Disclaimer: I don't own J.K. Rowling's universe, I just like to do really evil things with her characters, on occasion.

Master of all He Surveys

by Scribe Teradia

Chapter 1 - An Ending and a Beginning

The war was over, Voldemort was dead, and good had triumphed over evil.

Only the terrifically naive and the frustratingly obtuse believed that would be the end of things.

The battle between good and evil had begun eons ago, and was hardly going to be decided by an arrogant tyrant desperate for immortality and the Boy-Who-Was-Lucky-Enough-To-Get-One-Over-On-The-Ponce.

If things were a little easier for those on the side of good following Voldemort's defeat, it was mostly due to the fact that there were some changes going on among the ranks of the Bad Guys, and partly because the newest commander-in-chief was smart enough to figure out that a reprieve would give their enemies time to lick their wounds, relax, and become complacent. Thus the world continued to turn, without any signs that the Dark Lord's defeat had been just another ruse, and the Ministry once again became a force for order under Kingsley Shacklebolt. As the days turned into weeks and then months, people started falling back into their ordinary patterns, habits established over time, and life more or less returned to normal, or as close to normal as was possible in the wizarding world.

Years would go by before people had any indication that evil was making a comeback. It began with a rash of killings by a vampire in some Muggle village in the middle of nowhere, but before the Ministry could assemble a team to deal with the threat, it simply ceased to exist. Kingsley was smart enough to give his people credit for it, but those in the upper levels of the Ministry knew better, and they were worried.

Six months later, a series of attacks on Muggles in a village not far from where the vampire had been hunting led the Ministry to believe that a dementor was on the loose. The Muggles were unable to see the creature, of course, but the few eyewitness statements from those who were spared suggested it was the work of a Dark creature, and there was no way of knowing how many of them had escaped the Ministry's hunt after Voldemort's defeat. Again, however, the attacks stopped before Kingsley could assemble a team to investigate, and life once again returned to normal, the wizarding masses easily fooled by the fabricated story that the dementor had been handled by Harry Potter's team.

Harry didn't like taking the credit for something he knew he hadn't done, but he was talked into it by Hermione, who had proposed the solution to Kingsley in the first place. She was also the one who was convinced that there was something sinister going on behind the scenes, though she hadn't been able to find any proof to that effect. Ron said she was paranoid, and got a week on the couch for his trouble. Hermione couldn't shake her instincts, though, and she began doing her own research, not all of which was sanctioned by her superiors at the Ministry.

It was frustrating, unrewarding work, and eventually she was forced to leave the Ministry altogether because the conflict of interest became too great. No one wanted to hear that there was a pattern behind these events, no one wanted to consider that the death of Tom Riddle might not have been the end of organized evil in the world. Her theories were radical at best, unpopular at worst, and by the tenth anniversary of Voldemort's defeat Hermione had managed to alienate herself from all of her friends. What she didn't know, couldn't know, was that by doing so she was opening herself up to the very things she was looking into so hard, and hers was a light that the forces of darkness would be only too happy to extinguish.