Thank you to Shadow High Angel for being the first person to give me a review! Hopefully the rest of you follow this example and click the review button instead of just adding the story to your alert lists… I mean, I like getting added to alert and favorite lists, but I would definitely enjoy a review to accompany it!

P.S: I just signed up to be a beta reader, so if you've got a story that fits under the categories I've agreed to beta, then send me a private message. Also, a cyber-cookie to the first person who finds out where I got the idea for the spell Nitesco from… what does that spell do? You'll have to wait to find out, though I can tell you that Umbridge will be the most likely recipient.

Disclaimer: *checks* Since I'm not female, I'm obviously not J.K Rowling. Happy? Good!

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The Leaky Cauldron

None of the four had noticed the Auror watching the four of them from the bar…

The Auror quickly got up, paid the tab, and left. Nobody would have noticed the Auror's plain appearance; disguises were this one's specialty. The Auror went out of the Leaky Cauldron, following the path Samantha had taken, hoping to catch the silver-haired girl. Much to the Auror's dismay, Samantha was already gone. Damn. The Auror spoke a few words (expletives mostly), and apparated, leaving no trace that somebody had been there.

12 Grimmauld Place

Dumbledore was busy choosing which professors would assist the next year's first year Muggle-born students to find Diagon Alley and buy their things, when an Auror appeared in front of him. With a quick motion, the Auror's hair changed from a drab brown color to a vivid hot pink.

"Hello there, Tonks. Do you have any information to report on how Hermione and the two youngest Weasleys are holding up, given the death of their best friend?" Dumbledore asked Tonks, eyes betraying the false emotions on his face. Dumbledore still couldn't help but blame himself for Harry's death, and while he knew that Riddle had thought of every possible complication, the headmaster still couldn't shake the feeling that he could have prevented the tragedy.

"Actually, yes!" Tonks reported gleefully. She took a step towards a chair… and tripped over her own feet. She shot up quickly, bolted over to the armchair, and sat down.

"How did you pass the Auror stealth test, Nymphadora?" Dumbledore asked, peering over his half-moon spectacles.

"Don't call me that!" Tonks raged at the older wizard. She settled down. "I passed the test because every time I tripped, and the instructor turned around to see who it was, my previous appearance wasn't there," Tonks quipped. "Anyways, I'm here to report what I discovered. And trust me, this is going to be interesting." Dumbledore, obviously interested, put down his quill, capped his ink well, and leaned forward. Tonks cleared her throat before continuing.

"Apparently, Ginny ran into some girl with silver hair named Samantha, and befriended her quite easily as if they'd known each other all their lives, which was strange. And then Ron and Hermione showed up at the Leaky Cauldron, which is where things got interesting. Apparently, this Samantha is heir to some family of wizards and witches that hasn't seen an heir in three centuries, which raises questions by itself. When the four of them were talking, Samantha kept switching the topic every time Harry Potter was brought up, as if she had some kind of problem with talking about the boy. Then strangely enough she knows that Ron's middle name is Billius and that Ginny's real name is Ginevra. When she left, I followed her down the alley, but nobody was there, which was strange because she isn't old enough to have an apparition license. Anything about this sound strange to you?"

Once Tonks was finished, she was gasping for air because of how much she had just said. Dumbledore sat back in his desk, the familiar twinkle in his eye.

"What was this girl's last name, did you find out?" Dumbledore questioned.

"Oh, um yeah! It was, um, Zodiarkus. I haven't ever heard that last name before, and it seems really strange for a name while I think about it, but oh well. What about it?" Dumbledore pulled out a piece of parchment, along with a brown envelope, a quill, and an inkwell.

"And what year would she be in if she had gone to Hogwarts?" Dumbledore's eyes were twinkling ever brighter now.

"Um, I think she said fifth year. Wait, Professor, you can't seriously mean that you're going to send her a—"

"A Hogwarts letter?" Dumbledore interrupted. "In fact, I am. I am very interested in this young lady… and what she may or may not know about Mr. Potter."

Manor of the Zodiac Keepers

The next day, Samantha woke up bright and early. She still hadn't figured out everything about the Temporal Displacement chamber that she was supposed to use for her training with her new abilities, or even what exactly her new abilities were. She remembered Leonidas talking about some scion something or other, but Samantha still had no idea what those were. She also had to learn to fight with her new spear… and figure out more about how she was predestined to become the heir, and how to break the news about who she was and what had happened to her to her three friends.

After a quick shower and a hearty breakfast, Samantha gathered the items that she had retrieved from the family vault, along with the fourteen books Leonidas had told her to find from the library, and headed down to where the Temporal Displacement chamber was.

Down outside the chamber, Samantha found another letter similar to the one she had seen by the spear and in the library. She picked it up, and was surprised when this one had only two words on it.

Turn around. She spun on her heel incredibly fast, and came face to face with… a portrait of Leonidas?

"Hello there, Samantha. How are you doing today? Are you adjusting to your new body and gender well?" Leonidas was talking to her through the portrait; just like the portraits of past Hogwarts headmasters, the personalities of the person portrayed lived on in the painting.

"I'm doing quite well, thank you. Also, I think that the spell you cast on me to change my appearance and gender also modified my behavior; I'm acting feminine, as if I were a girl all my life, and I know I haven't." She looked up into the eyes of her predecessor, hoping he could explain a few things. "Leonidas, I found out recently that every successive Zodiac Keeper was predestined several centuries before actually becoming the keeper. Can you explain to me why I had to have my gender changed if Harry Potter was already destined to become the next Keeper?"

Leonidas let out a long, drawn-out sigh before speaking. "When I was imprisoned and died, the process of pre-selecting the next Zodiac Keeper was thrown awry, and three generations of Zodiac Keepers were skipped. There would have been one male and two female Keepers prior to your becoming the heir, but because of my untimely death the process was cast aside until destiny could intervene. The woman who was supposed to be my immediate successor was born, but never brought into the family as the new heir, and thus the two precedent heirs were never born. You, however, had a role in a different prophecy, and were born for that main purpose, while also fulfilling the predestination of the Zodiac Keepers."

"So if you hadn't been imprisoned I would still be male?" A very confused Samantha asked the portrait.

"That is correct. Three generations were skipped, and as such had they not been the process would have landed with you being the out of family heir, and male heir as well. Unfortunately, as some would say in these modern times, life threw a—what was it?—curveball. As for behaving in a feminine fashion… another side effect of the spell. Personality alteration was all it took, so that nobody would ever be able to tell that you weren't a girl for most of your life." Samantha nodded slowly, trying to take in all the information. The house itself was very confusing in its rules and designations, but eventually she would figure it out, and have to give birth to an heir (the prospect of which she did not enjoy one bit. What if she somehow wound up carrying the child of Draco Malfoy, or even worse, Crabbe or Goyle?) and then train said heir to take up the mantle of Zodiac Keeper.

"Sorry to break you from your daydream," the portrait said with a twinge of humor on his voice, "but I believe I must explain to you the use of the Temporal Displacement chamber. Are you ready to begin training?"

Diagon Alley

"C'mon 'Mione, you've been in that bloody bookstore for the past hour! If you haven't found what you were looking for yet, you won't find it now!" Ron was anxiously waiting outside Flourish and Blotts' bookstore, tapping his foot while talking to Ginny, who was just as impatient. But Hermione was inside that bookstore with a mission: find out more about the Zodiarkus family, and just how Samantha happened to be the first heir in over three hundred years.

So far, her search had been fairly… worthless. None of the books that she had found on pureblood or long-standing wizarding families had any mention of Samantha's house, and Hermione was getting desperate. She finally decided that now was the time for affirmative action.

Nobody had known, and Harry's ghost would have killed her a thousand times over had he known, but Hermione had 'borrowed' Harry's invisibility cloak after he died, and had been using it every so often when the need arose. This was one such time; Hermione slipped the cloak over her and used it to enter the restricted section in Flourish and Blotts'.

She found many books in that section that probably shouldn't have existed, including a book very similar to the two Samantha had duplicated for her yesterday. Her curiosity got the better of her as she started searching for the histories of certain houses.

After five minutes, and countless shouts from Ron and Ginny, both of whom were both impatiently waiting outside, she found what she was looking for: the family history of the Zodiarkus family. She pulled out the book, flipped open the inside cover, and very nearly freaked.

On the inside cover of the book was a family tree that extended from the time of Merlin to the future, going all the way down to the year 2600, and probably further if she turned the page. Quickly, she scanned down the list to three hundred years prior, and found something very interesting.

Apparently, the previous heir, who was named Leonidas, had been imprisoned in Azkaban, throwing off the cycle off heir selection of the house. The next three names on the House heir timeline were grayed out, to show that they had never come into their inheritance. Hermione's eyes scanned down to the fourth entry… and stopped.

This entry was flickering between two names, with a single constant being the Zodiac sign Leo. The two names were Samantha Jocelyn Zodiarkus… and Harry James Potter.

Hermione very nearly dropped the book. Instead, she tucked it into her bag (which was enchanted to hide the unique magical signatures of any enchanted objects that were inserted within) and slipped out of the store. She walked a safe distance away from Flourish and Blotts', took the cloak off, and walked over to Ron and Ginny, startling them.

"Blimey 'Mione, where'd you come from?" Ron asked, voice rising an octave or two in surprise. Ginny gave Hermione a death glare, seeming to say 'where the bloody hell have you been?!' Hermione shrugged off Ginny's reaction, and pulled the book out of her bag, showing it to the two of them before casting her eyes elsewhere. She did a quick 360 of her surroundings, and turned back to her two friends, leaning in close.

"Leaky Cauldron. Now."

The Leaky Cauldron

Samantha was sitting back in a booth, enjoying a cup of tea while people watching in the small pub. She was still recuperating from spending two months in the Temporal Displacement chamber; though for everybody else the amount of time she spent had been perhaps a few seconds at most.

The chamber operated in a unique fashion: it took the user of the chamber, and their immediate surroundings (in Samantha's case, the manor), out of time; that is to say that the mansion existed in a separate dimension, where time was completely frozen outside of the manor. The chamber was special in that it created everything that Samantha ever needed, from food, to clothing, to a bathroom to shower in, to… feminine necessities. Oh yes, Samantha had had the pleasure of experiencing that time of month for a girl while in the chamber. (A/N: That was definitely the most awkward line I've ever written in a story… a guy writing about that is, well, er, um, uh *ducks a couple of well-aimed shoes* taboo.) However, during that month, she had learned of the true powers of the Zodiac Keepers.

The Keepers controlled the powers associated with the signs of the Zodiac through the Scions that represented the signs.

Belias, Scion of Fire, represented the sign Aries.

Mateus, Scion of Ice, represented Pisces.

Adrammalech, Scion of Lightning, fell under Capricorn.

Famfrit, Scion of Water, represented Aquarius.

Chaos, Scion of Wind, fell under Taurus.

Hashmal, Scion of Earth, represented Leo, Samantha's own sign. Hashmal also most closely represented the Gryffindor mascot, seeing as his visage was similar to that of a lion.

Shemhazai, Scion of Souls, was the representative of Sagittarius.

Cùchulainn, Scion of Poisons, represented Scorpio. How fitting…

Zalera, Scion of Death, and otherwise known as the Grim Reaper, fell under Gemini. (A/N: Want to know why? Search 'Zalera Death Seraph' on Google images, and his image from FFXII should pop up.)

Zeromus, Scion of Gravity, represented Cancer.

Exodus, Scion of the Cosmos, stood for Libra. It fit well; Exodus always rode on a giant scale.

Ultima, Scion of Light, represented Virgo.

Samantha had yet to discover the identity of the thirteenth Scion, and whether or not she would ever be able to control that one, but she had a strange gut feeling that it was the strange voice that she had heard in the back of her head. She did not know what it was called, aside from Keeper of Precepts, but even that title was strange. What did that mean, Keeper of Precepts? That was a mystery for another day.

Samantha had also learned that by focusing on a specific Zodiac sign, she could not only summon the Scion associated with that sign, but also alter a specific point of her personality. When focusing on Pisces, for example, her imagination ran wild, just as when she focused on Leo she felt immense courage and bravery.

The Scions themselves were very imposing beings, and incredibly dangerous. The hardest one to tame had been Zalera, the Death Seraph. He had wanted to take Samantha to the afterlife as a part of his task as Grim Reaper, thinking that Samantha had cheated death one too many times (surviving the Killing Curse, the basilisk bite in the Chamber of Secrets, getting out of the Triwizard Tournament alive), but eventually she had defeated him and tamed his power. That didn't mean she had to enjoy using it, however.

Additionally, she had discovered that eventually the thirteen Scions would become her thirteen Animagus forms. She was quite curious over how she would accomplish transforming into the male Scions, but she cast that thought aside fairly quickly, thinking that whatever magics allowed her to summon them in the first place would take care of that problem when the time arrived.

Samantha hadn't even noticed that somebody had come to her table until she heard a book slam down onto the table, and out of the corner of her eye saw a hand open the inside cover and point to something inside. Samantha looked up cautiously… and caught the eyes of a fuming Hermione. Uh-oh.

"Uh… hi there Hermione. How are you?" She quickly glanced past Hermione and her eyes rested on two very confused Weasley siblings. Neither Ron nor Ginny had any idea what had gotten Hermione so worked up. Hermione had slid into the booth when Samantha looked back at her, and was still pointing at the single entry on the front cover. "Let me see that?" Samantha asked before quickly snatching the book, and glanced at the cover.

A sharp intake of breath followed. How did she manage to find the family history… only three copies exist: one in the vault, one in the manor, and the third was lost. Does that mean she found the third?

"How am I? How am I?" Hermione was practically yelling now, while keeping her voice quiet enough to not attract too much unwanted attention. The brunette then grabbed the book away from the silver-haired girl, flipped it back open, and pointed at the entry again. Ron, Ginny, and Samantha all peeked at the entry, when shock practically danced across their faces.

They all saw what Hermione had seen but moments before: the entry was flickering between the names Samantha Jocelyn Zodiarkus and Harry James Potter. The three of them were all staring at Samantha with very angry glares on their faces, each of them with a finger pointed at the entry, eyes demanding an explanation.

"Um… er… where exactly did you find this?" Hermione didn't answer, and the indignant look on Ginny's face was growing. Ron was so mad smoke should have been coming from his ears.

"Is this why you have such a bloody problem talking about Harry bloody Potter?!" Ron practically yelled. Thank god Samantha had cast noise-lessening charms over her booth just in case she let something slip that she shouldn't have…

"Whoa whoa, wait! I can explain! Just… not here. Too many people." Samantha reached out her hand to cover all three of her friends', grabbed the book with her other, and focused on her manor. In a flash of light, the four of them vanished.

Up the stairs, Alastor Moody was cursing under his breath, and hidden in the shadows Nymphadora Tonks was replaying the entire event through her omnioculars, trying to get a clear picture of what had been in the entry… to no avail. The thought going through both their minds was uniform: what was so incredibly important that those three would be so angry with somebody that they had just met the day before?