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Six Pomegranate Seeds
At the end something happened. Hermione clutches at one fraying thread, uncertain whether she is Arachne or Persephone. What she does know is that she will keep fighting to protect her friends even if she must walk a dark path.
- GenresFan FictionMagic
300 pages, ebook
Published January 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 2, 2026
3 STARS—I LIKED THIS STORY QUITE A BIT, BUT IT LACKED EMOTIONAL DEPTH
FYI SPOILER: this isn't so much a romance as it is a hermione adventure, with the vaguest hints of a crush not on malfoy but theo.
hermione awakens alone in a sort of afterlife within hogwarts after the final battle. she recalled feeling a shudder coming from under the castle and a boom before waking up. she finds out more or less that she's dead, and along with her presumably every other person at the Battle of Hogwarts, but she's given a choice by the castle's magic to rescue the castle and everyone by going back in time to take up the life of someone who had been Avada-ed—thus causing a tear in the tapestry of space-time, a tear her new thread can now be woven into—and through living their life try to figure out what happened at hogwarts and prevent its happening again, saving everyone's lives and the castle. she chooses the life of young ten-year-old Cathal Rosier, pureblood child, who was killed during an unauthorized Auror raid on the fideliused cottage where she and her mother had been hiding. the timing is perfect for hermione's purposes, with the real Cathal's murder and Hermione-Cathal's insertion occurring just a few months before the young girl was to be called to begin studies at Hogwarts. Hermione's consciousness is inserted into the young girl's body, and she wakes up in the cellar of Rose Cottage, her mother Avada-ed next to her, and smoke from fiendfyre burning around her. Cathal-Hermione cannot rely on her magic both because Cathal's body is so young as to be an immature conduit for magic and because it is not yet in accord with Granger's own magic, so she must rely on her creativity and cunning to escape, where she is immediately apprehended by the Auror running the illicit raid, who imprisons her in his home. She realizes the ceiling in the bedroom where she's trapped is merely Muggle drywall and breaks through it to escape by running along the cellar rafters and jumping through the weak ceiling material to fall out on the stair landing where she can escape out the front door. Free from the wards of the Auror's home, she is finally joined by Moppet, the house-elf companion that Hogwarts's magic had promised would serve as her guide, aide, and companion. The orphaned Cathal-Hermione receives her invitation to Hogwarts and matriculates with the same class as Ron, Harry, and the original Hermione, where Cathal-Hermione is sorted into Slytherin. all along Hermione's consciousness fully exists within Cathal's, and she must play the role of the pureblood, strategically suppressing much of Granger, to maintain her cover and over the next seven years learn the secrets of the castle while not changing too much of the timeline by which she would endanger the Golden Trio's destruction of the horcruxes and harry's defeat of Voldemort. Cathal-Hermione and Moppet grow closer through misadventure and the glut of time thrown in one another's company and learn to trust each other and cooperate, and Cathal wins her ultimate trust and devotion by teaching Moppet wizarding wand magic. As a student Cathal holds herself aloof and is an excellent scholar but never seeks the limelight, never doing more than she's required to do, spending as much time as she can exploring the warrens of the castle, which is communicating with her through a glorified Maurauders' Map of the school, which is 3-D, shows every living and ghosting being, and expands as Cathal-Hermioine explores and plots long-dormant parts of the structure that have passed out of even Hogwarts's awareness. Fairly early on Cathal befriends the hapless but cheerful Marcus Flint, who, it turns out, has been hooking up with Oliver Wood but is hiding the relationship because as a pureblood heir he must marry a pureblood witch to continue the dynasty. He and Cathal become allies of a sort: she helps him sneak out to meet Oliver for romantic rendezvous and tutors him while he protects her from Malfoy's bullying and pretends to intend to court her when she's older, giving her cover to live during the summer at his family's estate, where she can escape the guardianship of Narcissa Malfoy, her closest living relative not in
Azkaban. Over the years Cathal-Hermione slowly befriends, quiet, academic, staid Theo Nott, who by 6th year wants to court her. But, while she likes him, she holds him at arm's length because she's uncertain whether or not they'll survive the Battle of Hogwarts, and also because he occasionally expresses painful pureblood views. Leading up to 7th year, when the Carrows will torment the school, Cathal carefully prepares to help and hide as many students as possible, squirreling away food supplies, tents, camping toilets, bedding, and clothing and madly brewing as many healing and analgesic potions as she can. That summer she reaches wizarding majority and officially becomes the acting head of the Rosier family, and putative head of several others whose lines are dying out, taking charge of the Rosier estate, which since the first wizarding war had been tied up in warding curses before being taken over and neglected by the ministry. her grandmother rosier, newly escaped from azkaban upon voldemort's rise and only partially sane, is wildly, fanatically, devoted to Cathal's safety and comes to live with her, having forcibly performed blood magic on her to keep tabs on her and compel her to a type of obedience where she could. Back at Hogwarts for her 7th year, Cathal-Hermione and Moppet determine that the shuddering and boom that in the original timeline had killed her and everyone else and decimated the castle was probably some sort of magic underneath the castle triggered by a Death Eater that went awry when the acting head of school, Snape, was killed by Nagini. Cathal-Hermione obliquely hints to Snape that he might want to procure some Nagini antivenin, hoping to save his life. In the final battle, she fights to kill as many Death Eaters as she can and specifically works to save Lupin, and through him Tonks, and encourages the Weasley twins to wear helmets, thus saving Fred from his original-timeline death when a castle wall falls on him. At the end of the battle, as Harry's "corpse" is carried in by Hagrid and Voldemort and his cronies celebrate, Cathal-Hermione calls to Harry to get up and attack Voldemort, and then she invokes the magic's castle and destroys the remaining Death Eaters who hadn't Apparated away, electing instead to stand to the end with the Dark Lord—in other words, the fanatics. Cathal-Hermione awakens once again in the weird Hogwarts In Between, where the castle is distressed to tell her that Cathal's and Hermione's life threads have become so intertwined that it's impossible to untangle them, and only one thread can continue to be woven in to the tapestry: only one girl can live. Essentially, Cathal-Hermione has a choice to either die with Hermione's body or return but only ever and always as Cathal. She goes back as Cathal, still retaining Hermione's consciousness and memory of everything that has occurred up 'til now, but growing more fully into being the Cathal she is so familiar with after seven years. In the rubble of the castle, among the wounded and dead, she meets up with Theo and Marcus Flint, who had initially Flooed away from the battle with the other Slytherins and now have returned to help. Together they aid some younger Slytherins who had been in hiding during the fighting, getting them out of the castle to their parents. Cathal goes back to the Rosier estate where she finds her grandmother, maternal uncle, and grandmother's house elf dead from an unfinished dark rite her grandmother had been attempting to cast; it's ambiguous whether the grandmother had been intending to include Cathal as part of a blood sacrifice to escape a world where Voldemort has been defeated and the Death Eaters will be persecuted or the grandmother had meant to sacrifice her house-elf and her nephew as part of a protective rite to aid Cathal. The book ends.
seselt is always excellent on plot detail, world-building (or in this case, adding further dimension, history, context to the existing HP world), and action. they're also always digging deep into the lexicon and into literary, historical, and cultural roots to create allusions that sometimes elucidate the action but at the very least make everything sound a bit more poetic.
but the problems from other works remain too:
() insufficient depth of feeling (hermione feels bloodless, with greater emphasis placed on what she does than on how she interacts and feels; while it is understandable from a plot standpoint why she is so marooned from her fellow living creatures, not much life is breathed into her characterization, and she too often comes off as robotic and a tireless DOER instead of something infused with life, something visceral.)
() unresolved and shallow love interest and interpersonal relationships (the book literally ends with her looking at her grandmother's corpse, and we never find out how the wizarding world mourns hermione's death or whether or not she ever accepts theo's suit; we don't even know if she winds up in azkaban for appearing to have had death eater sympathies and hiding her criminal grandmother. while again from a plot standpoint it's explicable that the withdrawn, plotting Slytherins work through complex maneuvering and are never as gauchely blatant as the Gryffindors, theo and cathay's burgeoning affection is so muted as to practically be invisible, meaning that while i yearned to see them find connection and solace in one another it was basically impossible to. the reader gets almost no satisfaction from theo's presence in the story. cathal remains functionally emotionally isolated.)
() obfuscating wording (some poetic allusion is lovely, but it must be backed up by solid punctuation for clarity and correctitude and avoid being overblown or gimmicky: it must aid, not smother. seselt has an amazing grasp of literary and cultural history, which enriches their language and ability to add dimension to the text through thoughtful wording and subtitling, but often instead of being a delightful challenge to or treat for the reader it comes off as cumbersome and gilding the lily. i'm reminded of the exhortation to "kill your darlings"—ruthlessly scythe from your writing anything you love that does not actually serve the story.)
still, seselt is an amazing talent, and i fully intend to read everything they've written in the fandom.
UPDATE: i quickly learned that this was only part 1 of a 2-part series, and in the sequel we find out what happens with cathal and theo and see something of how cathal navigates a postwar Order mourning the death of hermione, bitterly distrusting the powerful Slytherin who somehow managed to survive the war and retain so much sway in the wizarding world. still, i say that the ending of Six Pomegranate Seeds feels much less like a cliff-hanger than a head-scratcher and needed to be carefully edited for positive effect.
FYI SPOILER: this isn't so much a romance as it is a hermione adventure, with the vaguest hints of a crush not on malfoy but theo.
hermione awakens alone in a sort of afterlife within hogwarts after the final battle. she recalled feeling a shudder coming from under the castle and a boom before waking up. she finds out more or less that she's dead, and along with her presumably every other person at the Battle of Hogwarts, but she's given a choice by the castle's magic to rescue the castle and everyone by going back in time to take up the life of someone who had been Avada-ed—thus causing a tear in the tapestry of space-time, a tear her new thread can now be woven into—and through living their life try to figure out what happened at hogwarts and prevent its happening again, saving everyone's lives and the castle. she chooses the life of young ten-year-old Cathal Rosier, pureblood child, who was killed during an unauthorized Auror raid on the fideliused cottage where she and her mother had been hiding. the timing is perfect for hermione's purposes, with the real Cathal's murder and Hermione-Cathal's insertion occurring just a few months before the young girl was to be called to begin studies at Hogwarts. Hermione's consciousness is inserted into the young girl's body, and she wakes up in the cellar of Rose Cottage, her mother Avada-ed next to her, and smoke from fiendfyre burning around her. Cathal-Hermione cannot rely on her magic both because Cathal's body is so young as to be an immature conduit for magic and because it is not yet in accord with Granger's own magic, so she must rely on her creativity and cunning to escape, where she is immediately apprehended by the Auror running the illicit raid, who imprisons her in his home. She realizes the ceiling in the bedroom where she's trapped is merely Muggle drywall and breaks through it to escape by running along the cellar rafters and jumping through the weak ceiling material to fall out on the stair landing where she can escape out the front door. Free from the wards of the Auror's home, she is finally joined by Moppet, the house-elf companion that Hogwarts's magic had promised would serve as her guide, aide, and companion. The orphaned Cathal-Hermione receives her invitation to Hogwarts and matriculates with the same class as Ron, Harry, and the original Hermione, where Cathal-Hermione is sorted into Slytherin. all along Hermione's consciousness fully exists within Cathal's, and she must play the role of the pureblood, strategically suppressing much of Granger, to maintain her cover and over the next seven years learn the secrets of the castle while not changing too much of the timeline by which she would endanger the Golden Trio's destruction of the horcruxes and harry's defeat of Voldemort. Cathal-Hermione and Moppet grow closer through misadventure and the glut of time thrown in one another's company and learn to trust each other and cooperate, and Cathal wins her ultimate trust and devotion by teaching Moppet wizarding wand magic. As a student Cathal holds herself aloof and is an excellent scholar but never seeks the limelight, never doing more than she's required to do, spending as much time as she can exploring the warrens of the castle, which is communicating with her through a glorified Maurauders' Map of the school, which is 3-D, shows every living and ghosting being, and expands as Cathal-Hermioine explores and plots long-dormant parts of the structure that have passed out of even Hogwarts's awareness. Fairly early on Cathal befriends the hapless but cheerful Marcus Flint, who, it turns out, has been hooking up with Oliver Wood but is hiding the relationship because as a pureblood heir he must marry a pureblood witch to continue the dynasty. He and Cathal become allies of a sort: she helps him sneak out to meet Oliver for romantic rendezvous and tutors him while he protects her from Malfoy's bullying and pretends to intend to court her when she's older, giving her cover to live during the summer at his family's estate, where she can escape the guardianship of Narcissa Malfoy, her closest living relative not in
Azkaban. Over the years Cathal-Hermione slowly befriends, quiet, academic, staid Theo Nott, who by 6th year wants to court her. But, while she likes him, she holds him at arm's length because she's uncertain whether or not they'll survive the Battle of Hogwarts, and also because he occasionally expresses painful pureblood views. Leading up to 7th year, when the Carrows will torment the school, Cathal carefully prepares to help and hide as many students as possible, squirreling away food supplies, tents, camping toilets, bedding, and clothing and madly brewing as many healing and analgesic potions as she can. That summer she reaches wizarding majority and officially becomes the acting head of the Rosier family, and putative head of several others whose lines are dying out, taking charge of the Rosier estate, which since the first wizarding war had been tied up in warding curses before being taken over and neglected by the ministry. her grandmother rosier, newly escaped from azkaban upon voldemort's rise and only partially sane, is wildly, fanatically, devoted to Cathal's safety and comes to live with her, having forcibly performed blood magic on her to keep tabs on her and compel her to a type of obedience where she could. Back at Hogwarts for her 7th year, Cathal-Hermione and Moppet determine that the shuddering and boom that in the original timeline had killed her and everyone else and decimated the castle was probably some sort of magic underneath the castle triggered by a Death Eater that went awry when the acting head of school, Snape, was killed by Nagini. Cathal-Hermione obliquely hints to Snape that he might want to procure some Nagini antivenin, hoping to save his life. In the final battle, she fights to kill as many Death Eaters as she can and specifically works to save Lupin, and through him Tonks, and encourages the Weasley twins to wear helmets, thus saving Fred from his original-timeline death when a castle wall falls on him. At the end of the battle, as Harry's "corpse" is carried in by Hagrid and Voldemort and his cronies celebrate, Cathal-Hermione calls to Harry to get up and attack Voldemort, and then she invokes the magic's castle and destroys the remaining Death Eaters who hadn't Apparated away, electing instead to stand to the end with the Dark Lord—in other words, the fanatics. Cathal-Hermione awakens once again in the weird Hogwarts In Between, where the castle is distressed to tell her that Cathal's and Hermione's life threads have become so intertwined that it's impossible to untangle them, and only one thread can continue to be woven in to the tapestry: only one girl can live. Essentially, Cathal-Hermione has a choice to either die with Hermione's body or return but only ever and always as Cathal. She goes back as Cathal, still retaining Hermione's consciousness and memory of everything that has occurred up 'til now, but growing more fully into being the Cathal she is so familiar with after seven years. In the rubble of the castle, among the wounded and dead, she meets up with Theo and Marcus Flint, who had initially Flooed away from the battle with the other Slytherins and now have returned to help. Together they aid some younger Slytherins who had been in hiding during the fighting, getting them out of the castle to their parents. Cathal goes back to the Rosier estate where she finds her grandmother, maternal uncle, and grandmother's house elf dead from an unfinished dark rite her grandmother had been attempting to cast; it's ambiguous whether the grandmother had been intending to include Cathal as part of a blood sacrifice to escape a world where Voldemort has been defeated and the Death Eaters will be persecuted or the grandmother had meant to sacrifice her house-elf and her nephew as part of a protective rite to aid Cathal. The book ends.
seselt is always excellent on plot detail, world-building (or in this case, adding further dimension, history, context to the existing HP world), and action. they're also always digging deep into the lexicon and into literary, historical, and cultural roots to create allusions that sometimes elucidate the action but at the very least make everything sound a bit more poetic.
but the problems from other works remain too:
() insufficient depth of feeling (hermione feels bloodless, with greater emphasis placed on what she does than on how she interacts and feels; while it is understandable from a plot standpoint why she is so marooned from her fellow living creatures, not much life is breathed into her characterization, and she too often comes off as robotic and a tireless DOER instead of something infused with life, something visceral.)
() unresolved and shallow love interest and interpersonal relationships (the book literally ends with her looking at her grandmother's corpse, and we never find out how the wizarding world mourns hermione's death or whether or not she ever accepts theo's suit; we don't even know if she winds up in azkaban for appearing to have had death eater sympathies and hiding her criminal grandmother. while again from a plot standpoint it's explicable that the withdrawn, plotting Slytherins work through complex maneuvering and are never as gauchely blatant as the Gryffindors, theo and cathay's burgeoning affection is so muted as to practically be invisible, meaning that while i yearned to see them find connection and solace in one another it was basically impossible to. the reader gets almost no satisfaction from theo's presence in the story. cathal remains functionally emotionally isolated.)
() obfuscating wording (some poetic allusion is lovely, but it must be backed up by solid punctuation for clarity and correctitude and avoid being overblown or gimmicky: it must aid, not smother. seselt has an amazing grasp of literary and cultural history, which enriches their language and ability to add dimension to the text through thoughtful wording and subtitling, but often instead of being a delightful challenge to or treat for the reader it comes off as cumbersome and gilding the lily. i'm reminded of the exhortation to "kill your darlings"—ruthlessly scythe from your writing anything you love that does not actually serve the story.)
still, seselt is an amazing talent, and i fully intend to read everything they've written in the fandom.
UPDATE: i quickly learned that this was only part 1 of a 2-part series, and in the sequel we find out what happens with cathal and theo and see something of how cathal navigates a postwar Order mourning the death of hermione, bitterly distrusting the powerful Slytherin who somehow managed to survive the war and retain so much sway in the wizarding world. still, i say that the ending of Six Pomegranate Seeds feels much less like a cliff-hanger than a head-scratcher and needed to be carefully edited for positive effect.
September 9, 2022
I absolutely ADORE morally grey / darkish Hermione fics. Theo/Hermione is also excellent. Add in theoretical explanations of magic, and I'm obsessed with this fic. I heavily procrastinated an assignment to finish this. Would definitely read again when I'm not stressed about a deadline.
Sept. 2022 Update:
5.5/5 stars
Just reread this fic and it really does hold up I love it. Yes it does get a little sidetracked when talking about side characters but the author makes it work.
Sept. 2022 Update:
5.5/5 stars
Just reread this fic and it really does hold up I love it. Yes it does get a little sidetracked when talking about side characters but the author makes it work.
February 7, 2023
Hermione goes back, but not as herself. Time travel fix it from a Slytherin POV. She really gets into character but is always detectable as herself from the reader’s point of view. Refreshing take on an old idea. Not everything can be fixed, but this is a great story!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews