A Second Channe Through Time

CHAPTER ONE

Page count: 12

Hogwarts — Saturday 2nd May 1998

Ron. Remus. Tonks. Fred. Percy. Luna. Seamus. Snape.

All dead.
Voldemort. Dead.
Harry. Dead.

The words repeated in her mind like a curse that refused to fade.

The battle was over. The Dark Lord had fallen. The light had won—so they said. But as Hermione stood in the ruins of what had once been their sanctuary, surrounded by smoke, blood, and the quiet echoes of loss, victory felt like a lie.

All she remembered was the blinding flash—the clash of two spells—and then silence. Every scream, every explosion, every sound of war had been swallowed whole as the entire world seemed to hold its breath. Two wands. Two destinies. One final collision.

And then... Harry fell.

Voldemort's body had turned to ash, scattered by the wind. But Harry—Harry remained. Still. Fragile. Mortal.

Hermione barely felt her knees hit the stone. She barely noticed the rubble biting into her palms as she gathered him close, cradling his head in her lap. His glasses were cracked, his skin cold, his eyes closed. For one impossible heartbeat, she waited—she waited for his chest to rise, for him to move, for the miracle that had always come before.

It didn't.

The sound that tore from her throat didn't feel human. It ripped through the courtyard, wild and breaking, and people turned toward her—but she couldn't hear them. She didn't want to.

"Don't touch him!" she screamed, and with a flick of her wand, she sealed them off from the world. Wards shimmered into place, golden and desperate, before fading from sight. Someone shouted her name. Someone else begged her to open the barrier. She couldn't. She wouldn't.

She cast a Silencing Charm, shutting it all out—the voices, the chaos, the living. Only the two of them remained.

Hermione pressed her forehead to his, shaking, her tears soaking into his bloodstained robes. She whispered apologies she couldn't remember, words that fell into the quiet like ash.

When the sun finally rose, its light cut through the smoke and ruin, painting everything in shades of gold that felt cruelly alive. Her throat burned raw. Her eyes were dry. The wards still held.

The courtyard was empty now. The bodies were gone. Only the wreckage of Hogwarts remained—broken walls and shattered windows, the hollow shell of the place that had once saved them. It had been their home. Their protection. Their beginning and their end.

Her gaze fell to her wrist. The tattoo there—a band of intertwined vines and roses that wrapped around her skin—was ruined. The once-golden ink was charred and blackened, the edges cracked and seared as if burned from the inside. Her pulse throbbed beneath it, each beat echoing loss.

She looked at Harry's wrist. His mark was the same.

Their bond—the sibling bond they had chosen, the one that had tied their magic and their lives together—was gone.

Few would ever know what it meant.

Fewer still would understand what it cost her to lose it.

~000~000~000~

...Flashback — 1995...

It had started, like most of Hermione's discoveries, with a book.

She'd been in the library one quiet afternoon during fifth year, tucked between the shelves with a stack of Arithmancy journals, when she noticed a worn, leather-bound volume abandoned on the table. Its spine was cracked, its title half-faded: The Ancient Bonds of Wizarding Magic.