Invisibly Jaded

Chapter 7

Harry tried to calm himself down. Each time he inhaled and exhaled there was an audible rattling sound because of his uneven breathing. What was happening to him? His magic was...leaving!

He'd never heard of something like this happening before. Granted, the Elumvians he'd been living with had slightly different physiology, but still, magic was magic. It wouldn't just abandon him, would it?

His essential years of growth and moral and character development had been rather turbulent, with only school teachers and a few acquaintances from the island to rely on. Magic had really been the only constant thing in his life thus far. Without his exceptional magical prowess to depend on, what else was there?

"Harry James Potter! What on Earth are you—" Oriana had come bursting through the door. "Are…you all right?" There was no way she wouldn't have noticed the moistened brow and the washed-out complexion Harry was currently sporting.

"Um, yeah. I'm, um, yeah, fine, er…good. You?" Harry's eyes were wide and his breathing heavy.

"Harry, what—"

"FLYING!" Harry yelled as he shot off the bed and to his feet in an instant. "You said…fly! Go! Us, I mean. Flying!"

"What—" Oriana tried again.

"Yeah, flying. Sounds fun! Good idea." Harry interrupted again. He shooed her out of his room and ran a sweaty hand through his hair.

How long had this problem with his magic been going on? Was it going to get worse?

Having just committed himself to going flying as an off-hand excuse, Harry dejectedly left his room and made his way to the large back yard.


Who had decided that something normally used to clean up nasty stuff from the floor would be a good thing to fly on? Seriously. Did some person just randomly decide it would be a good idea to put some spells on a cleaning tool and straddle it? Why a broom, rather than something more practical for seating purposes, like a chair or a cushion?

Harry warily eyed the shining broom his sister held out to him. Why exactly had he wanted to do this so badly as a kid?

"Harry, just take it already. It's not going to bite. I promise," Oriana said condescendingly.

The sound of male laughter sounded from above and Harry glanced up for a second, recognizing Hayden and his friend Ron. They had been practicing their throws and blocks with a quaffle since after dinner, but were apparently taking a break to watch Harry possibly make a complete fool of himself.

Harry snatched the broom from Oriana. He could do this. It didn't take much magic to operate the broom, and it wasn't like all of his magic had gone. Even some squibs were capable of riding a broom. The teen straddled the broom, at first feeling slightly ridiculous. A second after that thought, he mentally scratched it out.

There was nothing to be nervous at all on a broom. He felt the slight hum magic as the spell work on the broom activated, and he lifted from the ground. Seating was surprisingly comfortable. Harry felt the muscles in his legs relax as they dangled above the ground. A crisp breeze tossed his hair around wildly and pulled at his clothes.

This was why he'd loved to fly as a kid. He brought his legs up to grasp the handle behind him with his feet, stretched his upper body forward and moved his right hand to grip towards the front of the broom and his left hand to hold the broom beneath his chest. Poised for speed, Harry erupted from the hover and shot straight forward before beginning to angle up as he moved. Further and further he angled the broom until he was completely vertical. He kept going. Harry was upside down from his initial position, and was several hundred feet off the ground. Instead of completing the loop, the raven-haired athlete abruptly angled himself so that he was vertical again, only this time with his head facing the ground. He plummeted to the earth on his broom. His arm muscles were contracted as they strained against the pressure of the air he was moving through, trying to keep his body from flinging off the back end of the broom. The wind whipped at his eyes and Harry squinted at the ground he was drawing nearer and nearer to. With little time and space to spare, he pulled his arms forward and pushed his legs back to level the broom. Harry glided to a smooth stop in front of his sister. "That was a good warm-up," He commented off-handedly while stretching his arms. Whoever had said riding a broom wasn't a lot of work had obviously never been on one before.

Oriana eyed him speculatively.

The wind carried the words of a male voice to his ears, and he recognized it as the voice of Hayden's friend Ron. "I don't care what the hell you think is wrong that guy, Hayden. He just pulled of a genuine Wronski Feint his first time on a real broom. As long as he doesn't end up in Slytherin, he's good in my books. Oh, and as long as he joins the team instead of wasting all that talent…as long as he makes Gryffindor, I mean…yeah."

Harry's lips twitched upwards at the simple way he'd been accepted. Maybe he had someone else on his side after all. And maybe Hayden wasn't as universally adored as Harry had first thought.

The slight grin dropped off his face as words started tracing through his mind. Slytherin…Hogwarts…magic…

What the heck was he doing having fun when his magic was at stake? He needed to find out what was wrong with him lickety-split. Harry made to move back toward the house, but found his path intercepted by a brightly colored ball, which smacked into the grass at his feet and bounded away. Glancing at the nearest person, Oriana, he caught a mischievous twinkle in her eyes and a competitive smirk on her lips. She casually tossed a second quaffle up and down in her hand. One foot was propped up on the edge of a case of Quidditch supplies. "So you have some flying skills," Oriana stated, "but can you catch?"

Harry was somewhat displeased that his senses had yet again failed him when he didn't even notice the first ball that had been thrown at him. He knew now that something had recently been done to him to affect a part of him. Perhaps the magic malfunction was a side-effect of it? Or had any of the few people he'd been in recent contact with purposely and discretely placed a block on him? If either of the options were true, when had it occurred, and how had he missed the spell or spells?

His red-headed sister whipped her arm forward and hurled the quaffle. Harry caught it with only a small effort. Perhaps some… 'testing' of his reflexes could be performed.


"NO! No no no no! Ron, quit catching it all the time!" Hayden laughingly yelled after his friend caught the fourteenth attempted shot in a row.

"Sorry, mate. It's kind of my job."

"Time to switch, boys! I'm on defense now!"

Since four people was not nearly enough for a decent game of standard Quidditch, the teens had been playing with Ron Weasley as keeper, and alternated having two people as offensive chasers and one on defense. So far, Hayden and Oriana made up a decent pair, as did Harry and Oriana. Hayden and Harry on the other hand, would definitely be considered a complete failure as a team. Not only was Harry inexperienced at various flight patterns, but Oriana kicked butt at defending, and Hayden refused to pass to his brother at all. All-in-all, the Potter brothers had only scored a few goals each.

The twins glanced at each other—Harry in exasperation, Hayden in distrust. They positioned themselves equidistant from the goal posts and prepared for Ron to toss the ball out while Oriana waited several dozen feet below them. The ball was hurled in an upwards arc with all of Ron's might, and the race was on. By a split second, Harry was the first to snatch the quaffle out of the air, and head away from the goals Ron Weasley guarded. He reached a position three quarters of the field's length away from the goals and spun around, waiting a second for his brother to complete the maneuver as well. According to the rules of this four person game, the ball was now officially in play. Oriana was moving to a point where she thought she would best be able to capture the ball, ending her brothers' turn, and allowing her to be rotated back into offense.

Harry shot forward with the ball tightly gripped in one arm, and headed straight for his sister while tracking Hayden's progress with his peripheral vision. Oriana was determined not to be deterred by a move reminiscent of a foolish game of 'chicken,' so she did not stray from the straight path. Just as the two came close to ramming into each other, Harry dropped the ball and pulled up. Hayden was successful in catching onto the plan, and was home-free for the goal posts once he grabbed the ball out of the air. Miraculously, Ron's attention had momentarily faltered as he watched Harry do a strange twisting pattern in the air, and when Hayden's shot flew towards the left ring, Ron's fingers just barely brushed the edges of the ball.

"Yes! Goal!" Hayden screamed in celebration. Harry smiled at their success, but wondered privately if his brother even thought to give a bit of credit to him.

"Guys, Mum's going to kill me if I don't get back home soon," Ron said as he began drifting back down to the ground.

The Potter children took note of the sinking sun that rested half above the distant horizon. None of them had really noticed how late it was getting.

Once on the ground, Weasley gave a sloppy salute in farewell. Hayden swung his broom over his shoulder and walked his friend back into the house. Harry looked at his sister. The connection they had was very new and not much like a brother-sister relationship yet. It was more like an experience one had when meeting a new person who you just automatically…clicked with. There was nothing romantic about it at all, of course. Harry gave a quick shudder at the mere though of such a thing with his sister. If things kept going as well as they had, Harry imagined that Oriana would be someone he could learn to trust and depend on in the future. For now though, he wasn't too sure about sharing any of his secrets with her. For all he knew, she had inside information on what was wonky with his magic and senses.

Harry had pondered over this problem a bit while the four teens flew around, and had decided that the first thing he needed to investigate was his own mind. Since he had been feeling that something was wrong, he strongly suspected that some outside influence was involved, and the most obvious place to mess with if you wanted to alter a person's personality and control was the mind. Back at the island, he had heard whispered mentionings of forbidden mind arts, but had never discovered much about them. The Elumvians were very strict on privacy, and the act of invading a being's mind was one of the biggest offenses one could do. Harry had never ventured to learn anymore about the topic of mind arts. If someone had messed with his mind and had damaged his ability to control his magic…then Merlin help them when he found out their identity.

Oriana offered to take the broom he'd borrowed back to the shed, and Harry went off to scour the small Potter library for books on the subject.


Mind Arts. See Legilimency, Occlumency.

Legilimency. The art of reading emotions and extracting memories.

That was all the book said. Someone could have read his mind, according to this information, but what about altering it? A young student of magic could learn to levitate a small object, but as they progressed in age and talent, the student could levitate heavier things, hold them in the air longer, and may eventually be able to control the direction of the object without the need for summoning or banishing charms to be used separately. Could the definition of Legilimency be just the start of a complex art?

Occlumency. The art of defending the mind from external incursion and influence; mainly a defensive technique. See Legilimency.

This gave Harry more clues. The key word in this definition, he believed, was 'influence'. Influence was exactly what he suspected. Simply reading someone's mind could not influence a person. There was something to this that Harry felt he was missing, and many questions came to mind. Was this Occlumency something that you had to practice all the time, or would you only need to defend when attacked with Legilimency. If you didn't need to defend your mind all the time, then how could you tell when someone was reading your mind? Did the victim also see the memories that were being dug up, or was it so subtle that the mind reader would be the only one who knew?

Harry slammed the heavy volume of Magical Terms shut. A cloud of dust wafted out of the old book and made his eyes water. He slammed the book down on the table, and leapt away before he could be assaulted by dust particles again. He was angry. His magic and possibly his mind were failing him, and the best he could find was an old dictionary. The teen paced in front of the moderate sized bookshelf the tome had come from. The mind arts didn't seem to be as forbidden here, but neither did they seem to be eagerly studied. Harry stopped his pacing, and crossed his arms. He stared at the floor in frustration. He wondered if there was a public library near by where the information he was desperately searching for was readily available. From his position, the raven-haired young man closed his eyes and did a quick check on his magic again. The amount he could access was more diminished that before. A staffless (or wandless now, since he was expected to use the small stick instead of a long staff) spell to put the large dictionary back on the shelf failed only two seconds into it, leaving the yellowed pages open to the world when the book dropped to the floor unsupported by magic.

Harry knew that only a very small percentage of witches and wizards could perform magic without their wand. Harry was at a disadvantage to many of the magic users since he had been raised in a different world and was now being expected to jump into school. No one had elaborated on the type of spells taught at Hogwarts-- the school he was supposed to attend-- but he already knew that because he had chosen to be trained as a warrior at the islands, his spell repertoire had a lot more battle-type spells and less impractical spells like transfiguring animals into dinnerware. He had been very grateful that his staffless (or wandless) magic meant he was more powerful than the normal magical person, and, as past experience had proven, he could pick up spells a heck of a lot quicker. Now his magical advantage was lost. He could not depend as much on his senses honed from warrior training, so that advantage was being lost as well. It was almost like…

Harry inhaled quickly. His eyes were wide open, yet focusing on nothing. He was being made into an average sixteen-year-old.

And the average sixteen-year-old still tended to be pretty dependent on adults.


Yeah, I'm back again. I know, I know. I'm horrible at this updating thing. But as you can see, this story hasn't been abandoned! That's a good thing, right? I'd like to thank all of the reviewers who have encouraged the continuation of this story, even though the going has been slow. It might be kind of obvious as to what may have happened with Harry's magic by now, but I'd be interested in any speculation. Please review!