Hiraeth: noun - homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over a lost home that can never be returned to.
Story Premise: Persephone Pines former muggleborn Hufflepuff Unspeakable tossed into the walking dead dimension after a botched up portal take down at work. AU Walking Dead.
This story is rated M for future scenes and vulgarity. Be warned, this is an AU so things will be different at times. This is not a happy rainbows and pink kitten fluff story. It may be a dark. There will be violence.
I'll only state this once since none of this is for profit. The Walking Dead belongs to Robert Kirkman and the artist Tony Moore, Harry Potter belongs to J.K Rowling, and anything else recognizably trade marked does not, unfortunately, belong to me.
I do own this plot and Persephone Pines. This entire story is currently being rewritten into a new point of view, and layout because I lost it when I switched computers a long time ago. Any following ANs in the rewritten chapters will be at the bottom of the chapter. Thank you for your patience.
Chapter One: The Prologue
The sky was peppered with a heavy curtain of lights. They shone iridescent blues, yellows, and whites, hung against the sea of black. Outside the wind stung the trees, and sparked a cold heat in limbs, hands and faces, yet there was no snow, no dew, and no frost adorning the trees or grass.
Sweet chilled winds stung her reddening cheeks, as the water crashed against the rocky cliff side. The bright runic array that glowed before her, bathed her face in a purple eerie light. The smell of wet grass and dirt clung onto her nostrils as she scrunched up her nose. Pine trees swayed against the ebony curtain behind her. Her booted feet squelched slightly against the surrounding silence around her. It had been a long night for Persephone Pines.
As an Unspeakable she was tasked to do a lot of things in her three years of working in the Canadian Curiosities Department since her transfer from The Ministry of Magic's Department of Mysteries. Tonight, she was doing the last runic portal take down in her shift, one out of fourteen that she'd finished sealing up. They'd been dotted up and down the coasts of BC, and it was exhausting. The multiple apparitions and just the drain of each take down, one after the other, leached her stamina. A person only had so much magic.
They needed to be taken down though, ASAP. Muggles and magicals alike had been getting sucked in, never to be found again. As more and more people went missing, the magical government started to sweat. So sure, it was rewarding saving people this way, but none the less exhausting. Her arduous twelve hour shift was almost over. She could certainly do with a very long nap after all this was over.
Perhaps it was sleep deprivation or just the haze of exhaustion that sloshed through the thirty year old's form, but she didn't notice that this particular rural array was just one rune off from the others. Jeffery Piddles, her manager, was supposed to look over every runic portal and align them just so. This was to make the take downs seamless. It was the one thing he had to do in his entire shift, but it must have slipped his mind. Because of this simple mistake, Persephone Pines was vacuumed into a dimensional portal faster than you could say snap.
The runes glowed a brighter purple before fading and burning into the grass. Slowly, black smoke billowed up into the night sky. The scent of death just lingering in the air before a cold wind blew it away. The portal itself slowly seeped out of existence and erased any trace of Persephone Pines in this universe, closing the crack in space and time that it had been making.
No one would ever remember, and so the world continued to spin madly on.
It felt like she was sucked into a tube the size of a sewing needle filled with lightning. The pain from being ripped from her universe dimmed until she was numb. It was then that she found out why the pain had disappeared. She didn't really have any limbs to speak of, or really a mouth, for pain to be inflicted on. As she sped towards who knows what, time seemed to slip away. The warping light around her and ahead of her seemed to have no end.
Finding that her journey was taking an eternity and a day, Persephone let her mind wander. She thought about her life before this, however short it may have been. She had miscarried and lost her husband all at the same time a year prior to now, and thus couldn't find the peace to sleep. It was the entire reason why she transferred from England to Canada. It was why she kept accepting those stupidly long shifts.
She thought that a change in location would help. It didn't. The nightmares continued to haunt her. However, in this new brightly blue and white light filled place flashing around her, perhaps now they would stop. Perhaps now, she'd get to join them in wherever they were. She hoped that was true. Those stupid drunk drivers did this to her. She found that they were all to blame for her loss. It had been last year, 2019, and they still couldn't save her husband and her baby with all the technology they had. The magic and mundane world couldn't fix crushed corpses.
Those thoughts faded as she kept speeding on wards. On wards towards what, she didn't know. She idly wondered if everyone that got sucked into a portal like this was stuck here too. It didn't seem like it though. She was totally alone. How did she get here? Why'd she end up here of all places?
Suddenly, she knew why. It was because she didn't switch Departments. Was this karma?
Persephone knew that she should've switched out of her current department ages ago. People kept whispering about accidents and peculiar events happening in this Department. She figured that it couldn't have been worse than her prior Department. At least they didn't have morally repugnant experiments. Still though... The thought of additional income along with the long hours that could numb her mind, sounded too good at the time for her to listen to the rumors about people disappearing. She should've listened though. Oh well.
She inwardly sighed. The Magical and Mundane Tech Department never had accidents like this. She should've switched over when she'd had the chance before this assignment. Her curiosity about the portals was too great though. Look where that had gotten her, without a body in a light void with no end in sight. Great.
Persephone reminisced about having a body. She hadn't loved all the aspects of her mortal flesh, but now as she looked on at nothing... She missed it. Physically she had been fit albeit big boned. She'd never been as slender and wispy as her sisters, or like all those k-pop stars that were getting so popular on the HoloNet. Her cheeks always irritated her due to their chubby quality, but she missed them now. Her dark voluminous curls had always left her with headaches due to it's tendency to knot itself onto her scalp.
None of this really mattered though. With no body, and no voice, Persephone was just reduced to glowing stardust speeding through this tunnel of light. She ignored the fact she didn't have eyeballs, and the fact that she could see anything or be anything sentient right now threw her for a loop. If she had lungs she'd be hyperventilating right now. As it were, she was oddly calm. Awash with it in fact. It was too bad she didn't normally feel this way.
This was stupid Jeffery's fault. She couldn't do magic here. Not without a body. She felt helpless. Persephone hated feeling helpless. A cloak of depression settled into her mind. She couldn't conjure, charm, or transfigured anything to get her out of here. Persephone couldn't do anything with her beloved runes, or wandlessly do anything as a mass of blue doted lights, now could she? If she still had eyes, she'd cry.
Perhaps this was limbo? Had she been such an unhelpful and unmeaningful person in life to end up here, in this stupid in between place? Where was heaven? Fuck it. Where was hell? Anything, but this would've been better. She'd take getting poked in the ass by Hitler rather than this, and that didn't particularly sound fun, thanks. Fuck, she'd even take on zombies or monsters at this rate. Anything to get her out of here.
Not too long after that thought, a darkness started speeding towards her. If she had a heart at that moment, it would've thudded in her ears. Finally. She'd take whatever fate, life, God, Buddha, or whomever would throw at her in exchange for a way out of here.
As the darkness engulfed her, she did have one final thought.
She hoped that she wasn't going to regret her wish.