Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I do not own Harry Potter. Harry Potter and all associated characters and trademarks are the property of J. K. Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment.
CHAPTER ONE: THE RAID
"Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us."
-Robinson Jeffers
St. Ursula's Home For Orphaned Children was not a pleasant place at the best of times. Eleven stories tall, the old, ramshackle building on London's East End leaned into the Thames on rotten wooden stilts like a drunken hunchback.
At St. Ursula's, the best of times were nonexistent.
The Matron of the orphanage was named Martha Holmes. She was a hoary old spinster with a warty face, prominent ears, a jutting jaw, and beady mud-brown eyes. Ms. Holmes, as she demanded to be addressed, despised children, but she oversaw the orphanage due to her rheumatism, which cost her ruinous amounts to take care of. A short temper combined with a furious disposition made her into an intimidating figure who inspired fear, hatred, and reverence simultaneously in her subjects. At St. Ursula's, Martha Holmes was God and the Devil rolled into one banal Catholic woman.
Ms. Holmes, despite her rather unpleasant temperament, considered herself a very charitable woman, doing God's work by taking care of orphaned children (she conveniently ignored her own derision for her job when choosing to admire her generosity).
Of the roughly three hundred residents of St. Ursula's, around ten Ms. Holmes was actually quite fond of in an odd way. They functioned as her spies throughout the orphanage, reporting any interesting piece of information or bit of gossip they heard. In return, the Matron covertly gave her child agents extra clothes or scraps of food from time to time. Like dogs , she often derisively thought. Throw 'em a bone and they'll do anything for you . The rest of the children were mostly beneath her notice. Mostly.
Ten floors above where the Matron slept, her worst enemy sat on a lumpy cot. Her name was Lyra. She was eight years old. She was wearing a torn grey t-shirt, ripped black leggings, steel-tipped combat boots and a beat-up black leather jacket studded with safety pins. She had black hair that came down her back in gentle waves and glowing, radioactive green eyes that made everyone who made eye contact with her somehow unsettled. Her thin eyebrows and upturned nose gave her an almost angelic appearance.
Lyra's cherubic lips curled into a frown. She truly hated the day. November third. The day when her dear relatives had dropped her off at hell, otherwise known as St. Ursula's Orphanage. She only knew their names and physical appearances from a time when she had gently interrogated Ms. Holmes when she was blind drunk on gin. Her hand might have accidentally slipped some stolen sodium thiopental into her shot glass while she was drinking. Which might, purely theoretically, of course, compel someone to (perhaps unwittingly) tell the truth. Truly such a tragic accident.
Lyra knew their names were Vernon and Petunia Dursley. According to Ms. Holmes, Vernon had a ruddy face, a bristly moustache, and apparently looked like an obese walrus, while Petunia had a thin face, stringy blonde hair, and looked like a starving horse. She also knew they had a son called Dudley who was around her age. No one ever said that Ms. Holmes was not creative with her insults.
But as much as Lyra hated her "relatives", she hated her parents far more. According to the Matron, the Dursleys never called them by name. They were always "freaks" or "abnormalities". But Ms. Holmes had wheedled the names out of her aunt in the end.
Lily and James Potter. They were the ones who had left her on the doorstep of her aunt and uncle like a bottle of milk. They were the ones who abandoned her for her oh-so-precious twin brother. They were the ones who consigned to a miserable existence scraping out a living from the refuse of society. They gave her her old name.
Harriet Lily Potter.
Oh, how she hated that name. Harriet. What a pathetic name. Three pathetic syllables. Plebeian. Worthless. Ordinary .
Lily. For the mother that threw her to the wolves.
Potter. The surname of the worthless bastard who abandoned her.
Harriet Lily Potter died the same day that Lyra Zoe Noctis was born.
Lyra. For the only constellation she could see from her window. The lyre. The songs she sang to the moon and stars.
Zoe. For her first, last, and only friend. Her sister in all but blood. The girl who died to save her.
Noctis. Of the night. For the darkness inside her.
Three words that meant her .
But Lyra knew she was destined for more than she was now. She knew she was special. She knew she was better than the other children.
Her teachers called her a prodigy. She had taught herself to read when she was four years old. In reception, she could already do long division. She remembered anything she ever learned. Her teachers called it an "eidetic memory". At eight, she was already in Year 7.
But there was more than her teachers knew. When she was a toddler, things would fly towards her, pulled on invisible strings. When she was hungry, more food would be on her plate than before. When she grew bored of hearing the Lord's Prayer at church, the Bible would fall and smudge on a patch of dirt that hadn't been there the second before. At first they were accidents.
Soon, she learned control and precision. How to direct her wants. After reading The Lord of the Rings, she began to call her abilities "magic". She liked it. It meant she was magical and the others were nothing.
Lyra soon found that her abilities were practically limitless.
Lyra learned from all sources. When the Matron showed the orphanage Star Wars, Lyra spent months learning how to choke people with telekinesis. Even more useful was her newfound ability to shoot violet bolts of lightning from her fingertips with little effort.
Three months later, she made her move. Ten of the strongest and most intelligent children in the orphanage, who had previously ignored her, began to suffer from ever-more frequent nightmares, which she had clandestinely inflicted on the orphans. For months, their psyches deteriorated until they were on the brink of insanity. After she "miraculously" cured them, they gained an almost fanatical loyalty to her. They were her eyes, ears, and enforcers around the orphanage.
Whenever her followers chose to address her, they called her "The Lady." She liked it. It kept them in their place. Soon, she became rather fond of them, in the way a person is of their favourite pets. In return for their service and devotion, she taught them how to steal, how to threaten, and how to fight. Of course, she never showed any of them too much. Despite her youth, she was no fool.
Lyra hissed quietly. Come. Sybaris, her faithful companion, slithered out from under her lumpy bed. Her orange, gold and black scales gleamed in the faint moonlight. Lyra had liberated her from a London zoo two years ago with a strong outburst of accidental magic, vanishing the glass in her enclosure. Sybaris had accompanied her ever since.
Little misssstressss, Sybaris greeted. It issss late. You mussssst sssshed your day-ssssskin and go to your den.
Lyra sighed. Coming, 'barissss.
Sybaris yawned, revealing long, venomous fangs. Then she coiled up in a corner. Child and snake both lay down, silently watching the constellations.
Their stargazing was rudely interrupted as a black missile hurtled through the window. Glass shards flew everywhere.
Lyra hastily erected a non-corporeal shield around herself for protection against the storm of crystalline shrapnel shredding the room. Her ragged blanket was torn into pieces. The cheap, worn whitewash looked like a miniature tornado had hit it. A chunk of glass the size of Lyra's fist was embedded in her pillow.
Lyra sighed and lazily waved her right hand. The glass shards quickly unstuck themselves from her room and pieced themselves back together into a complete window. The worn cotton of her ragged sheet and pillow sewed back together by itself. The whitewash was again only partially worn off.
"Really, Umbra? Again?"
The large raven cawed. If a bird could look smug, Lyra swore that Umbra did.
"That's the fourth time you smashed the window."
Umbra gazed at her with his beady black eyes, completely unapologetic. He tilted his head and led out a hoarse croak. "Lyra," he said. "Lyra."
Lyra's name was his favourite word. Most of the time, the damn bird was worse than a bloody journalist. But there was a hint of warning in his raspy avian voice. For a second, she hesitated. Then the room exploded.
No. To say the room exploded would be putting it lightly. Half of the orphanage, in an instant, simply ceased to exist. Fortunately for her, Lyra's room was one of the farthest from the blast. Unfortunately for Ms. Holmes, her room was at the epicentre.
Lyra grabbed her battered rucksack, jumped out her shattered window, and threw out her arms. As if suspended by an invisible cord, her rapid fall stopped, leaving her suspended in midair, before she gently floated to the ground. Umbra followed her descent closely and then perched on her right shoulder. Lyra rapidly threw out a wide-area mental probe, finding no conscious minds in the immediate vicinity. She sighed in relief, before frowning at the lack of an obvious culprit.
Quickly, she sent a nightmare into the unconscious minds of her followers. A moment later, seven of them emerged from the rubble, limping and covered in scratches. Michael, the leader of her votaries, quickly bent over into a clumsy bow, the other six children mirroring his motions.
"Sorry, milady. We lost Oliver, James, and Daniel."
Lyra dismissively waved her hand. Quickly, her followers assumed a round formation around her, forming a human screen. Sixteen eyes scanned the surroundings, looking for any threats.
Her followers saw nothing out of the ordinary, but Lyra sensed something strange. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled. She felt a glimmer of something, some illusion, and pulled .
With a soft popping sound, six figures wearing black robes and ornate silver masks were revealed. Each of them held a long, thin wooden stick. The clear leader was an aristocratic-looking woman with curly black hair and hooded violet eyes that shone with insanity. She was the only one not wearing a mask.
Michael started. "What the-" He was cut off as one of the hooded figures shot a reddish light from his stick, no wand, at him. When it hit him, he crumpled as he began convulsing and emitting hoarse shrieks. All seven children stared at him, six in horror and one in fascination. Lyra quickly deduced that the mysterious robed people had exploded the building and that they were magical, special , like her.
For now, she simply observed. Perhaps they would not harm her. Quickly, the robed magicals tired of their game. Another person, a woman this time, flicked their wand and Michael flew backwards onto a jagged piece of lead pipe, impaled in a gruesome display. He began to cough up great gobs of blood and tried to raise his arm, weakly, before it fell, limp.
Her other five followers gave shrill screams and began to run as fast as they could. Lyra gave a feral snarl and began to raise her hands to punish her disloyal, cowardly followers.
But the hooded figures were faster. Five of them fired bursts of light at the fleeing children. Only the leader abstained.
The first of her traitorous followers screamed as his intestines spilled out of his lacerated belly. The second had her legs blown off by a powerful blue explosion. The third screamed as her bones imploded into powder. The fourth gave a brief shriek as his liquified organs came pouring out his ears and nostrils. The last child, after being struck by the final spell, gave a jerk. Then his head fell off his cleanly decapitated torso. Afterwards, all six then trained their wands on her. One person shot a green burst of light at Lyra. It was the last thing he ever did. A piece of shattered mirror intercepted the spell and it ricocheted. The man crumpled when the green light hit him. Before he died, Lyra was already moving. She let out a burst of magic and a tornado of shrapnel formed in her outstretched arms, before she launched it at the man in the centre. He was shredded into red mist. "YOU BITCH!" another roared. He was silenced as a whip of white-hot fire bisected him, dying mere moments after his companion. The remaining four lunged and fired a series of spells, but Lyra dodged them all. She gave a guttural scream and more chunks of stone flew at her attackers. Two dodged, but the other two were struck. One man was knocked unconscious when a fist-sized chunk of stone grazed his temple. The other had his neck snapped by a much larger piece and died instantly.
The two remaining both unleashed simultaneous spells at her, but she ducked and the spells collided, creating a shockwave that knocked the dark-haired woman unconscious. Unfortunately, the other person was unfazed. The last man standing gripped his wand with clenched fingers and began firing an assortment of curses at Lyra, which she telekinetically blocked with various debris. Both of them clenched their teeth as they resolutely walked towards each other. Then the man made a mistake. A jagged chunk of concrete was hit by one of his more explosive curses. Shrapnel flew everywhere, and one piece hit his wand, snapping it in two. Lyra's attacker tried to flee, but Lyra raised a hand and he was levitated until the two stood face to face. Then she brought her index finger and thumb together. The man gasped for air as his windpipe was slowly crushed. His legs began to jerk wildly as he fought to breathe. Lyra brought her other hand and roared, and bolts of purplish-blue lightning sped from her outstretched fingers and struck the man. He screamed as hundreds of thousands of volts coursed through his body. Lyra began to laugh sadistically and upped the intensity. Her victim convulsed uncontrollably. Then, she heard rapid footsteps and whirled, letting the man drop in an undignified heap.
Another cloaked figure was rushing towards her. Lyra raised her hands. But not fast enough. A jet of red light struck her in the was unconscious before she hit the ground.
Notes: St. Ursula's Orphanage is a fictional institution created and owned by me. Ms. Martha Holmes is a fictional character created and owned by me. Sodium thiopental, also known as Sodium Pentothal is colloquially called "truth serum" and is often seen in media. I imagine that Lyra, when questioning Ms. Holmes also used a rough analogue of a Compulsion Charm. Sybaris is a kind of snake called a fer-de-lance, which is a type of highly venomous pit viper native to Central America. The name is French and roughly translates to "lance of iron" or "iron of the lance", a reference to the snake's triangular head. Sybaris was a mythical cave-dwelling giant beast from Greek mythology which was slain by the hero Eurybatus. While not originally described in detail, she is often interpreted as a she-dragon or serpent. For any herpetologists out there, I know that when snakes "yawn", it has nothing to do with fatigue and simply helps them realign their jawbones into a more comfortable position. I am giving Sybaris this humanlike behaviour, as a result of her association with Lyra, a human. The reason that the emergency services (i.e. police and fire department) did not show up after the explosion was that the Death Eaters placed strong Notice-Me-Not and Muggle-Repelling charms around St. Ursula's. The illusions that Lyra sensed were strong Disillusionment Charms. They were ripped away at the same time because they were all cast by one person, probably Bellatrix. BTW, I am aware that there are a lot of Star Wars elements here. I am not trying to copy Star Wars in this fanfic, nor is it any kind of crossover with any other fandom. I'm simply using Star Wars as one of Lyra's initial influences in developing her magical abilities. Finally, just to be clear, I do not support J.K. Rowling's disgusting transphobic views. I am firmly for the rights of all members of the LGBTQIA+ community, including transgender individuals.