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.
Her Orchard
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him from every pore.
Sigmund Freud
Prompt: Her orchard was silent as the grave. The trees were blooming beautifully. Their fruit was poisonous and black.
It was beautiful; all agreed.
But it was a lie.
The orchard was as silent as the grave. The trees were blooming beautifully, but the fruit was black and filled with poison.
At first, they could ignore it—
But then all the fruit in the Weasley orchards began to mirror them—
And when little Lucy Weasley ate one, she fell sick and eventually succumbed to her illness.
As Molly proceeded to lose her everloving mind over the loss of her grandbaby, she let something slip from her lips—an odd comment that alerted many that something was very much amiss.
Something had gone terribly wrong.
"You should have married her immediately!" Molly was overheard hissing angrily to Ronald. "A sealed marriage bond would have cut her off from the grove and that greasy-haired traitor!"
"What grove," Harry growled through gritted teeth, his youngest child suffering at St Mungos. "WHAT GROVE?!"
Molly immediately shut her mouth, but Ron blurted, "That dryad forest 'Mione was always going to! She went there and fell asleep one day, and Mum told me to take her away from the great oak! To enhance our magic! To keep our family safe!"
Harry grabbed Ron by the collar and squeezed. "You call this safe?! I haven't seen Hermione in over a year. You told me she was sick, but she wasn't sick, was she? She wasn't being taken care of WAS SHE?"
"I never thought I would say this, but Snape was right," Harry snarled. "He begged me to let him save her, and you were always there to tell me Hermione was bloody fine. She was just sick, yeah? She just needed rest away from people after the war. Then you'd get married like two people in love, who were meant to be. That's what you told me, wasn't it?" His fists clenched convulsively. "WASN'T IT?!"
"Y-yes!" Ron whimpered, his blue eyes wide with fright.
Harry's eyes were blazing green orbs of fury. He reached to his chest and pulled out a phial from a chain and crushed it between his fingers. His blood dripped, mixing with a dark crimson fluid that looked eerily like dark, dark blood.
"By my bond to you as Ronald's brother-in-law, I invite you into the Weasley home by my right as the husband of a Weasley witch. By law of Old Magick and blood—where pureblood bloods mixed—I. Invite. You. In. By rite of blood."
There was the great howling roar of a great beast as the sun was eclipsed by the moon and the skies went impossibly dark no matter where one looked. The whole of Britain went Dark.
And the howl shook the ground.
Blood seeped up from the ground as if the Earth itself were bleeding, staining the ground with crimson. The very air was misted in red. The smell was acrid—like metal.
And a great black wolf walked toward them, its face a bleached skull with no flesh, the bone etched in long-forgotten runes, and its eyes the blackest of black fire as if space itself was churning inside. Blood dripped from the skull of the wolf in living rivers as pure hatred seemed to ooze from its great and terrible aura.
Evil seethed from its body like a living thing. With each paw drop, the ground seethed and became blooded char.
"For her, I would have spared this world," a deep, growling voice rumbled, both familiar and not. Screamed seemed to echo in the background. "For her, I would have let things grow naturally, decay naturally, and let hate fade to the background but for the whim of human choice—but you denied me my beloved's touch. You made her wither and rot in the chains of family magic. You caused the fruit of our love to wither, and as it did, so did the grove and all of its roots—all that she once touched."
The wolf blurred and shifted and twisted into a form that wasn't any less monstrous. While humanoid, its body was twisted with horns and pointed flesh over a skull with inhumanly sharp teeth. Claws glinted where fingers might have been. He rose, towering over the Burrow, and he slashed the roof open with one hand, sending splinters flying in all directions.
Then, oh so carefully, he cradled the pale, withered form of Hermione Granger in his hands, pressing it to his chest where Darkness slithered over her body and cocooned her to his body.
"Take your children and leave this land, Harry Potter," the demon growled. "I give you three days. Then all will be consumed with hatred and swallowed up by fire and damnation. I give you this boon for giving me back my mate. That is all I will give you."
"WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?!" Molly screamed.
The skull-like face twisted unnaturally into a toothy smile. "If you had not meddled, mortal, I would have remained Severus Snape, happy husband of Hermione once Granger until her natural death—but you destroyed her tree and her anchor, and now—all she has is me—Dul'Mephistos, the Lord of Hatred. Prime Evil, Odium, and the First Brother. I will craft her a body worthy of my Queen, and she will rule beside me as the Heavens fall in fire and corruption. And it will all start here, mortal. And you will be the harbinger—the one they blame for the fall of Britain, until anyone who utters the name Weasley is consumed with hatred. And only the strong will survive. Will you be? I look forward to finding out."
The demon snarled even as his taloned hand curled around the cocoon of his mate, pulling her against him. "Flesh of my flesh, mortal. Blood of my blood. Now and forever."
And suddenly the skies were blue again, the ground pristine as if nothing had happened at all.
It would be so easy to dismiss it as mere fever dream, a bizarre hallucination.
And perhaps that is exactly what the Weasleys did.
But Harry Potter immediately took his children and moved to France to be with Bill and Fleur, and the entire population of the Department of Mysteries disappeared overnight.
Exactly three days later, war broke out all across Britain and stained the land crimson with the blood of both the living and dead, achieving what two Wizarding Wars had failed to do—set Muggles against Magicals in a war that only had losers and never a winner.
The airspace over Britain was abruptly closed and no ships were permitted to come or go. Britain was land of blood and a war that none outside could understand, so they closed the walls around it and called it the no man's land—the second Atlantis, where hubris caused a once great society to sink into the ocean to bury their arrogance.
And hundreds of years later, all atlases in the world sported a dark void where Britain had once been. Only the label "Weasley's Folly" remained.
Severus pressed his muzzle against Hermione's neck and licked her skin as their spawn wrought havoc across the lands of blood and hatred that had once been Britain. "What are you thinking, my mate?"
"I'm thinking there are other things you could do with that beautiful tongue."
Severus murred and captured his mate in his multiple arms. "As my Queen commands, Lady of Hatred."
Hermione smiled at him as crimson vines and brambles grew all around them as he made skillful use of his deft and talented tongue at the base of a great and mighty corrupted oak tree whose branches spanned from one side of the former Great Britain to the other.
And they lived demonically ever after…
A/N: Bird has a lot of Diablo on the brain. Yuss.