Chapter Text
The sun didn’t set the way it used to.
Minerva Ginevra Granger-Potter knew this, even though she had never seen a real sunset. She had read about them in books, where the sun dipped below open horizons, sinking over fields, hills, and oceans — into a sky that didn’t smell of burning ash. Now, the sun filtered through thick layers of smoke and dust, staining the sky a sickly orange. It was the colour of something that should have been beautiful, but no longer was.
Underground, you couldn’t even see that much.
Below the surface, there was only the light of the sunstones the goblins had embedded in the tunnel ceilings. It was a flat, whitish glare that failed to cast shadows correctly — a light that left you unable to tell morning from evening, a light that existed solely because someone had decided it had to.
Raiven — for that was what everyone called her, except her parents — had grown up in that light. She had learned to walk along those damp, dark stone corridors; she had learned to speak in low tones to keep her voice from echoing through the tunnels; she had learned that silence could be a weapon or a trap, depending on who wielded it.
She was twenty-four, but she carried herself as if she were much older.
There was no single moment when the world had ended. It had been a cascade, an avalanche, where every falling stone dragged down a hundred more. But if Raiven had to point to a single catalyst — the exact moment the crack became a chasm — she always went back to that October morning, to that Muggle livestream that no one was ever supposed to see.
Three Muggles sliced clean in half by an overpowered Slashing Curse, broadcast in real time across countless screens worldwide.
Her mother had told her the story many times, in that flat, detached voice reserved for things too painful to speak of directly: Hermione Granger, the incumbent Minister for Magic, trying through her tears to beg a man to stop fighting; and Harry Potter, Hero of the Wizarding World and Head of the DMLE, duelling for his life in the driveway of a Muggle house. All because of Ronald Weasley — a name no one in this underworld uttered anymore without spitting a curse after it. He had kept casting spells until he struck the woman he claimed to love with the Cruciatus, then shattered his best friend’s right hand and leg with a Bombarda before the Aurors stopped him for good. All over a fit of jealousy.
All of it captured by a dozen smartphones. All of it uploaded to the internet within seconds.
In less than a month, half of the global wizarding population had been wiped out.
In less than a year, almost all magical creatures were extinct.
The world had stopped being the world and had simply become the war.
* * *
Raiven hadn’t even been born when Ginny Weasley died.
But she knew her story by heart. Everyone did. It had become one of those tales told to keep hope alive — to remind them that there had been people willing to pay the ultimate price.
Ginny had led a hundred wizards and a thousand goblins through the continent’s catacombs, heading toward the breach the Muggles had opened to slaughter the last remaining refugees. They had pushed the humans back. They had sealed the breach. Only twenty-three wizards and two hundred goblins made it back.
Ginny was not among them.
Raiven had a photograph of her — one of those magical ones where the people moved — one of the few keepsakes Harry had managed to bring with him before Hogwarts Castle was razed to the ground and the remnants of the wizarding population were forced to seek refuge in the goblin mines. In the photograph, Ginny had bright red hair, light eyes, and was laughing at something just off-camera. She laughed as if the world were still whole.
Raiven had spent countless hours staring at that photograph. After all, it was to that woman that she owed her middle name.
* * *
The hall was far too vast for the number of people it contained.
It had once been a natural cavern, but the goblins had expanded and levelled it, transforming it into what they called the Heart — the pulsing core of what remained of their civilisation. Crystal chandeliers illuminated pillars of carved stone, and at the centre of the room, resting on a raised dais, stood the Machine.
Raiven had been staring at it since she walked in ten minutes ago.
It wasn’t beautiful, not in the conventional sense. It was a fusion of goblin metal and wand-wood, thoroughly infused with Time-Turner sand. The entire structure pulsed like glowing veins, occupying a space large enough to fit a carriage inside. It was also the most extraordinary thing Raiven had ever seen in her life — and she had seen and done many extraordinary things.
“Stop staring at it as if it’s going to bite you.”
Her mother’s voice had that precise tone — affectionate yet slightly exasperated — that Raiven could have picked out from a million others.
“Well, technically, it was built to swallow me whole, so…” Raiven turned to look at the woman beside her.
Hermione Granger-Potter was leaning against one of the pillars with her arms crossed, looking more exhausted than Raiven had ever seen her. She was seventy-one years old and carried her age with a kind of austere grace, her brown hair streaked with silver, her eyes having lost none of their sharpness despite everything. Her body bore the scars of the war — a scar cut across her neck, disappearing beneath her collar, and her left hand trembled slightly whenever she was tired, a residual effect of the Cruciatus Curse that had fractured her magic into something unpredictable and ungovernable. Yet she was still the most brilliant person Raiven knew.
“I’m not afraid of it biting me,” Raiven said. “I’m afraid of actually understanding how it works.”
Hermione offered a faint smile. “When things are explained to you, it’s usually worse.”
“Exactly.”
They approached the Machine together, side by side. It was in moments like these that Raiven became acutely aware of the contrast between herself and her mother: Hermione viewed the Machine through the eyes of its creator, knowing every single component and the logic binding them together. Raiven looked at it as one looks at something with the power to alter reality itself.
“Let me explain the essentials… again,” Hermione said, her voice shifting into that precise, methodical cadence she used whenever she was about to unpack something complex. “The underlying principle is a cross between an ancient transfer ritual and the mechanics of a Time-Turner, all brought together using wandmaking construction techniques. Transfer magic is the most primitive form of teleportation in existence — predating Apparition — and it possesses a property that Apparition lacks: its structure is malleable. Because it’s a ritual rather than a spell, it can be reworked and modified in every conceivable way. Or even fused with something else. That’s where the wand-wood comes in. All the wooden branches and inlays you see have been infused with Time-Turner sand, ground even finer than what would normally be considered safe for temporal stability. At regular intervals within the wood, cores have been embedded. Ghastly things. Demiguise eyes. What the Muggles did to certain magical creatures makes me want to raze that part of history to the ground.”
“An abomination to end all abominations.” Raiven pointed to the strands of energy pulsing between the metallic components.
“Perhaps.” Hermione let out a long sigh, and a cold dread began to creep into Raiven. “The only remaining variable is the flow of time itself. We are ninety-seven percent certain it will work. You will go back to the past. What we don’t know is… will you rewrite our present, bypassing the grandfather paradox entirely? Or will you create a brand-new timeline? But the Council has made its choice. What matters is that we try to change things. We are on the brink of extinction. We’ve run census after census on our population and bloodlines.” She paused. “We calculated it, with Rose’s help. And Daphne’s, before she —” She cut herself off.
Raiven said nothing. There was nothing left to say about Daphne Greengrass that hadn’t already been said, and the silence hung heavy in the hall.
Hermione shook herself out of it. “Unless we can introduce the equivalent of roughly thirty percent of a new population with zero blood relations to anyone here, we will face complete extinction within three hundred years. Or at least, we’ll reach a point where the very thought of reproducing among ourselves becomes terrifying.” Another pause, her gaze drifting into the void, lost in thoughts Raiven didn’t even want to attempt to imagine. “MinGin. You are our only hope. The only one who can ensure that somewhere, somehow, the wizarding population — that magic itself — does not vanish from the face of the earth.”
The nickname, used only by her parents, struck her chest like it always did — warm and painful all at once. Everything else, the crushing weight of those words, paled in comparison to what those six letters carried. The sheer weight her names and title pressed down upon her shoulders.
“I know,” Raiven said, the fire in her eyes contrasting with the dull fog in her mother’s.
* * *
Her father was standing on the opposite side of the hall.
Harry Potter was seventy years old, a permanent air of exhaustion etched into the lines of his face — etched there decades ago, never to leave. His right leg was a prosthesis crafted by the goblins from their unique steel and exceptionally precise movement charms, though Raiven had learned as a child to spot the moments it pained him by the way he shifted his weight to the other side. His right hand had been replaced by something similar — metallic fingers that moved with a nearly natural fluidity. The green eyes behind his spectacles were unchanged: alert, measured, holding that specific quality found only in the gaze of someone who has seen too much but chosen never to look away.
He was speaking with King Brom, first of his name, the last sovereign of the Goblins. And Harry Potter stood there, at the side of a true King, demonstrating that innate ability to speak to anyone as if they were exactly at the level they deserved to be met — never condescending, never deferential, simply present. Raiven had spent years trying to understand how he did it, only to conclude that it was simply who her father was.
Catching sight of her approach, Harry brought his conversation with King Brom to a close and walked toward her. He didn’t say a word; he just pulled her into an embrace, one hand of flesh and one of metal. Raiven buried her head into his shoulder, just as she had done as a little girl, and just as she continued to do now that she stood as tall as he did.
“How are you doing?” Harry asked eventually, his voice calm.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m not asking for the official reports.”
Raiven pulled back from the embrace and looked at him. “I know it’s necessary,” she said. “I’ve always known. That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is the problem?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked at the Machine, then at her mother, who was now speaking with Scorpius across the room, before turning her eyes back to her father.
“The problem,” she said slowly, “is that the two of you built that thing to send me back in time to save a version of yourselves that doesn’t know me. A version that might not even truly be you. And when I go back and do everything I’m supposed to do, you won’t remember anything of who you became here. The war, the losses, everything that shaped you into who you are.” She paused. “And I will watch you grow up all over again, knowing exactly who you are but completely unable to tell you. I won’t be your daughter. I won’t even be able to tell you my real name.”
Harry said nothing for a long moment.
“No,” he said at last. “Maybe you won’t be able to at first. But one day, perhaps… when you think they’re ready, you could tell them your story.”
“How can you ask that of me? Even if I did, I’d be a stranger to them. A friend, maybe. But never family. Never truly. I would be entirely alone.”
It was the first time she had given voice to it. The question had festered inside her for weeks, growing in the silence that swallows everything left unsaid, and now it hung heavily in the air between them.
Harry looked at her for a long time. “We don’t want to ask this of you,” he said. “But we are asking because you are the only one who can do it. And you know, better than anyone, that if there is even a single chance to undo all of this, we have to take it.” He felt his daughter’s tears wet his neck as they stood together in silence, both acutely aware of what their fates would be, and that it was their choice to make.
* * *
The meeting took place that evening.
Only a few of them were left. Gathered around the central table in the Heart were Harry and Hermione, King Brom and Queen Nasha, Rose Granger-Weasley — leaning against a corner of the table with her prosthetic left leg — Scorpius Malfoy, holding his folders of temporal calculations, and Raiven.
For a brief moment, the gaze of the youngest person at the table drifted to the empty chair beside Rose. James Sirius Potter wasn’t there, because James Sirius Potter had died five years prior along with his entire squad.
Raiven refused to let herself think about it during meetings. Nor did she allow herself to think about her own chair — the one that had belonged to her mentor and teacher.
“The arrival point,” Hermione said, unrolling the temporal maps across the table — vast sheets of magical parchment covered in intersecting lines, formulas, and annotations written in three different languages — “is theoretically 1980. I cannot be more precise than that.”
“England?” Raiven asked.
“Highly probable. The Machine is calibrated to your father’s blood and magic, so the where is relatively certain. It’s the when that remains unstable. We’ve run countless calculations and formulas, both magical and Muggle. We did everything we could with the few simulations at our disposal. The best we could achieve is a ten-year margin of error. So, in the worst-case scenario, you could end up roughly ten years later or ten years earlier than our target date. Obviously, we are hoping you land as close to that date as possible.” Hermione pointed to a specific spot on the maps. “1980. Your father has just been born. The First War isn’t over yet, so you might even manage to save your grandparents and many others.”
Raiven stared at the marked spot. July 31st, 1980. Her father’s birth. With the anchor based on blood, it was the furthest back they could manage. Initially, they had tried using Hermione’s blood, but her magic — rendered unstable by the Cruciatus and weakened by decades of atrophy — wasn’t viable. Unfortunately, they had no other living blood relatives connected to Raiven they could use.
“And Voldemort?”
“If you arrive when we expect, or earlier, you will have to stop him. You know enough to win the First Wizarding War and put an end to Voldemort permanently right then and there. If you arrive after baby Harry has already stopped him, you’ll have more information about the timeline, but you’ll need to be far more cautious. They won’t be actively at war, so it will be politics and subterfuge that secure your victory.” Hermione lowered her voice. “And remember: Dumbledore. If you arrive before our target date — before the prophecy — he might be an ally. If you arrive after, he could prove to be a greater danger to you than Voldemort himself.”
“I know. You’ve explained it to me.”
“I am reminding you,” Hermione said, her tone conveying something far deeper than mere pragmatism. It was a mother trying to protect her child even now, even like this. “They aren’t just obstacles to be removed. Dumbledore and Voldemort — or rather, the movement Voldemort helped bring to power — are the pillars of the history we know. You are going back to dismantle that history, but you must remember that you cannot recklessly tear down those pillars, or the entire tower will collapse on top of you.”
“I won’t.”
King Brom slammed a hand onto the table. “The issue is not merely technical, nor is it so abstract,” he stated in his low, deliberate voice. “The question is: what do we change, and what can we not afford to alter?”
“Hermione has a theory,” Harry said, looking at his wife.
Hermione nodded slowly. “Time cannot be altered freely — assuming that what we hope Raiven achieves is possible and won’t simply spawn a new timeline,” she said. “But if she does successfully alter this timeline, she cannot simply replace an event with nothing. You can shift it, you can change its shape, but the pressure points remain. If Harry Potter was destined to be the focal point of the conflict against Voldemort, that destiny will attempt to reshape itself in whatever timeline unfolds.” A pause. “Which means Raiven cannot simply eliminate every threat. She must reset the conditions so that when the time comes, the people are stronger, better prepared, and less alone.”
“And less manipulated,” Raiven added quietly.
No one objected.
* * *
They went to bed late that night, even by the standards of the mines.
Raiven lay awake in the darkness of her quarters — a small room carved out of raw stone — staring at the ceiling for most of the night.
She thought about her brother.
James Sirius Potter had been gone for five years, and the way he had died alongside his squad, with no one able to do anything to save them, was one of those thoughts Raiven had promised herself never to revisit. Yet she always found herself returning to it at night, in the silence of the tunnels. She thought of Rose and her single leg, still making runs to the surface because it was what needed to be done, with no one stopping her because to stop her would be to treat her as though she were broken — and Rose Granger was not broken. She thought of Daphne Greengrass, who had taught her how to survive, how to fight, and had then died protecting her. She thought of that exact moment: the flames, the explosions, Daphne’s hand turning entirely still in her own. It was a moment Raiven carried inside her like a piece of shrapnel — ever-present, impossible to extract.
“You are Merlin reborn,” they told her.
“You are the only hope we have left,” they told her.
Raiven stared up at the ceiling, thinking that hope was an incredibly heavy burden to carry.
* * *
Her mother came to see her at dawn — or what passed for dawn in the tunnels, when the goblins turned the lights up to their maximum brightness to simulate morning.
Hermione brought two mugs of something warm, one of the few items surface raids still managed to bring back with any regularity. She sat on the edge of the cot without asking, just as she always had.
For a while, they said nothing. They drank in silence, and the quiet was not uncomfortable — between them, silence never was.
“MinGin,” Hermione finally said.
“Mom.”
Hermione stared into her mug. “I can’t find the right words for this. I’ve tried… you know how I am with words… but I just can’t.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes… I do.” Hermione looked up, her eyes glassy in a way that was entirely uncharacteristic for her — the woman who had learned to hold back tears like a dam holding back a flood. “I am sending my daughter back in time to save versions of myself and your father who won’t have the slightest clue who you are. I’m asking you to grow up around us all over again without ever being allowed to be our daughter. To watch us make terrible decisions and be unable to stop us every time you want to. To stay close to Harry, knowing he’s your father, but unable to keep him safe in all the ways you’d wish.” A pause. “It is a massive thing to ask of anyone.”
“It’s a massive thing to ask of your daughter,” Raiven said.
“Yes.”
Raiven looked at her mother and thought of all the versions of Hermione Granger she had studied in school journals, photographs, and Pensieve memories — the eleven-year-old girl who had stepped onto that train completely certain she would learn everything there was to know, with no inkling of what it would cost.
“But you’re asking anyway,” Raiven said.
“But I’m asking anyway.”
“Then I’ll do it. Because you aren’t just my mother; you and Dad are the people I love most in this world, and you’ve loved me just the same. I know you’re asking me because we both know there is absolutely no one else who can do this.”
There was nothing left to say. Hermione set her mug aside and pulled her into a tight embrace — an embrace that held a strength Raiven had always found surprising for a woman of her stature, a strength born entirely of determination, love, and terror mixed together. Raiven wrapped her arms around her tightly, holding on without hesitation, knowing already that this was one of the moments she would carry with her forever.
* * *
The day of departure arrived as all inevitable things do: too soon and too late all at once.
The hall was packed by current standards: two hundred goblins, perhaps eighty wizards — everyone who remained and was able to attend. It wasn’t a crowd, but it was everything left of existence, and Raiven looked at them one by one as she crossed the Heart toward the Machine’s platform, trying to commit their faces to memory.
Rose leaned heavily on her crutch, watching her with those brown eyes that were identical to Hermione’s, save for a constant quality of defiance that was uniquely her own. She wasn’t crying; Rose rarely cried, never when people were around. But as Raiven passed her, Rose reached out and grabbed her hand for a brief second — just a second — before letting go.
“Fix it,” Rose said.
“Even if it means erasing you? Along with James and Albus?” Raiven asked.
“Even if you have to erase everyone born after the First Wizarding War, if it allows whoever replaces us to have the life we could only dream of.” Rose pulled her into an embrace, tears finally tracking down her face.
Scorpius squeezed her hands in silence, displaying that quiet precision he had learned from his father and moulded into something of his own. “The equations are correct,” he said, as if needing to hear it one last time. “The Machine will work.”
“I know.”
“If there had been even a slight margin of significant error —”
“Scorpius.”
He lowered his eyes, looking utterly dejected.
“Find my mother’s family. Astoria. The Greengrasses. Save them.”
The image of Daphne flashed vividly in Raiven’s mind.
“I will.”
He gave a stiff nod and stepped aside.
Her mother and father were waiting at the base of the platform.
Raiven stopped before them, and for a long moment, there was nothing left to say. Every word worth saying had already been spoken, and the ones left unsaid couldn’t be uttered — not here, not now.
“Do you have everything?” Harry asked.
“Yes.”
“The Horcruxes —”
“I know what to do.”
“Dumbledore —”
“I know what to do with him, too.”
Harry paused. His gaze was that of someone who had learned hardness but had never allowed it to curdle into cynicism.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said at last.
“Dad.”
“Don’t do anything stupid even for good reasons. Good reasons are the most dangerous of all.”
Raiven embraced him without a word. Harry held her tight, and Raiven thought of the photograph she had always kept in her trunk — the one of her at ten years old standing between her parents — realising she was trying to memorise exactly how it felt to be held by him.
Then came her mother’s turn.
Hermione said nothing. She only looked at her — really looked at her, with that absolute precision she brought to everything — as if she were trying to imprint the memory of her forever.
“MinGin,” she said at last — just that, the nickname and nothing more.
“I know,” Raiven said. “I know, Mom.”
She embraced her mother one last time, then stepped onto the platform.
* * *
The Machine was larger on the inside. Not in a physical sense; it was a visual side-effect of its energetic structure, Hermione had explained. The way the magical forces coursed through the wood and metal warped the perception of space, giving off the distinct sensation of being in a place far grander than it appeared — a space compressing something truly immense into a tiny area.
Raiven positioned herself at the centre of the ritual circle etched into the goblin-metal floor. She checked her belongings one final time: the trunk gifted to her by the Goblin King — practically a national treasure — shrunk and weightless in her pocket. Inside lay copies of every grimoire and piece of research her mother had compiled or recovered over the decades. Her primary wand rested in its forearm holster, with a backup secured to her calf.
She looked up. She saw her mother and father at the base of the platform; she saw Rose and Scorpius; she saw the goblins and wizards surrounding them; she saw everything that remained of the world she had ever known, and she realised with absolute clarity that she was doing this for them.
For all of them. For the dead and for the living.
“Ready,” she said.
Hermione nodded. The currents surging through the Machine intensified, accelerating from a slow pulse to a rapid, urgent thrum. The light they emitted shifted from a bright white to a deep gold, and then to a hue that defied naming — a colour Raiven had only ever witnessed during certain sunsets on the surface, at the precise split-second the sun vanishes, leaving the sky hanging in the balance between day and night.
The world began to dissolve at the edges.
The last thing she saw was her mother and father, standing side by side, watching her. Harry had his metal hand resting on Hermione’s shoulder.
Then there was only light.