Author Note: Inspired by "Steady is the Hand" by rhosinthorn.

The Shards of Sorrow

Summary: The Deathly Hallows had cursed Heather Potter and sundered her from the Gift of Men. To call her the Master of Death was too kind and too cruel for a creature as pitiful as she had become. In pursuit of breaking this curse and finding Death, instead, she finds Life.

Prologue – Dreams of the Past

A woman slept with a stillness that betrayed the agitation that had invaded her dreams as she laid on the straw mattress within her small home in the village that she lived. She dreamt of memories of a lifetime ago, when she wore a different face under a different name that she had discarded. And yet, despite this rejection of who and what she had been, the memories remained and continued to haunt her though it had been decades since they had been created.

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She had been born Heather Lily Potter—a beautiful blend of her parents, James Potter and Lily Evans. Unfortunately, even as loved and cherished as her parents had been by those around them, they had died before their time due to betrayal and the twisted ambition of a Dark Lord too far gone into madness. Heather Potter survived what should have killed her due to the sacrifice of her mother and went from a home of love and care into a house of cruel words and loathing.

Even as a child, she had possessed long black hair as dark as pitch in wild windblown tresses. It had driven her Aunt Petunia, her mother's sister, to near lunacy as it refused taming of any kind. At one time, Petunia had chopped it all off with dull kitchen sheers, except for a longer fringe in the front to cover the red lightning bolt shaped scar on Heather's forehead and reducing Heather to tears in the process. It proved fruitless as her hair simply grew back in the span of a night to her aunt's frustration and uncle's horror.

Her Uncle Vernon, on the other hand, had seemed to take exception to her eyes. A shade of vivid green that he deemed freakish and unnatural. When she got older, Heather was certain the only reason that he had agreed to even allow Aunt Petunia to purchase second-hand glasses for Heather was to try and hide them somewhat. After she had grown older, Heather had wondered if the reason her uncle had been made so deeply uncomfortable by her eyes was if her liquid gaze full of tears had made him wonder if it was, in fact, he that was the monster and freak. How did one justify screaming at and lashing a little girl with a belt that barely came up to your waist so often and so viciously?

Her time living in the cupboard under the stairs as a child had rendered her pale beyond what might be considered healthy. Even after she finally became used to regular sunlight, she never developed much in color. Rather, she went from a shade just a little pinker than paper to a paleness just a shade whiter than cream. No longer unhealthy but fairer than seemed normal to people like the Dursleys.

Heather Potter had always been small as a child, something her cousin, Dudley, had taken advantage of along with her lengthy hair. She had lost count of times she ran from her cousin and his gang of hoodlums only to be caught by her hair and dragged to the ground. Those vile children became more cunning with their tender care after being caught a few times by teachers that did not tolerate them beating a girl, even if she was that "Potter girl," but they did not stop entirely until she had finally been taken away to the only true home that she had known.

Even then, she became more vigilant of them as their sneers had become leers as she had grown into womanhood. Despite those small-minded people who lapped up the lies of her aunt and uncle, Heather Potter was not a cheap harlot that spread her legs for anyone that wagged their tongue at her; no matter how much those boys wished it as she had began to grow into the beauty that her mother had blessed her with. Heather could not lie and say she did not enjoy the sour envy that grew more and more common on her Aunt Petunia's face as she grew into her looks. The daughter of Lily was just as beautiful and magically gifted as her mother.

Finding out that she was a witch had been likely the happiest day of her life. Before the rot and darkness of the Wizarding World had been revealed to her, Magical Britain had felt like a fairytale escape from the cruelty of the Muggles, as the Wizards called them. Even that first year in the halls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft Wizardry had been almost as a dream, until the very end when it all came crashing down. Though Hogwarts had been the only home that she knew, it had also been the site of heartache and heartbreak such that she could never look upon it the same after the conclusion of her education there.

Ronald Weasley had been her first friend followed by Hermione Granger. As they grew, Ron remained her first friend, but Hermione became her best friend and the adventures the three had faced together were carved upon her heart as surely as the Sun rose in the East. Unfortunately, age and the transition into adulthood had marred them far deeper than anything that the Dark Lord Voldemort had ever done to them.

Her first year at Hogwarts had been a blur of magic, new faces, and a dizzying amount of information of her new world and the truth of her parents' demise that had created her resulting fame. Even now, decades later, she despised unearned attention and found anonymity to be a more comfortable fit. This had only been reinforced by back-and-forth of the fickle masses and then the tragedy that would follow her eventually.

Heather Potter had been responsible for the death of a man at the age of eleven. She had been reassured by the wizened Headmaster that it was not her fault; that the man was doomed to die anyway as he had given his body over the spirit of Lord Voldemort—who was not nearly as dead as she had been led to believe. That did not change the fact that she had furiously wrapped her delicate hands around his neck as he screamed in pain; the protection her mother left in her blood burning him from the inside out. Albus Dumbledore was not the one who felt the cold relief as a living breathing human fell to ashes at her feet and so Albus Dumbledore could not take away her self-assigned responsibility either.

Her experience in her first year at Hogwarts and in the Wizarding World had opened her eyes just a little to the coming darkness. That darkness only became more violent and insidious with her second year as a soul fragment of the Dark Lord possessed a girl even younger than her and drove that child almost to murder and madness before it nearly devoured her life. All the while Heather was persecuted for an ability she had never asked for.

When Heather Potter drove the blade of a sword up and into the maw of a great serpent to slay it, that was the first time she felt truly heroic and deserving of praise. It would have also been her last act, if not for the intervention of a phoenix, as she laid dying on the floor of a cavern miles below the surface with liquid fire in her veins. She had taken savage pleasure in driving the fang that nearly stole her life into the diary that stored the soul fragment of Tom Riddle's shade.

On and on it went, like Alice down the rabbit hole. It seemed the Wizarding World wanted to see how vile it could become before she stopped swallowing what it fed her—demons of fear preying on souls of the innocent and guilty alike without remorse, the truth of her parent's betrayal and the suffering of an innocent man that should have been her godfather, the knowledge that the true traitor had been sleeping just across the same tower that she had lived in, and that was only one year.

The following year, she was entered into a dangerous tournament against her will and, once more, was reviled by her classmates as she had stolen the rightful glory of others. As if she had wanted or needed anymore glory than the name Heather Potter and the fucking scar on her forehead gave her. Even her first friend had abandoned her, his thin skin too delicate for his own prickly pride. But she showed them all exactly what she was made of in that First Task where she showed up a dragon. Little did she know, that would not be her last encounter of the draconian kind.

Suddenly, Heather Potter was beloved and praised again by the two-faced bastards that had had the audacity to cast her away in the first place. In all honestly, it turned her stomach. Only Hermione stayed loyal and, more importantly, visibly so. Some had given her quiet words of encouragement but those had meant nothing to her if they simply stood by and watched. She supposed that was why she had developed a crush on Cedric Diggory. Despite being the "wronged party" in the controversy of stolen glory, he had spoken out to scold those being so vile to her. She had only been a little devastated when he turned her down despite her working up the courage to ask him to that moronic Yule Ball. The same Yule Ball she had attended with some Beauxbâtons boy she could hardly remember while Ron simmered away in jealousy in a dark corner feeling wronged as if she owed him her affections because he had been her first friend. That stupidity would haunt her in the coming years and ultimately drove their trio apart.

As the coup de grace of that awful year, she witnessed the murder of the boy she had feelings for and played the part of unwilling reagent in a ritual that brought the Dark Lord Voldemort back to life—him revealing that all the suffering of that year had been a result of his plot to spirit her away from the safety of Hogwarts. That was when she realized how insane he actually was as it would have been much simpler for Peter Pettigrew to kidnap her unnoticed on a weekend trip to Hogsmeade. She learned that the Dark Lord Voldemort had a flare of the dramatic and that would become his downfall eventually.

After escaping with only her life and the body of the murdered Cedric, she sounded the alarm of Voldemort's return with the vocal support of Albus Dumbledore only to be met with derision and ridicule from the public at large. What kind of society thought it decent to scorn a fifteen-year-old girl, barely on the cusp of adulthood, as if she were some menace? The answer—an indecent society.

Heather Potter spent that fifth year at Hogwarts in fury, back and forth between icy and fiery, as she locked horns with a malicious and cruel woman that seemed to have taken Heather's claim of the return of the Dark Lord as a personal insult. Heather was certain that there was more to it as well. By that age, Heather had begun to blossom. Though she remained petite and small, her figure seemed to finally be developing and, to a fat, short, and ugly toad like Dolores Umbridge, that had likely been an even graver insult.

In addition to Umbridge, Heather felt like she had been left hung out to dry by Albus Dumbledore that year as he refused to even look her in the eyes and appeared, for all intents and purposes, to have simply accepted the horrible regime that was invading his school. Adding in awful private sessions of Occlumency "training" that felt more akin to mental torture with Severus Snape—a man that she despised and whose gaze upon her had evolved from loathing to something lustful as she had grown—and it was hardly a wonder that she had a hair-trigger temper that year.

So, in her frustration as Dumbledore removed himself entirely while she was lectured repeatedly to show respect to a man that appeared to harbor dark desires for her, Heather lashed out the only way she could. She led a group of students in direct opposition to everything that Madame Umbridge stood for while thumbing her nose at the Ministry with the christening of Dumbledore's Army. Even as abandoned as she felt by Dumbledore, she had still be loyal to him.

It was all the ammunition that Madame Umbridge and the selfish fool, Minister Cornelius Fudge, needed to drive the Headmaster from Hogwarts and tighten the Ministry's grip on Hogwarts. Life became more miserable as Umbridge took glee in making sure her message to Heather had sunken in as the hag made Heather carve 'I must not tell lies' again deeper and deeper into her hand. Oh, yes, Madame Umbridge took exception to the beauty of Lily's daughter and sought to mar it how she could.

Then, Heather Potter in her stupidity, had cost herself her godfather as he fell through the Veil of Death all because she was too prideful. While she despised Snape and his glares as they ran the spectrum from hatred to making her skin crawl, if she had listened and buckled down with the art of Occlumency, Sirius Black might have lived. The only very, very thin silver lining was that the Dark Lord was revealed at large, and she stood in vindication. But even that was ruined by the prophecy revealed to her that hung over her head like an executioner's axe. At last, the true reason of why the lunatic Tom Riddle had murdered her parents and hunted her on-and-off for almost sixteen years.

In her sixth year, Heather Potter finally saw behind the curtain to the machinations of Albus too-many-names Dumbledore; though she did not recognize them for the sinister thing that they were at the time. While she was concerned with prophecies, memories of soul fragments, and the plotting of schoolyard rivals turned terrorists, Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger were more concerned with matters of the heart. In his dissatisfaction with Heather's lack of interest, Ron began slobbering and being slobbered upon with the slag of Gryffindor Tower. And for reasons Heather had not, and still did not understand, Hermione pined for Ron and was hurt deeply.

It did not seem that their stupidity was resolved until the end of that year when followers of the Dark Lord, having successfully invaded the halls of Hogwarts through the efforts of Draco Malfoy, were able to strike a mortal blow against their moralistic opposition—the corpse of Albus Dumbledore was flung from the highest tower by his pet Death Eater while Heather Potter watched in horrified silence beneath her Cloak of Invisibility.

School was out forever and Heather Potter did not return to Hogwarts that next and final year. Instead, she took up the mission left to her by Albus Dumbledore and began to hunt the soul fragments that the Dark Lord had created and hidden across Britain with Ron and Hermione in tow. Secrecy was their only ally as they trekked about the countryside, joined by a malicious locket containing a soul fragment that they had no way of destroying; stolen from the very same Madame Umbridge that had tormented them in the year before last.

It had been that locket that Heather believed had destroyed any chance of her, Ron, and Hermione going back to the way things were. It whispered horrible black things into their minds and hearts. The most difficult part of it was that it was not all untrue. Hermione, still loyal but being worn down, was driven into dark jealousy as the locket hissed that Heather meant to steal Ron from her. The locket crooned into Ron's heart that Heather was his and his alone and she owed herself to him for his continued loyalty and that if she would not give herself than he should take it. For Heather, the locket sent her into deep paranoia that her best friends were nothing more than eventual enemies and would turn their backs on her, or worse, put a knife in her back.

If not for Ron's injury and Hermione's quick action, Heather was still not sure what would have happened the night he left them alone in the wilderness. It had only been a moment, he had tried to force her into a kiss but Heather saw something far more vile under the surface that reminded her of the leers of Dudley's hoodlum friends and the dark gaze of Severus Snape. She had struck Ron away from her in that moment. Furious and humiliated, he attempted again only for Hermione to drive them apart. Whether that was because Hermione was defending Heather or fueled by her own jealousy, Heather never knew but never tried to find out either.

Then it as just her and Hermione as Ron stormed away. In truth, their journey became easier after. Hermione was distraught with Ron's departure but, without his presence there, the locket seemed to have a much more difficult time latching onto her. Heather, having watched Hermione stop Ron from attempting to do Merlin knew what to her, found her faith in her friend restored.

It all seemed so petty and unimportant decades later. If only she had known what her obsession with the Deathly Hallows and the machinations of Albus Dumbledore would lead her to, she might have killed herself then and there.

Eventually, they reunited with Ron in their pursuit of the soul fragments, after Heather and Hermione had been reduced to near skin and bones from starving in the wilderness through the winter, and Ron and Heather destroyed the locket that had been haunting them. Within the images that the locket produced, Heather saw the depths of depravity that the soul fragment had pushed Ron towards. She never felt at ease with him touching her again and their friendship was too scarred to survive, despite Ron's efforts. She could never feel comfortable around someone who had been tempted to debase and violate her like that. She had always been wary of men in general due to her experience in childhood and how but this...her best male friend? The experience left her distrustful of men entirely. If someone she had trusted could wish to do that to her...and may have even tried, if not for intervention...that meant anyone could.

Before she even had time to process this experience, the three of them were captured by the enemy. After their capture, only Hermione's quick thinking had left Heather unrecognizable to their assailants, but Hermione's reward was to be tortured at the hands of Bellatrix Lestrange. Only the intervention of Dobby the House-Elf had saved them. Heather grieved many things as she and Hermione recovered in the home of Bill and Fleur Weasley—the death of Dobby, of her first friendship, of her will to live, and the dark despair of their situation.

The deathbed confessional of Severus Snape revealing the obsession, that he misunderstood as love, for her mother had been near too much for her and only pushed her further along the path that she was preparing to take. It had explained so much of awful interactions they had had. Though it was left unsaid, Heather understood that his obsession had slowly begun to shift to her. That he dared to give her a look of sadness and disappointment as he died and she silently rejected him and his words would have likely infuriated Heather had she not already internalized the hopelessness of the situation.

But none of it mattered because, in the end, Heather Potter had done what no one had before—whether by chance, Fate, or the plots of Albus Dumbledore—she had united the Deathly Hallows in a descendant of the bloodline that they had come from. Then she walked willingly to her death and died.

But that was not the end, because she came back to life. The Dark Lord's soul fragments were destroyed. He finally died, by his own hand as the Elder Wand was not willing to strike its true master down, and he fell dead like any other man. The Girl-Who-Lived had become the Woman-Who-Triumphed. Looking back, she felt to call her a woman then was a misnomer as she had still been a girl so hopelessly ignorant.

Voldemort's body was burned to ash like rubbish and scattered to the winds along with the bodies of the dark creatures that served him. The rest of the dead were buried and the Wizarding World seemed ready to start recovering. Heather healed her original holly wand with the Elder Wand before she snapped the artifact over her knee and place it back in Dumbledore's tomb. The Resurrection Stone was lost to the Forbidden Forest never to be seen again. She kept only the Cloak of Invisibility with plans to bequeath it to a child of hers someday in the future, if she ever chose to have children at all.

All seemed well.

Heather and Ron entered the Auror Academy together, though they never recovered their friendship, while Hermione returned to school. Hermione finally convinced Ron to give her a shot after it was clear that Heather would never have him in the way he wanted and they became inseparable despite their petty arguments. Heather drifted away from both of them as she could not and would not rekindle her friendship with Ron, and Hermione, despite what a remarkable person she was, was still human and the whispers of jealousy from the locket had burrowed into her heart.

Heather's own heart felt far too mauled and scarred to even consider romance at that time and felt that was far better left to the future.

Heather Potter left Britain after completing her training in the Auror Academy and joined up with the Auror Corps of the International Confederation of Wizards. She began to travel around Europe, learning new magic and taking in the locales and vistas she never would have dreamed to experience as a child living in a cupboard. She even had her vision corrected via a rather easy ritual done by a healer in Italy.

It was in Prague that they first came to her.

Heather could still remember clearly the sensation of them as she woke up. She felt rested, deeply so, and practically vibrating with energy. She found the unbroken Elder Wand in her right hand and the unmarred and unmounted Resurrection Stone in her left hand as her Cloak of Invisibility covered her as a blanket. She had flung them all away from her in an instant before coming to her senses. That was the moment she wondered if being the Master of Death was more than just accepting the inevitability of death.

She snapped and incinerated the Elder Wand and shattered the Resurrection Stone before throwing both ashes and dust into a river. She kept the Cloak only because she felt sentimental.

When the Wand and the Stone returned again whole and untouched to her in Amsterdam, she burned both the Wand and the Cloak to ash, shattered the Stone again, and flew them out to sea and spread them in small handfuls over miles of open water.

It did not help. They simply returned to her at a later date. Having no choice, she put them in a moke skin pouch and then hid them deep at the bottom of her travel bag. They seemed to accept that and did not reappear again when they were unwanted. After a few years, she was even able to forget about them for the most part.

Heather Potter's thirtieth birthday was not a special occasion as Heather had grow distant from everyone. The only thing she cared for anymore was travel and her perpetual education of magic as she expanded her tours into the other continents. Still, she thought, it was her thirtieth birthday. She should take a moment to marvel at the signs of impending old age, she laughed. But the mirror did not have any signs for her to see. Rather, she appeared as vibrant and youthful at thirty as she had at twenty…or maybe, one could argue, she appeared even more youthful than she had even at twenty.

There was no grey, silver, or white in her hair although she had remembered a bit even in her school days. There were no wrinkled crevices in her face caused from smiling, frowning, or thinking and her skin appeared as new as a babe's. Her eyes also seemed…odd. Brighter and more vibrant than she felt they should be. How long had it been since she had looked into a mirror for any length of time?

Strangely, Heather felt that she had somehow become more beautiful with age even though there were no signs of her aging. She shook away the creeping worry and put it out of mind. Obviously, the years of travel as an international auror with very little in the way of ongoing stress had been good for her. Of course, she would look more beautiful after taking care of herself far better than she had been as a child and teenager, she reasoned!

When Heather Potter returned to this line of worry five years later at thirty-five and saw almost the same face staring back at her, she realized something was desperately wrong. The difference of five years had not given her any signs of aging. Instead, she felt that she had continued to grow even more beautiful and youthful as something…other stared back at her from within green eyes that were too vibrant in a human face. Her thoughts turned to the Deathly Hallows sitting in the bottom of her travel bag.

She returned to Britain in a frenzy to speak with the portrait of Albus Dumbledore in the autumn of 2015. She expressed her concerns and the portrait had no answers for her. The Headmaster, in a sense, had collected the Deathly Hallows as well but never at the same time and, in addition, Heather had been of the Peverell bloodline. No one had collected all Deathly Hallows before and there was no indication of what the title of Master of Death bestowed within the myth.

Heather Potter began to curse the name Albus Dumbledore.

She refused to believe that these artifacts came from the physical manifestation of Death, no matter how powerful they were. Heather returned to the continent before she tendered her resignation with the ICW. She had the funds to live comfortably from the money left to her by Sirius, the small fortune of the Potters, and the large reward for the defeat of the Voldemort. From there, she began to traverse the archives and libraries of the continent in search of whispers of these artifacts. She knew that if the portrait of Albus Dumbledore had not known of anything further about the Deathly Hallows than what he told her then the information was simply not in Britain. His obsession had been even more powerful than hers before he discontinued his search.

She was somewhere in the Balkans when she died for the second time.

A coward had struck her from behind with a spell as she was walking down a lonely path between villages in thought. The spell carved right through and then out of her front, turning her chest cavity into a shower of blood and organs. She died before she rightly knew what happened.

Heather Potter woke up nude and standing in the middle of a field of perfectly white flowers that came to her knees. Even the stems and leaves were white while the ground see to be made of mist below them. The field was infinite and stretched off into oblivion. Even the sky above was white and there was not a hint of breeze or sound.

She would never forget that conversation of what she had happened to her…of how she had been cursed.

"Hello, Heather."

Albus Dumbledore, clad in white just like the last time she died, was standing across from her. He stood there among the white flowers appearing somber and a bit sad. She remembered feeling confused but strangely numb.

"Albus. Where am I?"

Heather had thought the next time she died, that was it—Game Over. Instead, it seemed Albus thrice-damned Dumbledore was here to tell her something was wrong.

"You've died again, Heather."

"Does this mean I need to come with you then?"

Dumbledore's face had looked pained then. He granted her a sad smile and he shook his head slowly as if it hurt him to do so.

"I'm afraid there's no place for you among the Dead, Heather."

She remembered that was the moment the numbness began to disappear. As it faded, her confusion gave way to anger.

"And what does that mean, Dumbledore?"

Dumbledore ignored her, it seemed, and instead left her off-kilter as he changed the subject abruptly.

"The Deathly Hallows were far greater and more terrible that I had ever surmised in Life. It is only now, in your presence, that I understand the Truth of their nature."

She remembered how she snarled at him, "And what is the Truth of the nature of the Deathly Hallows?"

He had only looked at her with pity.

"They are more and less than what they seem. The Elder Wand, the Stone of Resurrection, and the Cloak of Invisibility are simply the physical vessels of the true power within them. As a spirit of the Dead, I can see that you have been taking them in slowly. Likely, it would have been a lifetime before they finished assimilating into you. But now that you have died again, they work to mend your form even as we speak."

"What is this true power!? For once in your life and death, speak clearly with no riddles!"

She remembered how much she wanted to wring his scrawny neck in that moment as he seemed amused by her.

"I suppose that I did…do have a habit of droning on. Please forgive your old headmaster. A flair for dramatics is something of a universal failing for powerful wizards… The Deathly Hallows are nothing more than the physical vessels of the Shards of Sorrow."

That was the first time she had heard that term and of the Shards. They had haunted her and continued to haunt her even now.

"And what are these...Shards of Sorrow?"

"They are the sources of power of the Deathly Hallows. At this very moment, the Deathly Hallows are fading to nothingness as the Shards of Sorrow enter your being to never be separated from you or one another again."

"But what are they doing to me?"

"They are binding themselves to you. The suddenness of their binding has weakened their power for a time, but they will recovery. Their power will be different but the same from their physical shells. From the Elder Wand, the Shard of Power now resides in your Voice. From the Resurrection Stone, the Shard of Knowing now resides in your Sight. From the Cloak of Invisibility, the Shard of Unknowing exists as your Veil. They shall be your Mantle of Athanasy and crown you as the Deathless."

With that pronouncement, Heather Potter learned that she had been cursed but still she refused to believe what she heard. She refused to hear what had been said. Though he still spoke in riddles, it had been one of the plainest statements that Albus Dumbledore had ever spoken. She remembered how she howled at him in rage.

"What does that mean!?"

"It means as I said to you before—there is no place for you among the Dead. Death holds no dominion over you any longer and you will not find your final rest among us. The Deathless shall wander forevermore as the Restless, for that is burden of the one who wears the Mantle of Athanasy and bears the Shards of Sorrow. I'm sorry, my dear…but it is time for you to go."

She remembered waking up screaming, smothered in loose dirt, and the taste of blood in her mouth. Whoever had killed her had dumped her body in a shallow grave. She sat in her own grave soil for a while staring in disbelief and horror at herself, her own viscera covering her and yet her body was as whole and unmarred as the Deathly Hallows that she had destroyed more than once. She stared at her naked breasts through her ruined robes, not understanding how her chest was whole after feeling herself being ripped open.

With a surge, she had gotten up and apparated back to the room of the inn she had been staying at and dove into her travel bag. At the bottom, she found the moke skin bag in which the Deathly Hallows had been stored. When Heather turned out the bag, only ephemeral dust came forward that seemed to vanish into nothingness even as she watched. She had stood slowly on swaying feet feeling ill before going into the bathroom to be sick.

She remembered the next moment clearly.

It was when she was cleaning her mouth in the sink that noticed something off. The back of her left hand, which had borne the scars proclaiming 'I must not tell lies' for the last almost twenty years, was completely smooth. She then had looked up in a panic and the silvery remnant of her famous lightning bolt scar on her forehead was also gone, leaving unmarred flesh in its absence. She stared in unthinking horror as she took in the testament of her own gruesome death on the shreds of her clothing. Then something…other stared back at her from behind her eyes.

Heather Potter blinked and Saw for the first time as all illusions were stripped away and she Saw the worlds of the Seen and Unseen overlap at once.

Her true, glorious, and terrible form was revealed with a face far too fair, too beautiful, and too pale to be called anything than…Other. A shining white gem sat under the skin in the hollow at the base of her throat that she Knew was her Voice of Power. Her wild raven black hair was darker than the Void of the night sky and shrouded in the color of shifting twilight that she Knew was her Veil of Unknowing. Burning like stars, her emerald eyes blazed with green light beyond the natural world and she beheld her Sight of Knowing like a fool staring deep into the Abyss, only to find the Abyss staring back.

The Deathless Heather Potter wore her Mantle of Athanasy as a dark bride and black queen. As she turned to See the world with Knowing, she screamed as all illusions died before her gaze.

She Saw the Truth of All Things in their terrible Wholeness…and then madness took her.

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The woman woke with a start as she tried to calm her racing heart. She brushed back long hair the color of black mud as the sweat on her forehead and back caused her to shiver. Dark brown eyes stared out unseeing in a round and plain face. She huffed in annoyance within the darkness of her small house as the memories faded back into the shadows of her mind.

"…Fucking Dumbledore…"