After a fairly traumatic first lesson of the new school year with McGonagall where she broached the concept of Orichalcum – a powerful magical reagent used in enchantments and spells that required huge amounts of power to create – Harry, Ron and Hermione sat in the Great Hall, their minds feeling overloaded when Ginny and Luna came running over, eyes wide with excitement.

"What's up?" Ron said, first to his feet.

"It's amazing – it's, I can't believe it!" Ginny panted, waving back in the direction they had come.

"What, come on!" Harry said as Luna ran into Ron's arms.

"Defence Against the Dark Arts – we just came from there!" Luna said, pulling back from Ron's embrace.

Hermione's eyes went wide, "Oh, who's teaching it, we thought it'd be Snape or something."

Both of the third-years shook their heads vigorously, their plaits flying. "Not even close." Luna said, grinning at Ginny.

"Who then?" Harry asked, excited.

"Dumbledore." Ginny said, grinning.

"Bloody hell." Harry, Ron and Hermione said together.

"Oh yeah. It was amazing. He was like a totally different person." Ginny said.

"How so?" Hermione asked.

Luna laid her hand over Ginny's mouth before she could speak. "No no, you have to wait and see. It was amazing."

Ginny nodded then licked Luna's hand, forcing her to recoil, laughing. "She's right, it was brilliant, but he's covering the subject until Moody gets back, apparently."

Harry frowned in surprise. "That's intense, how's he going to be able to, with everything that's happening with the tournament?"

Hermione shrugged, "Who knows, time-turner maybe?"

Ron laughed, "No chance, he's just Dumbledore, isn't he? He can hack it. In any case, there's nothing happening until February now."

After a few minutes of rampant speculation everyone settled down for their lunch – it seemed that Dumbledore teaching anyone other than NEWTs for the first time in thirty-years was the only subject anyone was interested in.

"I can't wait for DADA now," Hermione said, excited, "I wonder if he'll talk about his duel with Grindelwald, or show us… you know – Dumbledore things."

Everyone laughed and Ginny shrugged, "I don't know, he actually just carried on with where Moody had left off for us, but he's just… so bloody good at teaching – everyone got the supersensory really fast this time." Then her eyebrows shot up, "Oh, I owe you ten house points, Harry."

Harry frowned, "What?"

"Yeah, he asked for volunteers to show off who could do it, I volunteered, and managed to see through a mannequin he had disillusioned in the corner which he said was…"

"Very impressive, Miss Weasley, ten points to Gryffindor." Luna said, with an eerily accurate impersonation of Dumbledore.

"Yeah, that." Ginny said, beaming. "So, thanks very much."

Hermione applauded, "Well done, you got there in the end?"

Ginny nodded, "I did after Harry helped, thanks again, Harry."

Harry smiled, "Any time." He couldn't' help but look at Hermione who had flushed a little, and he wondered how upset she was going to be at not being Ginny's go-to for additional DADA lessons.

"You know what I thought was most interesting?" Luna asked a few minutes later, thoughtfully looking at her reflection in the back of a spoon. "How he hardly used his wand at all. He just put it on the desk at the front of the room and left it there."

"He was doing wandless magic?" Hermione asked, surprised.

They discussed the oddity for some time, as so few of the teachers, or any wizard ever did any magic without a wand owing to either difficulty or habit. The risk of having no material channel for magic was huge as without incredible mental focus, even the most benign spells could go catastrophically awry.

The fourth year Gryffindors had Defence Against the Dark Arts with the Ravenclaws on a Wednesday – the first day of term – and, to everyone's excitement, Albus Dumbledore was waiting for them in their accustomed class after lunch.

They all shuffled in, and Harry saw that most of his fellows showed obvious signs of high anxiety. To most students, Dumbledore was a distant character, somehow elevated in the eyes of almost all of wizarding kind to the level of demigod or folk hero. His power and skill were legendary, a rare combination of a virtually bottomless reserve of raw power and an incredibly versatile (some said eidetic) mind. His achievements at the school almost a century earlier were legend and that had been just the beginning. From there, he had only grown into a figure of respect and awe.

That afternoon, he rested almost eerily still against the teacher's desk wearing robes of a vivid (and Harry thought, vaguely nauseating) teal, without a hat for a change. His legs were crossed, and he wore tall, dark purple boots without fittings, buckles or zips that seemed to shimmer slightly even when he and an observer remained completely stationary.

The second thing Harry noticed was that Dumbledore's wand was indeed on the table beside him. No one ever talked about the nature of the wand, either the core or wood, and Harry couldn't remember ever seeing it up close before. It drew the eye – or his eye at least – in a way that felt like something between the need to stare at Pansy's bum and the hunger he had felt when he had been locked in the cupboard at the Dursley's for the first time he had been locked in the cupboard at the Dursley's. It was beautiful, powerful, obviously rare and called to him as if it wanted to provide him with all he needed because it needed him and with it he would have all the answers to every question he had ever asked and between it and him nothing would stand in their way of greatness of power of the possibility of building a truly righteous and just world-

"Are you well, Harry?" Dumbledore asked.

Harry blinked. He was standing right next to the table, right hand slightly outstretched toward the wand. Unsure how he had come to stand where he was, he cleared his throat.

"Hmm?" it was more of a sound than a question. He looked up to see Dumbledore, one bushy eyebrow raised.

"I asked: 'Are you well, Harry?'." The old man said, with a small smile. His bright blue eyes flicking between Harry and the wand on the table.

"Y-yes sir. I'm sorry, I just got distracted." He felt like time had slipped somehow.

Dumbledore smiled and patted the wand on the table. "Best take a seat, Mr. Potter." He said with an almost imperceptible wink.

Harry turned and walked to his normal seat, sinking into it with a sensation not unlike getting out of a hot bath into a cold room.

"You alright mate?" Ron asked, nudging him with his shoulder.

Harry made an affirmative kind of sounds in his throat, which seemed to do the trick as an answer.

Dumbledore stood and the room fell into instant and total silence.

"Welcome," he said with the same effusive smile he displayed at every welcome and farewell address, "I don't doubt that my self-appointment as Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor has already reached your ears at this point. I'd like to make it quite clear that I will only be standing in until Professor Moody returns to us.

"With that being quite plain, and with this being the first fourth-year class I've taught in more than thirty years, I would appreciate one of you catching me up with what you were working on before the Christmas break."

The room was silent for several seconds until, as if on cue, Hermione's hand rose trembling into the air.

"Miss Granger, please."

Hermoine stood. "Professor, after Professor Moody completed our introduction to the Unforgivable Curses, and how to counter them, we carried on by spending half of each lesson practicing that. The other half we spent learning defensive charms and enchantments that Professor Moody referred to as Battle Spells. We started with Protégo and just before the break, those who were ready moved on to Reducto. But Professor Moody did suggest that he would be testing us on how well we had practiced resisting the Imperius Curse." She sat down quickly as soon as she had finished talking.

"Thank you, Miss Granger."

They emerged from the double-lesson almost two-hours later exhausted, enlightened and – in most cases – completely overwhelmed.

"I see what they were talking about now." Ron said, trying to roll out a tight muscle in his neck.

Padma, walking with them nodded, yawning into her hand. "He's… kind of hard to follow at times."

"I know what you mean, but when he explained how it is that Reducto is more of a jinx than a curse, it all started to make sense." Tomi Malik said thoughtfully, bumping fists with Terry Boot.

Harry, Ron and Hermione fell back a little, letting the bulk of the class get ahead of them.

After a few minutes, Hermione yawned. "I'm exhausted."

Harry, drained but utterly engaged, shook his head. "I'm okay, kind of buzzing actually. I'm going to shower before dinner. See you all there?"

"I think I'm going to find Luna." Ron said, heading toward the main staircase.

"I'll… see you at dinner." Hermione said smiling before turning the opposite way down the corridor.

Desperate to speak to Sirius, Pansy – anyone really – about the lesson they'd just experienced, Harry wound his way back toward the Gryffindor common room and passed straight up to the dormitories.

Defence Against the Dark Arts lessons quickly became a little easier as Dumbledore seemed to get a grasp of where the class was in their learning. The rest of January passed in a blur of escalating difficulty of their classes, endless waves of homework and Harry trying to spend as much time with Pansy as possible while finding time to research methods of surviving the Second Task.

It turned out that swimming – at least on the surface – was the least of his concerns. Hermione was a phenomenal swimmer, having been part of a competitive team in her previous muggle school. She turned out to be a decent if impatient teacher, taking him out two or three times each week to swim in the Black Lake for several hours.

The fact that they did this in January also led them to both learn a couple of new spells – one to help them endure temperatures that would normally be unbearable, and another to quickly dry themselves and their clothes using jets of warm, extremely dry air.

The exercise did Harry good, quickly helping him get fitter than he had ever been in his life. Between swimming and regular flying – either with Ron or the Gyrffindor quidditch team, he found his life more manageable than ever before. His slightly slower homework workload compared to his fellows gave him time to practice and practice until he was completely satisfied with whatever task occurred to him.

Best of all, after his resounding success at the first task, even the most critical members of Gryffindor house were now fully on his side. On the second Friday of term, he was approached by Nicholas Abercrombie – the final-year Gryffindor prefect – and offered a guest visit to the NEWT duelling club that met on Saturday evenings by invite-only 'purely as an act of solidarity for a school champion, of course'. He accepted and the following day, was introduced to duelling in a way he had only imagined it.

The way the NEWT students layered defensive enchantments, transfigurations and anti-jinxes was inspiring, bringing him new insight into just how wizards could really fight one another. Most interesting of all was Angelica Bavairan who, as a borderline squib with almost no magical power, somehow excelled at duelling due to her incredible innate ability to shrug off almost any spell targeted at her.

He left every session bruised and exhausted and after his fourth had to spend the night in the hospital wing getting his collarbone reattached to his shoulder but was learning so fast that the rest of the fourth-year Gryffindors no longer proved much of a challenge. By the middle of February, he was duelling Fred and George together and just holding his own, but Angelina could regularly demolish him.

Research into ways and means for surviving the hour underwater was much more difficult.

Pansy's suggestion of him learning to transfigure himself into a shark or otter turned out to be so radically difficult that he gave up on it after two days spent in the hospital wing getting his flippers turned back into hands.

Other suggestions ranged from him becoming an animagus until Hermione pointed out that it took even the most accomplished wizards a year to accomplish, and if he did manage it, he would almost certainly transform into a stag – as per his patronus – which wouldn't help.

"Something worth thinking about down the road though?" Ron mumbled to him before crashing into bed that night.

The answer seemed to present itself from one of the least-likely sources: Neville. He came over to Harry in the library with just two weeks remaining before the task when all hope had started to seep out of him.

"Have you had any luck with the whole underwater thing, Harry?" He asked, sitting down in an armchair next to Harry.

Harry just shook his head dejectedly and held up the book he was skimming through.

"Improbably Useful Adventuring Tools. You must be desperate." Neville laughed, putting a thick book bound in sea green linen on the table between them.

"What's this?" Harry asked, reaching over and picking it up. "Magical Water Plants of the Mediterranean."

Neville nodded. "Great book – I've marked a page for you."

Flipping to the mark, Harry landed on an entry.

The Uses and Applications of refined Gillyweed.