When Artemis woke, the world smelled of antiseptic potions and fresh linens.

St. Mungo’s.

Her body felt too small, too fragile, yet every nerve screamed with the memory of fire and pain. The hospital ward was quiet except for the gentle rustling of robes as a woman sat beside her bed, adjusting a blanket over her.

“Heavens, you’re awake.”

Artemis turned her head slowly, her eyes focusing on the kind face before her. It was a woman she recognized—her mother’s colleague from the hospital. Healer Miriam Whitmore. Her sharp green eyes were softened with worry, and her graying hair was tied back in a loose bun.

“How are you feeling, little one?” Miriam’s voice was gentle, but laced with sadness.

Artemis opened her mouth, but no words came out. The weight of reality crashed into her all at once. Her parents were gone. Edward was gone. Everything was gone.

Miriam reached out, squeezing her small hand in comfort. “You’re safe now, Artemis. You’re in St. Mungo’s. We’ve been looking after you.”

Artemis blinked, her mind still sluggish with exhaustion, but something pressed at the edges of her consciousness. A flood of knowledge that did not belong to a six-year-old girl. Names. Events. The past and the future tangled together in an overwhelming wave. Harry Potter. Voldemort. The war that had barely begun.

She inhaled sharply, her tiny fingers tightening around the wand still clutched in her palm. Edward’s wand.

Miriam noticed and gently pried it from her grasp. “It’s alright, sweetheart. You can hold it later.”

Artemis let her. She was too tired to protest. Too lost.

She curled deeper into the hospital bed, burying her face in the pillow, trying to ground herself in something—anything—that wasn’t the void of grief threatening to swallow her whole.

Miriam sighed softly and stroked her hair. “Sleep, Artemis. We’ll talk when you’re ready.”

But Artemis didn’t think she would ever be ready.

Not for this.

The following morning, the quiet hum of the hospital was disrupted by the arrival of the Ministry officials. Aurors in deep red robes stood at the foot of her bed, their expressions carefully neutral. With them was a stern-faced woman from the Wizarding Child Protection Services, her clipboard in hand and wand tucked neatly into her belt.

“Miss Lovelace,” one of the Aurors began, his voice unusually soft for someone in his line of work. “We need to ask you a few questions about what happened in Diagon Alley.”

Artemis remained silent, staring at the ceiling. The memories of the attack were still raw, a vicious wound she was unwilling to prod at.

Miriam, standing protectively at her bedside, folded her arms. “She’s barely recovered. Surely you can wait.”

The woman from Child Protective Services, a witch named Agnes Montclair, pursed her lips. “We understand the difficulty of the situation, Healer Whitmore, but we must determine where Artemis will go next. She has no immediate guardians.”

Artemis finally turned her head, her voice barely above a whisper. “Where will I go?”

Montclair softened, crouching slightly to meet her eye level. “We’ve contacted your father’s Great Aunt, Lady Aurelia Lovelace. She has agreed to take you in.”

Miriam’s brows furrowed. “Aurelia Lovelace? Eleanor talked about her in passing. She is an old Witch who never married and who lives alone in the countryside. Are you certain she’s the best choice?”

Montclair straightened, professionalism returning to her stance. “She is Artemis’s closest living relative. Unless there are objections, arrangements will be made immediately.”

Artemis barely registered the conversation. Her mind felt like it was breaking apart, fragments of a past she didn’t understand seeping into her consciousness. A library. A warm home in France. The scent of old books and fresh bread. The sound of her children laughing.

Children. But not Edward. Not this life.

She squeezed her eyes shut as panic bloomed in her chest. These weren’t her memories. But they were. She could remember dying. Lying in bed, old and frail, her husband’s hand clasping hers, her children whispering goodbye.

But she was six. She was Artemis Selene Lovelace.

She gasped, trembling as the memories flooded her—a 66-year-old retired professor, a lifetime spent teaching in Germany and Britain before settling in France, reading the Harry Potter books to her children, watching the films with them, enjoying a simple life of love and laughter.

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A different world. A different time.

She couldn’t breathe. The room swam, Miriam’s concerned face coming into view just before darkness swallowed her once more.

Days passed before Artemis was well enough to travel. The nightmares remained—flashes of both lives colliding in a tangled mess of emotions. She didn’t know who she was anymore. A child grieving for her lost family, or an old woman mourning a life that had slipped through her fingers?

The day she left St. Mungo’s, Miriam fussed over her, wrapping a warm cloak around her shoulders. “You can always write to me, Artemis,” she said gently. “And if you ever need anything—”

Artemis nodded numbly, barely registering the words. Montclair led her outside, where an enchanted carriage was waiting to take her to Aurelia Lovelace’s estate.

A woman stood by the carriage, her dark eyes sharp but not unkind. Aurelia Lovelace was a relic of another time. She examined Artemis with a calculating gaze before inclining her head. “Come along, child.”

Artemis hesitated before stepping forward, the weight of two lifetimes pressing upon her small shoulders.

The carriage rattled over the uneven countryside road, the rhythmic clatter of hooves against stone offering a steady but hollow comfort. Artemis Selene Lovelace, barely six years old, sat stiffly in the cushioned seat, her small hands gripping the hem of her too-large mourning dress. Across from her sat Aurelia Lovelace, her newly appointed guardian, a woman of imposing stature, wrapped in a deep emerald cloak lined with black velvet. Her iron-grey hair was coiled into a severe chignon, and her sharp, hawk-like eyes observed Artemis with an unreadable expression.

It had been weeks since St. Mungo’s, weeks since the attack in Diagon Alley had shattered her world. Weeks of sterile hospital sheets, hushed voices, and adults speaking of her future as though she weren’t in the room. Now, she was being sent away from everything familiar, placed in the care of an elderly woman she had never met—a reclusive pure-blood relative who lived alone in the depths of the countryside.

Aurelia Lovelace had been born in 1852, the only daughter of a long line of esteemed pure-blood wizards, raised in an era where a woman’s worth was often measured by the family she married into. But Aurelia had been different. While her peers attended grand balls and entertained courtships, she had buried herself in books and vanished into distant lands, studying the forgotten magics of ancient civilizations. She had written extensively about magical artifacts, creatures long thought extinct, Wars, Tragedies, History and obscure spells lost to time.

By the time she was in her Forties, she had carved a name for herself as an eccentric scholar, her works often controversial yet undeniably brilliant. Despite many suitors trying to woo her over the years, she had rejected them all, unwilling to trade her independence for the expectations of a marriage and motherhood. By the time she reached old age, she had become something of a relic herself—respected, but distant from the modern wizarding world, with her name whispered only in Highly Acclaimed academic circles with respect and Admiration.

And now, she was Responsible for a child, Halfblood Great-grandDaughter of her younger brother who had not lived to see his 70th year.

Her estate was vast but aged, a grand, isolated manor nestled deep within the English countryside. It smelled of parchment, dust, and ancient magic. Old Moving Portraits lined every corridor, scrolls stacked haphazardly on tables, and enchanted quills scribbled notes unattended in various corners.

For weeks, Artemis wandered its halls like a ghost, her grief a heavy shroud that even Fenny, the family’s devoted house-elf, struggled to lift. She ate little, spoke even less, and spent most of her time curled in the library, staring blankly at the pages of books she did not read. The weight of her past life pressed against her like an unbearable burden—she was a woman trapped in the body of a child, grieving two lifetimes at once.

Aurelia, for her part, was not cruel, but she was strict and wholly unprepared for raising a child. She believed in solitude, in disciplined study, in the pursuit of knowledge above all else. She did not know how to coddle, nor did she offer many words of comfort. She hadn't been in contact with any child for a long period of time since her own childhood. “Grief is like a wound,” she had said once, adjusting her spectacles. “It scabs over, but if you keep scratching at it, it will never heal.”

But Artemis was not yet ready to heal.

It was Miriam Whitmore, her mother’s old colleague from St. Mungo’s, who became her lifeline. Miriam visited every week, sometimes bringing along Healer Edgar Dawson, a man with a warm smile who had worked alongside her mother, and Alan Bell , a formidable Lawyer who had worked alongside Lysander in ministry.

They did not push her to talk but filled the silence with stories of her parents—Eleanor’s brilliant mind, Lysander’s unwavering determination in court, the way Edward had been so excited to go to Hogwarts. They brought gifts: a well-worn teddy bear Edward had once cherished, a bracelet Eleanor had worn in her youth, old letters filled with familiar handwriting, Endless photographs of her parents.

Slowly over the years, Artemis began to emerge from the fog of despair.

It was the children—Edgar’s twin daughters, Rosaline and Eliza, and Alan’s son, Henry—who truly pulled her back to the world of the living. At first, she resented them. Their laughter felt like an intrusion, a cruel reminder of what she had lost. But they were relentless, dragging her outside to play, chasing her on their brooms, challenging her to duels with Training wands, inviting her into their circle as though she had always belonged.

And then there was Fenny. The loving House elf who had known her since birth, had tended to her parents long before she had come into existence. Fenny refused to let her wallow, bustling about with warm cocoa, freshly laundered blankets, and whispered reassurances in the dead of night when nightmares clawed at her sleep.

“Miss Artemis is never alone,” Fenny would say, tucking her in. “Fenny is here. Always here.”

The years passed, and Artemis grew—not only in body but in spirit. Her old memories no longer felt like a suffocating weight but rather a quiet undercurrent, blending seamlessly with the new. She was Artemis Selene Lovelace, a child with a past she could not explain, but also a future she could shape.

She learned to navigate Aurelia’s peculiar ways, finding amusement in her sharp wit and warm care. She found solace in Miriam and the others, the closest thing to a family she had left. She grew close to Rosaline, Eliza, and Henry, forming friendships that tethered her to the present.

And when, on a sunny day of April, the morning of her eleventh birthday an owl arrived bearing a Hogwarts letter with her name in elegant green script, she did not cry for what was lost.

She only smiled, the weight of her two lives settling into place at last.

She was ready to begin again.