Allright, another finished chapter, another disappointed writer. I just can't seem to get them right, though in my defense I just wanted to get this one out as soon as possible since I'll be too busy in the next week to write. I'll probably come back and rewrite it before writing the next chap, can't promise it though. Like always, constructive feedback is appreciated, and English is not my first language so don't expect too much.
Disclaimer - J. K. Rowling owns Harry Potter, I am just using her world as a playground, since I have nothing better to do
Humans have always tried to understand the unexplainable. Curiosity is in our nature. From the day we made our first fire to the day the Atlanteans discovered how to harness magic. It is as much a curse as a gift. Yet I have always reckoned that some things were just not to be understood.
Death for example and what may perhaps lie behind its all-reaching hands. Is there truly a next great adventure, does utopia await us, or does it just end? Who knows, certainly not me.
We try to put order to things we can't explain otherwise, to things we have no real answers to. Religion for example. It is as much a thought as a possibility. Who can say who's right and wrong when we don't know the answer for sure?
Since the first year spent within this castle, I have learned that everything is possible with magic. Even cheating death, it seems. Yet I have needed to learn to sometimes just accept that some things don't make sense to me and perhaps may never will.
It is one of the major disadvantages of being muggle raised. We have since the Middle Ages reached an era of enlightenment and discovery. Our technology and wisdom have drastically developed within the last centuries and decades. We are told that our universe follows logic and that there are rules that bind it and its actions. Rules that are impossible to break. So, imagine the surprise one gets when suddenly informed of magic and the general disregard for any rules and bindings it holds.
Muggle-born will always try to find a common ground between the two. A place, a bastion of logic and rules within the otherwise chaotic whirlwind of magic. It is a hard instinct to ignore and often takes one their entire magical education before finally accepting that magic just can't be defined and held by rules.
One example would be Arithmancy and often the first step for muggle-born to accept magic and its whims. Do not be tricked into thinking that your knowledge of Algebra would be of use. True, some of the very first equations and practices discussed use it but in a way that could be described as doing Math while being hung upside down on a bridge and high on as much drugs as one could take.
Don't understand? No worries. How about starting slow and then going deeper so as to not screw up your brain too much. The first lesson one receives is actually one of the most common uses one finds within Arithmancy. Divining.
Now don't mistake it for seeing. One is a rare talent that allows us to glimpse into Fate and the Future, often confusing both with each other, while the other is mathematically divining glimpses of your future but with far poorer efficiency and accuracy.
It starts with using your name, in the magical world a powerful thing. Names, at least in theory, are after all said to connect you in a way to a part of your soul, allowing things like magical binding contracts or placing taboos, like good old Riddle.
For example, my name would be Harry James Potter. Then use the alphabet of your language, it actually doesn't matter what language you use as long as it's your mother language, weird right?
Then turn the letters into numbers, depending on the order of the alphabet. My result would be 81181825 10113519 16152020518. After that, it's simply using either Pythias Rule of Seven or Nostradamus Formule pour prophétiser, though that would mean more decimal places, and while providing more accurate results is not worth the amount of effort, since decimal places always mean a message within a message, and you'd need Zhang Heng's Method of Deciphering to make sense of it.
After all of the math, you'll be presented with a bunch of numbers and depending on what you wanted to find out, various other variables with no connection to them. When I first used it, I wanted to find out what would be served as dinner and while Beef Wellington was accurate, it forgot the side dishes. Evidence of inaccurate accuracy when divining with Arithmancy.
For this example, I went a bit further, trying to find out about major changes in my future. Mind you, what you'd get out of something like that with simple methods such as I used, chances are likely that it would just be gibberish, but hey it rained today and the time was 7 minutes after 7 pm on the 7th of September, all good signs and I've always been credited to be lucky, though I always seriously doubted it. What came out was almost more of a prophecy than gibberish, but only almost.
'The servant has… Beware of the… Platinum-white shall shine the…' Now, it was actually longer but the rest were just letters bundled together without any coherency.
I've never been one to believe in prophecies since they always just seemed to be the most likely possibility of a certain future, but not more, hence my nonchalance at the weird result. After all, nothing is certain when magic is involved.
Ah, but it seems we have gone a bit too far in this particular topic, hence let's look at some more advanced uses of Arithmancy, basically everything that uses 'Math' with seemingly no order or sense.
Question: Define the Fierceness of the matchbox present before you when in correlation to the Transfiguration of it into an orange, explain your method.
Hmm, first you'll need to know the number of matches within the box, 13 huh? Well, then you'd need the original number. 24, okay. Its last user was me, so I'll need to pluck one single strand of hair, mess its length in correlation to the matches and finally light it. You best use Aristotle's Number of Four for this one. A decimal value huh, means the orange can only be unripe. Wait, its colour is light orange so simply dividing the colour by the number of stars in our galaxy and the width of our sun means we could use the result and separate it into four blocks and write each one on a piece of paper. Pick one and burn the rest with one of the remaining matches. Use the ashes and weigh them. They smell intense but not as much as you'd expect, which means the total fierceness of the unripe orange is the combination of the number on the remaining piece of paper and the unpleasantness of taking in a deep breath of the remaining smoke. Ah, seems like the Fierceness is about as much as that of a black cat on a Sunday afternoon.
Don't worry, I didn't understand it either. Something you'll just have to accept things like that along the way of your magical education.
The funny thing is that even some wizards and witches need to learn that. After all, it is not just a muggle instinct to bring order and definition to the unexplainable. They tell you of rules and self-placed limits to the magic they teach you. Gamp's Laws of Elemental Transfiguration or Diophantos's Limits of Order for example. Rules that are said to be impossible to break. Even though at the same time they teach us everything is possible as long as you have magic. Wizards…
ooooOoooo
When your main cast of associates are ghosts, -such as the Headless Nick or the Bloody Baron-, suits pf medieval armours equipped with swords and Portraits of famous warriors within history you tend to pick up a thing or two about sword fighting.
A few insights here and there, tales of adventures or simply beginner instructions because of your curiosity, and a well-kept secret parted with, of one Draco Malfoy and his ancestral records concerning his great-great-great-grandma, a certain half-Minotaur called Zygerria Malfoy.
What can I say, a certain Acturios Malfoy isn't as closed-lipped as he assumed once drunken during one of Sir Nicholas's Death Day Parties, rather legendary of their reputation among Hogwarts all-year tenants.
Still, I was wholly out-skilled when it came to the seemingly overly intelligent suit of armour and its jewel-encrusted sword which it held in both of its hands. A strike to the head dodged by barely ducking and the follow-up block with the rapier in my hand. A hand that won't survive this brutal assault of swings and strikes much longer.
It was a testament to the skill of whoever created the rapier, that it still held, even when struck with the Sword of Gryffindor. A rapier that I had heroically saved from facing another gruelling millennium of being left within the catacombs of France. Why it had been left there was anyone's guess, just like the reason as to why I could be found exploring them when I was still just 11 years old and enjoying the first Dursley free summer, something which became sort of a tradition during the following years.
Still, I knew that even if the sword would survive, I wouldn't, so at the first opening I sprinted out of the hall, past the smug-looking portrait of Godric Gryffindor, whom I had finally managed of sharing the password with me, and as far away as possible. Only minutes later, did I stop to catch my breath and allow myself to relax.
I had expected challenges, just not a sword fight with an enchanted armour that seemed to be unfairly magic-resistant, probably due to the fact that it was made out of multiple XXXXX magical creatures. If the dragon-and basilisk skin on its gauntlets and helm were any indication. Using the surroundings also hadn't worked, since surprise surprise, wards called 'Neraskinliv dzid' and which were first used by Alexander the Great to protect his statues from being destroyed, using an advanced ritual and ward line that would stop magic being used within a maximal of one hundred feet radius, though strangely magical artifacts and enchanted items seemed to work within it. It slowly died out as the ingredients for the ritual went extinct or were just too rare to be wasted.
Looked like it was time to take some more instructions on sword fighting if I wanted to shove Godrics smug face right up his throat.
ooooOoooo
Ugh, that was a mistake. In my falsely placed confidence fuelled by a certain old headmaster and his compliments, I had walked to the kitchens, recipe book in hand and ready to perform in front of Nitwik showing him performance ages to be remembered.
Remembered it would certainly be, I mused, just not the way I had hoped. The badgy old house elf had given me a trashing so harsh that half of the elves present fainted and even I felt sick after some of the things he described doing to my… ugh my meals coming up just thinking about it.
More practice then. After all, practice doesn't make perfect, it only makes progress. And I certainly needed progress if I wanted to advance my cooking skills, which were apparantly closer to those of mountain trolls than Nitwit thought to be possible of one under his 'instruction'.
ooooOoooo
There is a tradition I hold every year. It started with Lockhart during my second year and continued since then, whereas I would always visit the first DADA lesson of the year and judge for myself if it would be worth the effort to attend it.
So, imagine my surprise that even I, one who had spent untold hours browsing the best books the Room of Requirement had to offer all the while honing my DADA skills as close to perfection as humanly possible, I still thought fourth-year lessons were worth my time. Still, the half-furniture, half-scars-filled man called Alastor 'Mad Eye' Moody certainly made it worth the time, even if I had to hold back quite a few snorts and chuckles at some of the questions asked by my fellow year mates.
When his first lesson began with barging into the room yelling "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" while shooting a few spells over our heads I knew I was in love. It was love at first sight as they say. And he made it damn easy with the way he acted.
The man just rocked. With a magical eye that never found rest and a wooden leg making his walk clunk and produce silence in its wake, he was perfect. The best auror they said, told to be responsible for filling half of Azkaban's cells they whispered, and cool as fuck they thought, or at least I had. Was this how fangirls of famous bands felt like? I certainly could sympathize now.
And against all of my imagination the man made me like him even more since the first lesson was apparently a showcasing of all the Unforgivables. True the spiders were rather horrifying to watch, but it still was nice to see the real thing after reading about them for so long. It certainly explained why they were hand in hand with a lifetime vacation in Azkaban upon use.
Just barely a week into the new year and I already had an all-time favourite teacher. Now all I needed was for Nitwit to stop insulting me and life couldn't be better. Truly the Golden age had begun, and enemies were beginning to resurface for one last defiance.