Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, Hogwarts, Gringotts, the Leaky Cauldron or anything else in JKR's wonderful world. Except for the little pebble just to left of the front doors of Hogwarts. I put that there. I might own that. Maybe. But probably not.

Aftermath

Six months later

Brian Denley sat in a little coffee shop reading the front page of the day's newspaper. The entire front page was taken up by the preliminary report of what had become known as 'The Stonehenge Event', and what an event it had been.

Stonehenge was complete.

That was an undeniable, indisputable fact. Oh, the outlying stones, the evidence of a larger, wooden, circle and burials and human habitation were as they always had been, but the main stone circle with its Sarcens and blue stones and lintels, that was whole once again for the first time in thousands of years. Dozens of experts on the monument had come to the agreement that what was there, was Stonehenge. All the huge stones that had been missing for millennia had wondrously, miraculously reappeared and been reassembled. Many had argued the newly returned giants couldn't possibly be original to the structure, but dozens of exhaustive tests had proven the newly returned stones had each come from the same proper quarries as the ones that had stood upon the plain since they'd been placed there.

More, the entire structure seemed to have been restored to a pristine condition, as if millennia of erosion had been undone. Marks and carvings which had been previously barely discernable or visible only to esoteric scientific devices now stood proud on the ancient stones, easily seen by the human eye. Carvings on the newly returned stones seemed to correspond to the older stones and were still being hotly debated as to their meanings.

Yes, the circle of Stonehenge was whole, complete, but even with the entire structure there to study, its purpose remained a mystery. Nobody truly knew what it was for.

But they had an idea…

…it gave life.

The memories he'd had that night were only the precursor to what was going to happen. They had all been about life and living it. The tall grasses and wildflowers that he'd awakened among had been only the first indication of what had happened over night. The trees he'd seen where there had been none the night before was the second. By official estimate between five and ten million trees had sprung up overnight around the site, most dense within seventy-five kilometers and then thinning out to one hundred twenty-five kilometers. Many of them were of species not seen on the plain since Roman times.

Roads, pipelines, electric lines, buildings, all had suffered casualties or been outright destroyed as the plant life had sprung up beneath them. Several small towns and villages had been engulfed as entire forests had appeared around and amongst them. Objects as large as cars had been found high in the air, nestled in the branches of giant oaks and other types of trees.

Young plants, trees and crops, flowers and grasses, had matured overnight, were ready for harvesting, which had brought to light another discovery: the soil was fertile. Not artificially fertile, with fertilizers and additives, but rich natural life-giving fertility with all the things soil needed to be fertile: bacteria, worms, bugs, nutrients. Experts were predicting bumper crops for years to come.

Like the trees the area of effect was over two hundred kilometers with a diminishing effect for another hundred.

Testing of the land led to another amazing find: the water there was pure, cleansed of all impurities, perfect. Streams, rivers, lakes, ponds, aquifers, even tap water, it had all been purified of any sign of pollution, even, to some extent, those areas of the surrounding Atlantic and Channel waters that fell inside the circumference of the affected area.

Even as minds had been boggled at the impossibilities of what they were seeing, someone had been inspired, had looked up, inhaled deeply and exclaimed "It's clean! Clear!"

So, with Earth and Water, why not Air?

With a clarity that had probably never been seen on Earth, the atmosphere around Stonehenge out to two hundred kilometers was pure, no contaminants whatsoever, with a rise in the pollution level from there to normal clear to the eastern border of France.

It hadn't lasted, of course. Air currents and winds and storms had immediately started muddying the skies again, mixing the air around the zone with that within it, as well as the man-made pollutants being produced from within, but for over two months the inhabitants of southern England had a true breath of fresh air. Some, however, complained at first that it smelled dead, sterile, but that lasted only a few days as the smells of nature wafted from the newly born life growing there, to tint the air with perfume.

Life.

It didn't end there. It didn't end there, oh no. What it did to the land, the air, the water, was nothing compared to what it did to the inhabitants, to those who lived there.

Wonderful. Amazing. Miraculous. Astonishing.

Those were only some of the words given. Within fifty kilometers, it cured.

Everything.

A horrible case of teenage acne?

Gone, clear skin left behind.

One foot through Death's door from incurable cancer when that pulse of light swept over you?

You stepped back, closed the door, and got up from your hospital bed and walked out to go home.

Dementia or Alzheimer's or some other degenerative brain or neurological disease?

You greeted friends and family with a clear mind and discussed what you were going to do with the rest of your life.

Cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, ALS, broken bones, open wounds, torn muscles, fever, infections, burns, poison, blindness, the common cold, it didn't matter. If it was a physical ailment, it…cured…everything!

Whatever the reason, however, purely mental illnesses were unaffected. It seemed the Stonehenge Effect could fix a damaged brain, but not a broken one.

The perimeter of the healing effect was fluid. Simple cuts and scrapes were healed out to one hundred kilometers while more serious injuries varied in the amount of healing depending upon the severity of the injuries. A first stage cancer might be cured completely while anything higher than that might only go into remission. It appeared to depend upon the disease, what affect it had on the body, how severe it was and perhaps the age of the patient.

It appeared the same thing had happened to the animals in the affected area as well.

Needless to say, a great many people were now very much interested in Stonehenge. The number of scientists, and the number of the disciplines of science, researchers and experts in Neolithic cultures intent on studying the ancient henge was so great the government had had to step in to manage access to the site. The fact the government itself had various teams studying various regimes or were studying data others had collected did not go unnoticed by many people.

What had happened that night had worldwide implications in the areas of pollution, healthcare, food production and a host of other areas that could change the face of the world. Other Neolithic sites and stone circles around Europe were being studied and restudied with a renewed interest. Ancient cultures in the Americas and around the world were having their tales and legends reexamined and it was all because of one thing…

Magic.

Every single person who had been an eyewitness to that night, who had seen what those two women did, agreed on the same thing…they had done nothing but stand before the altar stone and chant. They had performed a ritual in what many had claimed to be a place of power, but, unlike the faux Celts and druids and spiritualists and anyone who claimed a connection to the place who had prayed and chanted and held rituals, they had succeeded! The results were undeniable. Why they did it, and how they did it were unknown, but the success of their deed could not be denied. A very large part of the country and parts beyond had reaped the benefits of that success.

Despite the sceptics and the naysayers, the non-believers and anyone who simply wouldn't believe because it wasn't scientifically possible, what else could it be, but magic?

Which brought the idea of religion into the equation. Stonehenge was thought by some to be a magical place and what had happened certainly didn't fit into any scientific theories or explanations. Many, however, saw the Stonehenge Event as a truly miraculous thing, something only a higher being could accomplish. Many of the trees that had grown overnight were proven by every test imaginable to be hundreds of years old which was scientifically impossible when it came to things like radiocarbon dating. Radioactive isotopes decayed at very specific rates and none of them tested did so in a matter of hours.

Some physicists suggested some form of time dilation, but nobody had the foggiest notion of how that might have been accomplished on so many, over such a large area, much less explain why it hadn't affected people.

So, that left…God.

Christion religion was of two, totally diametrically opposite, minds. One side said the two women were angels sent from Heaven by God to show what the power of faith could do, to show what people could do if they only believed in the power of God.

The other side of the argument said they were agents of Satan, sent to lure people from the path of righteousness with heathenistic pagan rituals and away from the grace of God. To lure them with the promise and temptation of power to the side of the Devil.

They were railed at from pulpits around the world as manifestations of sin itself and praised as heavenly messengers from just as many pulpits for the display of life and healing that surely only God could provide.

Priests, Imams, Rabbis, there were as many opinions as people who wished to voice them, all with their followers.

Wiccans, Druids and other followers of the old ways (as they believed them) were more of the beliefs they were sent by the old gods to give warning about what man had done to the world or give notice of their eventual return.

Which was why there was a nationwide manhunt on for the two women. The government wanted to find out who and what they were, get them to tell what they did, and how, to do it again. Because outside the realm of religion, if the effect could be replicated, studied, duplicated elsewhere, Britain could see itself at the pinnacle of world politics. Other nations would offer incredible concessions on just about anything they wanted if they used this new power to help them.

The media was very careful to try and keep the other reason the government was so eager to find them from being asked: if they could give life, could they not also give death?

Brian didn't care about any of that, all he wanted to know was where Lacey was.

There was a dark side to the Stonehenge Event. In spite of the overwhelming evidence of the ritual that was performed being a good thing, despite various injuries caused by growing trees and such, fourteen people out of the hundreds there had vanished without a trace that night, Lacey being one of them. The theories for why they had vanished were varied, from the crackpot to the chilling. The most prevalent, and the one Brian steadfastly refused to believe in, had been espoused by several well-known witches who stated that great feats of magic required great sacrifices. The total lack of any remains of any of the missing, even any traces of blood, tended to refute the possibility of human sacrifices, however. Several Wiccan covens had emphatically denied any such possibility, stating such an act of good would never have been accomplished with such a dark act of sacrifice.

Scholars had come forth, though, pointing out that ancient peoples had used human sacrifice as an act of appeasing their deities and spirits in the hope of bountiful harvests and favorable seasons. They pointed to many examples of sacrificed bodies being found perfectly preserved in bogs across Europe.

Other scholars had refuted that claim, saying it was only speculation the people had been sacrificed. They argued the bodies could have been victims of crime or conflict, the bodies dumped in the bogs to dispose of them.

The debate continued to rage, even as evidence of the missing was still being sought. Law enforcement was adamant if there had been multiple murders committed, it hadn't been at the Henge, or it had been something like strangulation or poison, and the bodies carried away, because absolutely no evidence had been found to indicate otherwise. Vehicles and some possessions of the missing had been accounted for at the site showing they hadn't just left on their own without telling anybody.

Brian didn't believe the missing had been sacrificed. Lacey had been enchanted by whatever had happened, almost as if she had been summoned. She'd been happy as she had walked into the monument.

He refused to think about how traps were baited with something enticing that the intended target wanted.

He believed as the Wiccans did: you didn't bring about life by causing death. He had read the legends of the ancient peoples, of their known practices, and while sacrifices were made, most human sacrifices were in the fall, to thank the Gods and spirits for a bountiful harvest. They didn't even appear to be done regularly, but only when there had been good crops after years of bad.

Lacey wasn't dead. He knew it. He believed it. He hounded the authorities incessantly in their search for her, the others. His search. What he had felt, what he had seen, had been a celebration of life, a renewal of all things living. Murder would have tainted that celebration, destroyed it. He believed that as fervently as he did that Lacey wasn't dead.

She was alive, somewhere, and he would find her.

His thoughts were interrupted as someone attempted to sit down beside him, bumping into his hip. "Budge over, you." A pleasant voice demanded.

He was a gentleman, but it was just plain rude the way the woman was behaving, and he turned to look at her and say so…only to stop in surprised amazement.

"You!"

A/N: Oh, come on! That's not a cliffy! You know who it's going to be. I just did that because the finish is dry, my 15 minutes are up, and I have to get back to cutting and gluing and sanding and hopefully get another 15 in before bedtime. My muse is flitting around between 4 or 5 stories and maybe I can finish the next chapter over the coming week. Only one to go. Till then, TA! ER