            The sky was inky blue by the time Hermione decided to call it a night. She sat at one of the front tables, stacks of books beside each elbow. Snapping her last pick of the evening, Tales of the Great Romanian Necromancer, closed, Hermione leaned back and pinched her chin. This particular tome described the author’s invention of and experiment with a potion that replicated the sensation of death. According to Florin Alexe The Great, as the seventeenth century wizard called himself, the potion had been created as a means of torture. Victims would feel themselves whisked off to a blissful place Alexe called "The Last Hallway," only to be jerked awake once the potion wore off. One account even described the use of the potion during intimacy in order to subdue an unwilling partner. Hermione had stopped reading at that point, sickened.