1997-23 January

The air was refreshing without being cool, and, along with the distinct feel of the snow, made me want to try and summon a proper storm. With avalanches and winds so strong they would form twisters capable of kidnapping into the clouds the fools who dared to defy the weather.

I shook my head; I knew very well it wasn't something I could do. Yet.

I knew that I shouldn't walk around with only my trousers and my wand. It wasn't really a proper way of being discrete, but I was in the middle of the Alps, so I was hardly parading my magic in Piccadilly. It was unlikely that a group of muggles would jump out of nowhere, see me and scream 'wizard' making me responsible break the Statute. And I was able to perform memory charms anyway.

I snorted, Fleur would pout at me for having left the shack without waking her, even if I left a note.

I smiled, picturing her face in my mind. I felt... happy? I didn't expect to become so attached to her so soon, even if I hoped in something like this to happen at some point in our relationship. But in the short year we've been separated, she became who I felt she had the potential to be. While she maintained the vanity and pride a Veela typically develops, those traits were now more due to her knowledge of herself, and the understanding of what she would one day be able to do. She always had wanted to be treated like a queen, even if she didn't know it, and she was growing into it.

I had anticipated that a large part of the snags we would encounter during our relationship, at least for the first year, would all be linked to my refusal to formally teach her. But I had to explain it only once.

"Magic is half about the understanding of the world outside us, and half understanding the one inside us." I told her.

While it did admittedly sound like a very Jedi thing to say, it was true. Being spoon-fed knowledge in a class would help someone with getting started on the path of magic and would be more than enough for anyone that was content with what he was showed. Fleur and I both wanted to be more. To be among the greatest not only of our time, but among the wizards and witches of all the times. Not for the recognition, no. That would be a very hollow thing on which base our future. The 'being recognized as the greatest' part would come as a side effect of being and having done the greatest things in all of History.

"I could teach you." I had told her "I could teach you how I view magic, and the world. And I could correct the flaws I would see in your approach, showing you my solution to your difficulties, giving you a ladder or an alternate path every time you find yourself facing a wall. And you would never be able to perform any of my best trick as well as me, even with ten years of practice. How someone interacts with magic is a very personal thing. I could never come up with an enchantment that bypasses an alchemical process because I know actual alchemy. If I were formally teaching you, like you are asking me to, I would have stopped you from working on what I would have seen as a fruitless attempt and taught you how I would do it. And would have failed in producing something as beautiful and so... so... you."

I remember kissing away her frown then because she never thought about it in that way. "Explore your limits, break them, rise above. Like you did until the duelling tournament. You will find that learning magic is a cross between learning how to play music and climbing a mountain. Like for music, learning magic is a process that only ends when you stop thinking about it, and there is more than a single path to the top."

I hated drinking wine, it always hit me without warning. So, I had been a little bit drunk while giving that speech, but I got the message across, more her merit than mine, no doubt. I wouldn't teach her, but I would talk about magic with an equal. Giving tips that helped me in exchange of other tips. I didn't want a subordinate, not someone who could keep up with me, but someone who could carve his (or her) own path.

I laughed at the memory, and raised my wand once more, like I did thousands of times, simply letting myself to be, taking in the feeling of the resin clotting the wound in the bark where a branch had been snapped off, the creeping cold of the snow around my feet, the whispering of the wind among the trees.

I slowly collected myself, warming the air around me with a twirl of my wand. Feeling immortal was a stupid reason for walking around half naked. Stupid Philosopher's Stone. I was feeling the aftereffects of the elixir far too much for my liking. Maybe it was only because I wasn't used to it, time would tell.

I had been greatly disappointed by the peak of alchemic research everyone always coveted and dreamed of. It was a trick since it wasn't really a stone. It was more like an extremely viscous liquid, like glass. And behaved much more like a plant than anything else. Those were things anyone could learn with enough time spent observing the Stone, an alchemist would laugh at those observations. The most terrifying thing an alchemist could do was converting kinetic energy into heat and heat in kinetic energy redirecting small portions of it into transmutations. The stone, much like my Fiendfyre-metal hybrid, was an always active alchemical process. That is to say, that the stone was always at a temperature of 300,15 Kelvin (27 C). And, like all physical bodies, when it was in an environment at a higher temperature (or otherwise in contact with something 'warmer'), was on the receiving end of a flow of thermal energy. Thermal energy is Heat (that can become Kinetic Energy in the hands of an alchemist). So, while in a warmer environment, the Stone stored energy. But when in a colder environment (or in contact with something that was at a lower temperature than 27C), the Stone kept its temperature, meaning it did not surrender energy to said colder element.

In short, the Stone was always storing heat.

Now, the Stone was also something that did not bounce. Why? Because it stored Kinetic energy also.

The true marvel of it, was that the Stone kept storing again and again. Every time it touched something warmer, every time it received a flick. It was a never full battery. It did not explode because while stored into the Stone, all that energy did not actually exist, but was in there in a tight, endless cycle of kinetic-heat-kinetic-heat. And the only way through which it could release said energy, was through spending small portions of it in a transmutation. Crafting the Stone had meant binding the will that directed the cyclic transformation of kinetic into thermal energy to something. Said something was a lump of crystallized blood. My blood, since it was always been subjected to my soul-voice and identity, and so it reacted better to my magic than anything else. I didn't actually know if Flamel's one had been the same as mine, probably not, since the way you understand reality and manipulate it becomes more personal with the most complex kind of magic.

So, lead to gold? Doable, and it was as easy as transfiguring it, because you could pour so much energy into the transmutation, that the soul of the lead would convince itself that it was gold, and always had been. How? Energy is mass, with the infamous E=mcc so you could pour so much energy in the transmutation that you would change the mass of the lead. That equation worked, however magic was not strictly bound to physics, and so I didn't really need that kind of energy. Elements are based roughly on electrons, protons, and neutrons. Transmuting through the Stone, meant you actually created mass, adding to a said bunch of atoms (of the same element) neutrons, electrons, and protons, turning it into another element. There were, like always, limitations and dangers:

1)the energy stored into the Stone could be unleashed in a transmutation. But only slowly. So, an alchemist couldn't snap his fingers and turn a sea into a cloud of steam.

2)transmuting something into any of the noble elements (Argon, Gold...) was expensive, in the time that it was needed to complete the process and in the energy that was necessary to start said process both.

3)complexity matters: transmuting worked from an element to another, transmuting wine, while possible, at least in theory, was so horribly complex in practice that it was impossible. Wine is not only fancy water. There is hydrogen, oxygen, carbon. Organized in molecules, and complex ones: C4H6O6, HOOCCH(OH)CH2COOH, only to name two. And transmuting a molecule, even H2O, meant that you had to direct the alchemical process into crafting atomic bonds that very much preferred to stay on their own as elements, at least during the transmutation. You could transmute oxygen and hydrogen in the correct proportions and the right conditions of temperature and pression both, and they would condense into water. Directly transmuting a molecule was a process you should lead with your soul-voice (that is your magic), that cannot be so precise in its requests to any part of the world-soul.

4) the elixir of life was a liquid form of the Stone. People age because their cells split and after they hit 25, they start losing more and more of their cell's telomeres. At some point the telomere at the end of your DNA finishes, and during mitosis you start losing the end strands of your DNA. The elixir made sure that it did not happen and had the side effect that your metabolism running at double speed. So, stopped aging and made you need more than a double dose of the food. The elixir was not a potion, but an inert alchemical process that would start in each of your cells once its microscopical parts reached it during their mitosis. Being based on your blood and soul-imprint on it, it wouldn't work for anyone else. It would, in fact, kill them. And too much of it would turn me into a big amount of stem cells before exploding. The Stone could store endless amounts of energy, your body could not.

5) the elixir also made you feel like you could do everything, so it made easy overextending yourself and making errors that could easily kill you.

That was the gist of it. I shook my head, clearing my thoughts and turning my back on the valley covered in snow before going back to the shack.

While I had chosen the location of Rabbit's Hole so it could place me somewhere, I had easy access to open fields and sea both, I left the choice of how and where build her home to Fleur. I called mine Rabbit's Hole because I was a fox Animagus and found it hilarious, and because I could dig inside the British coast virtually forever, crafting my very own Wonderland. Also, the fact that I was the one to create it from nothing, the expansion charms I could add to it or parts of it would last virtually until the UK sank into the sea. Making my first room and the 'inside fields, had been fun, and while tricky at the beginning, it hadn't been strenuous. So, I kept thinking about ways in which I could improve it. While it would never become a system of caves in which a dragon could fly, my future basilisk would end up with hunting fields and more space it would know what to do with.

Fleur, thinking about herself, choose to call her newly built home Nest. Because Veela's were somewhat half-bird, duh. When I asked her how it was like, she pointedly observed that it would be like asking me what was it like to be human.

During one of ours mock duels however, she got desperate enough that she had been able to 'bring out' her heritage. Her cheekbones went up while her chin and nose merged into a cruel beak, with her beautiful blue eyes swallowed by her pupils. She sprouted beautiful white wings, while feathers covered what I could see of her skin. Her feet turned into fearsome talons that ripped her shoes apart, and her nails became black claws. She had been still able to hold her wand, using it with less finesse, but she was faster, able to fly, very much less predictable, and able to throw at me little fireballs that burned blue with her other hand. She wasn't suddenly able to beat me, even if I had to be a tad bit more careful to not hurt her. I smiled again at the memory, when she returned to her senses, she had been so embarrassed of her appearances, that I actually had found exotic, but no less beautiful. She also had been ashamed of her loss of control, and I agreed with her there. But as I understood it, she was very young and very powerful among her kind, making her other form something not easy to conquer.

So, she chose to call it a Nest, but refused to live in a treehouse, and in a 'cave with make-up' too (that was what she liked to call Rabbit's Hole). However, she expressed her wish to stay somewhere High. And since we were crossing the Alps at the time, she saw no reason to wait for another country to settle her private refuge in. In France, her family home would always be open for her after all. Impatient one I thought.

I turned into my fox form and ran fast through the undergrowth, my padded feet allowing me to move without having to force my way through the foot high snow. I followed my tracks backwards until I reached the clearing in which we had hastily built a shack. We were living in my trunk inside of it until the tower we were building was complete. Yes, a tower almost on the top of a mountain crest. And she refused the Dol Guldur design I jokingly proposed. I helped her polish her original idea instead, and shamelessly stole from Renzo Piano' Shard, that would be built only in 2012. We had completed the base with only a week of work, shaping the rock of the mountain. Steel was a difficult thing to procure and beyond my ability to transmute. Crystal was way easier to craft and held the great advantage over glass that it could be enchanted. Charmed iron worked just as well as steel, so no problems on that front.

For now, the tower started with black rock shaped like a twisting flame around the bottom of the structure, after seven meters the giant iron bars shot upward until they met at the top terrace, 313 meters higher. The walls were entirely made of enchanted crystal, with balconies opening here and there. There was really more space that we knew what to do with, and that was without expansion charms. As soon as the enchantments were complete, we would tear down the shack to begin living into the Nest and start rummaging through the endless amounts of Lost Things I had stored in my trunk from the Room of Requirement. It would do until Fleur managed to acquire proper furnishing.

We started it in November, and it was almost done. It was beautiful, and I placed crystal flowers of different kinds all over it. They were little and discrete and were the focus of an active alchemical process that turned the kinetic energy discharged upon them by the wind into heat that kept the inside around 20 Celsius degrees. I wouldn't have been able to craft those three months ago, they were another strange application of the same process I used with my Fiendfyre-metal hybrid for book bindings. And their project had been the kick that pushed me into the right direction to craft my philosopher stone.

I entered my trunk after closing the shack's door. The first floor had been turned into a vegetable garden, so that setting up greenhouses in the Nest would be faster and smoother, I didn't particularly like it, but I endured.

Raven flew toward me from one of the trees I managed to grow in the enlarged space. Hopping onto my shoulder she croaked into my ear.

"I'm the sailor's friend,

and cruel shot caller.

For the moon's whims I bend,

I creep lower and rise taller.

Who am I?"

I had actually come to like riddles, never seen that coming. "The tide?" I answered.

She flapped her wings, hopping from my shoulder to my outstretched arm. She stared at me with her normal eye. It still wasn't clear if she could see through her silver one. Even if she could get glimpses of the future, so it had been a far more than fair trade.

I passed the library floor without stopping to check on the new books I had been collecting since France. Runes artworks from all over Germany, potion procedures from Vienna (Fleur had a minor talent for potions and was interested in bettering her understanding of them), and finally Mastering the Sky, from Poland. When we could afford the books, we bought them, I stole them otherwise, and that had been the case with the last Tome. I had never been gladder Grindelwald went on a campaign, stealing rare artifacts and knowledge from all over Europe only to stack them here and there. In Poland they raised a museum upon one of those treasure boxes, exhibiting Mastering the Sky. I simply hadn't been able to resist.

I kept going downstairs. Refusing to fall to the lure of new knowledge. I ended up in my 'apartment floor' noticing tummy busy with the kitchen, probably setting up a far too big breakfast. I had paved this floor with solid panels of maple, adding only a single white-fur carpet upon which rested a brazier. There was also a modest round table with a stool and a chair that completed the living room, with the kitchen covering one of the walls, and the others, I hadn't been able to resist, were covered by whiteboards upon which I could scribble every kind of thought that crossed my mind. There was still a section that showed my first project for a boat that could sail the seas, fly, and dive underwater. I had hit an unbreakable wall at the time, but with the new understanding of alchemy that I reached while helping Fleur with her tower could probably open a new road to my end goal. I shook my head, focusing once again on my task. I opened the sliding door toward the bedroom expecting to find her awake and annoyed by my absence when she woke up (I smiled at the thought, she was always so inexplicably offended by that) but while she was awake, the fire of her magic that I could listen was subdued and almost quiescent. Then I noticed what she was reading.

"Those are some very old notes of mine." I grumbled as 'hello'.

She tore her gaze from the page and turned those vast blue eyes on me. I didn't even try to pretend I had not been admiring her chest. She expected to be admired by everyone but liked when it was me. Having said that, I refused to turn into a bumbling fool mostly to spite her and to keep proving myself that I could. She smirked, noticing my internal struggle, and put down my notes, knowingly exposing herself even more.

"You could already have crafted yourself a new eye." she accused me.

I sighed; I didn't expect that. "Like I said, those are very old notes." I grinned at her frown, she was confused, since what she said was true. I didn't own her an explanation, but there where things we could discuss once she knew the real story.

"What do you know about Raven?" I asked her.

Her frown deepened, the apparently non sequitur question had her linking the absence of my eye with my familiar, and she couldn't make head or tails of that connection. Not that I expected anyone but me could.

"Female raven with white feathers, a silver eye." she started recapping, hoping to stumble upon a pattern, no doubt. "She understands several languages and manages to get her meaning across using single words. She plays riddles, and sometimes puts into them things she shouldn't be able to know, perhaps she has a minor talent for divination. Which is an extraordinary feat for anyone but a demiguise, which she is not." Fleur concluded.

I nodded; it was indeed a good summary of my familiar. "Ollivander once told me, referring to wandlore, that 'feelings are everything'." I recalled out loud.

"I was trying to hatch a raven capable of not only speak more than one language, but able to understand and crypt messages on its own. So that she could act as a safe messenger. I conducted my experiment putting an egg into a modified Pensieve, in which I poured several potions to enable someone to speak another language, along with my memories, so that the raven could somewhat have things to make references to when encrypting messages." I started explaining. "I had calculated every step of that experiment, the arithmancy of it had not been a joke, let me tell you. It was then that I got a feeling that adding this and that would be exactly the perfect thing to do. In the same way I know that I don't have the right wood to craft a wand with basilisk venom as its core, or that one of your hair would sing most wonderfully with that extraordinary branch of fir I stumbled upon weeks ago." I stopped, studying her reaction. She looked irked that I only said this and that in my explanation, instead of properly explain what happened.

"I acted on those feelings, adding, among other things, my blood to the mixture. And she hatched from her egg." I went on "Very much like you see her now, playful and mischievous, with a penchant for riddles and stealing shining little things. But ultimately stupid, I had to teach her words in English, which she was mysteriously unable to translate, and I had to train her to not steal the stuff I needed." I let my face turn into a frown, that bird had been a pest for months. Fleur looked way more alert now, mentioning my blood had picked her interest. And since she knew a few snippets about blood and sacrifice, she could see where I was going with my tale. It was time to annoy her with another apparent non sequitur.

"According to both The Prose Edda and The Poetic Edda, Odin in his search for wisdom put on his traveler's guise and went to the land of the giants in search of Mimir's well. The Well of Mimir was located in Jotunheim, the land of the Frost Giants, and fed Yggdrasil, the world tree that held the 9 realms in balance. Mimir the Wise One was the guardian of memories who protected the well of cosmic knowledge. Biologically, Mimir was an uncle to Odin, through his giantess mother Bestla. Despite their family bond, Mimir refused to allow Odin to drink from the well without any payment. Thus, Odin gouged out his right eye and placed it into the well. After he had done this, Mimir filled Gjallerhorn, the horn with which he drank from the well, and allowed Odin to drink. After he had drunk, Odin was able to foresee his fate." I narrated, remembering the Norse mythology I liked so much in my first life. Some of the stories also said that Odin beheaded Mimir and used his head to divine the future, but it wasn't important to the purpose of my tale. Fleur was scowling and crossing her arms in annoyance. I so loved to mess with her.

"Imagine my surprise when one day Raven hops near me, to apparently read what I was writing, and eats my left eye." I raised a hand, forestalling her questions. "After gobbling it down, she said 'Sorry'. A word that I never taught her, and I asked her why she ate my eye in Japanese. Since she learned sorry on her own, maybe the potions had started working, honestly, I had no idea. She said, and I quote: 'Blood not enough, eye is enough'. Since then, she became, not less playful or mischievous, but... more adult, I guess? Somehow smarter, like she actually understood the contest we were in. For example, she lowered her stealing my trinkets a great deal. And she brought me an olive branch that was perfect for a unicorn hair I had. I crafted my first one with that. A few months later, she made up a riddle during the Weighting of the Wands, about stuff that she couldn't possibly know, and she had been the one to push me to enter the Triwizard." I studied Fleur's face then, she looked sceptical.

"You are saying that she can prophesize because she ate your eye? In the same way Odin could once he sacrificed his own in the stories?" She asked me. It was clear that she wasn't convinced.

"In my experience, magic and coincidences don't mesh well together." I started. "And stories come from somewhere. You once accused me of signing myself as One-Eye with the Odin's rune Ansuz. The parallelisms are too many and happened independently one from the other. Odin could see the future and had Huginn and Muninn, that were in a sense, a part of him. Raven can see snippets of the future, and is, as my familiar, a part of me. He was called Glad of War, and while battling the Sphinx and Voldemort both, I felt myself uncharacteristically enjoying it. At some point I will be able to live only of my elixir, without need for food, and the Allfather only drank wine. That it's not to say I'm turning into a god or anything so stupid. But it's believable that if such a powerful mage lived and has been thought to be a god, a memory of his soul has been imprinted into the world-soul. The more similar I grow to him, the more my soul resonates with the memory of his. And it would explain why Norse Runes work so well for me. And why Ansuz acted like a blessing on my iron golem against Lord Voldemort."

She frowned, the few things she knew about souls were too vague to properly discuss this. That's when I handed over a tome with a basilisk skin hardcover, very telling Fiendfyre-metal bindings, and an Ansuz rune carved on the front.

"This is the second book of the series I'm writing. The Whole: it explores the meaning of rituals and blood magic, the how and why behind them, and as such, the nature of animism, with some interesting hypothesis regarding true immortality, and not the temporary solution I achieved through the Stone. I'd like to hear your opinion about this and my eye both." I told her.

Her eyes shone when she had it in her hands, and I knew she would soon bring forward ideas and observations that would force me to reevaluate my understanding of what was happening to me once again.

"And you could start thinking about your path to immortality." I added, before kissing her and going back to the kitchen.