Chapter 4: Summer
"I don't believe it." Marlene gave a rare smile. "You transfigured the vase into bees to chase down Snape?"
"Yep." Lily grinned at her, and then took another bite of her ice cream. "I hope he knows what's good for him and stays away."
"My goodness." Mary sighed. "You people are really making the most of your Trace-Free wands, aren't you?"
"Yep." Marlene replied. "It's been amazing. I've had time to just drill, and drill, and drill for hours. I think if the curses I was using were even a little bit dark the back field would have become uninhabitable by now."
"Who said I used a wand?" Lily smirked conspiratorially.
"You did it wandlessly?" Mary gasped. "Is that even possible?"
Lily smirked even wider, and then picked up a stone off the ground. She molded her hands around it, and then quickly drew them apart in a grand gesture. The grey stone had shifted into a small hummingbird, which followed Lily's finger around, before being blasted with a subtle hex from Marlene.
"Merlin, Lily. I didn't know you could do wandless magic! That's something really skilled wizards are supposedly only able to do!" Mary looked at her friend. "Can you teach me?"
"I don't think to. I learned most of it before I got a wand, and while I have more control, it was really hard to learn in the first place." Lily admitted.
Marlene finished her ice cream, and then leaned forward in her chair. "So, Mary, sure you don't want Lils to remove the Trace from your wand?"
"I'm sure." Mary responded. "Just a little bit too illegal for me."
"Suit yourself." She shrugged. Further comment was interrupted by Alice finally showing up.
"Sorry guys!" she sat down at the table. "My parents had a big deal they needed help with. What's happened?"
"Snape showed up at Lily's house, and Lily chased him off with a swarm of wandlessly transfigured bees." Marlene explained. Alice wanted proof, so she demonstrated the wandless trick again.
The talked for a bit longer about everything and anything as Alice picked at her ice cream. Lily noticed that they general sense of unease in the shoppers of the alley had gone up sevenfold since she was last in the alley.
"Why is everyone so tense." She pondered.
"Oh? You didn't hear?" Alice asked, tilting her head. "The Turpin's business got blown up. Several people in black cloaks and white masks apparated in front of the business and fired several nasty blasting curses inside. They barely got away."
"That's horrible." Lily's face went pale. "I used to shop there whenever I came to the alley. They had such a great selection of books."
They finished up and went to Alice's Family's small estate. "So, Lily, what's this you wanted to do with us? I thought little old you had a traceless wand to do magic with." Alice asked.
Lily pulled out her wand. "Pyrologos." She drew a circle in the ground on one end of the room and walked to the other.
"What are you doing, Lily?"
Lily smiled mischievously, and then disappeared and reappeared in the circle with a loud crack. "Medical Spells, if you will, my dears." She called out, bowing with a flourish.
Mary sighed, and then pulled out her wand. She waved it in a complex pattern, and then lowered it. "You're fine. You didn't splinch yourself."
"You just practiced apparition in my parent's house." Alice held her head in her hands. "Lily, why are you like this."
"Being mundane is boring." Lily was practically bouncing. She suddenly stood still, and apparated to the other side of the room. "So! Who else wants to learn?"
"Lily. Even if we did want to learn, it's not like we can just heal the rest of us when we do splinch." Mary pointed out.
"Speak for yourself." Marlene dismissed her with a wave of her hand. "This is useful. Let's do it." Lily was practically glowing at her friend's acceptance of her shenanigans. "How did you learn so quickly? Apparition tends to be really hard to learn."
"So, I discovered a diary that belonged to a previous head boy, and he had a bunch of super useful philosophies on magic that helped me learn some stuff really quickly. One of which was apparition." Lily explained. Alice sighed, and took Mary outside to look over their summer homework, not wanting anything to do with the illegal happenings within.
"Now, we first visualize where we want to go…."
Lily didn't know why she kept coming back here.
That was a lie. She knew exactly why she kept coming back here. The magic. It was exhilarating. She couldn't help but to do it.
It was also drinking from a firehose. She pointed her wand out into the water and murmured the incantation.
The magic slammed into her with the force of a train. It felt like she was holding back a glacier undergoing cleavage or stopping an avalanche with sheer power of will. The water began to churn, in accordance with her will. Her exterior glistened with sweat, but was still, and calm.
Inside her was a raging storm of emotions. Euphoria, pain, pleasure, agony. She was occluding as hard as possible and couldn't stop it from tearing through her.
She dropped her wand, and the connection with the chaotic storm of magic dropped. Her vision was hazy, and her hands were slightly glowing. The whirling pool of water that had formed, only a meter across, subsided, and the currents s flowing.
Lily decided she was going to hold off on practice such extreme high magic for the time being. Maybe it was time to give that light spell a try.
She practiced much of her other magic. Powerful curses flew out above the water, trailing a thin wake of mist where their excess energy kicked up water. A clump of sand was levitated, transfigured into a golem, animated, and then turned back into sand. She worked her way through the tome on lighting spells.
And thus, her summer flew by, halcyon days disappearing in the face of the extremes that her magical practice took her to.
Channeling powerful magic was exhilarating. It was like that one time she had consumed alcohol at a family function, and got all floaty, but so many times better. It was like certain private nocturnal activities, in some ways.
It also hurt. Sometimes, when she pushed herself to the extent of what she knew she could cast, her body would start to ache, her muscles spasm, and a deep pain began to emanate from her bones. She had read about this. Magical Stress, they called it. When someone pushed themselves near their limit, this was what happened.
It disheartened Lily to find her limit was so small at times. She wasn't anywhere near the level of magic she had seen some of her professors do, and she was but a butterfly, or a flower in the face of the likes of Grindelwald and Dumbledore, who had razed an entire mountain during their infamous duel. She wasn't at the level of Merlin, who had supposedly tapped his staff into the ground and summoned forth legions of magical constructs.
She was going to be the best, there wasn't a doubt about that. Or, failing that, better than the likes of Mulciber. Rosier. The Bastard.
Lily kicked up a lot of dirt with the blasting curse she fired immediately after thinking about him.
Becoming the best just might take a while.
Her summer flew by so fast, in fact, that she didn't even notice when her mother came into her room at 9 on September 1st.
"Lily, dear. Don't you have to go to Hogwarts today?"
Right. That. Lily thought. She waved her wand, packing up her stuff has quickly as she could.
"I do." She responded to her mother. "I'll teleport there in a bit. No need to help me there."
"You can do that?" Her mother asked dubiously.
Lily blushed, and her face briefly was as red as her hair. "Not legally." She admitted.
"Is this one of those stupid laws you complain about, or one of those laws that is genuinely there for a good reason?" Her mother asked, tilting her head and putting her hands on her waist. Lily looked a lot like her mother. They had the same auburn hair, and the same emerald hue to their eyes, although Lily had inherited the shape of her father's eyes.
Lily had also inherited her mother's sharp intelligence, and disregard for stupid laws that one could break with ease, like underage magic restrictions and speed limits.
"Both." Lily admitted. She stared at her feet, hair flowing to hang in front of her.
"How can it be both, Lily-dear?" Her mother questioned in amusement.
"Well." Lily huffed. "It's a great law for most people, because it's ever so difficult, and they don't want people hurting themselves, but I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to do it when I can do it just fine. I'm a magical prodigy! I shouldn't be held back because the Stan Shunpikes of the world couldn't identify a werewolf if it mauled them!"
Her mother hummed for a moment. "Ok, Lily. Just promise me you will be careful." Her mother would never admit it to her, but she was entirely fine with breaking almost any rule or law, so long as no one got hurt.
"Yes, Mother." Lily agreed and went back to packing. When it was time to depart, she kissed her parent's goodbye, and dematerialized on her front porch.
She reappeared a great distance away in a restroom at King's Cross. Walking briskly, she passed through onto the main platform, and made her way onto the Hogwarts Express.
She was going back to Hogwarts, and back to the Chamber. Back to Tessie. Back to that wonderful Slytherin Library. Her library, now.
Back to Salazar, the bigoted Drama Queen.
Back to the likes of Mulciber and Rosier.
Back to the place she could really learn magic and be better than the others.
"Oh, Great! You're back!" Salazar's painting drawled at Lily. "It appears that my hopes that you would get yourself killed over the summer were misplaced."
"Sorry Sal." Lily smirked. "You're stuck with me." She immediately set to the bookshelves, digging through them. She found Definitive Defensive Devices and pulled the ancient tome off of the shelf gingerly. She set it down on the desk and started reading.
Evidently, she'd need some more defensive options with the way everything was heating up.
"Defensive spells?" Salazar queried.
"Yes." Lily responded. "The blood purist bastards have picked up their attacks, and I want to be ready. I'm not going to get caught off guard."
"If only I could have been so lucky. §TESSIE! Deal with the interloper§!"
"§Sorry Salazar§." The snake replied. "§You're stuck with her§."
"My goodness." Salazar sighed. He rubbed his forehead with his hand. "So, Lily." The painting sneered. My goodness, it really is a house trait… Lily couldn't help but think. "If you are going to despoil my inner sanctum with your filthy presence, could you at least tell me what is going on in the world outside of this chamber, so that I don't die of boredom?"
"Hmmmm." Lily contemplated Salazar's request for a moment. It wouldn't cost her too much to inform him of the goings on, just time, and it would be ever so interesting to learn what he thought about it. "I suppose so. The outside world is fairly violent right now. Outside of this school, there is a group of extremists promoting blood purity that call themselves the 'Knights of Walpurgis', and there have been a couple of attacks on muggleborns and muggleborn businesses associated with them. They burned down my favorite bookstore over the summer." Lily's eyes watered at the thought of all of the shelves of books she wouldn't get to pore over anymore. Damn, she had met Dorcas in that shop!
"Inside the school," Lily went on, "most of Slytherin house is aligned with the blood purists to some degree, and every few days or so, spells are exchanged between both sides."
"Interesting." Salazar said ponderously. "I must say I am disappointed in the actions of these 'Knights of Walpurgis.' Sure, their heart seems to be in the right place, but there are better ways of going about removing mudbloods from society than attacking them directly. If she were still around, Rowena would have had an aneurysm and whipped them herself if she heard they burnt down a bookstore! Any competently run organization would infiltrate the government and slowly undermine them, not harass business owners, and destroy repositories of knowledge! Speaking of, how is the government situation?"
"The government is fairly corrupt." Lily nodded, the first steps of a well-worn rant coming to her lips. "And a lot of it is controlled by a bunch of pureblooded ponces that want to oppress the Muggleborns. There are a bunch of rules that are easy for purebloods to circumvent but almost impossible for the Muggleborns!"
"Yes, I do remember Tom Riddle ranting to me about that." Salazar nodded, recalling his previous heir. "He was very unhappy at the end of the year until he discovered how to remove the 'Trace' from his wand. Apparently, he coped by developing his wandless magic skills. I do wonder what happened to old Tom… A bright student, but had delusions of grandeur and inherited no meager amount of his ancestor's insanity. Also, he killed someone with Tessie's assistance, and I doubt I will ever forgive him for that, no matter what he's done in the interim. I don't suppose you happen to know what happened to him?"
"No." Lily shook her head. "It looks like he just fell off of the earth."
"Pity. I wouldn't be surprised if he overestimated his abilities and ended up making the wrong move searching out ancient repositories of knowledge. He was devoted to purging the world of Muggles and saw becoming learned in magic as a means to that ends. I'm sure that if he were still around you would have heard of him."
"What of your other heirs?" Lily pondered. "The others that visited this chamber in their time here?"
"As I have said, none since the seventeen-hundreds were even remotely sane. All scions of the Gaunts, a sickeningly inbred line." Salazar spoke gravely. "They were almost as bad as mudbloods. The only line I can think of that ever benefited from laying with a muggle."
"Wow." Lily remarked sarcastically. "That's a low insult, coming from you."
"I know." The painting sneered. "And yet they were still more worthy of carrying my legacy than you."
"Yup. And there is the insult of me. Is it too much to ask to read in peace?"
"Very much so." Salazar sniffed. "So long as you desecrate these hallowed halls, I shall do my best to pettily annoy you."
"Thank you, Salazar, it's good to know you care." Lily drawled back at him. "I wonder… Basilisk venom is supposedly incredibly destructive to magical objects… §Tessie, are you willing to help an Heiress out§?"
"§Sorry, Little One§." The serpent hissed. Her head rose up from where she was curled up and stared at Lily and Salazar at about eye level. She wore an amused, snaky grin, somehow. "§Salazar's kept me company for over a thousand years. You've been here for less than one§."
"§And you're sure you don't want me to deal with him§?" Lily asked as she cocked an eyebrow and giggled.
Tessie's deep, sibilant laugh vibrated the chamber. "§You are funny, Heiress. Keep that up for the next hundred or so years, and I might just take you up on that offer§."
"§I don't know§." Lily mock pondered, twirling her swishy wand in her hand like a paintbrush. "§I could make an enchanted painting of myself§…"
"§My snake is contemplating betrayal§." Salazar grumbled. "§Tessie! Make yourself useful! Purge the mudblood from my Chamber§!"
"§No§." The snake responded. She snapped her large fangs playfully at the painting, and then lowered her head and curled back up. "§Although Lily, I'd really appreciate some fresh meat, if you could be so kind§."
"§Noted. I'll bring some next time I come§." Lily replied, and then got back to her reading. After feeling sure she had gotten a good grasp of the theory, she left and attempted some of the spells in the larger chamber. She painted a canvas of Shield spells. Some were large and intensive bubbles and walls of brightly colored magic, and she would feel the magic channeling through her into the protective domes, circles, and other shapes the shields formed. Others were smaller, barely luminous protective layers she could wrap over herself and other things, and she barely felt a trickle flowing through her when she cast him. Her wand loved every moment, the willow stick thrumming with satisfaction and happiness in her hand, pleased to be doing the type of magic it thought it ought to be doing, not resisting her ever so slightly at all, like when she was practicing darker curses.
Lily thought to the pages of Arcana Major that described a powerful, shapeable shield spell that could stop almost anything, and be contorted into almost any shape, a shield that, rumour had it, was used by Merlin to protect an entire army in the infamous conflict with Herpo the Foul.
Lily waved her wand in the proper pattern and forced the magic through it. A block of blindingly cyan magic cast dark shadows around the room, illuminating everything it was even remotely nearby. She focused on it, and the magic twisted and contorted, spreading out like spilled water in the air to mesh seamlessly with the walls. Her wand was humming in delight and growing warm in her hand. That deep seated ache in her bones whenever she attempted powerful magic. The pins and needles, or in extreme cases, knives forcing themselves into her bone marrow as she channeled the awesome magic. She occluded and focused on the feeling of immense joy she also got from the practice.
She let the magic stop, feeling exhausted. Satisfied with her practice, she returned to the inner sanctum.
"Wonderful." Salazar's dour voice called out. "And here I thought we were going to get a few hours of respite from your presence."
"You know?" Lily mockingly pondered, kicking her feet up on the ancient oak desk, green eyes twinkling with mirth, and a bit of magic that had bled out during her practice. "If you really don't like my presence, I'm sure I could arrange a change of scenery. How does the Forbidden Forest, or the second-floor girls lavatory sound?"
"Don't remind me of what they did to desecrate my study." Salazar grumbled, the painting's eyes squinting at her. "It's a testament to my magical prowess that the chamber was able to form an entrance, even in the loo. And get your feet of the desk!"
"You don't get to tell me what to do, Sally." Lily shifted her feet, and then levitated the book on shield spells back to its position on the shelves. She frowned to herself when she realized that while she loved annoying Salazar, she wouldn't dare risk damage to Arcana Major by handling it improperly. With a sigh, she took her legs off the desk, and pulled out the ancient tome of power.
"As if that's any better! Now, instead of disrespecting a desk far superior than you deserve, you are defiling a book far more valuable than your family!" As an afterthought, he added. "Frankly, I'm just glad that you aren't dirtying my magnum opus with your muddy hands."
"And what book would this be?" Lily smirked at the painting.
"It's – No, filthy girl, you aren't getting it out of me that easily!" Salazar crossed his arms. Lily sighed, stood up, and balanced her wand. "Scripto Scriptor Detecto Salazar Slytherin." She incanted. The spell spun the wand in her hand and pointed to the shelve directly behind the desk. There, she saw a collection of books that all appeared to have been written by Salazar. Lily grabbed the biggest one and set it on the desk. "Is this your magnum opus?" She gave a sly smirk.
"Nope! You aren't getting anything more out of me."
Lily just shook her head and sat down. The front cover was emblazoned with a massive, golden 'Salazar Slytherin', in a clear testament to the man's ego. Beneath that was the title: 'Ritual and Sacrificial Magic." Lily cracked the book open and began to read.
She had no intention of doing any of the rituals within, but it would be interesting to read an obviously illegal book and gain another perspective on them. Also, it would annoy Salazar for her to read it, and that was definitely a win in her book.