Many thanks to lubabpaul for the beta-ing!
1992-01 September
Aside from the scuffle in the Forbidden Forest, the last year had continued on Rowling's tracks. Harry saved the stone, Dumbledore made Gryffindor win, yadda-yadda-yadda. Not that I cared about house points. But I still call bullshit. My fifth year had been truly enjoyable, even with a thousand-year-old basilisk roaming around, it didn't take a genius to go around only with other purebloods. And the rare times I was forced to move alone due to the necessary security of the time turner, the professors enlisted for me the help of a random house-elf, which coupled with my partial transfiguration in order to give myself a superior hearing, managed to keep me away from creepy noises.
On the other hand, Luna Lovegood was a heart-breaking, walking clusterfuck. She believed in some unlikely shit, but our Transfiguration professor was actually a tabby cat, so I didn't think anyone had the right to force their beliefs upon her. When her disappearing belongings forced her to go to a lesson without her shoes, I threw the snickering idiots responsible into an illusion that landed them all in the hospital wing for a week. They now jumped at sudden movements, moving shadows and were terrified by invisible Hoknipings. I only named the things; I had no idea what the idiots had actually witnessed. Cho Chang could no longer play seeker. Pity.
For Christmas Luna received a bunch of notes on a simple warding mechanism, along with a bracelet made of three interwoven unicorn hairs that held a glowing ember in a tightly knotted net. The hairs were the ones I picked up during the Quirrelmort Hunt in the Forbidden Forest, while the ember came from the biggest of the fires in the Hogwarts' kitchen. It was always burning and was warm to her touch but would burn anyone else.
My study of cursed fires had progressed steadily, in a couple of years I would be able to safely cast Fiendfyre, and I could now alchemically redirect kinetic energy. I finally learned how to use runes and charms to turn a trunk into a vast dumpster: the arithmancy that stabilized the construct was still a work in progress, and turning a wooden trunk or a backpack into an apartment were two very different things. The 'magically enhancing my body' project didn't work out, and I tried everything I could think of.
I would need to do it the old fashioned way, maybe learning how to fight with a short-sword in my right and a wand in my left, since regardless of what Ollivander had said, my wand wanted to be held only by my left hand. I determined that the binding process that brought together wood and core was based on alchemy. In fact, even if my wand appeared to have multiple personalities, she had only one soul-voice, that could be described as: mind your own business - keep growing - avoid conflict but when unavoidable stand your ground.
I still needed to find a wand tree for the unicorn tail hair I've been given as a 'thank you' after the healing in the Forbidden Forest. Speaking of which, the centaurs did not like what happened in the Forbidden Forest on the night I met Quirrelmort, oh no, they had foreseen the death of the mare and did not appreciate my stealing their thunder when I said 'Mars is bright tonight' before them.
The RoR-training steadily improved my reaction time, as well as my stamina.
The very interesting stuff, however, had been warding: basically warding and enchanting were brothers. Runes tied in place your intent, and if you did your arithmancy right, the wards would become self-sustaining. Runes marked the changes you wanted to bring into reality, but enchantments wore down for the same principle that ruled transfiguration: if you charmed a ring to emit light, after a while it would 'remember' that originally it wasn't supposed to, and start to actively oppose the will that crafted the enchantment. That could happen after a decade or two, if the enchanter was capable enough.
Wards worked in a similar way, only, in that situation, runes were used to mark whatever you were warding as yours. And As such you could ward only stuff that recognized you as its owner, or with the permission of the said owner (in the latter case the wards would last far shorter. So there had to be a mutual connection between your opinion of what you were warding, and the 'feelings' towards you of the object itself. Even if it wasn't really noticeable, my shoe would respond to my magic more readily than it would to Flitwick's one. Goblin forged stuff always kept its magic because the enchantments were layered into the object while it was being built. It had been a fascinating topic of research, and Flitwick found several of my ideas spot on, even if exposed in an unconventional form. He looked at me funny when I started talking about the will of the objects. I found out that yes, there were ways to magically learn a language. It required potion and a book from the language you wanted to learn with the translated book in the language you already knew. It was devilishly complex.
At the bare bones, holding for three hours the potion in your mouth would enchant your tongue so it would 'transfigure' the sound exiting from your mouth. The enchantment on your tongue would last for a couple of years, during which a wizard would naturally come to associate the things he said first with the sounds he then heard, and would then strive to learn how to replicate those sounds with his own mouth. It would be interesting to see what would happen if I were to use two unknown languages. Probably nothing, since the enchantment was based on your knowledge of one of the two languages. I had to see what would happen if I tinkered with the potion and my next batch of raven eggs.
So, I could now speak Japanese if I willed myself to do so, and the more I spoke Japanese, the more I came to instinctively know the language. I could not read it though, which made sense, since our neural pathways and thought processes are built upon the language, we think in: a magic that forced your mind to think in a new language would probably cause an aneurism, or make you go completely bonkers until the effect faded. Or perhaps it would turn you into a wizard only capable to communicate with grunts, more like a very smart animal than anything else.
Probably said process would be classified as a curse. Another thing to research.
Oh, and being an Animagus was awesome, by the way.
1993-01 September
The OWL results came in during July:
Transfiguration: O
Practical: O
Theory: EE
Charms: O
Practical: O
Theory: EE
DADA: EE
Practical: O
Theory: A
(Not knowing the necessary wand movements penalized me in the theory part, but silent casting without the necessary wand movements had been mind-blowing)
Astronomy: O
History: O
Herbology: O
Practical: O
Theory: O
Potions: O
Practical: EE
Theory: O
Runes: O
Arithmancy: O
CoMC: O
Practical: O
Theory: O
Divination: EE
(I foretold that the innocent would be free after the true responsible had been seen, at this point I didn't know if it was because I read the books, or I actually divined the future. It worked both for Hagrid and the basilisk, and for Black and Pettigrew.)
Muggle Studies: O (I sat it without attending a single lesson, or reading a single element of the syllabus)
So, once again, I was a kickass wizard. The O bolded meant that I knew enough shit to sit my NEWT in that class.
My trunk was now warded and contained a whole apartment. After walking down a spiral staircase there was my kingdom: a personal library, a brazier that warmed the whole room, a kitchen, a bedroom, [a den/living room with] a couch, and comfy armchairs. Properly setting up the toilet had been a nightmare, but I had a shower-tub that was totally kickass. The floor was covered by real grass, half of the walls were blackboards, the others displayed open fields. There were bottles hanging from the ceiling: they contained light in various forms, either fireflies, bluebell flames, glowing mist...
I was very proud of it. But there was still room for vast improvements.
If I wanted to modify anything, or add a room, I had to break it down and begin anew. I wanted to make it something I could build upon in a modular sort of way. But even building in feather charms had been a nightmare.
Space manipulation itself had been a tough nut to crack; I had to become proficient enough to manipulate gravity itself. And that almost killed me twice. The gist of it had been that since gravity bends space, you could adapt and stabilize the curved reality. Meaning that my apartment was the inside wall of a gravitational well. Strangely, the time flow was not affected.
So, while inside the trunk, I experienced space like it was linear when I actually was inside of a non-Euclidean space.
The next step would be to become able to turn an empty section of the inside wall of the gravitational well into a new room without destabilizing anything else while adapting the featherlight charm to it. Managing to have multiple compartments would be a challenge. More like layered surfaces over the inside wall of the gravitational well. There were limits, I would never be able to safely build a manor into a fucking hat, however, the more space at your disposal, the more you could enlarge it. It was easier with tents, enchanting those you could stretch the space among the folds. Say what you want about wizards, they didn't have a Stephen Hawking, but that did not stop them from studying the space-time continuum.
And that was another reason muggles would never find curse breaker sites, and why the Amazon jungle, as well as Norway's and Canada's forests were still unexplored.
The last step would be turning the trunk into a necklace.
And Plastic tents could not be safely enchanted, for the same reason one could not enchant glass, or resin. They all were, at their base, very viscous liquids. At some point I would probably be able to produce a crystal that I could use like glass, but that I would also be able to enchant. Liquids do not recognize an owner, and any enchantment would pass through them, or slide off them.
You could enchant stuff that would manipulate water, or force it to assume a peculiar form, or alchemically change its state of aggregation, even if the same could be done with charms. But you could not directly add magical properties to it.
That, I thought, explains why we study potions.
Flitwick strongly suggested me to drop some subjects. But with having as a career plan "Learn Everything," did not leave him any ground to forbid me from attending any of the NEWT lessons. And I wanted to keep abusing my time turner. Seriously, I was used to 31-hour long days, and during the summer I grew restless and I started hating the Circadian-Cycle. Addition to the plan: weekly, two RoR nights would be dedicated to learning how to craft a time turner.
I didn't know how old I actually was. But I should have turned 17 in December.
1993-01 September
To my great dismay, I had been unable to craft a time turner. My second project had been a success however, or at the very least I thought so.
What I managed to achieve had been hatching an actually intelligent, talking raven. However, I learned later that I had vastly overreached my abilities at this point, and she was much too annoying. The original project was hatching a raven capable of speaking every language I had chosen.
For this project, I used one of the 3 Pensieves the RoR was able to provide ( even if none of them were nearly as impressive as the only one actually shown in the HP movies). I made some adjustments to the enchantments of this Pensieve to try to enable it to function the way I needed for this experiment. I also utilized within it an altered version of the potion I used to learn Japanese. The alterations to the potion were to try to allow the raven to learn to speak English, Spanish, Italian, French, Japanese, Russian and Deutsch.
Finally, I didn't want this raven to live only the standard ten years of its species, so, like a mad scientist, I poured the last vial of unicorn's blood that I had left into the Pensieve, hoping for it to infuse, if not immortality, at least longevity. Following a spark of inspiration, or maybe just madness, before the start of the process, I added twenty-one drops of my own blood to the mix of the potions in the Pensieve. Only then I delicately poked a hole into the raven egg, careful to avoid puncturing the yoke, and then placed it within the Pensieve.
She hatched on the 21st of March. A raven with white feathers and the left eye like molten silver.
I had been a responsible scientist only for the first half of the experiment. After that, I had then thought about what Ollivander said, "feelings are everything". Sure, he had been speaking about Wandlore, but I hadn't been able to resist, and caved into the urges of the mad wizard inside of me, who simply felt that adding my blood and memories was the 'right' step to add to the procedure. That following my gut didn't completely compromise my project spoke somehow for itself.
After the said project, and its partial success, I gained a relatively good knowledge of ritual and blood magic. In addition, through my research, I started to gain at least a hazy understanding of the soul.
Rituals are a non-adaptable form of temporary magic enhancement. Rituals are comprised of peculiar ingredients and exact runes that linked them to you in a specific pattern. Through those, you attempted to channel into yourself a sliver of the world-soul, directing it into yourself with a singular purpose.
Increasing the chances of a safe pregnancy? Ritual.
Preparing yourself for battle? You could either strengthen your body so it could withstand a giant punch, or gain an artificial affinity for fire, or become able to hold your breath for a month (if you wanted to battle underwater that is). But you could perform a ritual for only one of these purposes.
Ritual magic was very much older than wands, so it was the only way to become fearsome enough to protect this or that one's village or town against those random muggles, or that dragon, or whatever.
At some point, the sliver of world-soul would flow out of you to once again become apart of the Whole, leaving you without the boosts of said ritual. And rituals were not cumulative, if you did one ritual this week, you couldn't perform another until the effects of the first didn't bleed out completely. Under a theoretic point of view, you could try a ritual that would enhance different properties of both you and your magic. Different properties that would without a doubt end up conflicting in some absurd way that nobody could have foretold. And the effects of a silver of the world-soul in your magic (which would be your soul-space) or within your body, being in conflict with another sliver inside you? Well, it would tear you asunder.
Quite Literally and metaphysically. So, runes arranged in a proper way would redirect the properties of the other ingredients to enhance one of your own. It was impossible to quantify exactly what the fuck the ritual would do, because, to use a metaphor, you were a fish trying to coerce sea currents to aid you through squiggles and herbs or animal parts on the fucking sand. Therefore, while very old and documented rituals were stuff that you could do, experimenting with ritual magic was a one-way ticket to a very strange and unusual death.
Making up runes was also a very stupid thing to do. We study Ancient Runes because Futhark, Norse, Egyptian, Sumerian, and other old tongues are calm, and do not have a will of their own. Nobody would try using Aztec runes, because they still remembered how it was to be alive. In my opinion, it was likely because of the Aztec's willing human sacrifices, that from time to time poured a wizard or a witch' absolute faith into a ritual suicide.
Using symbols you read about in an RPG would either kill you because of your view of said runes would conflict with the views of those who thought about them into a different way; or transmute you into a chaotic mess I wouldn't wish to see. And finally, making up symbols don't grant them power.
Now, to create a new runic language, you could ritually murder thousands of people over altars inscribed with the whole new set of runes. And keep that process up long enough and it would imprint the meaning of each of those runes into the world-soul. At this point, the runes would be 'alive', and if you were to keep performing ritual sacrifices, they would even work for you (and only you) in the way they have been conceived. They would probably recognize every single magic-user but you as an 'offering-food', they would see them as a 'sacrifice'.
The Runes being 'alive' however, means that from time to time each of those new runes you 'birthed' could grow, evolve, or change in a way you don't, wouldn't, couldn't realize, or understand. And you can't foretell the happenings or the direction of said evolution, because the ritual sacrifices have brought the runes into being with a biological variable as their base.
Thus, we used Ancient Runes because, while the world-soul remembers what they are and what they mean, the Runes themselves forgot and are virtually 'dead'.
It's the world-soul memory that allows them to work, and since you are a part of the world-soul, their interaction with you and your magic is passive, and somewhat static. In short, they no longer have the ability to change or feed off your life. The obvious following line of inquiry would be what is the relationship between Runes and Old Gods. That's some shit I will research once I'm old enough to die without regrets.
Blood magic is close to ritual magic, but it's not quite the same. It's based more on pain and willing sacrifice than anything else.
Voldemort's ritual to regain a body at the end of Harry's Fourth year, had been a ritual in name only. It had been, or would have been, blood magic, nothing else, so that body wouldn't naturally fade with the waning effects of a common ritual, because the sacrifice had been paid in full.
Blood wards? You write down the runes that anchor your will to a place with your blood: it strengthens your claim on whatever you are warding, and can kill you if a stronger blood-magic user (stronger means 'with a louder soul-voice') stumbles upon them. Contracts written in blood between you and another? Blood willingly poured, means you anchor your life to the upholding of your agreement (this must be written in runes the world-soul understands, so, no English).
Blood sacrifice? You pay the price for submitting a 'contract' with the world-soul. If you cut your palm to symbolize said contract? The scar will never go away, and you will always feel a 'pull', a wish to submit another contract. Why? Because the world-soul is alive, and every soul that dies goes back to the Whole, it is consumed, meshed with the Everything, and then comes back to life again in another form. Basically, the world-soul eats the souls of things that cease to exist in a specific form, before birthing new ones, that is. 'Nothing ends, and Everything changes' was a curiously exact motto that summed up my tentative understanding of the World.
Wizard and Witches can become ghosts, meaning they stop being a connected part of the World-soul. Then how can magic influence them? If wands are bridges between the you-soul and the world-soul, magic is both the river that keeps them apart, and the umbilical cord that keeps them linked.
Hence why a basilisk's killing gaze can petrify a ghost and exorcisms do, in fact, work.
Research on ritual and sacrificial magic led me astray several times, and it was from there that my understanding of souls was born.
The most exemplary and academically fascinating result of sacrificial magic was obviously Harry Potter. Hence why I thought that blood was only a medium for the will of the caster and writing runes with it was an effective way of polishing the caster's intent. I hadn't realized until now that the (in)famous scar was coincidentally the rune Sol in Younger Futhark. That was worth enquiring about, but like hell would I discuss it with Dumbledore still alive.
Fiendfyre had been a tough piece of magic. It was the culmination of elemental animation (obviously of the fire element) coupled with destructive intent. If the perfect Gubraithian Fire was the embodiment of the caster's soul-voice, life force, and magic, then the Cursed Flame was the never-ending hunger, the unstoppable end. Fire had also an aspect of rebirth, of safety, of home. For example, there was the Hestia's Hearth fire, that once cast, would keep burning for as long as people thought about each other as family, and could not burn a family member, I remember basing the enchanted ember I gifted Luna on that. Learning how to redirect heat was useless against the cursed flame. Like every animated piece of magic, it recognized it's scorching heat as a part of itself, and fought fiercely to protect it.
I found a way to bypass the limits imposed by expansion charms. Instead of several enlarged compartments, my new trunk now sported only one. Every time I wanted to add something, I built a door from the inside wall of the gravitational well to its next layer. And I had to completely rearrange the featherlight charm so it would adapt independently to the weight of my traveling trunk.
I now had a shiny black necklace, that was also my home. If the trunk would be exposed to Fiendfyre, it would automatically be Portkeyed to a place of my choosing. Basically, it was a reusable portkey, I could change where the hook would aim.
To be sure that the enchantments would never wear off, I bought iron ores through owl service (thank you Gringotts) with some of the lost money I took from the Room of Lost Things, and refined it myself. Transmuting the ingots had been easy enough, and a single drop of blood poured into the molten metal, bound the trunk to me. I used alchemy to 'forge' the iron, layering dozens of enchantments; among them, there was a built-in portkey that would bring the trunk to me, while also making sure nobody could Apparate or Portkey inside was stupid, because of reasons.
Apparating was the equivalent of a space manipulation: you yanked your arrival point toward you while spinning on yourself for some idiotic reason. Someone adept at apparition would lift a foot into a random direction end put it down at his destination.
In short, magic compressed the space from point A to point B.
Trying to "jump" into an enlarged space would see you splattering on the outside wall of the gravitational well, unless you were already inside of it (in the books, the Weasley Twins apparated inside Grimmauld Place after all).
Portkeying into an enlarged space was another stupid as fuck thing to do. Portkeys hooked the place in which it was going to land, and then would punch a hole through space-time and basically let you fall through said hole.
Space manipulation charms and enchantments used, as I've already explained, a gravity well. At the bottom of said gravity well there is an magically crafted artificial mass that acts as a hook magnet for everything that tries to portkey into the gravitational well (which is, like I said, the enlarged space).
Everything that tries to portkey into an enlarged space ends up collapsed and part of the aforementioned mass.
The best part is that at the bottom of my gravitational well I built my own Time Dilation Room. Three hours inside were one hour of real time. The only downside was that I could only open or close the Time Room once for every hour of normal time.
Following intervals of three hours for the time inside, meant that if you didn't leave the Room during the last minute of the three hours of inside [the internal] time, you had to wait for the last minute of the sixth hour, then the last minute of the ninth and so on.
That also meant that between each opening of the door and the next, the Time Room did not actually exist in the space-time continuum and was Unplottable.
In July I took a bus and traveled to see the white cliffs of Dover.
During the night, at 300 feet over the sea, I dug a hole two meters high in length and 50 centimeters in width into the limestone. Three meters deep into the cliff, I turned left and dug out a room, twelve meters deep, and ten meters wide The ceiling was three meters high, enchanted to look like the sky, in the same way as the Hogwarts Great Hall. The wall toward the sea I charmed to be see-through only on my side. I basically created a loft with an amazing view in less than three hours. I charmed the exit so it would look like the rest of the cliff, and I wove into the spell both animal and muggle notice-me-not charms.
I transmuted a stone door that led into the 'loft' from the three meters deep entrance. For the last two months of summer, I warded, enchanted, transmuted, and all-around built my personal fox hole. Obviously, space manipulation had been heavily involved.
I still called it Rabbit's Hole because I had all the intention of dig a lot more, to create a vast system of caves (that I would later enchant, turning it into a proper Wonderland) accessible only through the Rabbit's Hole. I would also place in it my personal monster. Salazar had his basilisk, I would find something else, maybe modify the ritual to hatch a basilisk (once I stumbled upon one) or make up one.
I had a lot of fun, even if on the 31st of July my raven ate my fucking left eye.
Everything was going well, I fed her like usual, and earlier this month, she started taking progressively longer and longer time alone to fly around. That day she returned, and hopped on my table like usual to look at what I was writing down, and, out of nowhere, quick as lightning, her beak stole my left eye, gobbling it down like it was the best treat in the world.
The searing pain was blinding, it caused my whole head to pound, blood pouring everywhere. I stumbled around for a few, agonizing, never-ending seconds until I found my wand and managed to cast a numbing and a blood clotting charms.
I was about to vaporize the blasted bird when I finally understood what the hell she was croaking: "Sorry! Sorry!". She had done a lot of shit before, stealing a quill, pushing over a book, picking up pebbles, and letting them fall on my head, always croaking up laughs and calling me insults in English, curses and 'bad-words' that she picked up by my cursing at her annoying behavior.
She never answered when I tried to talk to her to see what she could understand.
That she was croaking 'sorry' indicated that she knew she did something wrong. Additionally, I had never taught her that word.
With the numbing charm fully in effect, my analytical side briefly took over and asked: " DÅshitedesu ka?!" {Why?!} Since she had already eaten my eye; I could at least check if she could speak the other languages too before erasing that blasted bird.
She flapped her wings while staying perched on an armchair: "Blood not enough!" she croaked back.
"So you ate my bloody eye!?" I thundered, while my mind discarded briefly the pain to consider the implications of her actions.
"Eye is enough." had been her answer. "Dumbass." she added.
I went into my trunk so I could get my medkit.
She followed croaking obscenities in more languages than I knew and throwing a riddle at me from time to time, only to insult me some more when I didn't get it right. I had to almost overdose myself with numbing and blood clotting potions. I had to cut around quite a bit to remove what was left of my eye, before properly treating it, to make sure it wouldn't grow infected. The following day I sported a bandaged left eye that made me look like Fucking Kakashi and was forced to go around with sense enhancing charms on.
On my ever-growing Project List I added magic sonar and Sharingan, because if I had to have an artificial eye I would craft it myself and make it awesome, though even with the time room it would take me years of study. I added 'eye anatomy' to the research topics.
A few days after that I started moving around in the first layer of my trunk: it was a vast grass field, with a spiral staircase in the middle: upstairs for the outside, downstairs for the wonderful library and the following floors. The field was such that the end of the enlarged space matched it's beginning, the earth was only two meters deep, but the air circling enchantment was randomized and the sky (that matched the real one) was 6 meters high.
I was proud of the following floor: ever since I learned how to enchant a quill to copy other books on its own, I started writing down 6 books each day from Hogwarts' library, and with three spells I could turn a bunch of parchments into a properly bound book. When I decided that my wound would not heal more than it already did, I went to the grass field. After a deep breath, I turned into a one-eyed fox.
It was annoying as fuck having only one eye, but the other senses complemented nicely, and the occasional croaking let me avoid slamming into the fruit trees I put around the first floor of my trunk.
On the 27th of August, Raven brought me an olive branch.
Literally.
It was as long as my forearm, and it felt...empty?
On August 29th, I finished crafting my first wand: eleven inches and one third, olive tree wood and a unicorn mare's tail hair, quirky. A wand that would make the most out of healing spells and pranks.
That day I ran as a fox alongside Raven's flying form for hours.