"It's not working," I said, frustrated.

I wasn't the only one; we'd been working on this for weeks, and a third of the class still wasn't able to summon even an silvery mist, much less a corporeal patronus.

After a year and a half of being in the top of the class, it was humiliating to be unable to do this, most important spell. How would I protect my people if I couldn't drive the dementors away? They'd almost gotten me the last time.

"It takes emotion Miss Hebert," Flitwick said. "A pure, happy memory."

"And what if you don't have any of those?" I asked.

I'd tried memories of my mother, but those were tainted by her death. Memories of my father were tainted by his inevitable slide into depression. My relationship with the Undersiders had always been complicated, and my time with the Wards hadn't been particularly happy.

My life here hadn't been happy either.

There had been happy memories, but they had always been fleeting, and none of them were pure.

"Not everyone is capable of this spell," Flitwick said gently. "Which is why it will not be graded."

At least he did not try to assure me that everyone had good memories. He didn't give me a look of pity either; for that I was grateful.

Those who were failing in the task tended to be those who had more troubled lives. Despite that, most of the class wasn't able to produce anything more than a silvery mist, and I doubted that would last under the onslaught of the fear in the dementor's presence.

There was a big difference after all between doing it in a classroom, and doing it in the field.

"I would have liked to have used a boggart as a substitute for a dementor," Flitwick said regretfully. "But as you know, there have been... issues."

The Hogwarts Boggarts had been getting smarter, or so it seemed, at least those that were copying me. Worse, he'd tried bringing a couple into the room, and rather than turning into dementors one had turned into me, and the other into Umbridge.

Most spells at Hogwarts were just a matter of saying the right words, and making the right hand motion. Feelings had never been my specialty; even before I was able to offload my actual feelings into my bugs instead of just my reactions, I'd been good at tamping them down.

This... required that I open up in a way that I wasn't comfortable with.

Hermione had gotten it in the second week, and the pitying looks she kept giving me were beginning to grate on my nerves.

Even Harry was doing better than I was. He'd managed to pull up a soft white mist only a few days ago. Given the bits and pieces I'd heard about his background, it was stunning that he was able to do as much as he did.

Malfoy was one of the ones who couldn't produce a patronus, like me. That seemed to irritate him endlessly, given that Ron Weasley was showing minor progress and liked to throw it in his face.

"I'm amazed that second years can manage it as it is," Flitwick said. "I'd always thought that this was something that only fifth or sixth years could manage, but I am happy to see that I am wrong."

I glanced at Malfoy and he scowled.

If Hermione and I tended to switch back and forth for first and second place in class, he and Harry jockeyed back and forth between third and forth.

Harry hadn't done nearly so well the year before, but since the Death Eater attack on the train he'd applied himself with a vigor I normally associated only with Hermione.

"It will be considerably harder to maintain the emotions under the sort of mental assault you will feel with dementors," he said. "So I encourage you all to keep working at it. Ordinarily, it would be a matter of academic interest; after all, most Wizards never even meet a dementor in their entire lives. Given the current situation though..."

He shook his head.

"I want a foot on the other uses of the patronus spell," he said. He looked at me. "Focusing on the uses as a messenger, not on creative ways of using them to kill people."

I shrugged.

Why did everyone think that I was obsessed with killing people? It wasn't like I spent every waking minute thinking about how to kill the Death Eaters.

Just most of them.

Class was dismissed, and Hermione stepped up to me.

"I'm sure you'll find a good memory," she said. "I use my last Christmas with my parents."

"My mother died," I said.

"Friendships?" she asked.

"They betrayed me, or they died," I said. "Or I'll never see them again."

She looked hurt.

"Not you," I said quickly. "It's just... I'm not built that way. Maybe when I was younger."

As we stepped out of the classroom, I saw Snape waiting for me.

"I'll talk to you later," I said. "I need to have a word with my Head of House."

We both waited until everyone had moved down the hallway, well out of earshot.

"I asked you once not to start a revolution," Snape said quietly. "It seems that you chose not to listen."

"I'm not sure what you are talking about?" I said. I pushed any anxiety into my bugs and kept my face impassive.

"You have followers now," he said. "Fifth years are looking to you for permission to do things."

"They think I know how to keep the Ministry from killing them," I said. "And they don't trust Dumbledore or the staff here to do it for them."

"Do you?" he asked dispassionately.

"I believe that we should at the very least give them the tools to defend themselves," I said. "Leaving them helpless is like putting a death eater with a wand in a room full of muggles who have never heard about magic."

"I'd have thought you'd rate the muggles chances a little higher."

"Under the right circumstances, with the right muggles," I said. "But surprise is a power multiplier. If it ever comes to a battle between the muggle world and this one, the muggles will lose... at first. But they'll learn, and the battles afterward won't go nearly as well."

"Against those who would subvert their leaders?" he asked.

"There are ways to tell," I said. "Ones that don't involve magic."

The Protectorate had strategies in place for dealing with Strangers and with Masters, and those would be the Wizarding worlds strongest categories. Most Wizarding attack spells weren't that much better than a gun or a bomb. It was their ability to mind control leaders from in secret that made them horrifically dangerous.

He stared at me.

"That would be of great value to certain parties," he said carefully.

Another teacher might have dismissed what I said as idle bragging. Snape didn't/ He'd taken me seriously from the moment we'd met, something which I appreciated about him.

"Why are you here?" I asked. "Really? It can't be to question me about the existence of a non-existent revolution."

There wasn't a revolution, not yet. It would require time and for me to have pieces in place. The thought that I'd be sending children off to die should have bothered me, but it didn't. All of them were slated for death anyway; all I was doing was giving them a chance.

"You've heard about the new Ministerial Decrees?" he asked.

"Where they're planning to take the muggleborn from their families?" I asked.

I'd been hearing about nothing else for the past few weeks. Nothing definitive had been done yet, but all of the muggleborn were worried about it. It had been stalled in the Wizengamot; apparently Dumbledore's people had been doing their best to squash it, and the Purebloods were horrified at the idea that they might be forced to house mudbloods in their own houses.

"What will you do if they pass?" he asked.

"Are you asking if I plan to overthrow the government, set myself up as the new Minister for Magic and go to war against the Death Eaters?" I asked, amused.

He stared at me for a long moment, apparently wondering if I was joking of not.

"Or maybe just assassinate the Death Eaters and their leaders, ending with him?" I asked. At his look I shook my head. "I probably won't do that this year."

Ultimately, of course I planned to kill them all. It was the only way that I and my friends could live uninterrupted lives. Right now wasn't the time for it; I still needed to gather more power.

After all, even if I killed Voldemort, I'd have to go after the Ministry next. Neville kept pushing for peaceful solutions, but I knew that it would never end until a fundamental change was made.

"You think that the Dark Lord didn't believe that he was in the right when he began?" Snape asked quietly.

"Tom's always been a little sloppy," I said. "Instead of cursing the Defense position, he should have put his own agent in; he could have influenced an entire generation of students."

"I'm sure it's not as easy as..." he began.

"Lockhart?" I asked.

Most likely the reason they'd struggled to find competent instructors was because of the curse; otherwise the moment they'd found one they'd have kept them. The curse on the position, if it was real was actually rather clever. By ensuring that en entire generation of wizards were unable to use magic effectively, he'd have made it easier for his people to take over.

An armed populace was one that was difficult to conquer after all, especially if you didn't have superior weapons. It wasn't like the muggle world, where a few rednecks with rifles weren't going to be able to stand up to tanks and planes.

One wizard was much the same as the next in their capabilities. The only real difficulties were in skill.

I was doing everything to close that skill gap with my people. Already the grades of the muggleborn were skyrocketing as they worked together in study groups. We were keeping the groups small, groups of four to five, usually led by one students from an older grade.

Just the process of teaching was helping some of the students remaster the basics, and our sessions three times a week were helping even more.

"Why is it that the entire muggleborn population seems to vanish sometimes?" Snape asked, staring at me.

I shrugged. "I'd have thought you'd have been happy not to have kids underfoot all the time."

"If I've noticed, others have too," Snape said. "It's only a matter of time before it gets to the Minister's ear."

"The Minister?" I asked. "Why should she worry about what a few schoolchildren do?"

"She sees you as an inconvenience, someone who supports changing the natural order," Snape said. "Should you become more than that... accidents have been known to happen. Unlike with Death eaters, if you kill aurors, the entire weight of the Ministry will come down upon you."

"So what should I do?' I asked. "Sit down and wait to die?"

"Be more circumspect," he said. "Continue whatever you are doing, if you must, but cloak it under some socially acceptable aegis."

"People have been telling me that since I came here," I said. "Don't make waves, keep up the status quo. The whole reason that the Wizarding world is in the position it is in is that not enough people have stood up for what's right."

"That may be..." Snape began. "But..."

"It's like the way things are is a river...it will sweep any one person away. But plant a boulder in the right place at the right time, and the course of the river may change. If that boulder is followed by enough smaller rocks, the river will change."

"And you see yourself as that boulder?"

"Someone has to be," I said. I hesitated. "Mark Twain once said 'When the mob and the press and the whole world tells you to move, your job is to plant yourself by the river of truth and tell the whole world...'No, you move."

He was silent for a moment.

"So you are determined to continue on this course."

"I have to do it," I said. "And not just for the muggleborn. Every half-blood has dealt with the casual racism the purebloods spew without even meaning to."

"You won't be able to stop that," he said. "No one can."

"Maybe," I said. "but I can try."

With that, we didn't have anything else to say.

That night I slipped out of my rooms and headed for the Room of Requirement.

I'd had enough of the humiliation of being a failure with the Patronus charm. I needed to master this if I was going to protect my friends. I had no illusions that the Ministry wouldn't hesitate to send the Dementors to find us and kill us and worse, devour our souls.

I found myself in a smal room; it looked like any other classroom, except that the door behind me was closed and would not open until I allowed it. I didn't want any witnesses for my failure.

I tried the spell again.

"Expecto Patronum!"

I'd tried every memory I could think of. Mom, Dad, the Undersiders, my times with Emma before everything had gone wrong. I'd been surprised at how few good memories I'd had; I'd always thought that I was a happy child until Emma had turned on me, but even before that I'd lived in a city on decline.

Seeing the sadness on my father's face had affected me even as a child.

Flitwick had told me my wandwork was impeccable. My pronunciation of the spell was perfect. The only flaw was the emotions that supposedly fueled the spell.

"Expecto Patronum,"

"Expecto Patronum,"

"Expecto Patronum!"

There was never even a hint of silver emerging from my wand. I wasn't sure why I'd expected anything else. Every other spell had come relatively easily for me; why was this spell different?

Over and over again I tried to cast the spell, and always it failed.

I found myself getting angrier and angrier and for once I couldn't offload my emotions into my bugs, because this spell required that I actually felt my emotions.

Was that the problem? Had I offloaded so many emotions that I was no longer even capable of feeling any more?

"Expecto Patronum!" I yelled, frustrated.

My anger kept growing.

Voldemort, his Death Eaters, the Ministry, the bullies... the more I thought about the people who had done all of this to me, the more angry I got. Scion, Cauldron, Contessa. I felt rage filling me, anger and even hatred.

"Expecto Patronum!"

I felt a sense of wrongness explode from my wand, as a wave of black bugs exploded from it. I could feel the malevolence within them, the desire to devour everything, but most particularly me.

They resisted as I took control of them; they wanted nothing so much as to devour me and destroy me.

I pushed them away from me, and they hovered, a malevolent man sized cloud.

What were they capable of? I couldn't tell; they were the manifestation of my anger and rage, just as a normal patronus was to be the avatar of my hope and joy.

A hole opened in the wall; the Room was responding to my unspoken need.

A mouse stumbled out, looking scared. A moment later my cloud lunged at it, and in the space of seconds all that was left was a small skeleton.

It took me a while to figure out how to dispel it, but then I had some thinking to do.

Something like this I could use. I hadn't even been aware that the Patronus could be perverted like this. What was this called, a Dark Patronus?

It had taken my bugs days to devour Filch. With this, I could do it in less than a minute. If if hadn't been for my control of insects, it would have turned on me, and I'd have been dead.

Luna Lovegood's mother had died during spell research. Had something like this happened?

What other spells could I pervert? Surprise was a force multiplier, and I doubted that Voldemort or anyone had an easy counter to a Dark Patronus.

Even better, ordinary Patronuses were known to be used to send messages. Would I be able to send my patronus out to seek out and find people?

It might make for the perfect assassination tool, although if it was discovered it might make people start to take precautions against insects. Still, it was another weapon in a toolbox that was woefully empty.

Everything was stacked against us, and we needed every weapon we could get. A few schoolchildren wasn't going to be enough; we needed allies.

The goblins had a history of revolution. Could I somehow subvert them?

What about the werewolves? The Death Eaters had control of some groups, but they were humans before they were werewolves, and I was willing to bet that not all of them were willing to follow a mass murderer.

There was so much to do, and there was so little time.