Chapter 267: Traps (Patreon)

Chapter 267: Traps

9th February 2013, Malfoy Manor

(Jasmine Sayre POV)

I prepared myself to create a secondary temporary consciousness that I would have programmed for them to ruin themselves before dissolving, but I noticed that Nathan started screaming. It was odd, I wasn’t even doing anything to him. He then started to burn, to melt into something. I noticed that the rest of the members of the Court were doing the same.

Oh shit, I felt that their life forces weren’t being dissipated but absorbed into a ritualistic array underneath the carpet. I hadn’t even noticed that. I couldn’t move. I was frozen completely, and I felt ethereal chains coming from the ground binding me as well.

This whole thing was a trap, and whoever was responsible used the entire Court of Shadows as a sacrifice to get to me. What a shit show.

(Hermione Granger POV)

Hermione Granger knew that she was an ambitious woman. It ran in her blood, after all. Her mother’s family wasn’t wealthy; they could barely afford anything after paying for food and rent. After they died when she was barely more than a teenager, leaving her practically nothing. Emma Granger, Hermione’s mother, had studied like no other, and worked her arse off, to rise from a nameless orphan, all the way up to a Dentist with her own successful practice, who earned more in a month than others did in a year.

Instead of wallowing in despair and helplessness, she refused to give up. She gave everything her best, no matter what, and that’s something that she had always stressed on Hermione when she was growing up. Her father was born privileged, with an upper-class family that always made sure that he was cared for. Truthfully, Hermione admired her mother and did her best to emulate her over the years.

It was why she studied so much, when she heard stories on how her mother studied her way to success. Hermione loved her father, don’t get her wrong, but her mother held a special place in her heart. When young Hermione had received her Hogwarts letter, her mother looked sad. Now, she understood that her mother had understood the inevitable division between them, the wall that would separate them, even when she wasn’t in school. Because even when she was at home, Hermione yearned to use her magic, something that she understands now is a way for the ministry to make sure that muggleborns stay in the magical world.

To not use magic for months at a time was torture, which means that muggleborns who will not have access to magic by ministry law, would always yearn to return to the magical world if only because they could just use their magic. And the magical world, no matter what these pompous purebloods said, needed them since they made up most of the working class in the country. Instead of a forceful split, the detachment of muggleborns from the muggle world was slow, happening every year while growing up, until they only have a home in the magical world.

Hermione’s mother had seen it coming, somehow, and had decided to prepare her daughter during the summer for the unmerciful world that awaited her. It started during the summer after her fourth year. Her mother had brought her aside and told her the truth about her rise, about her success. Her mother hadn’t just studied her way to success, she was as cutthroat as they came. She had no choice, no family to fall back on, no extra money, nothing really, and thus when the time came when she had to betray a friend, she would do so. If a time came if she needed to sabotage someone’s work just so that she would beat them, then she did so without batting an eyelash. Nothing came free in this world, and no one was going to hold her hand through life. She had to be ruthless, uncompromising. But the main thing was that she had to have a goal, a dream, an ambition, that she would do her best to achieve.

Hermione had taken these lessons to heart. And in a world where she was considered to be barely more than trash – since she was a muggleborn – she slowly worked until she became Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic. She had real power in her hand, and Nathan Potter was barely more than a puppet figure in the ministry, and with her being so close and having his complete trust, it was easier to achieve her ambitions.

Truthfully, Hermione was disgusted by the things that she had done in her rise to power. But quickly, she had realized that in this cold merciless world, nothing was freely given, it had to be taken. It was one of the main reasons she chose her dream, her ambition, to be a truly equal magical Britain, where everyone will have the same resources, the same starting point, so that no young woman like her, like her mother, would have to manipulate her way to the top, only her efficiency would be necessary.

It was a beautiful dream, one that she had worked towards for decades, and it was so close. Muggleborns were to be given special classes in Hogwarts to make up their ignorance of the magical world, alongside a stipend for them to use at their leisure.

The biggest problem she faced was the power that the old Purebloods held. It wasn’t really because of the wealth, because a wizard or witch could live comfortably with only the use of magic, but because of the family spells that held, written by their ancestors. It was hidden magic, old magic, that surpassed the basic education given to all students at Hogwarts. Hermione’s last step to victory was to destroy the family magic system and create a central repository of magical knowledge that anyone would have access to. No one would have an unfair advantage after all.

It was why she wanted Rose Potter’s magic so badly. It could prove to be the equalizer, the first step to truly unifying all spells in magical Britain. Alas, it wasn’t to be; her sister, Jasmine Potter, was still alive and was keeping a close eye on her sibling.

The woman, Jasmine Potter, terrified the hell out of her. There was something primal about the woman, something deeply powerful that caused the mere presence of the woman to unsettle her greatly. Hermione felt small, like a cute little animal that didn’t in any way pose a threat to the woman.

And when she tried to test her, the woman showed a fragment of her power that almost caused her to die in fear. And that was Hermione Granger’s life now, a woman living in fear. She feared the Court of Shadows who were slowly trying to force her to oppose Jasmine Potter, and yet she was far more terrified of the woman who haunted her dreams.

The Muggleborn witch hated this feeling of helplessness, stuck between two superpowers that were using her as a pawn. She needed to get out of that position and ironically enough, it was the Court of Shadows that provided her with her answer.

The court had attempted, under Nott’s leadership, to summon and bind her to their will. They had found the Peverell Grimoire, a book filled with wonderous spells, rumored to be written by the Peverell brothers themselves to summarize their knowledge of magic.

The three brothers had used an ancient ritual to summon and bind death to their will. There were some doubts about the veracity of the ritual, and yet everyone knew ever since Dumbledore’s disappearance, that the Deathly Hallows were real. Adding in the fact that the ritual to summon Death existed in the Peverell Grimoire, the fact that the legend was true was certainly a possibility. And if it worked on Death itself, an entity beyond mortal understanding, there was no reason why it wouldn’t work on a mortal witch.

Unfortunately, the ritual needed something to tether on the victim, a way to summon them. Nott tried using Jasmine Potter’s name, but it was unsuccessful. With this part of the ritual being a dud, the Court moved on onto another plan, one that seemed foolish since it was a surefire way to anger the woman that they planned to bind to their will.

But while the Court gave up on the Peverell Grimoire, Hermione knew better. She could remember the invisibility cloak that Nathan used, and that it was beyond anything else she had ever seen. The Grimoire was priceless, and the ritual could be a working one.

It took months of studying and experimentation, but Hermione discovered that the only issue with the ritual was the summoning which for some reason wouldn’t work on Jasmine. She had tried to summon and bind one of her enemies, and it worked flawlessly. They were obliviated later of course, after Hermione dispelled the enchantment. She wasn’t a monster after all.

The biggest issue was the fact that the strength of the binding depended on what powered them. The Peverell brothers were rumored to be three wizards of legendary power, maybe even in the same league as Merlin, something that Hermione definitely wasn’t. And with Jasmine Potter being the person she wished to bind; failure wasn’t an option. The Potter girl would just kill her.

And so, after some research in the Grimoire, Hermione discovered that there were few things as powerful as life force. She modified the ritual to use the sacrifice of certain people to power the bindings. She decided to forgo the summoning that didn’t seem to work on her enemy, leaving her with the fact that she had to lead Potter into a trap, as well as find people to sacrifice. She decided to hit two birds with one stone and just use the Court members as the sacrifice necessary to power the ritual, and also put the idea in their head to use Rose as leverage, by constantly mentioning how close the two sisters are.

In the end, she used an invisibility spell that hid her entire magical presence from the world, one that was created by Ignotus Peverell in an attempt to replicate Death’s cloak. This spell allowed someone to slip through wards unnoticed, but it was very magically consuming and was very unstable. Still Hermione gambled and used it to sneak into Malfoy Manor, prepare the ritual in the meeting room and afterwards it was just a waiting game.

She slowly marked the magic of every Court member to be used as sacrifices for the ritual when it activates if they’re in the vicinity. Every member of the court wore a ring that signified their membership to the Court, and they were used to bypass the wards to attend court meetings. It was simple for her to use those rings as the marker for the magics. Everyone who wears their rings when they’re inside the ritual circle while it’s activated, will have their life force ripped out to power the bindings. In the end, she waited until the Court foolishly kidnapped Rose Potter.

Watching through a mirror, Hermione watched as Jasmine Potter tried to make peace with the Court of Shadows, a foolish move, since the Court would always lust for her power, as many others did.

She watched fascinated as the woman effortlessly rescues her sister and starts breaking the members of the ritual. She even blocked a Killing Cure, somehow. No, not blocked, she froze it in midair and returned it to its castor, Malfoy, killing him.

And the worst thing was the emptiness in her eyes as she did all of this. She just looked so bored, so apathetic to the misery that she was condemning these men into, even those who had protested Rose’s kidnapping.

Things were getting too far; Hermione couldn’t afford Jasmine killing the members of the Court, since the less they are, the less powerful the ritual will be. Steeling herself, Hermione reminded herself that the lives that she will take that day were for the greater good. They would be used to defeat a vicious monster, a true threat to the magical world, and it would bring her closer to her goal of an equal magical Britain.

Hermione Granger simply walked to the door and activated the ritual, confident that it represented a giant leap of progress in the magical world.