The month of July passed incredibly quickly, even though Hermione was doubling every day. To her despair, the conundrums of the ring and the cup weren't yet solved, even after all of her long hours of research – Magical France had some lovely public libraries, a quality she wished could have carried over to Britain – and she had only just hit the age of sixteen, the magical majority in France, so she had to wait until now to enact her plan with the two horcruxes she did have.

Hermione had cut her losses and decided to use fiendfyre on her two hostage soul pieces, both because she would have a better chance of avoiding detection in France, and that she was simply too impatient to wait until she had all four to destroy them. Not to mention, she could apparate herself there, instead of relying on the uncomfortable feeling of side-along apparition.

If her Arithmancy calculations were correct, she would have an 88% chance of destroying the horcruxes without destroying anything else around her. She had chosen an empty field and warded it against everything barring single celled organisms. The chances here were much better than her family's summer cottage (a depressing 45%) and incredibly better than at Shell Cottage (an even more disturbing 16%). She was almost hoping she missed something in the equations, skewing the numbers to be far lower than she'd like, but had double-checked her work far too many times for that to be the truth.

She had planned the same operation for the other two horcruxes as well, and it had the side effect of not letting anything containing matter out of the circle as well. Hopefully this would stop the fiendfyre, if her will wasn't strong enough to control it.

The most dangerous element of fiendfyre was the amount of magical, emotional, and mental control it required. It demanded the caster have a concentrated desire to destroy something around it, to obliterate it into a thousand particles. Once cast, though, fiendfyre became a physical representation of the emotions that created it. It didn't take a genius to feel strongly enough to create those emotions and cast the spell, but it did take a lot of mental willpower to turn right around and control those emotions after feeling them.

Fortunately, Hermione was an accomplished occlumens, and a skilled spellcaster to boot. She had read myriads of accounts describing the process of fiendfyre, the pain that casters went through after their spell had gone wild, and had determined it was worth the risk and the potential sacrifice.

And so, standing in a lovely green field in the hills of rural France, surrounded by some of the toughest wards the world had ever seen, Hermione placed the diadem and locket on a "borrowed" stone table.

She thought about the pain and suffering Voldemort had caused; the personal sacrifice she and all the resistance members had gone through, and the lengths she had and would go to in order to eviscerate the demononic man who had caused it.

"Thuete Maxima!" She bellowed, speaking her spell for the first time in months. And her ugly emotions took a beautiful yet uglier form, twisting and growing and feeding off one another in a terrible orange light – Hermione was caught up in it for just a second, blood rushing and heart beating, hating right along with the mass of fire that looked like some winged monstrosity. Let it burn, let it destroy, she thought.

And all of a sudden, it was growing beyond just the table and towards her. It wanted to destroy her, too, and burn her into cinders like the diadem and the locket, on the table. For one, disastrous moment, Hermione let it grow closer and closer to her. The thing was less than a foot away from her before she came to her senses.

"No!" She screamed, and willed the mass downward, stifling it. It fought, hissing and spurting like some wild thing, but she was stronger. Hermione snarled and spat right back at it, siphoning it away with her wand like she was holding a sword, and as soon as she jabbed at it, she knew she had won – the longer she focused on it, the smaller it got, like it was slowly eating itself instead of feeding on the world around it. It got smaller and smaller, until it was more of a pitiful fluttering light than a monstrous flame, and Hermione slumped in on herself, exhausted.

She breathed heavily, closing her eyes to help herself calm down. She peeked at the – now blackened – stone table, and to her relief there was nothing but ash atop it. But to her astonishment, she saw something stirring in it.

Something black and dirty emerged from the piles, and in front of her eyes seemed to grow in size and density. Hermione was frozen, horrified, as the two black blobs became large enough to run into one another, and suddenly merged into a swirling mass. Before Hermione realized what was happening, the mass noticed her presence and began to rush towards her. She jumped into action, immediately bringing her wand up to cast the strongest shield in her arsenal.

It slammed into the shield like a ton of bricks, spreading out to ooze towards the extent of her shield. Narrowing her eyes, Hermione stabbed her wand outwards, pushing the shield farther and sending the black mass careening backwards. She panted heavily. Her young magical core didn't have a lot more stamina for fighting this black mass – she realized, in the scant moments she had before it gathered into a mostly opaque blob once more, she was fighting the wraith-like soul of Voldemort.

Cutting her losses, she dissipated the wards around her, and apparated away.

There was no way she knew to defeat a wraith like that, and the last thing she wanted was to go through a battle of wills with an angry spirit that wanted to possess her.

Back in the privacy of her bedroom in Rouen, freshly decorated with more wards than most people would cast in their lifetime, Hermione allowed herself to reflect on what had happened.

She had seen firsthand the way Voldemort's spirit emerged from the ashes of his horcruxes, like some sort of demented phoenix. Interestingly, she hadn't seen this happen before, even when she destroyed Hufflepuff's cup. She supposed that the two waifs seemed to be fairly innocuous before they merged together. Hermione wondered how much of Voldemort's soul was now out in the world. Of course, she knew the rest of his soul would eventually have to join as a spirit, or the whole effort would be for naught. She wished it could be as simple as Voldemort becoming a ghost, or deciding at the last minute to just bugger off to hell already. Unfortunately, life was never so easy.

Another part of Hermione feared what would have happened if she had actually destroyed all four horcruxes at once. Would her magic have been strong enough to defeat all four parts of Voldemort's soul together? She had almost lost, today, and that would have been catastrophic on so many levels. If just a portion of Voldemort's wraith was enough to give her a run for her money, what hope did she have of defeating the dark lord with a whole soul?

Hermione collapsed on her bed; after a crazy day like today, she deserved a rest. So it was only natural that her two-way mirror chose that moment to ring. She groaned, but stood up from her bed to answer.

"Hello Sirius," she said, picking up the mirror. Sirius looked like Hermione felt, and had a look in his eyes that was more fearful than anything she had seen from him. "Is everything ok?"

AN: Sorry for the cliffhanger. I couldn't help myself! As always, thanks for the interest and reviews.

I have made a few decisions in this chapter that I thought it prudent to justify. One, there is no magical significance to reaching your majority. I know it's a common trope in the fanfiction world (in fact, one of my all-time favorites, The Problem with Purity, uses the magical majority as a main plot point). Since there's no reference to it in canon, I will happily not use that idea for my story. Second, I'm treating magic like a muscle to be trained – Hermione isn't as strong as she would've been with her 21-year-old body, because her sixteen-year-old self hasn't trained as intensively with her magic. Therefore, she's a fair bit weaker than she was in the future.

Also, if anyone would be willing to beta read for me, I'd be very happy to get some help cleaning up my earlier chapters. I don't think there's a lot of grammatical errors, but I'm sure my phrasing could use some help. PM me if you're interested!

Spells created: "Thuo Maxima" is a bastardization of Ancient Greek and Latin, using "Thuo," the word for sacrifice in greek, and "Maxima" as the typical Latin superlative in HP spells. Together, it says "I sacrifice the most," which I'm using very creatively to imply the personal sacrifice it takes to cast it (like creating an inferus in Time to Spare) and the subsequent maximum destruction of whatever the caster uses it on (and potentially themselves, like Crabbe in book 7).