The book that I had been given was by far the best gift I think that I will ever receive. Well, the second best gift, as the small card that I had received from Daphne held a special place in my heart. It wasn't anything special but I could tell the effort that she had put into it and showed me how she was truly willing to be my first and still only friend.
That was two years ago now, it felt like an eternity had passed and when it comes to my knowledge and attitude it seems like that as well. The main reason for this was the book, as inside its pages lay a trove of knowledge and interesting stories. It held inside not only chapters with basic magical theory and application but also stories on how mythical magic had molded the world and how the old myths still lived on in truth and reality. But my favorite thing about the book was in the final chapter it provided instruction for some truly frightening magic. And while I am completely out of my depth when I try to understand it, having it there waiting for me motivates me to push my knowledge and capabilities. But stopping this progress was one major blockade, I do not have a wand. Even worse is that all of those pathetic dunces did. How could Lily and James provide these idiots with the ability to cast magic? What makes it worse is their lack of reverence! How could they have the power to bend anything to their will and desire at arms reach and yet they refuse to push beyond the simple cut-out boundaries? Even as they have become more specialized with their new teachers, they refused to ask, they refused to explore. Magic isn't something that just makes simple and basic tasks happen. Magic is Freedom.
At first, when I began to think this, I believed I may be going crazy or simply jealous of their new capabilities, so I did what I thought best, I asked Daphne. And to my utter shock, the letter I received told me that she completely understood me! I eagerly responded, and soon almost every day letters were exchanged between the two of us. So many that Pipkin had been forced to tell me that I needed to acquire a new method of getting her my letters. I then scavenged the house and any nook and cranny looking for any money that may have been left behind. This was around the time when the Big Three had gotten their own wands from Diagon Alley, and upon their return, Simon spotted me looking under the sofa and thought it would be a good laugh to throw coins at my head when I raised it off of the ground. As such the back of my head was pelted with 2 galleons and a handful of sickles. While this wasn't a sufficient amount of money to buy a new or perfectly good owl, it was just enough to get an old snowy owl that had been returned quite a few times. I named her Hedwig.
And so for the next two years, I continued to send letters to Daphne and study magic. Sometimes in that order other times not. For a while, the main focus during that time had been on runes and processing different languages. As runes didn't need a wand to activate or carve, all they needed was the ambient magic and some elbow grease to get working. Sadly the beginning months of my rune progression were halted by one major roadblock. My inability to understand any known runic language, so I forced myself into the library for a month learning nothing but the basics of Elder Futhark and Egyptian hieroglyphics. That was one of my least favorite periods, those damn Egyptians had created some of the most obscure glyphs, and even a slight change in the order or orientation completely changed the meaning. But for all the time that I dedicated it paid off, as before the beginning of 1987, I had successfully scribed my first working runic scheme. It was an awfully basic and easily broken scheme of protection, used to block only the most basic and weak spells. I tested it by angering Ronald, and to his utter shock I was able to bat away the pathetic stinging hex with the back of my hand. Did he know it was due to the stone in my palm? No, he believed that I had somehow deflected his spell, wandless at that! What a stupid boy. When I told Daphne of this, I could practically feel the laughter in her writing.
These letters, in the beginning, were filled with childish jokes and our stories to let the other know what was going on at home. These happy times didn't last, in both our homes a drastic and incredibly detrimental change occurred. In my opinion, her troubles are much worse and should have been the priority of my focus, but Daphne refused, wishing to try and deal with the problem on her own. Her parents, are currently on my ever-growing list of people to brutalize. They had for no known reason, disinherited Daphne. How dare they! How could they? On a random day after a meeting with the Goblins, they returned and informed Daphne of the change in the familiar hierarchy. As her younger sister now outranks her. The only consolation that she attempted to say lessened the blow, was that they gifted her a small magical ship that had been in the family since they arrived from mainland Europe. The small ship is now docked in Dover, waiting for her eleventh birthday on which its ownership is fully transferred to her. Had she been given the ship under any other circumstance I would have been jumping up and down for Daphne. It was outlined with some of the best protective enchantments known to any magical race and had survived countless decades of use. Sadly in recent years, it has fallen into a state of minor disarray but I have already pledged my help in repairing and improving it, as it's now the last piece of Daphne's heritage she can hold onto.
Sadly, when I would have rather been thinking of ways to either get her heiress ship back or researching new spells to help build up her ship, I had more first-hand pressing concerns. The change that occurred for me was my siblings and their lackeys being given better wands and new more specialized training. While the other pathetic children were not an issue for me even without a wand and any real training in magic, my siblings and Neville were a different story. They were not only significantly better than their teams, but they also had an unbelievable amount of magical power, and while if I had a wand and twenty mere minutes of study with it I do believe I would thrash the snot out of them all. But alas that was not the case. So for the rest of 1987, I was constantly at risk of spellfire and torment from any angle. Furious at the lack of defense, I began to rapidly search the library for any mention of wand lore and means of wand creation. Nothing was there. Absolutely nothing. How for all the years that our family has been in existence one would assume that we would pick up at least one book on creating a wand or magical conductor. At this point, I would take anything even a bastardized staff. But even with looking for those I could find nothing. I was desperate, pushed into a corner, and in desperate need of help when all of a sudden my book began to glow. I rushed over to it and upon reaching it the back half of the book, the one with spells and magic theory, had expanded. What the hell, how is this possible? So before I could think of the consequences of opening the now-discovered magic book, curiosity won out. Inside the new pages were two new chapters, one completely strange chapter about phoenixes, the other was not quite what I had been looking for. Inside the chapter was a way to advanced and complicated explanation of magical sensing. The very basic idea that I could get out of the chapter was to use the ambient magic found in the world to feel when a spell distorts it and is flying toward you. Technically this can be used to sense people as well but that is currently way beyond my level.
For the first three months of 1988, I forced myself into the line of fire. As it was best to get as much actual practice as I could. So to do this, I began to spy on the specialized training the teams were receiving. It had mixed results in getting the attention that I wanted. With Moongrave and Petrograd, it had the intended result as they spotted me quickly and used me as a target for their students to work their newly learned magic on. Quickly I discovered that Moongrave's teaching was the more inherently dangerous, Simon and his lackeys were very quick in their enactment of surrounding me and peppering me with a multitude of combative spells. A few of the times they had even had one of the members attack me like in a duel. At first, they had believed this to be an amusing idea but then they discovered that they were unable to even hit me when it wasn't Simon who was dueling me. That was even before I got my senses to work, as they are still incredibly sloppy and I could move out of the way of any chain they sent my way. Petrograd's teaching was quite different from the more direct combat of Moongrave. He has begun to teach them a multitude of environment-altering spells. So rather than encircling me like Simon. Neville would send spells out around me and begin to use the surrounding world to attack, the only thing that kept me alive in this was the nature and ability of his animations. But as I went to avoid the changes and basic golems that were being sent after me, Bones and Thomas would use a variety of charms to hinder my movement and ability to think as I ran. But after enough running, I would get out of the range and be left alone as I became a waste of energy. Bogard was the outlier, she had definitely spotted me, but despite this, she simply continued to teach her team, even at times raising her voice when discussing a vital part of the theory. If I were a more trusting person I would think that she is trying to help me, but for all I know she is using a rune scheme to translate the information into the wrong information. Creating a false sense of security should I try the magic, which could quickly lead to my demise. That isn't important though, for after the third month of subjecting myself to spell fire I began to get a feeling for sensing the magic being sent my way.
It wasn't a feeling like one would expect, it wasn't a strange tingling in the back of your mind or a sense of foreboding that scared you senseless. It was more of a radio signal. When there was nothing wrong the magic around me was undisturbed and nothing was amiss with my mind. But like when a spell is cast at me or a harmful enchantment is about to harm me, a static-like feeling can be heard, allowing me to know the direction it is coming from.
With that out of the way and allowing me to finally have a sense of security, I began to start learning more magic. My springtime was spent focusing on a variety of charms and their applications, for this, I was mainly looking for defensive spells and ways of concealment. When doing so I found and was immediately captured by one spell, in particular, Protego. While to many it was a basic and not interesting way of protecting oneself from incoming spells, I saw something different in it. When people saw a shield with a couple of variations, I saw a blockade that could be tweaked and modified to beat certain spells and reverse the effects of others. A theoretical example that I worked out was that should one cast a normal protego charm with no specific intent of defending against say, an Avis charm, then the shield would deflect the birds till it was overwhelmed and broke, but if my theory proved correct then if one added their own Avis to their casting then upon the birds hitting the shield your own spell, should your magic overpower the other casters, would transform the birds into conjugations of your control. While that specifically wasn't a great And powerful example of the ideas, it would be proof of concept. Another idea that came to my mind was to somehow nullify a specific spell, say a cutting or budgeting curse, turning some of the most used spells into ineffective and useless. Sadly this was all theory till I gained a wand.
While I liked the idea of altering my defenses to cause people's spells to become ineffective and embarrassing to cast against me, I would later find an area of magic that I loved. Elemental magic and conjugation. The most primal and what I consider the most powerful branch of magic, Daphne would disagree and call me a narcissist, as I had somehow developed the ability to cast minor and less elemental magic. I discovered this when I lit a letter from Daphne on fire while reading it and rather than stomping it out on the floor when I yelled out in surprise a blast of frost escaped my mouth! How did this happen? I still don't know but to my utter shock when I attempted to recreate the cold feeling when blowing onto a glass of water I was able to freeze it entirely! She was adamant in the fact that I was being a prick when I had written her telling of all my newfound powers and how elemental magic was the best thing to ever grace the world, she was constantly changing what she wanted to learn and began to study, one moment she was starting the theory behind human transfiguration and then the next was trying to decipher a new set of runes she planned on applying to the ship, now named The Wandering Nimbus, or the nimbus for short. The name came to her one day when she had come over to the manor. We had been sitting under the shade of a tree watching the clouds pass the world by, and in a stroke of brilliance, she decided that she would enchant the ship to fly, letting it travel anywhere she wanted.
So she began to study the different ways that we could permanently enchant the nimbus. I continued to look into offensive magic and elemental spells. In this search, one thing that stood out to me was the repeated mention of a worldwide dueling circuit. It was held bi-yearly with its participants needing to qualify either by placing high in their country's tournament or by nomination from someone who had placed in the top four in the last circuit. What surprised me even more is that when Pipkin returned with a report from the last circuit, Moongrave had won it. Upon realizing that my parents had gotten my brother the literal best duelist in the world for training I saw something I hadn't before. My confidence that I could and undoubtedly would best my brother in a straight-up magical fight may have been false. Because even if I had a wider knowledge of magic than the prick, he was currently miles ahead of me in the actual dueling aspect of fighting. As soon as this had dawned on me, Pipkin was quickly summoned and given the order to tell the other elves that I would require more food and more strict nutrition as of yesterday. But that wasn't the only thing that I would change, as soon the time where I had spent hours and hours studying and looking into anything that piqued my interest was now abruptly shortened. In their place was a new set of physical activities that would build up my physicality and endurance, well as much as my young body could. Soon I was up late into the night, practicing with a stick in hand moving through the wand movements that I would eventually make, all the while I had Pipkin charm small rocks and twigs to fly at me attempting to break my focus and developing stance.
And so 1988 and most of 1989 passed, in my opinion, 88' was rather uneventful besides the beginning of my advances in magic, no major event occurred. No, it was rather boring in that sense. 89' was quite like the last. With me making leaps and strides in my theoretical studies and physical training. That uneventfulness ended where all good things seemed to, on July 31st, my sibling's birthday party.