A/N: Welcome back! :D The brief break in posting was very helpful for me to handle some of the more complicated and tangled plot threads. But I am back now :)
Current chunk recommendations: 547, 557, 563, 569, 573
The first new moon of the year fell on January 1st, the last day of break before classes resumed, and Hermione found herself mentally making resolutions in her head that she'd never write down:
· Make sure I come out top of the class
· Make sure Harry survives the tournament
· Make the Shadows into something real
· Stop forgetting to go to Exmoor
· Figure out how to do cunnilingus right
· Stop obsessing over sex like I'm keeping score…
It was a weird thing, to realize she was at an age where people were starting to have sex.
Tracey had already gone all the way, so she was in the lead in experience, in Hermione's mind. Blaise had gone down on Fleur, and giving a girl oral sex – that was surely worth a lot of points, she thought. Hermione hadn't yet given oral sex to a girl, but she'd received it, under Fleur's wicked tongue and heated eyes, but that was worth fewer points than giving, she figured. She'd gotten to touch Fleur and finger her, which was probably worth some amount of points. Hermione had also been fingered by Viktor, though, and she'd made three separate guys cum in their pants without directly touching them, so that was surely worth something…
Hermione wondered what Snape would say if she went to him, asking for a potion to make her libido stop and leave her alone.
The Shadows met on New Year's Day just after breakfast by the lake, ready to make the most of the spare winter sunlight and go to Exmoor before the sun set, leaving them in the total darkness of a new moon. Harry, Susan, and Luna were already there when Hermione got to the large tree, Harry brooding as he looked out over the lake.
"I'm supposed to swim in that?" he said, his voice bleak. "Forget breathing – I'll freeze to death."
"Then we'll get you a deep sea diving SCUBA suit," Hermione said succinctly. She gave Harry a dark look. "You are not allowed to die, Mr. Potter."
Harry snickered, but he seemed to cheer up a bit.
"Duly noted, Miss Granger," he quipped back. "I'll do my best."
The other Slytherins made their way to the tree in a cluster together. Hermione wasn't surprised to see Neville, but she was caught off-guard to see Daphne among them.
"Daphne's coming," Pansy announced, as soon as they got close. Her eyes glinted at Hermione, daring her to object.
"Warrington was… having a bit of a fit in the common room," Tracey said diplomatically. "It seemed best that we all come together and not break up."
Hermione glanced at Millie, who just shrugged and smirked.
"Right," Hermione said, sighing. "Daphne, you'll need to swear a loyalty and secrecy oath when we get there. And you'll need to share the Portkey with Neville. Everyone ready to go?"
Exmoor was windy and chilly, but the temperature was well above freezing, and there was no snow on the ground, which gave the Shadows a surprise.
"There's clover!" Neville exclaimed, running around over the moor. "It's growing clover!"
"As well as a ton of toxic toadstools," Theo said, looking over the area with sharp eyes. "There definitely weren't all these around here a couple weeks ago."
Draco looked particularly smug, and Hermione shot him a questioning look.
"Well, only one thing's changed, right?" he said rhetorically. "We did the Werewolf Protection Ritual – a large part of which involved us channeling ley line magic through the land that we purified through the moonlight."
Hermione's eyes widened.
"You think that it purified the land?" she asked.
"Probably not all of it," Draco conceded. "But it seems to have purified at least the top foot of ground or so, right? From the depth we buried the runes at on up."
After some investigation, they were able to confirm Draco's suspicions were correct – the first foot or so of the soil was rich and healthy again, with a stark difference between it and the cracked, useless dirt underneath it. Except for the places where Neville's mushrooms had taken up residence, much of the dirt was still useless.
"Still!" Neville said optimistically. "This is great progress! Just look at all the mushrooms!"
They broke into different groups. Tracey and Susan were excited about the prospect of being able to plant more groves and more trees sooner than expected, and they set about determining the perfect places to plant the new trees they wanted. Neville, Theo, and Daphne set about using cauldrons and enlarged pestles to grind up the neon mushrooms, and the rest of them were put on mushroom duty, gathering as many of the bright fungi into baskets, everyone carefully wearing dragonhide gloves and scarves over their mouths, wary of breathing in spores.
After the mushrooms were collected and ground up, the coven was called on to help with the terraforming once again. Nevill had a large map (that Hermione had no idea how or where he'd gotten it from), and he was plotting out areas that they'd already started purifying. Sitting in a circle together, the coven breathed evenly together, sank into their magic, linked up, and then linked to the ley line, giving them access to more magic than they would have had otherwise. At the others' direction, giant swaths of earth levitated out of the way or just moved aside, nearly causing minor earthquakes as giant mounds formed and vanished at Neville's direction. Theo wanted to water the ground-up mushroom substrate before they put the ground back, insistent that it would help it seep further into the cracked useless dirt, and Hermione obliged as best she could, sending her magic through her water elemental to help tiny, localized rainstorms form over the ground.
Truth be told, Hermione was rather dismayed with her water elemental so far. She'd thought she'd be able to have water stream out of her hands, like she could with fire, but it was more like the earth elemental instead – she could control what of the element was already there, not create it anew. When she really closed her eyes and focused, sending her magic through the water elemental, she could sense the other people around her (magic was still magic, she figured) and the water in the air, and that was it. Even though the water elemental still felt volatile and wild, there wasn't much it could do. Hermione had carefully tried experimenting with breathing water in the bathtub, to a spectacular, sputtering failure, her air elemental fast coming to the rescue to blow the water out of her airways and lungs.
Maybe Blaise would be able to breathe in water, Hermione thought. If he bargained with a powerful elemental, maybe he'd actually get some use out of the bloody thing.
With the coven all working together and the other Shadows (plus Daphne and Neville) working in tandem, the terraforming took much less time than Hermione honestly expected. Tracey went back to ask for a few picnic baskets from the elves, and they all sat around on conjured blankets, discussing the plans of what to do next over a light lunch.
"We need to recruit new members to the Shadows," Luna said.
"Are we recruiting Neville and Daphne?" Harry interrupted. He glanced over at them. "'Cause if not, we should probably stop talking about this right now."
Neville looked startled, while Daphne's eyes lit up in excitement.
"Is this the secret group everyone except me is in?" she demanded. "Yes, I want to join. How do I join? I remember Pansy said it was hard—"
"A secret group?" Neville repeated. "What about?"
Hermione gnawed her lip, trying to figure out how to pitch the Shadows to Neville.
"We're a group of people concerned about the possibility of Voldemort coming back to power," Hermione settled on finally, "and we're trying to take proactive steps to protect as many people as possible from that, while also setting up to take a moral stand against him. We stand for equality for all, which includes the goblins and hedgewitches, and using magic to help everyone live the best life they can."
Neville seemed to consider this.
"You wouldn't just join Dumbledore?" he asked. "If—If You-Know-Who came back?"
"Firstly," Susan said, an authority to her voice, "Dumbledore probably wouldn't let us join his resistance group. He only accepts people who are of age, which none of us are. Secondly…" her eyes were sharp as they settled on Neville. "We focus on protecting people, and teaching people to protect themselves from threats. That's not something Dumbledore exactly focused on last time, is it?"
Neville flinched and looked upset, but Susan held his gaze, firm. Hermione bit her lip. Neville had essentially lost his parents to the Death Eaters, but Susan had lost her family, too.
"Like I said," Hermione said, moving on, "we're trying to be proactive. Right now, we're focusing on giving people as many ways to protect themselves and their loved ones as possible. We're helping the hedgewitches develop their magic more, and we're helping the Blackwell students expand their magic further while they teach us about making magical staves."
"We're also going to build a fortress," Millie said, matter-of-factly. She grinned, looking slightly mad. "It's going to be wicked."
Neville's eyes bulged, and Hermione sighed.
"As the lands of Exmoor are going to belong to the House of Granger, I will need some kind of formal house here," she said diplomatically. "Millie has taken charge of the project, and she is insistent that it be a fortress. I will likely insist that it at least cursorily look like a house," she conceded, "but honestly, a fortress isn't a bad idea. It would give everyone a place to retreat to and hide as a last resort."
"You guys really are going all out, aren't you?" Daphne said, admiringly.
Pansy snorted. "Have you ever known Hermione to do anything halfway?"
Neville still seemed somewhat skeptical.
"But you are against You-Know-Who, right?" he asked. "Even with—even with all the Dark ritual magic—"
"Neville, it's not Dark," Harry said, exasperated. "It's just powerful, which makes it easier to misuse."
"Anyway," Hermione said loudly. "If you don't want to join, that's up to you. But go sit over there and talk to Theo or something so you don't hear what we're talking about."
"How come I'm the one who gets excluded?" Theo complained.
"Because you already have a project going with Longbottom," Draco said, smirking. "Makes the most sense."
Theo sighed, aggrieved. "Fine."
He walked a ways away, Neville following behind, still shooting skeptical looks back at them. Once they were out of earshot, Hermione looked to Draco, who obligingly cast his Muffilato charm, before they began.
"If we're going to start recruiting people in different groups all over the country, we need to figure out how we're going to target them and do this," Hermione said, pulling out some parchment and a self-inking quill.
"Hey!" Tracey complained. "I thought I was the one who got to take meeting notes."
"Hermione's doing strategic diagrams," Blaise told her. "You should still be taking the minutes, though, if this is a formal meeting."
"Oh." Tracey looked cheered by this, then rapidly dug in her bag to find some parchment. Hermione rolled her eyes.
"Our draw for people is the promise of power and self-empowerment," Hermione said, writing self-empowerment on the parchment and circling it. "We have new ways to use magic we can teach them – how to use the ley lines, how to make a stave to channel more power, that sort of thing. But we need some kind of public demonstration, something we can do to make people believe we can do what we say we can." She looked up. "Any ideas?"
"Rituals to help the crops grow," Draco said at once. "If we're targeting hedges, that's something they care about very directly – the fertility of the land."
"Fertility rituals in general, for other purebloods," Daphne said, biting her lip. "My mum's not the only one with issues."
"Mass healing rituals," Susan chimed in. "I bet a lot of the hedges have The Plug."
Hermione paused. "Hang on, I've heard of that before…"
"It's the Muladhara Seal," Luna said. "Professor Sprout taught us about it at the beginning of the year, in the sex talk. She and Professor McGonagall cast a prevention spell on us all, but I don't think the hedgewitches would have ever gotten that."
Hermione's eyes widened.
"That's… that's the one that causes the clog in a person's magic, isn't it?" she breathed. "Unless they're super sexually active or something? Yeah, that one—yeah. We should treat everyone for it, and then figure out how to cast the prevention charm."
"We can't," Draco said pointedly. "It's a NEWT-level charm that we don't have the magic for."
"Maybe you don't," Blaise said, smirking. "Our coven will be able to cast it. I'm not worried."
Draco shot him a dark look while Blaise looked smug. Hermione ignored them both.
"We could teach them to brew birth control," Millie suggested. "Not that there's a whole lot of need for it just yet? But giving women the choice of when to have children—"
"There's already a shortage of magical children," Daphne objected. "Surely preventing more—"
"We're talking hedge kids, Daph," Draco told her. "They don't have the same fertility issues. And their kids don't have the magic to make it to Hogwarts anyway."
"We'll need something with an amount of spectacle," Hermione said, musing. "These are good ideas, but unless they're flashy, unless people can feel the magic, it won't be as impressive."
"We can start doing all the annual festivals on your land," Susan suggested. "We can make those traditions pretty big and flashy, and we can invite people from all over by word of mouth."
Harry grinned. "Those are the ones with fire jumping, right?"
"You can dress up the rituals, Granger," Pansy told her, rolling her eyes. "These people aren't going to know how it works or what parts are important. If you have them all standing around one of your giant ritual circles when it starts glowing, they'll start believing real fast."
"Hang on," Blaise said, looking at Pansy. "When have you seen one of Hermione's ritual circles?"
Pansy sniffed. "None of your business."
"We'll also need a way for people to get here, won't we?" Luna pointed out. "Only full members can jump the lines, and hedgewitches can't Apparate."
"Are we holding all recruitment here, then?" Susan said. "That seems like it'd make everything kind of obvious, doesn't it?"
"We'll hold final initiation here, and the annual rituals here," Hermione decided. "But otherwise, we'll go from place to place for the other parts. We'll go to where the people are."
"Really?" Millie frowned. "That seems disorganized."
"There's an amount of drama in a group of mysteriously-robed wizards emerging out of nowhere carrying staves and doing flashy magic," Draco said approvingly. "I like this. We can plant whispers of where we'll appear each full moon to lure people to the new monthly place."
"Big flashy rituals and spooky robes are just on the new moon, right?" Luna asked. "We're still learning how to make staves and then teaching other people how to whenever, right? Without the robes?"
Hermione bit her lip. "…yes. Let people see us and think we're part of an organization, not running the thing. When we're in the robes and our identities are hidden, then people can think they're faced with the leaders of the group."
"Robes?" Draco asked.
"Hermione traded for the spell the Unspeakables use on their robes," Luna told Draco. "It has to be cast continuously as the robes are made, unfortunately, but Susan's been working on making them in her spare time."
"Hey!" Tracey objected. Her hands and face were splattered with black ink spots from writing fast enough to keep minutes. "I help Susan out too!"
"What do we want to do today, then?" Blaise asked, getting everyone back on track. "Tonight is the new moon. We don't know any healing rituals yet. We don't even have staves of our own – we should probably get on that, actually – and we don't have mysterious robes."
Hermione considered, mulling over the problem while the others brainstormed. It was the start of the New Year as well as the new moon. She could use that somehow, she bet – beginnings were auspicious times. Snape had helped her get an air elemental on New Year's. A group channeling of ley line magic might be enough to help them feel stronger, but not all the hedges knew how to use the ley lines – only the youth, really, who had supported Hermione so fervently.
What result did she want, really? She wanted people to feel optimistic about the new year ahead, like they were just starting a journey to better themselves. She could try to nonverbally cast a mass Cheering Charm, but that wouldn't provoke the feeling of hope she wanted – just contentment or elation. She didn't know much emotion magic; emotion-based spells, sure, but emotion-causing magic—
Abruptly, her mind came to a halt.
"I have an idea," she announced. "Anyone up for a trip to Hogsmeade?"
