The Department of Magical Law Enforcement (DMLE) offices were in chaos, a high-octane frenzy that defied the usual stately silence of the Ministry. Wards were screaming, communications were overloaded, and a frantic stream of reports regarding the Azkaban breach piled onto every desk. Yet, at the epicenter of the storm sat Head Auror Hermione Granger, radiating a focused calm that was more intimidating than any shout.
She stood before a massive, magically projected map of the Scottish coastline, her hands clasped behind her back. The map was overlaid with a constellation of shimmering, red runes, marking every activated Ministry ward, every patrol route, and every area of detected magical fluctuation. The frantic, blinking lights across the digital parchment felt like a mocking echo of the frantic thoughts battling within her own mind.
Hermione was formidable. Her trademark bushy hair was tamed into a sleek, efficient braid wound tightly at the nape of her neck. Her Auror robes were immaculate, and her posture was rigidly controlled, betraying none of the internal turmoil that was currently tearing through her carefully constructed composure. Since the end of the war, she had dedicated herself to systematizing justice, driven by a deep, logical need to prevent the chaos she had fought through. But this… this felt different. This felt like the world unraveling at the seams, a return to the very instability she had sworn to prevent.
"Report on the breach point," Hermione commanded, her voice cutting through the clamor like a razor. She addressed Auror Dawlish, a wizard who still relied more on brute force than strategy, his usually ruddy face now pale with exhaustion and fear.
"Head Auror, the team found the cell empty, obviously. The exterior wall suffered a total collapse—looks like a high-yield Blasting Charm, but with no identifiable signature. More alarmingly," Dawlish reported, his voice tight, his eyes darting to the glowing red spot on the map, "the deep coastal security ward—Level Seven, specifically designed to counter high-level interferences—collapsed barely ten minutes after the escape. It vanished. No trace of feedback, no counter-spell residue. It just… fractured."
Hermione turned, her eyes narrowed in fierce concentration, tracing the map. The spot where the Level Seven ward had died glowed ominously red, a pulsing wound on the magical landscape.
"Impossible," she murmured, more to herself than to Dawlish, a cold, analytical dread beginning to weave through her mind. "A Level Seven ward requires sustained, controlled power, or a highly specialized ancient counter-charm. Riddle is non-magical. The collapse cannot be directly attributed to her. This was no brute force attack. This was… a subtle, yet overwhelming, internal failure of the ward itself, as if its very magical fabric was unraveled from within."
A cold, unwelcome thread of dread began to weave through her mind. This was not a random escape; it was orchestrated. Someone of immense power and strategic depth had gotten involved. And whoever it was, they were playing a different game entirely.
"Pull all Ministry records on that ward's collapse signature," she ordered, her voice sharper now. "Cross-reference with known Grindelwald-era tactics and any pre-Statute elemental magic. I want every possible signature—even those discarded as mythical—on my desk by the hour." She felt a growing unease; the pattern of destruction was too elegant for a simple criminal.
She then turned to the main objective. "The escapee. Ira Riddle. What do we know?"
Auror Shacklebolt's son, a quick-witted young man named Kingsley Jr., stepped forward with a detailed, magically produced profile. "Profile suggests zero magical aptitude. She has spent her entire life in isolation—no social contacts, no training, only the minimal interaction required for basic sustenance. She is a blank slate, Head Auror. Her only value is symbolic."
"And symbolic value is precisely what sparks civil unrest," Hermione countered, her jaw tightening. "Riddle's escape is not about her power. It's about the power she represents. The pro-pureblood zealots, the anti-Ministry fringe—they will view her as a messianic figure. We must find her before she becomes a political rallying point, before another generation falls into conflict." The specter of Voldemort, and the horrors of the war, still haunted her waking thoughts.
She took the magical profile, dismissing the Aurors with a curt nod. She walked to her private office, a high-ceilinged room lined floor-to-ceiling with books and arcane scrolls. The air here, usually thick with the comforting scent of old parchment, now felt charged with a chilling premonition. She cast complex anti-eavesdropping and secrecy charms behind her, the wards settling like an invisible shroud.
She sat at her desk, staring at the small, grainy photo of the fugitive: a stark, unreadable face with large, dark, haunting eyes. Ira Riddle. Daughter of the man who killed Harry's parents, Voldemort. The very image was a scar on the world.
But Hermione's thoughts were not entirely on the criminal. They were on her friend, Harry.
Harry, the Head of the Department, was currently overseeing a classified operation in the Balkans, unaware of the crisis unfolding in Scotland. Hermione knew, however, that her failure here would expose him to unforgivable danger. Harry, in his post-war years, had become hyper-vigilant about the rise of any new "Dark Lord," haunted by the specter of his past. He would view the return of the Riddle name to the public eye as a catastrophic failure of their generation, a personal stain on the peace he had fought so hard to secure.
More pressingly, Hermione's gaze drifted to a small, framed photo on her desk: Harry, Cho, and herself, laughing in a sun-dappled garden many years ago. It was a memory she cherished, a rare moment of lightness that now felt tainted by the quiet suspicion she had harbored about Cho. Cho had withdrawn in recent years, her communication sporadic, her life shrouded in a quiet secrecy that Hermione, the logical one, couldn't reconcile with the simple explanation of "wanting a quiet life."
Hermione pulled a large map of Scotland onto her desk, pinpointing the shattered ward location. She then manually plotted a complex series of retreat vectors, calculating the non-magical and non-Apparition routes a fugitive, especially a non-magical one, would most logically take.
She drew a circle around the coastal woods, her hand pausing. The woods near where Cho lives.
A sickening lurch hit her stomach. It was an irrational leap, a desperate connection of unrelated dots. Yet, the intuition, honed by years of surviving the impossible, screamed at her. She immediately pulled up the Ministry's Muggle records associated with the area, cross-referencing all names, all properties, all recent movements. She typed in the name Claire Wong and the corresponding Muggle address. The file pulled up a quiet academic, an artist. A perfect camouflage. A too perfect camouflage.
Hermione ran a trembling hand through her neatly braided hair. This was a long shot. Deeply unprofessional. But the sheer silence from Cho, the unusual location of the breach, the unprecedented nature of the ward's collapse—it all screamed of an intervention that defied logic, an intervention that somehow led back to her friend.
If someone powerful enough to shatter a Level Seven ward helped Riddle, they would be someone Dumbledore himself would have anticipated, someone whose power transcended conventional magic. Hermione thought of the old prophecies, of the suppressed truth Dumbledore hinted at in his cryptic will, and of the things he had kept secret for the "Greater Good."
She looked at the profile of Ira Riddle, then at the Muggle address for Claire Wong. She pulled out a small, leather-bound notebook that contained her most private, deeply guarded investigative notes, including her own half-formed theory on the potential existence of the Third Prophecy and its possible targets.
Her hand hovering over a page, Hermione knew what she had to do. She couldn't alert the Ministry yet; the risk of political panic or the spread of the prophecy rumor was too high. She had to confirm her terrible suspicion alone.
Hermione put down her quill, retrieved her personal wand, and with a heavy heart, whispered the name of the place she was going to check first: "The Granger cottage... the woods near the cottage." A grim determination settled over her face.
She was going to find out what her friend, Cho, was truly hiding. And she was going to find out who was powerful enough to shatter magic. And who, to her current belief, was Harry's son.