Hermione was speechless. Before her stood Malfoys best friend and she was supposed to accept the fact that he was her brother? She could barely get her mind around the fact that the person before her was Blaise Zabini. Her legs didn't seem to work and she couldn't blame them. If she had a choice she would run as far away as she could. Her mind was automatically considering this to either be some kind of sick joke or a trap, but Blaises expecting face was proving her to be wrong.

It took a few minutes before her mind decided to command her uncooperative legs to move inside, and it took even longer till Hermione finally moved. Blaise moved out of the way and closed the door behind her. Straight away Hermione was engulfed in darkness that was only broken up by a few lamps placed along the wall. Other than that she could barely see in front of her.

Finally focusing on the guy next to her she was surprised to see him glaring at her. It took her a few moments to realise why. She wasn't acting excited about where she was and who she was meeting. Though in her defence no one could blame her. She had just been ripped away from her parents and been told her whole life was fake. Focusing her attention back to Blaise she returned his glare. Challenging him to say something to her. Instead though he just locked away.

Hermione decided to ignore him and continued looking around the house. Her initial reaction that everything was made of wood was correct. Paying more attention to detail around her, it seemed to her that the walls were covered in words, or at least symbols. Seeing as she could understand a few, Hermione should have felt a bit less nervous. Instead though she felt more scared than ever. What was worse was that when she looked at a dark patch to her left she thought she saw and outline forming.

"Hermione, dear. Aww… you have no idea what it means to see you again." She saw a tall man appear and guessed that it was he that had spoken. A closer look at him shocked her into realising that this was her father. Trying to pay more attention to him was proving quite hard though. He kept disappearing and appearing from the shadows. Just his face, which might have been cleanly shaven, looked dirty and as if surrounded by a black substance.

Hermione tried to keep her face clear of any emotion. She wasn't sure how this man before her would react if he realised how disgusted she was by him. What worried her more was that Blaise had kept his eyes on her the whole time. She didn't appreciate such scrutiny of her actions and she was about to say something before,

"Hermione!" a voice from somewhere to her right shrieked. Before Hermione had a chance to react she was pulled in a bone breaking hug. After a few moments, the time where usually people let go of the hug, Hermione realised that she was still being held just as tightly. Slowly she began running out of oxygen and if someone hadn't managed to pull her away from this crazy woman she was sure she would have passed out.

Hermione, now red faced, looked at both the people before her. The man was now standing next to a tall and slim woman who was identical to him. As Hermione tried focusing on her she realised that you couldn't look at the woman without everything on her blurring up. Realising this she wondered what was wrong. This was too weird even for Hermione. Her dad was one with the shadows and her mum was disappearing before her eyes. Why?

"Hermione what is wrong?" Her mother asked. Something about her voice gave Hermione chills. It almost sounded robotic. Hoping to be able to get away from them soon she answered.

"Nothing…" She mumbled. She was beginning to realise just how scared she was. She guessed that these people were her parents but she couldn't be sure. There was no resemblance between them and either her or Blaise. She was also beginning to question whether they were as nice as they appeared.

"What did you say dear?" The man asked politely, but his voice betrayed him. Hermione realised that this wasn't a man with much patience.

She decided that she had to pull herself together. She couldn't keep trying to avoid a conversation with them. And the longer she wasted with one word answers the longer she would have to remain in their presence. Slowly Hermione tried to gather up her confidence and tried looking at them in the eye. She would not let them intimidate her. Hermione was also trying to prove to Blaise that no matter what the situation she would always come out on top in the end.

"Oh sorry, I said nothing. Nothing is wrong. Just a bit shocked I guess." She replied. She thought that she had pleased them when she heard someone enter the room.

"What the?" she said and nearly had a heart attack. A black blob moved around her feet and the only way she was able to distinguish that is was an animal was by its cat eyes. Hermione didn't know what to make by all this. This family was too weird for her to belong with them.

Looking around she tried to find a possible means of escape. Maybe she could pretend she needed to go to the bathroom. Maybe she could convince them that it had been a long day and she was tired. Looking at each of their faces in turn she felt deflated. They didn't look as if they were going to let her leave. Not when she had just arrived there.

Hermione couldn't help but feel intimidated standing there in the shadows. She wasn't one to be scared of the dark or small spaces, but when those two were combined, she felt claustrophobia closing in. She nervously shifted her weight from one foot to another waiting in silent anticipation for either of the two people before her to talk. Slowly she felt her calm persona begin to crack. The day's events were rushing through her head so fast she felt light headed.

She turned her head slightly and looked at Blaise, begging silently with her eyes for him to help her get away from there. She looked again at her parents and found them still looking at her, waiting for her to say something.

"So, umm…" she started, hoping that someone would take the hint and begin talking.

"Yeah, Hermione. Want to go see your room?" Blaise said after a few more minutes. Hermione quietly thanked the heavens for this and nodded eagerly.

"Blaise!" her new mother snapped, causing both him and Hermione to shrink back. "Hermione has just joined us. She must be curious to know all about our family and all about herself. She has to be told of the circumstances that surrounded her birth and why we had to give her away. You know that."

Hermione hung her head in defeat. Now there was absolutely no means of escape. She looked at Blaise again but he avoided her eyes. Instead he followed his parents into, what Hermione supposed was a living room, and sat down. She tried hard to keep the anguish from her showing on her face, but all that had occurred that day had finally caught up with her and all she wanted was to be alone.

It was quiet a few hours later, when the sky had turned an angry purple, that the two people stopped talking. Hermione had gone into the house knowing only Blaises name and now she knew his entire history from ten generations back. She spent half the time holding her tongue as her new parents told her about their dreams of Blaise and her becoming power death eaters. She had barely said anything and was surprised that people could talk for that long without any interruption.

When finally she was allowed to leave she let out a small moan. Her head ached and every inch of her body felt beaten up. Her eyes were the size of disks and her eyebrows were furrowed in an effort to not scream. Never before had she felt as helpless as she had those past few hours. Never before had she been lost for words, too scared to say anything in fear of what the outcome could be. Hermione couldn't believe the situation in which she was in.

She heard shuffling feet behind her and turned to see Blaise approaching her. He mumbled a quick sorry about his parents before leading the way up the stairs. Hermione kept her eyes on him the whole way. Wondering if there was any resemblance between the two of them? She doubted it or else she would have seen it all these years at Hogwarts. She knew that she had probably inherited the family's brains while he had the family's looks. She didn't care though. Brains were more important in life than looks.

Noticing for the first time her surrounding, Hermione was instantly interested in the strange carvings on the walls. She caught glimpses of words like 'Haunting', 'Followers', 'Black', and at times phrases like, 'Red Night', 'She entrances all'. Although she could read the carvings, Hermione couldn't make any sense of them. She wondered if Blaise knew what any of these things meant. He must since he had been living here all his life.

"Blaise," she said quietly, still uncomfortable being on first name bases with him. "Do you realise that there are strange carvings on your wall?" she asked matter-of-factly.

Blaise turned to look at her but said nothing. She felt momentarily rooted to the spot by his angry glare and felt anger boiling inside. How dare he get angry with her! What happened to the happy Blaise that was excited to see her that morning? Why was she now stuck with moody and silent Blaise?

"We're here." He said after a few more minutes of walking around. Hermione was too busy trying to remember every twist and turn that they had made and ended up walking straight into him. She mumbled an apology and flinched when he glared at her again.

"Here where?" she asked angrily. She was no longer in the mood for his drastic personality changes.

"Your room." He replied just as fiercely, challenging her to continue.

"Oh." She said quietly and a slight blush crept to her cheeks.

He turned away after telling her what time dinner was and she was left standing alone in the dark hallway. She opened the door with a shaking and sweaty hand and gasped. She had expected the room to be twice the size of her old one, but seeing it before her was amazing. She was lost for words as she closed and locked the door quickly and began walking around gazing at everything. She wasn't surprised to find all her belonging in the draws and her school things there.

Chills ran up and down her back as she realised that what she had at first considered beautiful was rather haunting. Her canopy bed was black and the purple covers looked out of place. The poor light that was filtering into the room from outside cast long shadows across everything. Her mirror looked fogged up and dust lay on every flat surface of the room. The millions of tiny crystals on the chandelier were twinkling with the soft breeze.

Hermione entered her adjoining bathroom and was relieved to see that this at least looked normal with one exception. The mirror over the sink, although surrounded by and elegant wooded frame, was divided in two by an ugly crack running from on end to the other. Hermione found herself looking at a rather ugly contorted image of herself and shuddered. She was going to fix it, but now all she wanted was to have a hot shower and get in bed.

It didn't take long for her to find everything that she needed. Although she couldn't stay in her room long without getting chills. Hermione wondered if she was ever going to get used to this place. If she was ever going to be able to call it home? At that moment she dreaded the though of living here but under her current circumstances, she didn't have much choice. Getting out of the darkness as quickly as she could she sighed happily as she went into her bathroom and into the warm artificial light.

Nothing in the world could ever beat the feeling of the scalding water running down her skin. It was a needed escape from the pain she was experiencing at that moment. Hermione had not been in the shower for more than a minute before she began shivering uncontrollably. Tears mixed with water and ran down her face. Everything that had occurred that day flashed vividly in her mind. She was numb from both pain and exhaustion.

She cried hard for everything that she had lost that day. From her parents, to her room, to her life. She even cried for things like warm light filtering through her windows, and hearing the dogs barking in her street. She bent over double as her shivering increased and her sobs became louder. When she was finally in control of her body, and her crying had ceased, she got out of the shower and quickly glanced at the cracked mirror.

I'm broken too, she thought and got dressed quickly.

Walking numbly to her closet to look for something presentable to wear to dinner, Hermione noticed a rather out of place object on the bottom corner. Reached down she pulled out a small black book with a velvet cover. Curious she went over to her bed and sat down, intending to look it over quickly before returning to her previous task.

"Hello my name is Aurora and I am not your average teenage girl. I am thirteen years old and although one might mistake me for normal. I am anything but. I am a witch. And I have only a few hours to live.

As you just read that I know what went through your mind, but no, I am not sick. I believe that if I had some terminal illness I would have been much better off that how I am not. If I was sick I would be lying in a hospital bed with flowers and cards around me wishing me well. Heck, if I was sick I might have a chance of survival.

But no, I am not terminally ill at all. And im am not in a hospital. I am only in my room, in my house. Writing in this black diary what I know. I wish there was a chance or a way to change my future but there isn't. And the only thing that I can think of is writing down everything I know for someone else. Someone in the future to read and be guided to a better fate.

The reason that I will die is simple. I will die because I know the truth. I know the truth about my house. I know who put the messages on the walls and why my parents are shadows. I, stating it simply, will die because I know too much.

I guess now I have nothing to lose anymore. From here on I will cease writing my introduction and begin telling you my story. The story of Aurora…as I silently await death…"