A/N: Okay, I've caved. I lost the plot and I'm rewriting it. Firstly, thank you to all of the readers. I'm really glad so many of you have liked this story, it was my first long fic and writing it has taught me a lot. But I never planned this story out. When I started it, I had this idea stuck in my mind of Harry with a little sister in first year and basically just tried to create a scenario where that would be possible. Looking back on it now, I don't like several of the characters' reactions and I don't like that I tried to infuse so many canon events into the story. One or two is about normal in an AU, but I think I was trying to make this more complicated than it needed to be.
Because I just had an idea of where to start and where to end, I didn't account for much else and when I got a review asking how it was possible for Harry to suddenly be so good at magic I was stumped. This led to the whole 'Harry suddenly losing his magic.' I was going to offer up a whole convoluted explanation about his 'magical core' to account for it. Again, a result of poor planning.
I'd like to take another crack at this story, condense the storyline, layer the OC's a bit more and generally tidy up the plot. There's a lot I'm going to keep and its pretty much going to end the way I originally intended, but I will be taking several divergent storylines in the rewrite. I tried going back to previous chapters and just editing them, but I realized I would be wiping out large chunks of events and rewriting them differently anyway. You'll see from the first chapter, I've made one very big change in order to properly explain the blood ward. I don't feel right just posting completely different chapters in place of what's already there, so it's just easier to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. I'll keep this original online, but you may consider this story officially discontinued.
The re-write will be under the new title: The Longest Road.