I love Lil Drop of Magic's story a Secret of Spells. For those of you GOT and HP fans who have not read it, I highly recommend you do. Unfortunately the brilliant story has been left on a bit of a cliffhanger, one that has driven me crazy for years. So like any good obsessive fanfic wrighter, I have made fanficition for that fanfiction.

These are just a few short stories I wrote in continuation of that story although there are a few noticeable changes to this one. Overall everything is the same except Harry's wand works and his Animagus form is a stag like his father. I don't know why, but I think animaguses can't transform into magical animals and I feel like a thestral is a bit too dark for Harry. Plus, the stag will be important later.

Also, I read how you become an animagus on the wiki page and it sounds pretty complicated, but it's such a useful skill to have that I left that the same, a few things may have been changed on how they became them though.

Now that that's out of the way, on to the story. At the moment these are just short stories about Harry and Hermione's time spent around the Winterfell with the Starks and other members of the house.

Thoughts and Prayers
Catelyn sat in the chair stoically weaving together the wreath-like prayer wheel of the seven gods. The girl in the bed slept fitfully. A fever had taken hold of her sometime in the past few days and hadn't released her for three of those. She switched between moments of clarity and hallucinations, murmuring in her native language and sometimes the Common Tongue. Sometimes she'd call for someone, names of people she may have known from before, one in particular stood out among them and Catelyn wondered if it was her word for "mother".

It had been a week since the girl had been thrown from the saddle of her horse and fell over the drop. Her bones were broken and she was in a great amount of pain, though Maester Luwin had done his best to mend what he was able to. He was possibly the smartest man in Winterfell but his efforts still weren't enough to keep the expected fever from taking hold of her.

When Hermione was lucid, the boys came to visit and she would assure them that she was healing well even as she smiled through the pain. But the sickness that wracked her body was persistent and violent on her. Measter Luwin had refused audiences to many of the children who came to see the girl and hoped to visit while she healed. The exhausted man had worked nonstop to care for her and had had to put his own rest aside as he tended the fallen maid.

It was late when Lady Stark finally offered to relieve the man for some time, allowing him to eat and rest for a while. The man instructed her on what to do, should Hermione wake at all, but aside from her occasional moan and feverish whimpers, there was nothing much the woman could do for her. Catelyn was alone with her own methods to aid the girl through this ordeal.

Silently, she went about constructing her wheel, and while she wove, she prayed.

She asked the Father to forgive Catelyn of her ill thoughts towards the girl. Asked him not to interpret her disproval of the young lady's strange and foreign behavior as a reason to take this girl away so young.

She asked the Mother to watch over her in this time of agony and heal her wounds, to stop her descent into pain and darkness and give her a way to live.

She asked the Warrior to protect her from the illness, to take her under his shield and keep the darkness at bay as she recovered.

She asked the Maiden to sooth her mind, wherever it had gone. Tell her that things would be alright and to comfort with whatever gave the girl hope while her body mended.

She asked the Smith to build her stronger than before. That this hurt would only be something that gave her strength for whatever challenges faced her in the future.

She asked the Crone to lead her from the strange land of dark nightmares and bring her back to the waking world where she was safe from their torment.

And she asked the Stranger to pass over her this time. Let her live as she had before and let her children continue their friendships with her and to not leave her fellow Lorathian, who would be alone without his companion.

It was true that Lady Stark wanted the girl gone to hopefully halt Robb's continued infatuation for her, but not like this. Never like this. Her goal had been to see that she marry and become a proper young woman as her own daughters were intended to be some day. Arya looked up to Hermione and it was thought that if the girl had settled down herself, her daughter's restless nature would have been calmed with it, but that hadn't happened either. Instead, the girl was thrown from a horse and fell from a cliff.

She had done no true harm to Catelyn herself, and yet this was how the gods chose to make her leave.

For the second time in her life, Catelyn Stark knew she was the worst woman who ever lived.

Hermione's ways were strange to her, but that did not mean they were evil. Their culture was just different from Catelyn's, not wrong. She had been brought up to know that there was a way to do things and a way not to do them. Everyone had their duties and everyone had an honor to uphold. It was what the gods had decided when they chose to make mankind.

Yet these two strangers intended to challenge that structure. The boy was too sensitive and the girl was too outspoken. It had concerned Catelyn where it bothered no one else and if she had been more accepting, then perhaps this never would have happened in the first place.

Her fingers bound and tied the sticks and twine over and over again, urging the girl herself to use whatever strange magic was inside her to battle the forces that fought over her spirit with all her might, and hopefully in doing so, she would win her life back.

Catelyn continued to work and pray and silently offer encouragement to the girl to fight, on and on into the night.

Hermione's eyes flickered opened the next morning, feeling much better than she had in the last few days. She couldn't quite understand it, but her broken bones didn't hurt as bad as before. Measter Luwin wasn't anywhere to be seen as Hermione had gotten used to him watching over her while she was sick. Instead, when she looked towards the chair he normally occupied, she saw the strangest thing she'd expected taking up his spot; an odd wreath with seven wooden dolls, fashioned of twigs, sticks, twine, and straw. Hermione was confused by such a talisman and tried to reach towards the chair to get a better look at it. It was unfortunately too far for her to manage without lighting up her wounds unnecessarily, but then she remembered her wand and merely swished it once to levitate the thing to her.

It was an odd little device. Seven doll-like figures, all different and all wrapped tightly around the circular construction. She wondered what it could have been before it actually struck her. In this world, people worshiped the seven gods or the seven personalities of the supreme god. The Father, the Mother, the Warrior, the Maiden, the Smith, the Crone, and the Stranger. Though the dolls didn't exactly capture what Hermione had been led to believe they looked like, she couldn't strike it from her mind that that was what they actually were.

So, was this wreath some sort of prayer wheel gifted to watch over Hermione?

Most of the people she knew were from the North and they tended to worship the countless ancient gods without name and without any true shape. The Old Gods, as they were known as. It was mainly people down south that worshiped these seven; the New Gods.

There was a church here, or a sept as it was known, constructed for Catelyn Stark when she married Lord Eddard. But surely the cold woman couldn't have possibly made this for her. She had always seemed so… irritated by Hermione and her aversion towards what the woman believed "proper" ladies ought to behave. Not to mention the way the horrible woman treated poor Jon.

No. This had to have been made by someone else. Maybe Sansa.

When Measter Luwin came back to check on her, she'd ask then. But when the old man did appear noting how much better she seemed, he shrugged by her question and answered that he wasn't sure who could have left the wheel for her, but whomever it was apparently cared enough to ask all seven gods to save her.

Hermione was touched by his words and the gesture of whomever had made this surprising amulet on her behalf and chose to hang it above her bed. It seemed that perhaps there was a bit of magic in it and that gave her hope that there may have been people here in possession of power that could have been similar to hers and Harry's. Perhaps everyone had a bit of magic to them and it was through their fingertips into their works and crafts that brought their longings to life.

Though she asked around, Hermione never really found out who made it for her, but when Jon came to visit her one day and saw the wreath hung on her wall, he announced how he had one just like it in his own room. It was at that moment Hermione truly knew that it hadn't been Catelyn after all.