Summary: There will be 31 days of mayhem, but I'm not sure there will be 31 actual stories. That would require more brain than Corvus has.

Beta Love: Dragon and the Cold Water Bottle Torture, Dutchgirl01 the Busiest Bee that Ever Buzzed, Commander Shepard the Winter Soldier

A/N: Each story will be a separate chapter to feed my laziness and desire not to post that many new stories for the same event.

Cast Aside But Not Castaway

We are all here on earth to help others; what an earth the others are here for I don't know.

W. H. Auden

Prompt: For the first time in a long time I have no path to

follow. No course set out before me. Whatever it is I do next, when I figure that out, I rather hope you will be part of it

The end of the world did not come via the Dark Lord—well, not exactly. The end of the world came after him. Everything that happened after his reign of terror ended and the Wizarding World attempted to pick up where he left off.

It was the world we had both fought our lives to save.

It was the world that turned its back on us in the end.

Me, forever a Death Eater.

Her, overshadowed by the massively swollen egos of her so-called best friends and considered useless for the infertility that resulted from Bellatrix' tender mercies. She could not help repopulate the Wizarding World with babies, so her worth to those like her former best friend, Ronald Weasley, fell to ruin.

The Wizarding World just resumed the same oblivious ways that had brought on the war to begin with. The first war. The second—

And when they'd threatened to blame Muggleborns for the entire bullshite that was the war— Muggles and half-bloods, well—

Some friendships simply didn't survive.

I didn't have any, so there was no terrible mourning there. I was a traitor to those who thought me a mere servant. I was a traitor to those who thought me the worst kind of trash. Whether or not they were right to do so, I didn't care, but she—

I looked to where Hermione was sitting on our hidden beachfront cottage porch, a large book on her lap as she swung in the hammock I had rigged to swing between the shade trees nearest the house—

She deserved so much more than the scorn of the Wizarding World.

For once in my life, I found myself with no masters to loom over me, waiting for me to make a mistake. I had no further obligations—no ties to the world but—

But one.

Somehow, she had become important to me.

Was it because she saved my life?

She said no. Any "decent" person would have done the same.

I don't think she realised there were very few such people in the world.

There were few people anywhere that would give a second, third, or whatever chance I was on from the constant downward spiral that had been my teenage life.

Hermione let out a soft screech as the hammock suddenly went spinning and she was dumped out onto the warm sand.

A playful young sandworm spat sand at her, tentacle tongues waving in amusement as it seemed to laugh at her.

Hermione set her book aside, huffed, and petted the inside of the sandworm's mouth—something we'd both learned it really liked.

This was why the beach had been abandoned for so long.

All who lived there left soon after.

Things disappeared. Cars ended up sunk in the sand. Parts of the houses. Kids found buried up to their necks, screaming. Pets disappeared.

That type of thing tends to make most people move rather quickly.

This beach was patrolled by sandworms.

They turned the large rock into soft, fine sand, and then they burrowed into it—the most pristine of beaches most would die to have, if it weren't for a few hungry, mischievous worms.

Hermione had found them by accident, having fallen into a sandworm "sinkhole" and woke up to find a baby sandworm inspecting her "gift" from Bellatrix that had carved up her arm with a cursed knife.

Many believed she had Mudblood written on there, but that was hearsay. Rumours created by people who tried to give Bellatrix some "reason" for her cruelty. The truth was, Bellatrix didn't give a shite about anything unless it pleased her closet lover and lord.

Few knew the truth of her insanity.

Witches from the Black family developed an exceptionally high rate of insanity when they became pregnant—their magic fighting to suck at the very heart of their baby's magic while the baby's tried to do precisely the same. Ruthless—even from within the womb. It was why the Blacks had no sets of twins—at least, none where both had been born alive. Many of them were born split from the twin they had murdered in the womb. Forever living with stolen magic—and the insanity that came with murdering their sibling before they were even born. Then, if they survived to breed, their infants tried to steal their magic—even as their bodies sought to squib-ify their children before they even left the womb.

This was the Dark secret of many a pureblood family—something Tom Riddle had discovered and used to his advantage. He knew their secret. He knew their dark pasts. And many a pureblood would pay heavily to keep such things secret.

But Bellatrix' gift to Hermione had been, strangely, the sandworms.

They ate Dark magic.

And Hermione and even myself—we had quite a few Dark wounds that had never healed.

Hermione had woken to finding the baby sandworm leeching the Dark magic from her arm like a child with a frozen treat. The pain had disappeared, if but for a time—time enough that by the time it returned, a ready and willing sandworm would arrive to tend to her.

She'd been a willing convert to the sandworm's proclivity for eating Dark magic, and after some convincing once I had finished flipping out on her for having fallen into a sand pit—the residual Dark magic from my accused tattoo and Nagini's fangs fed the worms as well.

For the price of being "played with" by sandworms from time to time.

And no one ever bothered us on this stretch of beach.

It was "cursed."

"Unstable."

"Deadly."

It suited us just fine.

And they gifted me with the finest source of purified sandworm sand ever seen in Britain or perhaps the whole of Europe.

While I had no doubt there were probably sandworms in any place that had sand, they were also probably even bigger than ours were.

And the bigger ones on our patch were not slouches. They would dig around in the stone and ground around us daily, moving dunes, eating unfortunate cars, and other such things—basically anything that got in their way. The biggest would sometimes loaf in the ocean, half of their body acting like a living sandbar as they munched on the stones and turned them into sand—sand so full of pure magic that the beach glowed at night and made the ocean alight with colour.

It was like the Northern Lights every night.

Just a handful of the sand could make a set of magical crystal phials or drinking vessels that literally purified anything it touched.

We made a few and arranged for an exclusive licence with the goblins to distribute the few we made with a swimming otter carved on the side that was dancing with a sandworm—in motif, of course. We kept our secrets in plain sight.

A single phial or flask commanded a king's ransom, and that made the goblins very happy.

So happy, in fact, that they gladly kept our location and business affairs locked under so much impossibly convuluted Gobbledegook legalese that anyone attempting to track us down as the creators was highly unlikely to be successful.

Our very first phial had gone to pay for the repairs and reconstruction of Gringotts, and the rest, as they say, was history.

The second had been gifted to St Mungos to store the most expensive potion in history—the cure for severe Cruciatus damage that I had perfected to help Hermione and inadvertently healed her fertility problem.

We hadn't realised it, of course, until the sandworms began to tickle her abdomen with their sensory tongues, and Hermione felt a kick in response.

So Mungo's kept that carefully under wraps because the potion was needed for Cruciatus far more than the more selfish desire to populate the world, and the phial kept someone from tampering with it.

It seemed, too, that Longbottom's ill-fated parents were making a slow recovery. They could never fully recover what was lost to them, but they could make new memories and keep them—and that was more than anyone could have dreamed of.

And Neville was going to have a baby brother.

I had to laugh at the irony of it all.

The Wizarding World, however, was a sodding mess.

Short of the goblins and St Mungos, we kept our noses well out of the British magical world.

Well, and the DoM because—you couldn't live with a bunch of Dark magic eating giant sandworms without attracting Amelia Bones' attention.

So, a few times a year, we opened up the beach, set up scores of lounging beds and invited DoM patients with the Darkest of magic wounds, and the sandworms did the rest.

The sandworms were happy.

We were happy.

The patients were ecstatic.

Only DoM patients or those affiliated with them could come because of the privacy Oath—not that any of them protested.

They could come here a few times a year, enjoy the beach, be served food and drinks by the all-too-happy goblins who happily took their galleons, and have their Dark, aching, painful wounds tended to.

Honestly, if I hadn't been the co-founder of the entire thing, I would have been swearing my Oath on the spot for a chance at it.

It wasn't a cure for the really bad wounds like mine or Hermione's, but for some—it was. And that was a miracle in itself. But I found that most people found the lack of pain for even a few months at a time was entirely worth it.

Honestly, neither of us were complaining. It allowed us to feed the sandworms regularly, and if it weren't for that, we'd never have realised what a wonderful gift this place was.

Hermione's laugh caught my attention, and I turned to see that the baby sandworm had found a new victim: Viktor Krum was now neck deep in the sand, laughing uproariously as Hermione giggled and helped dig him out.

He, too, came regularly for treatments—and he and Hermione were now solid friends—the kind of friendship she'd needed long ago but had been too busy looking after her idiot best mates to nurture.

Hermione's eyes blazed blue in the sunlight—and I knew mine were the same. We had lived too long—too closely with the worms to not be changed by them. They had gifted us with something more than just a syphon for Dark magic and sandworm mischief.

They had gifted us with their water—a concentrated droplet of magic from deep within the worm that it had placed in our mouths, and we knew we would never leave this place or these worms again. We were just as bound to this place as they were.

But anyone attempting to find Severus Snape or Hermione Granger would end up very sad indeed. For those two individuals were lost to the Second Wizarding War.

What and who we were now was not translatable in any spoken tongue. It was whispered by the worms that travelled in the deep earth. It was crooned by the very magic in the sand. It was flashed in the magic sparkling in the glow emitted by the countless grains around us.

As I took Hermione into my arms, she beamed at me even as Viktor brushed the sand off his body with a laugh.

"Lunch?" I asked them both.

They smiled and nodded, and I found my own smile in theirs.

This was the life I welcomed, and I looked forward to every single moment.