On Crimson Wings.

Part 1 of The Heart of the Dragon.

Harry's girlfriend has a secret. She's not human, but a magical creature. What happens when she receives her creature inheritance, and then passes it to Harry?

Rules:

No slash.

Can't use werewolf, vampire, or veela as the creature blood (waaaay overused).

Harry does not start out as the creature; his girlfriend converts him soon after her 15th or 16th birthday, when she hits her own inheritence. Harry may or may not know about her true nature before the change.

Harry and GF can use magic to disguise themselves as human.

Friendlier goblins, but they still have to be businessmen (they won't give Harry/GF everything they want).

Harry and GF learn some special kind of magic specific to their new creature forms and fighting with melee weapons from another of their race (GF's parents).

Harry and his GF only reveal their creature status to a very few trusted friends.

Harry must become a skilled Occlumens and Legilimens.

Harry uses his skills to change the battle of the Ministry for the better (ex. ambushing the DEs, bringing more friends, etc.) but there must be some sort of battle, and Voldemort is revealed. Harry (and possibly GF) must also reveal his (their) true form during the battle.

Recommendations:

Crossover (creature is from another book/movie/game)

Dumbles and Weasley Bashing.

5th year.

Snape as mentor and doesn't hate Harry as much after transformation (if used, Snape must be a creature himself).

Pairing with Hermione, Luna, Daphne, OC, or either Patil (or both :D).

Don't use a regular sword as the melee weapon.

Harry and GF have animagus forms, either before or after they become creatures.

If they have animagus forms before, change them with the inheritance transformation. If they get the form after, make it similar to their creature they become.

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, the world or the characters. They belong to J. , with gratitude for letting us play with them. The challenge comes from GoldenSteel, with gratitude for the ideas. The only thing I could lay claim to are the story and plotline, but that just seems greedy...

A quick author's note: There are two very important words for any writer to use when they start a story, in my opinion. Whether that story is a fanfic or an original work doesn't matter, only that the words are used. Please note that I do not say written, because that isn't the point. The words are not inspiration, although they may well inspire, nor determination, although that too is often needed. These two words work best together, and should be used frequently as the story goes on.

"What are these two words of great and terrible power?" you ask? What if?

On Crimson Wings.

Prologue: A Parent's Plight.

She watched as her daughter climbed into the purple bus and the whole contraption vanished with a massive crack of displaced air. Her little one was growing up fast, and the Change would be upon her soon. If the blood didn't skip a generation, as it was wont to do if her kind mated with humans, then the child would undergo the Change at sixteen. That wasn't that far off, as her kind saw things, and her little one certainly had the scent of the beginnings of the Change. As her beloved, but all too human husband held her close, she whispered to him.

"I have to tell her soon, my love. She will change, I'm afraid, and I'm scared she won't be ready for it."

He held her tight. The way she looked out for what she saw as hers with such intensity was one of the reasons he loved her so. "Christmas, then. Tell her at Christmas. Those few months shouldn't make a difference, should it?"

"I hope not," she murmured, "but she is hanging around with that boy. You know nothing is ever normal around him. She'll be lucky to reach the Change at this rate."

Kissing his wife to reassure her, he squeezed her tight again. "She'll be fine, Emily, or I'm not David Granger."

Chapter 1: Troubles Come In Threes.

Harry Potter looked around at the platform as he boarded the Hogwarts Express. For a moment he took the chance to cast his mind back over the past few months, as far back as the hippogriff ride to save Sirius. Having a girl's arm around him for that time, drastically short as it was had inspired several dreams that could have been attributed solely to adolescent hormones, were it not for the fact that she was always the same girl. As he set foot on the train, he glanced ahead at his best friend, and not so coincidentally the girl in question, Hermione Granger. The dreams had started shortly after that night, of flying on Buckbeak, with her arms around him and her body pressed against his back. They didn't stay that way, though. The dreams became more heated, he supposed would be the word, as each dream had the flight lasting longer, and with fewer clothes in the way of them connecting like that. He'd told no-one, not even Sirius, of these dreams, not even the time they'd been forced aside by the nightmare of Voldemort killing that old man. Harry didn't want to remember that one. In the last such dream he'd had, he was sure he'd been about to kiss her, but then he'd woken up and the Weasleys had brought him to the Burrow.

The next time he'd dreamed of flying, he felt like he was trying to flee from something that was hunting him down, all set to catch and cage him as some kind of trophy...

The Quidditch World Cup had been quite the eye-opener, and not just from learning about veela. They'd had almost every man there willing to jump from their seats to the pitch just for their smiles. Ron was still quite dopey over it that night, and only a handful or so of the men who'd been there had retained any control. He hadn't felt a compulsion like that before, and reluctantly admitted to himself that he might have remained under their thrall, without Hermione's voice. Suddenly, the veela's beautiful songs had sounded like ravens cawing madly, and the beauty of the non-human girls paled beside the way he felt and saw in Hermione's presence.

Shaking his head as he sat down in a compartment about halfway up the train, he listened with half his mind on the others' conversation, and joining in himself. The other half was trying to add things up, but some of the numbers seemed to be missing...

After Malfoy and his goons withdrew and Ron shattered the glass in the door slamming it behind them, Hermione sighed and cast a repairing charm on the door. Although she didn't know it, her thoughts were following a similar line to Harry's. There had been a tension, of sorts, at home, before she'd taken the Knight Bus to the Burrow, and her mother had obviously wanted to tell her something that her father had talked her out of. If Hermione had been less distracted by getting to see Harry again, and those recurring dreams of flying with him were... intense, she decided was the word for it. She'd always shared everything with her mum that she could, from the troll in first year through to the aid she'd given an innocent man to escape a fate quite literally worse than death. She hadn't mentioned the time-turner, though, not that she'd have been allowed to. After arriving at the Burrow, the dreams of flying had become nightmares, of being trapped in a high place with a massive red-haired ogre chuckling and chortling about how she'd be cooked and served. She shuddered.

Harry's eyes had slipped over her at that exact moment, and were suddenly filled with the question "Are you okay?" as clear as if he'd spoken aloud. Hermione nodded with a slight shrug, trying to convey the lack of sleep she'd been suffering. She must have gotten the point across as Harry moved next to her and let her use his shoulder as a pillow, neither noticing the glares this earned them from Ron, assuming his foul mood to be due to Malfoy. As she drifted off, Hermione had a moment or two stand out from the Quidditch World Cup: Harry shattering the thrall of veela allure at the sound of her voice, and the way Ginny was trembling at the time, as though torn between two differing desires. She passed much of the journey that way, but Harry wasn't going to complain...

Severus Snape rose from the couch at the end of his lair at the top of the Slytherin dungeons, pushing and squeezing his physical self into human form again. Soon the students would return so he felt it necessary to again become accustomed to remaining in this shape. He hated it. His room, right underneath the Black Lake, was certainly dank enough, but without the scent of mud and clay, it still felt wrong.

Carefully and deliberately, he attended to the potions he'd been brewing. There were three of them, each bubbling away at a different temperature. The first was the elixir he coated the old puppet's beloved lemon drops with, the ones kept in the bowl he himself had charmed to keep others from accepting them while the old man himself consumed them at least thrice a day. That potion rendered the 'Light Lord' Albus Dumbledore as pliable as a rubber wand, the better to protect Snape and his... less than legal activities. The old fool thought so many of the disastrous decisions he made were his own choices, when it was really a horrible suggestion by Snape, and kept the Headmaster firmly protecting 'his' Potions master and Death Eater spy, even against hard evidence.

Severus' true nature was hidden from everyone. It always had been. No matter who he called 'Master', no matter whose 'bidding' he performed, he was always the one in charge, the one making the choices. He'd never told his childhood friend, he'd never told the Dark Lord, and he'd certainly never told Dumbledore, exactly what he really was. Severus Snape was a dragon. Not just any dragon, either, but a Great Dragon, a Wyrm as they were referred to, which was bigger, stronger and smarter than any regular dragon. Only the Hungarian Horntail came close, by dint of sheer ferocity, a twenty-foot long living machine of destruction. Snape sneered, habitually. He himself was of the breed once called the Ligurian Grey, before the Ministry of Magic declared all dragons to be mindless beasts and started confiscating their hoards. That led to the dragons either fighting back, or changing what they felt constituted a hoard. After thirty years of persecution, the Great Dragons had disappeared, leading the Ministry, with all its customary efficiency and competence (not much, in other words) to declare them extinct, and dismiss the families who'd been charged to hunt the Wyrms: families that included the Prewetts, Weasleys, MacNairs... and the Potters.

That fact alone was reason enough for him to hate Harry Potter, but then the brat had the temerity to destroy Snape's meal ticket, the throne he was the power behind, by killing Voldemort. It could take decades to properly train another Dark Lord. Then when the brat showed up, he had the audacity to unmask and destroy the Dark Lord again, then to kill a basilisk with a sword and destroy that diary the next year. Then that business with the mudblood, Black and the Hippogriff. It was as if he didn't care how hard Severus had to work at this puppet-master business, the arrogant snot. (The little voice that would have mentioned something about pots and kettles was distinctly absent in Snape's psyche.)

He turned to his potions once more, tending carefully to them as his schemes unfolded in his mind. Now if he could only figure out why the school was smelling strongly of sulphur...

Harry nudged Hermione gently to wake her as the train drew close to Hogsmeade, having waved Neville and Ron into the corridor. "I'll be there soon," he said, although he left certain details out that he'd thought long and hard about during the journey. "I just have to wake Hermione up." Again, the truth, but by no means all of it. As his bushy-haired friend struggled from the depths of sleep, apologizing for using him as a pillow for so long, he waved aside her apology.

"It was my honour to cushion your tired head, Hermione," he said, in a voice that brooked no argument. "Besides, it helped me figure something out. For most of the Summer, I've been looking forward to today, and for the rest of it I was really confused and torn. When you fell asleep on my shoulder like that, it settled something. The best night of my life was that night we saved Sirius, and I've realized that it's not because we saved Sirius. That was good, but there were only fifteen minutes that night that made it the single most wonderful night ever."

Hermione's eyes brimmed with tears. That sounded... romantic! But it was impossible, a gruff and familiar voice told her, though she couldn't place it. No, the Boy-Who-Lived was too good for her, she wasn't worthy of someone like him, she'd have to settle for the sidekick... That thought was just too much, and Hermione's blood heated, her entire body going furnace-hot in an instant, before dropping back to normal. She didn't notice. Mentally she was screaming at the voice to shut the hell up! Her dream was coming true, the one she'd quietly held close since first year with the troll, the one she'd almost told him about at the end of the year as he went to face Quirrel. What would have changed if she'd had the courage to say the word 'love' to him then? The potion in her system was destroyed in that instant of incredible heat, and the voice immediately went silent.

Harry saw her tears, her happy smile, and looked down, so he missed the moments of inner rage at this depressing voice, and when he'd gathered his courage, he spoke. "Hermione, will you...{gulp}... be my girlfriend, please?" He panicked, which she thought somewhat cute, although she'd have to help him with that before he met her family. Giggling for only the second time in her life, and the first time she'd meant it, she answered "Yes, Harry, I'd love to," thinking as she did that he was really something. Trolls, Dark Lords, gigantic spiders, basilisks, murderous traitors and werewolves didn't seem to faze him, but confessing his feelings to a girl terrified him...

As the two of them emerged from the Hogwarts Express onto the Hogsmeade platform, to be greeted by the loud voice of Hagrid, they almost didn't realize they were still holding hands, nor did they notice the one who saw it and silently raged...

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