It was, in all actuality, a dark and stormy night. The rain was coming down in buckets and the lightning flashes were near constant, with the thunder rolling in directly after. Hermione, caught left-footed after getting off the coach from London, startled as a fork of lightning struck the steeple of the church not two-hundred meters to her left. She made the rather straightforward choice to duck inside the nearest establishment rather than trying to find the advertised hotel, hoping against all hope that it was a place with a room to let. She wouldn’t make it far in this weather without using magic.

She raced down a set of concrete steps until she was covered by a deep red awning. Wind whipped the rain sideways and spray wet her face and soaked her light summer jacket and trousers even with the overhead cover. She realized she stood at the entrance to a Muggle pub and with an internal shrug, ducked inside, letting the heavy door swing shut behind her.

The place was well-worn and not very large, but dimly lit enough to pass for cozy. It was sparsely populated with patrons scattered about here and there, mostly male, mostly middle-aged, wearing cagoules and caps, all huddled against the weather over pints or shot glasses. Their faces were indistinct in the murkiness as Hermione wiped water from her eyes, though there was something vaguely familiar about a dark figure at the far end of the pitted but well-polished bar top. Hermione took a moment to scrub her walking shoes on a threadbare mat and shake off excess water droplets so as not to create a mess. Then she slid onto an upholstered stool at the end of the bar closest to the door, letting her thankfully water-proof pack slip off her shoulders onto the floor by her feet.

A buxom woman in her fifties with bottle-red hair sidled over to Hermione from behind the bar, clutching a dish towel. She wore a form-fitting wine-colored blouse and black skirt meant for someone a third less voluptuous and moved with a no-nonsense confidence that signaled ownership of the establishment.

“You look like you nearly drowned out there, luv.” The landlady half smiled at her, amused, speaking in the lilting northern accent of the small town, forty kilometers from Harrogate and half a tick from the middle of nowhere. “You’re dripping all over my floors.”

Hermione took the towel with a wry smile and a word of thanks and made quick work of scrubbing the water off her face and arms, followed by her mass of sopping, unruly curls. Between the humidity and the electricity discharging through the air, she’d have a cloud of frizz if she could have used a Quick-Drying Charm, and Merlin knew Sleakeazy wasn’t an option in these parts.

“Can I get you something to drink, dearie?” the landlady asked.

“Whatever you’ve got on tap will do me just fine,” Hermione told her. She glanced at the doorway that served as a frame to a flooded world, rivulets of water pummeling the stairs and roaring down the gully just before the entryway. “You don’t happen to let rooms, do you?”

The landlady’s smile widened. “I may have a couple available,” she said. “The season doesn’t really pick up until July, but I’ve been getting overflow from the little hotel on Main already... I’ll just need a credit card and identification on file.”

Hermione unzipped the pocket of her Muggle hiking trousers and pulled out a credit card and driver’s license, legitimate and newly minted for the occasion, sliding them across the bar. “I don’t plan on staying more than a night or two so I shouldn’t interfere with any reservations,” she said. “Just until the twenty-first, if that.”

“So what brings you to the sleepy little town of Sheebane two full weeks before the Summer Festival? Business or pleasure?” The Landlady asked, handing Hermione back her credit card and identification after having run them through various machines, then wandering off to the tap to pour the requested lager.

“Oh, I had some time off—was overdue for a mandated leave, in fact—and I heard there were some wonderful hiking trails around here. I’m just passing through on my way up to Newcastle to visit with my aunt,” Hermione answered breezily, accepting the drink. She took a careful sip then licked the foam off her upper lip.

A low voice rumbled from the far side of the bar. “You should move on, miss,” the man said, ominously, eyes on his lager. “The woods aren’t safe. Four men disappeared under mysterious circumstances not even two weeks ago and there’s been no trace of them.”

“Oh?” Hermione asked, feigning surprise.

“Just some cavers,” the landlady said with a wink, shooting a glare at the man who sat at the far end of the bar, his cap pulled low over his face. “Strange ‘un’s, apparently. Not from around these parts. Had all sorts of fancy equipment, not all of it looking like it belonged in a cave, and not correctly outfitted for it, poor blokes. Sadly, they weren’t the first group that bit off more than they could chew when it came to all these underground systems—there was another handful of tourists who disappeared down a hole about ten years back. But nothing to worry about if you’re staying above ground, and I bet you’d be fine going cave-diving if you didn’t do anything daft.”

“Oh, I’ll just be sticking to the trails,” Hermione said, reassuringly, her foot kicking at her pack that was definitely not holding ropes or a harness or carabiners. “I’m not really all that adventurous—just needed to get out and into nature after endless days at my desk.”

The landlady snorted. “I understand entirely,” she said. “Sometimes working down here feels like I miss the sun for weeks on end.”

“Well, that’s just England for you,” Hermione said, offhandedly, and the landlady laughed.

The man at the end of the bar cleared his throat, still studying his drink. “In those woods, equipment will not work correctly. Hikers have stumbled out days after they went in, confused and near-starving—“

“Oh, come off it, Soren!” The landlady spat. “You’ve been wandering about the trails for the past week and we haven’t lost you yet.” She turned to Hermione, frowning. “There’s some iron ore up there that can make a compass go wonky, and there’s obviously no cell reception—not that this town’s much good for that, either—but the trails are well-marked and it’s all in the guidebooks.” She leaned closer, speaking to Hermione in a carrying whisper. “He just wants the third floor all to himself, that man. Seemed nice enough but then scared off a group of half a dozen backpackers on Tuesday.... It’s not like I couldn’t have used the business!”

The man, obviously meant by the landlady to catch every word, snorted and drained his glass. He rose without looking at them and dropped a bill on the bartop before heading up the stairs at the rear towards where Hermione assumed the rented rooms must be.

“He sent them packing with tales of lost hikers and misbehaving compasses?” Hermione asked, sotto voce, leaning forward to rest her elbows on the bar.

“Oh, no, not just that. You should have heard him going on. Carnivorous holes in the ground. A heartbeat in the woods. Grave of a Fae king. Terrific tall tales—took the local legends and dialed them up to eleven. He can really spin a yarn, that one.” The landlady lady shot a poisonous scowl toward the staircase.

Hermione briefly glanced in the man’s direction with an utter lack of curiosity, her mind skittering off the memory of his semi-obscured facial features.

She brushed her bare right forearm with her left index finger, her wand and its holder conspicuously absent. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I don’t believe in fairy tales.”

---

Hermione, rejuvenated from her shower, toweled off her mass of curls and dug through her pack for the Muggle honey-suckle scented conditioning spray, which she applied liberally before dragging a brush through her hair and fashioning it into a braid over her right shoulder. She found herself leaning towards the en suite bathroom mirror, closely examining her only very slightly more prominent front teeth. She’d undone the shrinking spell Madam Pomfrey had used to counteract Malfoy’s curse during Hermione’s fourth year. It occurred to her that her dentist parents had been right about her formerly disproportionate incisors after all—she had grown into them.

She pulled on a pair of lightweight blue pajamas purchased at ASOS, and, leaving the towel on the rack, walked into the surprisingly well-appointed bedroom. Sitting in the armchair to the right of the Queen-sized bed, she opened a cardboard-backed Muggle journal and rummaged in her pack until she found a ballpoint pen. She pored over her notes for one last look, reviewing the details of the lore and scouring for patterns in the multiple sources she had indexed. She then went over her checklist once again to tick off boxes for the third time ensuring that she was free of enchantments and charmed objects—Hermione meant to avoid the fate of Wollacks, Herkenbrue, Sumpter, and Jones, the first team of wizards the Department had sent, that on a purely investigative mission.

The lamplight caught the lighter band of skin around her right ring finger. It had been more than six weeks and the color had yet to return to normal. She felt the all-too familiar heaviness in her chest, a heady mix of shattered dreams and self-recrimination, but perhaps she and Ron had never really been meant to be. He had certainly moved on quickly enough.

Her musings were interrupted by an inpatient rapping at her door. For the briefest moment, she wondered if her erstwhile love had somehow found her here, on the front porch of nowhere.

Wrapping her gingham robe around her, she cracked the door open and peered out. “Hello?”

The man from the pub downstairs stood in front of her, arms folded across his chest. Though his cap was now off and his features were illuminated by the fairly decent hallway light, Hermione found him to be aggressively nondescript, while still possessing a niggling familiarity. He was a vaguely male presence and taller than she was, but as to build or coloring or roundness of face—she found she could not say. She was neither alarmed at his presence nor curious as to why he was knocking at her door at just after ten in the evening, but, as she had earlier, felt a distinct lack of interest in his person. In spite of her attempts to wear a polite look of inquiry, she kept finding her attention focused elsewhere, like the fascinating pattern on the molding behind him.

“Don’t go into the woods,” he growled. “It isn’t safe.”

She found herself looking anywhere but his face, now engrossed by the intricate light fixture, and she opened the door fully, leaning against the threshold, and crossed her arms in response. “While I appreciate your concern, sir—”

Suddenly his thumb and forefinger were gripping her chin and he was gently tilting her face to the light. A jolt ran through Hermione at his touch and for the brief moment of contact she was able to meet his dark, fathomless eyes.

He ripped his hand away like she had burned him.

The man cursed bitterly, under his breath. “Of course they would have sent you,” he muttered.

“I’m not sure what you’re on about,” Hermione said, vaguely. Without the physical contact, he seemed insubstantial and unimportant, a shadow of a man, and she found her gaze drawn to the dated floral wallpaper.

“You cannot go to the Grave,” he said, stressing every syllable.

“Can’t I?” she asked, absently. The flowers on the wallpaper were a faded blue and seemed to regress into each other infinitely, and the man’s presence ebbed like a tide going out. She stepped back into her room and started to close the door, eager to get into bed after her misadventures with Muggle transportation. Besides, she would need all her wits about her if she was walking into what her research had indicated she was.

The man’s foot caught the door as it closed and his hand shot out, grasping Hermione at the wrist that held the doorknob.

The jolt of awareness went through her once again, and she felt a strange squeezing sensation in her chest as she took in the man’s angular, harshly handsome face. Something nagged at the back of the mind, becoming increasingly insistent as the seconds ticked by, at first with mouse feet, then with ragged claws. Finally, she found her voice.

“Who—?”

“There is something that you cannot know about yourself that precludes your safety in the woods.” The man spoke deliberately and carefully, his obsidian eyes boring into hers. “Promise me you will stay away.”

Hermione shivered, the image of the man in front of her lying supine on her childhood bed with a chunk missing from his throat superimposed itself on her vision. Shakily, she lifted the hand not caught in his grip and pulled at the collar of his shirt, revealing a network of thin white scars crisscrossing the left side of his neck. The hallway seemed to shudder, the quaint furnishings and knickknacks lining the walls twisting and undulating.

“But aren’t you—?”

The man hissed and abruptly released her wrist. The corridor settled itself.

“Promise me,” he said.

To Hermione, there was negative space where a man once was.

“Of course,” she said, distractedly, and shut the door.

---

It was a lovely day for a hike. While the ground squelched in places from the downpour the night before, it was mostly solid, and the sun shone down clear and bright but not yet so hot as to be unpleasant. There were other people out on the trail in spite of the early hour, and she met a handful of dog walkers and runners taking advantage of the clear weather on the early part of her walk.

She checked her map against her gyrocompass, selected specifically to rely on the earth’s rotation for direction and not the mess that the abundant iron ore made of the local magnetic fields. When she was nearly at the fork in the trail that would lead her to her destination, she noted that the wood had become eerily quiet. She had not stumbled upon another soul in the past thirty minutes, and the fauna seemed to be running thin. The rustling that usually occurred in the brush as she approached had disappeared half a mile ago and the birdsong had gone silent. A faint, oddly rhythmic thumping slowly grew in volume beneath her feet.

Just at the place where the fork should have been, there was a downed oak tree, its leaves still green and unwrinkled. The oak was large and entirely blocked the northward part of the path to the point of obliteration, and as Hermione tried to make her way around it, she noted that the break in the trunk looked much too straight to have occurred by lightning or wear and tear, but that there were squared-off chips like ax markings. Eventually, Hermione resorted to climbing through the branches, alternatively ducking and climbing as residual water from the still-sodden leaves dampened her clothes.

Once past the obstacle, the trail curved upwards. The trees alongside the park took on a stunted look, though their elevation was nowhere near the tree line, and, in spite of the recent wet, the underlying brush looked desiccated and undernourished. The inexorable thumping underfoot grew louder so that the ground vibrated with each beat.

Hermione marched onward.

About a kilometer and a half past the fork in the trail, the trees to the right opened up to form a vacant circle surrounding a large, hollowed out tree stump. While there were clumps of scrub grass here and there, the ground around the remains of the ancient tree was mostly barren, covered by gray soil and bone-colored rocks. The stump itself seemed to throb to the rhythm of the thumping, and at its base to the left, facing the north, was a large gaping maw in the ground.

Hermione left the path and walked towards the abbreviated trunk until she had a clear view of the hole. She removed her pack and set it on the ground, bending over to rummage through it so she could remove her harness, as well as a couple of sturdy climbing ropes and a carabiner. She was reaching into her bag for a rectangular plastic container about the size of a hardback novel when she felt something encircle her ankle.

Hermione looked down with creeping horror and found a pocked, decaying tree root wrapped around the lower part of her leg. Instinctively, she tugged against it. Almost playfully, it tugged back against her, sweeping her feet out from under her so that she lay prone on the ground, her outstretched arms preventing her head from striking the dirt. At first slowly, and then picking up speed, the root pulled Hermione by her ankle towards the hole. The heartbeat in the ground accelerated in anticipation.

Hermione scrambled at the bleached rocks for purchase, her efforts dislodging some only to discover that the bone-colored rocks were not, in fact, rocks at all, but pieces of skulls and femurs and phalanges. Panicked, Hermione mentally flipped through her list, trying to figure out what magic on her person had attracted the imprisoned Fae king and if she could nullify it or remove it. Had she mended an item of clothing without realizing it? She managed to wriggle out of her light jacket (borrowed from her mother, who had bought at Harrods), which, unsurprisingly, made not a whit of difference other than to expose her now bare arms to scrapes.

Over the rapid rhythmic thumps echoing from beneath the trunk, she suddenly heard rushing footsteps and then there was the man from the pub, ax in hand, gripping the root and chopping at it as it now dragged them both towards the void. The root seemed to reform even as he removed chunks from it and he grunted in defeat, tossing the ax away.

“He doesn’t want you,” Hermione told him somewhat nonsensically in her panic. She was still unable to concentrate on the man’s face and found herself watching her trapped ankle. “You need to let go—you’ll be safe if you let go.”

The man then twisted himself toward her and gripped her bare shoulders, and once again she found herself gazing into his obsidian eyes.

“Memorio restituo,” the man said.

There was a flash of blinding light that seemed to come from inside Hermione’s forehead and she winced, turning her head to the ground and nearly vomiting from the intensity. Gradually, the light faded, and she turned her head back to look at her former Potions professor, who still had her by the shoulders and was looking at her intently. Not trusting herself to speak yet, she offered a half smile as her mind rearranged itself. The root stopped tugging on her ankle then slowly unwound, almost seeming to shrug.

“Are you all right, Miss Granger?” he rumbled, his brows furrowed in concern as his eyes traveled over her, examining her for injury.

And then Snape was on his back, being pulled forward on his bum by that same decaying, cheeky root. He curled forward and pulled at it with his hands, murmuring under his breath, and Hermione kept pace with him, yanking at the slimy, fetid thing ineffectually. The chasm yawned closer, and Snape finally let go of the root and, in an impressive display of wandless magic, let fly bright orange blasts from his right palm.

“Stop!” Hermione said, scrabbling at his hand as she tried to keep up with his movement. “Wait—stop—you can’t use magic. You can’t fight it like that. It’s like a Devil’s Snare.”

Out of breath, she straddled his abdomen and caught his hands, using her knees to trap his arms against his chest.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice cutting, glaring at where she literally sat on his abdomen.

Hermione felt her cheeks redden, but at least she had startled him out of whatever muttered spells he’d been attempting.

“Stop offering the King something to feed on, and the root should lose interest,” she hissed.

“Right,” Snape said, closing his eyes and letting himself relax back against the ground.

Their movement slowed, then stopped. Snape and Hermione watched the root unwrap itself from his leg and withdraw back towards the trunk into the hole. They were now only seven or eight meters from the edge.

Snape sat up and Hermione slid off his torso into the crook of his arm, her right ear pressed against his chest. The man smelled of ivy and knotgrass and Muggle toothpaste, vaguely reminiscent of the scent of Amortentia. For reasons she refused to examine she did not free herself right away. She snuck a look upwards.

Snape was studying her, an inscrutable expression on his face.

“We seemed to have survived, in spite of our best efforts,” Snape rumbled at last, and Hermione could feel the vibration from his speech against her cheek. “I knew better—I lost my nerve. I admit I am out of practice when it comes to mortal peril. I’ve been living a rather quiet life since my death.”

“And I seem to have forgotten about that memory charm.” She mentally congratulated herself on the steadiness of her voice.

Snape snorted. “That was rather its point.” He gently took her shoulders and pulled her away from his chest.

Hermione scooted sideways to allow for a polite distance between them, attributing her strange enjoyment of Snape’s proximity to adrenaline, and took stock of her injuries. Her ankle would no doubt sport a vivid bruise by the evening and she had superficial scrapes and cuts mostly over her elbows and inner forearms, but she otherwise seemed intact.

Snape rose to his feet in a single fluid motion, and offered his hand to Hermione, who used it to pull herself up. She absolutely did not feel anything electrifying when their palms met. She retrieved her jacket in a no-nonsense fashion then pulled it cautiously over her abused flesh. Efficiently, she gathered her harness, rope, and carabiners where she had dropped them. Before setting up the climbing equipment, she made sure to remove the gray plastic box from her pack and ensconced it in a lightweight nylon backpack, which she quickly secured over her shoulders. Though she noted that the thumping from beneath the stump had slowed to a steady throb, she did not wish to be unprepared if the vine succeeded in pulling her underground.

Snape joined her by her pack and was looking at her askance. “You mean to go down there?”

“It’s why I’m here,” Hermione told him flatly, old inadequacies slithering back to life at Snape’s incredulity. She kept her focus on tying knots, refusing to give him the satisfaction of her discomfort. “The Department of Magical Creatures sent me to make sure that the undead Fae king doesn’t escape tomorrow at the Solstice. He’s drained multitudes even while trapped in his underground prison, so they’re understandably concerned about what he’ll do if he gets out.”

“Shouldn’t isolating the Grave to prevent the king from draining more creatures’ magical power prove sufficient?” Snape seemed legitimately curious, now, instead of challenging.

“Unlikely,” she answered, gesturing with the rope to the bone shards dotting the blighted clearing. “He’s been eating well…” She paused in her work, another piece of the puzzle clicking into place, and met Snape’s eyes. “Is that what you’ve been doing here for the past week?” she asked, disbelievingly, “Concealing paths? Was that your downed tree at the fork?”

Snape frowned down at her. “Legend has it that it took one hundred twenty Fae generals to bind the king the first time around—using Fae magic no less—and we’ve now proven definitively that Wizarding magic will only make you his next meal.” Snape crossed his arms and shot her a withering look that had caused many an errant first year to burst into tears. “How, precisely, do you plan to stop him from escaping his coffin?”

“With this,” Hermione said, shortly, refusing to be cowed by Snape’s glower. She shrugged the nylon backpack off her shoulders and pulled out the gray box, opening it so that Snape could see the contents.

Snape looked inside the box and arched a dark eyebrow. “A nail gun?” he said, slowly. “You do realize that the sarcophagus is made of stone?”

His tone was straight out of the Potions classroom. He was testing her.

“It’s for the Fae, not for the box,” Hermione huffed, indignant. She carefully replaced the gray box into her bag, which she drew back over her shoulders, and crossed her arms. “A slug through the heart is a sight more definitive than obscuring hiking trails with dead foliage.”

She had not missed the feeling of both wanting to impress this man and strangle him–which had at some point evolved to wanting to snog the superiority right off his face. It had been half a decade since she had been in his classroom and he still managed to slide right under her skin.

Snape sighed, some of the steel ebbing from his posture. “These nails—you have confidence in them?”

“They’re made of pure iron, which the Fae can’t tolerate,” Hermione answered, slowly. “It’s how they were run out of the British Isles by Muggles… There’s no coincidence he was buried in hills full of iron ore.” She picked up a rope and started to thread it through the carabiner at the front of the harness, refusing to give him her full attention.

“You’ve done your research.” Snape’s tone was flat, but the corner of his mouth twitched upwards.

“I’ve been known to read a book or two,” she answered, nonchalantly, looking up at him from under her lashes. She began tying the short end of the rope in an anchor hitch with steady hands, feeling a mite victorious.

Snape tilted his head to the side, unabashedly studying her. Hermione, self-conscious, let the knot drop and busied herself securing the rope using a hammer drill and concrete bit so she would not have to meet his eyes. His steady perusal flustered her but she forced her hands to slow down and be thorough in her preparations.

After weighing the Piton hammer in her hands, she slid it into its place at the back of her harness, and then secured the helmet with its headlamp on her head. She bent and lifted the rope, pulling it taut, and walked to the edge of the hole. The bones here were more densely packed and less fragmented, and Hermione, recognizing a mostly intact unicorn skull, suppressed a shiver. With a murmured prayer to whatever goddess might be listening, Hermione slid into the chasm and started to let out rope to lower herself down.

Snape had approached the edge and now loomed over her, his shadow blocking the sun that now had a decidedly westward cant. Abruptly, he kneeled and caught her wrist just before she lowered herself out of reach. An electric current seemed to flow from his fingers into her arm, and she was not sure which was more dangerous to her–if the charged sensation was due to magic or if it was not.

“Arborists,” Snape murmured, clenching her wrist firmly but not painfully, “have a much lower mortality rate than spelunkers.”

“An unfettered Fae king would slaughter both,” Hermione reminded him, annoyingly breathless. Too gently, she pulled against his grip.

Snape sighed. “I have no interest in attending your funeral, Miss Granger,” Snape said, in a softer tone than she could recall having heard him use before. He reached out his other hand, as if to help her out of the hole. “As little as I wish to descend, could this not be delayed while you teach me how to use a harness?”

“I only have a single harness, and we are down to six hours before the solstice starts.” Hermione looked up, meeting his gaze evenly, abruptly angry at this dark, brilliant, suddenly tender man, with his incessant superciliousness and endless self-sacrifice. She was no longer his charge and neither needed him to test her mettle nor to protect her, and Merlin help her if she was made to watch him die again. She studied his inscrutable face against the setting sun for a moment and let fly what she knew would be a rude blow. “Besides, Professor, I’ve already attended two of your funerals, even if the second was only imaginary.”

The dark man seemed to startle and his grip on her wrist loosened. Hermione slid her hand from his grasp, briefly caressing his slackened fingers as she brought her hands down to the carabiner. Briskly, she let out rope, and lowered herself down into the rapidly cooling chamber, only twice glancing up to see Snape getting smaller and smaller. Then the passageway started to flatten, bending northward, and both Snape and the sunlight disappeared from view.

---

The cavern had dropped straight down for six or seven meters before curving into a gentle slope by the time it reached ten meters below ground. The roughly-hewn limestone of the cave mouth gave way to even bricks that seemed to luminesce under the harsh glow of Hermione’s headlamp. When she reached the end of the descending rope, she unscrewed the carabiner to remove the rope from her harness, knot intact in case of the need for a rapid exit.

While her practiced fingers made quick work of her task, she examined the hollow chamber with growing disquiet. Heaped against both walls were piles of bones, invariably cleaned of all soft tissue, mostly broken in half down their middle and hollowed out as if even the marrow had been consumed. The clear path down the center of the cavern, Hermione imagined, was due to the bodies of new victims clearing the way as they were dragged to their doom. Worst yet, the entire passageway seemed to pulse with the beat of an unseen heart, the walls undulating in rhythm, becoming louder and more imperious the further she advanced.

After fifty meters or so, the passageway opened up into a large round chamber with a high, domed ceiling. It was lined with the same luminescent bricks as the rest of the lower cavern. In its center was an immense stone sarcophagus that beat like a heart, flooding the room with a sickly, pallid light with each pulse. Other than a direct path leading from the entrance to the coffin, the floor was liberally littered with desiccated remains—here and there the skin or hide of the creature was still visible, though the bones were invariably cracked open and hollowed. On top of a haphazard pile at the left were swaths of shredded fabric, presumably the remains of Wollacks’s, Herkenbrue’s, Sumpter’s, and Jones’s robes.

Hermione stepped into the chamber and the sarcophagus beat faster. She was now so close that even the tiny spark of her magical essence was enough to whet the appetite of the undead king. Already, the gray box was in her hand, though she did not recall removing it from her nylon backpack. She opened it and removed a nail gun, top of the line, with a spring-loaded trigger and fully automatic action. While a pistol that shot pure iron bullets might have been better suited to the task, given the average age of said pistols, none of them would have been as reliable as the exceedingly prosaic nail gun. It would hopefully be a rather unromantic end for the Fae king.

Her nail gun and her sights fixed on the sarcophagus, Hermione made her way forward with sliding steps, gently nudging skeletal remains out of her path with the balls of her feet. When she was roughly two meters from the coffin, she stopped and took a deep breath, aiming the nail gun straight ahead.

“Wingardium Leviosa!” Hermione focused her attention on the lid of the sarcophagus, which obligingly hurtled upwards towards the ceiling. Nearly simultaneously, the undead king popped up from his sometimes resting place like a dark mockery of a jack-in-the-box. His skin was a putrid greenish gray and his red eyes blazed with unholy phosphorescence. A throbbing black hole could be seen through his chest wall, and it, along with the chamber walls, was now beating wildly. The king reached his clawed hands towards her, and she felt a strange plucking sensation underneath her skin, weakening her hold on the heavy stone lid, so that it dropped half a meter. Unfazed, she took aim at the center of his chest and pulled the trigger on the nail gun, letting fly a barrage of iron spikes.

In a rather shocking display of ineptitude that Hermione could only attribute to the fact that she was currently playing tug-of-war with her magic, she hit the Fae king in the stomach, in the forehead, in his grotesquely glowing left eye. At that last insult, much to her relief, the undead tyrant stumbled back a step before going to his knees.

Her consolation was short-lived: She felt a sudden tightness around her left ankle this time, followed by a swift tug. She had taken too long to make the kill, and now the impertinent root had time to travel into the chamber. It pulled her up, up, up until she was hanging upside down by her left foot several meters above the ground.

The king put his right foot out, and using the side of the sarcophagus, pulled himself back into a standing position. His arms reached towards Hermione and she once again felt the awful plucking under her skin. With a muffled curse, she let the lid of the sarcophagus fall with a reverberating clang, catching the king on his right shoulder. He swayed into the blow and the plucking sensation released for half a second before beginning again.

Luckily, Hermione thought with a tinge of hysteria, nail guns worked just as well upside-down as right-side up. She pulled the trigger once again, in rapid succession taking out the king’s left ear, followed by a nail in the hollow of his throat, and then finally, finally, in the beating black hole where his heart should have been.

There was a moment of complete silence, the rhythmic throbbing snuffed out, and for a moment nothing else happened. Gradually, though, the Fae king began to disintegrate. Starting from his clawed fingertips and working inward towards his empty chest cavity, the undead figure shed chunks black ash that drifted slowly outward from the sarcophagus and settled, like a corrupted snowfall, over the mounds of dry bones.

Suddenly, the root holding Hermione’s ankle went slack and she plummeted head-first towards the ground. Her magic was not yet entirely back in her control and her wandless cushioning charm fizzled as she cast it. She tried to rotate herself in the air, unclear how much protection her Muggle helmet would offer, and calculated how best to impact the uneven limestone floors even as she anticipated a grisly end.

To her shock, she collided with something much softer than limestone, something that smelled of knotgrass and ivy and spearmint. It let out a harsh whoosh of air at the sudden contact, but helped her to rotate the rest of the way right-side up and set her gently on her feet. The arms around her shoulders did not let go immediately, and she found herself settling into him once again, her headlamp resting awkwardly against his collarbone.

“Thank you,” Hermione whispered into his chest, her heart beating in her ears more loudly than the Fae king’s had ever done.

“Of course,” Snape said. His arms seemed to tighten around her for a moment before abruptly releasing her.

She took an unsteady step back and he winced as the glare from her headlamp hit his face. He reached out and unbuckled her helmet, his fingers softly brushing her chin, and set the hard hat askew so that the light was focused on the luminescent wall.

Hermione huffed out an awkward laugh, trying to slow the rapid beating of her heart. “I couldn’t have succeeded more clumsily,” she lamented, too breathily.

“It was rather reminiscent of the bumbling victories of your school days,” Snape readily agreed, scrutinizing her face. “The Golden Trio triumphed through tenacity, sheer dumb luck, and Dumbledore’s thumb on the scales.”

Hermione looked up at him, impishly. “You thought we had tenacity?”

Snape gave a long-suffering sigh, but the corner of his mouth slid upwards and he reached out, tucking a wayward curl behind her ear. “Obstinance would have been a better description.” Abruptly he jerked his hand back and crossed his arms, glowering down his nose at her like she had just exploded a cauldron. “Speaking of obstinance, were you trying to get yourself killed? You nearly had your head cracked open like an overripe melon.”

Hermione had no intention of allowing herself to be lectured like a schoolgirl, especially when the exasperating man was worse than she was. She crossed her arms and met his glare with one of her own. “What about you trying to fling yourself on the proverbial grenade? I mean, shooting fireballs? Really? It was kind of you to distract the root, but you were practically feeding yourself to the king. ‘Out of practice when it comes to mortal peril,’ my ass. Would you have let the root drag you down here if I hadn’t insisted on going along for the ride?” She reached out and knocked his shoulder in frustration, once again feeling the strange spark that seemed to emanate from their points of contact. “Are you truly surprised that I tried to leave you behind? I couldn’t trust you not to throw yourself into the bloody sarcophagus.”

Snape froze for a moment before his impassive mask cracked and he huffed out a laugh. He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes before reaching over his shoulder and removing a pointed metal rod, presumably made of iron, from where it had been tucked into a holster inside the back of his summer jacket.

“I am not nearly as suicidal as you seem to think,” he said, one side of his mouth quirked upwards, balancing the sharpened stick across his palms. “Much as I had no desire to enter the Grave, I did come prepared.”

Hermione rolled her eyes, refusing to be mollified. “‘My nail gun seems like the better choice.”

“Which is why I let you go first,” he murmured, smoothly replacing the makeshift spear into its hidden holster. He might have been smirking.

Hermione resisted the urge to stick out her tongue, instead straightening her helmet so that the light was back in Snape’s eyes.

“Shall we ascend?” she asked, achingly polite, clicking the fastener into place under her chin.

Snape, squinting, gestured in the direction of the exit. “Once again, after you.”

---

They trekked back up the gently and then more steeply sloping passageway until they reached the vertical mouth of the cavern, their focus on footing and not tripping over bones, which seemed to have become infinitely more disorganized after the second and final death of the Fae king. With the remnants of the sunlight steeply angled, direct light did not reach the bottom of the pit, but it was still bright enough that Hermione could turn off the headlamp.

She glanced at Snape and in the dusk and noted deep, angry welts across his hands from where he had slid down the ropes without gear.

“Episkey,” she murmured, watched with satisfaction as the welts faded back into his palm. She then turned her gaze up to the steep dirt and rock walls, punctuated only by the occasional rotting root. “I don’t suppose you wandlessly apparate?” she asked.

“Only if I don’t mind leaving behind something important,” was Snape’s sardonic reply.

She glanced over at him only to find him watching her again, his face unreadable. She loosened the waist and leg straps of the harness and slid it off before laying it carefully at his feet.

“Step in,” she told him. “One last thing we’ll do the Muggle way.”

She helped by guiding his holds as he climbed up the mouth of the cave, with clumsy cushioning charms on her hands and using her foot as a pulley in a disconcertingly makeshift belay. However, Snape made her task easy by never losing his footing, ascending inexpertly but gracefully.

When he reached the top, he tossed the harness back down to her, and she made her painstaking way up. When she reached the top, he grasped her wrist again, and this time she allowed him to pull her out of the hole. She stumbled forward but made sure not to collide with his chest again.

“Thank you,” he said, after a long moment.

“What on earth for?” Hermione laughed, self-deprecatingly, unclipping and tossing her helmet on the ground before working to loosen the waist strap of the harness. “Making you rescue me yet again?”

“Thank you for healing my hands,” he said, slowly, briefly brushing her shoulder with his fingers, stilling her movements.

Her eyes flew to his face and she found a curious warmth in his gaze. “I was just testing to make sure my magic was still intact,” she mumbled, feeling her cheeks start to burn.

“And for not allowing me to be dragged down to the king,” he continued, a smile playing around his lips.

“But you were protected by your pointy stick,” Hermione pointed out, unhelpfully.

His face broke into a full grin this time and Hermione had to look back to her harness for fear of what he might see on her face.

But he bent at the waist and tilted her chin up so that their eyes were level and she could not hide.

“Thank you for caring about me beyond my usefulness to you,” he told her, his eyes searching hers.

There was a look on Snape’s face that Hermione could almost describe as longing, but before her muddled brain could catch up, he had stepped away and was working to unknot her rope from the concrete bit she had drilled into the rock.

“Of course,” Hermione said to his back, feeling tears sting behind her eyes. She quickly busied herself removing her gear and packing it into her larger pack.

After Snape had untied and coiled the rope, he handed it to her and cleared his throat. “I need to move on to my next destination. However, if you’ll be staying at the pub tonight, I can retrieve my wand and stop by in the morning to replace the memory charm. It is too delicate to do wandlessly.”

“No, thank you,” Hermione said, her heart beating in her throat, bravely met his impassive gaze. “I’d rather remember you.”

Snape, moving with preternatural quickness, snaked an arm behind her back, pulling her against him, while his other hand smoothed an unruly curl behind her ear before tracing down the side of her neck and ghosting over her collar bone. Hermione, trembling very slightly, reached up and touched his cheek, gliding her fingers over the planes of his face, grazing his bottom lip.

Snape hissed and closed his eyes.

“I should let you get back to your life,” he said into her hair, through a clenched jaw. He took a deep breath. “Did you know you smell of honeysuckle and parchment and oak leaves?” His tone fell somewhere between consternation and wonderment.

“That last is your fault,” she murmured into his chest. “I had to climb through your bloody downed oak to get here… Why? Is that important?”

“Ask anything else, you nosy chit,” Snape said mildly. He bent his head and brushed his lips over hers, and Hermione felt the earth shift.

And then he had loosened her from his embrace, and she felt the chill of the falling night as he swiftly disappeared into the woods at the opposite side of the clearing.

---

Not finished. But it may take another decade to write chapter 3 so no one get their hopes up.