Gellert's fingers rested lightly against Hermione's, their hands splayed but palms not touching. In the space between their palms, a miniature hurricane brewed. He wasn't entirely sure what she was doing - her witchcraft was always abstract, achieving some goal only she knew. His magic melded with hers, and she wove strands of it through her own in a beautiful but abstract pattern.
Or perhaps she actually had no idea what she was doing and was just playing with the strands of her magic. Maybe she had no aim whatsoever and was just fiddling with their magic to see what happened. They certainly had enough of it between them.
Ah, she'd somehow turned the hurricane into a glass ball. He had no idea how she'd done that, perhaps by adding that glowing strand of her magic there... or perhaps she had just shuffled it all up differently and made a completely new spell.
He pulled out that strand to see if perhaps it turned it back into a storm. It didn't instead the glass just went cloudy as the other magical strands of its structure fragmented. Hermione didn't seem to mind, stirring their magic into a cohesive whole rather than strands and sculpting a bird. Gellert helped her, the aim was clear this time. Then he breathed life into it and the bird fluttered crimson wings. Hermione poked it a couple of times and suddenly it was a miniature dragon. It was taller and thinner than any he'd ever seen with huge spines in a single line down it's back.
It was an interesting observation - one could form objects by sculpting, or by simply imagining its form. An unnecessary observation really, he'd already known that, as had Hermione. She had begun to weave her magic over the form of the dragon, reminding him amusingly of a horse blanket. The image must have been too strong in his mind because suddenly the dragon had been replaced by a horse blanket.
Hermione huffed and dropped her hands. Her magic withdrew, leaving him with the darkness of his own. He'd never realised his magic was dark, it had just felt like magic. Then Herr Brun had first had them join their magic and he'd first felt hers. It was white gold, hot and bright, foreign yet familiar. It was the feeling of the morning sun first rising over the horizon, those first rays that lit the world. His own was like sunset, a dark, still peace. Their magics were polar opposites, cold and hot, light and dark, fire and water, sun and moon. It was what made their combined magic so strong, and it was why his mother had insisted they start this exercise so soon.
'I want to make it with a spell.' Hermione huffed in annoyance.
'The whole point is that its not a spell.' He grumbled.
'No, I want to discover the spell to make it.'
'That's not how spells work, Hermione!' Gellert tried his hardest not to laugh. She looked a little put out.
'So how does it work? I want to make a spell!' Huffed the witch, folding her arms across her chest.
'A spell is just a word to direct the wand, the wand directs the magic. Your magic does the work.'
'Isn't that easy then?' Hermione asked, missing the point.
'Well yes, its easy to say the word and make a dragon.' He opened his hand as he said the word and a dragon appeared from his hand, spiralling up into the air. 'But that's because you can focus your mind to control your magic. Those who can't feel their magic need a wand, the word tells the wand what to do. You need to have a close bond with your wand to be able to make spells that work.'
Hermione sat for a moment, then huffed.
'So I need my wand to make a spell?' She concluded, looking to where Herr Brun had left it on the desk.
'No, that's not your wand, that wand doesn't understand your magic. When you are eleven, you will get the wand built for you. After you have used it for years, you might be able to speak to it.'
Hermione deflated and he instantly felt bad.
'But you don't need to create spells when you can do magic like this. Look, I can show you something.' Gellert waved his hands in a circle and a stone bowl filled with shimmering silver liquid materialised in front of him. He tapped the surface and a memory of last Samhain appeared. The witches raised the spirits of their ancestors, opening the veil as the wizards flew on brooms around the circle of stones, jinxing malevolent spirits back to the other side. The dead feasted and danced with them, celebrating late around a pyre before swooping through the fields to punish lazy harvesters - those who had left food out in the fields - by filling them with maggots.
Hermione watched with avid fascination, then waved her hands too, creating a black box. It buzzed with black and white flecks and she touched a patch of green on the side. A picture appeared, like a pensive. Hermione, wearing a black, skin-tight outfit, bones drawn in white on it. Three other children ran with her, one a girl with a green painted face and pointed witch hat, one wearing a sheet with three holes cut for his eyes and mouth and another wrapped in rolls of thin, papery fabric. They hurried down the street clutching brightly coloured pumpkins made from a strange glass. Skeletons and graves, spider's webs and orange bunting decorated the rows of houses, all glowing with a strange, constant magic. Yet they were all muggles.
Hermione jumped and squealed as a miniature skeleton popped up from a coffin before recovering herself and knocking on the door. An adult dressed in a light, silky black cloak with a deep hood drawn up over his head answered the door and beckoned them all inside.
The strange light lit this room too, coming from a glowing orb near the ceiling. Music drifted through the room but there was no musician, not even an instrument. Adults drifted around in the next door room; one splatted with tomato sauce, another whose blue trousers and green shirt needed attention from a house elf, his leg needed attention from a healer too if the way he was dragging his leg was anything to go by. A woman walked past in a slinky red dress with a tutu, tail trailing on the floor behind her and little horns poking up from her hair.
He assumed they were all dressed up for Samhain, although there seemed to be no theme to the costumes. He looked over at the green painted girl again, wondering if that's what muggles thought a witch looked like.
'You sure about this American trick-or-treat business? It sounds awfully dangerous.' One of the adults who'd followed Hermione in muttered to another.
'I don't like it, but all those films have convinced the kids that its a real Halloween tradition.' The other replied. Hermione ended the spell.
Gellert wondered what on earth that strange glowing light was and how it worked. It couldn't be that their area had a benevolent witch to create it for them, not only would that be completely against the statute but any witch would have snatched Hermione up in a moment.
Unless it was some new muggle technology, perhaps one that they had only started using in England. He had heard rumours of candles that ran using something called "electricity" in some cities but he'd never seen one and had heard they were expensive and unreliable. He'd also heard that they couldn't be used in conjunction with magic.
Hermione's Samhain celebration was strange though; he knew the British wizarding society had let things slip, but he hadn't realised how far. The statute of secrecy may mean they couldn't mingle with muggles like they used to, but the muggles still remembered them. The muggles knew that it was wixen who blessed their crops, or cursed them if they were undeserving. Samhain was the one day of the year where they could still take their place, where they could remind muggles of their existence and why they should be feared. It seemed in Britain they had allowed the muggles to forget how reliant they were on the Wixan blessings... or had they stopped performing blessings at all. Alice and his mother had both suggested on separate occasions that the inbreeding the British families engaged in weakened them until proper rituals became almost unattainable. He'd heard rumours that most people couldn't even perform wandless magic.
The British also had their ministry of magic; a body made up of witches and wizards who were of such status that they had to work, usually lesser families with no respect for traditions. He had heard of the extensive lists of spells that were illegal there, he wondered whether blood magic, and therefore most rituals fell under that list.
He much preferred the German system - one could duel for the title, if one held the title, one was essentially king. The King never lasted long - usually they would manage a year or so before angering one of the powerful noble families. They would be removed, a more malleable candidate found and the cycle would begin again. His mother had disposed of three kings in Gellert's lifetime, believing them to be too light and likely to outlaw her rituals. The Tunninger patriarch had removed a King for seeming to interested in his wife. The whims of the old families were mercurial.