There is something amazing with the effortlessness of a writer with her words that you never see every day.

Thank you for sharing with me a miracle.

(I've read this thing for the whole day. 10 hours and I'm dropping off to sleep, but to review is the least I can do.)

Love and Cookies,

MR

Wow! Your story is written with beautiful language and the story is complicated (but well thought out) and certainly enthralling. I think 'Cassie' is fantastic, and the little dragon as well! Great job!

This story was an absolute chilling delight to read, a rare vein of silver in a mountain of unremarkable stone. I'm glad it was recommended to me. I might never have found it otherwise.

~Eia

best lines:

“Weasley knew there would be risk,” Severus said carefully.
Hermione tossed her hair back. “He was a teenaged boy. I’d say his risk assessment skills were zero to none, especially where souls and Advanced Dark Arts were concerned.”

She held the Hat in both arms...
She smiled.

best lines
“No, Albus. There was a time when I begged you not to abandon a small burden at a Muggle doorstep. You ignored me then; it was part of your plan. I’ll not have you force your choice on her.”

best lines
Alone, Severus Snape had always had the knack of silencing all conversation merely by entering a room, when he chose. The sight of the two black-clad scourges of Hogwarts standing in iron-clad stillness cast something akin to a Freezing Charm on the high table.

Not one staff member spoke. Hannah couldn’t even bring herself to eat, but she refused to leave as long as doing so meant turning her back to either of… of them.

“Well…” A serious determination shone in Neville’s translucent face. “Then who’s she protecting?”
“Protecting?” Minerva echoed faintly.
“Hermione never lied to get out of trouble, at school.” Neville smiled faintly. “She’d only lie to protect someone else.”

“It is our choices that make us who we are,” Dumbledore intoned sadly.
Minerva’s shoulders sagged.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Neville countered, “that may be true, but it’s not good enough.

Her mouth fell into a small o of surprise, and the Hat screwed its wrinkled brim into a moldy, moth-eaten smile.
Her hand flew to her mouth and she dissolved into a blurry fit of silent giggling.
The portraits were silent as they watched her.
“She never even got to be Sorted, did she?” Neville asked quietly.

I am so confused...

Who is the damn ghost? Some unborn child? The little girl that was Hermione?

best lines:

“No, you have instinctively held yourself apart. To touch another soul would prove too great a temptation for you; you would, inevitably, I think, attempt to break it.”
“Thus ‘remaining alone.’” She scrutinized his face.

“if one expects cruelty, there are ways to parry it. Cruelty in Slytherin House was expected – almost casual.” She was tracking his finger, and he watched her. “Quite the opposite of the cruelty you experienced in Gryffindor.”
She glanced up. “I never…” But memories of her first months at school flooded in. “Oh.”
He nodded, as though approving her at lessons, and began tracing the circle in the opposite direction. “Deliberate cruelty can be anticipated, shaped, twisted back on itself. Other cruelty – ” he opened his palm briefly “– inadvertent, thoughtless, careless – is impossible to guard against.

To survive deliberate cruelty, all you need do is expect it, and the innocent never do.”
“The flaw in Dumbledore’s thinking,” she offered.
“Precisely.”

“To win, you must strike first. You triumphed over the Dark Lord because no one thought you a threat. You would have been a target, you would not have remained standing, otherwise.”

best line
"I was your teacher for six years. Your theories were never without a practical catalyst."

His eyes boring into her, he unleashed the truth. "Your work defies the world, Hermione – at its foundation, at the darkest level of its assumptions of sweetness and light. A world that betrayed you, that continues to betray you, for your loyalty to its best-kept secret: that allegiance to the light requires a blindness that is, perhaps, the deepest darkness of all."
Hermione examined his words inwardly. "For such is the state of the faithful murderer's soul."

best lines:


With an icy glance at the portrait, Severus shot his words upward. “At one time, Albus, I was willing, even eager, to die for your Order. But your short-sightedness sentenced her to something far worse than the redemptive death we both believed was my fate. She has resisted, alone, a temptation worse than any you ever knew, for twenty-two years. I know what she has endured, better than she does herself. How it has shaped her. Twisted her. She sacrificed her innocence to preserve the world, Albus – for everyone except herself.”

“Hermione saved the world?” Minerva interjected.

unlike your boy hero, Albus, she at least had sense enough to keep quiet regarding actions she cannot explain.”

“Pray, enlighten me – and let us put an end to her torment.”
“You don’t know, then. No more does Hermione, who has been living with the question for twenty years. And it’s not as though she – or anyone – can ask the one person in the world who might have an answer. What form would such a question take? ‘When you’re touching your wife, Potter, can you tell if your best friend is watching? Can he feel it, Potter, when you make love with his sister?’”

"Very pretty, Albus. But I assure you, her loyalty is not to ‘our’ world.”
Albus blinked, his mouth still open to speak.
“And why should it be?” Severus continued, before the portrait could collect its wits. “Whatever magic our world holds for Muggleborns is gone for her, replaced by a world of convenience and bureaucracy which she, of all, can see is little more than a conspiracy of blindness.

“Of course; the innocent must be protected at all costs… all but one. Never mind that all that has changed is that you are no longer blind to her despair.

But then Albus’ judgment fell softly from the wall: “That boy has ever needed a cause.”
“You should know, Albus. You used it well enough.”

...

So what if Ron is in Harry while he's shagging Ginny? Who cares? Isn't incest in the best of Pureblood tradition?

best lines:

She drew herself straighter and returned his gaze for a moment, but could not quite summon its usual impassive force.
He laughed quietly; a short rumble, without humour. “I invented that look, Hermione. It won’t work on me. Not in private.”

“You don’t know...The world as I know it may just have ended.” She shook her hair back from her face and looked around them, at walls of stone and stairs stretching to shadow in both directions. Then her eyes deadened and, her voice dropping, she said, “I wonder how I’d even know if it did.”

“He – Ron – we had agreed… if… ” Her voice trailed off for a moment, and she watched the torchlight moving Severus’ shadow on the stairs below. Her throat closing with unshed tears, her words slipped out between them. “I broke his soul,” she whispered.

(nice to see that Ron did one useful thing in life)

“Why are you doing this to me?”
“For the same reason I’ve done most things.”
“Because no one else will stoop that low?”
“Because no one else can reach that high.”

“Seeking vengeance on yourself for a penance you yourself exacted!” she countered, pushing herself upright with cold, angry hands. “You asked to be hated, Severus. You damn near begged for it! Whereas I…” She faltered suddenly.
For an instant they sat, breathing heavily.
“… did exactly the same thing, for exactly as long,” he finished for her.

He wondered if that was how Potter had felt when she’d taken a piece of his best friend’s soul and shoved it into his scar.

(Potter's scar? Not Hermione's scarlet ink scar?)

best lines
He had railed against the inadequacy of Hogwarts’ Dark Arts curriculum, arguing for the inclusion of some active application, rather than the passive, defensive strategy that Albus preached was the best weapon against the Dark.
“Light, Severus,” Albus had ended every conversation. “Light is the only weapon that can succeed against Darkness.”
Damn him and his barbaric twinkling blindness.

Potter too blindly obedient to Dumbledore’s philosophy ever to consider Darkness a weapon against Darkness; Weasley too stupid to understand half of what she had learned – but a good enough chess player to see its possible application.

She had no such purpose now. With her first touch of Darkness, she had defeated the Dark Lord, and the war – the external one – was over.
But twenty-two years later, she was still at war.
A war with no battles, no medals.
Only casualties.

She should not have been alone. Would not have been, except for Albus’ fruitless insistence on his silence…

“DAMN YOU, ALBUS! YOU BLOODY COWARD!”

“Isn’t that why you’ve pushed them all away? Forcing their hatred upon you to expiate your betrayal, backing yourself into a corner until you’ve nowhere to run but straight to the murderer’s tower?”

best lines:


“Then she must be stopped,” the headmistress said, eyeing Slughorn’s unmoving form with growing horror.
Minerva’s words echoed in the silence as the three awaited the Baron’s return, but between the echoes, Severus’ mind supplied the word a younger Minerva would have used: “Helped.”

Careful to keep his voice even, he said, “I mean that she is a Gryffindor, with a Gryffindor’s honor, Minerva, but one whose mind is tainted, and the taint was left to fester.” He paused for a moment, then continued, “I believe her to be experimenting – testing whether or not a soul can be removed without a death.”

Potter had failed, his promise smothered by the cloying naiveté of Dumbledore’s belief in the power of blind innocence; he had failed, and a darker love had swept into the vacuum of his failure – knowledgeable, silent, surrendering to Darkness to do for Potter what he dared not dream do himself.

Hermione Granger had not killed Ron Weasley, but she had accepted the sacrifice of his soul in the name of his best friend.
Severus had no doubt she’d been acting by prior arrangement.
He had some idea how that worked.

(Indeed... damn Albus, letting Harry be the decoy... using Hr like that)

best lines
Mister Snape. Mister.
She was the professor now, and however abreast he had stayed of developments in his field…

She was sworn to secrecy. It was supposed to have been Harry, so Harry it was. He was the perfect symbol for the Ministry’s cultural reunification program – full-blood, if not pure-blood; not Muggleborn, but raised as one. Yes, he was the perfect symbol of hope and the future.
Whereas she was only… she was…
And Harry and Ginny made such a photogenic pair.

If – more likely, when – Harry became Minister of Magic, would they tell him?
The scene sprang to her mind, fully formed.
“Oh, one more thing, Mr. Potter. A few high-level government secrets, you understand… that business with Voldemort a few years back – you remember, surely – it didn’t go quite the way we led the public and, hrm, well, yes, you to believe.”

Her eyes were clinical, sharp. “I find that too emotional an investment in theoretical matters impedes clarity, Mr. Snape.”
He took her measure, and decided to test her. “Indeed. That way lies blindness.”
“Madness,” she corrected him automatically.
“Ah, yes, of course. Madness.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’ve read Derrida in the original French?”
She gestured impatiently. “Of course. He makes no sense at all in English.”

“Sheep,” she spat. “They’re all sheep.” She paused, her eyes seeming to search for the right phrase somewhere in the vicinity of her nose. “On opium.”
She crossed her arms emphatically, and glared at him, as if daring him to “Baa.”

“Well summarized, Professor Granger. But do you not agree that…”
And they were off. For hours, during which mugs of tea and platters of food appeared and cooled and were whisked away, untouched, by house-elves, Hannah Abbott, and, finally, Minerva, whose curiosity regarding their progress got the better of her.

best lines:
“Not implying, Minerva; stating. Despite appearances, it wasn’t Potter. Professor Granger’s research reveals that he did not kill Voldemort.”
Only the sound of Minerva’s ring clanking on her desk as she dropped her hands broke the shocked silence.
“What?” Dumbledore’s quiet whisper carried within it some tangible memory of his former power.

He snorted, turning back to face them. “Potter confirmed Albus’ theory, you mean, using the very words Albus had given him to ‘explain’ something that he doesn’t remember himself, and would not have the words to explain if he did.” His cloak rippled to stillness around him, obscuring the dying light. “Albus was wrong.”

When Severus Snape entered the Great Hall for dinner, all conversation at the High Table ceased.
Only Hermione Granger kept eating.

“Miss Granger,” he said, pulling out his chair.
“Professor Granger, Mr. Snape.”

He knew that Hermione Granger’s shoulders wanted to droop, her head to fall forward, and her hands to clutch the edge of the table while she screamed.
He knew it intimately, without knowing her at all.

Despair he had expected. Shame, envy – those were present; those he had seen years before.
But now, behind stone, behind ice, a corona of rage.
A rage with no object, no direction, no purpose.

Minerva cast a shrewd, hooded eye at the former Potions professor, who seemed unaware of the magnitude of Hermione’s invitation or of how legible his expressions had become during his years of self-imposed exile.

If, indeed, Harry had been Dumbledore’s parrot, it was all too apparent whose mirror Hermione had become.

(best line of the fic?)

Did Hermione kill Ron?