Last of the Edhel, Chapter 2
by CinnamonGrrl, for Technoelfie
Hermione took a month of long-overdue personal time from work. Knowing she'd never get any peace if she remained in the apartment she shared with Lavender Brown, she told her roommate some feeble excuse and holed herself up in Harry's apartment in London, the better to study the book and discover some way of using it to find the Source. Since Harry himself was off on some Auror mission or another, and unlikely to return to his home anytime soon, Hermione let herself in with the key he'd given her years ago. For the next month, she did her duty by her parents and the Weasleys; weekly visits to them and to Ron were the only distractions she permitted from her work. Her notes, organized in piles around the lounge, and then the kitchen, and then the bedroom, were covered in arcane symbols and the near-illegible scrawl she adopted when on the very hot trail of an exceptionally important idea.
The first week, she figured out a spell to make the magic of an individual visible. Casting it on herself, she was both disconcerted and thrilled to see that her body was emitting a faint bluish-grey glow that floated mistily around her. "Would have thought that magic would look more dramatic," she commented aloud to Crookshanks II as she stared in the mirror, then lifted an arm to study the phenomenon more closely. The cat, who Hermione had adopted after his predecessor had passed on to his reward, merely gave her a kitty-headbutt on the ankle and stalked off to see whether his empty food dish had miraculously become less empty in the last hour.
A week after that, Hermione unearthed a few messily-scrawled sentences that she could use to modify Prior Incantato, thus revealing the even deeper origination of magic. When the modification was ready, she cast it using a detailed map of the world. Little blue-grey lights began to glow in various spots round the globe but to her immense shock and pleased surprise, instead of some exotic locale like a Mayan temple or primitive African cave or remote Himalayan mountaintop, the strongest flow of magical energy was concentrated dead in the centre of the Forbidden Forest that bordered Hogwarts.
"What were the odds of that?" Hermione murmured to Crookshanks, eyebrows lifted in amazement. He was, however, somewhat tougher to impress and merely fell asleep again. The more she thought about it, however, the more it made sense—Hogwarts was heavily protected, and boasted some of the finest witches and wizards of each generation to help protect the Source, and the forest itself was very dangerous and inhospitable. You'd have to be crazy to go there voluntarily, she thought with a faint smile, thinking of all the times she, Harry, and Ron had indeed ventured into its gloomy, menacing depths.
She could Disapparate to Hogsmeade, walk to Hogwarts, and walk into the forest—that part was easy. The difficult part would be withstanding the danger that teemed within the woods—if the centaurs didn't get her, Grawp might. Or the werewolves, vampires, spiders… the list went on and on. Hermione was no idiot; she knew she stood little chance of surviving alone in the Forbidden Forest for long, no matter how skilled she was in defending herself. Her talents lay in the conceptual, not the actual. She'd never been the best dueler in the club, nor even during any of the myriad battles she'd fought at Harry's side through the years.
Briefly, Hermione considered telling Harry-- he would come with her in a heartbeat, she knew—but just as quickly dismissed the idea. For an Auror, Harry was a hopelessly bad liar, and she didn't want to get him into trouble, or worse, jeopardize her mission if he somehow blabbed what they were doing to the wrong ears. No, Harry would have to learn about what she was doing at the same time as everyone else-- which returned her to her original quandary. If she could simply Disapparate to the Source itself, she felt confident that the situation could be withstood.
Part of Hermione, the impetuous and eager part, wanted to scoff at the danger involved in pursuing her new information to the Source. The sensible, responsible part—that which had far greater control over her, thankfully—made her sit and stay where she was, soothed her fierce disappointment, and assured her that there was a solution to this dilemma. She just hadn't found it yet. But she would; the third week was spent in deep research, this time on how to adapt the Four-Point spell to pinpoint the end of the etheric trail of magic to its Source, and also on how to Disapparate directly to that end.
Exactly one month after she'd left the archive of the Ministry of Magic with the stolen book secreted in her pocket, Hermione performed the series of spells—the Muggle part of her wondering if there were some way she could create a macro and thus execute them all in a more efficient manner—and with a final, deep breath, Disapparated to where the Four-Point spell indicated.
Immediately, she knew she was a complete dunderhead. No matter how blasted hot it was in the rest of the United Kingdom, here in these murky woods it was cool, with a dampness rising from the ground that began immediately to seep into her scantily clothed limbs. "Lumos," she whispered, raising her wand. To her intense dismay, nothing happened. "Lumos!" she repeated, her voice rising with alarm. Hermione turned the wand toward her face, staring at it in bafflement, but before she could even begin to figure out why it wasn't working, she heard a low growl behind her. Spinning, she found an enormous grey wolf crouched there, fangs bared and gleaming lethally in the dim moonlight.
Automatically, Hermione brought her wand up. "Stupefy!" she cried, aiming at it, but once again nothing happened, except that the wolf tensed its legs to spring at her. Barely had its paws left the ground, however, when something—or someone, rather—dropped to the ground from the tree above her head. The figure was male, tall and lithe, and even in the poor light of the almost-new moon she could tell his long, arrow-straight hair was pale. He had what seemed to be a machete in his left hand, and strapped to his back was a bow and full quiver.
I've been saved by Robin Hood, she thought dazedly as she heard her saviour say a few words to the wolf in a musical, utterly foreign language. The creature actually seemed to nod in comprehension, and skulked away like a shade into the night. Hermione knew she should be shocked that he could communicate with the wolf, but there was something about him that was such a part of the forest that she found herself completely unsurprised. With every breath he took, his body declared him intrinsic to the woods surrounding them; with every waft of cool night air on her skin and whisper of tree branches and rustle of small creatures, she knew the wood and the creatures in it accepted him as its liege.
Then "Robin" turned to her, his face shadowed by the moon to his back. "Who are you?" Hermione asked, trying to be polite, but her usual lust for knowledge was fired and she wanted, no, needed to know more about this man. The analytical part of her brain, which never seemed to stop functioning no matter how agitated the rest of her, noted that there was something about his ears that wasn't quite right, and if she weren't mistaken—which she rarely was, when observing—he was… was he glowing? Before she could bite back the rude words, they slipped from her mouth. "What are you?"
He shifted then, the moon illuminating him with its faint creamy light, and her first glimpse of his face was like a painting come to life.
The best-looking man she'd ever seen was Draco Malfoy (though Hermione quite believed she would die before admitting to that opinion). Universally proclaimed as the pinnacle of wizardly beauty whilst attending Hogwarts, as years passed, his looks had only improved. It had broken hearts all over England when he'd been sent to Azkaban for his part in the Battle of Hogsmeade. Even his mugshot had made the girls swoon with its chiseled features, lock of tinsel-like hair falling rakishly over his brow, and lovely mouth twisted into a seductive smirk.
The man before her made Draco Malfoy look about half as attractive as a Dementor.
His hair was the exact shade of expensive champagne, and his eyes were the colour of the mist-shrouded dawn-- grey, but also pearl and charcoal and silver and slate and stone. They were ancient, and they were laughing at her, even if the exquisitely formed mouth was not. He stepped closer to her, and she caught a whiff of his scent: a combination of earth and pine and sky and night, and Hermione was gripped for the first time in her life with the nearly overwhelming desire—no, the need—to kiss a man. Her gaze dropped to his lips, and she wondered if they'd be hard or soft beneath her own.
"Yon school is not the only home of magic," he said then, his voice like a rivulet of silk whispering over her skin. She barely had time to shiver at the feel of it before he brushed a fingertip to each of her eyelids, the sensation making sparks form behind them as they closed. The sparks faded immediately, and so did consciousness; Hermione was dimly aware of strong arms coming around to keep her from tumbling to the forest floor, and then there was nothing.
Ron was running.
After all, trapped as he was in his own body, locked into a never-ending autumn day at a deserted version of Hogwarts in his mind, there was nothing else to do. He couldn't leave the castle, though many times he'd tried. Sometimes, looking out a window, he could see other people on the grounds: his family, his friends. Strangers he assumed were doctors trying to help him, trying to release him from his mental prison. He tried calling to them, but they were always too far away to hear him. Frustration and rage would fill him on those occasions—indeed, he didn't seem to need a catalyst for his rage and frustration, it was just always there, simmering inside him—and so, for lack of anything else to do with himself, he would run.
He was running now.
Up from the great doors at the entrance to the castle, down a stone corridor, up a flight of stairs that shifted in mid-ascension. Weightless, gripping the banister that felt both solid and insubstantial at the same time under his grasping fingers, he felt the breeze of motion waft across his face as he swung on the stairs to a new position. Scarcely waiting for the steps to lock into place, he leapt forward and took off down that corridor. The destination didn't seem to matter, only the movement. It was imperative, somehow, that he not stop. As if the entire world would crumble away if he stopped.
And so he ran.
Letting his feet choose for him where he went. Ron ran until he came to the Astronomy Tower and loped up the steps two at a time. At the top, he skidded to a halt and gazed out over the rolling grounds of Hogwarts. Squinting against the sun that filled his eyes but which, curiously, did not feel warm to him, he spotted a figure in the distance, running full-tilt toward the Forbidden Forest. The banner of bushy hair that streamed out behind the figure confirmed his suspicions: it was Hermione. He wanted to call out to her, to make her stop, to keep her safe. But there was no 'safe' anymore, he knew. Not since that fateful day, when he'd been wrenched from his life and locked within his own mind, had anything been safe.
Ron was fully aware of what had happened to him; he'd been hit by Malfoy with an Avada, and Hermione had scarcely managed to keep it from killing him. He had felt the icy-hot stream of energy hit him, felt the two magics fighting, one destructive, one protective. Had felt Hermione's spell vanquish Malfoy's killing curse. And he had felt it all within the same split second before his consciousness had been roughly shoved to the back of his mind and sealed away as securely as any secret in a vault at Gringott's.
Ron missed his parents, his brothers, his sister. He missed Harry; he missed Hermione. It was agonizing to be able to see them from the Astronomy Tower, but unable to speak to them, though he'd shouted himself hoarse so many times trying, always trying. He tried again this time, willing Hermione to hear him, but she just continued toward the forest.
Sometimes he hated her for doing this to him. Better to have died, Ron reasoned, than to spend all day running through the castle, surrounded by cold grey stone, by shadows and dust and cobwebs from spiders that never existed. There was no one here, nothing alive or moving besides himself. He couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, and even the books in the library couldn't be read. There was nothing to do but run.
He was bloody well sick of running.
Hermione's figure disappeared into the trees, then, and Ron sighed. He knew she was trying to find a way to help him, and wondered idly if she were doing it for him, or because she couldn't resist a challenge. He supposed it didn't matter, really. Not like he could do anything about it, either way. Until she succeeded in whatever she was trying to do to bring him back, or until some kind soul took pity on him and finished him off, there was nothing he could do.
Nothing but run, that is.
A faint breeze swirled around him, caressing his cheek for the briefest of moments. Ron covered the spot with his hand, willing the sensation to last, but all too soon it faded, just like everything else. With a resigned sigh, he turned and ran down the stairs.
At Ron's bedside at Saint Mungo's, Hermione had finished whispering her plans into his ear and brushed a kiss over his wan face. "I'll be back soon, Ron," she murmured. "Soon, you'll be awake again."