"Do you, Bathsheda Sandra Babbling promise to keep Harry Potter's secrets pertaining to his extracurricular activities on the condition that he seek your advice before any major experiment for any of said extracurricular activities?"
"I do"
"And do you, Harry James Potter promise to listen to and respect Bathsheda Babbling's advice on the condition that she listen to you as if your words where mine with all the power that entails?"
"I do"
"Then I, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore observe this oath magically binding and active for as long as the conditions may hold, so mote it be"
It had taken a long time to decide on a contract that Dumbledore, Harry and Bethesda were happy with, they had elected to go with a conditional oath instead of an unbreakable or magically binding oath, with an unbreakable oath there could be no misdirection as every party had to be fully aware of what they were agreeing to, as such Harry would have needed to reveal his mithril and ideas to Bathsheda before she agreed which Dumbledore thought unwise. His reasoning was that even if she agreed to take the oath someone proficient in legilimency could pick out the secret from before she had agreed to keep. Another downside to the unbreakable oath was that the oath keeper had to stay alive as the magic lived within them for the oath to remain binding.
Dumbledore did not want to trust in surviving all seven years Harry would be at Hogwarts and any time spent afterwards, of course he hoped he would live to see Harry graduate but knew he was slowing and did not want to needlessly put Harry at risk after Harry having to suffer his mistakes for ten years.
A magical oath was almost immediately disregarded as it gave no warnings when either party got close to breaking the oath, if Bathsheda had gotten close to revealing the secret even accidentally the only time she would become aware would be when her magic got stripped away, with either of the other two oaths magical warnings were given before the punishment. Another reason to not take a magical oath was that it did not protect the mind so Harry would have had to trust his secrets on her mental shields.
A conditional oath was the most difficult to use as for each term a participant agreed too there had to be a term of equal power that the other participant had to agree with. This limited how much could be within the oath as the oath could become unbalanced and lose its power.
Theoretically you could make a magical or an unbreakable oath with as many terms as needed due to the lack of balancing, there was once an unbreakable oath between two magical world leaders that took over two hours to read through, however the benefit to a conditional oath over the other two options was that a participant did not have to actually understand what they were agreeing. Even if a legilimencer broke Bathsheda's mind apart they would never be able to learn of Harry's secrets, as far as protections go it was complete overkill because Harry himself had no mental protections and did not have the oath protecting him.
The final reason they chose on a conditional oath was that it was impossible to break, the magic of the oath lived within the participants and no matter how much they tried to break a conditional clause the magic would stop them before they got close.
Dumbledore had explained it to Harry by gently tipping two wooden boards until they used each other to hold themselves up, by leaning on the other board you stopped yourself falling, but as the other board was also doing the same neither could fall while the other stood, the only way one could fall was if the other board was removed, signifying death, if Bathsheda died Harry would have no reason to go to her for help, if Harry died Bathsheda would have no reason to reveal or hold his secrets.
Bathsheda had been reluctant to agree to Harry holding the same verbal power of Dumbledore but Dumbledore pointed out that was just an extent of secrecy as the contract of school professor Bathsheda was magically bound to not reveal any of Dumbledore's secrets that she happened to learn while being employed by him, now the magical bind counted Harry as equal to her employer on top of the far more powerful conditional oath of secrecy.
After the oath had been drawn and agreed too Harry showed Bathsheda what he had discovered with his mithril. She had assumed it had to be something huge as Dumbledore had personally gone to her asking her to help Harry, the fact he wanted her to take an oath was just more evidence to support her idea.
It was not all that unusual for a teacher to take an oath to keep a student's secret for an extracurricular project and when Bathsheda had been a student she had gotten an oath from her own runes professor, the project they worked on together had gotten her the mastery she had wanted and allowed her to take over from her mentor when he had retired.
She instantly began coming up with potential uses of mithril and quickly realised she could think up uses for mithril forever and not reach a limit, it was no wonder that each goblin made item was considered unique, the creator only had to think about what they wanted and it could be made.
She also saw potential in expanding her own personal projects, as she thought over her ideas she spoke to Harry, neither the student or teacher noticed when Dumbledore quietly left, she had been planning a giant ward structure that would use modules rather than full sections.
Currently a ward structure would be unique to each area, even if two warded areas had the same ward builder they would come out subtly different, this made it extremely difficult for a standard for wards to be established as the ward builder could only guess at how much the ward could take based on previous wards, if they tested their wards to breaking point then they would have to be rebuilt meaning they would have a different breaking point.
By modulating the wards each module could be guaranteed to be the same as another, the subtle differences would still be present for each module but the modules would interact with each other in a standard fashion, if somebody wanted a ward array that stopped apparition, alerted the owner to people entering and exiting and be unplottable they currently had to hire a single ward master who would charge an extremely high price.
Due to this the warding profession consisted of either high quality, high price masters or poor quality, low price apprentices, with modules a team of workers could be taught how to install the modules into a central matrix, even if the worker knew nothing about wards they could still follow the instruction and set up a high quality ward structure for a significantly lower price when compared to a ward master.
Bathsheda had come across the problem of tying to power the ward, each module required the power of a full ward and then additional power to make two modules work together, for each module in the scheme the amount of power required expanded exponentially.
For somewhere like Hogwarts with access to leylines it might have been worth it but for a private home without such luxuries the additional power requirement meant that modules would be extremely easy to overpower and bypass, now however with the use of a mithril reactor, power was no longer an issue and allowed for more powerful modules, Bathsheda decided that the first issue to fix is the magical signature.
"Why does it have to be your magical signature Harry?"
"Because I'm the one who made it?"
"Yes but once it's formed, theoretically it could run with anybodies signature right?"
"Well yes, but once it's formed its flooded with my signature and it generates only my signature"
"What if… what if you formed it with the idea of changeability"
Harry formed a mithril cube with that idea and presented it to her, she drew her wand and summoned her magical signature to her wand tip, she then pressed it to the cube and noted the cube absorbed it, she then looked into the magic and laughed delightedly when she saw rather than Harry's lime green magic it had become her light purple, she then asked Harry to add his signature back into the cube. When he pressed his finger to the cube she saw the green spread over the purple and take over control.
Drawing a small ward scheme she asked Harry to make a generator similar to what he made with Dumbledore, she then powered the ward up with the mithril charging pad rather than manually charge it, she nodded when the ward activated normally as if it had been powered up by a human.
She then picked up the cube and pushed her magic into it until it was her purple, she then tapped it against the glowing sphere and was disappointed when nothing happened, she asked Harry to make a flat surface on the sphere and reform it with the idea of acceptance, once done she tapped the cube back against the sphere and this time the purple spread from the cube to the sphere.
The generator was now making purple magic, however the magic with the generator refused to move into the wires, shutting off the generator she then asked Harry to also reform the wires and pad with the idea of subservience and then add the idea of master to the generator, she noted that the wires and pad had become purple instantly and asked Harry to take the cube and make it his green signature and tap it against the sphere.
The green spread into the sphere and did not seem to move into the wires, but the moment all the purple in the generator had been consumed the wires and pad flashed and became Harry's green allowing the magic to flow through them and into the ward, the ward itself had briefly flickered momentarily when the generator had been mostly purple while the wires were still green but that was to be expected as the power temporarily shut off.
Excitedly Bathsheda explained to a bemused Harry what had happened "The cube takes the magical signature of the holder and stores it, when it comes in contact with the sphere it transfers over into the generator due to the acceptance ideology, once the sphere becomes attuned to that signature it begins making magic with that signature as if it had been made by that person. Once it is fully one signature it passes it to the wires over the mastery and subservient ideologies, as the wires are now the exact same signature as the sphere the magic can pass through like normal."
She took a deep breath before continuing "This means that even if the current owner dies before they can pass ownership onto another the new owner just has to get ahold of this cube in order to become the new owner of the ward structure, if they do not have the cube then the generator and ward are safe from interference. That's why I wanted it to be on the separate cube rather than go directly into the generator so the owner could place the cube into something like a Gringotts vault and even if someone manages to break into their house and can get to the ward anchor they cannot become the master over the ward. I feel like we should also come up with a way to uniquely identify each mithril generator so that only one key can only 'unlock' its corresponding generator, otherwise someone could just buy a key and use it to unlock someone else's generator."
Harry jumped in, understanding dawning within him "I think I could also make the key forget the signature after a set amount of time so it can't be taken and used without the owner's permission… we could also put the entire ward scheme and generator inside a mithril shield so that only the owner can enter and change the wards. We could even make the entire shield the generator with the wires and ward stone inside!"
"Would the words work inside the mithril dome though?" Bathsheda asked cautiously
"I see no reason why they wouldn't… and even if they did I could make it so that it lets magic pass from the inside out but stop magic going from the outside in"
"Well there is an easy way to find out, let's try it"
Harry formed a hollow sphere big enough to completely enclose the ward stone and generator with more than enough room to spare, he felt extremely weak after it was complete but simply reached for the generator and redrew the rune after changing the ideology from transfer and back to growing, he then drew in the magic as fast as the sphere could grow, once he felt replenished he scored a deep line through the rune and changed the ideology back to transmit magic.
"We need to find a quicker way of cutting off the rune… I don't suppose there is a conditional rune that could be combined with the preservation one so that it is only active when we want it to be?"
"As a matter of fact there is… it is really impressive that you can form something that huge and then basically recharge you magic instantly… your going to be extremely powerful when you get older Harry"
Harry grinned, accepting the praise and turned back to the generator, specifically the preservation rune, he pushed his magic into the mithril and made a pit within the generator, he then formed a small mithril button that would give off a small electric current when triggered.
He made the rune move into the area by moving the mithril underneath the rune and then asked Bathsheda to draw the conditional rune with the trigger being electricity, once she had drawn it and connected it to the preservation rune he completed the preservation rune, as he hoped it did not activate.
He slotted the mithril button into the pit so that it both covered and touched the runes preventing them from being changed or seen, he gave the entire generator the ideology of not conducting electricity then pressed the button, instantly the generator started up and pressing the button again turned it off.
With that done he moved the generator as close to the ward stone as he could and reformed the charge pad with the ideology of sticking, he then placed the mithril shield over the lot.
He added a small hole into the shield where the generator was and adjusted it so that the button and signature plate where flush with the shield, pushing the button made the ward activate, clearly visible on top of the mithril shield, as expected pressing the button again deactivated the ward.
Using the cube Bathsheda could still claim ownership of the generator and thus ward but Harry felt it made the entire generator safer and harder to break. Adding a plate to the shield itself Harry formed it with a conditional ideology within it inspired by Bathsheda's conditional rune.
The condition was that if a magical signature was placed against it that was identical to the magical signature of the generator then it would activate a reforming ideology that would make a giant hole appear in the side, by tapping the cube key against the signature plate on the shield it opened the hole allowing the ward to be edited, tapping the key again made the shield reform.
"What exactly can you do with your raw magic Harry?" Bathsheda asked one evening
"What do you mean?"
Harry and Bathsheda where lounging on his sofa after working on their 'ward generator'
"Well, I know what you can do with mithril in its solid form, but what about when it's still in its raw form?"
"I haven't messed with the raw mithril as it once burned a hole into my aunt's carpet when I first discovered it…" Harry said slowly, he pulled forth his magic and shaped it to a blade, after using his mithril so much he barely had to think about what he wanted.
He felt it begin to solidify and began feeding it a constant stream of magic to keep it in its raw form, it took more magic than he expected and he was forced to let it drop
"Damn, it seems to take more magic to maintain the longer I hold it, could you transfigure something to cut please Bathsheda?"
Picking up the blade he returned it to its raw form and sliced it through the wooden block Bathsheda had summoned, it passed through the wood as if it was simply not there, where the blade had passed through the wood had become scorched as if badly burnt.
He had also noticed that when the mithril blade touched the wood it had become harder to maintain as if the magic was draining faster as it passed through the wood, possibly indicating the magic was being absorbed by the wood.
"Try something harder like rock now?"
The blade passed through rock, metal and plastic with no resistance, it had even shattered the magical shield Bathsheda had summoned as a joke, the only problem was breaking the shield drained Harry faster than anything else and he had to wait for his magic to recharge before he could try it again.
Luckily for him he had been sitting on a sofa made entirely of mithril that had been formed to be soft and yielding, it had been easy to turn it into a magical generator and get his magic back.
Thinking of generators Harry formed a cylinder with the basic generator properties and added the activation button they had developed for the wards generator, rather than plug the wires into a ward scheme however he plugged it into the blade itself and then reformed it to remain the exact same size and density. When he pressed the button the blade began glowing as the magic collected with nowhere to go until eventually the mithril melted into pure magic, holding it by the generator he found he could use it like a long knife or short sword.
Remembering an old show he had once seen Dudley watch he deactivated the generator and shrunk the blade to be tiny, then added the ideology to grow to a specific size and width and then stop along with being entirely weightless, he then added a casing around the generator, wires and what was left of the blade and made it more comfortable to hold.
He then pressed the button, immediately the blade expanded from barely visible to about three feet in length and an inch wide, it felt no heavier and was easy to wield, it still cut through objects as if they were not there, although when he shattered through the shield the blade had flickered a few times and Harry assumed he had managed to use up the magic quicker than the generator could supply it.
Turning to a scrap piece of mithril lying in the workshop Harry touched his magical saber to it, sparks flew in all directions until the mithril was sucked into the blade of raw magic, he asked Bathsheda to turn on the ward scheme and instructed her to take ownership of it, he then touched the blade of magic to the ward and winced as the ward and saber flashed brightly.
Both died at simultaneously, his saber quickly regained its form as the magic began returning but the ward scheme remained down, deactivating the saber he and Bathsheda opened the shield to find that the ward scheme itself had been completely obliterated.
"I suspect the two infinite sources of magic fought each other and both lost at the same time causing the magic to backfire, the mithril directed the magic to become light which was the flash we saw, the ward itself had to direct the magic through the ward scheme trying to feed it back into the generator which was still trying to push magic into the ward, the result was a feedback loop which overloaded and fried the runes. I have never seen a ward scheme react so violently before and I must congratulate you not only coming up with a ward generator that we believed completely unbeatable but also managing to then find a way to beat it so thoroughly it will be extremely difficult to fix… I wonder what it does to a normal ward?"
She set up a powerful ward scheme and powered it manually, she indicated for Harry to test it while she hide behind the mithril sofa, thrilled by his mentors confidence, Harry tentatively powered the blade and touched the ward with it. He was stunned when the ward seemed to rip apart, starting out from where he touched the ward with the saber then expanding outwards.
The saber hadn't even flickered once, looking at the runes he grimaced at the smoke coming off the stone Bathsheda had etched the runes into, it had several cracks running down it and now possessed a giant scorch mark in the exact shape of the runes that had been etched into it, Bathsheda poked her head out from behind the sofa and successfully summed up Harry's thoughts "Bloody hell"
When I first wrote this chapter the time was almost one in the morning by the time I stopped, I just could not stop writing, I hope it is clear that I much prefer writing about the "science" of magic compared to building such trivial things as character and plot.
On a more recent note last chapter it got pointed out I tend to have extremely long paragraphs so I kept reminding myself to keep them short and punctuated, so hopefully it is easier to read now, eventually I will go over previous chapters and fix the paragraphs there too although that will take time and is not a big priority currently.
Oh and in case anyone wants to complain about Harry having infinite magic it will be explained in a future chapter but briefly, Harry's magic is like lightning, his body is like a tree in a thunderstorm, and the ground is his target, to get to the ground the lightning has to pass through the tree first, often the tree gets scorched in the process. Just because Harry has access to infinite magic does not mean he can actually safety wield it.