Author's note: Shit is hitting this fan really quickly. Really really quickly. Like, so quickly. In the space of one or two chapters, pretty much.
Kaleidoscope
Astrid heard a strange melody in the morning. She had been poisoned yesterday, probably during a battle with Strout.
Rizo-Waal Strout was a strange man - no, he was not a man at all. It was difficult to call him a concept. The lines around him, the melody around him was a little too human, a little to easy to understand. In fact, High Zelretch and Nicholas were more complex and deep than this… little man.
He was powerful, though, and though they had joined in battle, he had escaped. It was hard to believe that this type of thing was an Apostle, let alone one of the oldest vampires that ever walked the earth.
Well, one of the oldest surviving vampires. Her forefathers had done an admirable job in matching Strout's comrades.
He named his sword the True Demon Neardark, and she had wondered why the sword wasn't fully embraced by the darkness. He had scoffed, telling her that his curse was not one which understood something as pure as the darkness. Perhaps that was why he was human. He wasn't quite as absolute as the other things she had faced in the past.
She had fought him with Blue, who was not quite as well adjusted as she was. Blue looked rather disconcerted that when the young girl had activated the Fifth Magic, the Fractal of Remove, she had failed to kill Strout instantly.
Blue was now sitting at her bedside, neither of them having spoken since the battle.
"You're young." And foolish, the accusation was quite clear.
Blue looked angry. "I hold the most powerful magic in the world."
Astrid chuckled and pushed herself into a seated position on the bed. "Fate/Remove is only one of five, of thirty one."
Blue didn't understand. She was sixteen, after all, and this was mostly myth.
Astrid pulled a notepad off her bedside table and a cheap pen and began to sketch.
Her shaking hand drew the number 'thirty-one' in Urdu, a language she wasn't quite too familiar with.
Then she wrote in more English styles of notation, and drew a line under it, with the number three under the line.
"Fate, Fae and the World - these are the concepts that the Thirty One From the Sky are divided into. Five, Eight and Eighteen. I don't understand the significance of these numbers, except for the fact that they're almost magical but not quite. We associate magic with threes, fours, sevens and seventeens."
Blue was, at least, a good student.
"Fate/Remove is only one piece of a much larger puzzle, Blue."
Blue pushed her hair behind her shoulder and left the room, undoubtedly having been told her entire life that she was a genius, a prodigy and the most powerful magus to live. Astrid privately wondered how she managed to work with the girl, ever.
No Peace
It was the middle of November and despite her daily sojourn into magical knowledge, Daphne was so very bored. There was a little bit of excitement at the end of October, when someone had let a troll in by accident. Everyone in Slytherin said it was Hagrid, but the man had looked a combination of excited and confused on the staff table, while Professor Dumbledore had run off to deal with it.
It turned out that there were actually two trolls - one in the dungeons and another that had followed its leader in. The first troll was disposed off by Professor Dumbledore as he led Slytherin House from the Great Hall down to their common room with some sort of charm which either vanished or teleported the troll away.
They later found out that Professors Flitwick and Snape had quietly subdued the other troll in a girl's bathroom. There hadn't even been damage to any bathrooms, from what Daphne could see, so it was clear that the two of them were quite skilled.
This was why she was currently standing outside of Professor Snape's office, waiting for him to let her in. She had put her name on a sign in sheet that she wasn't sure that he checked to begin with - her name was the only one on the list, after all. She had to write in the date herself, considering it seemed as though only three people had been to see Snape since the beginning of the year.
She waited another five minutes before a voice called out, "Greengrass." She should have known better than to worry anyway. Snape wouldn't do something like ignoring students who had signed up for office hours, especially not ahead of time.
Snape's office, at the back of his potions classroom, was haphazardly neat. It was clear that some spills had not been cleaned and that some of the papers around on the floor were probably important, but every rare ingredient she saw on the walls were well kept and labelled meticulously. There was a collection of four mystic codes behind cabinets of thin glass. Daphne wondered if he had ever been the target of an assassination attempt and had to reach them very quickly.
Four mystic codes was quite many to keep during times of idyllic peace.
"The spellbook is Darklight, named in my fifth year, for every shadow cast by a lit candle. The glove is nameless, because it does not deserve one for its mundane function of being able to summon my wand from any nearby vicinity. The smaller of the two jewels is not actually a mystic code, but a gem given to me by an old friend who went on to Clocktower to learn High Thaumaturgy containing a fair amount of knowledge on the subject of short range weather control. The larger gem is unfinished."
Daphne gave him a questioning look.
Snape's expression was his usual, slightly sallow and didactic in equal parts. "I show every student who chooses to enter my office of their own volition those objects. They are not a point of pride as much as a point of example. Considering the usual student is here but once, to ask for a better Potions grade or to attempt to employ my understanding of the Dark Arts, these examples are important."
"My mother says you went to school during her time, Professor."
Snape nodded. "She is doing bigger and better things than brewing to teach and for profit."
Daphne wasn't quite sure if he would believe that what her mother was doing was better.
"She was one of the many students taken by the Headmaster. There were a handful from every year. Are you here because you wish for me to teach you until you catch his notice?"
Daphne nodded carefully.
Snape scoffed. "I am not a powerful Mage, nor am I particularly skilled at much other than the magic of battle and potionmaking. Considering your roots, you could do better than myself."
Daphne took a gamble. "You subdued a troll with no damage to a bathroom."
Snape looked ready to actually laugh at her. "Any teacher in this school with a degree of competence would be capable of that. I had the added benefit of Filius Flitwick's wand by my side."
Daphne shook her head. "You have Mystic Codes. Including a spellbook."
Snape looked at her as if she had disappointed him. "Your friend Longbottom's grandmother has a collection of thirty seven."
Daphne understood. Snape wasn't going to teach her as his apprentice - but he could teach her in other ways. "Can you spare any time in your day to duel with me?"
Snape stared her down, evaluating her closely. He nodded. "Saturday evenings at six, before dinner. We will duel for anywhere between five minutes and an hour, depending on your skill."
A Fistful of Dreams
By the first snow of December, Neville was the only one among them who wasn't consulting teachers en masse to learn things far beyond his station.
Daphne walked to the Great Hall from lessons with Snape on Saturdays and lessons with Flitwick on Sunday with a collection of bruises or cuts which were too trivial to heal, but left her looking like a punching bag.
Draco, who had become the castle's darling since his change in attitude, studied dueling with Dumbledore, who was far more gentle than either of Daphne's teachers, but also had developed a rather unique love of Astronomy.
Harry actually turned down the offers of the majority of his teachers, being the single student in the school who saw Dumbledore more than the rest of the students combined. Dumbledore was a visionary in the fields of Transfiguration and Alchemy - and though Harry had never truly wanted to learn how to duel, Dumbledore sensed that it would be useful to him in the long run and taught many lessons with a side focus in the art.
No, Harry and Neville learned to duel from Draco and Daphne. Harry was barely ever interested in the affair - he told the other three that he had an arsenal necessary to defend himself if necessary and the study of alchemy was conducive to defeating wizards twice his age, even without the element of surprise.
Despite his lack of interest in the process of dueling, it seemed as though none of his friends had any sort of ease in defeating him anyway. Harry kept telling him that there was a certain mindset they had to understand of those who were or wished to be alchemists. The conversion process of even air itself could be twisted and improvised to do extremely intuitive things that could win a duel before it started - their goal should have been to think of what Harry would do to combat certain strategies and respond accordingly.
Neville showed the most aptitude for this, choosing to dive into barrel rolls or knock his randomly conjured metal plating out of the way upon every slash of his wand. Harry couldn't do anything to drastic for fear of severely hurting them - and they weren't about to use the borderline dangerous curses that they could fling with impunity against their mentors.
Recently, Neville had taken to study sessions with various members of different houses - all of them their age. Unlike Draco (who cultivated a following of admirers rather than friends), Daphne (who was charming to everyone but rather aloof to those who weren't in her friend group already) and Harry (who unsettled most people with his brilliant stare and more brilliant mind), Neville was a natural leader of sorts. The boy had cultivated a following of people who were rather useful - even Harry admitted it.
Only Daphne joined him in these study sessions and Neville never let them forget that he enjoyed all nights of learning esoterica during the weekends in the common room with them far more than he enjoyed time with his newfound friends.
But Neville had all but dragged them along this time to one of his study sessions.
There were a ton of people there. Ron Weasley from Gryffindor, who looked guardedly at Harry and Draco, but developed a shade of pink in his cheeks when Daphne curtsied at him. Hermione Granger, the girl they had met on the train, who looked rather surprised at the comfort that 'Neville's Slytherin friends' seemed to exhibit with one another. Two more boys from Gryffindor - Finnegan and Thomas, who Harry didn't know the first names of.
There was a modest muggleborn boy from Hufflepuff that no one seemed to know very well, Terry Boot from Ravenclaw who Daphne waved to in the Great Hall once in a while, Padma Patil, who was spinning her wand in her left hand casually, and three more people that Harry really didn't remember the names of at all.
After bows and curtsies were given all around, as well as hasty introductions by Neville and warm smiles from Daphne, the room was sealed quickly. Neville had learned to summon a time-sensitive cone of silence rather than one that had to be held up with continuous effort.
"Okay, everyone, Potter, Greengrass, Malfoy, we're here to create our very first Mystic Codes."
The room broke into cheering and excitement.
"So as we all know-"
"No."
It was Harry who had spoken up. Harry was shaking his head, his expression in a frown.
Hermione looked as though the wind had been taken out of her sails. Daphne stared at Harry with a fair amount of curiosity, the rest of the students with resentment. Draco played with his wand and Neville shrugged with some sort of emotion that Harry thought might have been close to embarrassment.
"Why not?" Hermione asked. To their credit, the rest of the students allowed Hermione to speak for them rather than erupting in pandemonium.
Harry drew his wand. "Okay, take a look at this. This is every wizard's first mystic code and likely the only one that they will never create in their entire life, right?"
Hermione nodded at him, looking contemplative.
"Okay, so when we went to see Mr. Ollivander, he told us that certain wands were good at certain things, right?"
Everyone remembered the strange old man.
"When you create a mystic code, you're putting influence, you're putting your specific bent on the way you interact with magic. Ten points to whoever knows the Sweeting quote about intrinsicness."
Daphne waved her hand in the air with a positively campy smile on her face. "Ooh! Me, Harry!"
He wasn't as amused as she thought he would be. She put her hand down in a huff.
"The wizardfolk whom we call strong are those who find themselves intrinsically and inextricably tied to the performance of magecraft," she recited, sounding bored of his antics.
"So why does everyone say that Ollivander's Wands are the best? Because he wants to do something more than make a profit of ten or twelve galleons off the next poor fool who needs to perform magic. Professor Dumbledore said that there always has to be an exchange between the caster and magic itself every time a spell is performed. You have to make your intentions clear and you have to go through some sort of ritual to perform the simplest of spells - wave your hand, think in a certain way, wave a wand, whatever."
Hermione nodded, beginning to understand.
"So what do we know about Mystic Codes? We hear of the Broken Hand of Justice which belonged to Godelot Lestrange. About how he used it to shatter the rules of spellcasting due to his hatred of order. We hear of the First Blaze of Merlin, carried down the line to Dumbledore himself, which is used to burn 'existences' according to the books I've read."
It was clear that most of them had heard of neither of them, because only Draco seemed to be nodding along to this. Harry threw his hands in the air.
"Okay, anyway. The point is that you need to feel something really strongly about the way that you want magic to work with, for whatever reason, before you can change the way magic is cast. I think that the reason Ollivander can create a world renowned wand with a bit of wood and a dragon heartstring is because he feels some sort of obligation to open the eyes of a child to magic. So when you're creating a mystic code, it has to be something more than 'yeah, I want this to make magic easier for me'," Harry finished.
To his surprise, it was Daphne who interjected suddenly rather than Draco, who was probably one of the only people in the room with a chip on his shoulder large enough to write a Mystic Code. "Okay, this is all well and good. Professor Snape has a Mystic Code he calls Darklight. I mean, can you think of a more cliche name than that? He formed it in his fifth year."
"I dunno, Daphne. That sounds kind of cool to me," Neville said.
"Neville. Not helping," Daphne grumbled. "Okay, so it proves that he can make a Mystic Code and he made it at a young age. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to work. Why can't we just try to make one. We don't have to aim to recreate the Left Hand of Justice or whatever. We just have to create something that we might not even be proud of enough to name. I for one want to know if I can create a permanent enchantment like a Mystic Code at this age. Snape is seriously smart, you know."
Harry gave up, deciding that trying to write a Mystic Code wasn't the dumbest thing in the world.