doing unethical experiments with black magic and bioalchemy and so forth, a haven for the worst dark mages from all over the world. She had little idea just how accurate their reputation was...but given it was supposedly the same Miskatonic that HP Lovecraft wrote about, there was probably something to it. The idea that one of the Founders taught at Miskatonic, of all places, was a bit...

Wait a second. Godric was obviously Gryffindor, and Helga was Hufflepuff. "Wynn", that was...probably Ravenclaw? Hermione couldn't quite draw the line from one to the other, but that was the only thing that made sense. Which meant "Sylvi", Silvahárr of Syltheris, that must be...

"Slytherin is still alive? And he teaches at Miskatonic?!"

Lilly, her back to Hermione, focusing on the food, gave a lazy one-shouldered shrug. "Sarah is a metamorph, and she hasn't managed to get herself killed, so yes, 'Slytherin'," the modern name said with a faint note of sarcasm, "yet lives. And yes, she teaches there — she's a founding member of the Miskatonic Valley Magical Co-operative, in truth."

...Hermione had no words. Just, none. What the fuck was she supposed to say to that?!

Sounding slightly exasperated, Lilly said, "Sylvi was not what you think, Hermione. Sarah's aware of how she's remembered by Britons today, and she hates it, truly. It's part of why she hasn't set foot on the Isles in centuries now, and prefers that the people here continue to believe she truly is dead — she wants not to deal with it, at all.

"Fuck it all," Lilly growled, head tipping back to glare at the ceiling for a second, "Wynn was 'muggleborn', for all that we knew, and they were the best of friends since they were small children! And we didn't know, Wynn was orphaned as a young child, a vagrant Sylvi's family took in and cared for — nobody knew where she came from, and nobody cared. All this talk of 'muggleborns' or blood purity or the like, the concepts didn't even exist back then! How Sylvi is remembered now, it's absurd, and honestly infuriating."

"...Then tell me what they were really like, then. I'd like to know." Hermione would prefer it if one of the Founders of her school weren't an awful, genocidal crazy person, that's just...not what she'd heard. Of course, everyone she'd heard it from had been born hundreds of years after Slytherin had died (or "died"), and Lilly had actually known him (or her, apparently?), so...

Yeah, she would listen. She'd definitely listen.

Besides, did they really have anything better to talk about?

Lilly let out a long sigh. Once she was finished stirring the stuff in the pan — a few more things had been mixed in from jars on the shelves, Hermione hadn't seen what — she set it back, casting some kind of spell over it. Dragging down a second pitcher, she set up some more of the tisane, carried it over to the table and sat down across from her again. Pouring herself another mug (from the old pitcher, probably far too strong for Hermione by now), Lilly said, "I think I'll need to start from the beginning, give you the whole story like. Besides, I think you'll ask eventually, and it works for this, I guess. It's not a short story, though."

Hermione shrugged. "Did you have something else you wanted to do today?"

Her lips flickered with a smile.

Landvættrin — Lilly briefly explained the concept, I won't bother going into it, since it's not actually important. The point here is, I'm not certain this is right. It was extremely frustrating finding a dictionary that actually has this word in it. The second part of the compound in Old Norse is vættir plural, vættr singular, and finding not only what the word is in Icelandic, but how it's declined, was a fucking pain. Ultimately, I did find vættr in a dictionary from the 1800s, where I was told it's a feminine noun. (And also that the dative is vætti, which didn't match any of the declension tables I found?) I'm pretty sure modern Icelandic sticks in a vowel to make vættur, but not when the definite suffix is added, making vættrin. I'm, like, 75% sure on that, which is an uncomfortably large uncertainty for me xD

[they were purple, bloody weird] — Interestingly, purple was the dominant carrot colour throughout much of the West for centuries, before gradually being displaced by orange over the last five centuries or so. They can come in all kinds of colours, though, which I think is pretty neat, I didn't know that before doing some food history research before writing this chapter. Learning is fun!

Æðelstan and Ælfræd — Woo, Old English. Ælfræd is just Alfred in Old English (the "æ" is the TRAP vowel), and Æðelstan is usually spelled Æthelstan these days. Alfred the Great was a King of Wessex, and the first to call himself King of the Anglo–Saxons. Æthelstan was his grandson, the first to be referred to as the King of England (by contemporaries), and called himself overlord of the entirety of Britain (which, arguably, he was).

Æthelstan also thought executing 12-year-olds for theft was a great idea. You might think, "Oh, things were just like that back then," but no, that was unreasonably harsh even by the standards of the time. It was bad enough he had trouble getting his underlings to actually carry it out...which of course was considered corruption and lawlessness in the government I just read several historians praise him for working to eliminate. Ugh. Yeah, I'm gonna have to differ from what seems to be the mainstream view on the subject, talking about what a great legal reformer Æthelstan was, honestly fuck that guy.

Also? Fuck a significant portion of medieval historians.

I originally planned to have the first bit in the past here, but it went longer than I expected, so I ended up splitting it. Which makes this a relatively short chapter by my standards, but these things happen.

The next chapter is a significant portion done already. Maybe half? Dunno, it depends on how long the ending goes. Of course, I can't guess how long it'll be until I have it — this fic isn't a priority, it's all been By Gods Forsaken lately, and I'm trying to get back into writing The Good War and The Plan. And also my health isn't getting better, seriously, trying to read is making me dizzy and headachy at the moment. As you might imagine, it's not very easy to write when you're having trouble reading. I'm gonna blame any typos I didn't catch on that.

Right. Bye.