"I felt the currents move. The grains of sand whispered against each other. His wings were lifting. The darkness around us shimmered with clouds of his gilded blood. Beneath my feet were the bones of a thousand years. I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer.

Then, child, make another."

― Madeline Miller, Circe


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Tom did not release her easily. He walked at her side like a phantom limb she could not unfeel, long after it had been amputated. He was there in the dawns when she woke in phantasmic arms only to reach out to a cold bed. He was there in company when she'd look up to catch his absent eye in an unshared joke. A decade together, trampled into dust.

Hermione did not forget and so she walked on through the years with a silver shield of scar tissue to face down the world. Sometimes she shared her bed, sometimes even her heart - but there was no one whose eyes glimmered at her triumphs in quite his way. No one who pushed her. Beauty, but never sublimity. Romance - but not partnership.

Those early years were shaded dark and colourless with the loss of him, with the failure of it, with the constant nagging wonder: what was the point, all along?

But life goes on after loss, and Hermione was left to forge her own path.

(Why wasn't I enough?)

Her greatest triumph in those faded years was the stone, of course. It turned her magic full circle, from her first year at Hogwarts. She'd helped destroy a stone to fight Tom Riddle once and now she was making one to outlive him - and yet it was a triumph Tom (her Tom, Tom-less-splintered) would have relished. It would have brought out that look in his eyes no one else ever quite echoed and when she looked down at it for the first time after two years of making it she still longed for that look. Something better than pride; something that made her feel seen.

This was how Hermione learned how to make a Philosopher's Stone:

Rowena Ravenclaw had sacrificed the last fae to close off Avalon and live on in that timeless realm. The Hogwarts founders had given up some part of their bloodlines to keep the school strong. It lasted even into death; or Helena would have left long ago. Horcruxes took more than a life. Hermione had sworn herself a soldier to light a branch of eternal flame.

(Could I have prevented him?)

All greater magic took a tithe: she knew that as well as anyone now. Perhaps better.

So Hermione worked out the price of the stone and off she went to Albania to get it. It was not a cheap payment, this. Eternity demanded a different kind of eternity, just as a greedy Horcrux took a life to make a life.

She would give up godhead, give up the chance to turn her blood to ichor with a golden bite and turn an apple into a stone.

(For Hermione knew what Tom Riddle did not: living forever was a curse more than a blessing and one day she would want to die. She knew that biting into a golden apple would take its own toll for the power and immortality it gave. She would no longer be a witch if she ate it, she would be something more - and something less.)

That great cost of magic had eluded alchemists for centuries - but it was hardly that simple.

The rest of the recipe was as mysterious as its final ingredient. Nicolas Flamel had shared his centuries before. But attempts to recreate it had failed. Most alchemists led a lonely life chasing a fool's-gold dream: never realising that the strangest of magical arts required each to find their own recipe. Hermione could no more follow Flamel's than she could fly to Jupiter. But Hermione was not alone.

(Why am I here?)

She was an alchemist's daughter - and Cerdic had already turned base metals into gold.

"Here," she said one day in the castle after breakfast (after the winter of grey and tears and heartbreak worse than losing Harry had turned into a spring of purpose), "I brought you something."

She wasn't sure why she'd waited so long, why it had taken the loss of Tom to take this step towards her own greatness, but she slid the shining, golden apple down the polished surface of the table with a sense of rightness.

"Don't eat it," she warned with a smile and watched her father examine it curiously. It took a moment before Cerdic remembered what she'd told him before she went to Albania - the final ingredient - and then his face grew reverent. His warm brown eyes met her own, filled with joy and wonder, and a little colour slipped back into the world.

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Knowing how to make a Philosopher's Stone was one thing. Actually making it was quite another.

The potion was complicated beyond her wildest imaginings. It required ingredients like a flower picked from a mountain at the centre of the world, phoenix tears (willingly given and only to be added during a three planet parade), even - rather horribly - a live Red Cap pixie. The list was long and complicated and even though Cerdic had taught her enough alchemy to understand some of what he needed, the instructions made Hermione's head spin. No wonder he had lived in isolation for decades.

No wonder this drove people to madness.

If she was wrong about the apple, they would be wasting months, possibly years -

(Was it real?)

but she relished its challenge. It called her back to herself, forced her into her own skin.

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Phoenix tears were one of the easiest ingredients to obtain. After a frustrating lesson with Albus where all their theories of time travel were unravelled, once again, to nothing, she simply asked permission to talk to Fawkes.

"You can make the request, Hermione, as others have before. Sometimes he will and sometimes he will not."

So she sat for hours with the startlingly beautiful bird, at the height of his cycle of life and death and rebirth, and told him her story. It was more lament than epic, then, with her heart shrouded in mourning and aching for an impossible future.

I let myself believe in him, Fawkes, she said, through her own tears. And now I have four decades of war and sorrow ahead of me, forty years where I can't stop him and I can't really help anyone. I just want to be young enough to take back my own future when I get there.

Cerdic still had some ingredients from his experiments through the decades but others were far more complicated to obtain and required either large amounts of gold, good contacts, or Hermione to hunt them down herself in whatever far-flung corner of the world he'd gleaned them from in his youthful experiments.

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One of the most memorable ingredient-gathering trips Hermione took was this:

Russia and its firebirds were a fair way to being locked down behind its iron curtain, even to witches these days. Especially to witches. Her first impression was a land of grey buildings and grey faces whipped by a wind so sharp it could have cut diamonds. A land sold a lie of equality.

Soviet Moscow was terrifyingly cold in the spring of 1958. Its sky was hard and flat as iron, unrelenting and vast. All Hermione needed was a feather, but that was a dangerous land for magic, and asking the wrong person could get you killed.

As she walked through Pushkin Square towards Aragvi, the KGB-favoured restaurant where she would meet the woman who would, she hoped, help her buy what she needed, Hermione decided Moscow was as almost as red as it was grey. It was a city bathed in the colours of a dying fire. Red flags fluttered everywhere in that slicing breeze, a blood-on-ash reminder of allegiance no one could possibly need. The official reason for Hermione's visit was this: she was representing a Marxist women's group - hiding in plain sight was the safest and easiest way to visit the USSR.

Russian magicians had never developed their own society-in-hiding in the way many European countries like Britain had. And so, when Communism had swept the Empire like a fever, nearlyas many witches and wizards had joined the struggle as Muggles. Theirs was against the Dark Wizard who stood next to the Tsar like a poisoned shadow before he'd been killed to help make way for revolution, and against the Imperial power that had stamped out what had once been relative harmony between Muggle and magic. In the years after, Rasputin's singular power and influence were remembered and any mention of magic was viciously oppressed. Books were banned, the psychics and wise-women went underground. Some left to fight both for and against Grindlewald, as his war spread across central Europe and threatened the Soviet states.

In the USSR magic was outlawed - except when the Kremlin thought it would be useful.

Katya Lebedev was waiting for Hermione at their table. She stood up to shake Hermione's hand, welcoming her rather loudly, "Helen Dearly from Women for Marxism? Welcome to Moskva."

She a witch with a sweet, round face and eyes that crinkled up at the corners one moment and flashed a warning the next.

"What an extraordinary place," Hermione murmured back a line of code in reply. "I can see it rebuilt in Rome."

Indeed, Aragvi was extraordinary. In the middle of a city where food was scarce and unvaried, the twelve-page menu would have silenced the Tsars themselves.

"Everything from my mother's home," Katya told Hermione after she'd ordered from a suspiciously military-looking waiter. "In Georgia. Ah, Georgia! The wine, the wine - you must visit."

Hermione nodded politely, wondering if the table was bugged.

"Tell me how was your journey," the older woman continued. Hermione obeyed. She'd made the trip as a Muggle, aware of the intense scrutiny she might be under.

She'd been put in touch with Katya, a loyal KGB agent who liked to make a few extra rubles on the black market. She was also a witch. Hermione, smiling as they clinked glasses, chose not to wonder what role magic played in her work.

Katya tapped the table meaningfully, and placed a little silver button on it, which gave off a very faint whirring noise, like an ancient, dust-laden fan struggling on against the odds.

"Everywhere is bugged," she said cheerfully. "I had to get you talking so your voice would be picked up. Now we will be recorded as having a boring conversation about the terrible state of your bourgeois nation and so on. A clever little trick is it not?"

It was much cleverer than merely masking the conversation, Hermione conceded. Katya did not offer the origin of the device and seemed disinclined to explore that conversational avenue any further. Hermione wondered if the other woman thought she might be a British spy.

She watched the way Katya drank the wine of her mother's land like it tasted holy. The way she let the caviar slide down her throat like lemonade in summer, how she savoured her lobio, as though it was the only warm thing she had eaten in days.

"Can you get it?" she asked eventually.

"Business later," Katya said dismissively. "But yes, I will tell you where to get it. First, tell me about Hogwarts."

"Hogwarts?" Hermione echoed, surprised.

"We do not have a school like this. We learn from the village wise-woman or a relative. Some children were left in the woods for the cherti. Once the rich went to Durmstrang, but not now. How would you explain it? A boarding school!" she laughed dismissively, but there was a hunger in her voice unsated by the food.

"Hogwarts is a castle in Scotland," Hermione started slowly, wondering why she wanted to know. Wondering if this was dangerous. "How do you know about it?"

"A wizard told me once. He said the best children go there to learn. He said it was the greatest school in the world. He said it was safe to be magic because they'd never find you. He said your wizards live in a separate world, not alongside Muggles."

Was she really a mostly-loyal Soviet soldier who hungered for something more, Hermione wondered, or was it all an act?

"Hogwarts is… it's more than I could ever tell you. A castle of secrets that reveal themselves when they're most needed - and sometimes when you really don't want one. A staircase you have climbed a thousand times takes you somewhere new one day when you're late. The Great Hall has a ceiling that mirrors the night sky. During the day it's covered in constellations we don't see in the northern hemisphere."

"What do they teach you?"

"The main disciplines of magic like Transfiguration, Charms, Potions… About the flora and fauna of the magical world. Transport like flying or apparition."

Katya frowned and drank deep of her wine.

"Do these wizards not have an unnatural and unfair superiority over the majority of people?"

"Unfair, perhaps, but magic isn't unnatural."

"We believe it is." Katya said, as she gestured for a second bottle.

"Once perhaps, but with all the technology and might developed by your state do you not think that's less relevant now?"

This was a clever answer, for it flattered as it argued and the other woman smiled slightly.

"Perhaps, but an individual witch like you is born with unnatural power over an individual without it. This creates a class system where magicians are unnaturally elevated. Here, we either use that to advance the cause or we die."

Something in her tone made Hermione wonder if this ordinary looking woman was a witch-hunter. But where the teenage version of herself might have rushed in, horrified and ready to fight and judge, the adult sat back to consider.

"Magic," she said after a time, "is harder to wield here. Have you noticed?"

"Yes," the other woman said proud and sad together, a woman who longed to be more and hated herself for it; a woman who killed her own kind but wanted to know what they were like. "We have been destroying the source of inequality for many years."

Hermione listened in silence as the woman described the steps taken by the special branch of Soviet intelligence to which she belonged to finally kill off the dangerous, unnatural knotweed of magic and magical children. She felt startlingly sober, despite the wine, though indeed she'd been wandlessly vanishing much of it to help keep her head clear.

A land that had been full of wild, extraordinary magic had now been choked of it, first by religion and then by this new, grey form of collective worship.

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At last it was over, and when Hermione had paid both the bill and an extortionate bribe, Katya gave her what she'd come for: instructions for a meeting with the man who had a firebird feather.

"By the way," Hermione asked as they stood outside the restaurant, ready to part, "the man who told you about Hogwarts. What was his name?"

"He called himself Lord Voldemort," Katya said, frowning. "He came to us seeking knowledge of an ancient magic. We showed him how we had destroyed it."

"Thank you," Hermione said hoarsely and tried to smile. "I'm sure that was very wise."

This was a danger she had never foreseen and she felt untethered by it, her worldview upended.

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Other ingredients were more difficult. Hermione travelled to those hidden pockets of the world to collect them, learning as she went. At times it seemed an impossible, arrogant mission and she came close to giving up.

The memory of Cerdic's hope and her own longing to see Harry and her family pushed her through but so did this: a burning sense of purpose that began as a vague sense of wanting to do some good in the world and gradually formed itself into a blueprint of something more.

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The first attempt went badly wrong, melting a hole in the cauldron, and seeping out onto the stone floor of the alchemy room beneath the castle. The stain never left and smelled faintly of blood.

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The second, many months later, did not.

It was an extraordinary moment and one that would echo through her mind over the years, on the days she doubted her own power and drive.

The stone began as a potion, made up of a hundred hundred ingredients from all over the globe. She knew it was right the same bone-deep way she knew she was magic, as Cerdic added a vial containing three phoenix tears and the cauldron's contents shuddered and shimmered and turned a pure, shining white, gold smoke pouring off it smelling like the first breath of spring and the last breeze of summer.

"It's ready," she whispered, hardly daring to believe it.

This was the moment: days of sweating as she trekked up mountains, risked imprisonment for smuggling expensive and protected ingredients out of Japan; captured members of a fierce tribe of Red Caps at a haunted ruin on the Scottish border; found new ways to preserve herbs and flowers and leaves as she went.

"This would turn any base metal to gold" Cerdic said. "But I never found the next step until you came, Hermione. Add it and let's see if we've done all we thought."

She took a deep breath.

"Are you sure? You've spent your whole life trying to make it, you should do it."

As an answer he went to the carefully-protected cabinet at the back of the ancient workroom, opened it and took down the box containing the golden apple she had given him.

(The other was hidden away, a question she had not yet answered.)

He opened the box and handed her the apple. Even in the dim candlelight of the alchemy workroom it had its own unearthly glow, a promise of eternal life and power. A promise of immortality she was going to sacrifice.

The workroom was silent, even the fire seemed quiet, like the way the wind drops before a storm, or a silent crowd before a starting pistol at the Olympics. A moment, a choice, that stretched out, out -

- out until she took it from him and, before she could think about it too much, gently dropped it into the potion.

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Nothing happened as they stared down at the smooth white surface, golden tendrils rising with their heavenly scent. Nothing happened and then it did.

The surface began to boil and Hermione leapt back, pulling Cerdic with her, a split-second before the explosion. For a moment the world was gold, golden mist, hotter than the apex of a volcano she'd stared down into as she tried to capture a rare lizard dwelling there two months earlier. Hot and fierce and terrifying. The work bench splintered and caught fire, buckling as the cauldron split and her heart sank. The ball of gas turned bright white, and she shut her eyes against its devastating brightness.

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Wrong wrong wrong - she'd fucked it up and wasted the rarest ingredients on earth for nothing. A scream was caught in her throat, ripping its way out without ever leaving, on and on, silent and painful and unending.

Then the great white mass retreated back into itself, turning ruby-red as it imploded. Stars are born like this, she thought wildly -

and and and

- and there it was. The searing heat gone as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a blood-red stone no bigger than the palm of her hand.

Next to her, Cerdic slid down to his knees and she followed, embracing him as they wept together.

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thank you for all the amazing love you guys give this story. i can't describe what a gift it is. i read every single one and they mean SO much. a special thank you to my dearest SallyJAvery, who is the polish to my rough-hewn mahogany.

this chapter is dedicated to GoldNiffler1996. i hope you like it.

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