Ginny’s head hurt. Her chest hurt. Her shoulders hurt. Her- her entire body hurt.
Then, there was a noise. It sounded… a bit like a voice. No, it was a voice. It was… It was a girl. And… And it was the sweetest, most innocent little voice she had ever heard.
Finally, she heard the words.
“Ginny? Ginnerva? Are you okay? Um… That is your name, right?”
She made a valiant effort to respond. “Mwha?”
“Um, are you okay?”
She opened her eyes, and shook the pain out of her eyes. For some reason, she couldn’t-
She very suddenly knew why she was unable to reach her own eyes to rub the blurriness out of them. At the same time, everything snapped to perfect clarity.
She was in that strange, white space, where the goddess had spoken to her once before. Inside her mind, the goddess had told her.
There was something black here, too. It was huge, arching over her, holding all four of her limbs tightly, stretched out as far as they would go- like it was trying to rip her apart. One last arm of the black thing was hanging right in front of her, forming a huge spike, pointed straight at her chest.
She stared at it.
“Ginny? Um, Ginnerva? Or… Or do I have your name wrong?”
She looked.
There was another girl. Also pure white, just like she was, but free- and, actually, climbing on the black stuff to reach her. Behind the girl, she could see that the black stuff was reaching in through a blackened tear in the air.
“What… happened…?” she asked, eyes wide, but too stunned to say anything.
“I don’t know,” the girl answered. She was the source of the sweet voice. “I… I woke up, embedded in this black stuff, a long time ago- but I couldn’t move, and… And I can’t remember anything before that. I…” She took a deep breath. “I couldn’t sense, but I… I seem to have access to your memories. I think. Then, just now, a bunch of white lightning came along and pulled me out.” She shuddered- and nearly lost her grip on the black stuff. “When… When it did that, you… You looked like…” She could see the tears.
“It’s okay,” Ginny muttered.
“No, it’s not okay,” the girl answered immediately. She pointed at the spike. “That thing was in you. The lightning forced it out- and you looked a bit like string cheese. And kinda… transparent, too. Then it… put you back together. Made you… Solid.” She reached one hand over to touch her very lightly.
Ginny looked down… and saw that her previously spotless white mind-body was now riddled with crisscrossing scars. White scars, but scars nonetheless.
She looked up, trying not to give in to her terror. “Who… Who are you?”
“I have no idea! You’re Ginny, right?”
“I… Yeah. So…”
The girl started tugging on the black stuff, but it didn’t budge. “Ugh… What even is this stuff?”
“So… What can I call you?” Ginny asked, determinedly not thinking about the spike just waiting to impale her again.
The girl looked at her. “I don’t know. What do you want to call me?”
When Ginny awakened into the real world, outside of her mind, it wasn’t sudden, but it also wasn’t slow. She’d spent a little while in her mind-realm, struggling to free herself, through which Ariel had tugged almost continuously on the black stuff, trying to free her. Neither of them had gotten anywhere.
On the other hand, she’d been able to calm herself down, slightly- enough to realize that her heart had leaped for that girl in her mind as well.
She wasn’t sure how that was going to work.
But they’d eventually settled on a name to call her. It wasn’t great, but it was something, for until she remembered her real name.
She opened her eyes, slowly. She was lying on her back, in… She had to pause. The ceiling wasn’t familiar.
“That’s the Hospital Wing,” Ariel piped up suddenly. “I recognize it. No idea how, but I do.”
“Hospital wing?” she answered silently. “Someone must have gotten worried when I fell asleep or something while writing a journal entry.” She paused. “And… you can see out…?”
“Yeah. It would seem that, while you’re… um, awake, on the outside, I can see through your senses. I don’t think I can actually go out there, and be my own person, but…”
Right at that moment, she felt a hand take hers, and squeezed gently. She knew that hand- it was Hermione.
She looked. “What happened?” she muttered.
“I was going to ask you that,” Hermione informed her. Morning Sun was sitting next to her.
She sighed. “I don’t know. One minute, I was writing in my diary, and the next…” She glanced up at the headboard; Ariel was right, it was the Hospital Wing. “The next, I’m here.”
Madam Pomfrey cut in suddenly from her other side. “Alright, you two are free to go,” she said.
Hermione looked up. “Two?”
Ginny looked; as much as the bed opposite hers was occupied, it was by an amused-looking girl that was just sitting on it, legs hanging off, like she’d already been released. Besides, Madam Pomfrey was looking directly at her.
“Is it just me, or is she referring to me?” Ariel asked.
“Good question,” Ginny answered her.
“Yes, two,” Madam Pomfrey smiled, before looking at Ginny. “Unless your daughter is feeling unwell?”
“Wait, she has a daughter?” Silver asked.
“My… daughter.” Ginny said slowly.
“Yes. You can probably talk to her in your head, yes?”
“What?” Morning asked, mildly alarmed. Madam Pomfrey ignored her.
“Uh… Are you talking about Ariel?”
“Ariwho?” Hermione asked.
“You’ve already named her?” Madam Pomfrey asked, eyebrows raised.
She nodded meekly. Ariel, she could tell, was just staring, too stunned to speak.
“Good for you. Unless she’s feeling unwell, you’re good to go.”
“Wait,” Ginny muttered, sitting up. “You said… You said she’s my daughter. How? I- My cycle hasn’t even started yet!”
“Well actually it has, as of about an hour ago.”
She raised an eyebrow.
Madam Pomfrey smiled. “To answer your question. Some time ago, how long I’m not certain, some foreign soul fragment invaded your mind. It was just a fragment, mind- effectively, just an anchor for the rest of the soul. No clues left for who it was, though- those were all erased when you went through the Papa Tango, which affected it instead of you. The fragment was reformed into a more complete Equestrian fragment- it then had all the facilities of a full, unbroken soul- even a mind of its own… but still lacked the wellspring, memories, or anything else to think about, so will have laid dormant.
“Meanwhile, when it first invaded your mind, it was part of something called a horcrux… which means there’s still a not insignificant part of dark magic spellwork that came in with it. That spellwork has been draining your lifeforce- and, combined with the drain of maintaining a dormant soul fragment that didn’t have any of its own, you started running out very, very quickly. You even got a few grey hairs, too. Anyways, you ran out of lifeforce, and passed out from it. The Killing Curse works by draining its target of lifeforce, after all.
“Enter Miss Granger here. She found you drowning in a puddle on the bathroom floor- probably that horcrux spellwork, seizing control of your body and thrusting you into unconsciousness. It actually didn’t matter that you were drowning, because you were already out of lifeforce, so her non-magical attempts to get you back were fruitless.” She shrugged. “But we both know her magical resources are without limit.”
Hermione blushed, and put her face in her hands. “They are not without limit,” she stated.
Madam Pomfrey chuckled. “They were not, at least. We’ll get to that in a minute.” She smiled, and looked back at Ginny. “She gave you some fresh lifeforce, alongside so much magical energy that the core of your soul actually duplicated itself- and the new core merged with the soul fragment from the horcrux to turn it into a fully-fledged soul.” She shrugged. “Well, I say duplicated, but the two cores are entangled- for either one to die, the other must die as well. As such, for as long as either Ariel or yourself are alive and in the flesh, neither one of you can truly die. Though, you can still run out of lifeforce, drain each other, and die that way.”
Ginny looked at Hermione, and back at Madam Pomfrey. “But… If Hermione gave me lifeforce… what about hers?”
She shrugged. “When I last saw her, she had enough to last her about two thousand years. When she walked in today, even though she’d given you, Ariel, and Myrtle over here each enough to last five thousand years, she still had enough for those two thousand years. Now, though?” She smiled up at Hermione. “Literally no limit. You’re actively producing more than you use- effectively, you’re immortal. Even the Killing Curse won’t work on you, though a sword probably still would.”
“Uh, what?” Hermione asked.
“How does that make her magical resources unlimited, though?” Morning asked.
“Easy: In every being I’ve seen except for yourself but including Ariel, lifeforce is converted at a constant rate into magical energy, among other energies required to sustain their being. And besides, if Miss Granger created lifeforce, she created magic in the process- and anything that can use magic to create magic has infinite magic.”
“Did you say five thousand years?” the girl on the other bed, Myrtle, asked. Ginny blinked- now that she thought about it, she looked very much like the ghost in that third-floor bathroom.
Madam Pomfrey looked over at her. “Yes. Provided nothing happens, you’ll live for about five thousand years.”
“What do you mean, except for Morning?” Ginny asked.
“Mm? Oh, her kind are the scavengers of the lifeforce cycle.”
“Scavengers?” Morning blinked. “I- I thought we were parasites.”
“Parasites?” Hermione asked, alarmed.
Madam Pomfrey shook her head. “Maybe if you consumed actual lifeforce, but you don’t. Instead, you absorb some of the energy by-products from that lifeforce conversion that other entities don’t use, and re-convert them into a different set of energy products that you can use. You probably look like parasites in Equestria because Equestrians tend to hold that energy inside their forms, rather than releasing it to the environment- but British entities just expel the waste products you live on, without storing it at all.” She shrugged. “It’s a miracle that your kind evolved in Equestria instead of on Earth, really.”
“... Oh,” Morning muttered. “So… what would we contribute to the ecosystem if we’re… Wait, I think I know that one. It’d also explain why we evolved there instead of…” She took a deep breath. “Because Equestria is home to literally hundreds of sentient species, which all look very different from each other- and developed their own languages. That’s…” She took a deep breath. “We thought we were a byproduct of chaos magic turned loose, but we might well have been spawned by Harmony instead. We… They call us changelings because we can shapeshift, fit in literally anywhere.
“Which… which would give us a unique ability to fit in with all the varied races, and help bring them together in peaceful conversation… in harmony. Which is what every creature in Equestria strives for.”
“You say there are so many sentient species,” Madam Pomfrey began, “But we only see humans attending hogwarts.”
Morning nodded. “I… I don’t know if I’m supposed to be telling you this, since it’s still an Equestrian National Secret, but…” She took a deep breath. “So, don’t tell anyone?” She looked from Madam Pomfrey, to Myrtle.
Both of them nodded.
“Okay. Um, the secret is that humans don’t exist in Equestria. They’ve got a transfiguration spell of some sort on the gateway that pushes us into ‘local’ forms.” She sighed. “Of course, I can violate that easily, but…” She shrugged.
“The Papa Tangoes can too,” Hermione piped up. “Our Animagus magic lets us.”