The next few weeks at Hogwarts were a flurry of activity as people prepared for the wedding. It was to take place in the Great Hall, and it seemed like just about everyone in the land was invited. Hermione had been in a terrible dither in the days after she had broken the news to her parents; it turned out that they approved of Voldemort's chivalrous attitudes and sensible financial planning, but could not forgive him for canvassing on behalf of Gary Johnson in the 2016 US General Election. Both of Hermione's parents were dyed-in-the-wool Bernie Sanders supporters and they considered the Libertarian Party literally worse than Hitler. "At least the Nazis had a national healthcare system", they had wept, besides themselves with shock and anger that their little girl could date a Libertarian; roundly ignoring that fact that dear uncle Adolf had in fact euthanised thousands of patients he deemed unworthy of state support, and imprisoned and executed millions more for purely ideological reasons.

Voldemort had been very supportive during this time, but had steadfastly refused to shell out a single penny to put towards the wedding. As a traditionalist, he was adamant that the bride's family must pay. They had briefly considered murdering one of Hermione's parents to get the other one on board, but Dany had talked them out of it and promised to come up with a better solution. Voldemort agreed readily to the idea, but Hermione had seemed sullen and disappointed. She had shaved her head to look like Voldemort, and cut off her own nose, making sure that she used an extremely powerful curse so that it could never be grown back by magical means.

Some days after the conversation, Dany had introduced Hermione to Grawp and they had hit it off right away. Grawp was in awe of Hermione's hacking skills and made a her a proposition that they go into business magically jailbreaking smartphones and tablets for East European criminal gangs. Hermione had been a little disappointed that they wouldn't be involved in the process of stealing the phones themselves, but she made Grawp promise to pass on her ideas of how to best intimidate and punish those people who refused to hand them over. The ideas were quickly adopted, being as innovative and brilliant as they were aberrant and sadistic.

Hermione had also co-opted half of Hogwarts into helping prepare for the wedding through various means of persuasion, both carrotty and stickish alike. Almost all the boys were prepared to do anything for her after she had modded their smartphones to allow them to access Redtube and call premium-rate sex lines for free. The Hogwarts firewall had been horrendously difficult to hack, having been put in place by Dumbledore himself to hide his internet activity from the Feds, but between Hermione's brilliance and Grawp's workman-like tenacity, it had been cracked like a bad egg.

Seamus had been incensed. As a feminist he considered anything even remotely concerning male sexuality to be misogynistic, and the idea of his fellow Gryffindor boys innocently pleasuring themselves to naked females was almost more than he could bear. He had gone to Dumbledore to grass-up the whole operation, but Dumbledore had simply seemed delighted and said.

"Oh, she got through the firewall! She did do the thing properly, didn't she?"

It turned out that Dumbledore was deeply into the East European crime scene, and had his pension tied up in all sorts of nefarious activities from stolen phones, to human trafficking and other less savoury pursuits. He had Ser Jorah on speed dial, the aforementioned knight being one of his best customers. Mormont had a nasty temper and breezed through girls like the wind through corn. Indeed Dumbledore had found a way of tripling his profits all from the same, original transaction. First he sold the girls to Mormont, then he charged him extra to remove the bodies and after that he sold what was left to Snape for double the original price. It helped that Snape liked them looking a bit knocked-around, he said it reminded him of his mother at the end.

Seamus had stalked back to Gryffindor tower, weeping with shame and rage. The next day he organised a protest outside the Gryffindor common room, but only Snape had turned up and that was because of the promise of free poppadoms and chutney. Seamus had been forced to march around outside on his own for all twelve hours of the planned action, waving his placard of a flaccid penis - drawn in exquisite, loving detail as a favour from Crabbe - until his arms ached and his back groaned for him to stop. The only person Seamus had met during the whole half-day he was there was Dumbledore, who strode out of the tower on the very stroke of the twelfth hour, tenderly stroking his magically jailbroken HTC U11.

"For watching cute little animal videos when I'm not connected to the ethernet in my tower." He had winked at Seamus, with a cunning gleam in his eye. "I do so like aardvarks."

Seamus found out later that the reason he had been all alone for the entire twelve hours was that Dumbledore had phase-shifted him into a different reality - an exact replica of our own - but devoid of a single person. No one quite knew how Snape had gotten into it, but his prowess at sniffing out a free meal was legendary. People had stopped inviting him along on nights out after the fifth time he'd 'forgotten' his wallet, although the pungent smell of rotting meat and his habit of getting drunk, snapping his greasy fingers and calling all the waiters 'Abdul' also had something to do with it, in all fairness.

Seamus had caused a scene in the common room that night by staging a dirty protest in his pants, until Jacob had gotten thoroughly tired of it and thrown him out of the window again. The young Irishman was still covered in bandages from the fall, having deeply offended Madam Pomfrey after accusing her of 'internalising her misogyny' for the crime of her being satisfied to remain 'only a nurse'. Pomfrey could have fixed him in a jiffy, but was refusing to even look at the angry young feminsit after his bitter accusations agaisnt her. Seamus considered nurses misogynistic of course, alongside any opinion expressed by a male, the paper industry and cream crackers.

Gandalf had arrived at Hogwarts sometime during the last week, but no one had seen him since he had rolled up to the front gate needing to prised off his moped, white beard stiff with frost and arms locked in riding position. He was a particularly careful driver and refused to go above three-miles-per-hour, even on the motorways. The journey up from Cornwall had taken nearly ten days non-stop, and his flowing yellowy-white robes reeked of exhaust fumes and excreta.

Since his appearance, Gandalf and Dumbledore had been locked in the latter's tower and no one had seen sight nor sound of either man. It was said that at night, strange lights could be seen flickering from the windows, and Cho Chang swore she had heard some sort of demonic chanting and caterwauling early one morning, carried down on an ominous wind. The inhabitants of Hogwarts had laughed off these reports, albeit nervously. Surely the two greatest wizards of the age couldn't be plotting anything too nefarious they reasoned, with uneasy glances towards the tower.

Only Jacob and Dany seemed to notice Colin's long absences from proceedings, and his increasingly frequent late night jaunts to various homeless shelters and soup kitchens in Diagon Alley, and elsewhere. Jacob was all for bumping him off as quickly as possible - he'd been sharpening his skinning knives in preparation for days - but Dany had recommended caution. She was just as suspicious as Jacob over the Nor-folkian's disappearances, but Dany felt it would be better to try and find out more information and butcher him afterwards once the intelligence had been obtained. If he was working with the Night King as they suspected, he might possess valuable knowledge that they would not be able to obtain in any other way.

Of all the people rushing around the school in those days, by far the busiest was The Hound. He had been placed in charge of illumination and candles, and was often showing up in the most unexpected places, brandishing a theodolite and a light-meter. He had fiercely petitioned Dumbledore to have the enchanted ceiling painted-over, as the luminescence was simply too unpredictable; but in the end they had settled for hanging a magically engorged piece of pink netting from the roof in order to minimise its interruption.

Snape had put himself in charge of food and drink. No one was quite sure how he'd gotten the job, being a disgusting cook (and person in general,) but he seemed to have some sort of influence over McGonagall and she had all but insisted he be allowed to 'create his masterpiece' with the help of the more-than-competent House Elves. He was planning an experimental fusion menu, taking in delicious cuisines from all over the globe and making them singularly inedible, (if his finger buffets were anything to go by.) Snape was the only man in existence known to have burnt water, he had also accidentally poisoned the Minister for Magic with a simple grilled cheese sandwich, so that all his body hair fell out; and he had made a bus-load of children go blind with his homemade dandelion and nettle cordial. Voldemort had been delighted with the choice; he was especially looking forward to trying Snape's trout and espresso ice-cream, and the dragonfly jambalaya had the Dark Lord all but shivering with boyish anticipation.

Hermione was happy as long as Voldemort was happy. By happy, that is to say of course that she was frantic with stress and worry, not helped by the fact that Voldemort had casually advised her that she could stand to lose a few pounds before the big day. She was lightheaded with hunger from starving herself, and feeling horrendously guilty from all the binge eating - and vomiting - she had been doing on the sly. A naturally slight girl, Hermione's bones were already beginning to poke out of her delicate white skin, giving her a haunted, skeletal look. In the last few days she had taken to overdosing on suppositories and was liable to soil herself at any given moment, having lost all but the most perfunctory control of her bowels. Her stools fitted in perfectly at Hogwarts, being little more than ectoplasmic, beige jelly, with a slightly fruity, acidic odour; indeed very like Peeves the poltergeist, as several unfortunate witness to her 'little accidents' noted.

This similarity was not lost on the mischievous apparition himself, and Peeves could often be heard flying around the castle singing;

"Oh Granger, you danger!

Oh what have you done?

You're cacking your panties,

You think it's good fun!"

Indeed there was barely a chair in Gryffindor tower that did not now bear its own bespoke sepia blotch, like a scratch-and-sniff Rorschach test that spoke of nothing but tragedy to all who had the misfortune to gaze, or sit upon them. Hermione would wait until she thought everyone was asleep at night to sneak down into the common room and begin scrubbing and weeping in earnest. Somehow Professor Trelawney had been made aware of these stains (Jacob suspected Parvati and Lavendar,) and had taken to embarrassing Hermione by visiting the tower in the evenings to dramatically read in them auguries of death and sexual dysfunction.

Beric had given up trying to convince Hermione to get married according to the doctrine of the Lord of Light. She had been quite receptive of the idea at first, but had gone off it when the Lightning Lord had point-blank refused to burn any children as part of the ceremony. It was all moot however, as Voldemort was insisting on a voodoo wedding, with freeform jazz-scat singers to accompany Hermione down the aisle. He had been quite taken with the idea of a satanic wedding until the two men had quarrelled over the honorific 'Dark Lord', at which point Voldemort had tweaked Lucifer on the nose and promptly taken up Louisiana Voodoo; partly to spite him and partly just because he loved that old-time creole jazz.

Hermione's father was stubbornly resisting all and any efforts made by the girl's friends to consent to giving his daughter away. The young bride was devastated by this turn of events, but nothing could be said or done to persuade him. Several people noted with no little respect that for a middle-class dentist, Mr Granger was proving remarkably resistant to the various, brutal tortures that Voldemort was having him subjected to. It was becoming increasingly obvious to all involved that his mind would break before his body, but his will would outlast both; although this did not stop Voldemort devising new and appalling persecutions to visit upon him on a daily basis.

It was unconscionable to a traditionalist such as the Dark Lord for his bride not to be given away by her legal father, and so he was adding to Hermione's stress by insisting that she divorce her parents and allow herself to be adopted by Draco Malfoy; whom Voldemort assured would make a wonderful, supporting father. Hermione had begged, cried and pleaded to be allowed to keep her natural-born sires, but had reluctantly consented to the plan after Voldemort had threatened to call off the wedding in one of his trademark fits of perverse, insouciant malice. He had taken to calling Draco 'Daddy' and likewise Malfoy was now delighting in grinning broadly, winking and calling the Dark Lord 'Sonny', at any given opportunity.

Draco was not so kind to Hermione however. As her legal guardian, he was now insisting that she run his errands, make him cups of tea and massage his stinking feet of an evening. He banned Hermione from spending time with certain 'bad influences' - Jacob amongst them - and imposed a strict four pm curfew on all her activities. This gave Hermione precisely one half hour to socialise, and do her homework after classes finished, and then she was expected to be tucked up in bed, ready for her fifteen hours of beauty sleep. Malfoy also made constant, derogatory comments about her appearance and general life choices; threatening to withdraw her from Hogwarts if she so much as thought about refusing his demands, or answering back. He had taken to smoking an enormous curved pipe - intricately carved from an actual rhino horn - and wearing tartan slippers and a twill dressing gown around the castle. Voldemort thoroughly approved of this turn of events, and was going to have himself adopted by Draco too until Amycus Carrow pointed out that doing so would technically make him and his bride-to-be brother and sister. Voldemort briefly considered calling the wedding off so he could legitimately allow Malfoy to become the father he never had; but in the end the Louisianan in him won out and he decided to marry his own sister.

And then, after what seemed like years crammed into a few scant weeks of hurried organisation, stress, tears and uncontrollable diarrhoea; the day of the wedding was finally upon them!