CW: Disturbing content
The new moon for March fell on a Wednesday, so Hermione and the other Slytherins were awake and at Astronomy class at midnight. The sky was an eerie, complete darkness, and Hermione shivered, her thoughts heavy with what she was about to do.
After Astronomy class was over, Hermione left the tower with the others, hid in an alcove, and waited for the others to pass, before quietly making her way back up the stairs. To her relief, Professor Sinistra was also gone, nowhere to be found. Hermione aimed a locking charm at the door, and, hands shaking, she carefully removed her materials from her bag, trying not to think too hard about what she was about to do.
The ritual she had found in the book Professor Quirrell had directed her to had not been to start someone's period; it had been to cause ovulation, to help with pregnancy. It was one of the lighter rituals in the book, in that it only jump-started a natural process in a woman's body. Most of the other rituals in the book were much, much darker. Hermione had read them all, her eyes large, even though she had to stomach revulsion and nausea at some of them. They were academically fascinating, though, and Hermione could begin to see common elements throughout rituals, the more rituals she read about. But they were also horrifying, and they were Dark. Very Dark. Hermione had never considered that woman might want a ritual to steal the fetus from one woman's womb to implant into her own, but there it was.
A circle was carefully drawn with chalk and gone over three times, to make sure the lines were solid, and then an exact triangle was constructed inside of the circle, each side perfectly equal. At the points of the triangle, Hermione placed three stone bowls – larger mortars that she had found in an old potions classroom in the dungeons.
Into one of the bowls, she placed orchid seeds and mistletoe berries. They symbolized the fertility she wanted to bestow upon herself, the potential of new life. Hermione felt slightly off, placing things in the bowl as if she were actually trying to have a child. But she needed this ritual to work, icky feeling or not.
Into one of the bowls went water, with a few fresh eggs set to float. Another symbol of fertility. Hermione had checked beforehand that the ritual would only stimulate her ovulation – not actually cause her to fall magically pregnant. The eggs had been awkward to obtain, but Hagrid kept chickens behind his hut. He'd amenably given her a few when she asked, and he hadn't asked why she wanted them. Hermione suspected that when it came to animals and magical creatures, Hagrid didn't think to ask many questions of why.
The last bowl Hermione paused at, before very hesitantly, withdrawing what she'd had to get.
It had been this ingredient that had given her the most pause in deciding if she was really going to do this or not. Eventually, after a lot of deliberation, she'd gone ahead.
It hadn't been that hard, to find a dead rabbit, really. Dozens of students had cats that roamed the grounds. She managed to find several dead rabbits on the edge of the forest, once she'd figured out how best to look.
It had taken longer to find a dead rabbit that had been pregnant, and to take the full womb from the body, still fetuses still inside of it.
Hermione hadn't wanted to do it. She had not wanted to do it. It was cruel, it was barbaric, and it was horrifying. Harvesting dead fetuses. Even the words made her shudder.
Only… they had already been dead when she got them. She hadn't gone out and killed anything to use purposefully. Surely it was better that their energy was used, instead of left to decay into nothing?
It wasn't that much different than harvesting Potion ingredients, she reasoned. They used all kind of animal-based ingredients in Potions class – eyes and claws and fangs and scales. It was easy to dismiss the implications when they were pre-prepared, stored, and dried, but surely someone had to kill the animals to harvest the parts, didn't they?
Hermione had forced herself to concentrate on her end goal as she had harvested the rabbit. Now, again, Hermione swallowed back her bile and focused very hard on what she was doing this for and put the womb with the rabbit fetuses into the last bowl. This would help her for the rest of her life. This would help her maximize her potential. She'd eaten rabbit stew before to nourish her body; was using rabbits to nurture her magic so different?
She shuddered, wiping her hands off on a towel she'd brought.
The ritual recommended a sacrifice to enhance the chances of success – generally, the blood of the father-to-be. Hermione had nixed that part of the ritual. There was nothing she wanted to sacrifice, and she was fine with poor chances of conception – she just wanted the little egg out and her body starting to try.
Hermione took a deep breath. She'd only been in two rituals before, and someone else had run them both – Daphne, and then Snape. And they had been simple. This was very ambitious for her third ritual ever. Hermione had been a perfectionist when setting everything up – the books Quirrell had recommended for her gave many ominous warnings of just what horrors might happen if anything were to go wrong.
Carefully, Hermione lifted the edges of her robes and stepped into the middle of the triangle. She sat down, folding her legs, making sure not to touch the chalk lines. When everything was ready, she paused, took a deep breath, looked up at the dark sky, and began to chant.
The chant was… syllables. Not Latin. Possibly Old English, or Celtic words, or something older. There had been a phonetic spelling to help her learn it, and the chant wasn't long – maybe a sentence or two, repeated over and over.
As Hermione chanted, she became aware that something was happening. There was a quivering, a shaky feeling of magic, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the chalk lines light up with an unearthly pale blue light, connecting one bowl to the next to the next.
Her chant continued, Hermione taking care to keep her voice steady. She nearly gasped as she saw the berries and seeds abruptly consumed by a blue fire, but she managed to keep it together, continuing to repeat the chant, feeling the power in the circle rise as she did.
The eggs were next, gone along with the water in a flare of power, and it almost astonished Hermione that they could just vanish like that, and be gone so completely, before her mind chimed in to remind her that this was magic – of course things could just disappear.
The power rose further, and Hermione felt herself begin to sweat.
As the last bowl lit with pale blue flame, Hermione felt a sensation of something beginning to swirl around her, as if a wind from nowhere was rising and was trapped in the triangle with her. It was uncomfortable, it was stifling, and Hermione felt scared, but it wasn't as if the book had described what would happen, only to keep chanting "until the ritual is done."
She managed three more recitations of the chant before the power abruptly engulfed her, lighting up her body like a ghostly lantern, and Hermione screamed.
Pain like she'd never known seared through her middle as something burst inside of her. Awful pressure was building, as if something was inflating that was never meant to inflate, and her organs were shifting inside of her, making room for the magic to accomplish its goal. It felt foreign and painful and horrible, and Hermione gasped and cried out as her body betrayed her, weakening as the magic ravaged her parts.
When the pain finally faded, the blue light fading from her body as it did, Hermione was gasping, her face wet with tears, and firmly not happy with the result.
She lay on the stone for several long minutes, crying helplessly, cradling her midsection, alone, under the stars.
When she had finally collected herself enough to sit up, Hermione slowly began cleaning up, wincing as she moved. She angrily shoved the three stone bowls into her bag and cleaned off the chalk with a Ventus and more water for the stubborn lines. The ritual book hadn't said it would hurt so badly. Why hadn't it warned her? Hermione unlocked the door and left the Astronomy tower, prepared with her excuse of losing track of time after class looking at Jupiter in case she ran into a teacher. The ritual hadn't taken that long, after all. It was plausible.
But on her weak legs, aching pain still in her center, the stairs from the Astronomy tower down to the Slytherin dungeons seemed an insurmountable obstacle. She made it down one flight of stairs, then half of another before tripping and falling down the rest. Hermione lay there a long moment, breathing hard against the wall, before shakily getting to her feet once more.
Her leg muscles weren't working properly, Hermione's mind catalogued dully. They'd gone through some type of trauma, with the pain, and they were refusing to work. As were her arms, for that matter – it'd been a challenge to pull herself up on one of the railings.
So. Legs not working, arms not working, rolling down the stairs not a viable solution…
An idea slowly formed in Hermione's mind. Exhausted from the pain, Hermione was desperate enough to latch onto it.
Carefully, Hermione reached down into her power, pulling it up into herself.
She was tired, which helped – usually, her power responded much more forcefully, but she could only manage a gentle ebb now. She felt for the element of air inside of herself and called it forward too.
She was surprised when a feeling of softness came up, one that almost felt caring, and carefully, Hermione focused not so much on flying, as she did gliding – just enough power to gently glide down the stairs.
It worked.
Holding onto the railing, Hermione leaned forward, feeling herself almost slide down the stairs – only, she was standing. It was an odd feeling, the feeling of wisps of wind around her body and her power literally pushing her, but it was working. And somehow, Hermione felt better – more alive, like this, with her magic literally pulsing through her body.
She managed to make it down five staircases before her magic gave out, and she collapsed and fell down the rest of the way, yelping and crashing to the ground hard. There was sharp pain in her back and Hermione vaguely saw someone running toward her as her head slammed into the ground, and everything went dark.
The next morning, Hermione was dismissed from the hospital wing. She'd had a minor concussion that Madame Pomfrey had tutted over and healed, and she was deemed in good health. She'd escaped with only 10 points off from Slytherin – Professor McGonagall, who'd found her, had believed her claim that she'd been so tired after Astronomy that she'd literally just struggled to get back to the dungeons. She'd played on the fact that none of the Slytherins would have ever offered help, and that in her position with her Muggle heritage, she couldn't risk losing face by having to ask for assistance. Hermione suspected that the professor had also been merciful because Hermione been injured – McGonagall had seen her fall.
As she slipped into her seat at breakfast, planning on cleaning up and changing clothes before her afternoon Potions class, Hermione touched her middle almost absently, wondering. The ritual had definitely done something to her. Was there a way witches could tell if they were actually ovulating? Or did they just have to wait for their periods the same way Muggles did?
Either way, the ritual had better have worked. If she'd gone through all that mess and gore and pain for nothing, Hermione was going to be furious.
Two weeks later, the day before her half birthday, Hermione woke with her underwear oddly damp. She went to the bathroom and saw her thighs streaked with blood, and she quietly celebrated her first period by herself with a fist pump and a quiet "yesss!" hissed aloud. Her period had come on the day of the full moon – just as the book had said it would if she hadn't managed to conceive.
She received a bar of dark chocolate and a lotus flower in the mail that day, along with a note.
.
Congratulations. Well done on hitting your 18th month precisely.
The enclosed will help you learn more about what other useful things you can do now, should you want to learn.
.
Hermione felt a cold shiver pass through her body. How had he known she'd been successful?
Enclosed with the note was the name of a book, Feminine Magick and Power, and the signature of Professor Quirrell.
When Hermione realized the book was a grimoire filled entirely with rituals and spells that involved menstrual blood, she balked and nearly gave it back to Madame Pince, before slowly putting in her bag anyway.
Just because she read about something didn't mean she was going to do it. It was objectively fascinating all the same.