WOW! Your Awesomeness, this must be the most detailed feedback I've ever received for ANY of my stories and I humbly thank thee for your time and your kind words!

We all knew where this story eventually would end, so it really didn't lack the depictions of those horrible dying scenes. What more important was that I wanted to form a picture in the reader about the loving, caring woman and mother Aranrhod Lovegood once was; how much impact her early death caused in Luna and how much she had missed her ever since.

You are a very attentive reader and point out things about my own story I would have never suspected. For example, about what one needs in order to be able to see a Thestral. I always figured it's enough to see a dead person, turns out it isn't!

I simply HAD to throw in Gred and Forge; from canon we know the two families lived nearby so it was just appropriate for the children that they would know each other and in fact spend time, play, or simply hang around together. Another thing I remembered only after having read your reviews is Luna's Patronus. It completely skipped my attention that it was a hare. I simply thought she would be one to love rabbits for pets. And yes, do call your Mum everyday and tell her how you love her! 

Luna definitely has a soft spot in my heart and Shadowlands is greatly based on her as the main antagonist. In fact, this little one-shot was born while writing one of the recent chapters of Shadowlands.

We know that Luna's Mum did love experimenting with Magic. I always imagined Luna having inherited her features from her mother; with her fair complexity I imagined she would be Irish, that would fit her doing Druid magic. The language she teaches to Luna is Irish Gaelic.

I'm really glad to have been able to entertain you with this story and I hope you will enjoy my other works as well, if you like controversy, that is.

As you know, this is a spinoff story, based on the latest (so far) chapter of Shadowlands. I simply couldn't help but pen down this small story about someone we never really knew.

Another story of this kind you might want to read is "The Beginning of all Beginnings".

So sorry for having caused the depletion of your Kleenex stock :D

You're absolutely right. We know the end result. The purpose of this story was to show how our cherished worlds can fall apart just like that, how we can lose everything we consider dear to our hearts.

Thanks for your kind words and your review; I'm glad you liked it.

Thank you Carl, for this marvellous review. From the pen of the biggest Luna Lovegood fan around, this means a lot to me! Thanks to you, Luna quickly became one of my most favourite characters :D

The idea for this story came while writing the latest chapter of Shadowlands. The two appear there as well, and I had fun writing that one, so I decided "why not?"

You are completely right. Pick a character, give or take a few seemingly unimportant traits and your character is completely yours. That IS the power of fanfic. We all see the world with different eyes, hence the differences in our interpretations of these characters. I made Luna deliberately "normal" here; a few traits of canon-Luna must have evolved as a result of her personal tragedy, losing her mother so young. For me, depicting the tragedy itself wasn't that important. I wanted the difference in the serenity of the before and the grief-struck existence of the after. The contrast.

I'm praying that you finally get to DFK, I'm aching to read it further! Anything I could help with?