"ON THE LONGEST DAY OF THE THOUSANDTH YEAR, THE STARS WILL AID IN HER ESCAPE, AND SHE WILL BRING ABOUT NIGHTTIME ETERNAL"

Prophecy spoken by Anstice Trelawney near the newly constructed Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, December 21, 992 C.E.

Somewhere

April 16 1992

Hermione Jean Granger was dead.

Or at least, she reasoned that she was dead.

She last remembered drawing in a breath and whispering to Harry, "Not your fault." She exhaled, and closed her eyes, and distantly heard his voice say, "Don't do this." But she did, and now she was here.

Where was here?

Her legs were chewed off by a troll. It was terribly painful at first, but once she began losing enough blood, the shock overrode the physical pain, and she knew she was going to die. And now she was dead. There really wasn't any other rational explanation.

She was alone now, cut off the world, devoid of sensory perception, a singular consciousness simply existing, capable of one thing, and one thing only: thinking.

I think, therefore I am.

She was thinking, therefore she was. But simply being is not the same as being alive, at least in the sense that she was used to thinking about things.

She tried to think what Harry would do in a situation like this. Science. He would do science, of course. Step 1: Form a hypothesis. Step 2: Do an experiment to test your hypothesis.

The problem was, how exactly does one go about falsifying theories like, "I'm in the afterlife" or "I'm just having a bad dream"?

She supposed she could falsify the Dream theory by never waking up? But she didn't want to not wake up. She could imagine Harry's somber face reminding her that reality was indifferent, that her wants would have no bearing on the results of the experiment. But she wasn't so sure that was the case in this world. This world was hers, this world was her.

She had the nagging feeling that, if she so chose, she could simply fade away into oblivion, abdicating her mind to a blissful eternity of nothing. After all, her entire "self" only persisted through the active, conscious act of thought, which she could deliberately cease at any moment.

But she didn't want to, so she didn't.

Instead, she decided to do bad science. Her new hypothesis was, "I am NOT in a dream." If she could do something that she could only do in a dream, she would falsify that hypothesis, and therefore prove that she was in fact, dreaming.

She was fairly certain that science didn't actually work like that, but she didn't have any better ideas at the moment.

She thought about the few times she had lucid dreams. What was it like? She could see, hear, feel, smell, taste… There was a world, albeit one of her own making, to interact with. It may have been a paper-thin veneer of a world, but it was a world nonetheless. This, on the other hand, was emptiness. It was nothing.

If she was dreaming, she could make something out of nothing, and so she tried. She thought about a ball. Just a simple toy ball, to start with. At first, she considered it too abstractly, she was envisioning the concept of "ball", and got nowhere. She tried again. This time, she tried to actually visualize what this specific ball would look like in reality. She defined its size, its color, its material. She imagined it close up, what it would have felt like if she had a sense of touch, the smell of the rubber against her fingers, the sound it made as she ran her hands across it. She fixed those values in her mind.

This was her ball. Baby steps, she told herself.

She now tried to think about the ball in relation to another object: a floor. A simple, floor of polished metal with no detail besides its preternaturally smooth surface. How would the ball interact with the floor if she, for example, dropped it? What about if she bounced the ball? She played over various scenarios in her head, sketching out in excruciating detail the behavior of the ball.

After nine or ten different scenarios, she noticed something interesting. She was the one playing with the ball. Her. Without even deliberately trying to, she was imagining herself, her own mind giving herself Form without conscious direction. The form had no details, it was just an edgeless mass of shadows, but it was unmistakably her.

She looked down. She now had a persistent form in this world: fractal black shadows, roiling and twisting, undefined and yet concrete. This was her, and she held her ball, and she was bouncing it against her floor.

Baby steps, indeed. So, she thought to herself. This is a dream, after a fashion.

But a dream of what? Her brain had ceased to function, presumably. And the patterns of information that made up her identity, those patterns were represented by a physical brain when she was alive. That brain took those patterns and gave them weight and meaning and a means of interacting with other patterns, and it was still. Lifeless and fading.

But her brain was simply the medium. Her brain was not her. When she was in school before Hogwarts, one of her maths professors had scrawled the first seven or so iterations of the Fibonacci sequence upon the blackboard. When he eventually erased the writing, that did not remove the Fibonacci Sequence from reality. Once established, the Sequence would persist, iterating on into the infinite, regardless of whether some professor manifested those iterations on a blackboard, even if no one was there to observe it.

She figured that this was the case with her; she was simply a pattern of information. An enormously complex, self-referential pattern that happened to be aware of itself, but she was a pattern nonetheless. Once established, that pattern would persist, iterating on into the infinite, regardless of whether some collection of protein and fat manifested those iterations in the world or not, even if no one was there to observe her, besides herself.

It was a reasonable enough explanation, although at the moment she hadn't the slightest idea how she might go about testing that particular hypothesis. But it didn't really matter much, did it? If her theory was wrong, it was wrong, but there was nothing to lose.

Now that the had a vague concept of how things might work, she needed a plan. She knew what she wanted: she wanted to return to the real world, to go back to being a flesh and blood girl, to see her friends, her family, her teachers again. She also knew that she had a friend in that real world who would likely stop at nothing to make that happen.

She had heard Harry talk ad nauseam about cryonics, the science of freezing a body upon death in order to preserve the brain until a future era in which it would be possible to reconstruct the damage caused by death and restore someone to the world of the living. She had seen the wisdom of his suggestions, but had never quite gotten around to having the "Hey mum and dad, I want you to freeze my corpse if I die" conversation.

She suspected that Harry would likely take matters into his own hands. He had once sought her assistance in learning the Glacius charm, a third-year spell. He never told her why, and she never asked, although she had her guess, which was most likely accurate.

It would be completely in character for Harry to steal her body, freeze it, and then stash it away somewhere. He probably had a walk-in freezer somewhere in the depths of the extended space in his trunk, procured specifically for this purpose. She wondered how he would provide it with power, since it wasn't like Hogwarts had an electrical outlet anywhere. She recalled from the instruction manual of her parents' chest freezer that it used around 400 kilowatt hours.

She did the quick mental math. 2,000 kilocalories a day was what an average person consumed. At four thousand joules per kilocalorie, that was 8 million joules per day. Watts were joules divided by seconds, and there were 86,400 seconds in a day, so that was a little bit less than 100 watts. Multiply that by 24 hours in a day by 365 days in a year and you had more than enough power to run a freezer.

She wondered how many calories a house elf consumed?

She noted that, as her conscious mind focused on this digression, she could "see" abstract representations out of the corners of her "vision". As she was thinking, she witnessed herself crawling into her chest freezer to see if it had enough space; she observed Harry eating toast just to make sure he actually consumed calories like a normal person; she watched, bemused, as a woebegone house elf pedaled laboriously away at a bicycle generator.

Whenever she tried to focus on these abstract visions, they flitted away as easily as they came to her. But she found that if she gave them weight, specificity, deliberate boundaries and identities, they would persist.

Harry had told her once that if there was an outlandish solution to a problem that required little to no effort, you may as well try it, on the off chance that it would actually work. If it didn't, well, then you haven't really lost much. It was for this reason that Harry had pledged allegiance to the deities of a hundred or so gods of various, mentioning that he was willing to bet thirty seconds of his life on Pascal's Wager, and that was it.

So, she built herself a Harry.

He stood before her. She studied its face. It was a formless mass, devoid of specific details, and yet she knew it was him. It was like looking at the night sky, how you could see the stars clearly from the corners of your vision but when you tried to look at them directly, they faded into darkness. When it spoke, it sounded like Harry, at least when he was saying things she remembered him saying in the past.

It didn't reply when she asked it if it was alive. She tried to think what Harry would say if that same question was asked of him. The simulacrum replied in a voice that wasn't-quite-Harry's: "I certainly feel alive, but that doesn't really say much, does it?"

She decided to try carrying on a conversation with her not-Harry, filling in what she thought the real Harry would say. "Am I dead?" She asked it.

The concept of FROWN splashed across its face. "Yes, but I'm working on fixing that."

"Do you think you'll succeed?"

"Yes. Eventually."

"So, is there an easy way out? Is there some pathway you can you lead me down that ends in a door that I can open and walk back out into the real world?"

It considered for a moment. "You're trying the outlandish solution aren't you?"

She smiled. "Of course."

"Well, I applaud you on that, but I don't think that will work. After all, you know this isn't really me. It's just your expectations of what I might do or say. You'd have to be able to contain two whole brains worth of information in your one brain for it to really be me, and that seems like a contradiction in terms. It's interesting that I'm the avatar for your inner monologue when it comes to science-y type things. It's not weird, I don't think. I told you once that I have simulations of lots of my friends in my head. If I think something might be unethical or wrong, I try to ask my not-Hermione what she would do."

As it spoke on, its voice sounded less like Harry, and more like Hermione trying to speak in Harry's voice.

Oh well, it was worth a shot.

Instead, she thought back over the multitude of books she had read, trying to think of any magicks capable of translating dreams back into reality. One particular entry came to mind, "Extremities of Particular Importance" by Alexander Phaethon. It detailed the history and descriptions of several magical locations and artifacts, many of which were considered little more than myth. The depth and breadth of its research led many to consider it a sequel of sorts to "A History of Magic", including Bathilda Bagshot herself. However, many others were left unsatisfied by its frequent forays into the world of unfamiliar mythology and the fantastic.

One of those fantastic places it described was the dreamscape of Tír inna n-Óc. Chapter twenty, page four-thirty-six, her near-photographic memory helpfully provided:

"The town of Ipswich often claims to be Britain's oldest town, since it is known that the community has persisted unbroken since the early seventh century. The wizarding world knows better – Diagon Alley is the oldest continuous community in Britain, surviving since the fourth century before Christ, when it began as a single cottage built by a Greek wizard, a wanderer who had abandoned his century-long journey in search of the legendary Cup of Midnight in order to create a home in this distant land of savages. In one shape or another Diagon has existed ever since, rebuilding homes and shops as needed. It is because of this antiquity that, when Merlin wrought the stone of the Wizengamot and made himself the leader of the magical world, he did so in London. He may have also been honouring the long-ago Greeks who brought wands and high magic to Britain for the first time, although he said nothing of this.

Tír inna n-Óc is older.

That fact no longer means much, truth be told. Tír inna n-Óc was woven from nightmare before Ελαολογος even left in pursuit of the Cup of Midnight, and by the time that Cup was broken in the tenth century – woe be upon the breaker of that precious cup! – the hellscape of Tír inna n-Óc had already been abandoned by the Tuath and the Unseelie, and no creature called it home.

The realm persisted, regardless. It had been crafted from the horror-dreams of nameless beasts of the sea, creatures no longer known to man or wizard that lie still and breathe salt and do not die, and Tír inna n-Óc would endure as long as they."

It further explained that the place transcended physicality and could be accessed from anywhere on the planet using a dark ritual that had, unfortunately, been lost to time. She decided that if the dreams of these nameless eldritch horrors could be used to build an alternate plane of existence, then so could hers.

And so it was that she set about the task of building the kingdom of her dreams.

The Forbidden Forest

June 3rd, 1992

Harry had checked the books, had learned that since he was too young to have sexual thoughts he would be able to approach a unicorn without fear. The same books had said nothing about unicorns being smart. Harry had already noticed that every intelligent magical species was at least partially humanoid, from merfolk to centaurs to giants, from elves to goblins to veela. All had essentially humanlike emotions, many were known to interbreed with humans. Harry had already reasoned out that magic didn't create new intelligence but just changed the shape of genetically human beings. Unicorns were equinoid, were not even partially humanoid, didn't talk, used no tools, they were almost certainly just magical horses. If it was right to eat a cow to feed yourself for a day, then it had to be right to drink a unicorn's blood in order to stave off death for weeks. You couldn't have it both ways.

So Harry had gone into the Forbidden Forest wearing his Cloak. He had searched the Grove of Unicorns until he saw her, a proud creature with a pure white coat and violet hair, with three blue blotches on her flank. Harry had gone over, and the sapphire eyes had stared at him inquisitively. Harry had tapped out the sequence 1-2-3 on the ground several times with his shoes. The unicorn had shown no sign of responding in kind. Harry had reached over, taken her hoof in his hand, and tapped the same sequence with the unicorn's hoof. The unicorn had only looked at him curiously.

And something about feeding the unicorn the sleeping-potion-laced sugar cubes had still felt like murder. At least, it would have, if not for the curious barking noise.

He looked up from his grim work, trying to identify the source of the noise in the dark. It seemed to come from a ways off in the distance, and something about the high pitched, wheezy noise suggested that its source would not pose much of a physical threat. It wasn't a low, rumbling sound that Harry might have expected from a large dog, nor was it an aggressive growl. It sounded frightened, possibly even wounded.

The thought crossed Harry's mind that whatever had wounded the dog could easily do the same, if not worse, to him. But upon logical consideration, (combined with a fair bit of wishful thinking), Harry concluded that the non-sapient creatures that lived within the Forbidden Forest would never actually harm a student. Dumbledore would know that the Forest was a honeypot even more enticing than the third-floor corridor. Harry was quite certain that there would be beasts that were frightening, creatures that may threaten harm. But to actually follow through? As insane as Dumbledore was, he still valued the safety and well-being of his students.

At that particular thought, Harry felt a brief twinge of dark anger, but quickly suppressed it, and resumed his task with renewed resolve.

He had almost put the sound out of his mind until it returned, this time more insistent, and troublingly, closer. Aware that he was likely projecting intent where there was none, Harry thought that the bark carried with it hints of anger and frustration in addition to fear.

Warning signs that he had trained himself not to ignore began flashing in the back of his thoughts. He may have been safe from the creatures in the forest, or so he hoped, but his experience with the centaur served as a stark reminder that intelligent beings lurked within those woods. What if the incessant barking drew their attention? Harry was far from sure that he could rely on another deus ex machina from Professor Quirrell; it was due to his failing health that Harry was even here in the first place.

Even if harm did not come to him, it would be quite inconvenient if he were to be caught hunched over the body of an almost-dead unicorn. Although his justification was reasonable, he doubted that others would see things as he did. His anger began to creep back up as he imagined himself arguing with well-meaning idiots, pointing out the hypocrisy of their carnivorism and being met with looks of consternation.

The noise roused him from his angry thoughts, close enough now to where Harry realized he had to make a decision. He silently cursed himself as he acknowledged that he should have been thinking of a plan this entire time rather than reassuring himself that he was safe. He decided, rather impromptu, to simply hide and observe. He removed his broomstick from his pouch and placed it between his legs, ready to mount in the event he needed to beat a hasty retreat.

In a few short moments, the creature emerged into the clearing, and immediately began frantically barking upon seeing the collapsed body of the unicorn. It was, as Harry suspected, a dog, but one of the oddest dogs he had ever seen. It was small, no bigger than a Pekingese, mind you, and its fur was a pale violet, with green ears a tuft of darker green hair on the top of its head. It wore a darker purple spiked collar around its neck, and there was a clearly visible tag attached to the collar. Harry could see from the distance that the tag was embossed with an image of a heart, but couldn't discern if there was writing or not.

Either way, the implication was clear: this was someone, or something's pet. And judging by its reaction to seeing the almost-dead unicorn, Harry had an idea of whose it might have been. The implications of this had Harry feeling suddenly ill.

The dog let out a mournful, wailing howl, and loped over to the unicorn, pawing at her flank, sniffing around her ears. Tentatively, it poked the side of her face with its snout, and began howling again in earnest. It collapsed against her, curling into the crook of her neck and whimpering softly.

The unicorn's leg jerked slightly, immediately silencing the whimpers and moans, and the dog excitedly jumped up and paced around, unsure of what to do. It paused momentarily, then stiffened slightly as if it had an idea, and ran to the unicorn's snout, putting his ear against it. After a few short moments, it excitedly leaped into the air and shouted.

"HERE! She's over here!"

Harry blinked.

He had brief flashes of his "Snakes are sentient?" moment, but reminded himself that people don't eat dogs, or at least people in his culture don't. He considered the possibility that humans were waging systematic genocide and slavery against an entire sentient species. His inner Slytherin drowned out the other voices that began to come to life, shouting, "You won't be able to do anything about it if you're killed or thrown in jail, you prat!"

That seemed to do the trick, and Harry snapped out of his moment of contemplation to focus on the problem at hand. He could now hear voices, human voices from far off in the distance, but not the direction of the castle.

It was time to leave. Now.

He adjusted his footing in order to hop onto his broom, and as he did so, he stepped on an exceptionally poorly placed and inconveniently brittle fallen tree branch, which broke the silence with a resounding SNAP.

Immediately, the dog's head snapped up in the direction of the noise, stared straight at Harry, and began to charge.

Crap.

Harry fumbled with the broom, forcing it between his legs, but before he could launch, the dog was upon him, gripping the corner of the invisibility cloak in its teeth and ripping it from him, revealing all of Harry's head and most of his torso.

The remainder of the cloak was pinned between Harry's legs and the broomstick. As Harry tried to rise into the air, the broom pitched upward as he struggled to free the cloak from the curiously strong grip of the dog's jaws. The dog clamped down resolutely upon the fabric, stepping slowly backwards, dragging the broom backward in midair along with him.

Harry's mind raced. If he shrugged off his Cloak of Invisibility, he would free himself and could escape to safety. But it was his quest item, and he really didn't want to lose it. Besides, there were no guarantees that he would even escape if he were to free his broom. And what if this dog-who-talks could be reasoned with?

Harry was about to come up with yet another brilliant rationalization for not leaving behind his Cloak when the decision was made for him: with a resounding SMACK, someone had crashed into him in a flying leap, knocking him from his broomstick to the ground.

"What'd you do with her, egghead?"

He was pinned down a witch who looked to be no older than a teenager, maybe a fifth or sixth year? She had short-cropped hair that he could have sworn was rainbow in color, and was wearing a jean jacket over her school skirt. Harry breathed out a sigh of relief; an angry student was, objectively, loads better than an angry centaur. She did not seem to appreciate his apparent relief, and shouted again.

"Answer me! Say something!"

"Uhmmm… What did I do with who?" Harry stammered.

"Our friend, dummy!" The girl shouted.

He had suspected as much. He hadn't considered that the unicorn may have been someone's pet. It seemed a bit of a stretch to call it a "friend", but he knew other people tended to be much fonder of animals than himself, so he didn't press the point. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize. I really didn't."

"Didn't realize what? What did you do to her?"

Harry didn't think now was the best time to mention that he fed the unicorn poisoned sugar-cubes, nor that he intended to eventually have its sweet, life-giving blood drained and consumed in what he could only assume was a ghastly ritual, unpleasant to behold. So instead, he said something that was true from a certain point of view: "I… I put her under an enchantment. In order to keep her safe."

At this, the dog, who had been lurking back a few paces and was now closer to the unicorn than Harry, perked his ears up and spoke. "What do you mean, keep her safe?"

As the dog spoke, Harry could hear other students making their way through the woods, although oddly enough, they weren't coming from the direction of Hogwarts. As he squinted through the darkness to try to make out their forms, the dog spoke again.

"Hey! You! What were you keeping her safe from?"

This one was easy enough for Harry to answer truthfully, "Something in this forest has been killing unicorns and eating them."

At this, the rainbow-haired girl and the dog exchanged dark, knowing glances, and the witch spoke. "Yeah… we know."

She stood up, still above him but no longer pinning him to the ground. As she did, several more students emerged into the clearing. It was three more witches, all around the same age as the rainbow-haired one. He was immediately stricken by their odd choices of wardrobes and hair colors. The first into the clearing was a blonde witch wearing boots and a cowboy hat, who immediately ran over to the unicorn upon seeing her and kneeled down.

The second to emerge had hot pink, curly hair and wore a ruffled skirt colored a similarly intense shade of pink. She didn't seem to walk so much as bounce, and she seemed more interested in Harry than she did the unicorn. "OoooooooOOOOooo. You look like us!" she squealed as she peered down, wide-eyed over him.

Lastly, a timid-looking witch with pale pink hair and a blue dress emblazoned with butterflies peeked out from behind a tree, looking like she would rather be almost anywhere in the world besides a dark, scary forest populated with unicorn-eating monsters.

The girl standing over him looked to her friend in the cowboy hat. "We caught him casting a spell on her. Says he was trying to protect her, protect her from some kind of monster that's eating unicorns," she indicated down to Harry with one hand.

"Well, I'll be hogtied," the witch in the cowboy hat drawled. She had a curious accent; it reminded Harry of the female detective in an American movie his father had taken him to see last summer, The Silence of the Lambs, much to the consternation of his mother when she found out. The accent stood out to him then because he had never heard anything like it before, and it stood out to him now.

The girl with the pale pink hair shivered a bit and spoke in a voice barely louder than a whisper, "You don't think the monster is anywhere near here, do you?"

Harry spoke up, louder than he probably should have. "No, it's not. The last time I saw him, I… well, I scared it off." At this, the rainbow-haired girl and the bouncy pink witch who had been staring at him both seemed impressed.

"So, what's this enchantment you put on her?" the rainbow one asked.

"It put her to sleep. It's not permanent."

"Well, take it off, then!" she demanded.

Harry wasn't sure that a Finite would actually do anything against the effects of a potion, but he figured he may as well give it a shot. Rainbow Witch, which Harry had begun to call her in his mind, stepped off of him, and he stood up, brushing branches off of his robes before pointing his wand at the unicorn.

"Finite Incatatem!"

The unicorn's equine features began to melt away into those of a human female with pale white skin and purple hair. Harry suddenly felt the urge to vomit.

His eyes grew wide as he consider just how incredibly short-sighted and stupid his tests for sapience had been. Tapping 1-2-3? That's it? Because she failed to ape his pattern, he was prepared to drug her and present her almost-dead body to Professor Quirrell to feast upon. He wasn't sure which thought scared him more, the fact that he almost took part in murder, or what Professor Quirrell's reaction would have been upon drinking the blood of a transfigured Animagus instead of a unicorn. Either way, he vowed to be much, much more careful about this sort of thing in the future.

"She probably should get taken to a healer, just to be safe…" Harry started.

"Are there any nearby?" Scaredy-Cat asked. In absence of knowing their actual names, he had assigned them nicknames. In addition to "Rainbow Witch", he had nicknamed the timid one "Scaredy-Cat", the blonde witch "Clarice", and the pink one "Pinky".

Harry was a bit confused by her question. "Closer than the hospital wing? I doubt it… The centaurs might have one, but I don't think they're particularly keen on helping me out right now. I can bring her there on my broom, I think that would probably be fastest. You all can find your way out, right?"

"I'm coming with you, then!" the talking dog yelled.

Amidst fearing for his life and his momentary moral crisis, Harry had totally forgotten about the purple-and-green dog. Given that the girl he had poisoned was obviously an Animagus, the fact that the dog could speak like a human suddenly made a lot more sense.

"You should be small enough in that form for me to carry you. Are you an Animagus, too?" Harry asked.

"No, I'm a dragon!" the dog replied in an indignant tone that Harry mistook for sarcasm.

"Sure. Just, don't transform while we're up in the air, okay?"

At those words, Rainbow Witch's eyes immediately snapped up. "Did you say, 'up in the air'?"

Harry looked at her, curiously. He swung a leg over his broom and kicked off the ground, hovering a few feet over the forest floor to demonstrate. Rainbow Witch's jaw dropped.

"That. Is. AWESOME! Where can I get one?" She demanded.

"Jeez, you're acting like you've never seen a broomstick before… Look, just, meet me at the hospital wing and we can talk about it then. Will one of you help me get her," he indicated with his head towards the unconscious, purple-haired girl, "up on the broom?"

With a dull POP of an Appartion, yet another newcomer appeared in the clearing. Harry almost fell off his broom at the site of… whatever it was. At first, Harry though it was some kind of Satyr, as it stood on two legs and had the head of a horse. But upon closer inspection, he saw it had deer antlers, the arm of a lion, a lizard's leg, the claw of an eagle and the leg of a goat. It also had something that looked like a unicorn horn on the top of his head, and mismatched wings.

"Now you wait just a hot moment," the creature demanded.

Harry had immediately shifted into a defensive position on his broom, ready to fire a curse at a moment's notice.

"Oh, come now, little one. What are you going to do, curse me with that fish?"

Harry's eyes darted back and forth as the wand in his hand had apparently transformed into a small haddock.

"Who, or what, are you?"

"Why, the elemental spirit of Chaos, of course! Pleased to meet you, my general."

Harry said nothing, staring back, nonplussed.

"Of course, I go by other names as well. Shiggoth of the Spire? Aforgomon? Yog-Sothoth, Lurker at the Threshold? He who knows the gate, he who is the gate? The key and guardian of the gate? Ringing any bells at all? No?" The creature sighed dramatically. "You summon me from across the multiverse and this is the welcome I receive?"

Harry was again nonplussed. "Summon? Don't tell me that 'shuffle duffle muzzle muff' is actually a real incantation." At those words, the creature threw its hands up defensively and shrieked. Indignant, Harry asked, "Are you serious?"

"No, I'm Peter Pettigrew!" The creature waited for a reaction. "Nothing? Is this thing on?" It tapped on a microphone that was not in its hands a moment earlier. "Gee, tough crowd. No, I'm not being serious. That was just a ridiculous rhyme. Anyway, I suppose you can just call me Discord."

"Okay, Discord. What… what do you want?" Harry wasn't sure what he was supposed to say.

"The same as you, I'm sure."

Harry let out a humorless chuckle, "I highly doubt that."

"I'm here to help out a friend," Discord declared.

Rainbow Witch scoffed, and rolled her eyes. "Uh huh."

"Oh Dashie, you wound me to my core," Discord turned to her. "As it so happens, I heard of your little predicament. Your little bookworm friend got in above her head, now she's gone, and you're trying to find her and bring her back. I'm going to help."

"How?" Rainbow Witch and Harry both asked in unison, and then briefly glanced at each other, somewhat confused.

"Well, sadly, we creatures of god-like powers have certain silly little rules we have to abide by, especially when we're in other realms like this one. I cannot interfere directly. So don't go expecting any deus ex machinas at the end of your little story. In fact, I don't think I can interfere at all. Sorry, chum." He placed one of his paws on Harry's shoulders as if to illustrate, and it passed through him as if he, (or Harry) was little more than air.

Clarice spoke up, hands on her fists, "It doesn't sound like you're being honest with us, here."

"Et tu, Jackie? Well, I have to admit, I'm not acting completely altruistically, there's something in it for me." Discord conceded.

"Uh huh, that's what I figured." Clarice replied, and they all stared at Discord expectantly. Discord put a single talon to his chin, stroking his goatee while leaning over and examining Harry intently.

"How much do you know about Heat Death?"

Harry was taken off-guard by the question. He suddenly was much more interested in what this "Discord" thing had to say. "More than most, but not as much as I'd like. Why?"

"You might say it's the opposite of chaos when you think about it, isn't it? Everything in perfect, pristine equilibrium? It all sounds terribly dull. Fortunately for me, the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines, and with a little hard work and elbow grease, I could probably get things moving again, but it would take a really, really, reaaaaaaallllllllly long time." Discord emphasized.

"You're saying you could single-handedly reverse the heat-death of the universe." Harry said, flatly. "How long are we talking here?"

"What's the biggest number you can think of?"

"Um, three to the power of… three to the third power of three, to the power of itself?"

Discord paused for a moment, apparently working out the math in his head. "Yes, that seems suitably absurdly high. Let's say that many years, give or take. Not that I mind the work, of course. I'm nothing, if not hard-working." At that, it was Clarice's turn to scoff, "Never mind her. No, what I'm not particularly looking forward to, as much as it pains me to admit it in front of them, is making new friends. I rather like the ones I have."

At that, Scaredy-Cat Apparated into his arm, and he mussed her hair with his knuckles. Judging by the perturbed look on her face, Harry did not think she Apparated herself willingly. Nonetheless, she gave Discord a weak smile. "Well, we like you, too."

"Speak for yourself…" Rainbow Witch muttered under her breath. Scaredy-Cat gave her a withering glare, and she begrudgingly conceded, "Yeah… We like him."

"This is crazy." Harry's checklist of things-to-do-using-the-newfound-science-of-magic included, near the very bottom, figuring out how to circumvent the inevitable accumulation of entropy, so it was at least nice to know he had a resource he could consult in that department. But there were a lot of steps between here and there. "So how DO you plan to help?"

"Oh, it's not going to be me that helps you. Really, these girls are going to do most of the hard work. I'm just going to kick things off, so to speak, like a Greek chorus delivering the Prologue. You see, as you may have guessed, we're not from here, and these girls will need a place to stay."

With a flourish, and a puff of smoke, a massive woman stood in place of where Discord had been not moments earlier. She was a handsome, olive-skinned older woman, wearing black satin dress robes. She was the tallest person he had ever seen, taller even than Hagrid, though not nearly as wide.

He… or she, rather, leaned down into a low bow. Even when her head was perfectly level with her torso, she was still taller than Harry. "Madame Olympe Maxime, charmed, I'm sure." Discord spoke in the voice of the woman, with an exaggerated French accent that bordered on comical. "I shall tell zee 'eadmaster, Dumbly-dorr, zat we are visiting students from Beauxbatons. I 'ave, of course, seen to it zat zee true 'eadmistress of Beauxbatons will be blissfully unaware of my impersonation,"

Pinky giggled and clapped her hands together. "You sound so cultured!"

"Now of course, zese 'orrible outfits of yours simply will not do." Discord snapped her fingers, and the witches were suddenly clad in identical periwinkle dresses, shawls and sleeves, and each had a matching hat sitting at a jaunty angle atop their heads. Fortunately, Harry could still tell them apart by their hair color, if not their mannerisms.

"And of course, names, we will need names. 'Oo would believe you to be students with those ridiculous names of yours? You!" Discord snapped her fingers at Rainbow Witch. "What shall we call you?"

"Uh… Manebow… Smash?"

Discord turned to the other witches in turn, snapping his fingers at each.

"Maudileena!" Pinky giggled, clapping her hands. "This is exciting! We're like spies!"

Clarice stammered when put on the spot, trying to think of a name that would sound normal, whatever that meant. "Babs?"

Scaredy-Cat looked down and kicked at the dirt lightly with her toe while she spoke in barely more than a whisper, "Jane?"

Discord considered this for a second. "'Orrible. Zey are all 'orrible names, except for yours, of course," she nodded at Scaredy-Cat. "Tisiphone, Megaera, Alecto," he pointed at Rainbow Witch, Clarice and Pinky, respectively. "Zat is what we shall call you."

"Tisiph-i-what?" Rainbow Witch cried, indignantly. "Those names aren't any better than ours."

"Oh, I think you will find them more than appropriate, my little 'umans. Now come. You, zee chosen one, 'op along on your little broom and fly to zee 'ospital."

"What about me? What's my name going to be?" The purple dog piped up.

"Ah, but you are used to being an afterthought, no? We shall simply call you Spike."

Spike wasn't sure if this was an insult or not, but didn't want to waste any time. He loped over to where Harry was floating on his broom, and Harry lowered himself enough so that Spike could hop into his arms, and then nuzzled up to the unconscious body slumped over the broom.

As Harry raised himself up, he paused for a moment. "I know that beggars can't be choosers… but you mentioned something about helping me bring back Hermione?"

"I said nussing of zee sort, 'Arry Potter."

Harry frowned. "You said you were going to help me find my 'bookworm friend'."

"Oh, silly boy. I was talking about zee uzzer bookworm friend, ZEIR bookworm friend." At that, Discord's voice changed back to its original rather than that of a French cartoon. "What a delightfully unlikely and totally not-intentional misunderstanding!" Discord tittered, and then resumed the French accent. "I only told you I would help you stop zee eternal night."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Right. Well, like I said, beggars can't be choosers. See you all back at the castle. It's that way," he pointed, and launched upward as Tisiphone stared longingly.

"So… awesome…" she whispered under her breath.

"'E is taking zis all in stride, don't you sink?" Discord asked, as he watched Harry fly away into the distance.

"Well, if he can help us find Twilight, then I don't really give two darn toots how he takes things," Clarice, now called Megaera, muttered.

"Yes, zat is the spirit! Now come, we have an 'eadmaster to meet!"