Time had no meaning in the burning world. Mostly, Hermione spent her days trying to find someone who didn't despise her, but it was impossible. The only common element in the place was rollicking hatred. Voldemort was here, along with a hoard of death eaters including the ones she had killed. Lucius Malfoy crashed through the burning sky sometime after her. Like everyone else, he raged at the sky and raged at the gods and the flames, but it didn't matter. For a while she entertained herself with hunting them and hacking their heads off. Voldemort blasted her with a massive Aveda that splashed against her bones, burning like acid, but it did nothing else. His high pitched laughter turned to screaming when she grabbed him by his eye socket and stabbed a chunk of sharp shale into the gap between his head and neck and twisted, popping his head off in one quick snap. She smashed and smashed and smashed the skull while his body stumbled over rocks and tumbled down a hill. Like everything else here, he eventually turned up again, all the worse for wear.
Without anything stopping her from sneaking after him, she saw how hollow the rhetoric really was. He was simply an impotent nutter. Nothing he said made any sense, but it didn't matter. His Pureblood zealots were brainless lumps rendered thus by generations of incest. The only reason they even survived were the rituals which imbued whole families of meat puppets with evil spirits. Umbridge was a prime example. Once separated from her demon, her empty husk wandered aimlessly until it spilled over a cliff.
Greyback made a far more interesting quarry. She hunted him for years, sneaking in unawares and hacking his head off while he screamed and begged. The first few dozen times were fun, but he still raged and spewed the same all consuming hatred.
Bellatrix had been a disappointment. For as powerful and canny an adversary that she had been in life, here, she cowered and begged like a confused little girl when Hermione cornered her. The witch who had caused her so much pain fell to her knees and cried like a child when accosted by her victims.
Narcissa Malfoy eventually met her husband. Watching them fight endlessly over his complete inability to accomplish anything tangible in life had been a treat. Being berated about her bastard of a son had not. Her anger overflowed and she hunted them until she trapped them under a mountain of sliding rock.
An army of angry dead were chanting and hauling one pleading against them. Dumbledore's voice was unmistakable, but it was shouted down by the thronging children who died fighting under his banner. Her mind drifted back to conversations with the few American Wesen who knew there even had been something going on in Wizarding England. Their view was that her so called wizarding war was simply a kooky British political squabble between wizards which got out of hand in an endless history of the same. They all pointed out that the nutjob's forces had been soundly defeated by a scrum of school children. That had given her pause. It was only then that she realized The Order of the Phoenix never contained more than a dozen adults. She should have been furious with the Wizengamut's head Mugwhump, but somehow, she didn't have it in her given what she knew about her own self. Her fondness for the man didn't extend to trying to save him, though. For all his high minded rhetoric, he had resigned a generation of innocents to their deaths.
Then, there was a crack and a swirling cloud of dust mingled with fire. An old man was struggling against the flames. He was crying out, cursing the gods. The voice clicked inside her brain. "Harry?"
He shot to his feet, swatting and struggling against burning robes. Milky eyes tinged with green searched, eventually lighting on her broken corpse. His hand came up as he bellowed out a dozen curses and hexes. White, orange, and red magic crashed through her, searing as its payload emptied, but there was nothing for it to light on.
"It's me! Harry, it's Hermione!"
His lip curled off his teeth. "So, the whore sends her final insult to The Lord Black, eh? The bastard was a surprise, for sure. He took my sweet Daphne from me! Ripped her to pieces! She was my whole world!"
Green lightning rippled off his fingertips as his Aveda bellowed out. The death curse splattered, hissing and crackling over her bones like acid.
And he cursed her. She would rot and burn for all eternity for making his son an orphan. Her cowardice left a wizard to grow up with muggles who beat him and burned him and whored him out as the play thing of deviants. So he sought out the darkness, and powered his war with blood.
She was crying and pleading on her knees when his magic ripped her apart and buried her under an avalanche of burning sulfur. She begged for death but the smothering heat and stench wouldn't cooperate. She wiggled and broke free and dug. Grit drifted down, so she wormed up. The chips and rocks cut her ligaments and wore the tips off her bones, but there was no rest.
Her head punched through the glassy crust, only to be greeted by a mop of red hair burning in the expanse. Ron poured more Avedas and Crucios into her mummified remains. He cursed her for making a son too. The boy wrecked everything. Murdered his parents and wife. Enslaved his daughters to be his brood mares. Charlie's, Luna's, Malfoy's, all of them.
Thousands of witches and wizards. All smashing her with rocks and sticks and curses. The muggles entered the war. They brought in field artillery and bombers. Machine guns and drones. They lit the roads from Belfast to London with the bodies of witches and wizards. Half the population of wizarding England was burned alive because of her.
Her son had escaped them, but he could not escape death. Mark and a hoard of grandchildren eventually poured into the burning expanse. The Americans joined the war and laid waste to his forces. They cursed her and sealed even stronger and heavier fetters on the whore who wrecked the whole world.
Heavy, thick chains wrapped her as they poured their bile over her bones, and they kicked her over the cliff.
Her body smashed, twisted, and bounced until she splashed into a sticky, burning lake. Thick layers of glowing ooze clung to her bones, wrapping them in fiery slime. Ancient corpses popped up and gnawed into her. They laughed as they chewed her smoldering carcass, but no matter how badly she begged, death escaped.
Liquid fire poured into her mouth, choking her as she sank. She deserved far worse than anything the gods could ever mete out. Do overs never accomplished anything, so she didn't beg for a second chance. She wallowed in self pity and wished for death as ages passed and she wondered how she could have done anything different.
They caught her son and chained him and pitched him in with her, but he simply cursed her and pounded black magic through her while he raged and burned every single day for millennia.
"Rise!" thundered across the landscape. Rocks and fire swirled around her chained body as the earth swelled and washed. Her links burst loose and the creatures gnawing her skeleton were torn free. Streamers of liquid fire vomited her. She crashed into the crust of stone and was driven up through infinitesimal gaps in the rocks, drowned again through endless caverns of waters, more rock, sand, piping, and concrete..
She shot up with a gasp into blackness and her head smashed steel. Her lungs sucked in disinfectant soaked air and shivers wracked her numb body. Cold wracked every once of her, but she was stuck in some sort of metal box. She kicked and screamed until her shelf rolled out into flickering, greenish light. Gasps and screams greeted her. The room went silent, but she could feel stares boring into her flesh. Her neck was burning and her ears ringing as she craned and strained in the glittering kaleidoscope blur. Her fingers shot down and found a hollow belly covered with waxy flesh. Zig-zagging rows of metal staples criss-crossed her stomach and chest. She cried out for her baby, but only made raw gurgling.
Her legs swung over the side and she cartwheeled, hitting the floor head first. She was pushing, pulling, stumbling and fell over something hard. Hot hands wrapped her arms like searing fire. Mouths moved. A woman screamed and ran. Soon she was shivering, hobbling, stumbling through metal doors with a nun under each shoulder into the icy rain in the black night.
Her eyes fluttered open, but her brain was so sluggish. Brilliant white stars twisted and turned in the slick of water battering the church van. She snuck a blue hand onto the nun beside her and focused her powers. The words buzzed in her brain while the nun's mouth moved mechanically. The spice shop. She needed George Calvert at the spice shop.
Hermione's head clumped against the seat in front of her as the van slid to a stop. It lurched then bounced over a curb as it swung the opposite direction. She was so tired, and so numb. Her eyes were barely cracked open as she tried to process what was happening. It must have all been some strange dream. The fight in the church and the police officer and the girl. Her hand drifted up to her neck and found a mangled ear and rows of staples jutting out of the flesh. Where had those come from? Her hand drifted down over the loose flab stapled across her belly. Where was her baby?
The nuns shivered as they stood outside the back door in the alley. Her bare feet were ankle deep in a puddle but she couldn't feel a thing. She tried to talk, but could only gurgle, so she took the nun's arm and focused. The woman's mouth moved mechanically and the priest rummaged her purse out of the large plastic bag. A brass key hung on a purple, flowery loop that read "Kay." It slid into the lock and they moved her inside The Spice Shop to the small cot.