Chapter Text
Just like promised, all the teenagers gathered by midnight outside the ritual room at N°12 Grimmauld Place, a room not even many adults in the house know about and Harry had to search for a long time before finding it. As he was the only one with Black blood at the property, until Draco joined them a few weeks after the break started, and thus able to even see the door leading into the chamber since they were afraid of Sirius insisting on assisting them if he knew, it took longer than they expected to get on with the magic.
Hermione walks in last, a big and heavy book under her arm, yellowish pages clinging to it only thanks to the help of magic. They formed a circle around the candles lighting the room, putting down all the ingredients they painstakingly prepared during the past month of summer break, after their bookworm friend discovered and discussed with them the possibility of going forth with said ritual.
Ron is the most nervous of them all, while in contrast, the twins look as solemn as anyone’s ever seen them before, completely focussed on what they're doing at the moment. Harry’s palms are sweating and he is having a small nervous breakdown inside his head. Hermione, likewise, is nervous, but more because she fears making a mistake and summoning an eldritch horror directly from hell, instead of help for them to get rid of the dangerous Dark Lord that’s been terrorizing the world nonstop since he kidnapped and used her best friend’s blood in a ritual to be reborn into a new body.
In another hand, there is Draco, who simply doesn’t care much about anything anymore. Losing his father to the Dark Lord for a simple mistake, and soon after his mother, who saved Draco’s life and sent him off to her cousin to escape the same fate. Draco is all for revenge and has little time to worry about consequences, if this goes the way he wants it to then good, if not, then he will be back to the library and learning as much magic as he can, in an effort to someday kill the man who murdered his parents... if he is lucky enough to get a hit in, before getting an AK to the forehead.
Hermione and the twins set up the scribbles down on the floor in complete silence, checking the book a dozen times in between to make sure there is no mistake. Once they are done with that part, they laid down the sacrifices, as any other ritual is wont to demand.
Draco’s family ring and last connection to his father, makes it into the bowl. As the entire manor was burnt down by the Dark Lord and his inheritance will be withheld for another year, until he reaches seventeen, he has very little to spare beyond the clothes he was wearing when he arrived and the ring.
Hermione puts down a necklace her parents gifted her for her last birthday, before she erased herself from their minds and send them off and far away from the war. It is her own family heirloom too, passed for generations on her mother’s side and holds as much sentimental value as Draco’s ring considering she isn’t even sure she’ll see them ever again.
Harry puts down the folded Marauder’s Map and says goodbye in his head to one of the few remaining connections to his parents, thankful that the ritual only demands the single sacrifice from each person, because losing the cloak too would have been too much at the same time.
And finally, Ginny, sitting on a corner and covered in a white and almost transparent silk gown, stops glaring at the circle so much and steps forward with an expression of determination taking over her face. As she stops the shivering of her arms and sighs the last dregs of fear out of her, they get ready to start.
The Weasley’s also lost a parent not so long ago, and while only Arthur died, the news hit Molly so hard that it was as if she died too, becoming a shell of her old self and wandering around crying, mourning, and dishevelled all day every day ever since, not even cooking appeals to her anymore.
While her siblings don’t have to sacrifice anything as they are there only to stabilize the output of magic during the ritual, Ginny is meant to be the blood sacrifice. No, it’s not like they’ll kill her, they just need the willingly given blood of a virgin to help boost the strength of the ritual and their chances to get what they want. While her sacrifice may not seem like much, what with blood-replenishers potions and all, she is still the one in more danger at the moment.
If, Merlin forbids, things go awry and an eldritch creature comes out of the bowels of the void, as Hermione fears creating for making a silly mistake, then Ginny will be the one to suffer the consequences... or the brunt of them anyway, at first. Hecate knows why the demons like to rape the one sacrificing their blood on a ritual gone wrong, but it’s happened before. Ginny knows that, the rest of them know that, but there isn’t anything they can do or say to convince Ginny to stop helping them with this.
And then, there is also the tiny little itty-bitty detail of them all losing their minds, their magic, their lives, or all of them the following months or years if this fails; not like getting captured by the Dark Lord or his followers would bear a different future for them in the end.
There is a reason why rituals, more so those involving sacrifices and blood, are illegal. But after two years of Grindelwald back and raising support once more to try and take over the muggles as the wixes slaves, things aren’t well. All of them lost family and friends while fighting against the man’s forces with little to no luck, and now, losing Dumbledore just five weeks ago, they fear what the next day will bring.
With the morale of their forces on a constant low by now, they saw no other choice but to do this, no matter what will happen in the end. Is not like they have too much to lose anyway, and if this works as they hope and they get help, they have everything to gain instead.
Ginny steps to the middle of the circle with the trigram on it, drinking a low-acting but heavy dose of blood-replenisher, before cutting her wrists not too deep and letting the blood drip at a natural pace down her raised arms, drenching the silky gown crimson red, and the chanting starts slowly all around her.
Hermione steps forward next, wording the base chant for the ritual in the most complex language, as she has an easier time than the rest with it, and stands at one end of the heptagram, adding to Ginny’s magic flooding the room. When she finishes the first chant, Harry joins with a different one in Parseltongue, their voices overlapping, their magic mixing and turning the atmosphere of the room into something heady and heavy. And so, when Harry finishes his part alongside Hermione, Draco joins with a third language, stepping too into the circle drawn on the floor and letting his magic leave him freely, to add to the rest.
The blood pooling at Ginny’s feet starts slowly travelling in different directions when Draco, Hermione, and Harry chant their verses in union for the third time, steadily covering the entirety of the drawings on the stone floor. When all of it is shining red under the light of the candles, the twins and Ron start murmuring their own verses in the three different languages used, as they kneel inside the outermost circle with a trestella drawn on the floor.
To accomplish this, Harry and Ron had to hide under the invisibility cloak and sneak out of the house one day, arriving at Gringotts and getting Ron blood adopted as Harry’s sibling. The only way, Hermione discovered, that would make someone able to speak Parseltongue unless being born with the skill. That also opened another can of worms regarding Harry’s ability to speak the magical language, but it’s a thing he doesn’t want to distract himself with right now, when they have more important things to deal with, than another lie from the late Headmaster regarding him.
The blood travels around the painted circle as the male Weasleys step up front and touch the drawing. They pool their own magic to the mix, but theirs is meant to stabilize and control the magic, so it won’t go wild and kill them all. When all of the circle is finally covered in blood, the room becomes red as the magic in Ginny’s blood glows. All of their mixed magic surges with more strength, and the floor shakes when their chanting stops dead after the thirtieth time of being sung since Hermione started by herself.
If no one noticed the slowly building magic of the ritual in the beginning, by then they certainly do, but at that point, there is no stopping it anyway so they don’t really worry anymore. What will happen, will happen.
For what seems like an eternity, they remain silent and in the same position. But while they stopped speaking, their magic hum in the air, continuing to create a song based on the chanting they used; and just like Ginny’s blood, and the magic concentrated in the room, it flows smoothly all around them as sparks start going off everywhere, almost blinding them with the intensity of it all.