Disclaimer: No money made, no disrespect intended. Thanks.

Author's note:

Gratitude to my reviewers: MizzMoonyLuver - Forgive me, as I personally would go out to fight the forces of evil in chiffon and heels; as we saw in the Order of The Phoenix , you never know when Voldemort will show up! ; ) Seamus joined the Order, yes. In my version, at least. His Dad's a Muggle, and the Death Eaters don't like that.

Nynaeve80 - Thank you very much! and Angelic Bladez - thank you! Much appreciated!

Summary:

"If we were alive today, we would never have met."

When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help, now she's….well..dead?

One

Beyond The Veil?

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."

The Soul Realm lies in between the worlds of the living and the dead. Some never go there; they are the ones who have made their peace with their lives in the world they have left behind.

Some never leave, and there is not always a choice in this strange place, for it is largely what you make it. Sometimes, if they are lucky, the few that are brave enough to travel through this strange realm can find a message, a pointer left by those who have gone before in case another soul one day should pass the same way. For there is no mortality here, only the strengths - and the weaknesses - of one's soul shine through and show who you truly are. Death hold no fear for those who travel here, but as a very wise wizard once said...there are many things worse than death…

-

When Hermione came to, all the voices and the shouting and the rushing noise of blood in her ears had gone. She felt the damp under her cheek from something that felt like grass, and without opening her eyes, she reached stiff wet fingers up and under, almost prising her cheek away from whatever it was she was lying on.

Somewhere, in some kind of logical space, Hermione expected to see the stiff silent white of a hospital room, and in this way she could explain the still air, and the soundlessness, and the aching in her head. She was not at all prepared for what she did find, when at last reality dawned - dragging her up from some kind of hazy inbetween dream - and showed her at last that this was not St. Mungos, nor home, nor any place she knew. She lay on her side, in what used to be called the recovery position when she took those first aid lessons in Girl Guides. Her left cheek seemed to have almost fused with the grass, which had left the marks on her face.

The first silly thing that came to mind, was that the place did not seem to make any sound at all. But far from being peaceful, Hermione found this disturbing; the scrabbling of animals and the sound of snatches of birdsong and flowing water in the countryside a reassuring thing. As such, there was no reassurance about this strange place, and she didn't want to even begin to question how she actually got here in the first place.

This was the countryside, but if all she could remember was the Order and the mission and the Death Eaters and Harry and Ron, and the shouting and the Death Eaters and the Ministry and the shooting of spells and the falling and the veil……and the veil coming so close as she fell…..and the feel of the brush of the ghost of black fabric on pale skin and…

Hermione forced herself to stop thinking.

"Get a grip on yourself, my girl," she told herself firmly, digging the nail of her index finger into her palm as if to reassure herself that she was still feeling and this really wasn't a dream.

It must be some sort of temporal teleport activated from all the spells being fired at once, and no matter how tenuous her rational mind wanted to tell her this explanation was, she couldn't really believe she had fallen through..right through the veil, because then she'd be dead….and she couldn't be she? Not when she could - Hermione heaved herself carefully to a standing position - stand up and walk, and feel the ground underneath her feet, no matter how unsteady those feet felt at that particular moment.

Hermione felt woozy and lightheaded at she stood in the centre of the unfamiliar field. The sky was blue, she noticed, but not the reassuring summery blue of the lazy days she used to spend on the riverbanks of Oxford, the days that Harry and Ron would come to visit her and they would watch the Muggles go by in their boats. This sky was different, a low storm-colour, with no clouds or variation in tone at all, just an endless stretch of the same flat, menacing blue. She half expected to hear the rumble of low thunder but the place really felt like somebody had turned off the sound. The grass, too seemed a sick, yellowish green, and although it was coated with the sheen of what Hermione assumed to be dew, there was no morning freshness in the air. The whole place just seemed to exude wrongness.

She took a tentative step. She was still wearing the same dress she had put on earlier that night, but now the sleeve was ripped and the hem was torn. Perhaps she'd hit her head, and suffered some kind of concussion, and accidentally apparated herself away? She supposed that must be it, because her head ached terribly.

The best thing would be to get out of this field, and find someone with a telephone or an owl. That way she'd soon be able to get help.

Feeling slightly calmer, she began to walk towards the edges of the field. When she looked round, she noticed that one corner of the field she had been lying in looked strange blurred and dark.

Probably a bog. Or a swamp? The last thing I need now.

In the opposite direction, she could see faint treetops beyond a rising bluish mountain range. Hermione had never liked heights, not at least since she'd been forced to ride on the back of a Hippogriff with Harry and Sirius Black, of all people. They had thought it was something of a good laugh, but she couldn't bring herself to agree with them, somehow. She felt dizzy just looking at the mountains.

Looks like Wales. Maybe it is. I wonder if Wales feels this depressing?

The tops of the mountains, she noted, were not covered in snow, an icing sugar shower viewed from far off. They seemed to hang with a kind of dark grey fog, like the haze above traffic on one of those awful, hot, damp sticky days in London when the smog would hang above the traffic, and she would watch it unobserved from the windows of the Black's horrible old house. The house was a little like this place, she thought. Everything slightly off……..like a kind of sickness about it. Even the few trees and scrubby bushes she could see seemed to be losing their battle to live, twisting and pointing downwards like tortured bodies giving up the ghost. Hermione had no idea where she might be.

Better find out, then.

The voice inside her head was talking louder now, pushing her on towards logical steps both inside and out.. Hermione's mind had always been constantly on the go, even as a little girl. But now it seemed to have stopped, relying on inherent codes of practice to find the solution to a problem.

It all should have been very straightforward, but even as Hermione began to walk slowly towards the field's edge, she could not shake off the feeling of dread in the bottom of her throat, the feeling that there was something about this place that was anything but straightforward, and that she was at some point soon, going to find out what it was.

-

Her first thought was to look for a path. Any path, she reasoned, for a path, by it's very nature, should surely lead somewhere, somewhere that she could be found. Somewhere with lines of communication. But now she'd been wandering across fields for what felt like over an hour (though she couldn't be sure) and there was really nothing here at all.

Sometime earlier on, she had felt in her dress, entertaining the vain hope that someone had been helpful enough to conveniently stash her wand in her pocket. But the one pocket was empty. She had vague recollections of her wand falling from her hand, but that was before she fell…

She noticed also that there were dark spots of dried blood all the way down the front of her clothing. They made darker, flat streaks on the material and dried hard. Hermione assumed that her nose must have bled, and raised her fingers up to her face to check, the cracking of dried blood around her nostrils flaking under her nail, confirming her suspicions. And her wand was nowhere be found.

She'd attempted, in desperation, to conjure her Patronus without the wand, but although pointing with a finger and incanting "Expecto Patronum!"produced the faintest of silver glows, Hermione knew in her heart it was hopeless.

Neither was there any discernable path, just endless fields and rocks and nothing that she could even say had been made by man or even creature, something to suggest that another living soul had passed this way before. It was untouched, blank, and although Hermione told herself firmly that she would not be afraid, she could not ignore the cold tendrils of fear that were just beginning to creep around the edges of her heart.

She walked on and on. Walking only because there didn't seem anything else to do.

Dark in this place did not seem to fall in the usual way, creeping over slowly from the west in minutes and hours. It began as a dark indistinct shape in the very centre of the sky, then seeping out over its entirety like a malignant ink blot upon the universe, colouring everything black. When Hermione realised what was happening, for the first time, she admitted to herself that she really was afraid. She did not even know if dark would even fall in this place, though she assumed it would at some point. She had no watch, and although her mother had bought her a mobile phone last Christmas, insisting that all the young people loved them these days, the pink gadget was still, to her knowledge, sitting on Ron's bedside table after he had discovered it and spent all afternoon fiddling with the games it featured until the battery ran flat. Ron didn't know how to recharge it, and even if he had, Hermione had never seen any electrical sockets in Grimmauld Place anyway. He had contented himself with removing the 'interchangeable fascia' that the box boasted, hadn't been able to reattach it, and then simply forgotten all about it.

Not knowing what else to do, she crouched down at the foot of the largest tree she could find, and with the fading daylight, searched around for some twigs in the hope of finding a way to build a small fire to keep away and wild animals that might be roaming in the night. She hadn't seen any animals, nor even any sign of them, but she supposed that one never could be sure. And she was cold without her cloak, the dress was fairly thick, enough under a cloak or coat for chilly London, but not enough to keep out the seeping cold of this place, wherever it was. Goosebumps prickled on her shoulders despite the fact that there was no wind. There was just a steady drop in temperature, almost Dementor-like. A fire would warm her, and she had no desire to sit in the dark until the morning came.

'If it comes…'a nasty little voice whispered in her ear

Hermione would have liked to have been able to cast a simple "Incendio!" to send the flames spiralling up into heat and light and fearless colour. But without her wand, she had no choice but to find two sticks, rubbing them together in the hope of a spark until her wrists ached and her eyes blurred from watching them…back and forth…back and forth. But the twigs were damp…everything around her seemed to be damp, infused with cold and wet in a kind of despondent sadness, and the dark had fallen long before Hermione admitted to herself that it was useless. She huddled uncomfortably against the gnarled trunk of the stunted tree, and stared out into the blank darkness until she was convinced that her eyes were beginning to play tricks upon her and make the darkness move and shift in shapes and whispers. Her eyelids felt oddly heavy, and she felt them eventually close, her mind drifting away from her body and the cold with the blind hope against hope that when she woke up, this strange country, infused with the essence of hopelessness and despair, would be gone, and she'd be home again.

-

It was those same whispers that awakened her some time later, only now they were louder, and more distinct. Distinct enough for Hermione to be sure that she was not imagining the sound, nor what she saw as her eyes snapped open.

Her hair prickling with fright and the cold air numbing her arms, she saw the crawling black shapes advancing upon her through the darkness. Their shapes were hooded, vaguely humanoid, if one could imagine a human so utterly made of the sound and feel of darkness. They shifted around Hermione, distinct shape flowing to indistinct, forming a half circle around her as she crouched, frozen with fear, watching these unnamed creatures in some kind of terrible dance.

Their eyes seemed to glow amber-red in slits around black, empty sockets as they advanced, their whispers turning to awful laughter and becoming louder and louder, filling Hermione's ears. She tried to scream, but no sound came, just a choking noise of fear. She could not even reach out and cover her eyes as the largest shape leaned over and reached out to grab hold of her.

But before it could, someone else did.

Without any warning at all, a hand grabbed her shoulder from behind the tree, wrenching her with it, pulling her away from the creatures. A hand attached to a body that flung her roughly behind it and stood facing the creatures as she cowered in fear and confusion just out of their reach.

A light was coming from somewhere, and looking up, gasping for breath, she could see the owner of the hand.

A man, all in black. He was very tall and very, very pale, almost ethereal-looking in the dim light of the flame torch he held in his other hand. His eyes were pale too, silvery-grey, dark smudges beneath them, and they regarded her with a mixture of mild surprise and alarm. He wore a long cloak with a hood, and his hair was tied at the nape of his neck,over a ragged black silk scarf. The hair was so long that Hermione could not distinguish how far down his back it went, for it was, like the cloak and scarf, completely black. His fingers were warm on her wrist:

"I would say run for your life," he panted, as she stared in shock. "But in the circumstances….just run."

-

Next time...caves, pyromania, and inadequate footwear. Who could resist? Comments welcome.

Quote by Isaac Asimov