Harry Potter and the Sorceress of the Stars

In the end, it turned out that there had been nothing for Mrs. Weasley to worry about. A handful of minutes after their supposed disappearance/kidnapping, Harry, Ron and Hermione had shown up safe and sound in the back rooms of Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes.

The Gryffindor Trio could take care of themselves, so Oleandra hadn't overly concerned herself with their vanishing act. Rather than it being about them, her own anxiousness was being monopolised by the mysterious circumstances behind Tracey's own disappearance.

Tonks had told Oleandra that she had loaned Tracey some money for a room at The Leaky Cauldron, and yet, when Oleandra had asked the proprietor Tom about her, he'd claimed to have never seen her. Furthermore, she'd been out of the Faraway Communication spell's range, which indicated to Oleandra that Tracey had left the Greater London area.

And so, the instant the Ministry car dropped her and her sister off at the hideout, Oleandra ran up the stairs, locked herself in her room and closed the blinds, before retrieving her runestones from her pouch.

"Mani! Wotan! Wyrd!" Oleandra hissed, casting the carved pebbles onto the floor. "Tracey Davis's fate!"

The stones danced and skipped across the warm floorboards, before coming to an unnatural and abrupt stop, as if an invisible hand had seized them mid-roll. Four of the twenty-four runestones had remained upright: Yera, Mannaz, reversed Naudhiz and reversed Eihwaz.

Cold sweat ran down Oleandra's temple. Tracey was alive and well, but her fate was identical to Oleandra's and Daphne's— one year from now, she would die.

Oleandra had previously divined her two sisters' fates, but since Astoria's fate was to live a long and prosperous life, she had surmised that the future peril they would encounter would not be specifically aimed at her family.

However, now that Oleandra was armed with yet more foreknowledge, she felt obligated to search for a pattern. She had ignored this problem long enough…

First, she divined her parents' fortunes— and she immediately regretted doing so.

"Father…!" Oleandra whispered, letting out a single choked sob. "Father…!"

Her mother Iris would live out the rest of her natural lifespan, but her father Maxwell was dead. He had died months ago, on the exact night that the scramble battle for the Prophecy Record had occurred.

She hadn't wanted to believe it, but in her heart of hearts, Oleandra had been expecting as much. After so many weeks without any news of her father, she had suspected that something had gone horribly awry, but to have her fears confirmed in such a way…

How would she tell Astoria? Daphne? And their mother…

Oleandra wiped away her tears and half-heartedly threw her runestones again, unwilling to even look at the results, for fear of once again being overwhelmed by the heavy burden of foreknowledge.

She called out the Gryffindor Trio's names and steeled herself for the worst, but surprisingly, the runestones weren't forthcoming.

Harry Potter, Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger were stuck at the very centre of a maelstrom of possibility. Their choices and their actions would mould the very future of magic itself, and as such, Oleandra's runestones could not shed any more light on their situations.

As all-knowing as it was, the magic of the stars could not surpass the gifts of a True Seer when it came to prophecy— for True Seers are nothing more than human-shaped pressure valves for the River of Time, which feeds the roots of Yggdrasil itself.

"Our shared fates," Oleandra said out loud, talking to herself to organise her thoughts. "Will we all die at the same time because we'll be together when it happens, or is there something else we've got in common that I'm missing…?"

Something in common.

If there was something they had in common, it was their connection to the magic of the stars— which meant that if…

"Mani! Wotan! Wyrd!" Oleandra whispered, casting her runestones. "Draco Malfoy's fate!"

Oleandra's watched the stones bounce and roll into each other, before finally coming to a stop; in the exact same configuration they had formed when she had divined Tracey's fate a few seconds ago.

Yera. Year.

Mannaz. Person.

Naudhiz. Crisis.

Eihwaz. Death.

Oleandra's breathing quickened.

Information was power, and she had just found a common point linking them together— they all used the magic of the stars. As long as she could figure out the how and the why, Oleandra firmly believed that she would be able to overturn the prophecy of their fated doom.

"Less than a year to save ourselves," Oleandra murmured to herself. "But from whom? Or from what?"

There was simply no way of knowing in advance, but Oleandra was determined to give it her all— their lives depended on it. But as she continued to psyche herself up, there suddenly came a sharp rapping noise from her bedside window. Oleandra climbed onto her bed and reached across its soft expanse to pull on the window blinds' cord to open them, only to be met with Hedwig's fluffy white face and her startling yellow eyes, staring back at her. It was Harry's snowy owl!

For some reason, the Fidelius Charm did not appear to work on owls, which seemed like a major oversight.

At any rate, curious to know as to why Harry would write to her so soon, since it had barely been an hour since they had parted ways, Oleandra quickly tore the letter from its envelope and began reading it, distractedly shooing Hedwig away.

"Go bother my sisters downstairs if you want a snack," Oleandra told the owl, as she opened her bedroom door. "I'm not in the habit of carrying dead mice in my pockets."

Hedwig indignantly ruffled her beautiful white feathers and flew out through the doorway and to the lower floor, interrupting Tonks and Astoria's afternoon teatime.

…

"I couldn't care less about Malfoy," Oleandra grumbled to herself, as she crumpled up the letter and threw it in a bin. "He can play Death Eater all he wants, but he's no match for me."

In essence, Harry and company had been playing detectives earlier and stalked Malfoy to Borgin and Burkes, where he had asked for a pair of something to be repaired. Furthermore, they had also noticed that Malfoy hadn't allowed Madam Malkin to touch his left sleeve, leading Harry to believe that Draco Malfoy was Voldemort's newest Death Eater.

"…oh, and to Hel with it all…"

Even though she had stopped seeing him as a friend a long time ago, Oleandra couldn't help but remember Merlin's advice from the previous year, just before he'd forced her to regurgitate yet another prophecy. According to him, keeping her friends close, including Malfoy, would be to her advantage, because otherwise, he might turn into a huge headache for her…