Disclaimer: Tuba mirum spargens sonum, per sepulchra regionum, coget omnes (cum JK Rowling) ante thronum.

A/N: Surprise! I got this chapter done faster than I expected. The next one will probably be in two weeks, though, just because it's very complicated.

A number of people have criticised Hermione's reticence to kill in the context of causing greater harm down the road. I think this is unfair. As Hermione told Dumbledore at the end of fifth year, you don't shoot to kill; you shoot to stop the threat. For muggles, this means shooting a gun at the centre of mass and probably killing, but for wizards, it means shooting a bunch of powerful curses to break through shields and probably incapacitate. And even then, Death Eaters in a group are actually kind of hard to put down, especially when you're outnumbered. Hermione also will not kill an enemy who is disarmed and incapacitated, because that is illegal in the muggle world, or at least borderline illegal. That may not be the most effective way to fight, but we have those rules for good reasons, and Hermione was raised to follow them.

Big thanks to Gofanon for helping me with the Hebrew in this chapter.

Chapter 79

Neville stood before a tear-stricken Luna. His Gran was dead. Cut down by Rodolphus Lestrange. And Luna was a killer. Yes, it was war, and yes, it was justified, but Luna? She was too gentle a soul for that. Right now, she could barely even speak.

"Your dad?" Neville asked worriedly. He hadn't seen him with the others.

Luna's face tightened. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.

"I'm sorry," he said, and he wrapped his arms around her tight. They stood there a minute, trying to hold onto this momentary quiet—to find just a few seconds to grieve.

A loud boom shook the Great Tower. The moving staircases swayed. It wasn't over. Would never be over unless they finished it here and now.

"We've bought a few minutes, but it won't last long," McGonagall said. She looked around at the defenders scattered over a dozen flights of stairs on three different floors. "Miss Granger, Mr. Potter, you need to go back down and do what you came to do as quickly as possible. There's no time to waste. The rest of you! We must stop the Death Eaters from getting to them."

Hermione, Harry, and Ginny grabbed a couple brooms and dropped down to the basement while everyone else took their places to defend against the inevitable attack. They could hear screams from the corridors, but Neville had no illusions that that blob-thing would stop all of them. He shuddered. What the hell was that? Hermione seemed to know, but she hadn't told anyone.

The Grand Staircase was cooperating. It had shifted back so that none of the stairs reached the doors that the Death Eaters had tried to come through. It wasn't perfect; there were other doorways, and the stairs couldn't pull away from all of them, but it would slow them down. People started transfiguring the banisters to make them taller and close the gaps to provide more cover. The walls were still shaking from the external assault, but Neville was more worried about the doors.

It took a few minutes for the pounding to start, and then a few more minutes for the doors to be blasted inward. One of them flew clear across the staircase and smashed against the opposite wall. Death Eaters ran out onto the landings but promptly stopped and backed up when they saw there were no stairs there and took cover behind the door frames.

Neville didn't see any big names in the group that was casting curses at them, but that didn't make them any less dangerous. The arrangement of the battlefield was in the defenders' favour, but that situation couldn't continue for long. Soon, he heard banging above him, and another door blasted inward. Three Death Eaters scrambled onto the the staircase he was standing on. The staircase started to swing around in a pattern he didn't fully understand, and all of them staggered against the railing. Neville, Dean, and Lavender faced off against the three Death Eaters as they spun around. Under their attack, one was thrown clear over the railing and fell to the floor forty feet below with a crunch. Lavender was knocked down the stairs, but came to a stop against the railing. Dean then shielded while Neville cast defensive spells, and a second Death Eater fell. Then, Neville got a look at the third one's face: Rabastan Lestrange.

A bolt of lightning lanced out and barely missed Neville. It struck Lavender instead, and she screamed, even as she threw a Scouring Hex back at him. Neville saw red. Heedless to the danger, he advanced, dodging one spell and shielding another with Dean struggling to keep up. Rabastan backed against the railing, but there was nowhere for him to go. Coming up from below, Dean hooked a conjured chain around his ankle and pulled him off his feet, giving Neville a chance to close the distance.

"This is for my family!" he shouted, and he slashed with his wand, breaking Rabastan's neck.

Neville looked up. The staircases were moving faster than he'd ever seen them, constantly shifting the battlefield and throwing off avenues of attack. Some of them were even changing floors, flattening out and thrusting their steps up or down in the other direction. Somehow, they didn't crash into each other. Still, the battle was complete chaos around him in all three dimensions.

He checked on Lavender. She was alive and conscious, but she had a nasty, lightning shaped burn on her face—not like the one on Harry's head (and Ginny's, somehow), but a long, jagged, ropey thing that extended over the side of her face and down her neck under her shirt. She looked angry more than anything else.

The staircase they were on shifted and pushed them up a floor. Neville looked down over the railing and saw Ron, Daphne, and Tracey fighting Pansy Parkinson, Theo Nott, and Elizabeth Runcorn. Students, all of them, but very dangerous. He was shocked when he saw Parkinson snap off a Killing Curse, targeted at Daphne. Ron tackled Daphne, rolling them both out of the way.

"Thanks," Daphne breathed.

"Where's Potter?! I'm gonna kill him!" Parkinson shouted.

Neville started casting down from above. The Death Eaters found themselves in a crossfire and backed up. Nott went down, disarmed, but Parksinson was vicious, and Runcorn was probably the cleverest of them.

"TRACEY!" Daphne screamed as Parkinson's curse connected with her friend and threw her over the railing. Tracey fell, and her back was broken on the railing of the staircase below before she dropped again to the floor.

There was a flash of spells, and Neville couldn't tell who did it, but in moments, Parkinson was dead. Runcorn stood alone, then. She looked back and forth at the three wands pointed at her, and she turned and ran.

"Stop them!" someone yelled from above. Neville looked up and saw two Death Eaters following Harry's lead and flying down the staircase on broomsticks. Half a dozen people tried to hex them on the way down, but they didn't stop to fight. They kept going and blasted through the door to the subbasement where Harry, Ginny, and Hermione had gone. He could only hope they could handle themselves down there.

More broom riders came from above, but they were ready for them this time, and they couldn't get through the gauntlet. But there was another problem. Death Eaters had broken through to the lower levels and were trying to come out under the defenders. Neville didn't slid down the banister to the next floor with coordination he didn't know he possessed. The staircase shifted so fast it whipped him around to the next one, and he nearly lost his grip. He barely caught hold of the post and turned onto the next flight, which he slid down again. That staircase tossed him onto a third flight, which he slid down to the ground floor.

The castle was really trying to help, he thought, sending him where he needed to go—that is until he realised he was in front of a pile of rubble and blue-stained viscera blocking the way into the Entrance Hall—on the opposite side of the tower from the fight. He turned and vomited at the smell. And then it got worse. A creeping sense of cold and despair came over him. He looked up in horror and saw dementors crawling over the pile—the one way they could actually get into the castle on the ground floor.

"Expecto Patronum!" He cast. Flicker. "Damn. Always have trouble with this one," he muttered. Not to mention that to say he was having a bad day was an understatement. He thought of Luna and his hope for the future and tried again: "Expecto Patronum!" His mongoose Patronus burst forth and pushed the dementors back. Soon, others joined it, and then a blinding-bright goat charged forward and head-butted the lead dementor, and all of the demons recoiled from it.

"I've got this. Go!" Aberforth Dumbledore ordered. Had the old bartender been holding out on them?

Neville didn't question it. He ran back into the fray, but the next thing he knew, Hermione popped up on a broom. "Anthony's down for the count!" she yelled. "Can anyone else speak Hebrew?"

What?

"I can!" Luna called. "A little…I know the sounds, anyway."

"Good enough," Hermione said. She grabbed Luna and pulled her onto the broom before disappearing into the subbasement again.

What?

Hermione was incredibly relieved that the Death Eaters who had broken into the basement hadn't damaged any of the runes. Of course, they probably knew that casting curses down around the Anchor Stones was a dangerous prospect. Unfortunately, Anthony was out cold from a stray hex and didn't look like he'd be getting up anytime soon. In desperation, she flew up and grabbed Luna, since Hebrew spellcrafting was apparently a rare skill even among Ancient Runes students. She wasn't surprised that Luna was the first volunteer. She knew the girl was something of a polyglot. She dove down far faster than she felt comfortable and rejoined Harry, Ginny, and the others in the inner circle.

"Okay, we're going to have to do this fast," she said. "The rest of you, go up and help the others. Don't let the Death Eaters get down here. We have to make sure we can see this through to the end. If the ritual is interrupted, even I don't knew what will happen."

"What?!" Professor Babbling shouted.

"Hey, I hadn't got that far yet!" she protested. "At least I got the ritual finished in time."

"Dammit, Granger, that's something you should say upfront."

Hermione grumbled: "Are you in or out, Professor?"

Babbling sighed. "I'm in."

"Good." She turned to Luna and handed her a parchment with the words of the ritual on it. "Luna, this is what we're doing. This ritual is designed to kill Riddle at a distance, but it's messy. It will bring a curse on the day he was born, and it will kill every magic being and beast in the British Isles that was born on that day."

Luna's eyes grew wide. "Are you sure about this Hermione? You could kill innocent people, and that could have serious consequences."

"I know," she said. "I looked at the records, and I'm reasonably sure there were no other intelligent beings born on that day. There's a chance there are animals, but it was seventy-one years ago, so it won't be many."

"And what happens if you're wrong, Miss Granger?" Babbling asked pointedly.

Hermione lowered her gaze slightly. "That's the uncertain part," she said. "The ritual has a sort of…wager to it, for lack of a better word. It weighs the lives of the things to be destroyed against the lives of the casters."

The others were tense at that. That wasn't the kind of thing you wanted to hear about a ritual. Luna was curious, though. "How is that decided?" she asked. "I don't know if we can match You-Know-Who's power, even with five of us."

"It's not magical power," she said. "It's not raw numbers, either. It's…I'm not even sure if there's a word for it. Worthiness, you might call it, but… it's measured by ourselves. If we believe our cause is just—if we believe the relatively small risk of killing innocents as collateral is worth it—the ritual will work. If we made a mistake, and there are a lot more innocents affected that we thought…we die."

Ginny's eyebrows shot up. "You didn't mention that before," she said.

"It's not very likely. The key is, it's filtered through the Anchor Stones themselves."

"What does that mean?" Harry finally spoke up.

"It means Hogwarts is nearly sentient." She motioned to the circles around them. "It's not in a way we're familiar with, but these rune stones have an alignment all their own, and that alignment is tilted to the Light. It will give a boost to our side of the wager. If Riddle tried to use this ritual to kill you, Harry, he probably could, but the Anchor Stones would work against him, exponentially increasing the risk that it would fail."

She looked between her four would-be co-casters, praying they were still in. Harry shrugged. "Riddle's going to kill me anyway," he said. "It's this or abandon Hogwarts, and I'm not doing that."

"If Harry's in, I'm in," Ginny said.

"I have my duty to the school," Babbling said firmly.

Hermione turned to Luna. "Luna, if you don't want to do this, I can find someone else," she said.

Luna shook her head: "There's no time. It's only…what's the cost. A ritual this powerful must need a very powerful sacrifice."

"There are four," Hermione said solemnly. "A day's light, a night's joy, rousing the Leviathan…and a year of our lives."

The others already knew that, but Ginny still had questions. "I still don't get how that works," she said. "Will it make us a year older or something?"

"No. It's like any other time you sacrifice a part of yourself. If it's a sacrifice of blood, your body becomes very slightly less efficient at producing blood. If it's a sacrifice of time…you age slightly faster. Since we probably all have a century of healthy life ahead, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make." A bit of a stretch, but it wasn't like they would have to kill a dark lord every year, or even every decade if they actually got their act together. In any case, accepting one percent poorer health—or in Babbling's case, maybe one point two percent—was a small price to pay when so many people had lost their lives in this war, and she could see the others agreed. "Okay, best not waste any more time, then," she said. "Take your places on the pentagram."

The five of them spread out in a pentagon just inside the inner stone circle, nearly thirty feet wide. All of them except Hermione held copies of the ritual in front of them. Hermione wore Ravenclaw's diadem to ensure she remembered perfectly.

"We don't need any proper spells or implements to do this, so just make sure to stay there—and stay on rhythm." She raised wand and cast, "Metronomos." A mysterious ticking noise filled the chamber. That sounded more ominous than she'd intended. Maybe there was already a spell for that, but it wasn't important. She holstered her wand to avoid interference, but kept her hand raised like the conductor of an orchestra and led the chant:

"Ligate scripta judicii pro dies luctae."

The pentagram on the floor and the related runes began glowing with a harsh white light. Normally, white was a good colour, but there was something more dangerous about this light. An almost electric charge of energy filled the air.

Hermione raised her hands, and the others followed suit. "Nos iactamus aleam et ea ligamus vitae nostris."

Golden cords wrapped around their wrists, connecting each of them to the others. There was something even more dangerous about these cords. The felt like hot wires around Hermione's wrists. The others flinched, but thankfully didn't go off the script. Now, it was time for the core ritual:

"Yovad yom Tom Marvolo Riddle bo nolad vehalaylah amar horah gaver."

An enormous pulse of magical energy exploded from the the centre of the circle and washed over them. The power nearly knocked them off their feet. For a moment, Hermione felt she would be crushed by the sheer weight of magic. The light was blinding, though it dissipated as it spread, and the castle shook to its foundations.

Until this moment, Lord Voldemort had been having a good night—a welcome change from the day before. His beloved Nagini was dead, another piece of his soul lost. His only consolation was that Potter and Granger had been driven away before they could harm the Cup of Helga Hufflepuff, but he had thought his horcruxes safe, even after Granger's suspicious behaviour at Malfoy Manor. He had immediately checked on the others…and disaster. The Gaunt Family Ring had been taken from his family's shack. Worse, the Locket of Salazar Slytherin was gone from the sea cave. Even Dumbledore should have had a hard time finding that one. Or had Regulus found out?

The Diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw was his other remaining horcrux, hidden safe within Hogwarts where only he knew about it. The fact that Potter had beat him to the castle was worrying, but from what he could gather, the boy hadn't even tried to seek out the Room of Hidden Things. Thus, he could be reasonably assured that he had two anchors to life remaining.

Not that he would use the excuse to take chances. The blood traitors had even gone so far as to shoot him with a muggle rifle, but he had long since prepared for that. No, he would let his Death Eaters handle this. He would have entered the fray if it had seemed he needed to, but now they had nearly secured the entire castle. Losses had been heavy, but the defenders were cornered. Soon, the last resistance of the Order of the Phoenix and Dumbledore's pathetic Army would be cut down, and he would have Potter beg him for death.

That was, until he felt the pulse of magic explode from the castle like nothing he'd ever felt before. It washed over him like a physical blow and rattled his nerves even worse. Voldemort had never experienced the sensation the muggles called, someone walking over his grave, but that was exactly what he felt now—five someones, in fact. He could see them in his mind. Five witches and wizards standing in a circle, and all of seemed as if they were looking him in the eye. One of them was Potter. He would have ignored the others, except the second one he saw was Granger.

And she was wearing Ravenclaw's Diadem.

Tom Riddle felt true fear for the first time since his resurrection. Granger wore the diadem and wore it like a queen—utterly comfortable—powerful—deadly. There was nothing of himself in those eyes—no possession. She was using the diadem as it was originally intended—a weapon he himself had been unable to wield. And what was more, she had somehow found a way to remove his horcrux without destroying it, and that meant she might very well have done the same to Hufflepuff's Cup. He might well be without any horcruxes remaining.

Whatever they were doing down there, he had to stop them, at any cost. Lord Voldemort took to the air and flew towards the castle.

Hermione saw the vision, the same as the others. Tom Riddle looking her in the eye with rage and terror. The one good thing was that it was only his eyes they saw. There was no one else under the doom of the ritual. In that respect, they were safe. Only, they had to finish this fast.

"Hayom hahu yehi choshek al-yidreshehu Eloah mima'al ve'al-topha ala neharah."

Another pulse of magic raced out. The light of the Anchor Stones dimmed. Only the pattern on the floor retained its full brightness.

At the Ministry of Magic in London, alarms were ringing. The rune stone network was going crazy. The few wizards on the night shift looked at each other helplessly. They'd never seen anything like this. The even fewer Unspeakables in the building wouldn't be able to parse what was happening until it was over, but they knew it was bad.

In muggle London, the only people who really remarked the sudden change in the weather were the weather forecasters on the night shift, when the satellite feeds began to show an unnatural heavy overcast forming over the whole of the British Isles.

"Yigaluhu choshek vetsalmavet tishkah-ala ananah yeva'atuhu kimrire yom."

Neville saw a blond-haired man with a potbelly disembowelled by Mulciber. Grawp picked up Mulciber and threw him out a window. Flitwick pulled the blond man back and started closing the wound. They still had the advantage that the Death Eaters were forced to come in a few at a time, and a lot of the inner circle had already been killed or incapacitated, but it was still bad. Bellatrix Lestrange was duelling three people at once and holding her own. Neville tried to get to her, but he was having trouble getting through the crowd.

That was when the first pulse of magic made everything stop.

With the second pulse, the torches went nearly dark, casting barely enough light to see the tower.

With the third pulse, a chill came over the Tower. For a moment, Neville thought the dementors were back, but this was different—not despair, but raw fear as if some great doom were about to come down on them all. Was this Hermione's ritual? What was it doing?

The majority of the Death Eaters fled under the weight of what was coming. Most of the rest turned away from the defenders and forced their way down. They had been trying to reach the kitchens and the makeshift infirmary in the Hufflepuff dorms, but now, they blasted through anyone who got in their way in a blind panic to reach the subbasement.

"Halaylah yiqachehu ophel al-yichad bime shanah bemispar yerachim al-yavo."

The fear in the air turned back to despair as Tonks looked out across the grounds. Something was gravely wrong—or, if they were very lucky, gravely right. She prayed it was Hermione's ritual that had made the lights of Hogwarts go dark. This wasn't the all-consuming despair of the dementors' aura. No, this was an indefinable feeling that tonight was the worst of all nights for some supernatural reason that had nothing to do with the battle.

She stood on the lake shore, just outside the training grounds. They'd got all the children out, by some miracle, but they were just now clear of the castle and on level ground where they could get back to Hogsmeade—she hoped.

Except now, she heard the sound of screaming. The less devoted parts of Voldemort's army were fleeing in terror—and half of them were headed right toward them.

"Everybody run!" she cried.

Hermione could hear a door smash in far above, but she kept up with the ritual. They couldn't stop now.

"Hineh halaylah hahu yehi galmud al-tavo renanah bo."

Lord Voldemort flew in through one of the holes that had been opened in the roof of the Great Tower. He strongly considered casting Fiendfyre down at the defenders and wiping them out in one fell swoop. But no. He could tell this was a powerful ritual, and mixing such powerful dark magic as Fiendfyre with it and possibly destroying the Anchor Stones could have even worse consequences. Besides, with so many of his enemies in one place opposing him, they just might be able to contain it.

He conjured a whirlwind around him. He would plough through the defenders at speed, which would be nearly as fast as the Fiendfyre, and straight down to where Potter was before they could hit him. None of them would use Avada Kedavra even on him, and he was confident he could block anything else.

"Hava vanekalel hayom ha'atidim orer Livyatan."

Beneath the surface of the Black Lake, an ancient beast older than Hogwarts itself awoke in a rage. It powered through a crowd of fleeing merpeople as it began to swim for the shore, lashing out with its many tentacles at anything that moved.

Death Eaters raced down the stairs to the Anchor Stones. They cast curses, but they again limited their spells. It was too dangerous to damage the stones, most of all during such a dread ritual. It matter little as the air swirled around the five casters, and the hexes went wide.

"Yechsheku kochbe nishpo yeqa-le'or va'ayin ve'al-yireh be'aph'ape-shachar."

The defenders looked up in terror as a tornado descended through the Great Tower. It ripped the portraits from the walls and kicked up rubble and even bodies and whipped them around in a cloud. And in the centre of the maelstrom—him. Voldemort himself, eyes glowing red with rage, flying as fast as a broomstick straight down to where Harry Potter was.

A Blasting Curse of terrifying power blew a hole in the floor of the tower, opening the way. The defenders could do nothing but shield themselves against the flying debris. The torches all blew out. The darkness grew deeper, and all hope seemed lost.

"Ki lo sagar delet bitnecha, vayester amal mieineynu!"

The last pulse of magic felt like scorching flames blasting out from the centre of the circle. The cords binding the five casters snapped, all five of them were knocked flat on their backs, and the glowing runes winked out.

The Death Eaters stopped in their tracks, each one holding their left arm as a burning sensation shot through it as the magic in it was spent.

The whirlwind stopped, and the debris fell, littering the floor of the Great Tower.

Hermione, Harry, Ginny, Luna, and Bathsheda Babbling had just enough time to look up and scream before Tom Riddle fell in the centre of the circle. He was dead before he hit the floor.

"He's dead," Harry said, as if he couldn't believe it himself.

He's dead, Hermione thought. It's over.

High above, there was a roar of cheering. The rest of the defenders understood. It was over. Except…

"POTTER!" a voice shrieked.

"It's not over," Hermione breathed.

"Bellatrix!" Harry hissed.

"Brooms!"

The five of them scrambled to get onto their…two brooms. Damn. Babbling didn't have one of her own, but when they looked at her, they saw she was in no condition to travel.

"Professor! What happened?" Hermione gasped.

In the faint wandlight, the curse that had afflicted Professor Babbling all night had changed. It was in her blood, now, the veins turning black under her skin and spreading fast. "The sacrifice," she choked out.

"No!" Hermione said. "The ageing factor shouldn't have affected the curse!"

Babbling shook her head. "The other sacrifice."

Hermione blanked for a moment before it hit her. "Oh my God! I'm so sorry!"

"It's okay," Babbling said. "I knew this would happen…Worth it to…end him."

Her body went limp. Hermione was dazed for a moment before Harry slapped her on the shoulder, and the sound of renewed fighting above. "We'll get her later! Go!" he said.

"What sacrifice?" Ginny demanded as they mounted their brooms—her and Harry, and Hermione and Luna.

"A night's joy," Hermione said quickly as they took off, leaving Babbling's body down with Riddle's. "Great misfortune will fall on the casters until the next sunrise. Luckily, that's today's sunrise, even though we won't see it through the clouds, which is only in about an hour."

"Except we have to survive an angry Bellatrix that long," Ginny pointed out.

Yeah, there was that.

When they popped up through the hole, Bellatrix was there, and fire swirled around her—not the inferno that Riddle could produce, but enough. She was trying to fight her way down to the subbasement against the Order and the tide of her onetime allies fleeing the other way. She stopped when she saw them.

About a dozen of Riddle's most hardened fighters remained—the Azkaban escapees, mostly—people who had nothing left to lose. The rest had fled when they saw Riddle die, but these were the worst of the worst, and Bellatrix was easily worth half a dozen ordinary dark witches all by herself.

"Potter!" she cried rabidly. "You—you—this isn't possible!"

Harry shook his head and tried the dubious tactic of talking: "It is, Bellatrix. Tom never heard the rest of the prophecy: And the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not. And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives."

With an incoherent scream of rage, Bellatrix lashed out with a whip of fire. Harry, Ginny, Hermione, and Luna darted out of the way, but both of their brooms were set on fire, and they had to jump off them. She advanced on them, and Hermione saw that she had two wands now—stolen one off a body, no doubt.

"Avada Kedavra!"

Killing Curses shot out from both wands at once, expertly aimed at Harry and Hermione. Both of them rolled out of the way. Fred and George ran in and stood by Hermione's side. The three of them tried to hold Bellatrix back while Harry and Ginny slipped up the stairs. They dodged Killing Curse after Killing Curse, blocked other dark curses of terrible power, and shot curses back to try to distract her from Harry.

They were only partially successful. Bellatrix still ran after Harry, but as she did, she casually cast a Killing Curse off to the side that came so close to Fred that Hermione feared it had hit him before she saw he was still standing. That was the moment when, addled by sleep deprivation, the exhaustion of the battle, and the whirlwind of sensations from Ravenclaw's Diadem, Hermione finally snapped.

"NOT MY BROTHER, YOU BITCH!"

Bellatrix stopped and turned. "Brother?" she said incredulously. She didn't even look to put up a shield that blocked Harry's and Ginny's curses, and she dodged expertly when they tried to slip around it.

Hermione held up her left hand, showing her engagement ring proudly.

"Ooh, so you think you're moving up in the world, mudblood?"

Hermione clenched her fist and held her arm at an angle where Bellatrix could see the MUDBLOOD scar flaunted before her. "You won't touch them," she said. "Any of them."

Bellatrix cackled. "And you think you can stop me this time, little girl?"

"Yes. You know the power the Dark Lord knew not?" Hermione said."It's me!"

A/N: Metronomos: Greek for "measure regulation," the origin of the word "metronome."

Ligate scripta iudicii pro dies luctae: Latin for "Bind the writings of judgement for the day of mourning."

Nos iactamus aleam et ea ligamus vitae nostris: Latin for "We cast the die and bind our lives to it."