INTERLUDE:Hermione Jean Granger

Hermione had sequestered herself in the study/library on the second floor of 12 Grimmauld Place and had been there for a solid six hours and counting. Ever since Harry finished showing them how to self-transfigure into solid objects in fact. The moment the door was closed and locked, she picked up with doing what she had been doing in this small library since the four of them had... escaped to this... foxhole! She'd been studying.

Most people think they knew what Hermione was all about, most think they understood who and what she was and most even believed they knew what her place in the world was. Even her parents and closest friends fell into the belief that they knew pretty much everything about Hermione Jean Granger.

They were wrong.

Hermione was not your normal brainiac student-oriented witch. In fact, on multiple levels, she was not normal by any definition of the word. Hermione was very special in a way that not many knew about nor could they comprehend it very well either.

Ironic really, how unique she is in the world, and identified for the smallest and simplest things that she can really do, while at the same time there was a secret and unique specialness in regards to her best friend Harry Potter that made him just as unique and just as special. Harry was split into four separate beings, each then had a different and individual training in magic. Then a Time Wizard came along on Harry's 17th birthday and fused all four back into one, creating a magic-user of such power and skill that the entire planet couldn't even imagine. He then turned right around and began teaching his friends all of his skill and doing his best to help them attain enough power of their own so they could help him.

Little did anyone know that after her first week at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, she could have passed her OWLs with straight Os in all the primary courses. By Christmas break, she could have cast every low-power spell (charm, jinx, curse or otherwise), given a full lecture on every other spell in the books, brewed any potion you could think of, no matter how complex, and could recite from memory the complete timeline, of all magical species, goblin and wizards alike, from the beginning of recorded time (Wizard edition) to present day. By the end of the First Year, she could have passed her NEWTs with an O+ on the primary courses and all of the electives. Well... except Divination, but she had avoided that until she couldn't avoid it any longer in Third Year when Ron and Harry had joined that class. After all, what good is it to know everything? There wouldn't be anything new to learn after that!

In simple terms; Hermione is a genius.

Hermione sighed as she put down the book she'd read for the fiftieth time all together. She was about to start all over with the limited collection when an idea struck her. She'd been thinking about the meditations Harry had shown them, of pulling in and containing their magic, and then releasing of it into each spell they did. In fact when she really thought it about, it was exactly what their wands did for them all the time!

Yet at the same time, she knew that there were other ways that wizards focused their magic. Ancient Runes for one, and it just so happened to be a course that she easily passed while at Hogwarts. She wondered, would it be possible for her to focus her magic into runes without actually having to write them out or put them into an object?

It wouldn't be that hard really, especially not after all the meditation and training with their magic Harry had put them through for the past few weeks. She already knew all of the runes that were magic themselves, or could have magic put into them, and focusing her magic into something she already knew, rather than a 'shape' like Harry had them doing with Battle Magic was considerably simpler.

Mind made up, she sat herself on the floor and folded her legs and closed her eyes in order to concentrate. She immediately fell into the now familiar meditation, finding her core and focusing all of her magic down into it, leaking nothing from her core or even her body as she worked. Soon, she was imagining every rune that she knew and was picturing them quite clearly in her mind.

Now came the hard part, she thought to herself. Infusing magic into these... mental runes and seeing if they behaved the same or not. It was harder than she thought it would be, as even though she could imagine the runes without any difficulty, they seemed to disperse themselves the moment she tried to infuse any magic in them, unlike with shaping the spell, which was already made out of magic and had no trouble containing it. Runes were symbols, meant to represent something else, not be made up of it.

Still, she kept at it, and almost lost it the first time she actually succeeded. She stubbornly stayed at it until she finally managed to infuse the mental runes with as much magic as they could handle. Which, surprisingly, wasn't as much as she had thought, and her reserves weren't even drained from the effort.

If Hermione had bothered to open her eyes at this time, she would have seen that all the light had been leeched out of the room, save for that directly around her. What else might grab her attention is the fact that each and every single one of the runes she had just infused with magic, were floating around her body in a haphazard manner, yet still they were there and glowing a bright magenta.

Hermione, however, did not see any of that, as another idea struck her, a basic rule of using runes, they needed to be arrayed into a symbol or pattern, otherwise they didn't really do anything. For example, putting the same rune into a specific pattern, such as your basic pentagram, and depending on the rune you may either have a protection spell, a repelling ward, or even a booby trap that could shoot out a vile curse at the next person to cross it's path. Depending on what symbol you use and what pattern you put it into, you could have any number of results really.

As an experiment, Hermione decided to use the Leguz run in a simple spiral pattern to see what would happen. She focused on the rune repeating over and over into an every expanding spiral with her at the center. Yet again, if she had opened her eyes, she would have seen all the runes that had been floating around her vanish until only the one she was focusing on floated directly above her head. It began to glow brighter the harder she concentrated on it, and then when she started focusing enough magic into her spiral, the spell finally triggered and the effect took place.

Hermione was suddenly brought out of her meditation by a sharp coldness surrounding her. Opening her eyes, she was shocked when she saw that the room she'd been sitting in was frozen over. Not just cold or a bit of snow and ice, but as in completely frozen throughout, like the next ice age had come through and spent a few hundred years transforming all that occupied the room into solid frozen matter.

"Oh... my..." she whispered softly as she got to her feet.

"I need to get Harry," she firmly decided and bolted for the exit as quickly as she could.