Owl Feathers
The job Hermione Granger had chosen for herself wasn't glamorous. The sweat that dripped down her brow for years as she worked tirelessly in her tiny workshop was proof of that fact. The raw wooden table that took up the bulk of her space had always been littered with materials. Organized chaos had become the easiest way for her to efficiently work. Regardless of the limited space and the cluttered area, this small little workshop and the work she completed here had been her life and also what made her happy.
The job which Hermione was striving for as she acquired multiple degrees had been a closely guarded secret. Only her dearest friend Luna had known of her goal to become a wand maker. Those blissful years when her dream job had been a hidden secret would always be looked back upon with fondness. During those same years, Hermione had acquired masters in Potions, Runes and Herbology. She had also compiled minors in Transfiguration, Arithmancy, Charms and Care of Magical Creatures. Setting records for scores and time archived, Hermione had accomplished her studies in eight short years.
The Wizarding World had been waiting for their next Minister, their next Professor to later become Headmistress. In other words, they had been waiting for Hermione Granger to sweep in and change their world. To them it had been a disappointment and a shame as that very which disappeared for two years after she had received her last masters in the study of Runes.
Those two years were spent slowly informing the right people of what she planned to do. Important years of strategy passed before she broke all the rules and created a wand making business without the family history of wand makers to accredit her. Furthermore, those years were spent making sure that she would live up to her own standards, because if Hermione Granger was going to set her mind to something, she's be damned if she was not the best at what she did.
The first person she told during those two years was Neville Longbottom. After studying for and completing his masters in Herbology and minor in Potions, Neville had set off to dominate the Herbology field. He had been well on his way to accomplishing just that when Hermione had approached him. Of course, Neville had been thrilled to help her even before her offer had been laid onto the table. He had been even more thrilled to help her when she had offered the funds to set up two green houses for his business in return for the finest stock produced from the first green house. These materials included the wood she would need for her own business: Cherry, Hawthorn, Holly, Hornbeam, Redwood, Mahogany, Vine, Maple, Oak, Rosewood, Willow, Hazel, Yew, Elder, Cedar, Dogwood, and Ash. With the two green houses she had funded and the third that he had struggled to build up on his own, Neville was well on his way to becoming the success his Gran had always hoped for. Finding a partner in a well off witch who really only had a fondness for the art, his business grew in size to become the largest collection of green houses in England, producing the finest ingredients in the area. Hermione had the best of those fine ingredients.
The second lot she had gone to were the centaurs who herded in Forbidden Forest. The friendship she had found among their herd was as unexpected as it was discreetly hidden. The Centaurs were a solitary bunch and they hadn't wanted the unlikely friendship that one witch had obtained to encourage others to associate with them. This had been perfectly fine with said witch. She had come into their acquaintance for the first time under unsavory circumstances during her schooling in Hogwarts. She had been young and in trouble and they had taken her hasty plan as an insult. The second time Hermione had gone out of her way to make their acquaintance had been in the aftermath of the final battle. She had been spending time at Hogwarts rebuilding the school as she simultaneously worked towards her Herbology Masters. During her free time, late in the evening, she had traveled into the Forbidden Forest to ask if there was anything she could do to help them because the Forest had suffered just as much - if not more than - the school had. They hadn't turned her away; they had foreseen the odd act of her venturing out to help and had welcomed her. They also hadn't given her much to do. For the most part, she completed whatever small tasks they came up with without complaint and without question. During this time she had also taken to talking with the beings who worked around her and became close to them as she learned more about the forest. Through these talks, she learned about the increased power of Unicorn hair offered to a centaur. Through these same friendships, she received the gifted materials when she came by to visit or harvest the hair of a Thestral. Furthermore, the secrets she had learned from her friends were included in the many she would take to the grave.
It had been nothing more than a stroke of luck when she had met Darwin Elli. She had been in Romania searching to learn more about dragons when they had sat beside one another at a bar. At first they had hardly been aware of each other's presence, but out of the corner of his eye he had recognized her from newspaper clippings and introduced himself as a mate of the late Charlie Weasley. They had talked and lightly flirted as they talked about the much missed Weasley brother and as their conversation had strayed towards themselves, he had been surprised to hear that she was building up her own wand making business and was in the area in hopes of learning more about dragons. With absolutely no prompting he had scheduled for her to come up to the reserve that very night where she met with the head keeper. As a rule, outsiders were not generally accepted into the reserve, but as a friend of the late Charlie and the freshly met Darwin, she had been received with open arms. Speaking in honest opinions, she had surprised the men - who had been told of her career path by her eager friend - when she had shown no desire in any materials that would harm the beasts if harvested. She had left being the first person ever to be offered supplies straight from the Romanian Reserve.
Phoenix feathers had never been something she was particularly worried about obtaining. The phoenix core was a rarity; only very powerful wizards tended to bond with said material. Besides which, she held little desire to work with that particular core. Fawkes had always been more then willing to offer up his own feathers for the young woman whom he cared for and a women who was linked to the other humans he cared for as well. She accepted his gifts and even acquired the feathers of a few other phoenixes in her travels, but she was content to work with the material as little as possible.
Her business had started up before she got a good connection to obtain Veela hair. This was mainly because the material was a distinctly French material and the wand makers there had a near monopoly on obtaining the hairs. In Hermione's mind, the only option would have been to ask Fleur - a woman it had taken years to build up a friendship with. Hermione refused to ask, and instead worked with second rate materials. This changed when, as a present for the opening of her business - an event that she surprised her friends and family with - Fleur had gone about acquiring the hairs of every Veela she knew. In less then a week, the blonde beauty had filled Hermione's stores and offered her more direct material than she knew what to do with.
Hermione had told her friends and family about her business, but she had not told the Wizarding World. Set up under a distinctively commonplace name, her business had opened without anyone being the wiser of the maker. The front was managed by a charming young man who had learned to use the meticulous storing system of the finished wands seamlessly. He was a natural at reading measurements and finding the wand that would best match whichever young witch or wizard entered her shop. Selling the wands was a task Hermione had always dreaded, so she was content to pay him a handsome sum to man the store and make the sales as she busied herself making more wands.
As the first ever muggle born wand maker - a fact that wasn't even known to her customers - Hermione was perfectly comfortable reaching outside the box, unlike her competitors who learned their craft through their family and stuck with tradition. Hermione was at ease as she experimented with new woods and cores. Through these very experiments came a breakthrough which both solidified her place as forerunner of her field and also ruined her peaceful existence in her little workroom.
She had never been one to simply put a new core with a bit of wood and sell it to whatever victim walked through the door. Hermione was much too educated and her craft much too advanced for such. She created theories, working out the properties of her materials down to the dates harvested and comparing them with the materials they were to work with; puzzles made up her work. She carefully created the combinations of material for her masterpieces. With the materials chosen, the wood was always treated in finely brewed potions exactly altered to work best with the length and material of the wand. Her cores were always carefully stored and treated to bring out the strongest of their magical capabilities until, through the process of charms and the essence of wandless magic, the core and the wood became one to form a wand.
Her bravest theory, worked out over months of carefully examined equations of a rune and arithmancy mesh, was the basic idea of using owl feathers as a wand core. The known fact that owls were one of the strongest bonds to the existence of a base magic had been overlooked for too long. Hermione became the first ever to use the owl feathers and in doing such achieved what she imagined she might. A wand core which would work specifically with a weak magic signature. Like training wheels on a bicycle, the wand would act as a method to build up a child's magic to a point where their wand grows with them, or they move on to a stronger wand retaining a stronger magical ability.
In doing such, her peace was smashed like a rock breaking the surface of a calm pond.
The nice, attractive face and calming voice of her hired employee was no longer enough to keep the customers from demanding an audience with her. The customers wanted to meet the faceless celebrity. The reporters rushed in after gaining wind of her miraculous reappearance. The idea of wand making having to be a family art had been crushed, and for every hateful comment thrown at her for breaking tradition there were two more people hoping to be taken in as an apprentice, hoping to learn. She was once again the attraction of the public's eye and when the hype did not slow, even after a year, she knew it was time to move on.
She shut down her store, selling off her shelved products to wand stores who were offering generous payments to play house to what would publicly become known as the last made Granger wands. Eight years of schooling, two years of preparation, and six years of living her dream had come to this final moment where she extinguished the magically fueled lamps of her now empty workshop. The ride had been good, but it had come to an end. Once again it was time for Hermione Granger to disappear; it was time for her to live another dream.
Within a day's time of the popular and successful shop's closure, she was located in the depths of the Ministry, accepting and looking forward to her future as an unspeakable. Here, she could be happy too, and from time to time she would gather a few materials and craft a wand or two to store in one of her vaults. Family, friends and co-workers would be welcome to obtain their wands from these shelves. For the wands were unimportant, a hobby as she continued her life, occupied as an unspeakable.