Sacrarium Ignis

Chapter 1: Howlers of the Night

The sound from the fireplace jolted Hermione awake. Frozen and confused, she could hear fire, but couldn't smell it. For a second she was thrown by her memories of war, but quickly blinked them away. It was still dark out, the shadows outlining familiar tomes strewn all over her room. A big chair with all of her clothes from last week swam in her sight. She could faintly hear murmurs coming from outside her room. Could it be Ginny? Or is it Harry forgetting something? Dammit, I should definitely order that Remembrall, Merlin's sake.

She padded outside her room through the kitchen, seeing faint wisps of color by the fireplace, the voice louder now.

"...I'm sorry, so incredibly sorry..." the envelope-shaped mouth of the howler disintegrated to ashes before she could hear more, the smell of sulfur and burnt parchment filling her nose as it disappeared into a puff of smoke.

A howler NOT screaming AND a self opening one? That was new.

Hermione rarely thought of dealing with howlers anymore. The Prophet's constant coverage of the "saviors of the wizarding world" frequently prompted a slew of fan mail from all over the wizarding community expressing gratitude and love or hate mails. Thank goodness, she had someone to deal with it—Foopy, a retired house elf she hired to manage her incoming letters and trinkets.

Of course, Foopy dealt with the usual sort of letter that would arrive at her house. Howlers were different; Howlers were personal, and unfortunately not so irregular an occurrence in her home as they should be.

She could predict when a Howler would come: when Ron pissed off Lavender, their arrivals were spurred on by Ron's eternal daftness.

Then there's Harry, a special volume of them would arrive when Ginny inevitably refused his requests for play-by-plays while he reviewed students' DADA homework. He seemed to continue to delight in using magic for magic's sake: he'd never forgotten how stifled he felt by summers at the Dursleys.

The Howlers came from everyone, though, for a variety of reasons. George and Charlie also sent occasional ones, the former asking for her advice on some experiment gone drastically wrong that he swore should have worked perfectly, and the latter often inquiring if she wanted a pet dragon for company. The new support animal trial they were running at St. Mungo's had shown great promise with war veterans. She continuously declined; Crookshanks would not be keen on sharing the house with a dragon, no matter how cute it was.

Hermione gazed down at the ruined howler. She couldn't recognize the low, velvety voice but the way they perfectly enunciated every word, she shall know by the end of the day.

She did not know who it was by the end of the day.

The howlers never stopped coming.

It was becoming an annoying part of her daily life. The howlers came erratically, always arriving when she was on the cusp of falling into a much needed sleep. The loud woosh of the fireplace and the crinkling of paper startled her awake. Sometimes it was a slew of multiple howlers repeating the same "I apologize, Granger" "I am so sorry." "Howdy, would you ever forgive me" on the rare occasion that it slurred its words like someone drunk calling her and by then, all howlers would conclude and simultaneously combust.

She was never able to overhear the whole howler but some nights she was fast enough to get a full sentence out of it.

"Your hair wasn't as horrible as I told you. It was actually very nice."

"I would just like to say how much of a hoarder you were. Although you were the official swot of Gryffindor, I was the swot of my house and you never returned books on time. As if you were the only one who actually needed them! And don't get me started on you stealing books from the restricted section, I should know because I used to do that too-"