A child. That's all I wanted. When I first found out that I could never have a one of my own I thought, I'll just have to adopt one, no big deal. No one told me how stupidly naive I was thinking that. Probably didn't want to take the act of telling me on their shoulders.

A member of the magical society is not allowed to adopt a muggle.

Then you just have to adopt one from a family of wizards, right? While that is theoretically possible, all the wizarding families have mingled for such a long time, that practically everyone is related in some way. And as for letting me adopt one of their orphans? They would rather off themselves than let one of their prestigious members be brought up by a mudblood.

A mudblood. A wizard or a witch with muggle parents and no perceivable connection to the magical society. No one knows how a muggle-born child could develop magical powers, just that it happens time to time.

I was over the moon when I first heard that I would be a witch. The very next day after getting the invitation letter to “Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry” I was already jumping around and pestering my parents to take me to buy my very own wand. I never should have accepted that invitation.

The funny thing about us humans is that we don’t want to let those close to us worry about our own problems. This holds true on both children and parents. You see, I didn’t want my parents to know how hard I found my life being after joining this side of the world. I didn’t tell them how after joining Hogwarts I tried to hold onto the principles they taught me, only to end up time and time again being the one in the wrong for not being “pure-blood”. My parents were the same. They never told me how much it cost them to send me have my “magical” studies. Neither did they tell me how they had to take loans to keep our house and pretend to be well of in case I would bring some rich wizard friend visit my home. Stupid idiots.

After six long years I finally graduated and for a while after that everything seemed to be getting better. Ministry of Magic releasing new laws to restrict the “pure-blood” families, me opening an apothecary using my good grades in both herbology and alchemy and sending money back to my parents to help them pay back their loans. Yes, everything seemed to be going fine. And then He happened.

The First Wizarding War against He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. I was visiting my parents when it all began. With no magical protection in place, His followers apparated right in their living room and stunned me before I could take out my wand. Oh how I wish they had just used the killing curse on us and been done with it, one of them in particular took so much joy in carving my womb out of me and feeding it to my mother before killing her and my father. I don’t quite remember what happened then, but the next thing I knew was that I was in a hospital bed.

After getting myself out of the hospital I left Britain, “let them kill each other” I thought. My parents were dead, my friends were dead. Fight? Just one more corpse to the field. No. I had a much better plan.

There was one more subject I excelled in when I was in Hogwarts. Transfiguration.

While I worked as an apothecary, I heard of people trying to create beasts more powerful than dragons or any other XXXXX rating magical beast by combining the traits multiple beasts into one. I was going to find these people and create a hybrid capable of destroying those who took those I cared for away from me.

For years I searched high and low for knowledge and materials to create my perfect killing machine. I had found that a chimaeras egg would be my best option as a base to add more traits as chimaera in itself was already close to what I wanted. Getting it back to Britain was easy with the war still raging. I used a year to slowly adjust the fetus inside the egg to be more receptive to different DNA, but before I got to start the final phase in which I would insert the said DNAs, word spread that He has been killed, His followers in hiding and the war was over.

For a while I didn’t know what to do. For ten years I have been preparing myself, and while I sometimes wondered if someone would get Him first, I never thought it would happen right as I was on the finishing line.

 A week went by as I watched people come and go through my window, and I noticed one thing. Families with children recovered faster than those without. I wanted a child of my own. As soon as I thought of that I ran out of my door to the closest orphanage and was ready to sing the adoption papers of this cutest little girl, when the people from Ministry of Magic came and clarified some of the non-spoken laws of theirs.

I was devastated.

I walked back home with hollowed eyes, there were no more tears to cry.

After getting home, I decided to clean up the “project” I had so meticulously planned. While preparing myself to activate the runes to destroy the egg, that I had installed in case something went wrong, I got an idea.

If you won’t let me have a child, I will make one myself.

I had everything ready, I just had to change the other DNAs I had planned to use in giving the hybrid their traits with my own DNA. I also had to make small tweaks to the spells to give ‘her’ a form as close to a human as possible. I used the mandrake to make ‘her’ an animagus in the hope that at least one of her forms was humanlike.

Finally, after getting everything ready I activated the spells and waited.

After 2 hours the acceleration spell matrix should have sped ‘her’ development enough for ‘her’ to hatch, so while fearing the worst I checked every spell formula one by one, but everything seemed to be working as they should. Not knowing what to do I paced back and fort when someone knocked on my door. Begrudgingly I walked to the door, while thinking that this better be important. Opening the door, all I saw was a new issue of Daily Prophet on my doorstep. Just then the spell keeping track of the eggs state send me an alarm.

I slammed my front-door shut and bolted back towards my laboratory. I busted through the door and tried to catch my breath while frantically trying to find ‘her’ with my eyes. And there she was. Golden eyes, pointy nose, small lips and red hair. She was perfect, and she was my, Evalyn Marlsons, daughter.

I swooped her in my arms, not minding her still being wet from her hatching. I was just so happy for finally having someone to call my family again. I had started crying at some point and after a while I was crying so hard, I could hardly see anything, and had to hold her even tighter to reassure myself that it really worked.

After finally managing to get myself back together, I lifted her little face to see her beautiful eyes and said.

“Welcome to the family, Almira.”