He With The Jewel Eyes ~ Rewrite | Irregular Updates

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Harry ran. Footsteps followed him, along with the shouts of angry men and women. The occasional sound of a gun firing and a bullet whizzing past his body accompanied the sounds of the crunching of branches beneath his feet and the rustling of thick bushes as he dove through them in a desperate effort to lose the people behind him.

Harry panted and coughed as he ran, stumbling occasionally. His body was covered in bruises and cuts. But what stood out the most were the handcuffs that bound his hands together. The handcuffs clanged as they were hit by the chains between them, the dull metallic sound giving away his location as sounds behind him continued. Harry gritted his teeth as he glanced at them, his face as pale as a white sheet.

The chase had been on for many hours already. Harry had escaped from his confinement in the hands of Muggles by knocking out a security guard and kicking off, not even looking back until the camp could not be seen anymore. He had managed to be free for some days, but a search party had caught up to him after that, and he was running again. He had barely slept in the last two weeks, and he was hanging at the edges of his sanity from the torture and horror he had been through.

The era of magic was over. After a group of Muggles had, by accident, come across a Nordic magical village some years ago, and one of the group had managed to run off with their memory intact, the whole world had been exposed to the existence of magic at a speed that was impossible to stop, and a worldwide witch hunt had begun.

Magicals, who had been so confident in their magic, had underestimated Muggles. Their magic was futile against the atomic and hydrogen bombs dropped upon them. Within two years, the magical world had diminished to a tenth of itself.

The Muggles hadn't gotten off scot-free either. From both the magicals' effort and their own weapons, around two-thirds of Muggles had been wiped out. Most began their own small tribal communities, living at the rare places that were still habitable, guarding against other communities to save resources.

It was as if time had gone back a hundred thousand years. Only, the world was in a much worse state from the harm it received at the hands of humans.

Harry, his family and friends, had huddled together in a small valley near Edinburgh, placing a ward to protect themselves. They had kept in touch with other magicals using Vanishing Cabinets, growing more and more despondent with time as news of deaths came every other day.

Then, one day, they had stopped receiving any news.

Two weeks later, they had been discovered. They had had to run away again. During the chase, they had lost Neville. He had sacrificed himself to create a chance for them to escape, like the brave Gryffindor he had been. Things had not gone as planned even then, and they had been captured.

What awaited them had been hell. The Muggles had somehow gotten their hands on Magic Restraining Handcuffs, used by the Ministry to restrain outlaws and keep them from causing harm.

The handcuffs had been what ruined them. Without their magic, no matter how hard they had fought, their numbers were nothing in front of the angry Muggles they faced. They had been tortured to the brink of death every day, interrogated to find if they were any others, and subjected to all the cruelties the Muggles could think to inflict upon them.