Gellert drummed his fingers against the arm of his chair as he watched several of his allies mock duelling, egged on by the others. It was nothing compared to what he could achieve with Hermione; painfully slow, bellowed incantations and botched wand movements that resulted in weak spells as they clung to the methods they'd been taught. None of them understood the true workings of magic, and how they could reach beyond the limitations of words and motions and connect directly with their wand and magic.
It was the ill fitting wands, he decided - his own custom Gregorovitch wand was a rarity reserved for the wealthiest and most influential families and there was only one other in the room. It was a better match by miles than the stock standard wands wielded by everyone else. As far as he was aware, there were piles of wands in the shop and the wand maker merely had wixen try each wand until there was one close enough to work. It was a rough art at best, and the resultant parings depended wildly on luck.
But even custom wands had their flaws - it's creation had been limited to the materials that were in Gregorovitch's workshop at the time of it's construction. After all, even woods of the same species could wildly vary, as could the core materials, depending on the life it's donor had lived.
And that wasn't taking into account the natural changes in a person's magic over time. At least custom wands were built with the anticipated changes in a wixen's magic in mind. Gellert's wand had been built with the anticipation that his magic would develop like his mother's and become easier to channel over time. He hadn't been the best fit for it initially, as it had struggled to keep up with his young and restless magic. There had been frequent errant magical effects every time he cast. Hermione's had held her magic in tight clamps to begin with, but it now needed every single one of the runes carved into the sides to keep her magic from overwhelming the wand entirely and going off on it's own path. Berg's magic had become more responsive over time, shedding some of it's earthy depth and becoming a little lighter, closer to his mothers. His wand no longer struggled quite so much to draw out his power.
His allies, with their stock wands, had been suitably matched when they were eleven but now a number of them struggled with the more advanced spellwork needed for the upper years and had to find increasingly awkward ways to compensate. He'd noticed the Mustonen bothers both had to be increasingly aggressive with their casting as their magic settled into a stable maturity whilst Mira Nikolova's wand struggled to provide sufficient flare in her casting unless she put it in herself with exaggerated gestures and twirls of her wrist.
That was the strength of the elder wand, the way it could change it's own characteristics over time and adapt to the changing magic of it's user - illogical, theoretically impossible - but Hermione had proven time and time again that the impossible was merely a stumbling step on the way to miracles. Who was he to say that a wand's characteristics were fixed when his betrothed had an immortal knight as her ally; wasn't death meant to be even more unchangeable than the nature of a wand? Or when she could throw herself into rivers of ambient magic and not only survive but alter the flow itself, when everything he'd been taught warned of the danger and impossibility to anything but the smallest siphon of power.
Yes, the elder wand was a powerful artefact, but for the moment it was out of his reach. At least he knew where it was, and he knew that it was awaiting his retrieval of it. The others however - the stone and the cloak. He wondered at the true powers of those when the power of the wand had been so understated by the tales.
He glanced down at the book that rested on his lap - more research into the Gaunt family. They were unremarkable, beyond their ability to crumble into poverty and insignificance when the bride price of a single daughter should have been enough to fund even the most extravagant generation. The Gaunts hadn't always been powerless and pitiful - he could trace the power of the resurrection stone through more than seven generations after the marriage with the Peverells. Reports of knowledge they shouldn't have, that could only be gleaned from the dead. Tales of undead soldiers and recovery from mortal wounds.
Then abruptly, the Gaunts crumbled. A young, budding dark wizard with an army of inferi, who'd died an untimely death and been succeeded by an infant cousin. From then on the family had disappeared into obscurity until they'd withdrawn from society entirely in the most recent generation. Gellert could only assume the stone had been lost.
The question was who it had been lost to. Who had defeated the last Lord Gaunt?
It should have been an easy question, but the man had alienated so many people in his quest to power. Gellert had a list of powerful factions that could have been the ones to land the final blow. It was a lesson for his own planned fight; his faction would always be small, as only the most passionate of the traditionalists, so he needed to find other factions that he could ally with.
And there was one already pre-made, and notoriously easy to incite to violence in the direction he wanted. It would be child's play to get them on side and he knew exactly how to do so. He flicked his fingers, summoning a quill and parchment to his hand and closing the book to use as a surface to write on. His actions drew a brief interest from the closest of his followers, but their attention returned to the duel as he unscrewed the ink pot and began drafting his letter to Rowland Yaxley and his betrothed, Petrovna, who had promised to aid Grindelwald should he require it. Perhaps it was time to call in that favour.