This Subdued Fire

After the rather extensive ones I put in....*sigh* I do it for you! I do it all for you!
Sorry. had a bit of a Scully in \'Bad Blood\' moment there for a bit.

The plotline up to the previous chapters as follows:

Hermione and Draco are head girl and boy

Draco inadvertently discovers her mage talents, he blackmails her with sex so he won\'t squeal

Hermione finds out that Draco is a magus, too.

Draco is tortured by his father in a fit of pique and Lucius finds out the truth about Hermione

Voldemort tortures & kills Hermione\'s parents to let her know that he is the boss

Hermione sinks down into a pit of despair and disgrace

She must redeem herself, which she does, by taking out an old testament style of retribution agains the Malfoys

Hermione and Draco get back together and form a grand plan to get rid of Voldemort once and for all and they bring Harry and Ginny in on it, too.

The four students are marked with the Rose Mark

Hermione marks Snape, too, which is a good thing

Voldemort begins the ritual on Hermione and the quartet\'s plan goes awry

Snape enters the melee and manages to get them out of there

Dumbledore explains the Rose Marks and how they came to be. Implied in his tale are the reasons why Harry, Hermione and Draco are magi.

So for those who missed the earlier explanations through the various author notes, here they are.

1) I made Hermione of French descent to make the Merovingian connection easier to get

2) Malfoy is assumed to have some French in him due to his name which means \"bad faith\"

3) Harry\'s folks did reside in Godric\'s Hollow - that\'s canon. Plausible, isn\'t it, that he would be descended from Godric Gryffindor

4) At the time of the founding of Hogwarts, the Norman conquest of England was happening, so it\'s also plausible that the four founders would be of Norman descent, which had been under the rule of the Merovingians before the rule of the first Carolingian king, Pepin the Fat, a progenitor of Charlemagne.

5) A magus is as defined in Webster\'s \"as a member of the hereditary priestly class of the ancient Medes and Persia\" and also as a \"magician, sorceror.\" Draco, Hermione and Harry fit both of these terms to perfection. They are, by heredity, part of a long line of priests and kings and they are, all three, sorcerors.

6) The Sorting Hat did want to put Hermione in Ravenclaw and I can\'t believe that it\'s just based on her extraordinary smarts alone. That\'s stretching the fabric of coincidence a bit too far. Also, it did put her in Gryffindor. The Gryffindor symbol is a lion, but the word is actually a French word. Gryffin and D\'or: Gryffin of Gold or Golden Gryffon. The lion has always been a symbol of royalty and authority, as are it\'s colors of red and gold.

7) The Rose symbology and the color choices that JKR gives to her opposing houses also give rise to a sort of grail lore arising through the HP tales. Green and White were the colors of the House of York and Red and Gold were the colors of the house of Lancaster. York was the house of the Plantagenet family of whom Richard III (also known as Crookshanks! yet another link) was the last ruling member. The Plantagenets may or may not have taken their name from one of the last known members of the Merovingian line, whose surname is Plantard. The ensuing battles for the throne of England were known as the Wars of the Roses, as I\'m sure we\'re all aware of.

8) The Dog-star, Sirius, is a prominent feature of Grail lore and I find it interesting that JKR features a character in her books with that very name.

9) The Chalice and the Blade, represented by a V and a ^, are the two primordial forms given to represent the divine feminine and the divine masculine and I felt that it was correct to use this as a parallel for my story. Also Hermione is constantly shown as being a repository of knowledge, a holder, a chalice, if you will. But she can also be the blade, ie, when she\'s smacking Malfoy around and most recently when she led Umbridge into the centaur\'s glade. Draco has been shown as the blade, always antagonistic and thrusting with his \"thin, pointed face\" as JKR characterises him. But he has a few moments of softness such as when he warns our golden trio of canon to keep Hermione away from the Death Eaters in GoF.

10) The Forbidden Forest with its myriad of animals and creatures leading more or less peaceful lives is (in my own opinion) to echo Arcadia, the mythical Utopia where Pan resided.

11) The features of the Merovingian shield do have bumblebees on them, and Dumbledore does mean bumblebee in Old English. They also have two bears on them which are meant to represent Ursa Major and Ursa Minor in which resides Sirius, the dogstar.

12) The number 12 does come up a lot in the HP tales, although not in mine. JKR uses it a lot. For a complete listing head over to the HP Lexicon.

13) The number three is ever present, but most likely in canon the three (Harry, Hermione and Ron) are to mean the Soul, Mind and Heart. Which is echoed in ecclesiastical texts as the Trinity. I know it\'s a bit of a stretch but I don\'t think it\'s that far of one. I\'ve switched my three around, cutting Ron out and inserting Draco.

14) (yes, I know it\'s getting a bit long now!) Hermione and Draco are that classical pairing of opposites, call me mad but yeah, and they\'re not *so* different. Both are whip smart and cunning and not above to using trickery to meet their own ends. If you think I\'m off my crumpet think about Hermione\'s devious plan to free the Hogwarts house-elves in OotP.

And and yeah...There\'s another essay like thing on the subject on my Free Opendiary. Just head over to http://www.freeopendiary.com and type in *Gammie Pie*. I haven\'t the foggiest idea of what I named the essay, it\'s probably the davinci code. But between that, this and my author\'s notes on the last chapter that should put at least one person into information overload. :)