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Chapter Text

"A girl will be born as the seventh month dies

Born to those who are willing to sacrifice their life

A woman will be made amidst agonizing strife

Reborn from the ashes as Master of Death and Life

Dreaming of dreams in a world not her own 

She who has faced her problems all alone

Shall find companion in a man needing an equal of his own"

Chapter Text

~Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live~

-Norman Cousins

Death is cruel—but time, time is far crueler.

To exist in a world that constantly evolves while you remain unchanged is a slow, merciless torture. It is watching the world slip through your fingers year after year, unable to keep up, unable to let go. The people you love move on. They age, they wither, they die. And you stay behind.

Always behind.

Asteria Lilith Potter knows this pain too well.

The Girl Who Lived. The Woman Who Conquered. The Master of Death.

Those are just a few of the titles that have followed her across the span of her 117 years. Titles given by a world that demanded too much, too soon, and offered little in return.

She had been just a teenager when it all began. A girl raised in a cupboard, thrown into the chaos of the wizarding world, then tasked with saving it. She was expected to defeat one of the darkest wizards of all time—nearly five decades her senior—armed with little more than a prophecy and blind faith. No proper training, no preparation, just a gentle pat on the back and a “do your best.”

Thanks for that, Professor Dumbledore. She often rolled her eyes at the memory. If sarcasm had a Patronus form, hers would’ve been particularly sharp.

But somehow, impossibly, she had survived. Not just survived—won.

She defeated Voldemort. She stood in the wreckage of the final battle, the war finally over. And somewhere in the haze of smoke and death, Death itself had come to her.

And offered her a choice.

She accepted the Hallows. All three. The wand, the cloak, the stone. In doing so, she became something more than a girl, more than a hero—she became the Master of Death.

At first, she didn't understand what that meant. Didn’t care, even. Victory was euphoric. The future seemed brighter than ever before. Her friends were alive. The wizarding world was healing. For the first time in her life, she could imagine growing old.

But that vision didn’t last.

The changes were subtle in the beginning. Her friends—Hermione, Ron, Luna, Neville, George—started to show signs of aging. Tiny wrinkles at the corners of their eyes, gray hairs, slower steps. But Asteria stayed the same. Year after year, her reflection didn’t shift. Her skin remained smooth, her eyes unchanged. No graying strands, no fading strength. She was a ghost in a living world, untouched by time.

Decades passed. Her friends became grandparents. Some passed quietly in their sleep. Others after long illnesses. One by one, they left her.

And she remained.

At first, she tried to pretend it didn’t hurt. That immortality wasn’t what it seemed. She told herself she still had purpose. That maybe, someday, someone would need her again. But it got harder. The world moved on. Magic evolved. Technology grew. And Asteria—stuck in the body of a seventeen-year-old—watched everything familiar fade away.

She tried to make connections again. New friends. New causes. But it never lasted. People either revered her like some kind of legend or feared her as something unnatural. And eventually, they too would age while she stayed the same.

The loneliness became suffocating.

Asteria wasn’t afraid of dying. She was afraid of being left behind. Of watching everyone she loved disappear while she stayed trapped—denied the peace of death, the closure of goodbyes.

Because despite holding Death’s favor, she could never follow her loved ones. Not really. They had all crossed that final threshold. And she... couldn’t.

So, she wandered. Aimless. City to city. Country to country. Century to century. Surviving, but not living.

Until that one fateful night when she found him.

Aleksander Morozova—more infamously known as the Black Heretic—was a man molded by solitude. Power, ambition, and the cruelty of the world had carved away everything soft in him, leaving behind only sharp edges. He was a commander, a visionary, a man cloaked in legend and shadow. And beneath it all, unbearably alone.

For centuries, he had walked the line between savior and villain, dreaming of a world where his people, the Grisha, would no longer live in fear. He had fought for that vision with fire and blood. He had founded the Little Palace, built sanctuaries with his own hands, shaped the Second Army into something formidable. He had created the Fold—yes, but only because the world gave him no other weapon strong enough to answer its hatred.

And yet, through all his triumphs and tragedies, the ache of loneliness remained. No matter how many battles he won, no matter how many enemies fell at his feet, it never left him.

Until he dreamed of her.

He didn't know her name at first. She came to him as a whisper in sleep, her presence soft and silvery, her magic singing like a forgotten lullaby. Her face was young, her eyes old, and her magic—her soul—felt as infinite as his own.

They met night after night, drawn together across the fabric of time and space by a thread neither of them could see but both of them felt. At first, the dreams were brief—fleeting images of a girl with stardust in her gaze and fire in her veins. Then came the conversations. Then laughter. Then long silences that spoke louder than words ever could.

He began to wait for sleep. To crave it. Aleksander, who trusted nothing and no one, found peace only in dreams—only in her. In that space beyond reality, she was not a legend or a weapon, and neither was he. There, they were simply two people searching for something neither had ever truly known: belonging.

And over time, without even realizing it, Aleksander fell in love.

Not with her beauty, though she was beautiful. Not with her power, though it rivaled his own. But with the way she understood. The way she listened. The way she held her grief with quiet grace. She did not flinch at the darkness in him. She recognized it. Because it mirrored her own.

He loved her long before he knew who she was.

And then, one night, she spoke her name.

Asteria Lilith Potter.

He remembered the chill that ran down his spine. Not from fear—but from recognition. From the way her name settled in his bones like it had always belonged there. The Master of Death, she said with a wry smile, like the title meant nothing.

To him, it meant everything.

And when they finally met face to face—no longer in dreams but in the waking world—he already knew. Already loved. Already belonged to her.

She was real. And more than that—she was his.

Not by fate, not by magic, not by prophecy. But by something deeper. Something neither of them dared to name. Not yet.

But the world would name it for them soon enough.

Chapter Text

“He knows her not by name, but by the ache in his chest when he sleeps alone.”

Asteria Lilith Potter had not dreamed in years.

She had learned not to. There was nothing waiting for her in the vast ocean of sleep except aching memories and a hollow quiet that reminded her too much of the silence she woke to each morning. But then, one night, a fragment of something unfamiliar drifted into the darkness—smoke, shadows, the soft glint of sunlight on water, and the echo of a voice she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t clear. Just a feeling, like a tug behind her ribs. But it was enough to stir her.

And for the first time in years, Asteria dreamed.

He stood beneath a blackened sky, a storm swirling behind him. The air smelled of ash and frost. He didn’t speak. He never did. But he watched her with ancient eyes, dark as the night sky without any stars.

She couldn’t reach him. Her feet were heavy with water, her hands full of flowers she didn’t remember picking. And when she looked again, he was gone.

Aleksander Morozova woke with a start.

The wind outside howled like wolves scratching at the windowpanes, and his breath came shallow, unsettled. He sat on the edge of his bed in the Little Palace, hands clasped loosely before him, eyes unfocused.

Another dream.

She had appeared again. The girl with wild black hair and eyes like green fire. Always just out of reach. Always watching him like she knew things no one else did.

She never spoke. But her presence lingered even after he awoke, trailing behind his steps like a scent, like a memory that refused to fade.

It unsettled him.

It also gave him the first sense of peace he’d felt in a century.

Days passed. Then weeks. And still the dreams came.

Asteria sat in the enchanted greenhouse she had conjured outside her isolated cottage in Ireland. Her fingers brushed against a vine of moonflowers that only bloomed under starlight, magic humming beneath her skin. But her mind was elsewhere.

The dream. The man.

He was always wrapped in shadow, but never threatening. Regal, proud, alone. He looked like a man used to silence, one who bore loneliness like a second skin. She understood that look far too well.

She had worn it herself for over a century.

The greenhouse wasn’t real. Not truly. Just another illusion woven from her magic to fill the aching spaces where people used to be. She could summon all the color and warmth in the world, but it never made up for the absence.

Hermione had died last spring. George two winters before. Neville had passed away in his sleep surrounded by his grandchildren, and Luna… Luna had disappeared into the forest one night and never returned.

Asteria remained.

Because she always did. Because Death would not take her.

And now—she dreamed.

Aleksander stood alone in the map room, candlelight flickering against the golden edges of Ravkan borders. His advisers waited outside, arguing over troop placements and growing threats beyond the Fold. But his thoughts strayed.

To her

The woman in his dreams

He didn’t know who she was. She wore strange clothing. Her magic—because there was no mistaking it was magic—felt old, older than even the Small Science. It moved like wind and lightning through her veins, like creation and destruction tied in a single breath.

And she was sad.

He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. It radiated from her like a storm hidden beneath calm waves. She was surrounded by color, but she looked colorless inside.

He knew that feeling.

He carried it daily.

The dreams deepened.

One night, Asteria found herself in a frozen field, snow falling like feathers from the sky. She turned—and there he was, standing at a distance, a black kefta billowing around him. His eyes pierced through the cold.

He raised a hand—not in greeting, but as if he wanted to touch her, to prove she was real.

Then everything faded.

She woke with tears on her cheeks.

He stood beneath a tree made of glass. She sat beneath it, barefoot and bruised, humming a lullaby he didn’t know. He watched her, yearning and afraid. And then she looked up.

Their eyes met for the first time.

He didn’t sleep for a week after that.

The ache of curiosity became unbearable.

Asteria tried to summon answers from her magic. She consulted every ancient tome still left in her collection, scoured through dream-walking spells and crossed-realm rituals, but nothing explained him. He was not from her world. Of that, she was certain.

And yet, he felt more familiar than the air she breathed.

At dusk, she walked through a town nearby, illusion-wrapped so no one would recognize her. Children ran past, laughter echoing off stone walls. A baker handed out samples from her stall. Life happened all around her.

She remained invisible.

A ghost with a pulse.

And all she could think of was the man in her dreams.

Aleksander stood on the balcony of the Little Palace, the wind tugging at his collar. Below, the gardens bloomed in defiance of the late frost, tended to by Grisha with patient hands. Joy echoed faintly below. Footsteps, chatter, laughter.

He heard none of it.

His thoughts returned to her.

Every time he closed his eyes, she was there. Sometimes in fragments. Sometimes full and vivid. And always aching.

He didn’t even know her name.

But he knew her magic. He knew her grief.

He knew her.

That night, the dream changed.

The forest was endless. Trees loomed like titans, cloaked in mist. They walked side by side, though neither acknowledged the other. Their shoulders brushed once.

The contact jolted them both awake.

Heart racing. Palms sweating. Eyes wide.

They sat in silence on opposite sides of the world, connected by something ancient and inevitable. Both afraid to name it. Both unable to escape it.

Asteria found herself speaking into the emptiness one night.

“I know you’re not real,” she whispered.

But her voice trembled.

Because part of her hoped he was.

Aleksander pressed a hand to his chest, just over where her voice seemed to echo in him. He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. But he whispered her into his dreams again.

As if summoning her.

As if he already needed her.

And so they lived.

Dreaming of each other.

Breathing in rooms full of people but never feeling seen. Carrying the weight of survival, of duty, of memory—alone.

Until the day they wouldn’t be. But for now, the dreams were enough.

Barely.