Love and Other Misfortunes

Epilogue

Two years later.

The shock wave that abruptly emerged from deep within the Wiltshire countryside one sunny Saturday was powerful enough to be detected by the British Geological Survey's seismology department. It resulted in the dispatch of two BGS fieldworkers, who returned to London late in the evening in a state of bewilderment regarding the general geography of Wiltshire and excitement over the anomalous data readings they had.

It might have resulted in the publication of a highly controversial scientific paper, but before too many reports managed to be filed, the British Prime Minister's office unexpectedly sent some mysteriously credentialed and strangely attired operatives from an undisclosed agency to conduct private interviews with the BGS fieldworkers and demanded a seizure and scrub of all the data. The fieldworkers both became quite vague about Wiltshire after emerging from their interviews. Within a few weeks the event was largely forgotten by almost all but the higher ups, who shook their heads and muttered for months about Big Government overreach. The office's resident tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist took it as confirmation that the British government was indeed concealing the existence of Martians.

In reality an explosion had emanated from the ancient, warded estate of Malfoy Manor. A blast which roared through the walls of the house causing the portraits to shout loudly in complaint; in the kitchen the Malfoys' priceless crystalware nearly shattered against each other before being frozen in place by the house elves; Narcissa's rose garden vibrated from the shock wave and several petals fell off of her Scarlet Pixie; in the Unplottable drawing room, the shaking caused a beloved, long-lost pipe to fall off the mantle and break upon the hearth; and it made the Chippendale furniture in the tea room shudder and the Lucius's favorite Wedgwood cup to clatter on its saucer, spilling tea onto the copy of an Advanced Alchemy journal he'd just received.

As the manor ceased shuddering, down in the dungeons Hermione Granger-Malfoy sat up, spitting magical feathers from her mouth, as she popped through Draco's wings.

"Oh, bollocks!" she said, her voice a plaintive wail. "I was so sure we'd gotten it right."

She looked around the potions lab in despair.

The power of the explosion had cracked the heavy stone walls in several places, the damage showing starkly against the whitewash. The wards protecting the wall of ingredients had been annihilated and the bottles were shattered, their contents oozing over the floor and reacting unpleasantly with each other. The cauldrons that hung along the wall had fallen to the ground, with the more fragile varieties cracked or dented. The bookshelf and other shelves had fallen over. There was shattered glass everywhere. The tables, scales, and knives that had been near the explosion were twisted and warped irreparably. In the center of the room an enormous cast-iron cauldron that looked as though a bomb had gone off inside it; the iron was both shattered and melted in places, and its contents were dripping down from the ceiling and splattered across all the walls.

As Hermione glanced about mournfully a hand snaked up under her shirt to caress her. She smacked it.

"Really, Draco," she said, huffing with indignation, "only you would use the destruction of several thousand galleons worth of lab materials as an opportunity to grope me."

"I'd better be the only one," he said in a sly voice, sliding his hand up again undeterred.

"I don't understand what went wrong," she said, her expression despondent as she stared at the wreckage before them.

"I don't understand why we need to make Wolfsbane Potion in batches that large. The arithmancy formula we found for making a hundred doses at a time has already reduced the failure rate to the point that Prima Verde is recovering. Trying to double it again was always overly ambitious," Draco said, sitting up and looking around at the destruction wrought upon the historically immaculate potion lab.