Note: The first few chapters will be slow, since they spend much time establishing the mechanics of magic and lay out some mysteries which will later prove crucial to the plot. After the stage has been set, the story will pick up in pace. For the first few chapters, be ready for a lot of exposition and discussion about magical theory.
Harry will be as out-of-character as you can possibly imagine (and Voldemort to a lesser extent, mainly to make him more competent than he was in canon), but I'll try to keep all other characters close to canon insofar as we have information on them. If you have ageist prejudices, you may find yourself thinking that this story's Harry is too mature for his age, which is certainly true if you compare him to the average person his age. Harry is hardly average in this story, however. If you don't like this kind of story, I'm writing this as fair warning so you don't have to read further and be disappointed.
If you're looking for any kind of romance, angst or character bashing; this is not your story.
There will be some technical content, but I will do my best to write the story in such a way that the uninterested reader can skip over most of these parts and still understand the plot. Regardless, the premise that magic is a part of nature that can be understood by humans is central in this story. If you have a more mystical conception of magic then you might find this distasteful. (Despite the impression you may get from this chapter, the wizarding world is not actually as "backwards" as it seems to Harry. Keep in mind that you're seeing the world from his perspective and not as it truly is.) Once again, I've given fair warning.
For most, it was just another night at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The half-moon shone brightly over the tall mountains spread across the landscape around the castle, its light complementing the ethereal beauty of the lake and the forest below. A gentle wind was blowing, rustling the leaves and the branches of the trees in the Forbidden Forest, the resulting sound carrying with it a sense of foreboding that seemed to warn of the dangers within the forest. A particular raven-haired boy stared out of the window in his room in the Ravenclaw dormitory, observing the idyllic scenery while contemplating the changes in his life that have occured over the past two months.
Harry Potter had always known that he was different. He could do things, sense things that others could not. He could easily understand concepts his peers struggled with. He could make objects move without touching them, incinerate things, create light from the palms of his hands. It was unnatural, as his relatives never failed to remind him, and he agreed with them at first. However, as he tried to understand how he could do the things he was able to do, he came to realize that his abilities were just as natural as anything else in the world.
It was accidental, at first. Sometimes, he would get glimpses of something exquisitely beautiful brushing at the edge of his consciousness. When he tried to grasp it, to try to sense more of it and understand what it was that he was experiencing, it would be gone. He learned through trial and error that forcing the issue did not help, so he tried the only thing he could think of as a five year old boy - meditation. At first, it was an impossible task for him. He couldn't clear his mind for more than a few seconds at most - his innate curiosity worked against him, always reminding him of something worth thinking about, and his concentration would be broken. It took him many months before he could clear his mind for more than a minute.
Then, he felt it. There, just at the edge of his consciousness, close to slipping away, was the most beautiful thing he had seen in his short life. This time, instead of trying to use force, he sank deeper into the meditative trance. The world did not exist for him at that moment. There was only what he could see in his mind's eye; an entity of seemingly endless detail and complexity, the entire construct seemingly vibrating in harmony, creating music like he had never heard before. Mere words were impotent to describe what he felt, what he saw at that moment. After some time, perhaps seconds or perhaps hours, he gradually woke from the trance and centered himself. That was the first time Harry Potter was able to get a glimpse of what he would later call his own soul.
As the years went by, he learned many things from study and experimentation. He discovered that his seemingly unnatural abilities were in fact somehow facilitated by his soul. He learned what he could about mechanics, about derivatives, about classical fields and their laws of motion. The more he learned, the more he realized how fascinated he was by nature and its intricacies. He later came to understand that what he saw in his mind's eye when he cleared his mind was best described as a superposition of many scalar-valued fields, or equivalently, a vector-valued field. At eleven years old, his knowledge of infinite dimensional vector space theory and functional analysis remained woefully inadequate, so he was only able to get a rudimentary understanding of the collection of fields he named "the Shroud". To the best of his understanding, there was a coupling (or a resonance) between the Shroud and the fields described in the physics textbooks he could find in the libraries he frequented. It was similar to the coupling between the electric and magnetic fields in classical electromagnetism, and he doubted that without Maxwell's work he would've been able to construct even the simple toy model he was able to put together. The coupling constants, however, was not large enough compared to the amplitude of the vibrations common throughout the Shroud, which made the extra fields impossible to measure in most contexts. The only exception he could find to this was when he himself acted to cause changes in the Shroud, which carried over to the physical world through the coupling. He still did not understand how it was possible that brains were capable of resonating so strongly within the Shroud, which was one of the many problems with his simple model.
Through this understanding and practice, his control over his abilities gradually improved, but he remained unable to do anything which required anything more than a modicum of precision with them. He also grew concerned about the fact that this entire new realm of physics was apparently unexplored by anyone who came before him. Either he was the first to stumble upon this discovery by accident, or the discovery had been kept secret from the general public for reasons he could not fathom. In either case, he surmised it would be dangerous to speak about what he knew openly until he had a better understanding of the situation, so he kept his discoveries about the Shroud to himself.
Then, the fateful day arrived. The Dursley household got a letter, addressed to one Harry James Potter specifically, inviting him to attend a school of withcraft and wizardry. Harry would've thought it an elaborate prank if it was not for the unusual sensation he got when he touched the letter - there was a certain level of excitement, something resembling high frequency but low amplitude vibration in the Shroud around the letter, suggesting that it had been subjected to some resonance in the near past. Unfortunately for him, nothing inside the letter so much as hinted at knowledge of the Shroud, choosing instead to talk about wands and broomsticks and cauldrons. They even requested a reply to their message by owl. The situation was surreal, and Harry needed to go up to his room and lock himself inside for several hours while trying to work out what could possibly be going on.
The most plausible hypothesis he was able to come up with was that the letter had been written using a code, but his efforts at cracking it yielded no results. He speculated that whoever sent the letter may have assumed that he knew the code and would be able to understand the contents without much trouble, but unfortunately this was not the case. He had no idea how to send a reply to the letter by owl, and even less of an idea where to get all of the strange items mentioned in the letter, so he decided that there was really no way he could respond to receiving the letter. He would save it just in case, perhaps sometime in the future he would feel like wasting another hour or two trying to crack a uniquely strange code.
It was a few days later that, on a whim, he brought up the strange letter at the dinner table with his relatives. To his surprise, Petunia's face turned white at the mention of the "Hogwarts School of Wicthcraft and Wizardry", whereas Vernon's face turned a shade of purple. He learned, after some convincing, that the letter was not a joke and there was a whole world of witches and wizards out there who wore strange robes and communicated with each other by owl. Apparently his parents had been a part of this secretive community, and they did not die in a car crash like he had been led to believe. He had never questioned the circumstances of his parents' death, but if he had, the theory that they had been killed by a mad wizard in a wizarding war would've been one of the furthest things from his mind. The bizarre exposition finally sent him over the edge, and he simply started laughing, failing to recenter himself for a few minutes. After his hysteric attack was over, he asked Petunia if she knew where he could learn more about this world, and she told him about a place called Diagon Alley which he could enter through a pub in London called The Leaky Cauldron. After some more convincing, they agreed to give him enough money to take a cab to make his entrance to the wizarding world.
If he thought that reading about wizards and witches on a piece of paper was surreal, Harry had no words to describe the scene before him when the bartender Tom agreed to open the way to Diagon Alley for him after tapping a sequence of bricks with a wooden stick that Harry assumed to be a wand. Apparently he was famous in the wizarding world for something he could not remember, if people's gawking, staring and not-so-quiet whispering behind his back was any indication. When he told Tom about the situation he found himself in, he received the advice to visit Gringotts first, which was a wizarding bank run by goblins. Harry did not know if anything could surprise him anymore, so he simply nodded and promptly made his way to the white marble building which was being guarded by vicious-looking green dwarfs who he assumed to be goblins. His business in the bank went surprisingly well, and he found out he had more than enough wealth to cover for his expenses in the wizarding world thanks to a trust vault set up by his parents before their untimely demise. The international common currency system in the wizarding world intrigued Harry quite a bit, since he vaguely recalled the dangers of such a policy from a macroeconomics book he had once read, but he refrained from interrogating the goblin with his questions about the economy of the wizarding world. Instead, he took an amount of money deemed adequate by the goblin who showed him to his trust vault, and promptly left the bank to find a bookstore.
He was aware that his attire was extremely out of place in the wizarding world, which seemed to be stuck, in every way conceivable (including their sense of fashion), in the Renaissance era. He was never one to care much about appearances, however, so he felt no compulsion to take any time to replace his clothes with something that would not stand out as much. Instead, he made his way to a bookstore named Flourish & Blotts, and proceeded to spend four hours perusing the books on the shelves and choosing which ones to buy. He had brought the letter with him, so he also decided to buy all of the books which were listed as requirements for first year students at the school. Unfortunately for him, it had slipped his mind to acquire a means of carrying the books he had bought, so he simply levitated them and moved to get out of the bookstore. He thought something was off about the stares he was getting while walking to the Leaky Cauldron to rent a room, but he attributed it to the fact that he was levitating the books instead of carrying them inside a trunk like everyone else seemed to be doing. He had to admit that it made him stand out even more than he had been already.
After he convinced the bartender that he had nowhere else to stay because his Muggle relatives had chased him out of the house after he got his Hogwarts letter (which may not have been too far from the truth in a world where Harry was less capable and less intelligent), he was able to get a room without any further trouble. He deposited the books inside the room and left for his final stop of the day, which was a wandmaker in the Alley called Ollivander's. He had read a bit about wandlore in the bookstore before making his way back to the Leaky Cauldron, and what little he had read had left him with more questions than answers. It appeared that witches and wizards relied on wands as a focus for their magic, which made it easier for them to use magic and allowed them to cast spells.
Harry still had no idea what "magic" or "spells" actually were, even though he knew the incantations and wand movements for many from his time in the bookstore. He simply did not understand how uttering some Latin phrase and making a swishing motion with a wooden stick made it any easier to produce the waves in the Shroud required to generate resonance with the physical world, and none of the books he had the opportunity to look at in the bookstore expounded on this subject of crucial importance. He was sure that what he could do was, if not "magic", at least somehow related to it; as since he had entered the Alley he was feeling a constant excitement in the part of the Shroud surrounding him, one similar to what he had felt from the Hogwarts letter. He could not yet extend his senses in the Shroud beyond his immediate vicinity, so he could not sense what others were doing when they used their wands; so he resolved to head to the wandmaker to acquire one. It would be much easier to experiment and discover how wands fit into his model of the interaction between the Shroud and the physical world once he had one in his possession.
With these thoughts on his mind, Harry made his way to the wandmaker, opened the door and stepped inside. The shop seemed empty, so Harry took some time to look around him. He saw many boxes filled to the brim with different wands, and it was at that moment that Mr. Ollivander chose to startle him by appearing seemingly out of nowhere. After some talk about his parents' wands and how he had been expecting Harry, Ollivander took some measurements and they proceeded to go through half of the wands in the shop without finding "a match". As he had read in the bookstore and as Mr. Ollivander chose to remind him, the wand chose the wizard, not the other way around; though Harry still had no clue how a stick of wood with part of some magical creature inside it could "choose" anybody for anything.
However, it was the way the wands reacted when he held them that Harry found most intriguing. They seemed to lightly probe his presence within the Shroud, and then fell silent. When he tried waving the wands as Mr. Ollivander instructed him to, he felt the wand's probe more strongly and his own soul reacted on instinct, pushing the unwanted intruder out and causing unintended damage throughout the shop. Finally, Mr. Ollivander handed him a wand from inside a room at the back of the shop and Harry felt the difference instantly. This wand also probed his presence, but instead of retreating, it established a link between them. Harry felt the resulting surge of warmth strongly, and waved the wand, which produced blue and green sparks.
"Oh, bravo! Yes, indeed, very good... curious... how very curious..." Ollivander seemed to feel no compunction about not elaborating further, so Harry pressed him:
"What's curious, sir?"
Ollivander eyed him with a gaze that somehow apeared otherworldly, and replied:
"I remember every wand I've ever sold Mr. Potter, every single one... It so happens that the phoenix whose tail feather is in your wand gave just one other. It is very curious that you should be destined for this wand when its brother gave you that scar."
Harry remembered the term "brother wand" from his brief time in the bookstore, but he did not know how it was significant for two wands to share the same core. Still, it was with a certain sense of foreboding that Harry left the wandmaker's shop, the knowledge that his wand was the brother of the Dark Lord's weighing down on him as if the air around him had become denser. Harry felt it was no use pondering this mystery when he did not know the first thing about wands and how they worked yet, so he filed this knowledge away in the back of his mind and returned to matters of more immediate concern, such as understanding the role of wands in casting spells, as he walked back to his room in the Leaky Cauldron.
By all accounts he should've been hungry by now, but as it often happened, he forgot about lunch in favor of experimenting with his newly acquired wand. He opened the Standard Book of Spells that he had acquired from the bookstore once he got back to his room, and found the page depicting the Wand-Lighting charm - a simple charm designed to create a ball of light from the end of a wizard's wand. Harry could already achieve this without the use of spells, since the electric and magnetic fields were both directly coupled to the Shroud - it was one of the simplest ways to generate resonance. He also thought his control over it was fairly good, so he felt it was the best option to start experimenting with.
He took his wand, made the necessary wand movement, focused on his intent to create light as instructed by the book and incanted "Lumos!"
At that moment, Harry felt the wand's probe through the connection, and instantly a part of his soul reached out, from him, through the wand; and Harry could only watch in awe as the wand seemed to perform what could only be described as a perfect demonstration of electromagnetic resonance. An instant later, the wand's tip lighted up.
It was difficult to express in words what Harry was feeling at that moment - it was a mixture of befuddlement, awe, contemplation and shock. Willing himself to calm down by clearing his mind as he had learned to do so many years ago, he closed his eyes and started thinking about how to interpret the results of his small experiment. First, he understood that what he was doing and what other wizards did with their wands was not only similar, but in fact exactly identical - the Wand-Lighting charm created light using the same method that Harry himself used to do so. However, when he held the wand in his hand, Harry could not honestly say that it was him who created the ball of light. Yes, the wand had drawn on his soul and he could feel how his soul manipulated the Shroud through the wand, but Harry simply did not have the required level of precision and control to create light without a wand as gracefully and as unwastefully as the wand seemed to direct him into doing. It was almost as if the wand knew exactly what to do, and Harry's only relevant input in the process was the temporary use of his soul.
Hypotheses began to form in Harry's head; wild and uncontrolled. He wanted to know how the wand was able to do what it was doing; no, he needed to know. After some thought, Harry concluded that the only way the wand could've known exactly what to do in this situation was if two conditions were met: the wand had some way of probing its surroundings within the Shroud, since without this input the appropriate manipulation can't be decided; and the wand had within it a stored procedure (or some way to access such a procedure) for the Wand-Lighting charm, which was refined beyond what Harry could hope to achieve in his current state without the wand. Unfortunately, Harry had no clue how a stick of wood with a phoenix tail feather inside it could possibly contain such precise and refined instructions, process them within miliseconds and react appropriately to the command he gave the wand. He realized it now; the wand movement, intent and incantation were probably all components required to erase any ambiguity, and they carried no special meaning beyond the fact that the wand seemed to be tuned to recognize them as a trigger. Again, Harry had no ideas on how this was possible.
In fact, now that he thought about it carefully, he did not even have an idea of how it was possible for a wand to have such a distinguished presence in the Shroud to begin with - similar to a creature with a rudimentary nervous system. If the similarity went beyond the Shroud, as Harry now felt it must, then there may have been more merit than he had initially thought in the claim that "the wand chooses the wizard" - after all, from what Harry knew at this point, conscious experience was indirectly coupled to the nervous system through the Shroud, so it was reasonable to conjecture that a distinguished presence within the Shroud, which one could call a "soul", was a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of some form of consciousness. If the wand indeed had a rudimentary form of consciousness, it could quite possibly make choices of its own, and the presence of some kind of nervous system would also explain the wand's uncanny capability for storing and using large amounts of information. This line of thought made Harry regard the wand in his hand with a newfound respect and reverence. That which he had initially dismissed in his ignorance as a stick of wood was in fact a veritable treasure trove of knowledge on how to manipulate the Shroud, if one only knows the language with which to speak to it. Practicing with the wand and observing its actions could allow Harry to improve his skills far faster than he had thought.
Satisfied with the conclusions he had drawn so far, he made two swishes with his wand as instructed by the book and incanted "Nox!" The experience of manipulating the Shroud through the wand was repeated, and the wand ended the stable local equilibrium that existed between the Shroud and the electromagnetic fields with grace, and the light emanating from the tip of the wand died out.
Harry spent the next two hours practicing various spells from the Standard Book of Spells until his hunger became too much to ignore.
In the weeks leading up to September 1st, Harry stayed in his room at the Leaky Cauldron and occasionally ventured out into the alley to purchase new books or complete his acquisition of school supplies. He had decided to attend Hogwarts after his first day in the Alley, and his discovery about how wizards who did not complete their Ordinary Wizarding Level exams with satisfactory results were not legally allowed to carry wands only reinforced his decision on the matter. He had already informed his relatives that they would most likely not see him until the next summer, if at all, since Harry would much rather be in close proximity to the Alley for now.
However, Harry also had his share of disappointments with the wizarding world, starting from the complete inadequacy of their understanding of mathematics and physics. When Harry had observed that the wizarding world seemed to be stuck in the Renaissance era, he did not think this state of backwardness would extend to the study of nature as well; especially given the level of knowledge that wands obviously had access to. Only someone with a knowledge of mathematics and physics far beyond Harry's own could have engineered these marvelous artifacts and then provided them with the necessary knowledge for them to be able to perform their function. In fact, the discrepancy between the capabilities of wands and the level of general mathematical competence in the wizarding world was so striking that at some point Harry harbored some suspicions about whether wands were a species that co-evolved with wizards and witches to have a symbiotic relationship with them, but the obvious existence of wandmakers put such outrageous musings to a halt. It did not help that wandmakers were excessively secretive about their craft, and did not divulge information about how they produced the wands they sold, leaving Harry in the dark and extremely confused.
The only piece of information Harry was able to obtain about wands other than what he had speculated himself on his own through trial and error was found in books about spell-crafting. Given what he himself had surmised about the nature of spells and the general scientific illiteracy of the wizarding population, the discovery that spell-crafting was an esoteric subject touched by only a tiny fraction of wizards was not surprising to Harry. He had to scour several bookstores in the Alley to find some tomes on spell-crafting, and each time he bought a book on the subject, the employees working at the bookstore gave him a look that Harry suspected was somewhere between bewilderment and condescension. Harry paid it no mind, but he was aware that the rarity of these tomes was beginning to put a real dent into his Gringotts vault. He had found out by reading Hogwarts: A History that Hogwarts had an exceptionally large library for the students to peruse, so he resolved to curb his expenditures on rare tomes after his purchases of spell-crafting books.
What he found in these books was... interesting. Harry had hoped to find a method for instructing the wand on what to do directly, but spell-crafting was not such an exact discipline. There was some mathematical theory involved, but far less than Harry had expected; and most of the books were dedicated to understanding how to piece together simple actions that the books assumed the wands were able to perform by default and chain them into spells with much more complicated effects. It appeared that most spells were created this way - in retrospect, Harry had to admit that this was a much more efficient method than doing everything from scratch every time you wanted a new spell which would achieve a new objective. However, what Harry found more interesting was that every wand would be able to perform a spell once it was created using any wand. This meant that the knowledge of spells was not stored inside the wand as Harry had initially thought; there had to be some way for wands to communicate with each other, even if indirectly, for the knowledge of the creation of a spell using one wand to be transferred to every wand in existence. It could be that the base Spell-Creation Charm, incantation creo incantamentum, had as part of its working procedure a way to transfer knowledge to other wands; or it could be that different wands shared some form of collective consciousness, or it could be that there was some common repository of information that they could access. Without more information, Harry really couldn't say, though the subject of wandlore and spell-creation was becoming more and more interesting to him by the day.
He was also fascinated by transfiguration. It was something Harry would not have attempted in his wildest dreams before his discovery of wands and their capabilities, since the precision demanded by even the simplest acts of transfiguration, such as the common first year exercise of turning a match into a needle, was simply unattainable for him. However, using a wand and simply concentrating on the process of the change from a match to a needle, as well as the properties of both objects that he could think of, made it not only possible, but easy. It took Harry some trial and error to understand exactly what the wand demanded from him to achieve a successful transfiguration, but after this step Harry repeated the simple transfiguration of a match into a needle more than fifty times, each time carefully observing how it was possible for an object to be changed in such fine detail - the very atoms making up its structure were being changed, after all. Harry quickly learned from his textbooks that transfiguration could not change the mass of an object, which made sense to Harry - after all, if his model of the Shroud was any good, there was still a global conservation of energy law to worry about, and simply destroying mass would release inordinate amounts of energy either within physical fields or within the Shroud, neither of which would be pleasant. Because of this, he was very suspicious of the Vanishing Charm, and believed it was more akin to a form of teleportation. After all, there is little practical difference between vanishing an object and teleporting it to the vacuum of deep space some light years away from the planet.
His experience of short conversations with various witches and wizards in the Alley, who were only too happy to have a chance to talk to the famous Harry Potter; along with what he read from the various books he had acquired led him to the conclusion that at least the common witch and wizard were unaware of the actual mechanics behind the use of magic. In other words, to them, it really was magic - which made the nomenclature rather apt in a way Harry had not suspected before. Harry was initially astonished and somewhat outraged over this discovery, but as he put more thought into it, he realized that there really was very little difference between using magic and using your arms to lift an object off the ground. Most people who use their arms to lift an object off the ground do not know a fraction of the biological process that allows them to achieve this feat, so why should he expect it to be different with magic? Wizards and witches simply, instinctively know how to use a wand to lift an object off the ground, and the wand serves as an augmentation tool which makes up for their lack of capability and expertise in some essential subjects. However, this lack of awareness, along with the distinction between Muggles and wizards, led Harry to a fundamental question: what is the difference between a wizard and a Muggle?
After all, both wizards and Muggles had presences within the Shroud, and both could clearly perform the necessary wand movements, speak the proper incantation and have the required intent to get results out of a spell. Since the wand drew on the presence of a human within the Shroud, the answer should somehow be related to the nature of this presence, but since Harry's own perception within the Shroud did not extend very far from his own central nervous system, he was unable to perform any observation to settle this question. It was another mystery that he would have to live with, at least for the time being. However, he was appropriately amused by reading a vast assortment of utter nonsense on the subject, which described any publication and any book he was able to find which tried to answer the question. There was no shortage of insane armchair speculation, ranging from the hypothesis that all wizards descended from magical creatures (which, aside from contradicting the existence of muggleborn wizards, only serves to push up the question to the next level without answering it) to the hypothesis that wizards had a "magical core" from which they were able to draw "magic", which was apparently some kind of "pure energy", and then use the wand to "change its form" into one that they liked, or some such nonsense. It seemed like the very concept of energy was too difficult to grasp for the esteemed writers who wrote on this subject. Harry was geniunely hoping that he would have access to better resources than this drivel in an educational establishment as renowned as Hogwarts was.
On September 1st, Harry woke up early and packed his belongings, most of which were part of his book collection that was at this point growing into a small library, into a trunk he had recently purchased in the Alley. He dressed in his school robes and used the Floo of the Leaky Cauldron to make his way to Platform Nine and Three Quarters. He briefly wondered why he could not simply Floo to an establishment in Hogsmeade, the small wizarding village near Hogwarts, but assumed there must be some traditional or practical reason to make students spend some time on the Hogwarts Express. As it would turn out, he was right, and in this instance he would not be happy to be.