After double checking, then checking again as was her habit, that the door to The Jily Harmony was securely locked, Hermione hitched her heavy rucksack over her shoulder and followed Harry down onto the deck plate of the ruined town.

It was unlike any place Hermione had ever seen. Built purely for mining function, there were spacious warehouses where there should have been shops, refining chambers in place of civic buildings, with the only passable interpretation of housing facilities being a crude hut lined with uncomfortable-looking steel bunks, which had rotting, mouldy blankets left askew on top of them.

Harry led them around the rim of the small town. Cogs and coils poked through the muddy detritus that littered the floor, discarded or dropped by scavenger towns that had already torn this place to shreds looking for spare parts. There wasn't much of the town intact it at all, and Hermione was left to wonder what was keeping the super structure in one piece.

"We should be careful, Harry!" Hermione hissed. "Even a loud noise could cause a town-quake on this wreck. I don't fancy the idea of losing you beneath a mound of rubble."

"The alternative is getting off and walking on the ground," Harry pointed out with a grimace.

"What? On the bare earth?!" Hermione fired back in disgust, as the Traction Londoner in her reared its head. "Don't be such a savage, Harry."

"Then I suggest you watch your footing," Harry grinned. "Look at the size of that tank there, Hermione. What do you think that was for? I'm thinking some sort of experimental steam motor."

"Yes, I'd tend to agree," Hermione nodded. "It looks like a giant compression boiler, doesn't it? I bet there used to be enormous pistons to drive the engines just underneath it, but they've likely been stripped long ago. And if you make any crude jokes, that involve stripping and showing me your giant piston, I wont talk to you for the rest of the day."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Harry smirked, pocketing the comment he was about to make that contained all those naughty references.

At the corner of the town, the one that looked like it had been driven directly into the dirt of the hillside, Harry and Hermione found a rickety walkway that was just about still intact. They followed it, lighting their torches as soon as they disappeared away from the light at the mouth of a vast cave.

"Be careful, Harry!" Hermione whispered sternly. "We have no idea what might be hiding in here."

Harry nodded in cold agreement and drew out a thick, serrated blade from a leather holder attached to his hip. Hermione gulped hard. She didn't know where Harry had gotten that knife from, but it quickly made the whole situation very serious. She stuck close as they moved on slowly.

But there were no enemies inside this cave. The ones who had excavated it had made it this far and were then forced to stop. For there was a barrier in front of them, one that no-one had yet been able to penetrate.

And it was a barrier distinctly man-made.

"What is this!" Hermione whispered in awe.

"I have no idea," Harry hushed back.

And he meant it, too. For they were looking at a huge, vaulted archway, easily thirty feet high. The lintel that topped the arch was massive, way over a hundred tons in weight. Harry just goggled at the sheer size of it a moment.

"How did they even get that up there!" He mused in astonishment, pointing to the lintel. "There's no crane that I know of strong enough to manage it."

But Hermione wasn't listening to him. Ignoring her instinctual distaste for the earthen floor, she had crossed into the arch to crouch down in front of what looked like a pair of marble headstones, undamaged by the passage of time. And in the space between the headstones was a large plaque, with the etching clearly readable even in the half-light from their torches.

"H-harry!" Hermione breathed. "Come and read this!"

So he did ... and immediately lost his breath, as he spoke the words of the dedication plaque out loud.

"Here lies the famous Harry Potter, with his wife, Hermione, in their Ancient and Noble home of Godric's Hollow. May they Rest in Peace.

"Hermione ... what is this?"

"It's ... Harry ... I think this is a tomb ... our family tomb!"

Her voice was barely more than a whisper. Harry moved to her and dropped to his knees at her side.

"Look at this inscription, Harry," Hermione went on, pointing with a trembling hand at her own name etched in marble before her. "Hermione Potter (nee Granger), 19th September 1979 - 3rd July 2091. I was a hundred and twelve years old when I died, Harry!

"And look here, there's more on the dedication plaque, a family genealogy of sorts. Read this part ... Harry and Hermione are survived by their three children - Sophie, Celesca and James. Harry! We had children! Our son even married someone ... a girl named Alison Longbottom. Look, it says so here. But why are there no birth or death dates next to their names? If this a family tomb, I'd have expected them to be there."

"Look closer at those dates, Hermione!" Harry cried, still trying to ignore the horrific notion of Hermione dead that was crossing his overwrought mind. "If that is true ... and 1979 refers to the Babylonian calendar that the Ancients used ... then that would mean that you lived over twenty-five centuries ago!"

"Great Quirke! You're right!" Hermione yelped. "And you were the same. Look ... your death date is just three days after mine!"

"I probably died of a broken heart," Harry speculated. "I wouldn't have wanted to go on without you."

Hermione smiled fondly at him. "You sappy romantic you!"

"Don't tell anyone, okay?" Harry quirked back. "I have a rep to uphold."

"You do? Since when?" Hermione teased.

"Be quiet, you," Harry smirked. "But those dates might explain why there are no death dates next to our children ... they would have been young adults at the time of the Sixty Minute War. They might have been wiped out by one of the blasts!"

"And there was simply no-one left to etch their epitaphs!" Hermione gasped in horror. "Oh, Harry! Our poor babies."

"Though what if they survived the War?" Harry pondered aloud. "What if they somehow got to safety in one of the bomb-proof bunkers, then their descendants survived all the wars that followed in Indo-Europe, and they took shelter underground during the fifth Ice Age and the Volcanic Era that followed, then emerged to help found the Traction Era? Hermione ... we might still have members of our family wandering around the Earth to this very day!"

"That's very speculative, Harry, contains a lot of what ifs and would require an extraordinary amount of good fortune," Hermione frowned doubtfully. "We may, indeed, have relatives that survived to live in this world ... but what I'm more concerned about is how we are now living in it.

"I mean ... what are the chances? It is entirely possible that a person called Harry Potter and another person called Hermione Granger lived before, yonks and yonks ago, but what are the chances that both pairs would meet, fall in love, and ultimately marry and have families? They did it, and we will do it ... with only the date and time of that being unknown. But what are the odds?"

"Literally millions to one, I reckon," Harry guessed. "Billions, maybe."

"I agree," Hermione nodded. "Then I think we have to accept something, Harry, something profound ... we were this Harry and Hermione before ... these are our final resting places. We might not be exactly the same as them but, somehow, we have been brought back to live again. We have no memories now because they have eroded over the last twenty-five centuries ... but back in the twentieth century, we made them afresh. They are just lost to the erosion of time."

"So how do we get them back? And how to we get to the bottom of why we are suddenly living again?"

"The answer must be beyond this barrier," Hermione mused. "Someone has tried to get through it before ... why all the effort to excavate the place so extensively,\ if there wasn't something powerful to find down here? I'm going to see if I can succeed where whoever else was here before us failed."

So she did, reaching out to touch her own headstone, which was almost too macabre a thing to really wrap her head around. But as soon as she touched the stone, something began to happen. At first it felt like an earthquake, as everything began to shake and gritty dust fell from the walls and ceiling of the great cavern, covering them in a choking shower. Then a crack opened up in the middle of the large archway between the headstones, revealing a massive stone door, which swung back with a great grinding noise as a vast, dark passageway opened up before them.

"Now what in the name of Crumb is this!?" Harry hushed.

"Are we Archeo-Historians or not?" Hermione replied lowly, her eyes twinkling. "Let's go and find out."

"I'm afraid that this is about as far as either of you need to go," said a voice from behind them. "So sorry about this."

Then Harry felt a sharp sting of power at the bottom of his spine. He turned to see his attacker, who had crept up behind them with impressive silence, and was now pressing some form of Lightening Gun to the base of both Harry and Hermione's backs. Harry had only one more second of cogency to angrily scream out the name of his assailant ...

"VALENT -"

And then Harry knew no more.

In the bleak darkness that follows, Harry remembers more of Hermione. She scores 112% on a test and he is proud of her. She shows compassion to a cat nobody else wanted, and he admires her heart. They dance together for the first time, as foreign voices whisper around them. They kiss. They marry. Hermione returns one day with a white plastic tube containing a single blue line ... and for some reason this makes them rejoice.

Then all is dark again, and Harry knows nothing. He struggles to hold on to the once-unforgettable memories, as though they were fragments of someone else's dreams. Then a voice speaks.

Do not move, it says. You are suffering severe electro-static shock ... if you move you could rupture your entire central nervous system. I will take care of you now. You are safe.

My name is Amelie Flamel ... and I have been waiting for you, Harry Potter. Sleep.

So he does.