My stance was simple, relaxed, half-turned, blade pointed at the floor. Nott, on the other hand, decided to put on a display of "top form," settling into what I assume were the finest traditions of some school of fencing — I've never taken any interest in the local sword arts. In my own head, meanwhile, it was the elf shard holding the reins, and his experience with bladed combat is immense — he devoted two hundred years to it, if you count the fifty during which, as a Ranger, he took up swords specifically as a "transition" onto a new path. So if Nott turned out to be good enough to force me to actually take things seriously, he was about to become acquainted with a highly efficient, economical, elegant style of combat — one aimed not at looking impressive, but purely at killing the opponent as fast as possible.
But… it was all rather dull.
Flitwick gave the countdown, the fight began, and Nott advanced toward me confidently, though with a touch of wariness — my earlier little intimidation hadn't worn off, evidently, hadn't worn off at all. A lunge — I parry. A strike — I deflect it aside. Strike, strike — I just keep deflecting them aside. I moved only my sword, and my arm only slightly. Of course, I was shifting my centre of gravity through my legs and so on, but from the outside it was almost imperceptible.
"I thought," Potter's voice reached me — he was watching the whole thing with obvious curiosity — "Hector would flatten him in about a second."
"Oh, come off it," that was Ron. "How's he supposed to know how to fence? Look, he's barely even moving, and that stance is all wrong. Nah, mate, trust me, Hector's holding on by the skin of his teeth, barely keeping up with that bloody slimeball."
"Whose side are you even on, exactly?"
"Wha— well, yours, obviously, isn't it?"
That was the only exchange I gave any weight to and paid any attention to — everyone else was just whispering, talking nonsense, oohing and aahing, and placing bets. Where did the bets come from, you ask? Well, our respective seconds, Nott's and mine, keen to squeeze some profit out of this thoroughly pointless spectacle, had gone round the rows collecting the wretched things. Absolute crooks.
Nott kept circling me with his sword, trying to land hits, combine attacks, and a few might even have worked, if I simply weren't faster than him — no need to even mention the phantom experience from the shard. Eventually he grew winded and tired, his sword arm showing clear strain.
"Fight, coward!" he said, somewhat hoarsely from the mild breathlessness. "All you can do is flail that sword about like some stick!"
"Hm?" tilting my head slightly to one side, I looked at Nott the way you'd look at a rabid Niffler that had suddenly started talking, unable to reach some shiny thing it wanted. "This goes until unconsciousness or inability to continue fighting, correct?"
"Suppose so…"
Nott was standing about a metre outside striking range, so I simply accelerated sharply, covering not one metre but one and a half, gave the boy's sword a sharp, momentum-stealing tap with a short whipping strike that very nearly knocked the blade clean out of his hand, and then, with the same whipping motion, followed through with a resounding, thunderous slap across the face with the flat of my blade.
Nott's head snapped sideways, he swayed, and simply crumpled, unconscious.
"Er…" I said, genuinely surprised. "That's it, then?"
"The winner — Hector Granger!" Flitwick announced.
The assembled students erupted in the whole spectrum of noises — delight, disappointment, and simple exclamations, along the lines of "Brilliant!"
"All that swagger, and for what…" I muttered, handing the blade back to Flitwick.
Madam Pomfrey hurried over to Nott, checked him over and, with a flick of her wand, hoisted him up into the air, evidently planning to levitate him straight to the Hospital Wing.
I left the Ballroom in the company of friends from our own House as well as Slytherins in the form of Daphne, Draco, and Pansy.
"Made a decent haul, then?" I asked Malfoy.
"Whatever there is, it's mine," he answered shamelessly. "But between us, yes, plenty."
Strangely enough, that short, ridiculous episode was how we ended up heading off to the library, all in that same little crowd of classmates, while there was still time to get through the homework set for today. And once it came time for curfew and nearly everyone had scattered, Daphne and I headed off to the Room of Requirement — she was far too curious about exactly what I had in mind, and how I meant to carry it out. And, judging by everything, she also simply wanted to spend more time in my company, which suited me just fine, even if it did come wrapped in a scientific-experimental pretext.
Summoning the same room as last time, I brought Daphne inside, and quickly explained what was what, what the mirrored table was for, and so on. Daphne caught fire with enthusiasm at once, and immediately decided to make use of the table herself, tracing runes on it and trying to use them to enchant some trinket or other. As for me, I simply took out my wand and, feeding it neutral energy through a runic chain in the air, took it apart. I'm sure it made for an interesting sight from outside.
Suspended in mid-air, surrounded by a spinning, glowing blue lattice of runes, the wand simply "unravelled," like a plait, revealing its contents to me — the unicorn-hair core. Hairs darkened in places, and a few outright torn.
Drawing the core out toward myself, I left the wand hanging in the air within the runic chain — it wouldn't roll itself back up on its own, wouldn't break, nothing would happen to it, it was protected from all that.
Taking out all the necessary ingredients, the vials of potion, the distilled water — conjured up with a modified Aguamenti — and laying everything out in the right order, I unravelled the core. Once I'd prepared the necessary solutions and concentrates, I took Bineshii's feather, laid it on the unravelled unicorn-hair core, and made use of the first "potion" — the purified concentrate of acromantula venom.
One drop. The instant it touched the feather and the hairs, it spread across their entire surface at once as an invisible layer, shimmering faintly from the reaction taking place within it. Listening closely to the magic, to the processes underway, I nodded to myself with satisfaction, sensing quite clearly that everything was going according to plan.
Half an hour's wait, during which the feather and hairs shifted slightly in shape and seemed to almost fuse together, twisting, changing in size, and then it was time for the second stage — unification. Even though, visually, the feather and hairs looked joined together, they weren't, not magically and not physically. Which meant it was time to place the proto-core into the nectar essence solution — no point having prepared it otherwise.
Into a tall, slender flask, purified as thoroughly as possible of absolutely everything, I poured water and added a drop of the purified essence. The clear water immediately took on a faint otherworldly quality, glowing a grey, misty shade — though this wasn't dirt or debris, but a magical effect. Into that substance I placed the proto-core. It needed another half hour and close, careful observation of the process, since it might go faster, or off-plan, or, alternatively, take longer, and any possible "surprises" needed dealing with immediately, on the spot. Daphne had already finished with her own experiments and was now simply sitting on a tall stool beside me, watching closely what I was doing — or watching me just as closely, in general. But she didn't distract me, and I'm grateful to her for that.
Once the merging of the cores had finished, I lifted the finished product out of the solution. Now the thing genuinely resembled a core — the intertwining of the merged hair and feather looked interesting, to say the least, slightly shorter than the original feather but still fairly long, coloured in white, blue, and yellowish threads. But very thin. A core, in short — what else can you say.
I carried it over to the mirrored table and ran a diagnostic with the runic circle. It took me a couple of minutes, and it confirmed that my preliminary calculations had been correct, meaning no corrections were needed.
"You've got blood," Daphne came over with a transfigured handkerchief in her hands and, with an almost eerie gentleness and care, wiped away a thin trickle of blood above my lip. "Don't overdo it."
There was simply no possibility of not putting an arm round her waist, so that's exactly what I did, at which the girl, with a faint smile, kissed me. The kiss wasn't especially long, but it wasn't chaste either. Only after that was I permitted to get back to work, while Daphne occupied herself sitting nearby, watching, and occasionally jotting brief notes in her notebook.
Time for the third stage of working with the core — locking in the effect. But! Since I'd decided to add my own blood, the potion I'd already prepared had been adjusted back during the lesson, and now… we were back to preparing a water-based solution again.
Cleaning a tall flask with magic, I filled it with the purest water, measured out twelve drops of the potion, six drops of my own blood — fresh, I'd cut my hand specifically for this just now — and placed the core inside. This particular process didn't need close watching, so I calmly summoned a chair and sat down beside Daphne.
"Blood-binding?" she asked, watching the process on the table, sparkling and shimmering through different colours as it locked the magical effects into the flask.
"Not quite. Maximising compatibility specifically with me, and tuning it to match my particular quirks and my magic."
"Does that actually matter all that much? Then again… you are fairly unique. I wouldn't be surprised if nobody else ends up able to use your wand at all. At least not cast with it in any remotely normal way."
"That's rather the point. And the efficiency itself will go up too."
"Is that actually necessary?" Daphne turned her gaze to me. "Wands have an enormous throughput as it is, and if one suits its wizard, it's essentially impossible to overload."
"Possibly," I smiled, and since we were sitting pretty much pressed together side by side, I put an arm round Daphne, who immediately rested her head on my shoulder. "It'd just take a great deal of effort. If I really pushed myself, I could burn out even a wand that suited me perfectly. Not one custom-made for me — an Ollivander, say."
"What kind of magical output would that even take," Daphne said quietly, in a tone so relaxed it almost sounded like purring.
"I'll show you sometime. Maybe even this Samhain."
"So you haven't given up on the idea of conjuring up something strange and unknown this Samhain, then?"
"Of course not. By the way, do you know what that feather was?"
"Testing my knowledge?" Daphne tilted her gaze up at me, managing to shift the position of her head on my shoulder only slightly. "A couple of years ago I'd have said thunderbird, but blue… so, Bineshii. Wherever did you come across such a marvellous creature? And you got the feather willingly, too…"
"Willingly? What if I'd shown a bit of true English spirit and simply seized the precious thing by force?"
"Oh, don't make me laugh," judging by her voice, she was smiling. "Your understanding of magic is far too advanced for you to use forcibly harvested ingredients in a wand. Even in potion-brewing, that's an extremely important consideration."
"Yes, well, using forcibly seized parts from living magical creatures is a thoroughly dubious idea all round. What are you writing, anyway?"
"Hm? Here," Daphne held her notebook out so I could read the notes too.
"Wow, powerful runic chains," I said, genuinely admiring the elegance and complexity of some of the solutions, the meaning of a few of which I only grasped in the vaguest terms. "Looks like your part of the work on our, ah, extravagant ideas, is coming along in leaps and bounds."
"Not like I can leave you to do all the work yourself."
"I've got a talented girl on my hands," I kissed Daphne on the crown of her head.
"Not without a bit of your help. Speaking of, here, look…"
For a while we worked through some runic chains Daphne had been having trouble with — the more runes in a chain, the harder it becomes to tune their interaction with one another, and the difficulty scales exponentially. That's why so many runic chains max out at around five symbols, occasionally six, and in more complicated cases it's far simpler to build lots of small chains and tune the interaction between the outputs of each one instead. It cuts down heavily on the variability of how they can interact, but it forces you to properly think through an enormous number of triggering conditions.
Whereas a single huge, powerful, properly tuned array can be compared to artificial intelligence in terms of the variability of inputs and conditions under which the desired outcome is still reliably achieved.
At the right moment I got back to my own work and drew out of the glass flask the now fully finished base for the wand. Now it needed combining with the wood, once I'd first purified that with the same venom, and gone through all the same procedures — soaking in solutions, potions, and so on. That took me another hour and a half. Even then, the wand still wasn't finished — it needed "drying" in my magic, entirely because of the blood. If not for that, it would have been enough just to leave the wand alone for a couple of hours.
For the drying, I used a simple runic circuit, drawn out with my finger on the mirrored table. It would hold my magic and let it act on the wand. In general, this circuit's meant for creating particular conditions within it, but it would serve my purposes just fine.
Placing the wand, which had barely changed in appearance, into the centre of the runic circuit, I fed it every energy I had available, and even drew a thread of "darkness" from my own phoenix-self, currently drifting carefree somewhere over the expanses of Australia — someone's got to check in on my parents' business every so often, after all.
The runes glowed softly, shifting through white, green, blue, grey, and black — strange as it sounds, that kind of light does exist too, where magic's concerned — but nothing could be felt from the outside, since all the magic was being held contained within. All those shades seemed to reflect faintly across the wand's surface, flowing smoothly over it, like energy across an energy shield, or oil slicks across the surface of a bubble.
Now there was nothing left to do but wait. And so as not to be bored while waiting, Daphne and I settled onto the sofa, pulled a conjured blanket over ourselves like a pair of sparrows, and got on with our joint work on the runes. Daphne made no secret of how much she enjoyed a moment of closeness like that, how pleasant it was to work on something interesting together, and the sheer fact of such close contact, hinting at the possibility of getting up to various "silly" things of varying degrees of severity, was stirring, even arousing — though both she and I could easily have suppressed those impulses without any real strain. But we didn't. Not entirely, at least.
Even so, accustomed as she was to a strict daily routine, Daphne soon drifted off to sleep, lulled by the embrace, the warmth, the comfort, and a faint air of romance from the closeness we don't, for one reason or another, allow ourselves in public.
Not a bad evening, all told. Not bad at all. Except Pansy's bound to scoop Daphne's brain out with a dessert spoon trying to find out just where we were all night. Because all night is exactly how long I'd be staying here.
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