You wake up hoping everything was a dream. For those blissful seconds between sleep and real life, Taylor is still there. Lily is still there. Last Light hasn’t happened. But you raise your left hand, and the scars are carved on your skin.
Time hadn’t been fully rewritten, you understand now. Only the Beast would be able to do that once freed, but not the demon who had lived inside Lily. You’ve read enough muggle sci-fi to know what the butterfly effect is, and you know that the existence of a single person, even for a time as limited as eighteen years, could and would have drastic effects on reality. Yet things seemed to be mostly the same, except for Lily’s existence and its direct and immediate consequences.
Time, it seemed, did not like to be torn. The last day <span class="mu-i">had</span> changed. Nothing else could explain your left arm still being there, or your body not being covered with scars. Everything else had been… adjusted. Memories, locations, objects. All twisted to reflect a simulacra of what the world <span class="mu-i">should </span>have been like, even if it was impossible for it to have ever arrived at that configuration.
Your possession of the Resurrection Stone could not be explained without the interference of Lily, it being an Artifact of Power of too great importance to change. So it hadn’t been. No one had seen it disappear, and not even you could remember how exactly you’d found it in the forest, but you had it before time had changed, and so it had remained.
You had stumbled upon the Room of Requirement by sheer chance, and used it to train Battle Magic with your friends, Arty and the other Hufflepuffs. Even with your poor teachings, Arty had managed to win the first two battles.
All your relationships with your friends and enemies remained the same.
Falere, a seventh year Ravenclaw, had been chosen as Head Girl instead of Lily, as she was now the best student in the year. A Head Girl badge was not an Artifact of Power, so it could be easily moved between dormitories.
A second year Gryffindor that used to sit on the bench, just hoping for Lily to have a stomachache so he could play, had instead been playing since the beginning of the year. Someone else sat on the bench.
The Potter household, if you had to guess, had just gained an empty room, where they stored all their old books and the fancy silverware. All their pictures and paintings, edited in the blink of an eye.
An adjustment, a tweak in the right memories, and done. No one was none the wiser.
Except for you, Raven and Faith, protected by the Ancient Magic below, remembering both the lie and the truth.
