Born from the Ashes (A Harry Potter Fanfic)

Prologue

The rope dug into Letha Martin's wrists as she fought to free herself from her confinement. She felt the heat of her own blood running down her fingers from where her nails had dug into her palms. The flames licked closer to her as her room burned around her. 

The air was singed with the disgusting smell of burning flesh as she cried out in agony.

An accident they would call it. 

The young genius that had taken the world by storm, burned alive in her sleep. Such a tragic end, a blaze of glory one might say. 

Letha Martin would never claim to be a good person. She was brilliant and manipulated her way from the bottom to her throne. 

Her technology, medicine, and philosophy reshaped the world around her. Not for something as feeble as the betterment of humanity, but for wealth, for power, for prestige. Her name would live on even after they've sacrificed her on this burning altar. Letha was in a way... immortal. 

She stepped on a lot of people to get where she was and one by one her family suffered for it. 

Letha loved deeply, she sacrificed every moral so that her mother and sister would never know hunger again. In doing so she orchestrated the very thing she fought to avoid, their demise. 

She fought to put back together the pieces that her failure of a father left behind. 

She made mistakes. 

She knew that as she watched similar accidents consume her family members one by one. 

Her sister, whom she read bedtime stories and let sit in her laboratory for hours, died in a freak accident not three months prior. She missed her sister, she missed her long conversations about which cabin she'd be in at Camp Half-Blood or how she would survive the Hunger Games. She missed her sister's silly ramblings, the lab had been so quiet since she died. 

Her ambitions had killed her lovely little sister, she knew. As she felt the flames continue to devour her in the sanctuary of her own bedroom she thought of seeing her sister again. 

I think I'd be in Hufflepuff! You'd definitely be in Slytherin, there's no doubt about that. Her sweet sister had giggled in this very room as they read through the Harry Potter books together. This room filled with so much love, now burning around her. 

The unfinished final Harry Potter book burned on the table beside her, its unread pages curling and mocking her. It had sat three months dormant, now the last few chapters burned never to be read to her sister before bedtime. She wished she had finished the book so she could tell her sister the ending when they met again in the afterlife. 

Letha Martin was cunning and ambitious as she was vicious, but she loved... oh how she loved. She did it all for the love of her sister and the love of her mother. 

Her heart ached with the thought of being sent to hell, forever separated from her angelic sister and mom. She wondered if that would be her final punishment, for all the wicked she did. 

Her enemies had found her in the middle of the night, tied her to a chair, and ran as they set her home ablaze. 

She choked on the smoke filling her lungs like water, drowning in air and flame. 

In a blaze of glory, Letha Martin burned but she never gave them the satisfaction of a scream.