Ch. 10: The Core of Magic
Harry was itching to tell Hermione, Ron and the twins about the conversation he had overheard, about the feathers and his suspicions. However, they never had a moment when they would be alone.
At breakfast there were plenty of other Gryffindors around and Harry didn't want to risk anybody overhearing them or realising that they were using a Muffliato spell. After breakfast, the twins went for their classes, so Harry couldn't tell everybody his revelations and he didn't feel like repeating himself.
That didn't mean that he didn't think about it. Quite the contrary: he didn't hear a single thing that professor Binns said. Not that it was anything exceptional. He usually didn't pay attention to that particular lecture, either because he needed to do something else or because he fell asleep. Hermione was quite possibly the only student in the history of Hogwarts, who actually paid attention during those lessons.
Arriving at lunch, Harry was almost jumping with excitement, which was quickly extinguished when he noticed the twins chatting with none other than the exchange students. There was, of course, no way that he could talk about his suspicions in front of them, so he called up a smile that he hoped didn't look too fake and greeted the whole group cheerfully.
'Oz was just telling us that he thinks McGonagall doesn't like them,' Fred announced, not caring to keep his voice down, earning a somewhat panicked look from Oz. The latter quickly looked around the hall to see if McGonagall wasn't lurking anywhere. Ron laughed and said that McGonagall was just strict.
'No, no,' Elliot said. 'We know a difference between a strict teacher and a teacher who wishes to be anywhere else than in the classroom, we did go to school before, you know,' he added, surprising everybody by the amount of words he spoke at once. Harry noted the small fact in the back of his head. He was about to ask about the school, but Elliot continued. 'She barely even commented when Leo managed to transfigure his feather into a needle.'
'Oh, you're only doing that now?' Hermione asked with some disappointment. 'Didn't we get an owl feather to transfigure into a needle on the first lesson?' she asked, looking at Harry and Ron for confirmation.
'Do you seriously expect us to remember that, Mione?' Ron asked back with some distaste. 'But it's true that we had something to transfigure from lesson one,' he added, probably because Hermione looked ready to scold him for his attitude towards his education.
'Well, we only got a feather now and it was a raven's feather,' Oz commented carelessly. 'Maybe she thought we needed to do all the theory with her before she could let us transfigure anything,' he added and even Harry could say that he didn't believe his own explanation of McGonagall's behaviour. Could it be that the Transfiguration teacher didn't want the exchange students to master her subject? It was an odd thought, however Harry looked at it.
'Oh, so she went from owl to raven,' Hermione noted and wondered out loud if there was any difference between transfiguring one kind of feather or another. Harry, in the meantime, wondered silently if McGonagall had an ulterior motive in giving the exchange students a raven's feather. Could it be that she was suspecting Raven the bodyguard of something as well and she wanted to see if she would get a reaction?
'I thought that McGonagall was a creature of habit,' George laughed. Harry almost missed the slightest of frowns that appeared on Leo's and Elliot's faces for the briefest of moments.
'Raven's feather worked perfectly fine,' Leo commented with a shrug, his face frown-free. He grimaced at Alice's annoyed reply that it might have worked fine for him but not for the others. 'It's not the fault of the feather if you couldn't perform the transfiguration,' he said in a cold tone.
Oz put a calming hand on Alice's shoulder. Still obviously annoyed, the girl turned her attention to her plate, which was, as always, full of meat. She seemed to miss the disapproving glance that Elliot shot her as she started eating, because she didn't comment it in any way.
Times like that, Harry wondered what the relations between the four students exactly were, because they sometimes seemed like they were constantly on the point of exploding into an argument. They never really got into any serious fights, usually because one of the ones not directly involved in the argument-to-be would do or say something calming. On the other hand, other times they seemed like best friends since early childhood. They would share small, internal jokes and knowing glances.
'What are you doing after lunch?' Hermione asked, changing the topic. Somewhat displeased, Leo answered that they were going to the History of Magic with the first-year Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs.
'With the first-years?' Fred laughed. He laughed even more when Elliot scowled at him.
'It seems that professor Binns didn't see a problem with that and neither did the headmaster, apparently,' Oz explained, also not sounding extremely enthusiastic about the topic.
'Shouldn't you have some prior knowledge about the History of Magic?' Hermione asked, frowning. 'After all, like you said, you went to school before.'
'It didn't seem to matter to professor Binns,' Leo explained. 'He seems to be under the impression that nobody but him can get it exactly right and definitely not those "crazed islanders", as he so kindly put it,' he added, rolling his eyes.
'That's quite rude,' Hermione noted with surprise. It was true that the ghost teaching History of Magic didn't really seem like somebody to say something like that. To his surprise, the exchange students laughed.
'It's hard to be offended by a ghost,' Leo said with his typical, dreamy smile. 'Besides he apparently remembers before the isolation and talks about our ancestors, so it really doesn't concern us that much,' he added. Harry twitched, eyes widening in realisation: they had a perfect source of information about the Four Great Dukedoms! Hasn't Dumbledore thought about it?
With the corner of his eye, Harry noticed the suspicious look that Elliot was giving him and fought to control his expression. Next to him, Oz continued about how it was weird to sit in the classroom with the small kids and how they didn't understand how Hogwarts' students could fall asleep in class.
'Yeah, we have been told that Hogwarts was the most prestigious wizarding school in Great Britain,' Elliot agreed. He didn't seem impressed when the twins laughed and told him that it was the only wizarding school in Great Britain.
In the end, Harry, Ron and Hermione had to go to their next class before Harry had the opportunity to share his suspicions. Having heard about the feathers only strengthened them and he couldn't wait till he would be able to share them with the others.
It didn't help that their after-lunch lesson was just about as interesting, in Harry's personal opinion and in the opinion of just about everybody except for Hermione, as History of Magic: Core of Magic.
Professor Lunettes gathered the students by forty, meaning that each year had lessons all together, for half a day. They sat in the largest classroom of Hogwarts, or so they have been told, where the audience was formed as a sort of amphitheatre around the large stage.
Nothing much happened on that stage, because professor Lunettes preferred to talk throughout the lecture with no help of pictures or practical demonstrations. It was almost as though he was trying to bore them to death.
As every week, the teacher was already in the classroom when the students filed in, talking animatedly in groups. He watched them settle down with a somewhat absent smile on his face. Harry always wondered if he was the same when he was teaching in the Four Great Dukedoms or if he was making a special effort.
'Now that you have all arrived,' the teacher started and waited till all the conversations hushed. He never raised his voice and never scolded students for misbehaving. He never took away or awarded House Points and sometimes Harry wondered if he even could. 'Last week we finished on the topic of contemporary theories of magical usage and the consequences it has on the balance of the magical field surrounding Earth.'
Professor Lunettes seemed to be a Muggle scientist sometimes. Harry, of course, didn't know much about scientists, but when Professor Lunettes pulled up a blackboard and started scribbling equations that was the image that came to his mind. The teacher had once spent a whole lesson teaching them about electromagnetic and gravitational fields, only to equate them to a "magical field" that might or might not be encompassing the whole planet. Well, that was what Hermione said in any case, because Harry's mind had gone into energy saving mode about three equations into the lecture. Whether or not Professor Lunettes realised that nearly none of the students were listening to him, or understanding what he tried to teach them, Harry had no idea. The man never showed any emotion.
'All that was necessary to begin discussing what magic exactly is and, afterwards, where it comes from,' he continued in the dead silence of the classroom. It was still early enough into the lecture and Harry was actually trying to pay attention, should the man mention some big secrets, so he frowned at the statement. The teacher smiled absently, the expression never quite reaching his eyes.
'I know what you are all thinking,' he stated. 'You are thinking that it is obvious and you have been doing magic since you can remember, but let me ask you this question,' he produced a quill. 'You will agree that it is a pretty mundane object, one that every Muggle could successfully use if they tried and thus not magical.'
'Well done stating the obvious, dude,' Ron muttered next to Harry. Standing behind his desk, Professor Lunettes posed the quill on a piece of parchment and it didn't fall flat onto it.
'However, if I enchant it to take notes of what I say,' he started and the quill scribbled on the parchment. 'Suddenly the quill becomes magical, wouldn't you say so?' he asked and looked at the auditorium. Was he really expecting an answer? Of course a Quick Notes Quill was a magical object. Everybody knew it. 'Or should I ask: is the quill magical now or am I giving it some sort of power or skill?'
Hermione started noting something in her notebook.
'This spell will only last as long as I focus on it and afterwards the quill will become a Muggle, mundane object,' the teacher continued. As if to illustrate his point, the quill fell flat on the parchment. 'So is the quill magical or not?'
Harry had to admit that there was something to think about in that question. However, he found it extremely difficult to focus on the problem. Who cared if the quill was magical or not if it did what the teacher wanted it to do? Did it even matter? And what the hell did this have to do with what the teacher was supposed to be teaching them?
'There are many theories built around answering that question, but we shall not go into them in detail, since the subject of this lecture is but one of them,' Lunettes said and Harry sat up straighter. Was he finally going to tell them what the Core of Magic was? Even Ron seemed to be a tiny bit interested.
However, what followed was a long and complicated discussion about provenance of magical properties of the quill and how it drained the wizard's energy if kept up too long and Harry was nearly asleep when the teacher paused. Ron snored at that particular moment and it was impossible that the teacher didn't hear it because half the students turned to look at the red-head. Harry elbowed him awake, worried that it might have been a bit too much and the teacher's neutral façade would crumble.
'In the heart of the theory that is the most probable lies the Core of Magic,' said Professor Lunettes, completely ignoring Ron's snores. Awake as he was, Harry had no idea where the statement came from. He shouldn't have spaced out because this was obviously the important lecture. 'Some like to think that the Core of Magic is an intrinsic ability of the chosen ones and needs no further explanation. Some think of it as a field surrounding the universe, albeit like gravitational field. Finally, some prefer to see it as a separate dimension, where our laws of physics are void and thus magic is possible.'
'In the following lectures I will present you arguments for the second and third option, because I don't think I need to tell you that the first one is reserved for ignorant fools and has no reflection in reality,' the teacher continued in a lighter tone. Harry wondered if Malfoy would write to complain to his father immediately after the lesson or if he would last till after dinner. 'I will not try to persuade you to either option, because this is a matter still largely under study, however, I would like you all to give it some consideration. Afterwards, we will discuss the reason why only some people are able to draw power from the Core of Magic.'