Dearest Philippa,

I'm glad you enjoyed the new (old!) sheet music! I have much, much more where that came from. The third piece is a bit of music I have been working on off and on since school and therefore find it especially flattering that it is your favorite. I must say that the changes in notation and edits are much appreciated and will incorporate your notes (suggestions!) into the composition as soon as I get the time. Your pieces are really thrilling. Beethart variation and Chokovsky have never sounded so sweet and it's any wonder you had never tried to write music before. I knew speaking with you that you would produce something as lush and elegant as these combinations and when I finally got to yours? A true delight thank you for sharing your work with me.

Concerning your questions on magic-

Some of what you have asked I find difficult to answer not because of the subject, though a little bit because of it, but because the histories are scattered and disputed and the theory is unclear. The observation is astute though but given what I know you know about magic, maybe unsurprising. Yes, the imperius curse and legilemency are largely related. They derive from similar impulses but deviate where the execution and energy required are concerned. You are also correct in asking if the imperius curse can be used for good. All of the curses, at least what we classify them as contemporaneously, can and have changed. In fact the imperius curse was known as the ambulocus spell. It was developed by early healers in the earliest version of St. Mungos. It was an early means of getting the wounded mobile and part of the recovery process with wizards who suffered ambulatory wounds during a war long ago. Instead of leaving or levitating a patient they would move their bodies through the patients' minds to strengthen both the muscles, maintain circulation and also "rewire" (I can't think of a better word for this) the brain, strengthening their mental acuity also. Legilimency is born out of this practice and as you can imagine occlumency developed as a response to this. A powerful enough occlumens can also stop the imperius curse but not only is this exceedingly rare it is difficult since a witch talented enough can use the imperius curse from very far away. I do not have a stomach to write some of the details of what you asked about in your own letter and having worked at the ministry this long I am also wary of detailing some of what these developments had wrought but yes, that too is a result of both but predates all of this and no matter what time or era we discuss it has always, always been a mark of sickness to reanimate the dead, even in our community. While I can say that it does require a great focus in the beginning, the magic used does not require the same level of focus as the imperius curse and if you ask me, should be included as an unforgivable curse except that when it has been brought to the Wizengamot it was argued that it was not in fact a curse but "a proceduralized unit of spells that do not necessarily require or imply ill intent". That was as late as eighteen years ago and that is maybe all I can say about it for fear of getting sick at the thought of some of the people I still work with.

The relatedness of spells and curses can be difficult to parse out. Again for the same reasons. The spell locomotor mortis which operates on the living and locomotor rigidis cannot be used on a living person and combines several spells together that can be used on a living body. There is a rumor about a book that delves further into this that I have tried to get and one in German that may further illuminate the subject. I will let you know if I get any more information.

In the meantime, the earliest form of spell casting was developed by what we call 'cantors'. Early (I mean BCE) magic, worldwide was generally formed through music, chanting and poetry. Depending on what part of the world, we even go so far as to include dance in Sub-Saharan Africa as the oldest of these and the original magic. To this day there are people in that region or the great-greatest descendants of those wizards and witches who are rumored to be able to do magic without a wand.

As we transition to the common era, even past the founding of Hogwarts, all of wizarding Europe needed a means to share magical ideas. Originally, the spells we use now were developed largely by these cantors and the form could change slightly from person to person, family to family and community to community. There would be various ways of doing the same spell faster or slower depending on your proximity to someone who had been taught a more efficient means of casting that said spell. Soon that was made possible to share that information around the time that, not coincidently, coincided with the muggle invention of the Guttenberg press. Gutenberg is still largely assumed to be a muggle born wizard but I can find no clear substantiation on this matter. I personally think this is untrue and highly unlikely. We have a habit of taking the greatest muggle minds and attributing their intelligence to magic. The standardization of the common spell form (CSF) using Latinate and Greek to mirror the scientific binomial form developed by Linnaeus. You would be familiar with this form in the naming of species. Our use of a standardized form and language (it is always Latin. Snore) is in fact a result of (confirmed) children born to muggle scientists. They recognized the power in standardizing many of these spells and in writing them down, as well as some of the theory, which was called something else at the time.

On your last question, it is worth asking Dorcas about this as I have on good faith that if she had not been trained at Hogwarts she would have still been a powerful and influential witch and might be even more gifted than I already believe her to be. Philippa, she really was everyone's friend growing up. I feel I can say this to you but in the strictest confidence. Before I attended Hogwarts, I did not enjoy school for a number of reasons. I was an outsider in many ways and felt the hurt of that in many ways and with reason. I did not expect that it would be any different when I received my letter to Hogwarts but, I found a home there and being friends with Dorcas brought me more friends than I had ever had up to that point. It hurt to leave early but also didn't, again, for too many complicated reasons that I cannot and will not enumerate here. You must know that we lived together after she left school also. A group of us from Hogwarts shared a house. She was not the best student in our class or even her house (she will be the first to tell you this) but she did some of the most elegant and complicated magic I have ever seen or even heard of and I say this as someone who works where I do. If she hasn't already brought up some of what she has accomplished it speaks to her humility and her natural gifts: the first, that so much of what I had to study to understand she could and can make magic on the fly (a wizard expression, at least we contributed to the lexicon in some way) and the second that she assumes that everyone no matter their skill level can learn to do what she can do naturally. She in fact may be a cantor. It may be a sore spot for her so if you do, tread lightly. But she is one of a group of natural spell casters. She is part of the lineage of witches and wizards that can chant new magic into and out of existence. Like I mentioned earlier, cantors were amongst the first wizards and witches to develop spoken magic. If what I believe about her is true, and I wouldn't believe it without evidence she ranks amongst what we all, muggle and wizard alike, called the Blessed. Cantors made Azkaban unplottable and that it the weakest of it. There are stories, I can't even say histories because it's so devastating, that the oldest of cantors were so powerful that they could "gift" magic to muggles temporarily and the reverse, who could create barriers that could collapse magic in on itself that made it so a wizard would be unable to do magic ever again.

Cantors could do incredible things. They keep the legacy of wild and pure magic alive and though so much magic can be taught it is not the same. As a musician you understand there is a difference between someone with perfect pitch and a musician with a good, fast memory and well-studied relative pitch. With a reference point the latter can appear as the former but the former doesn't have to try; they don't have to think or consider it. They are their own reference point they only need to learn the names for the sounds they can already hear in themselves. The greatest downside being the speed. The purity of that kind of magic often takes time but coupled with good magical training, the likes of which Dorcas has as an auror, she is relatively unstoppable. Her natural gift is to develop spells and those spells are a natural extension of the witches temperament and spirit (this also may not be the word I'm looking for). Her goodness shows up in the magic she does. It is naturally preserving and protecting and combined with her training and her gift and her vocation makes it very precise. Very, very precise and maybe even slightly increases her spell casting speed for the layperson this means shaving a minute or two from doing the dishes. For her and other aurors in the field, the difference could mean someones life. If we had been graded on the ability to think of something differently to use and combine resources she would have received much higher marks than anyone and certainly me. I feel no shame in knowing how hard I work to understand what I know and have always been an excellent student but had I not known Dorcas, I might not have had the access to some of the resources I did while still in school in the first place. I did the studying on my own but she provided the keys to a whole library if I can obscure my meaning. I love her as one of my best friends and, though I know she would call me a friend, it is still a surprise and honor given everything that led us to each other in the first place that she could count me as a friend too.

Back to your last question though. The imperius curse when used by a competent witch is, famously, a calming spell maybe given its origins. Legilimency if done correctly I can imagine may be the same too but this is where I think it's worth pointing out given my research and what I know from having the ability to do magic. Not only does magic leave a trace, magic requires something deeper in general. There is in magic, and this is where theory falls apart and discussing magic using the language of science and muggle invention fails me and therefore frustrates some theoreticians, especially those of us who attended muggle schools: magic is invariably tied to the witch who performs it. Whether it is amplified or reduced, how it mutates is determined by the witch who performs it and who it is performed around. To use an auror for example, part of their training is to repeat magic around many different people, to depersonalize their skillset so that it behaves reliably. I cannot and do not know exactly what that entails and yet I know also that (and I'm sure they do also) that the magic is you and you are the magic and there is no such thing. Like a fingerprint. It leaves a trace specific to that person but also the people closest to that person.

There is documentation of children's first magic being related to the last spell a person used, married people's magic, even amongst aurors, amplified in each others presence and siblings strangest of all. Twins especially. And twin sisters strongest of all. One can say a spell that the other uses regardless of their distance from one another. This brings me to a fascinating book I read years ago. One sister was a squib and the other a noted witch but they did not know one of the sisters was a squib until her first year in school. She could not replicate or cast a spell on her own. They volunteered (or were most likely coerced given the time and place they lived) and one sisters magic could travel in the body of the other in some instances. Some of what you feel you may not have the physical vocabulary to understand and this is not any insult to you, and some of it is, in my estimation, Dorcas' magic. You are not twin sisters to be fair and you are not a witch but some of you, just based on your love for each other, your proximity to one another is recognized by Dorcas and by extension, the magic part of her which is inseparable from her. There is the power of blood magic and shared blood when we talk about being related to someone but I will give you one guess as to when a witch's power is absolutely strongest. In the presence of other women, even in the muggle world, that shared experience is also well documented that a woman's body recognizes another's enough that their menstrual cycles get closer (I will send an especially funny old article about the proposition of all women being part werewolf given moon cycles. It is only funny now that no one takes it seriously). I would not be surprise to find out that you have done or seen things you can't explain in any other way than as magic now that you are so familiar. It would not surprise me at all to find that you are capable of what was once called the common magic: hyper sensitivity to magic places and fields (nature especially the zen dualities of water and fire), a deep love of music or poetry (which we know you have), a heightened sense of intuition and an ability to focus on a single thing for unnaturally long periods of time (a form of meditation or a form of self possession or imprinting yourself onto yourself I will explain later) and the ability to occasionally change or move things with your own will. The last in the literature is maybe the most exciting proposition for you but is also the weakest point of distinction as it was meant that you think of moving something, and then with some part of your body move it so it is meant very literally not in the witch or wizard can literally move something with your mind but also the will to make what you imagine of yourself which is difficult for any of us on the best of days.

I apologize as this may be disappointing. Anyone can be capable of these things and to be sure the common magic was not a comprehensive outline at all, some call it bunk outright, but the point also, and this is the most important maybe, is that magic also makes itself available to you. As with the squib sister the experiment ended when the squib sister drowned herself. The confusion came from both the muggle authorities and the ministry when they could not find the source of water that caused the drowning. All of the symptoms were there, down to the bloating but her skin and clothes were dry her windpipe was shut as if she had drowned. It was found that her sister hundreds of miles away was under fire stress, a condition when a wand temporarily cannot cast a spell. This is usually irrelevant and temporary and remedied with the change of a wand or the stressful episode passing or a therapy of starting several fires over a prescribed period of time (one of the earliest spells and easier to conjure than water) due to the personal stress of a witch but it manifested in her sister's body holding the water to put the wand's "fire" out. What the investigation did not conclude was if the witch sister's wand stopped working first and that resulted in the drowning or the drowning in some strange way happened first and the wand responded in the only way it knew to force the witch sister to use it.

This is not where I should end this letter but the case study is fascinating if not grim. The point I'm trying to emphasize is not only to trust your intuition but to recognize you are sensing something. It may not be the thing you think but magic or not, unless you are sick and, even then still sometimes, there is something you are telling yourself or something magic or non-magic is telling you. It is not always our place to understand or decipher what those details are. Secondly, magic recognizes many relationships but is grounded in a type of physicality and the natural, physical realm. Water being the second most powerful liquid to blood and everything with water, that is to say every living thing on a magical level recognizes itself. Everything with water finds use and that statement is truer still along bloodlines for better or worse. The water lines shrinks until you have blood magic within a family and then within oneself which I cannot write about here or maybe even discuss though I can guess that makes you more curious but strangely enough the blood magic that someone using their own blood tends to be the saddest and most pointless of all though powerful. It almost always ends in the death of the person who tried to study it using themselves as a subject and as you can imagine there is very little but theory on this and is largely poetic and melancholic as a result.

To end on a happier note, I have included more sheet music from early 20th century that you may enjoy. You will find that it recalls the melancholy and mundane of Mendelssohn with some of the wistful (wishful?) naiveté characteristic of wizard compositions made during the time. For context, a lot of these compositions predate even the first war by ten or so years when wizarding England could claim to have superiority over 'muggledom' without it yet being thrown in our faces that we could, in fact, turn on each other in such a spectacularly destructive way that it would lead to a war of any magnitude let alone the size of one ushered in by Grindewald. This is, unfortunately, typical of the era when wizards refused to recognize that if muggles disappeared, we would have all of the same problems as muggles were never the root cause of any of them. I suppose that is not a much happier note at all. I also included the article which, upon another read, is more scary than funny… Well, I hope this letter finds you in a cheerier disposition than you will be after you read it. I will answer as many more questions as I can and as you send them; this is keeping me fresh in my theory at least!

All My Despair,

Lydia