"A man doth not build his virtue in summer alone.
Cold months demand cold hands,
and cold hands, given time, do become most capable."
Common saying, no attributed source
The students returned on the fifth of January.
I watched them come in from the entrance hall, having finished hauling a load of firewood up from the side courtyard and having nothing else assigned until after the midday meal. The main doors opened in batches, letting in gray light and cold air with each group, coats damp at the shoulders, boots wet from the road, the general smell of travel and winter on everything. Groups of students huddled together as they walked, lost in animated discussion about something that had happened over the break. A cluster of Gryffindors who had clearly resumed an argument somewhere on the journey and were still going at it by the time they pushed through the doors.
The castle, which had been quiet enough over the break that I could hear my own footsteps echo in the upper corridors, filled up inside in less than two hours.
I'm already starting to miss the quiet life we had enjoyed over the break. We ate at one long table in the Great Hall regardless of house, and the professors on duty were nowhere to be seen apart from the meal times. It was quieter than normal school life and considerably less comfortable, since the kitchens reduced their output when fewer mouths needed feeding, and the heating was maintained in the dormitories and the main common areas and nowhere else. I spent most of the break in the third-floor classroom with my pine boards and my notebook, working by candlelight when the window gave out around midafternoon, and sleeping a great deal more than I usually did.
It had been a productive twelve days, which was all I had outside of working hours, where I had written a substantial number of pages and carved a substantial number of boards, which was not necessarily the same thing. When I say substantial, I mean the boards could have been used to create something the size of a pillow fort or a lincoln-log building. Oooh, that might be a fun idea. That stray thought aside, I may have gotten into a groove (see what I did there) carving my runes so hopefully I can begin on some of the more exciting projects I've thought of.
As I was thinking to myself, Thomas came through the door with Eleanor beside him, both of them red from the cold and loaded with their things. Thomas spotted me across the entrance hall and made a face I interpreted as you stayed here the whole time, didn't you? I gave him a shrug that meant yes, obviously. He shook his head with the expression of someone who finds another person's choices simultaneously baffling and unsurprising, and they both went off toward the dormitory.
Margaret came in last, or nearly last, in a group of three or four students I didn't recognize. She had a canvas bag over one shoulder and was wearing a heavier cloak than she had left with, which told me that at least part of the holiday had gone reasonably. She saw me from about ten feet away, said nothing, and fell into step beside me as I turned back toward the lower corridor.
"Thou art well," she said. It was not quite a question but more like an inquiry with half a question mark. Just a lot harder to tell with all the old English words and norms.
"More or less. Nothing's changed besides the increased noise and people, a bit livelier is all."
The January work assignments were harder than the autumn ones.
Work before the break had included things like hauling supplies, sweeping corridors, assisting in the laundry and kitchen, useful tasks, real tasks, but not particularly demanding in terms of physical effort. The January list was different. The cold had done things to the castle and the grounds that needed addressing before they got worse, and the students assigned to manual work were the ones addressing them.
The inner courtyard was my first assignment of the new term, the morning after the students returned. Ice had formed over the paving stones during a cold snap in late December and then partly thawed and refrozen into a surface approximately the texture and reliability of soap. Two flagstones near the north wall had cracked from the freeze pressure, probably caused by water in the cracks expanding when frozen, widening the cracks throughout the winter.
The snow that had accumulated on the flat parapet ledges had packed down and was now working its way under the stonework joints by the same water-ice-expansion process that ruins roads. All of it needed dealing with.
They gave us iron-shod wooden mallets for breaking ice, and long-handled scrapers for clearing it, and wheelbarrows for the removed material, which they apparently wanted moved to a designated pile near the groundskeeper's building rather than dispersed somehow. I asked Owen Thatcher about this logic on the first morning and he told me, without much elaboration, that the pile melted on its own by March and the meltwater drained properly, and that the castle did not require my suggestions on the matter.
I still wished they would teach us or invent some kind of spell for this crap. The fact many spells don't exist currently, or rather remain undiscovered, is appalling to me. Not even lumos, a simple light on your wand, but I digress. It'll just have to be something I focus on, maybe once my transfiguration improves I can use it to skip the manual part of manual labor.
I worked beside a second-year Hufflepuff named Hugh, who had a quiet, methodical approach to the scraping that I recognized as someone who had done this before and made his peace with the fact that it would take however long it took. We didn't talk much, the kind of silence created when you stop thinking and mindlessly do a task. It was like when you play a certain block game and go mining with a friend, the companionable silence only guys get.
The noise of iron on stone and the cold made conversation more effort than it was worth. My fingers went numb inside their gloves in the first twenty minutes and stayed that way. The ice came up in chunks near the wall where it was thick and in flat sheets where it had spread across the courtyard flagstones, and the wheelbarrow filled faster than I expected. Moving it to the pile and bringing it back empty was the only part of the work that kept me adequately warm.
In my previous life, there was a freeze which caused power outages and my marvelous father had a wonderful idea to go around town, finding fallen trees, cutting them into logs, and bringing them back to the house to split them. We sold the split timber, but let me tell you, having to split a log frozen, most of them with ice that had made a solid covering on the wood overnight, was a tortuous experience. I was lucky enough to be the weak one in the group and thus, was not expected to contribute to the laborious task of slamming the axe into the iced-over logs. Thankfully, I escaped after two days of this because a friend invited me to his house which had power. Anyways~ back to my medieval magical life!
By the time we finished, late morning, my shoulders were sore and my arms tired from a particular combination of angling and force that the scraper demanded, not exactly the same muscles as anything else I typically used, and there was grime from the broken ice and the wet stone ground into the cuffs of my gloves and the knees of my breeches from where I had knelt to work a stubborn patch near the drain channel. I looked and felt like I had been doing something, which I had been to be fair. That was satisfying in a concrete way that an afternoon of reading was not. Was this the legendary post-workout soreness that brings an odd sense of pleasure and fulfillment?
The firewood assignment came two days later. The woodpile behind the groundskeeper's building was stacked against the outer wall, and several of the lower-stacked sections had gotten wet from the freeze-thaw cycle and then frozen again in a way that meant the logs were bonded together and had to be broken apart before they could be moved. It was heavy, cold, and produced an impressive amount of bark dust and ice chips in one's clothing regardless of how carefully one attempted to avoid it. I hauled wood with Eleanor that morning, who turned out to be stronger than she looked and considerably more efficient at stacking than I was, my arms too sore from the morning had started to shake and wobble from the weights.
"Thou hast done this before," I said.
"My father's trade was timber work," she said, and left it there. Jeez, tough crowd, am I right?
The stonework was the strangest of the three. A section of the outer wall along the east face had developed a crack in the joint between two large facing stones, not structural, Owen assured us, just the pointing compound that filled the joint, which the frost had expanded and contracted until it cracked and crumbled out. The repair was straightforward: mix new mortar compound from the materials provided, pack it into the joint, smooth it, and let it cure. The difficult part was doing any of this with hands that had lost most of their fine motor precision to the cold, using a trowel that wanted to slide rather than press, on a vertical surface four feet above the ground so that every bit of excess mortar that didn't go where it was supposed to went directly onto one's upturned face.
Thomas was the one who pointed out that I had mortar in my hair.
"Thank you, Thomas. I appreciate that observation."
"Thou art welcome," he said, with the complete sincerity of someone who cannot tell when he is being given an ironic response. I swear, if I had said 'Thank you Captain Obvious', he probably would've replied he was in fact not a captain.
The chimney cleaning was the last and worst. I had been told it was not really chimney cleaning, that the official name for what I would be doing was soot management above the first fireplace fitting, which did not meaningfully change what it involved. There was a tool with a long flexible handle and a circular brush head at one end, and you pushed it up from the hearth into the flue, and you worked it back and forth, and what came down was soot, in volumes that suggested the flue had not been seen to in some time, in a fine black powder that settled on everything within a radius I had not anticipated and which did not come off clothing by rubbing and only partially came off skin by washing. I cleaned three fireplaces that week. By the end of the first one I had given up trying to keep my face clean and simply accepted the situation. Okay, scourgify is now on the list of things to learn.
Also, I just realized the floo was a play on words by Rowling and whichever character created it because a flue is simply the air space/passageway for smoke in a chimney. I don't know if this was lazy or ingenious, but man did that woman like a play-on-words.
The older students who saw me in the corridors that week, covered in some combination of ice grime, mortar dust, and chimney soot depending on the day, reacted in varying ways. Most just registered my existence and moved on. A few gave me a look I interpreted as better you than me, a medieval Draco Malfoy if you will. Aldous Fenn, the second-year Ravenclaw who had talked to me once about woodcarving earlier in the year, saw me one afternoon and said, with what I thought was genuine appreciation, "Thou dost accumulate occupation remarkably thoroughly," which was completely incomprehensible to me, so I just nodded and moved along. Seriously, what does 'accumulate occupation' even mean? And I thought modern english was bad.
Class resumed shortly with charms class on Tuesday. Professor Ashford had arranged the room differently than the previous term, the desks pushed into a rough semicircle rather than rows, with himself standing in the center where he could see everyone's wand work without moving. He was patient in a way that seemed constitutionally rooted rather than performed, the kind of patience that doesn't track how many times it has explained the same thing because it genuinely does not keep that count.
"The warming charm," he said, "is among the oldest spells in common use, attested in records predating Hogwarts itself. Its function is to raise the surface temperature of an object or a small region of air by redirecting ambient thermal energy inward. It doth not generate heat from nothing. It concentrateth what is already present." He wrote the incantation on the board. Calfaciō. "The motion is a slow spiral, inward, beginning at the object's edge and tightening toward the center. Thou art describing the direction thou wouldst have the energy to move."
He demonstrated on a small iron disc lying on a stand. The disc warmed visibly after a moment, a slight shimmer in the air immediately above the metal surface.
"Practice upon thy stone discs, if thou wilt. Note that stone doth hold charm-heat less efficiently than metal. Thou shalt need to sustain the motion longer before thou feel any result."
Finally! That sadistic mediwitch who made me, a poor pitiable little boy, walk through the cold with naught but a cloak and pants is going to have her comeuppance! I can't believe the warming charm is a first-year spell and she had the nerve to not cast one on me. Stewing in my plan for vengeance, I worked through the exercise and got something on the third attempt a faint warmth in the stone, distinguishable from the normal temperature of a surface sitting in a heated room. The basic principle was there: the motion described the path, and the path determined what moved and where.
The binding thread charm was the most unexpected of the spells we'd been taught so far, and the one I found most genuinely interesting.
It was a Thursday, and Ashford had brought a collection of torn fabric scraps, different materials, linen and wool and one piece of rough canvas laid out on the front desk. The charm was old, predating modern mending spells (like reparo) by several centuries, and it worked through a different mechanism than what general mending magic would eventually develop into. Where later mending magic would reconstruct the original material, this charm gathered the existing threads and wove them back against each other, which worked on fabric and similar fibrous materials and on almost nothing else. The incantation was Connecto and the wand motion was a figure-eight that pulled tight at the crossing point.
I still don't get why we can't just say connect, and get the same outcome but the professor explained the name for the spell is learned and associated with the spell effects whereas the words we use everyday may have varying or non-concrete meanings in our minds, thus distorting intent. Let's put it on the list of things to do because his explanation is going ~fwoosh, right over my head.
On wool, it worked. The torn edge drew together and the fibers knit back against each other with a slightly raised seam visible at the mend, thicker than the surrounding cloth by perhaps half a thread's width, but holding. On linen the result was rougher, the fibers less forgiving, and the seam lumped slightly if your motion at the crossing hadn't been clean. On canvas it barely registered. The material had too little give in its weave.
I spent the rest of the lesson trying it on different sections of the wool scraps with different speeds of motion, because the question of what the speed was actually doing to the mechanism interested me more than simply getting a clean mend. Slower crossing seemed to produce tighter seams but more distortion in the surrounding cloth. Faster crossing produced a lighter joint. The crossing speed appeared to determine how hard the threads were pulled against each other, which had the same effect as thread tension in ordinary weaving too tight and the cloth puckered, too loose and the join didn't hold.
I wrote that in my notebook that evening. Then I stared at it for a while, because I had just mapped a magical mechanism onto a mechanical principle I already understood from a different domain, and I needed to think about whether that was actually informative or whether I was pattern-matching onto a coincidence. It took me until the following day to decide that it was probably informative, conditionally, and that I needed more data before drawing any conclusions.
The Transfiguration work that term was early object-to-object transformation. Professor Crane who I suspected had drawn the short straw at some faculty meeting and ended up teaching Transfiguration on top of her Curses and Countercurses load set the first exercise as a small lead disc to a copper one. Same shape, same size, change of material. The principle she explained was essentially pattern substitution: thou holdest the existing structure of the object in thy mind, thou substitutest the properties of the target material in the conceptual layer, and thou castest. The casting itself was almost secondary, she said, a formalization of what the mind had already decided.
She said this in the tone of someone who knew it was more complicated than that and was choosing to simplify for the sake of starting somewhere reasonable.
I got partial results in the first week: the disc changed color and developed a slight variation in surface texture but did not change material in any measurable way the weight was the same, and it left no copper mark on the testing stone. By the second week I had something that changed weight, heavier, the wrong direction for lead-to-copper, which Professor Crane said indicated I was importing copper properties in the wrong order. "Thou art sequencing the properties wrongly," she told me. "Consider what the substance is before thou considerest what it doth." I adjusted, and by the third week had a result that was at least partially copper, with the right surface color and the right mark on the testing stone, though the weight was still off by a margin that suggested the interior wasn't fully converted.
The crude concealment charm was offered as an elective exercise for students who were ahead on the main curriculum. Professor Crane apparently operated on the principle that students who expressed specific interest in something were allowed to attempt it regardless of where they stood in the standard sequence. The charm produced a visual damping effect: it did not make you invisible, it made you less registerable to the eye, specifically by dimming the contrast between your silhouette and whatever was behind you. "'Tis no true concealment," she said when she described it. "Thou art persuading the eye to pass over thee, no more. It will not serve thee in strong light, nor when any man is actively seeking thee." She described it as a first cousin of several better-developed concealment charms and said nothing encouraging about its practical limits.
It was harder than the warming charm and easier than the Transfiguration work, which told me something about which skill sets it drew on. The result, when I got it, was visible to me in a small hand mirror I borrowed from the washroom I could see that my outline was slightly harder to read against the stone wall behind me, the edges softening in a way that was perceptible if you were looking for it and might plausibly be missed if you weren't.
Thomas, when I demonstrated it in the common room, said, "Thou art not invisible."
"I know."
"Thou art barely less visible."
"I know that too."
He looked at it for another moment. "It is still rather impressive," he said, which from Thomas was the same as elaborate praise, and I accepted it as such.
The magic-as-capacity explanation came from Professor Ashford, in a session in late January that began as a discussion of why the Luminis working made some students more tired than others.
He had noticed that the students who lost the light most frequently were also the ones who looked most drained afterward, while a few students who had struggled to produce light at all seemed physically unaffected. He began the explanation by writing two words on the board: capacity and expenditure.
"Magic is not a fuel," he said. "It is a capacity an ability that a wizard possesseth, as a body possesseth strength. Thou dost not spend it as thou wouldst spend a coin. Thou dost exert it as thou dost exert effort. And as with effort, the limit is not the amount available but the rate at which thy capacity can sustain that exertion."
He paused, looking at the class.
"Consider: a man of considerable physical strength may carry a heavy load for some distance. He doth not do so because he possesseth a store of strength-substance that depleteth as he walks. He doth so because his muscles are capable of sustained exertion at a certain level. The capacity is his; the exertion is the work he doth with it. When he tires, his muscles are not empty. They are fatigued. They can still lift, still carry, but less effectively, and if he pushes past the fatigue he risks injury."
He turned back to the board and wrote: Capacity determines maximum. Fatigue determines practical limit.
"This is how magic worketh. A witch or wizard of great capacity doth not have more magic than another. They have a higher ceiling for what their exertion can sustain, and a higher threshold before fatigue impaireth their performance. What feeleth like the running-out of magic is fatigue. The capacity hath not diminished. The body hath."
He let that settle.
"This is important for what cometh next, because the spells we shall introduce in the upper years require sustained exertion over time. A student who hath spent the morning's work on three demanding castings and then attempteth a fourth will produce inferior results not because the fourth spell is beyond their ability, but because the fatigue of the first three hath reduced the quality of their exertion."
The implication was obvious and I was surprised nobody else appeared to immediately see it, though possibly they did and simply didn't remark on it. If magic was a capacity rather than a fuel, then it could be trained the same way any physical capacity could be trained. Controlled load and recovery, Progressive demand and increasing capabilities. The same principles that govern any kind of physical conditioning. You couldn't pour more magic into someone by studying harder. But you could, presumably, develop the capacity over time by using it at the edge of one's comfortable range and allowing recovery, just as you built muscle or wind.
I underlined the note and kept listening.
The kitchen experiment was a Thursday evening in the second week of February, which was late enough in the day that the house-elves had finished the main meal service and were occupied with cleaning and preparation for the following morning, and early enough that the probability of running into a professor in the lower passages was tolerably low.
I want to clarify that I was not sneaking. I was making use of a route that was not prohibited, during hours that were not restricted, to access a space that was not formally off-limits to students, to request food that was entirely within the bounds of what the elves normally provided to students who asked. The only reason anyone would call this sneaking is that I did it quietly and at an unconventional hour, which is not the same thing.
The Hufflepuff common room's relationship with the kitchens was, by design, convenient. I let myself into the passage, went through, and found the kitchen in its post-supper state: warm, heavily lit by the hearth and by a row of floating candle-holders the elves had arranged over the main work surfaces, smelling of bread and the remains of whatever root vegetable had featured in tonight's soup.
Several elves stopped what they were doing and looked at me. The oldest of them, a small elf with large ears and a neatly folded cloth pinned at the shoulder in the manner they all used, came forward.
"What is it young student be wanting?" she said.
"I had a question," I said, "and also a request, if you're willing."
"Binky is listening," she said.
I explained what I was after. I had been thinking about this for three weeks and had prepared the explanation carefully: a type of food I knew from before, that I was attempting to recreate as closely as the available materials allowed, and that I needed some assistance with since certain key ingredients either did not exist here or existed only in forms I had not been able to locate. I described the basic structure: a flat bread base, something on top of it, and a layer of melted cheese.
Binky listened with complete attention and a slight tilt of the head that I associated with careful processing.
"Student is describing a kind of tart?" she said.
"Similar. The bread is thinner and it goes in an oven quite hot. The toppings are applied before it goes in, not after."
"And what toppings is it student be wanting?"
This was the hard part. The tomato-based sauce that was the modern standard for the thing I was trying to make did not exist here in any practical sense. Tomatoes were known; I had heard them mentioned in the context of continental curiosities but they were not grown in Scotland in February, and the preserved versions available were not in the kitchen stores because nobody here ate them regularly or with any particular enthusiasm. They had a reputation in England in this period as potentially poisonous, which was not entirely without historical basis, and this reputation had not yet been effectively contradicted.
I was therefore trying to make a pizza without tomato sauce.
"Garlic in oil," I said. "As a base. And then dried mushrooms , do you have them?"
"Dried mushrooms, yes," said Binky.
"Hard cheese, grated, as fine as possible. Some herbs like rosemary and thyme. And some onions cut into small squares, cooked down first until soft."
Binky turned to two of the other elves without any visible communication that I could perceive, and they began moving. The dough came together faster than I expected, though considering these were house-elves, and the preparation that would have taken me forty minutes took them perhaps seven, I really shouldn't have been surprised. I watched the dough portioned and rolled out, thinner than the elves appeared to consider standard for a flatbread, and set on a flat iron plate.
I assembled the toppings in the order I remembered. Garlic and oil first, spread thin. Mushrooms, which had been reconstituted in warm water and then patted dry. The onion, which they had cooked in a small pan with a little butter until it was soft and slightly golden. The cheese last, grated coarse enough that it would melt rather than just sit on the surface.
It went into the oven on the iron plate and now we wait.
What came out was not exactly pizza. The bread was denser than I was used to, the mushrooms more prominent in flavor without the tomato acidity to balance them, the cheese different in texture more like a melted aged cheddar than mozzarella, which was a reasonable substitute given what was available but not quite the same thing. The overall effect was recognizable in structure and genuinely good by the standards of what I had eaten for the past year, which admittedly was a lower bar than I would have preferred.
The elves examined it with attention that was clearly professional in origin; they were evaluating the technique, not being polite about it.
"Student's method is most unusual," Binky said.
"It's from somewhere else. Far away."
"The cheese is applied unmelted and then heat is used to melt it in place. Yes." She looked at it again. "Binky thinks this could be done with a better result if the bread were thinner at the center. The heat doth not reach the middle quickly enough with this thickness."
"I think you're right," I said, "Maybe we should try a kind of cheese based sauce next time?"
I ate two pieces there in the kitchen, standing at the work counter because there was nowhere to sit that didn't obstruct someone, and brought the rest back in a cloth in case Margaret was still awake.
She was. She tried a piece, chewed it, and said, "What manner of thing is this?"
"Something I was working on."
"It is strange," she said. "And yet I find I want another piece."
"You know what, I'll take it."
"Thou will take the food?"
"Uhhh.. that isn't what I meant. I meant that your response was.. satisfactory enough not to cause disappointment."
"I see." though it was obvious she had written it off as one of my quirks.
The rune work evolved in February in a direction I had not planned for in the fall but I believed it to be worth the investment.
The muscle-stimulation question had started as a theoretical note following the magic-capacity lesson: if runes channeled ambient magic through a substrate, and if Mannaz governed human influence while Tiwaz governed directed force, then a combination of the two in an appropriate sequence with Thurisaz as a force output should, in principle, be capable of producing a controlled muscular contraction in whatever limb it was attached to. The theory was straightforward. It was essentially a magical version of the electrical muscle stimulation that physical therapists used in rehabilitation work, not something I had personally experienced but something I knew existed, understood in principle, and had considered in terms of rune logic.
I did not want to test this on myself immediately, because a rune circuit applied to human tissue that failed in the wrong direction could plausibly cause cramping, localized damage, or some other outcome I did not want to experience at first hand. I spent three weeks building increasingly precise circuits on pine boards first, testing the force output at the Thurisaz terminal against a small spring balance I had borrowed from the Charms supply cabinet for an afternoon, calibrating the channel dimensions until the output was consistent and predictable. When I could reliably produce a force at the terminal rune that was measurable and controlled, no sudden spikes, and no feedback vibration I considered the circuit ready for a controlled test.
I carved the test circuit onto a small square of cured leather from the cobbling supplies, which was more appropriate as a substrate for skin contact than pine. The circuit was small, about the size of my thumb, intended to go against the forearm. Fehu as the power source, Mannaz as the human-influence condition, Tiwaz as the directed-force operation, Thurisaz at the terminal with a Concordia logic gate between Mannaz and Tiwaz to require both conditions to be present before the force output is engaged. I enclosed the circuit in a circular boundary, checked the channel depths against my calibrated standard for this effect level, and added an Isa rune at the terminal enclosure as a damping element: the dormant state designation from the runic text which I intended as an automatic limiting factor if the output began to exceed a set threshold.
I pressed my thumb to the Fehu rune and held it against my forearm.
The contraction was in my arm, roughly the muscle along the top of the forearm that lifts the wrist. It was controlled and it was limited and it was unmistakably a contraction rather than a cramp, which was the critical distinction I had been hoping for. It would've been unfortunate if it had caused cramping, unless if I wanted a rather unusual torture device.
My wrist lifted about two inches against the resistance of its own weight and held for the duration of the activation, then released cleanly when I removed my thumb. No residual tension or lingering discomfort and the Isa damping had actually held without issue, a first for once.
I held it against my forearm again and released three times, observing the result, then sat very still for several minutes considering all the things that could have gone wrong and had not. So I had essentially created a magical shock-therapy that would simulate natural muscle contractions. It was a strap-on workout (don't even think of something else, I see you!), just activate and your arm is put through a magical workout, though I will have to be careful to turn it off.
Which is an issue because when working out or in manual labor, as your muscles tire you naturally cannot continue on without true will but if you fall asleep with the MAW (magically artificial workout), patent-pending, then your muscles would be shocked into atrophy or cellular death. I ain't a gym-ologist or biologist but even I can guess this.
So naturally, if I can have a lazy man's workout for my body, can I do the same for my magical capacity? And so, a new experiment started. The mana-flow rune was harder and more theoretical and I was considerably less confident about it.
The concept was different. Where the muscle circuit imposed a physical effect on a physical substrate, this one was intended to interact with the caster's own magical perception heightening the sensitivity with which I could detect ambient magic, which I hoped would eventually give me a better instrument for measuring what the other rune circuits were actually doing. If I could tell the difference between a rune circuit actively channeling magic and one that was dormant, I would have at least a qualitative sensing tool.
The relevant rune was Magus, the sensing rune for magical energy, combined with Fehu as the power source and Uruz as an amplification element to strengthen the Magus signal. The logic was that the amplified sensing rune, applied to my own wand-hand, would increase the sensitivity of my natural magical perception by forcing more ambient magic through the same channels I was already using.
The risk I was aware of was feedback. Uruz amplified magical flow. If the amplification was too high, the signal would exceed whatever my natural sensitivity was calibrated for, and I had no reliable way to predict what happened after that. I had seen rune overload crack pine boards. I had no desire to find out what the equivalent effect was in a human forearm.
I set the amplification pathway conservative, with channel dimensions on the narrow side, and added Nauthiz as a constraint element between the Uruz and the Magus, which the text described as a need or restraint function and which I used here as a deliberate choke on the amplification level.
The first test produced exactly nothing. The second produced a faint sensation which I could not precisely describe, like an awareness of the lit candle on the desk as more present than it had been, as though the heat of it were registering slightly more completely, which might have been the rune working or might have been a suggestion. The third test produced something I was fairly confident was real: I could feel my own wand, sitting on the desk six inches from my arm, in a way I had never felt it before. The wand was just a physical object from the outside. But with the circuit active it had a quality to it that I did not have a word for yet, something that was to ordinary physical presence what temperature is to touch a category of information that I had not previously had a sense for.
I held the activation for thirty seconds and released it, because thirty seconds of something I could not measure or predict seemed like a reasonable limit for a first successful result.
My notes from that session were longer than usual and considerably less systematic, because the sensation was difficult to describe in any language I trusted. I wrote several attempts and crossed most of them out and ended with: Rune appears to work. Effect produces awareness of wand as magically distinct from other objects. Not painful, no cramp, no feedback. Duration: 30 seconds. Do not increase amplification until I can determine where the safe ceiling is. Consider adding Mora delay element to force a pause between activations.
Wait a minute; hold on. I might be over-engineering this. If magical capacity can simply be increased by magic being used and expelled from the body, what if I created a feedback loop that drains my magic and then feeds it back into me after draining. If all that's required is regular magic consumption for my MP to increase, all I need is a way to fill my MP up, like a mana potion. But if I can just store magic externally to the max and take it back in from the external storage, I should theoretically be able to have a perpetual motion machine as a magical workout, a PMW (Perpetual Magical Workout), another patent pending marvel.
And so, the grind continues to realize this wondrous dream, a life where I don't get out of bed but still get a peak physique. I can see it now: a wand in one hand and a bludgeon in the other, summoning natural disasters with a never-ending supply of magic and bashing in heads with a musculature to make Hercules jealous. Mwahahahaha! Cough cough, back to work, Nick, it ain't gonna get itself done.
Letters arrived unevenly through January and February, the post owls coming in the morning as usual but in numbers that varied more than the term before. The news they carried, as it filtered through the common room by the usual routes of overheard conversation and the gossip Margaret had a facility for collecting without appearing to pursue, was not uniformly comfortable.
There had been trouble in the midlands. Muggle conflicts, a phrase I heard from two different Hufflepuff sixth years on separate occasions without either of them specifying what that meant exactly, only that it was not the ordinary kind and had required certain families to relocate. A third-year Ravenclaw whose uncle apparently worked in some administrative capacity for the Wizengamot's regional council told his friends that the council had dispatched surveyors to three sites and received no reply from one of them. This last piece of information traveled through the common room in about six hours and gained several details I suspected were invented along the way, as such things do.
The goblin news was different and specifically enough repeated that I took it more seriously. Goblin movements northward, was how the older students phrased it the kind of phrasing that assumed the listener already knew why northward was significant, and that I had not yet worked out. I considered asking Margaret, who had a better intuition for which questions were worth asking of whom, and decided to wait and see if the next letter post clarified anything. It did not. Neither did the one after that.
What I had by the end of February was an impression, assembled from fragments, that the world outside the castle walls was doing something that the people inside were monitoring without discussing directly. There was no single event I could point to. There was a general lowering of informational temperature, the way a room becomes quieter when something has happened and no one wants to be the one to say it first.
I mentioned this to Margaret on a Sunday evening while she was reviewing her Potions notes and I was working on a rune diagram in the margin of my notebook.
She considered it for a moment. "The elder students do not speak of it before us," she said.
"I noticed."
"Which doth mean they hold it unsuitable for our hearing, or they have been bidden say nothing."
"Or both," I said.
She looked at her notes for a moment longer. "We have no means of learning more than they choose to let fall," she said. "And pressing for what they will not freely offer is unlikely to improve matters."
She was right, which I found mildly frustrating in the way that sensible advice usually is when you are already inclined toward a course of action it argues against. I turned back to the diagram in my notebook and let it go for the time being.
The Magical Creatures lesson that month was on a Saturday morning, which was why it was called Magical Creature Saturday by the students who had worked out that this was always when it occurred. It was held in one of the side rooms off the ground floor too cold to go outside reliably in February and was run by Professor Wren, a thin woman with the careful, observant manner of someone who had spent years studying things that required you to move slowly and make no sudden sound.
She had a covered cage on the table at the front of the room, which she did not uncover immediately. She began instead with three minutes of reading from a volume on her desk, summarized: a classification, a behavioral profile, a status note. The creature was extremely small. The creature was extremely fast. The creature was, by the official count, endangered to the point where the number remaining in Britain could be stated in a figure that fit on one line, which she said without further comment and let settle.
She lifted the cover. Inside the cage, on a small branch, sat a Golden Snidget.
It was about the size of a sparrow, fully golden from beak to tail, with red eyes that caught the candlelight and held it. Its wings were not structured like a normal bird's wings they rotated in their sockets, forward and back and in full circles when the bird chose, which it demonstrated at one point by hovering motionless in the center of the cage with its wings moving in rapid, continuous circles that were almost impossible to track. Every student in the room went quiet. Even Thomas, who was generally not quiet, said nothing and watched.
"The snidget hath inhabited these islands since before any record we possess," Professor Wren said, still in the careful, low voice. "It doth not migrate. It nesteth in dense woodland, it feedeth upon very specific small insects that require undisturbed ground cover, and it is exceptionally fast in flight faster than any native bird by a margin that is not close. The estimate thou hast read suggesteth that they were once common in every forest in England and southern Scotland."
She paused to let that comparison work on its own.
"They were used in sport," she said. "For two hundred years, the primary use of the Golden Snidget in the wizarding world was as quarry in a game that required the bird to be caught. The seeker who caught it was awarded a sum of considerable value. The bird did not survive the catching." Well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out flying at high speeds on a broom and snatching a bird would crush it. Seriously, it sounded like a darker looney tunes episode: 'I tink I saw a putty cat… wait, that's not a putty cat!' squish!
"The game was eventually reformed," she said. "The snidget was replaced with an enchanted ball, which doth perform the same function and doth not need to be killed to be caught. This reform was made when the snidget population had fallen to a level at which continuation of the old practice would have caused extinction within living memory. The record of how that decision came to be made, and how long it took those with authority to make it, is part of thy assigned reading."
She went through the ecology in detail, the nesting habits, the diet, the breeding rate, which was low by design in a creature that historically had few predators and needed no reproductive surplus. The historical population crash was a case study in what happens when a reproductive strategy calibrated for low predation encounters sudden, sustained, species-level hunting pressure. The math was simple and bleak.
On the way back to the common room, Eleanor said quietly, "Those who hunted them were not wicked."
I waited, not bothered by the topic. After all, so many species had become extinct by the 21st century courtesy of fads and unintended consequences of technological innovations.
"They did simply not consider it," she said. "One bird seemed like a small thing. And then another. And then 'twas gone."
"Sounds about right."
February settled into its routines and the common room took on the particular character of a heated indoor space during extended cold, where the same furniture has been sat in by the same people enough times that everyone has an unofficial assigned position and the fire has been fed often enough that someone has established an unspoken rotation for it. I spent evenings there with some frequency that month, which was a change from the autumn term when I had used the third-floor classroom almost exclusively.
The animated board game was Thomas's idea originally, or rather Thomas's complaint. He had found a set of carved wooden pieces in the common room storage that corresponded to a game he knew, but several of the pieces were missing and one of the game surfaces had warped from heat near the fire. He showed it to me with the implicit expectation that I would do something about it, which was the kind of expectation Thomas operated on whenever something appeared to require any ingenuity.
I looked at it and thought about the object-to-object Transfiguration I was practicing. A piece of the wrong shape could be converted to the right shape if the Transfiguration was precise enough; a warped board was more difficult since the material hadn't changed, only the structure. I spent an afternoon working on the pieces first, getting the shapes consistent, then had the idea which I should have thought of initially of trying the Connecto charm on the warped board's underside to pull the warped grain back together rather than Transfiguring anything.
It worked partway. The board was flatter, not perfectly flat, but flat enough that the pieces didn't slide off the low end anymore.
The animation part was Thomas's second contribution, which he made by saying, "Canst thou make the pieces move?" with the confidence of someone who believes this is a reasonable question to ask.
I tried it. The basic Locomotor charm, which I knew from the assigned Charms reading but had not worked on in practice, applied to an individual piece produced exactly what it described: it moved the piece. Applying it with a specific intention like move to this square took several attempts before I could get it to follow the instruction rather than drift in a vague direction. What I eventually arrived at, after two evenings of work, was a set of pieces that would move to an indicated destination when the charm was applied with sufficient specificity of intent. It required each player to cast the charm on their own piece, which was more involved than a purely physical game, but the pieces moved when told to and stopped when told to and did not fall over, which I considered a reasonable result given the starting point.
Thomas won the first game. He then immediately wanted to play again, which I took as a positive review.
Eleanor watched from the chair nearest the fire and said, at one point, "The knight doth move most strangely."
"It's supposed to move that way," I said.
"What manner of knight cannot walk in a straight line?"
"A chess knight," I said. "That's the rules, I don't make them."
"But you do,"She said, to which I had no comeback seeing as wizarding chess wasn't a thing yet. "It seemeth a poor design for a knight."
"Perhaps you're right," I replied using a response which meant: I don't agree and don't care enough to argue further, something my parents said when they didn't want to get into it. Very similar to another personal favorite: It's not my business. I use this one anytime someone tries to bring me into a conversation to agree with them, 'tis a trap I say!
I have tried, in the years since, to identify what it was that set that night apart from the others before it. There was nothing. The day had been ordinary. I had attended Charms and worked on the illumination exercise and eaten supper at the usual time and spent an hour in the common room watching Thomas lose the third consecutive game of chess to Margaret, who approached the board with the same methodical efficiency she applied to everything. I went to bed at the normal hour, fell asleep without difficulty, and did not lie awake thinking about anything in particular.
The hill outside Hogsmeade was the kind of green that only came in the hours after rain, everything saturated and close, the grass still holding water along the blades so that when you sat it soaked through your breeches within the first few minutes. I was aware of this and did not move. The sun was high and the air was warm enough that the wet didn't matter much, and Margaret had spread the blanket over the flattest section she could find on the slope, and Eleanor was lying on her back with her arm over her eyes, and Thomas was eating bread and not offering any of it to the rest of us.
"Hey, that's the last piece. Can't you share it?" Margaret asked, a little put out with our pig-stomached friend.
"I shared the last piece," Thomas said.
"That was Eleanor's."
"I shared it with Eleanor."
I stretched my legs out and looked down the hill toward the rooftops of Hogsmeade. From here you could see the whole western end of the settlement, the apothecary, the tavern-and-supply-house building, the narrow gap where the main road came in from the south and beyond it the tree line, dark even in afternoon sun, the forest holding shadow under its canopy the way stone holds cold. It was pleasant up here. I could not remember deciding to come up here, but that was the way of an afternoon that had gone well. You stopped tracking the decisions and simply found yourself in the right place.
Eleanor made a noise that meant she had fallen asleep, a light snore and breathing.
Margaret was reading, which meant she had brought a book up the hill, which I had not seen her carrying, but that was Margaret.
The wind changed, now fastly blowing south.
It was a small thing. The kind of change that you register physically before you have any reason to register it at all, a shift in the smell of the air rather than the direction, something underneath the grass-and-rain smell that did not belong to either. I looked at the tree line again. The forest was darker than it had been, or the angle of the sun had shifted more than I had accounted for. The shadow under the canopy had moved out past the tree line, which was not how shadows worked.
"What time is it?" I said.
Margaret turned a page. "Why do you ask?"
I did not have an answer. I looked at the sky instead, which was still blue, still correctly daytime, but the quality of the light had changed in a way I could not quantify. Warmer. More orange. The kind of light that arrived an hour before sunset, not at midday.
Thomas finished his bread. "I want to go down," he said.
"Go then," Margaret said.
He stood, brushed crumbs off his breeches, and walked down the hill. I watched him go, and when he reached the road he turned left without looking back, and I tracked him until he disappeared behind the apothecary, and then I was not on the hill anymore.
I was on the road.
Not at the bottom of the hill. In the middle of the road, on the eastern end of the settlement, the section past the tavern where I had walked before but not often, and it was fully evening now, the sun completely gone, lanterns lit in the windows of the buildings on either side. I did not try to account for the transition. The afternoon must have run faster than I had followed it.
The lanterns were the wrong color.
They were orange rather than yellow, brighter than tallow allowed, and the light they threw onto the road was wrong in the way that firelight from a large source is wrong, moving, sourceless, and coming from more directions than the lanterns justified. I looked up the road toward the western end.
Smoke was coming from the houses all around.
Not chimney smoke. Not the thin column that comes from a properly-drawn flue, well-fed, burning clean. This was the horizontal kind, thick enough to have a body, rolling rather than rising, carrying the smell of something other than wood. Wool. Straw. And underneath those, the other smell, the one that took me a moment to name because I had only encountered it once before, in the earliest hours of a morning in my first life, a kitchen fire in a neighbor's house where I had stood outside at two in the morning and watched the professionals work, and the neighbor had stood beside me and the wind had shifted and I had never forgotten what it carried.
I was walking east before I had made any decision about walking.
The sounds reached me before I cleared the gap between the two buildings at the road's end. Voices at a volume that voices do not naturally reach, the kind of sound that happens when the register that handles language has been bypassed entirely. I came around the corner and the tower was there, and it was burning.
All of a sudden, there were masses of people in the road.
A woman I did not recognize was on her knees in the mud, both hands pressed over her face, two men were running in the direction of the western road, not looking at anything behind them. A child, a girl, eight or nine, someone I should have known, lain across the doorway, blood pooling underneath her.
Explosions sounded and I twisted around towards the sound. Out of nowhere the people all around were shouting, spells were slinging everywhere and small statured creatures were everywhere: on the rooftops, from the alleys, and as far as I could see down the street. Battles were taking place left and right, bodies piling all around and limbs flying overhead.
Crash!
The house to my right collapsed, dust and debris billowing up and fire spreading far. Jumping out of my stupor, I run into the tower, leaping over the poor girl's cooling body. It was eerily quiet except for an infant's cry. Moving through the rooms, I came upon children's corpses and the goodwife was impaled onto the stairs, her dress torn diagonally as a bloody gash had carved all the way to the bone. Running up the stairs towards the cry, I trip on a small, pale leg, hitting the ground. Scrambling up in a pile of blood, I see a figure through a doorway.
My heart clenching and adrenaline pumping I burst through the doorway only for the crying to cease. All I see is a short creature swinging a sword and a small object flying my way. Unconsciously, I reach out and catch it only to be face to face with a baby. The precious little infant without a body.
My vision goes red and all of a sudden, I'm on the demon, who resembled the goblins seen in the movies. A nameless spell launches from my wand, crushing the thing into a fleshy sphere, shrinking to the size of a baseball.
Dropping to my knees, tears stream from my eyes and grief grips my heart, suffocating in the way only heart-rending sorrow can. Tears fall on the headless infant and something in me snaps.
Wood paneling tears from the walls, nails, ash, and fabric rising and spinning in the air, a wordless howl breaks from my throat as magic explodes from my body.
The muggle born tower was forced apart and created a tornado, centered around myself. Flying into the air, stretching my hand out, a dead look on my face, "None shall leave alive." The tornado blows apart seeking out every goblin, screams creating a blissful melody to my ears.
A gray blur from the corner of my eye grabs my attention only to see the tip of a spear right before it makes contact.