Isiri Pudireach
Predictive text can go duck itself
The Romans may still have been the inventors, as the civilization that became the empire started several centuries before 382 BC
Wikipedia said:
Spells in Silence (Harry Potter)
- Thread starter Silently Watches
- Start date
Doomreaver
Fluffy Tail Enthusiast
A few potential scenes I would like to see, should they happen:
- Hazel learning she's wealthy, and would never have needed to steal if she had had access to her inheritance.
- Hazel exploring the Forbidden Forest. She deserves to meet the unicorns!
- Slice of Life scenes of Hazel's and Sally-Anne's friendship.
- Location
- Deep inside the sand
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
And I quote Rule 3: Be Civil.
Do you have any arguments to my argument?
- Location
- Netherlands
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm a little late to this conversation probably, but on the whole "magic to normalize eyesight" thing: I'll note that not all disabled people have an interest in, or are even comfortable with the idea of their disability being a Problem That Needs To Be Solved.
I think that's an important thing to keep in mind when talking about these topics, even if it would be entirely in-character for British wizard cultural norms to see disabilities as exactly that. (EDIT: It would be especially in-character in this fic, considering we've already seen the attitudes regarding mute wizards)
I think that's an important thing to keep in mind when talking about these topics, even if it would be entirely in-character for British wizard cultural norms to see disabilities as exactly that. (EDIT: It would be especially in-character in this fic, considering we've already seen the attitudes regarding mute wizards)
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- Location
- Neptune
What argument? Ageist nonsense is no argument. Do you have anything to support your claim that people experiencing age-related failing eyesight, people experiencing cataracts and glaucoma and already willing to undergo severe treatment to deal with those in the contemporary muggle world, are LESS likely to seek treatment than the young? Anything at all?
Because experience tells otherwise.
Depends on the treatment. Magic tends towards very specific solutions to very specific problems.
And kind of have a bunch of very interesting failstates while getting there.
- Location
- Deep inside the sand
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I guess. I don't understand it but I can respect their decision.
From my view. (Please keep in mind that we all have different fields that we are interested, experienced in or have plenty of knowledge in. So if I'm not previously subjected to this its not a deliberate offense or a sign of my character.)
If I have for example experienced problems in my daily life, bullying or any kind stigma due to e.g. bad eye sight or really any other kind of disability in my youth that I'm bothered by then I would like to heal it if its as easy as waving a wand. If and only if there is nothing experimental, costly, side effects, fishy in their history of successes and long term effects.
So its hard for me to understand but I think I will understand this in time with compassion, humility and understanding. Thank you for your helpful response.
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FictionPack
Monochromatic Ursine
- Location
- Tennessee
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I wouldn't be too surprised if a lot of their problems like bad eyesight, unruly hair, or other common family characteristics is due to some kind of curse in the bloodline or otherwise caused by magic affecting the family.
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Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
Regarding eyesight issues at least, I have already mentioned that this is not a disease nor injury that can be healed away. It is a matter of a perfectly heathy eye and a perfectly normal lens being mismatched to each other. The only purely magical solution would be human transfiguration, which carries such significant risk to the point that if wizards Healers swear the same Hippocratic Oath that I did, it would be an option for when glasses failed or were insufficient.
That is such a strange statement to read. I take it that refers to a particular sort of solution? The sort of mindset that would say Hazel has not solved her muteness with her air-writing spell? Or her notebook before that?
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
Egleris said:
Ah, thank you both! I didn't notice the arrow, and I indeed did not know that.Silently Watches said:
Oh, I could certainly see the Romans being the inventors, and perhaps that even contributed to Rome's early success. But if the Romans invented them, I do not see how they'd not have reached Africa during at least the Roman Empire if not earlier -- and it likewise seems odd to me that wand technology wouldn't have been able to spread fairly broadly in the centuries since.Isiri Pudireach said:
Oo, I don't recall that having occurred to me before at all, but now that you've mentioned it, I also want to see that!Doomreaver said:
- Location
- Neptune
Again, the same can be said for muggle afflictions and their treatment. Or would you claim that the treatment for prostate cancer is generic and non-specific and comes without severe side effects?
As in we're looking for treatments that don't have any gradation between general relief and the spell or potion that specifically treats a specific curse.
Conventional medicine has a lot more gradations that we've seen. And a much larger population to learn by trying on
Arzte
Lady Of Chaos
- Location
- Where Order Is Not
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
Well, this was not what I was expecting when I came across this fic considering my only other familiarity with this author was with the much darker work which does an excellent job at the villain part of villain protagonist. But this hits well on the thought that went into it without the... everything that makes said darker work hard to recommend.
I really love the effort gone into making more of a traditional adventure, fleshing out the magic and world to include not only its dangers but also the multifacetedness that real life is so fond of. From helpful, to harmful, to loving families of human eaters and more, effort to ensure they're more than just bumps in the night but faceted people is great. It reminds me of works like The Ancient Magus Bride, and its efforts to portray folklore and the beings found in it as dangerous but not exactly evil. They just are.
I'm excited to see where this goes, while the events at Hogwarts, and its giant library that will certainly take much much time to go through, are vastly important to any harry potter story, I'm equally excited for the world outside of Hogwarts, what it has to offer, the deep and unknowns of magic, how not everything is even remotely discovered or available in a classroom...
It'll be interesting to see how some of her more recent challenges will be handled, from the anti-spirit realm wards on Hogwarts (I imagine that was the intent when they were put on the castle, unlike somewhere like Diagon alley, where it's likely just anti-teleport wards), to what exists and is hidden in the woods, or in fact, even the castle itself. Such a labyrinth of a building probably has many secrets indeed. (including a literal Chamber of them!!)
I really love the effort gone into making more of a traditional adventure, fleshing out the magic and world to include not only its dangers but also the multifacetedness that real life is so fond of. From helpful, to harmful, to loving families of human eaters and more, effort to ensure they're more than just bumps in the night but faceted people is great. It reminds me of works like The Ancient Magus Bride, and its efforts to portray folklore and the beings found in it as dangerous but not exactly evil. They just are.
I'm excited to see where this goes, while the events at Hogwarts, and its giant library that will certainly take much much time to go through, are vastly important to any harry potter story, I'm equally excited for the world outside of Hogwarts, what it has to offer, the deep and unknowns of magic, how not everything is even remotely discovered or available in a classroom...
It'll be interesting to see how some of her more recent challenges will be handled, from the anti-spirit realm wards on Hogwarts (I imagine that was the intent when they were put on the castle, unlike somewhere like Diagon alley, where it's likely just anti-teleport wards), to what exists and is hidden in the woods, or in fact, even the castle itself. Such a labyrinth of a building probably has many secrets indeed. (including a literal Chamber of them!!)
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Ch. 34, For Lack of a Wand
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
The next morning Hazel and her year-mates made their way out of the castle to the greenhouses on the grounds, guided today by their other seventh-year prefect and accompanied this time by the Gryffindor students instead of the Slytherins who had shared their Charms class. Sally-Anne walked alongside her happily, the other girl's thoughts revealing relief at the fact that Hazel had managed to eat a small – by the standards of the other students– bit of dinner the previous night and a larger breakfast this morning. Apparently Sally-Anne had been reaching toward the conclusion that Hazel had gotten sick with something and that was why she was reluctant to eat anything.
Truly, having someone this invested in what and how much Hazel ate felt extraordinarily odd. She was not sure if she liked it or not, but she knew one thing for sure. There was no way she was going to tell Sally-Anne that she preferred to sleep on the floor. She had made the mistake of sleeping on the floor next to her bed last night instead of in the common room, and in addition to waking her up through the night when someone snored unexpectedly, it also hammered home the realization that what she did and what she preferred truly was not normal. The girls all looked perfectly comfortable, and she knew back when she lived with the Dursleys that her aunt and uncle and cousin all slept in normal beds.
It was something she knew intellectually, but she had always slept either in a cupboard or on the floor or on a loaned pallet. It was out of sight and therefore something she could safely ignore. Now that it was in front of her face, she was not sure how she should feel. If she brought this up to anyone at this school, she knew it would paint her as even more different, and not for reasons she wanted. She was proud of her druidic heritage and how she worked her magic without the need for a wand, and if that was what brought her in conflict with wizard sensibilities then so be it. This, though? This she was not so proud of, but it was also not something she could easily change.
The werewolves and the hags would not find it too strange, or she did not think so at least, but as she was being reminded again and again, they were not human. What did it say about her that it was nonhumans with whom she more easily identified?
A stocky woman with greying hair in a dirt-stained robe stood in front of row after row of greenhouses, her attention focused inwards until she spotted them crossing the grounds. The smile she gave them then was nearly blinding. "Good morning!" she said once they were close enough for them to hear her without her needing to shout. "I am Professor Sprout, the head of Hufflepuff house and your Herbology professor. It's good to see all of you this morning, especially my new Badgers." She turned her head to focus fully on Hazel's group. "I apologize that I wasn't able to introduce myself to you before now, but some bloody annoying issues came up. Because of course the devil's snare would decide to act up after he told everyone how to run into it. Let's go into Greenhouse 1, and we can start today's lesson."
The crowd of students followed the professor into the greenhouse with a large number '1' painted over the door. The inside of the building was, like so many other spaces that wizards got their hands on, much larger than it should have been considering the outside. Large enough in fact that there were four different aisles, two on each side of a long, wide table in the middle of the room. "Find somewhere to sit on the benches," Professor Sprout told them as she walked up to the head of the table. With a wave of her wand, a riot of color and a swarm of pots came flying from down a different row and landed on the table.
Hazel had to shake her head because at first she doubted whether she was seeing what she thought she saw. The pots were full of smallish rose bushes, and they were responsible for the colorful swirls. On a single glance she would assume it was because every flower was a different color from its neighbors, but as she watched the flowers' colors shifted into something else. Then again, and again. The change was not immediate, instead taking several seconds, but the change was continuous. She glanced around to discover that yes, all the rose bushes were doing this. It was not just the one in front of her.
"It's always nice to see the look of surprise on their faces. If only that wonder would last through the years. In this class, we work with a wide variety of magical flora and fungi. Some of them are common and everyday plants, while others will be strange, surprising, or even disturbing. There is more variety in plants than there is in animals, if you can believe it. I will teach you how to recognize and care for many of these plants, what use they have in other fields, and in some cases how to keep yourselves safe from them."
First Professor Flitwick, and now Professor Sprout. I would have thought magic school would not require so many warnings about how dangerous it is, she told Morgan. He tilted his head before chirping chidingly at her, as if trying to remind her of something. What was not exactly clear, however, and it took her a few moments to guess at what he was thinking about. Yes, true, we've run into plenty of danger ourselves, but that was just us wandering around the world! It was not inside a school. And, she continued, it is a bit of a shock considering the shopping areas we've been to. Listening to those people, I would not have guessed that they lived in a world where everything, including their own spells, is trying to kill them.
"You do not have to worry about anything too dangerous right now," Professor Sprout continued as Hazel and Morgan were conversing in their own way. "This first semester will focus on safer and more familiar plants. We will only move on to plants that are a little more exciting when you have a good grounding in the basics of herbology.
"What you have in front of you is a variety of house plant some of you may be familiar with. Does anyone know what it is?"
Hazel just shook her head and looked around to find expressions of confusion on several other people's faces. After a very long pause, one of the boys in Gryffindor red raised his hand. The professor gave him a nod, and he said in an extremely quiet voice, "Rainbow roses, professor."
"Very good! Take five points for Gryffindor, Mr. Longbottom. These are indeed rainbow roses, and you should be able to guess by now where they get their names. They are a not-uncommon sight around magical homes, and while they do not have useful properties in potions, they do have an amusing one." Professor Sprout plucked a petal from one of the nearby bushes and popped it in her mouth. A couple of seconds later, bright butterfly blue cascaded down the lengths of her hair all the way to the tips. She took some of her hair and twirled it around one finger, smiling at the somewhat nervous laughter coming from a few of the students. "Like I said, amusing. Let's get started on deadheading them, which is important for the health of roses and many other flowering plants, and as you work we will talk more about just what these marvelous plants need to thrive in a typical garden."
The professor waved her wand to levitate pairs of shears to everyone, and while steel was flying around and various people were either excited or already bored by the task at hand Hazel could only mull over silently something that was very confusing. Namely, this boy had just earned 'points', but they were not his own. He had earned them for his house. When McGonagall had said before they were all split up into their houses that they would be earning points, she assumed that meant these points would be their own. But it was for the house as a whole…
This whole points thing sounds very backwards, doesn't it, she asked Morgan. I mean, if all the points go to the house and not the person, then they don't mean anything, do they? 'Your' points rise and fall based on things you can't control, so really what is the incentive of them at all? I assumed there would be a reward or something for the person who had the most points, but done this way there isn't any reason for anyone to do any better or worse than they already would have. They don't matter.
She returned her attention to the class at hand and glanced down at the set of shears sitting next to the point in front of herself and Sally-Anne. For all that it was supposedly a wizardly set of shears, it looked exactly the same as the one she had carried for a year in her satchel. The same one she had gotten rid of during her walk to Greece because she already had a better tool.
Reaching into her satchel, she summoned her stone knife to her hand and rubbed the edge with her thumb. It was still as sharp as it had been when she first made it under Elfriede's watchful eye. Even back when the hags were not under the misconception that she was one of them, Elfriede had been honest. Never before had she needed to craft a knife blade out of stone, and so the hag had walked her through it step by step, giving her the chance to prove her claims fairly instead of trapping her through her own inexperience.
She did not recall if Elfriede had said the knife would never lose its edge, and perhaps despite using it for such mundane tasks as sawing through branches for a fire or cutting her hair when it got too long she had yet to put it through enough stress for it to chip away or dull, but regardless it had been a faithful tool for… had it been nearly a year now? She supposed it had been. It was shocking how quickly time could fly.
Basing her actions on the directions Professor Sprout was giving the class at large, Hazel carefully took the wilting color-changing flowers and used the sharp edge of her knife to cut the base of the flower's stem and pull it away. She tossed the dying flower into the bucket with those from the rest of the class and moved on to the next.
It took just over an hour for all of the roses to be cleaned up, only partly because Professor Sprout did just as she said she would and rattled off seemingly everything she knew about the proper care of these plants as they were working. Once that was all done, she spent the remaining fifteen or so minutes of class answering whatever questions anyone had for her, even opening the floor up to questions not directly related to her class. Hazel quickly got the impression both from the words themselves and the direction of her thoughts that this was at least in part her way of making up for not being available to answer the Hufflepuff's questions the previous nights.
Sidonia Smith was the prefect waiting to escort them back to the Great Hall this time. She gave them all a smile and then a joking sniff while the Gryffindor students passed them by. "Well, you firsties don't smell too terrible. Sprout must not have made you go digging around in her fertilizer. That'll come in time. But… I guess we don't need to stop at the dorms for anyone to get cleaned up before we go to lunch. Come along!"
They were perhaps fifty feet in total behind the other first-years, but strangely by the time they reached the small corridor that led from the greenhouses to the castle proper there was no one in sight. No one else seemed to notice, but Hazel thought it odd. Had they been so excited for lunch that they ran ahead? It would make sense—
Something fat and yellow flew with speed from the corner near the ceiling and splashed against the back of Sidonia's head.
The prefect whipped around, soap suds and water flying off her two-toned hair, and she looked around before her eyes moved up. "Of course it would be this bastard. Peeves!" she shouted, pulling out her wand but holding it with the tip pointed at nothing in particular. "Go away!"
Everyone else's head turned to follow Sidonia's gaze, and from a twist of shadow emerged a humanoid figure sitting on empty air. It looked almost like a short and squat little man, one with a too-wide mouth and dark eyes that glittered menacing in a blunt contrast to its bright orange pants and ruffled blue shirt. In its arms it carried a collection of balloons filled nearly to bursting. It flew across the corridor, the movement jostling the stack of balloons, and several fell from his grasp to hit the students where they immediately popped.
"Such dirty, stinky firsties you are!" it crowed with a sinister delight. It juggled the pile of balloons and shuffled them so it somehow carried all of them in the crook of one arm, leaving a single projectile in its left hand. The balloon was tossed once. Twice.
The spirit swung its arm around in a full circle and let the balloon fly. This one broke against the head of Wayne Hopkins, a dark-haired boy who had been visibly reluctant to get his hands dirty with the rainbow roses. He was standing just off to Hazel's side, which meant the force of the balloon was enough to slosh soapy water onto Sally-Anne's shoulder and to splash Hazel fully in the face. She spluttered, and Morgan quickly made his own displeasure known.
The spirit cackled maniacally and started chanting, "Stinky! Stinky!"
Sidonia bared her teeth in a borderline growl. "Damn it all, why don't the professors ever do something about this arsehole? Get lost, Peeves, or I'll get the baron! You know I will! Not that it ever does anything. He's right back doing the same thing the next day."
"Peeves is not being bad!" The spirit stuck its tongue out at her, then lobbed another balloon at the quickly forming trio of Susan Bones and Hannah Abbott and Megan Jones. The girls shrieked and tried to dodge only to run into each other and slip on the water left behind when the balloon flew between them all. The sight of the sprawling girls made him cackle again. "Firsties need to be cleaned!"
Sally-Anne's fingers were digging into the meat of Hazel's arm, and thoughts that were normally so clear to hear had become distant and muffled. Hazel glanced over only for her gaze to refuse to budge. Sally-Anne stared up at Peeves in terror, the word 'cleansed' repeating over and over and over in her mind accompanied by a nameless, formless dread. The sight of this girl, of someone looking to become a friend, feeling such fear set her own emotions to churning. Hers, though, was a different emotion than Sally-Anne's. It was the same emotion she felt when she heard the werewolves worry about a magical boar that might eat away at their food supplies. The same emotion she felt when a drunken wizard turned his wand on Hedwig.
It was anger, flowing thickly through her bloodstream and burning like acid.
She passed her staff from her right hand to her left, shaking Sally-Anne's grip off her arm in the process. That motion pulled Sally-Anne from whatever memory she was drowning in, and the blonde looked over only for Hazel to push the other girl backwards and partially behind her. She was not tall enough to provide a human shield, but that deficit was irrelevant in this scenario.
She had no intention of hiding or running. Not this time.
Peeves said something else, but she was not listening to the malevolent spirit. It was funny, she acknowledged in the back of her mind, but he did not look so scary to her anymore. He could not hold a candle to the ghosts in de Rais's tower that had tried to consume her and her warmth. Next to the spirit of the scoured clearing, drawn there by the anger of a mass grave, he was even less.
Her right hand flexed and her star dart appeared. It no longer looked like a lawn dart, though. It had changed since her encounter in the scoured clearing. Now when she created it, it took the form of a long, thin dagger, the same shape it had taken of its own accord while she was trapped in the spirit realm. Rolling her shoulder, she watched Peeves throw another balloon, and then she whipped her arm in front of her and let go.
The dart, the dagger, flew straight and true and trailed sparks in its wake like a comet as it stabbed into Peeves's belly.
The spirit roared, the sound coming out louder and deeper than his voice had done the entire time it was taunting Sidonia. His head and body swelled and distorted for an instant; not only the first years but Sidonia as well took a step back, proving without words that this was not normal. For a moment, Hazel worried that she might have underestimated the cruel spirit, might have overestimated herself.
Peeves dropped all the balloons from his arms. While they splashed harmlessly against the stones, he grabbed at his abdomen where a hole had appeared. The edges glowed with a bright green light, the color paler even than the freshest leaves sprouting in the springtime, and the hole expanded as they watched until they could see the stones of the wall behind him. Peeves let out a bloodcurdling screech of pain and hate and horror. Whirling away from them, he took off with such surprising speed that he was nearly a blur by the point he turned around a corner and disappeared from view.
Hazel watched the corner for a moment just to make sure he was not going to come back anytime soon, then she returned her attention to Sally-Anne. The other girl was looking down at her with wide eyes. Hazel gave her a small smile and wiggled the index finger of her left hand in the air. 'Are you okay?'
"Am I okay? She just… just… What was that?" Sally-Anne asked in a whisper.
'This isn't the first evil spirit I've encountered. Not all of them are bad, mind you, but some are.' She shrugged. 'It's helpful to know how to defend yourself.'
Sally-Anne could only blink in shock and borderline disbelief.
"Well. That happened," Sidonia told them at last. "I don't know what it was, but… it happened. Let's go ahead and keep moving. Whatever it was, I don't want to be here when he comes back. He looked… terrified and furious all at the same time."
The bunch of Hufflepuffs started walking, taking care to avoid the puddle of water from all the broken water balloons. Hazel's wet robes shifted and stuck to her uncomfortably, and she splayed her fingers against the surface of her robes and pushed her cleaning spell into the fabric. Within moments, they were as clean and dry as they had been when she left the dorms earlier in the morning.
"That's just not fair." She looked over to find Sally-Anne looking enviously at her now-dry clothes, and with a short and silent sigh she reached out and caught the hem of Sally-Anne's sleeve. Another casting of the cleaning spell ensued.
Sally-Anne gave her a grateful smile, but the smile dimmed somewhat as she shifted her robes around on herself. "Huh. That feels a little weird. Nice to have, but weird all the same. Thanks, Hazel."
She waved the gratitude away as a quote from a book came to her, a quote she quickly shared in her spark-writing. 'What are friends for?'
Lunch turned into an interesting experience thanks to their encounter with Peeves. While they were walking, Sidonia had cast a spell on herself that dried her robes, but by the time they reached the Great Hall she had only cast it on a few other people. Instead she asked for help from other Hufflepuffs in the sixth year, and with their help soon all the first-years were dried and comfortable. Sidonia had then turned this into a teaching moment, revealing that wizards did in fact have a spell for drying wet clothes and other things and sharing how to cast it with the understandably attentive students.
When Hazel asked if it did anything else besides drying, such as cleaning out ground-in dirt, Sidonia had given her a strange look before explaining that for the most part, wizard spells only did the one thing they did. She had gotten that impression when reading through the magical theory books, but it was good to have it confirmed. Overall, she had to admit that while the wizards had many more spells than she knew, their spells seemed a bit limited compared to her own abilities.
She carefully took notes on how the wizards cast this spell regardless. She had been caught in plenty of storms during her months with the werewolves, and she could not remember Jean Luc or Marcel ever drying themselves or each other. Were they unaware of this spell? If so, she hoped they would appreciate the notes she planned to send off to them via owl.
Her pen slowed to a halt as she followed that thought to its logical conclusion. Marcel had been expelled from his magic school when he was bitten, and Jean Luc never went in the first place. Professor Flitwick had mentioned that most wizard magic fit in the charms category. She had to wonder, would the notes she was taking benefit them? Teach them spells they had not picked up on their own?
…Did the school have owls she could borrow? Or would she have to pop over to Diagon Alley and send a letter to them the same way she had when she first sent her rejection letter to McGonagall? She hoped for the former, if only so she could make the gold and silver she stole from G.L. last as long as possible.
When lunch ended, their year was escorted once again to class, this time to the fifth floor where the Transfiguration classroom was located. If Hazel was honest with herself, this might be the sole class she was not excited for, but she also knew it was not solely because of the subject matter. She had not forgotten that McGonagall was one of the people who left her on her aunt and uncle's doorstep, and even a month out from that discovery it still left her hands clenching into fists. Hopefully transfiguration did not require trust in the teacher because after that discovery, Hazel doubted she would be able to trust McGonagall very far at all.
The professor in question was seated at her desk when Nicholas opened the door and waved them in, but she lifted her eyes to see who was entering her domain. "It is still so strange that the Hufflepuffs do that every year. All of my prefects would turn in their badges right then and there if I told them they needed to run around the castle herding the younger years. Well, except perhaps Mr. Weasley," she added to herself with an almost imperceptible smile. "Thank you for leading your fellow Badgers here, Mr. Andersen. You may go."
McGonagall waited until the Gryffindor students arrived and had taken their seats before introducing herself in nearly the exact same way Professor Flitwick and Professor Sprout had. Hazel was beginning to assume there would be a lot of that this week. Yet another roll call followed, then McGonagall stood and started writing – drawing? – a number of strange symbols and diagrams on the chalkboard behind her desk. Runic symbols were scattered here and there, connected by triangles and squares and half-circles and random lines.
"Transfiguration is the most exacting and most complex branch of magic you will study here at Hogwarts. The spells you will learn in Charms and Defense Against the Dark Arts can be cast successfully so long as you are close enough, but the same cannot be said for this class. Transfigurative spells require precise geometric patterns, and these patterns must match the cadence of your wand movements and your incantations. If these are off by even a tiny degree, you will not achieve a complete transformation." She turned away from the dizzying diagrams she had just finished drawing on the board to give the group of students a gimlet glare. "This branch of magic requires perfection, and so do I. The spells I will teach you in your early years are more forgiving of these mistakes, but at higher levels a failed transfiguration can be deadly."
The professor's eyes swept over the assembled class. "Some of them look like they still aren't paying attention. Their mistake. Perhaps instead of a pig, I should go with something a little more exciting." She swept her wand over her desk with a murmur, and the papers and the wood and the little bottle of ink twisted into itself and came out the other side in the shape of a massive lion that let out an ear-rattling roar. The students at the front of the class pushed their chairs backwards until they were pressed against the desks in front of them. McGonagall gave them a tiny smirk and rested her hand lightly on the flank of the lion. "That's more like it. Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned."
Another elaborate wave of her wand later, the lion was once again a desk. "Now, for your first lesson we will start by transforming matchsticks into needles. Behind me you can see some basic diagrams of how the spell and incantation need to be performed…"
McGonagall's lecture continued, and soon enough Hazel's head was spinning. At first it sounded like what they had learned in Charms class, but the need to 'stretch' a wand movement to match the diagram drawn on the blackboard was distracting, as was the professor's repeated insistence that the syllables of the incantation had to reflect the diagram as well. It was all carefully choreographed, and if anything it made her think of some of the fantasy novels she had read where some character, typically an evil one, was performing magic by chanting out an ominous phrase in another language.
Why do wizards make everything more complicated than it needs to be, she complained to Morgan. This would be perfectly magical all on its own if they had just stuck with chanting and waving their arms around in the correct pattern. Instead they insist on adding their wand motions to everything.
It left her with a problem, though. She could not chant. In the novels where these chant rituals appeared, it always had to be done out loud and in as loud a voice as the sorcerer could use. This could not follow the exact same rules, both because this needed a wand when the stories did not and because she could not see McGonagall telling her that silent magic was easily achievable if her own subject was reliant on speech.
McGonagall waved her wand yet again, this time causing twenty matchsticks to rise up from her desk and fly over to each student. Hazel glanced down at the match in front of her and grimaced. She knew she had forgotten something, namely that she needed to create a spell or tool for this subject. It only just now struck her that she had yet to consider how she was going to go about that.
It was possible that thanks to her druidic heritage, she might be able to do exactly what she had just told Morgan the wizards should have done. It would not address the lack of chanting speech, but she could not ignore McGonagall's assurance that it was possible. She might not trust the professor on a personal level, not after discovering that the woman had been one of the people who consigned her to nine years of hell, but there was a difference between personal and professional trust. Professor Flitwick's words had confirmed that wizards could cast spells, even transfiguration spells, without the need for an incantation. When it came to this discipline of magic, she had to trust that the woman both knew what she was talking about and was speaking the truth.
Feeling kind of foolish, she stuck her index finger out and moved it in the pattern drawn on the blackboard, thinking the syllables of the incantation as forcefully as she could. Much as she half expected, when she completed the motions the matchstick remained just that; there was no sudden transformation into a needle.
Morgan twittered teasingly at her, and she shot her friend a glare from the corner of her eye. Yes, yes, I get it. I should have given the wizards the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their magic. This time, anyway. For all that she had failed this time, her next step was obvious. All her spells relied on her forming a mental tool she could use to manifest her magic. Why would wizard transfiguration be any different?
That just left her with the still-enormous hurdle of figuring out what tool would do best for these spells. What kind of tool was capable of turning one thing into another? Hard as it might be to believe, she had never encountered anything during her time in the normal nonmagical world or during her stay with either the werewolves or the hags that could just transform things, which meant that she was drawing a blank as she stared at the matchstick.
Glancing around the room at the other students waving their wands around and McGonagall walking between the desks, she had to wonder. Was it possible to use the shape of a wand as her tool? It was the only thing that appeared capable of performing transfiguration, so it made a weird sort of sense that she would need to pick that as the relevant tool for this type of magic.
She took a moment to picture what a thought-form of a wand would look like, would feel like, but even as she curled her fingers around the imagined wand she had to frown. Something she had learned through nearly two years of experimentation was that when her mind latched onto a tool or a shape that worked, it felt different than just imagining something random. It… clicked, it resonated with her magic and – if she wanted to be a little poetic – her very soul. Her ghost hand, her star dart, the sparkler which she had folded into the ring with which she now wrote out her thoughts; all of these she had felt out in her mind and refined until they were able to alter the world outside her head.
The wand she was imagining? She could already tell this was not the way to go. Maybe it was because she did not understand how a wand itself was supposed to work in the first place, or maybe a wand, being a wizard's tool, simply was not something she could emulate with her druidic powers. Regardless, she knew without moving the 'wand' a single millimeter that this was a dead end. She could wave it all she wanted, it would be worthless to her.
If a wand was not the way to go, what could she use to completely transform this matchstick into something else? She cocked her head in a similar manner to how her little feathered friend did. Perhaps a paintbrush? She could 'paint' over the matchstick in question with the image of a sewing needle?
"What is she… Ah, of course. There's always one every few years. While I appreciate you taking my warnings to heart, you will have better results should you actually use your wand," McGonagall said as her gaze swept over Hazel. "It is all but impossible to know if you are making the correct movements at the right interval unless you actively try to cast the spell."
'That's what I'm trying to do,' Hazel replied, returning her eyes back to the matchstick.
"What is she talking about? And you expect the spell to work without your wand? She did not strike me as an imbecile in the Leaky Cauldron, quite the opposite. So why is she acting like this?"
She waved her left hand negligently, words slipping out from her spark-writing ring almost as quickly as she could think them. 'I certainly hope it will considering I don't have a wand. I can't use one in the first place.'
Her words were clearly unexpected, and the professor's surprise pushed back against Hazel. "What are you talking about, you can't use a wand?!"
'Exactly what I said. I can't use a wand. I'll never be able to.' Or at least, she would never be able to use a wand so long as she carried her staff. That was not a condition she felt like admitting to McGonagall right now, however; whether she carried a staff or a wand was, as Mr. Ollivander had made so clear, ultimately her choice. She was the only one who could decide what path she would tread. 'Since I can't do the spell your way, I need to figure out some other way to get the same result. You wouldn't happen to have any ideas on how to go about that, would you?'
She looked up hopefully at McGonagall, but that hope immediately withered at the expression of utter befuddlement on the woman's face. McGonagall's thoughts sounded off, as if they were caught in a loop of some sort and unable to process the idea that someone might not be capable of using a wand.
Their conversation had not gone unnoticed by the rest of the people in the room, and while at first everyone else's surprise had been swirled together it did not take long for a few people's minds to move off on their own directions. "What kind of witch can't use a wand?" muttered Zacharias, his voice nonetheless clearly audible in the near-silence of the shell-shocked room. "So much for her claim that she's been learning magic from werewolves. She can't even do real magic. The Girl-Who-Lived? Don't make me laugh. At the end of the day, she's nothing more than a Squib."
Squib. That was a word she had read but never heard spoken, and even in reading it she had come across it in only a single book. Namely, the book she found in Flourish and Blotts that told parents they should throw away their handicapped children to nonmagical orphanages and forget they ever existed. Hazel's left hand clenched into a tight fist as the anger from reading that waste of paper returned to her for a moment. For all that Zacharias's thought had remained unvoiced, that word nevertheless spread through the minds of the people she knew or suspected of being wizard-born. Their voices were tinged with varied combinations of emotions, but surprise and disgust and pity were the most prevalent by far.
Hazel felt her shoulders rise up defensively almost without her realizing it. The emotions surrounding her felt familiar, and it took her longer than she would be willing to admit to realize where she knew them from. They were similar to the thoughts she heard while she still attended school in Little Whinging. It was the attitude she had grown up around that considered her little better than scum on someone else's shoe.
An attitude she had always ignored for her own sanity, and one she now realized she had much preferred staying in the past where it belonged.
McGonagall's thoughts did not follow quite the same direction as the students', although whether that was a benefit or not Hazel was unsure of. "I can't believe she is incapable of using a wand. She's clearly capable of magic, else she would not be able to use that writing trick. The supply list clearly stated that you needed to obtain a wand before coming to school, Miss Potter. Fifteen points from Hufflepuff for being so sorely unprepared, and I will be speaking to Professor Sprout about this incident. Pomona will need to take care of this on the weekend. We can't have a first-year student think she can get away with not bringing a wand."
The loss of meaningless points was followed by mental and in some cases not-so-mental groaning from the rest of the Hufflepuffs. All but Sally-Anne, that was, who was ignoring the matchstick in front of her and staring at Hazel. "Hazel can't use a wand? But she can use magic. She used it on that flying man and then on me." Waiting until McGonagall stormed off to continue critiquing the wand-wavings of the wizard children, Sally-Anne leaned over and whispered, "H-How can you do magic if you c-c-can't use a w-wand?"
Hazel's response was written in small letters this time, a message meant for Sally-Anne's eyes only. 'I don't need a wand. Never have. My ancestors were druids, not wizards. It means my magic follows different rules.'
Sally-Anne looked up from the words to meet Hazel's eyes, searching for any hint of deceit. After a long few moments, she nodded slowly and looked back down at her matchstick. "I hope you figure out your magic, then. Everything the teachers taught us so far has been hard enough doing it the way they said to do it. I can't imagine needing to learn it all a whole different way."
Hazel sighed and looked down at her own match, the lack of an appropriate tool nagging at the back of her mind like a loose tooth. She hoped she could figure out how to adapt the school's lessons to her own magic, too, and honestly? She was not sure if she had much more confidence than Sally-Anne did.
The tapping of her staff against the stone floors of the castle echoed lightly in the silence that wrapped around them. The corridors in this part of the castle were empty of everyone except Hazel, which gave them a bit of an eerie quality even it was simultaneously a welcome relief from the constant bombardment of other peoples' thoughts.
The first Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson had gone better than Transfiguration, if only because Professor Quirrell was starting them off on theory in a similar but more focused vein than Professor Flitwick. Dinner, though; that was less welcome. Between the Gryffindors who had been present in McGonagall's class and a few of her fellow Hufflepuffs confirming the story, rumors about her magical abilities were already spreading through the student body like wildfire. She was a Squib, they were saying, bereft of any kind of magical ability. Her spark-writing, something so many people had been curious about, was now dismissed as the work of some magical device she kept on her in secret to hide her failings.
Mute, magicless, worthless. Those were the thoughts and opinions circling around and around her, echoes of her primary school days jumping out of her memories and into the present where they were still unwanted. It seemed like the only person who both was not dismissing her and was less than twice her age was Sally-Anne, and that was solely because the other girl had seen her defend them from Peeves and then clean them both afterwards of all the soapy water. As far as she could tell, she was being dismissed and consigned to irrelevance by just about everyone else.
If anyone asked Hazel what the she thought about all this – not that anyone had, of course – she supposed that her answer would surprise them. The farther the whispers spread through the school, the less angry or upset she felt about it. Quite the contrary. It actually amused her in a strange way the more she reflected on it.
She had been to four classes so far, only one of which had called for a wand at all, and from nothing more than that people thought she had no magical abilities? All because she did not do things in the exact same way that the wizards did? How insular, how arrogant, did they have to be to assume that their way of doing things was the only way those things could be done? Even in her extremely limited experience, hags were capable of things that wizards were not, and she was well aware that other species had their own abilities.
It was only now that she was interacting with wizards with any regularity that Hazel was starting to understand why the hags referred to them as 'wand-wavers' in such a derogatory way.
It was not the opinions of others that had sent her wandering the hallways, however. She was on a search for something far more interesting.
Of all the classes that Hogwarts offered, the one that had caught her attention and interest immediately was Potions. That was no surprise; she had been interested in potion-making as soon as Elise and Amorette first introduced the subject while she stayed with them in Compiègne Forest, and the hags had only reinforced it when they showed her the full depth of what the Brewing entailed. The first potions class of the week was tomorrow, finally a class she had to go to on the first period of the day, but it was in one of only two classrooms Devin had not shown them. All he told them was that it was down here in 'the dungeons'.
She had been wandering the lower levels of the school for maybe an hour or so now, leaving the common room when the pitying looks and thoughts from the rest of the Hufflepuffs grew too irritating, and in that time she had seen a few different interesting things. The farther she walked away from the main staircase, the more disorganized and unused the rooms became. Many of them were storage, but as she progressed farther down the hallways she soon came across rooms that looked like they had been used at one point for something. She was not sure what classes needed large tables that filled nearly the entire room, nor what could be done with smaller metal tables that looked like man-sized sinks on legs complete with drains and moveable straps. As she continued down the corridors, she soon found rooms that looked like they belonged in a literal dungeon, complete with thin pallets and doors that were made from iron bars. At first, she assumed this was where she was supposed to be, but no matter how long she looked she could not find a potions classroom anywhere.
It took her an embarrassingly long time to realize that Devin was probably using the term 'dungeon' figuratively.
Her explorations resumed, she eventually came across a different area of the castle that looked like it was better-traveled. The rooms still looked like they had not been used in years, maybe even decades, but the decor was closer to what she expected from a potions laboratory. She was getting nearer to her goal, she could feel it.
Pushing open another door, she smiled as she took in the insides. This was what she had been looking for. The room held several thick and sturdy tables that were attached directly to the stone floor, each table supporting a heavy cauldron forged from a dull grey metal. Pewter cauldrons, she had to assume, since the supply list required them to buy such things, although now she had to wonder why they needed to buy their own if the school provided them. On the walls were shelves that held jars and vials of all sorts that contained preserved animals, some of which she recognized and many she did not. Torches lit this room just as they did the other classrooms, but here instead of burning yellow and red like normal their embers glowed a sullen green. She could only imagine what it would look like when the room was fully lit, and for once she found herself nodding at how this classroom seemed finally to embrace its mystical nature—
"You are far from your burrow, Potter."
Hazel's feet all but left the ground as she jumped up, whirling around as best she could and placing her staff between herself and whoever had just spoken. The man staring at her wore all black robes over black trousers and shiny black shoes, his pallid face brought into even clearer contrast framed as it was by hair the same color as his clothing. Only his eyes were darker, staring into her own with an intensity she had seen before in cats before they pounced on an unsuspecting mouse. His mouth was twisted into a half-sneer half-smirk, as though he was unsure whether he was amused or angry.
Most importantly to her, he was a person, not Peeves or some other spiritual entity sneaking up on her. She lowered her staff from its defensive stance and braced it on the ground as she leaned onto it for support, her left hand pressing against her racing heart. She took several deep gulps of air before removing her hand and waving it through the air. 'Don't do that! You scared me.'
The man's only reaction to her words and her glare was the tiniest rise of one eyebrow. "If you do not wish to be scared, perhaps you should not be in someone else's domain. Why are you here? Planning a fun little trick?" He all but spat the last words at her.
Hazel blinked at him, caught off-guard by not just the accusation but the strange voice he spoke in. It was as if his words were… flat, for lack of a better explanation. There was a quality of his speech that was missing in comparison to anyone else she had ever conversed with. The best comparison she could come up with was that he sounded like people on the telly or the radio, except he did not have the excuse of talking through a machine.
He waited silently as she thought about what he said and how he said it before shaking her head. He had asked her a question, even if she did not understand just why he was asking in the first place. 'We have Potions class tomorrow morning, and Devin didn't show us where the classroom was on Monday. So I went looking for it.' The man still did not say anything, waiting as quietly as a statue. If he was not going to say anything, she supposed that gave her the right to ask her own question. 'I think I saw you at the staff table our first night, but no one has told me your name. I'm Hazel Potter.'
The man's lips curled into more of a sneer, and in a flash she realized why this man was so off-putting. She had not been able to put her finger on it before, but now it stood out like a light in the dark. She could not hear his thoughts! Everyone she had ever met, everyone, she had been able to hear. It did not matter if said person was a mundane human or a wizard or a werewolf or a hag, she could still hear them.
But this man? There was not a hint of what he was thinking, neither in words nor even in emotions. Was that what was wrong with his voice?! Was that the explanation for why she had been disturbed when she was little whenever the Dursleys would turn on music or a television show? Did those peoples' voices sound unreal to her not because they came from a machine but because they came without the echo of their thoughts?
"I'm well aware of who you are," he growled. "I, for your information, am Professor Snape. The potions master for this school."
Her small, polite grin widened into something true when he said those words. What a happy coincidence! Or maybe not a coincidence; now that she thought about it, it made perfect sense that the Potions professor would be in the same area as his classroom. He had probably just left his office or something, and she had not noticed because of whatever was preventing her from hearing his mind.
"And I will ask you again. What are you doing in my classroom. The truth, this time."
Hazels' smile wilted. What did he mean, 'this time'? 'I just told you. I wanted to know where it was.'
Black eyes narrowed, and without warning his thoughts burst into her head. "—thinks she can lie to me! Why is he so angry? What is this? There's no reason for him to think I'm lying. Are these my thoughts? These aren't your thoughts? This is— I've never met anyone— She is too young to I thought I was the only one takes years always just me can't get out what do you mean out no escape urge to run Legilimens resonance what is panic confusion anger fear falling swirling collision pain pain painpainpain—'
The voice – voices? – cut off as unexpectedly as they began, and Hazel stumbled backwards and half-slumped against the stone wall. Morgan twittered into her ear, his song loud in the sudden silence. Each note reverberated agonizingly in her head, everything stretched out as if her brain had just tried to swell three times its size. She blinked, not sure when she had closed her eyes at all, and looked over at the professor who had also staggered against the opposite wall. From the expression on his face and the tired way he wiped sweat off his face, he obviously felt no better than she did.
She had to wonder. Did she really hear what she thought she heard? Some of those thoughts in his head were not his but hers. He had read her mind! For all that she was hurting and worn out, she could not help the excited smile that wanted to spread across her face. She had never met anyone else who could do that; she had resigned herself to being the only one, all alone in the world. But she wasn't! This was amazing!
The pain, on the other hand? Not so amazing.
Snapping her fingers sounded too loud to her own ears, and if he truly had as bad a headache as she did she could not blame him for the level of venom in the glare he shot her. She winced and wrote, 'Sorry, that was loud. I didn't know anyone else could hear thoughts like I do. Is that why your voice sounds weird?' Actually, if his voice sounded weird and he could read minds, maybe… 'Does my voice sound weird, too? Like people on the radio? Why couldn't I hear you before, and why can't I hear you anymore now?'
His face shifted through several emotions too fast for her to catch, once more leaving her on the back foot. She had never before realized how much she relied on her mind-reading to understand the people around her, but now bereft of her abilities it felt almost like she was floundering in a dark room looking for something. Except unlike a dark room, there was no light switch or torch she could use to banish the shadow. When his face did settle on a single expression, it was one of rage. "Twenty points from Hufflepuff!" he roared. "And it will be more if you tell anyone about this! Now get out!"
The intensity and volume of his shouting made her jump backwards and ram her back into the wall. Now was probably not the best time to ask him any questions, she supposed, so sliding sideways she moved away from the angry professor and once free scurried around the next corner. When she could no longer see Professor Snape, she breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
There really was no reason for him to yell so loud, she told Morgan. At her thought, he sidestepped away from against her neck where he had huddled in fear. Blue tits, and she assumed most other little songbirds that had to fear cats and birds of prey, did not like loud noises. All I wanted was to talk to another mind-reader like me. But… She rubbed her chin. He was very insistent about not talking about this to other people. I know I never told anyone in Little Whinging about it because they would react badly to finding out, and from the way everyone right now is acting, the same is probably true of wizards.
Do you think he was so angry because he was scared of this getting out when he wants to keep it private? I guess that would be understandable, but he still could have been nicer about it. All he had to do was ask that I keep it between the two of us.
It took some time for her to follow the corridor back to the Great Hall and the nearby staircase, but at least once she reached those landmarks it was a familiar path to walk back to the rows of barrels that concealed the entrance to the Hufflepuff common room. Placing her hand flat against the middle barrel in the second row from the bottom, she told it, I want to go to bed.
Other people getting into the common room had used those words or words much like them before, and those people had been let inside. For her, however, the barrel did nothing.
That… was not good.
Pushing down her irritation, she propped her staff against the wall of barrels so she could switch hands. With her left hand free, she used her spark-writing ring to make the same request as before but visible this time. Once again, there was no response. Because of course everything in this culture seemed designed to keep her from doing anything.
Starting to lose her temper, Hazel thumped the lid of the barrel twice. Hopefully that would be loud enough that someone, anyone, would hear her banging and let her in. Something rumbled in the depths of the wall, and she smiled as she dropped her hand. Someone had heard her!
Two lids on each side of the 'doorway' barrel flipped open, and water rushed out in a torrent aimed straight at her. The force of all that liquid catching her in the chest flung her backwards and to the ground, and she slid across the wet stones until she hit the wall where she was pinned for another second more. The flow of water was cut off, and with that so too went the pressure.
Hazel coughed a few times as he throat burned, and a sniff of herself made her scowl. This was not water. That would have been too nice. It was instead vinegar of all things! She was soaked through with it, as was the stone floor. Who was going to clean this up?
The answer to that question became clear a moment later. The wide puddles starting shrinking rapidly, as if she was watching a video of them evaporating in fast forward. Within the span of seconds, they had vanished entirely.
She climbed to her feet and glared at the barrels. What do you think the chances are that they've already refilled?
Morgan, rather than sing anything in response, leapt off her shoulder and flapped over to the top of the barrels. Now off her wet self, he puffed up and shook himself dry.
Traitor. He did not appear to care about her chiding, so she walked over to the barrels again. She remembered which ones had opened, and now she wanted to experiment. She slammed her hand against the doorway barrel again and moved to the side, out of the line of fire from the vinegar barrels.
This time it was just the barrels on the opposite side from her that opened, and not fully either. Their lids moved just enough that they could spray all their contents at an angle, conveniently aimed once more directly at her.
Another couple of seconds passed before they cut off, and for the span of several breaths Hazel remained exactly where she was, laying on her back in the middle of the hallway some twenty feet away from the barrels. It meant she did not have to look at the offending entrance, although it did nothing to keep her from hearing Morgan's hysterical chirping. She sucked on her bottom lip with a pop and pushed herself into a sitting position. Are you done yet?
If anything, her obvious irritation just made him laugh harder.
Once more she staggered upright, the only wet thing in the hallway. She gave the barrels an ugly look before shaking her head. She was not getting into the common room tonight. It was a good thing she had stuck with her own way of doing things instead of copying other people, namely in that she continued to wear her satchel on her person and kept everything she needed inside it. She would hate to be stuck outside the dormitory and have all her belongings on the other side of the unopenable door.
She raised her hand with the intent of pulling her staff towards her, but before she could start forming the shape of her ghost hand the staff flew towards her and smacked into her palm. Hazel blinked a couple of times as she stared at the length of maple. That was new. Welcome, but new. Compared to a fellow mind-reader who did not want to talk to her about their shared abilities and a dormitory that would not let her in, it was probably the best part of tonight.
Come on, she told Morgan with a sigh, turning away from the wall of unfriendly barrels. We'll find somewhere else to camp out tonight.
Truly, having someone this invested in what and how much Hazel ate felt extraordinarily odd. She was not sure if she liked it or not, but she knew one thing for sure. There was no way she was going to tell Sally-Anne that she preferred to sleep on the floor. She had made the mistake of sleeping on the floor next to her bed last night instead of in the common room, and in addition to waking her up through the night when someone snored unexpectedly, it also hammered home the realization that what she did and what she preferred truly was not normal. The girls all looked perfectly comfortable, and she knew back when she lived with the Dursleys that her aunt and uncle and cousin all slept in normal beds.
It was something she knew intellectually, but she had always slept either in a cupboard or on the floor or on a loaned pallet. It was out of sight and therefore something she could safely ignore. Now that it was in front of her face, she was not sure how she should feel. If she brought this up to anyone at this school, she knew it would paint her as even more different, and not for reasons she wanted. She was proud of her druidic heritage and how she worked her magic without the need for a wand, and if that was what brought her in conflict with wizard sensibilities then so be it. This, though? This she was not so proud of, but it was also not something she could easily change.
The werewolves and the hags would not find it too strange, or she did not think so at least, but as she was being reminded again and again, they were not human. What did it say about her that it was nonhumans with whom she more easily identified?
A stocky woman with greying hair in a dirt-stained robe stood in front of row after row of greenhouses, her attention focused inwards until she spotted them crossing the grounds. The smile she gave them then was nearly blinding. "Good morning!" she said once they were close enough for them to hear her without her needing to shout. "I am Professor Sprout, the head of Hufflepuff house and your Herbology professor. It's good to see all of you this morning, especially my new Badgers." She turned her head to focus fully on Hazel's group. "I apologize that I wasn't able to introduce myself to you before now, but some bloody annoying issues came up. Because of course the devil's snare would decide to act up after he told everyone how to run into it. Let's go into Greenhouse 1, and we can start today's lesson."
The crowd of students followed the professor into the greenhouse with a large number '1' painted over the door. The inside of the building was, like so many other spaces that wizards got their hands on, much larger than it should have been considering the outside. Large enough in fact that there were four different aisles, two on each side of a long, wide table in the middle of the room. "Find somewhere to sit on the benches," Professor Sprout told them as she walked up to the head of the table. With a wave of her wand, a riot of color and a swarm of pots came flying from down a different row and landed on the table.
Hazel had to shake her head because at first she doubted whether she was seeing what she thought she saw. The pots were full of smallish rose bushes, and they were responsible for the colorful swirls. On a single glance she would assume it was because every flower was a different color from its neighbors, but as she watched the flowers' colors shifted into something else. Then again, and again. The change was not immediate, instead taking several seconds, but the change was continuous. She glanced around to discover that yes, all the rose bushes were doing this. It was not just the one in front of her.
"It's always nice to see the look of surprise on their faces. If only that wonder would last through the years. In this class, we work with a wide variety of magical flora and fungi. Some of them are common and everyday plants, while others will be strange, surprising, or even disturbing. There is more variety in plants than there is in animals, if you can believe it. I will teach you how to recognize and care for many of these plants, what use they have in other fields, and in some cases how to keep yourselves safe from them."
First Professor Flitwick, and now Professor Sprout. I would have thought magic school would not require so many warnings about how dangerous it is, she told Morgan. He tilted his head before chirping chidingly at her, as if trying to remind her of something. What was not exactly clear, however, and it took her a few moments to guess at what he was thinking about. Yes, true, we've run into plenty of danger ourselves, but that was just us wandering around the world! It was not inside a school. And, she continued, it is a bit of a shock considering the shopping areas we've been to. Listening to those people, I would not have guessed that they lived in a world where everything, including their own spells, is trying to kill them.
"You do not have to worry about anything too dangerous right now," Professor Sprout continued as Hazel and Morgan were conversing in their own way. "This first semester will focus on safer and more familiar plants. We will only move on to plants that are a little more exciting when you have a good grounding in the basics of herbology.
"What you have in front of you is a variety of house plant some of you may be familiar with. Does anyone know what it is?"
Hazel just shook her head and looked around to find expressions of confusion on several other people's faces. After a very long pause, one of the boys in Gryffindor red raised his hand. The professor gave him a nod, and he said in an extremely quiet voice, "Rainbow roses, professor."
"Very good! Take five points for Gryffindor, Mr. Longbottom. These are indeed rainbow roses, and you should be able to guess by now where they get their names. They are a not-uncommon sight around magical homes, and while they do not have useful properties in potions, they do have an amusing one." Professor Sprout plucked a petal from one of the nearby bushes and popped it in her mouth. A couple of seconds later, bright butterfly blue cascaded down the lengths of her hair all the way to the tips. She took some of her hair and twirled it around one finger, smiling at the somewhat nervous laughter coming from a few of the students. "Like I said, amusing. Let's get started on deadheading them, which is important for the health of roses and many other flowering plants, and as you work we will talk more about just what these marvelous plants need to thrive in a typical garden."
The professor waved her wand to levitate pairs of shears to everyone, and while steel was flying around and various people were either excited or already bored by the task at hand Hazel could only mull over silently something that was very confusing. Namely, this boy had just earned 'points', but they were not his own. He had earned them for his house. When McGonagall had said before they were all split up into their houses that they would be earning points, she assumed that meant these points would be their own. But it was for the house as a whole…
This whole points thing sounds very backwards, doesn't it, she asked Morgan. I mean, if all the points go to the house and not the person, then they don't mean anything, do they? 'Your' points rise and fall based on things you can't control, so really what is the incentive of them at all? I assumed there would be a reward or something for the person who had the most points, but done this way there isn't any reason for anyone to do any better or worse than they already would have. They don't matter.
She returned her attention to the class at hand and glanced down at the set of shears sitting next to the point in front of herself and Sally-Anne. For all that it was supposedly a wizardly set of shears, it looked exactly the same as the one she had carried for a year in her satchel. The same one she had gotten rid of during her walk to Greece because she already had a better tool.
Reaching into her satchel, she summoned her stone knife to her hand and rubbed the edge with her thumb. It was still as sharp as it had been when she first made it under Elfriede's watchful eye. Even back when the hags were not under the misconception that she was one of them, Elfriede had been honest. Never before had she needed to craft a knife blade out of stone, and so the hag had walked her through it step by step, giving her the chance to prove her claims fairly instead of trapping her through her own inexperience.
She did not recall if Elfriede had said the knife would never lose its edge, and perhaps despite using it for such mundane tasks as sawing through branches for a fire or cutting her hair when it got too long she had yet to put it through enough stress for it to chip away or dull, but regardless it had been a faithful tool for… had it been nearly a year now? She supposed it had been. It was shocking how quickly time could fly.
Basing her actions on the directions Professor Sprout was giving the class at large, Hazel carefully took the wilting color-changing flowers and used the sharp edge of her knife to cut the base of the flower's stem and pull it away. She tossed the dying flower into the bucket with those from the rest of the class and moved on to the next.
It took just over an hour for all of the roses to be cleaned up, only partly because Professor Sprout did just as she said she would and rattled off seemingly everything she knew about the proper care of these plants as they were working. Once that was all done, she spent the remaining fifteen or so minutes of class answering whatever questions anyone had for her, even opening the floor up to questions not directly related to her class. Hazel quickly got the impression both from the words themselves and the direction of her thoughts that this was at least in part her way of making up for not being available to answer the Hufflepuff's questions the previous nights.
Sidonia Smith was the prefect waiting to escort them back to the Great Hall this time. She gave them all a smile and then a joking sniff while the Gryffindor students passed them by. "Well, you firsties don't smell too terrible. Sprout must not have made you go digging around in her fertilizer. That'll come in time. But… I guess we don't need to stop at the dorms for anyone to get cleaned up before we go to lunch. Come along!"
They were perhaps fifty feet in total behind the other first-years, but strangely by the time they reached the small corridor that led from the greenhouses to the castle proper there was no one in sight. No one else seemed to notice, but Hazel thought it odd. Had they been so excited for lunch that they ran ahead? It would make sense—
Something fat and yellow flew with speed from the corner near the ceiling and splashed against the back of Sidonia's head.
The prefect whipped around, soap suds and water flying off her two-toned hair, and she looked around before her eyes moved up. "Of course it would be this bastard. Peeves!" she shouted, pulling out her wand but holding it with the tip pointed at nothing in particular. "Go away!"
Everyone else's head turned to follow Sidonia's gaze, and from a twist of shadow emerged a humanoid figure sitting on empty air. It looked almost like a short and squat little man, one with a too-wide mouth and dark eyes that glittered menacing in a blunt contrast to its bright orange pants and ruffled blue shirt. In its arms it carried a collection of balloons filled nearly to bursting. It flew across the corridor, the movement jostling the stack of balloons, and several fell from his grasp to hit the students where they immediately popped.
"Such dirty, stinky firsties you are!" it crowed with a sinister delight. It juggled the pile of balloons and shuffled them so it somehow carried all of them in the crook of one arm, leaving a single projectile in its left hand. The balloon was tossed once. Twice.
The spirit swung its arm around in a full circle and let the balloon fly. This one broke against the head of Wayne Hopkins, a dark-haired boy who had been visibly reluctant to get his hands dirty with the rainbow roses. He was standing just off to Hazel's side, which meant the force of the balloon was enough to slosh soapy water onto Sally-Anne's shoulder and to splash Hazel fully in the face. She spluttered, and Morgan quickly made his own displeasure known.
The spirit cackled maniacally and started chanting, "Stinky! Stinky!"
Sidonia bared her teeth in a borderline growl. "Damn it all, why don't the professors ever do something about this arsehole? Get lost, Peeves, or I'll get the baron! You know I will! Not that it ever does anything. He's right back doing the same thing the next day."
"Peeves is not being bad!" The spirit stuck its tongue out at her, then lobbed another balloon at the quickly forming trio of Susan Bones and Hannah Abbott and Megan Jones. The girls shrieked and tried to dodge only to run into each other and slip on the water left behind when the balloon flew between them all. The sight of the sprawling girls made him cackle again. "Firsties need to be cleaned!"
Sally-Anne's fingers were digging into the meat of Hazel's arm, and thoughts that were normally so clear to hear had become distant and muffled. Hazel glanced over only for her gaze to refuse to budge. Sally-Anne stared up at Peeves in terror, the word 'cleansed' repeating over and over and over in her mind accompanied by a nameless, formless dread. The sight of this girl, of someone looking to become a friend, feeling such fear set her own emotions to churning. Hers, though, was a different emotion than Sally-Anne's. It was the same emotion she felt when she heard the werewolves worry about a magical boar that might eat away at their food supplies. The same emotion she felt when a drunken wizard turned his wand on Hedwig.
It was anger, flowing thickly through her bloodstream and burning like acid.
She passed her staff from her right hand to her left, shaking Sally-Anne's grip off her arm in the process. That motion pulled Sally-Anne from whatever memory she was drowning in, and the blonde looked over only for Hazel to push the other girl backwards and partially behind her. She was not tall enough to provide a human shield, but that deficit was irrelevant in this scenario.
She had no intention of hiding or running. Not this time.
Peeves said something else, but she was not listening to the malevolent spirit. It was funny, she acknowledged in the back of her mind, but he did not look so scary to her anymore. He could not hold a candle to the ghosts in de Rais's tower that had tried to consume her and her warmth. Next to the spirit of the scoured clearing, drawn there by the anger of a mass grave, he was even less.
Her right hand flexed and her star dart appeared. It no longer looked like a lawn dart, though. It had changed since her encounter in the scoured clearing. Now when she created it, it took the form of a long, thin dagger, the same shape it had taken of its own accord while she was trapped in the spirit realm. Rolling her shoulder, she watched Peeves throw another balloon, and then she whipped her arm in front of her and let go.
The dart, the dagger, flew straight and true and trailed sparks in its wake like a comet as it stabbed into Peeves's belly.
The spirit roared, the sound coming out louder and deeper than his voice had done the entire time it was taunting Sidonia. His head and body swelled and distorted for an instant; not only the first years but Sidonia as well took a step back, proving without words that this was not normal. For a moment, Hazel worried that she might have underestimated the cruel spirit, might have overestimated herself.
Peeves dropped all the balloons from his arms. While they splashed harmlessly against the stones, he grabbed at his abdomen where a hole had appeared. The edges glowed with a bright green light, the color paler even than the freshest leaves sprouting in the springtime, and the hole expanded as they watched until they could see the stones of the wall behind him. Peeves let out a bloodcurdling screech of pain and hate and horror. Whirling away from them, he took off with such surprising speed that he was nearly a blur by the point he turned around a corner and disappeared from view.
Hazel watched the corner for a moment just to make sure he was not going to come back anytime soon, then she returned her attention to Sally-Anne. The other girl was looking down at her with wide eyes. Hazel gave her a small smile and wiggled the index finger of her left hand in the air. 'Are you okay?'
"Am I okay? She just… just… What was that?" Sally-Anne asked in a whisper.
'This isn't the first evil spirit I've encountered. Not all of them are bad, mind you, but some are.' She shrugged. 'It's helpful to know how to defend yourself.'
Sally-Anne could only blink in shock and borderline disbelief.
"Well. That happened," Sidonia told them at last. "I don't know what it was, but… it happened. Let's go ahead and keep moving. Whatever it was, I don't want to be here when he comes back. He looked… terrified and furious all at the same time."
The bunch of Hufflepuffs started walking, taking care to avoid the puddle of water from all the broken water balloons. Hazel's wet robes shifted and stuck to her uncomfortably, and she splayed her fingers against the surface of her robes and pushed her cleaning spell into the fabric. Within moments, they were as clean and dry as they had been when she left the dorms earlier in the morning.
"That's just not fair." She looked over to find Sally-Anne looking enviously at her now-dry clothes, and with a short and silent sigh she reached out and caught the hem of Sally-Anne's sleeve. Another casting of the cleaning spell ensued.
Sally-Anne gave her a grateful smile, but the smile dimmed somewhat as she shifted her robes around on herself. "Huh. That feels a little weird. Nice to have, but weird all the same. Thanks, Hazel."
She waved the gratitude away as a quote from a book came to her, a quote she quickly shared in her spark-writing. 'What are friends for?'
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Lunch turned into an interesting experience thanks to their encounter with Peeves. While they were walking, Sidonia had cast a spell on herself that dried her robes, but by the time they reached the Great Hall she had only cast it on a few other people. Instead she asked for help from other Hufflepuffs in the sixth year, and with their help soon all the first-years were dried and comfortable. Sidonia had then turned this into a teaching moment, revealing that wizards did in fact have a spell for drying wet clothes and other things and sharing how to cast it with the understandably attentive students.
When Hazel asked if it did anything else besides drying, such as cleaning out ground-in dirt, Sidonia had given her a strange look before explaining that for the most part, wizard spells only did the one thing they did. She had gotten that impression when reading through the magical theory books, but it was good to have it confirmed. Overall, she had to admit that while the wizards had many more spells than she knew, their spells seemed a bit limited compared to her own abilities.
She carefully took notes on how the wizards cast this spell regardless. She had been caught in plenty of storms during her months with the werewolves, and she could not remember Jean Luc or Marcel ever drying themselves or each other. Were they unaware of this spell? If so, she hoped they would appreciate the notes she planned to send off to them via owl.
Her pen slowed to a halt as she followed that thought to its logical conclusion. Marcel had been expelled from his magic school when he was bitten, and Jean Luc never went in the first place. Professor Flitwick had mentioned that most wizard magic fit in the charms category. She had to wonder, would the notes she was taking benefit them? Teach them spells they had not picked up on their own?
…Did the school have owls she could borrow? Or would she have to pop over to Diagon Alley and send a letter to them the same way she had when she first sent her rejection letter to McGonagall? She hoped for the former, if only so she could make the gold and silver she stole from G.L. last as long as possible.
When lunch ended, their year was escorted once again to class, this time to the fifth floor where the Transfiguration classroom was located. If Hazel was honest with herself, this might be the sole class she was not excited for, but she also knew it was not solely because of the subject matter. She had not forgotten that McGonagall was one of the people who left her on her aunt and uncle's doorstep, and even a month out from that discovery it still left her hands clenching into fists. Hopefully transfiguration did not require trust in the teacher because after that discovery, Hazel doubted she would be able to trust McGonagall very far at all.
The professor in question was seated at her desk when Nicholas opened the door and waved them in, but she lifted her eyes to see who was entering her domain. "It is still so strange that the Hufflepuffs do that every year. All of my prefects would turn in their badges right then and there if I told them they needed to run around the castle herding the younger years. Well, except perhaps Mr. Weasley," she added to herself with an almost imperceptible smile. "Thank you for leading your fellow Badgers here, Mr. Andersen. You may go."
McGonagall waited until the Gryffindor students arrived and had taken their seats before introducing herself in nearly the exact same way Professor Flitwick and Professor Sprout had. Hazel was beginning to assume there would be a lot of that this week. Yet another roll call followed, then McGonagall stood and started writing – drawing? – a number of strange symbols and diagrams on the chalkboard behind her desk. Runic symbols were scattered here and there, connected by triangles and squares and half-circles and random lines.
"Transfiguration is the most exacting and most complex branch of magic you will study here at Hogwarts. The spells you will learn in Charms and Defense Against the Dark Arts can be cast successfully so long as you are close enough, but the same cannot be said for this class. Transfigurative spells require precise geometric patterns, and these patterns must match the cadence of your wand movements and your incantations. If these are off by even a tiny degree, you will not achieve a complete transformation." She turned away from the dizzying diagrams she had just finished drawing on the board to give the group of students a gimlet glare. "This branch of magic requires perfection, and so do I. The spells I will teach you in your early years are more forgiving of these mistakes, but at higher levels a failed transfiguration can be deadly."
The professor's eyes swept over the assembled class. "Some of them look like they still aren't paying attention. Their mistake. Perhaps instead of a pig, I should go with something a little more exciting." She swept her wand over her desk with a murmur, and the papers and the wood and the little bottle of ink twisted into itself and came out the other side in the shape of a massive lion that let out an ear-rattling roar. The students at the front of the class pushed their chairs backwards until they were pressed against the desks in front of them. McGonagall gave them a tiny smirk and rested her hand lightly on the flank of the lion. "That's more like it. Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned."
Another elaborate wave of her wand later, the lion was once again a desk. "Now, for your first lesson we will start by transforming matchsticks into needles. Behind me you can see some basic diagrams of how the spell and incantation need to be performed…"
McGonagall's lecture continued, and soon enough Hazel's head was spinning. At first it sounded like what they had learned in Charms class, but the need to 'stretch' a wand movement to match the diagram drawn on the blackboard was distracting, as was the professor's repeated insistence that the syllables of the incantation had to reflect the diagram as well. It was all carefully choreographed, and if anything it made her think of some of the fantasy novels she had read where some character, typically an evil one, was performing magic by chanting out an ominous phrase in another language.
Why do wizards make everything more complicated than it needs to be, she complained to Morgan. This would be perfectly magical all on its own if they had just stuck with chanting and waving their arms around in the correct pattern. Instead they insist on adding their wand motions to everything.
It left her with a problem, though. She could not chant. In the novels where these chant rituals appeared, it always had to be done out loud and in as loud a voice as the sorcerer could use. This could not follow the exact same rules, both because this needed a wand when the stories did not and because she could not see McGonagall telling her that silent magic was easily achievable if her own subject was reliant on speech.
McGonagall waved her wand yet again, this time causing twenty matchsticks to rise up from her desk and fly over to each student. Hazel glanced down at the match in front of her and grimaced. She knew she had forgotten something, namely that she needed to create a spell or tool for this subject. It only just now struck her that she had yet to consider how she was going to go about that.
It was possible that thanks to her druidic heritage, she might be able to do exactly what she had just told Morgan the wizards should have done. It would not address the lack of chanting speech, but she could not ignore McGonagall's assurance that it was possible. She might not trust the professor on a personal level, not after discovering that the woman had been one of the people who consigned her to nine years of hell, but there was a difference between personal and professional trust. Professor Flitwick's words had confirmed that wizards could cast spells, even transfiguration spells, without the need for an incantation. When it came to this discipline of magic, she had to trust that the woman both knew what she was talking about and was speaking the truth.
Feeling kind of foolish, she stuck her index finger out and moved it in the pattern drawn on the blackboard, thinking the syllables of the incantation as forcefully as she could. Much as she half expected, when she completed the motions the matchstick remained just that; there was no sudden transformation into a needle.
Morgan twittered teasingly at her, and she shot her friend a glare from the corner of her eye. Yes, yes, I get it. I should have given the wizards the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their magic. This time, anyway. For all that she had failed this time, her next step was obvious. All her spells relied on her forming a mental tool she could use to manifest her magic. Why would wizard transfiguration be any different?
That just left her with the still-enormous hurdle of figuring out what tool would do best for these spells. What kind of tool was capable of turning one thing into another? Hard as it might be to believe, she had never encountered anything during her time in the normal nonmagical world or during her stay with either the werewolves or the hags that could just transform things, which meant that she was drawing a blank as she stared at the matchstick.
Glancing around the room at the other students waving their wands around and McGonagall walking between the desks, she had to wonder. Was it possible to use the shape of a wand as her tool? It was the only thing that appeared capable of performing transfiguration, so it made a weird sort of sense that she would need to pick that as the relevant tool for this type of magic.
She took a moment to picture what a thought-form of a wand would look like, would feel like, but even as she curled her fingers around the imagined wand she had to frown. Something she had learned through nearly two years of experimentation was that when her mind latched onto a tool or a shape that worked, it felt different than just imagining something random. It… clicked, it resonated with her magic and – if she wanted to be a little poetic – her very soul. Her ghost hand, her star dart, the sparkler which she had folded into the ring with which she now wrote out her thoughts; all of these she had felt out in her mind and refined until they were able to alter the world outside her head.
The wand she was imagining? She could already tell this was not the way to go. Maybe it was because she did not understand how a wand itself was supposed to work in the first place, or maybe a wand, being a wizard's tool, simply was not something she could emulate with her druidic powers. Regardless, she knew without moving the 'wand' a single millimeter that this was a dead end. She could wave it all she wanted, it would be worthless to her.
If a wand was not the way to go, what could she use to completely transform this matchstick into something else? She cocked her head in a similar manner to how her little feathered friend did. Perhaps a paintbrush? She could 'paint' over the matchstick in question with the image of a sewing needle?
"What is she… Ah, of course. There's always one every few years. While I appreciate you taking my warnings to heart, you will have better results should you actually use your wand," McGonagall said as her gaze swept over Hazel. "It is all but impossible to know if you are making the correct movements at the right interval unless you actively try to cast the spell."
'That's what I'm trying to do,' Hazel replied, returning her eyes back to the matchstick.
"What is she talking about? And you expect the spell to work without your wand? She did not strike me as an imbecile in the Leaky Cauldron, quite the opposite. So why is she acting like this?"
She waved her left hand negligently, words slipping out from her spark-writing ring almost as quickly as she could think them. 'I certainly hope it will considering I don't have a wand. I can't use one in the first place.'
Her words were clearly unexpected, and the professor's surprise pushed back against Hazel. "What are you talking about, you can't use a wand?!"
'Exactly what I said. I can't use a wand. I'll never be able to.' Or at least, she would never be able to use a wand so long as she carried her staff. That was not a condition she felt like admitting to McGonagall right now, however; whether she carried a staff or a wand was, as Mr. Ollivander had made so clear, ultimately her choice. She was the only one who could decide what path she would tread. 'Since I can't do the spell your way, I need to figure out some other way to get the same result. You wouldn't happen to have any ideas on how to go about that, would you?'
She looked up hopefully at McGonagall, but that hope immediately withered at the expression of utter befuddlement on the woman's face. McGonagall's thoughts sounded off, as if they were caught in a loop of some sort and unable to process the idea that someone might not be capable of using a wand.
Their conversation had not gone unnoticed by the rest of the people in the room, and while at first everyone else's surprise had been swirled together it did not take long for a few people's minds to move off on their own directions. "What kind of witch can't use a wand?" muttered Zacharias, his voice nonetheless clearly audible in the near-silence of the shell-shocked room. "So much for her claim that she's been learning magic from werewolves. She can't even do real magic. The Girl-Who-Lived? Don't make me laugh. At the end of the day, she's nothing more than a Squib."
Squib. That was a word she had read but never heard spoken, and even in reading it she had come across it in only a single book. Namely, the book she found in Flourish and Blotts that told parents they should throw away their handicapped children to nonmagical orphanages and forget they ever existed. Hazel's left hand clenched into a tight fist as the anger from reading that waste of paper returned to her for a moment. For all that Zacharias's thought had remained unvoiced, that word nevertheless spread through the minds of the people she knew or suspected of being wizard-born. Their voices were tinged with varied combinations of emotions, but surprise and disgust and pity were the most prevalent by far.
Hazel felt her shoulders rise up defensively almost without her realizing it. The emotions surrounding her felt familiar, and it took her longer than she would be willing to admit to realize where she knew them from. They were similar to the thoughts she heard while she still attended school in Little Whinging. It was the attitude she had grown up around that considered her little better than scum on someone else's shoe.
An attitude she had always ignored for her own sanity, and one she now realized she had much preferred staying in the past where it belonged.
McGonagall's thoughts did not follow quite the same direction as the students', although whether that was a benefit or not Hazel was unsure of. "I can't believe she is incapable of using a wand. She's clearly capable of magic, else she would not be able to use that writing trick. The supply list clearly stated that you needed to obtain a wand before coming to school, Miss Potter. Fifteen points from Hufflepuff for being so sorely unprepared, and I will be speaking to Professor Sprout about this incident. Pomona will need to take care of this on the weekend. We can't have a first-year student think she can get away with not bringing a wand."
The loss of meaningless points was followed by mental and in some cases not-so-mental groaning from the rest of the Hufflepuffs. All but Sally-Anne, that was, who was ignoring the matchstick in front of her and staring at Hazel. "Hazel can't use a wand? But she can use magic. She used it on that flying man and then on me." Waiting until McGonagall stormed off to continue critiquing the wand-wavings of the wizard children, Sally-Anne leaned over and whispered, "H-How can you do magic if you c-c-can't use a w-wand?"
Hazel's response was written in small letters this time, a message meant for Sally-Anne's eyes only. 'I don't need a wand. Never have. My ancestors were druids, not wizards. It means my magic follows different rules.'
Sally-Anne looked up from the words to meet Hazel's eyes, searching for any hint of deceit. After a long few moments, she nodded slowly and looked back down at her matchstick. "I hope you figure out your magic, then. Everything the teachers taught us so far has been hard enough doing it the way they said to do it. I can't imagine needing to learn it all a whole different way."
Hazel sighed and looked down at her own match, the lack of an appropriate tool nagging at the back of her mind like a loose tooth. She hoped she could figure out how to adapt the school's lessons to her own magic, too, and honestly? She was not sure if she had much more confidence than Sally-Anne did.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
The tapping of her staff against the stone floors of the castle echoed lightly in the silence that wrapped around them. The corridors in this part of the castle were empty of everyone except Hazel, which gave them a bit of an eerie quality even it was simultaneously a welcome relief from the constant bombardment of other peoples' thoughts.
The first Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson had gone better than Transfiguration, if only because Professor Quirrell was starting them off on theory in a similar but more focused vein than Professor Flitwick. Dinner, though; that was less welcome. Between the Gryffindors who had been present in McGonagall's class and a few of her fellow Hufflepuffs confirming the story, rumors about her magical abilities were already spreading through the student body like wildfire. She was a Squib, they were saying, bereft of any kind of magical ability. Her spark-writing, something so many people had been curious about, was now dismissed as the work of some magical device she kept on her in secret to hide her failings.
Mute, magicless, worthless. Those were the thoughts and opinions circling around and around her, echoes of her primary school days jumping out of her memories and into the present where they were still unwanted. It seemed like the only person who both was not dismissing her and was less than twice her age was Sally-Anne, and that was solely because the other girl had seen her defend them from Peeves and then clean them both afterwards of all the soapy water. As far as she could tell, she was being dismissed and consigned to irrelevance by just about everyone else.
If anyone asked Hazel what the she thought about all this – not that anyone had, of course – she supposed that her answer would surprise them. The farther the whispers spread through the school, the less angry or upset she felt about it. Quite the contrary. It actually amused her in a strange way the more she reflected on it.
She had been to four classes so far, only one of which had called for a wand at all, and from nothing more than that people thought she had no magical abilities? All because she did not do things in the exact same way that the wizards did? How insular, how arrogant, did they have to be to assume that their way of doing things was the only way those things could be done? Even in her extremely limited experience, hags were capable of things that wizards were not, and she was well aware that other species had their own abilities.
It was only now that she was interacting with wizards with any regularity that Hazel was starting to understand why the hags referred to them as 'wand-wavers' in such a derogatory way.
It was not the opinions of others that had sent her wandering the hallways, however. She was on a search for something far more interesting.
Of all the classes that Hogwarts offered, the one that had caught her attention and interest immediately was Potions. That was no surprise; she had been interested in potion-making as soon as Elise and Amorette first introduced the subject while she stayed with them in Compiègne Forest, and the hags had only reinforced it when they showed her the full depth of what the Brewing entailed. The first potions class of the week was tomorrow, finally a class she had to go to on the first period of the day, but it was in one of only two classrooms Devin had not shown them. All he told them was that it was down here in 'the dungeons'.
She had been wandering the lower levels of the school for maybe an hour or so now, leaving the common room when the pitying looks and thoughts from the rest of the Hufflepuffs grew too irritating, and in that time she had seen a few different interesting things. The farther she walked away from the main staircase, the more disorganized and unused the rooms became. Many of them were storage, but as she progressed farther down the hallways she soon came across rooms that looked like they had been used at one point for something. She was not sure what classes needed large tables that filled nearly the entire room, nor what could be done with smaller metal tables that looked like man-sized sinks on legs complete with drains and moveable straps. As she continued down the corridors, she soon found rooms that looked like they belonged in a literal dungeon, complete with thin pallets and doors that were made from iron bars. At first, she assumed this was where she was supposed to be, but no matter how long she looked she could not find a potions classroom anywhere.
It took her an embarrassingly long time to realize that Devin was probably using the term 'dungeon' figuratively.
Her explorations resumed, she eventually came across a different area of the castle that looked like it was better-traveled. The rooms still looked like they had not been used in years, maybe even decades, but the decor was closer to what she expected from a potions laboratory. She was getting nearer to her goal, she could feel it.
Pushing open another door, she smiled as she took in the insides. This was what she had been looking for. The room held several thick and sturdy tables that were attached directly to the stone floor, each table supporting a heavy cauldron forged from a dull grey metal. Pewter cauldrons, she had to assume, since the supply list required them to buy such things, although now she had to wonder why they needed to buy their own if the school provided them. On the walls were shelves that held jars and vials of all sorts that contained preserved animals, some of which she recognized and many she did not. Torches lit this room just as they did the other classrooms, but here instead of burning yellow and red like normal their embers glowed a sullen green. She could only imagine what it would look like when the room was fully lit, and for once she found herself nodding at how this classroom seemed finally to embrace its mystical nature—
"You are far from your burrow, Potter."
Hazel's feet all but left the ground as she jumped up, whirling around as best she could and placing her staff between herself and whoever had just spoken. The man staring at her wore all black robes over black trousers and shiny black shoes, his pallid face brought into even clearer contrast framed as it was by hair the same color as his clothing. Only his eyes were darker, staring into her own with an intensity she had seen before in cats before they pounced on an unsuspecting mouse. His mouth was twisted into a half-sneer half-smirk, as though he was unsure whether he was amused or angry.
Most importantly to her, he was a person, not Peeves or some other spiritual entity sneaking up on her. She lowered her staff from its defensive stance and braced it on the ground as she leaned onto it for support, her left hand pressing against her racing heart. She took several deep gulps of air before removing her hand and waving it through the air. 'Don't do that! You scared me.'
The man's only reaction to her words and her glare was the tiniest rise of one eyebrow. "If you do not wish to be scared, perhaps you should not be in someone else's domain. Why are you here? Planning a fun little trick?" He all but spat the last words at her.
Hazel blinked at him, caught off-guard by not just the accusation but the strange voice he spoke in. It was as if his words were… flat, for lack of a better explanation. There was a quality of his speech that was missing in comparison to anyone else she had ever conversed with. The best comparison she could come up with was that he sounded like people on the telly or the radio, except he did not have the excuse of talking through a machine.
He waited silently as she thought about what he said and how he said it before shaking her head. He had asked her a question, even if she did not understand just why he was asking in the first place. 'We have Potions class tomorrow morning, and Devin didn't show us where the classroom was on Monday. So I went looking for it.' The man still did not say anything, waiting as quietly as a statue. If he was not going to say anything, she supposed that gave her the right to ask her own question. 'I think I saw you at the staff table our first night, but no one has told me your name. I'm Hazel Potter.'
The man's lips curled into more of a sneer, and in a flash she realized why this man was so off-putting. She had not been able to put her finger on it before, but now it stood out like a light in the dark. She could not hear his thoughts! Everyone she had ever met, everyone, she had been able to hear. It did not matter if said person was a mundane human or a wizard or a werewolf or a hag, she could still hear them.
But this man? There was not a hint of what he was thinking, neither in words nor even in emotions. Was that what was wrong with his voice?! Was that the explanation for why she had been disturbed when she was little whenever the Dursleys would turn on music or a television show? Did those peoples' voices sound unreal to her not because they came from a machine but because they came without the echo of their thoughts?
"I'm well aware of who you are," he growled. "I, for your information, am Professor Snape. The potions master for this school."
Her small, polite grin widened into something true when he said those words. What a happy coincidence! Or maybe not a coincidence; now that she thought about it, it made perfect sense that the Potions professor would be in the same area as his classroom. He had probably just left his office or something, and she had not noticed because of whatever was preventing her from hearing his mind.
"And I will ask you again. What are you doing in my classroom. The truth, this time."
Hazels' smile wilted. What did he mean, 'this time'? 'I just told you. I wanted to know where it was.'
Black eyes narrowed, and without warning his thoughts burst into her head. "—thinks she can lie to me! Why is he so angry? What is this? There's no reason for him to think I'm lying. Are these my thoughts? These aren't your thoughts? This is— I've never met anyone— She is too young to I thought I was the only one takes years always just me can't get out what do you mean out no escape urge to run Legilimens resonance what is panic confusion anger fear falling swirling collision pain pain painpainpain—'
The voice – voices? – cut off as unexpectedly as they began, and Hazel stumbled backwards and half-slumped against the stone wall. Morgan twittered into her ear, his song loud in the sudden silence. Each note reverberated agonizingly in her head, everything stretched out as if her brain had just tried to swell three times its size. She blinked, not sure when she had closed her eyes at all, and looked over at the professor who had also staggered against the opposite wall. From the expression on his face and the tired way he wiped sweat off his face, he obviously felt no better than she did.
She had to wonder. Did she really hear what she thought she heard? Some of those thoughts in his head were not his but hers. He had read her mind! For all that she was hurting and worn out, she could not help the excited smile that wanted to spread across her face. She had never met anyone else who could do that; she had resigned herself to being the only one, all alone in the world. But she wasn't! This was amazing!
The pain, on the other hand? Not so amazing.
Snapping her fingers sounded too loud to her own ears, and if he truly had as bad a headache as she did she could not blame him for the level of venom in the glare he shot her. She winced and wrote, 'Sorry, that was loud. I didn't know anyone else could hear thoughts like I do. Is that why your voice sounds weird?' Actually, if his voice sounded weird and he could read minds, maybe… 'Does my voice sound weird, too? Like people on the radio? Why couldn't I hear you before, and why can't I hear you anymore now?'
His face shifted through several emotions too fast for her to catch, once more leaving her on the back foot. She had never before realized how much she relied on her mind-reading to understand the people around her, but now bereft of her abilities it felt almost like she was floundering in a dark room looking for something. Except unlike a dark room, there was no light switch or torch she could use to banish the shadow. When his face did settle on a single expression, it was one of rage. "Twenty points from Hufflepuff!" he roared. "And it will be more if you tell anyone about this! Now get out!"
The intensity and volume of his shouting made her jump backwards and ram her back into the wall. Now was probably not the best time to ask him any questions, she supposed, so sliding sideways she moved away from the angry professor and once free scurried around the next corner. When she could no longer see Professor Snape, she breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
There really was no reason for him to yell so loud, she told Morgan. At her thought, he sidestepped away from against her neck where he had huddled in fear. Blue tits, and she assumed most other little songbirds that had to fear cats and birds of prey, did not like loud noises. All I wanted was to talk to another mind-reader like me. But… She rubbed her chin. He was very insistent about not talking about this to other people. I know I never told anyone in Little Whinging about it because they would react badly to finding out, and from the way everyone right now is acting, the same is probably true of wizards.
Do you think he was so angry because he was scared of this getting out when he wants to keep it private? I guess that would be understandable, but he still could have been nicer about it. All he had to do was ask that I keep it between the two of us.
It took some time for her to follow the corridor back to the Great Hall and the nearby staircase, but at least once she reached those landmarks it was a familiar path to walk back to the rows of barrels that concealed the entrance to the Hufflepuff common room. Placing her hand flat against the middle barrel in the second row from the bottom, she told it, I want to go to bed.
Other people getting into the common room had used those words or words much like them before, and those people had been let inside. For her, however, the barrel did nothing.
That… was not good.
Pushing down her irritation, she propped her staff against the wall of barrels so she could switch hands. With her left hand free, she used her spark-writing ring to make the same request as before but visible this time. Once again, there was no response. Because of course everything in this culture seemed designed to keep her from doing anything.
Starting to lose her temper, Hazel thumped the lid of the barrel twice. Hopefully that would be loud enough that someone, anyone, would hear her banging and let her in. Something rumbled in the depths of the wall, and she smiled as she dropped her hand. Someone had heard her!
Two lids on each side of the 'doorway' barrel flipped open, and water rushed out in a torrent aimed straight at her. The force of all that liquid catching her in the chest flung her backwards and to the ground, and she slid across the wet stones until she hit the wall where she was pinned for another second more. The flow of water was cut off, and with that so too went the pressure.
Hazel coughed a few times as he throat burned, and a sniff of herself made her scowl. This was not water. That would have been too nice. It was instead vinegar of all things! She was soaked through with it, as was the stone floor. Who was going to clean this up?
The answer to that question became clear a moment later. The wide puddles starting shrinking rapidly, as if she was watching a video of them evaporating in fast forward. Within the span of seconds, they had vanished entirely.
She climbed to her feet and glared at the barrels. What do you think the chances are that they've already refilled?
Morgan, rather than sing anything in response, leapt off her shoulder and flapped over to the top of the barrels. Now off her wet self, he puffed up and shook himself dry.
Traitor. He did not appear to care about her chiding, so she walked over to the barrels again. She remembered which ones had opened, and now she wanted to experiment. She slammed her hand against the doorway barrel again and moved to the side, out of the line of fire from the vinegar barrels.
This time it was just the barrels on the opposite side from her that opened, and not fully either. Their lids moved just enough that they could spray all their contents at an angle, conveniently aimed once more directly at her.
Another couple of seconds passed before they cut off, and for the span of several breaths Hazel remained exactly where she was, laying on her back in the middle of the hallway some twenty feet away from the barrels. It meant she did not have to look at the offending entrance, although it did nothing to keep her from hearing Morgan's hysterical chirping. She sucked on her bottom lip with a pop and pushed herself into a sitting position. Are you done yet?
If anything, her obvious irritation just made him laugh harder.
Once more she staggered upright, the only wet thing in the hallway. She gave the barrels an ugly look before shaking her head. She was not getting into the common room tonight. It was a good thing she had stuck with her own way of doing things instead of copying other people, namely in that she continued to wear her satchel on her person and kept everything she needed inside it. She would hate to be stuck outside the dormitory and have all her belongings on the other side of the unopenable door.
She raised her hand with the intent of pulling her staff towards her, but before she could start forming the shape of her ghost hand the staff flew towards her and smacked into her palm. Hazel blinked a couple of times as she stared at the length of maple. That was new. Welcome, but new. Compared to a fellow mind-reader who did not want to talk to her about their shared abilities and a dormitory that would not let her in, it was probably the best part of tonight.
Come on, she told Morgan with a sigh, turning away from the wall of unfriendly barrels. We'll find somewhere else to camp out tonight.
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Evaunit02mark1
S-s-smell the Prey, S-s-start the Hunt.
Honestly I'm starting to think she'd have been better off sticking with the Hags. At least there she'd actually learn something.
How not to end up on someone's plate probably but still something.
How not to end up on someone's plate probably but still something.
Nuew
“Mankind, be vigilant. We loved you.”—Julius Fučík
- Location
- hiding in ∅
- Pronouns
- She/They
Well.
Things are going extremely poorly and nobody seems willing to make any accomodations. I wonder how long until she tries to leave.
It's a bit of a shame how badly things went with Snape. Hopefully that was just him being concerned about the initial meeting and will get better for future meetings, but, well.
Anyways, thanks for the update! Hope to see more soon.
Things are going extremely poorly and nobody seems willing to make any accomodations. I wonder how long until she tries to leave.
It's a bit of a shame how badly things went with Snape. Hopefully that was just him being concerned about the initial meeting and will get better for future meetings, but, well.
Anyways, thanks for the update! Hope to see more soon.
Lagoon12002
How far have I fell down into this deep deep sea
The more and more reactions I see of these Wizards of Britian, I have to wonder how far back, and how deep, this suppression goes.
In fact, if I were to make a wild guess, I would say a large amount of memory modification was used to cover this up, along with a book burning worthy of Nazi Germany and a strict set of indoctrination processes. That thought spiral of McGonnal's may have been natural, but maybe not.
It would also imply a rather macabre past of Azkaban and it's usage.
So many secrets, so little chapters!
Edit: Oh! I wonder if there are Taboo spells on spoken words relating to Druidism and other 'darker' magics. A few hit squads of Unspeakables with full reign would explain these oddities.
In fact, if I were to make a wild guess, I would say a large amount of memory modification was used to cover this up, along with a book burning worthy of Nazi Germany and a strict set of indoctrination processes. That thought spiral of McGonnal's may have been natural, but maybe not.
It would also imply a rather macabre past of Azkaban and it's usage.
So many secrets, so little chapters!
Edit: Oh! I wonder if there are Taboo spells on spoken words relating to Druidism and other 'darker' magics. A few hit squads of Unspeakables with full reign would explain these oddities.
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- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, wizarding education remains utterly awful! Literally every single subject other than Herbology has led to Hazel having to invent her own ways to do things, no?
While undoubtedly a way to stretch one's magic skills, it's telling that only one class has actually been able to teach her rather than force her to teach herself (and do so far faster than is sensible).
Her inability to understand the house point system is... interesting, although it doesn't quite make sense to me. It's obviously supposed to speak to her immature individualism, but I feel that at least her experience with, say, the werewolves should have taught her about group benefit and detriment.
While undoubtedly a way to stretch one's magic skills, it's telling that only one class has actually been able to teach her rather than force her to teach herself (and do so far faster than is sensible).
Her inability to understand the house point system is... interesting, although it doesn't quite make sense to me. It's obviously supposed to speak to her immature individualism, but I feel that at least her experience with, say, the werewolves should have taught her about group benefit and detriment.
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Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
And if there was a prize at the end based on the points, she would understand. The problem is that as far as she understands, there isn't one (or at least not what she would consider a prize).
Theirs a prize? Also thanks for the chapter!
Nuew
“Mankind, be vigilant. We loved you.”—Julius Fučík
- Location
- hiding in ∅
- Pronouns
- She/They
She doesn't want Minerva (or someone else) to force her to break her staff so she can get a wand.
There are some other ways she could have phrased it without bringing up the staff, (e.g. "Olivander couldn't find any wands that matched"), but maybe she didn't want to be misleading, or didn't think of it in time.
Lagoon12002
How far have I fell down into this deep deep sea
Perhaps she will explain properly once her and Minerva are talking about it?
Edit: Ah yeah that seems more likely.
Evaunit02mark1
S-s-smell the Prey, S-s-start the Hunt.
If I recall correctly the Great Hall get's the colors of the winning house for the last meal of the school year, and also bragging rights.
More than one story (usually by an American author) has pointed out that this seems, lackluster considering the amount of effort it takes to keep said points and how everyone acts about it.
I'm not sure how the Brits who's school system was the basis for the 4 Houses see it mind you. They might find it perfectly ordinary.