There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you.

Marion Zimmer Bradley - The Mists of Avalon


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The war began with a whisper, and then another.

Hatred and fear-mongering about Muggleborns increased, and so did their responding violence. The fringe radicals Tom Riddle had once stoked on either side stepped towards the centre. Society's fractured bones punctured through to the surface and lay exposed and bleeding.

The question of the second apple rang unanswered as the war loomed, threatened, and then began in earnest. But all that violence was a backdrop for Hermione, set to a song of questions like why am I here? what do I do with the second apple? why must I suffer this too? how can we possibly find a way to send me back in time after a quarter of a century with no real leads?

Hermione stood at Albus Dumbledore's side as he built the Order of the Phoenix up from the ashes of a society where neighbour had lost trust in neighbour, but she did not fight. She couldn't, because of the hag-blasted oath she'd sworn to a beautiful boy by a lake all those decades ago. But even if she had been able to, Hermione had no interest in fighting a war whose outcome - whose every death - was fixed before her involvement.

"The war is your job," she told Albus. "Mine is to worry about what comes after."

It was a mantra she repeated to herself often as the bodies piled up and the age grew darker.

(Caradoc disappeared and something inside her broke).

But Lord Voldemort never stepped out into the light to bring his grand ideas to the mainstream, and she wondered at that. She had known, of course, that he wouldn't, but it was different to see the shadowy world of hate and fear he built from behind a curtain. His myth grew massive in people's imaginations, but he was capable of things few could even think of. He won nothing from staying hidden, and yet for the most part he did.

She wondered if, somewhere, somehow, he was ashamed of the monster he had become. Not of the brutality, perhaps, but she thought the man she had known would have hated the inefficiency of this attempt to take power. Hated the waste of magical blood. Hated how many stood against him.

War was not a sacrifice. War was a waste. War only cost and never gave except to feed misery and fear. Hermione wanted no part in it.

Instead, she wondered what it would take to heal the country after it was all over, to heal the part no one else seemed to see or worry about. To heal the magic itself that she was sure was growing weaker.

And if another threat followed in the cooling footsteps of this one, what position would they be in to face it? Education dumbed down from all sides, and children raised on suspicion and fear.

And then one day Hermione Dearborn woke up from a dream so vivid she recognised it as her mind providing her with an answer she'd long sought, and so she went to her most warded vault, deep in her castle, and she took the shining golden apple – its lustre undimmed by time – and she left the war behind to follow a dream, a dream of Avalon.

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Later, when she looked back, Hermione would see 1981 as the strangest year of her life.

On the main earth of Great Britain, Lord Voldemort was at the very peak of his power, after ten long and bloody and fraught years.

But offshore, something else began to happen.

Hermione Dearborn, who had lived in many fine and strange places, and was known in certain circles as an extremely powerful sorceress, set up her life alone on a small yacht and took to sailing around the seas and coastline searching and searching for something she had seen in dream.

If Xenophilius Lovegood had seen her then, she thought, he would have had to eat his stupid pointy yellow hat.

Finding the Argante had been its own quest: she'd started life as a small Muggle yacht but Hermione had worked with a magical fisherman on Skye for several weeks to modify her for a long and often grim sea voyage. Her hull was reinforced, her cabins enlarged. She had a small Potions lab and a miniature library, both protected from the damaging sea air. A real bed and a real kitchen and bathroom would have made life more comfortable but there was a limit to the size she could be safely expanded and so they were improved but remained very much more cramped than ideal. Her sails learned to tack themselves. Ropes would recoil if left unattended. Even in the worst storm she would never capsize. Her nets wouldn't come up too full or too empty, and a barrel at the back was enchanted to purify both sea and rainwater. When the wind lulled to nothing or became too strong she could skim through the water by magic alone, quick as a bird.

So, the Argante became a magical boat and she was the sleekest, fastest, and most comfortable vessel Hermione had ever been on. Thirty years of exploration had not yet made her a seasoned sailor, but the Argante needed little guidance compared to a Muggle boat. She tacked into winds with the instincts of an old fisherman in bays he'd known all his life and could take care of much of the complexities of sailing by herself. Hermione's most important job would be to navigate – and, of course, to search.

But still she was a just boat, and as they began their lonely journey from the Scottish islands Hermione wondered if she would go mad; if perhaps she had already gone mad. They set off one day in May, the pre-dawn light as beautiful as she had ever seen, escorted by the little local fleet of fishing boats.

The Argante leapt eagerly beneath Hermione's guiding hands, her course set for nowhere in particular except away away away.

Standing at the helm as she set off that first morning, as land and other boats vanished into memory behind her, was the freest and loneliest she had ever before felt.

"Where are you?" Hermione murmured into salt-laden air, the sharp morning breeze wilding her hair and turning her nose and cheeks pink and whipping her words away into nothingness.

There was no answered call: the barren rock she sought as yet had no magic to summon her back. But somewhere, somehow, it was waiting. It had to be.

Days passed slowly, and then weeks, and then months. Sometimes she sighted other vessels and if they were close enough sometimes they'd wave and ask where she was bound. At first she found this a relief to the wearying isolation that came with life alone on a boat. But when loneliness turned to lonesomeness she often choose to enchant the Argante invisible so she could slip past unquestioned.

Hermione learned the languages of the sea in those summer months. She learned where to anchor and where to avoid. Once, she learned the terrible, agonising fear of returning to find the vessel had slipped its weak mooring on some rock and had floated away. But Hermione was a witch and she could apparate to the Argante from almost any shore in the world and so she kept on her quest.

"What are you looking for?" a woman with odd eyes like Luna's asked when Hermione stopped for food and a rare break on land one July day on Bardsey Island.

"What makes you think I'm looking for anything?" the witch replied with a smile. They were packing a crate with cheese and meat and eggs and fresh vegetables and her mouth was watering at the thought. It had been three weeks since her last stop on land and though spells could keep things fresh, there was still a limit.

"You've just got a look in your eyes, like you've seen a white whale."

"Something like that. I'm probably just chasing a dream."

"Well, if you can afford it," the woman said pragmatically as she hefted the crate and a sack of flour onto the cart.

"No price is too great for hope," Hermione agreed with the sort of cryptic smile she knew this too-wise small-holder's wife would enjoy, though she wondered if she meant it. The family could afford to share only a little of what they had, though she cheerfully overpaid them for it. It was only two miles to the mainland – and therefore far more variety of food – from here, but she wouldn't step back onto that until she'd searched every damn rock in every damn ocean.

"Call me Ishmael," she told her little boat as they set off again, the mass of the Welsh coastline vanishing behind them. "Or don't, as I hope I'm not that mad yet, even if I am talking to you."

The rock in Hermione's dream had belonged to no nation. It was far enough out to sea to be fully out of sight from any other land, but far too small to have ever been inhabited by anything but birds. The exact shape of it was imprinted on her mind as though she'd stared too long at something lit up, and closed her eyes to find it burned on her retinas long after.

The rock was her hope and her dream and she sailed on and on, always out of sight of land unless she needed more food; always outside the border on the map of Magical Britain she had stolen from a Ministry Archive; on through late summer storms, looping back on herself to make sure she'd covered every inch.

When she found the rock, she'd lost track of the days but she knew the season had long since turned to Autumn. The night before had been a stormy one, so bad she'd been tossed out of her bunk onto the floor. Normally a ship of the Argante's size wouldn't be fit for weather like that in open seas, but magic kept her safe (if not steady) and they made it through the night with dry decks, and a only a bruised hip to show for damage.

The long and fruitless journey was beginning to take its toll and Hermione realised she wasn't sure she'd cope alone on the seas during the winter. This bitter pill, on top of a horrific and sleepless night, meant tears were still mingling with the spray whipped up by strong winds as she took the tiller that morning.

Nothing else marked the day, spent somewhere between Ireland and America though far closer to the former, as particular. Far away on land Muggle children across the Atlantic were dressing in costumes and carving their last pumpkins. At the end of the day the sun had struggled through the clouds and it was this that showed her the way: lighting up the rock that burned so clearly in her memory as it set behind it.

Hope and magic flared together, sending the Argante flying across the water to reach the tiny rocky outcrop before the light died completely.

She dropped anchor and apparated onto the only foothold she could see, scrambling to reach the top. As the light died Hermione saw there was just enough earth to plant the apple, just as there had been in her dream.

Guided by magic alone, as she had been a very few times before, Hermione set the world's rarest ingredient alight with her most powerful fire-spell. She told the veins in her wrist to open and let her blood pour out onto the hot ashes and, weak and crying with relief and exhaustion, she scraped the blood and ashes together into the patch of mud.

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When Hermione woke to a bright dawn, her throat drier than anything she'd seen since May, the rock had already grown.

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Argante is a niche reference to Arthuriana: she is Avalon's elvish queen in Layamon's Brut, who will heal Arthur's wounds and restore him.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL THE LOVE. I've had quite a few new readers lately! Welcome, and a special outpouring of love for people who send their thoughts as they go through. It is my favourite thing.

Thank you also to everyone who voted in the the Beyond The Book FanFiction Nook Summer 2018 Awards - I think voting is open for another week or so if you haven't done that.

Also to my Great Love, SallyJAvery, who makes this readable (and who is a very talented writer herself).

And lastly, thank you to everyone who's stayed with this over the years. It's not the end yet though!

The next chapter is mostly done, I'll have it up in a few days once people have had a chance to read this.

Let me know what you think - what has she done?

PS this was sort of a Halloween chapter just a little bit late