"What he didn't tell you is that most people who try to use the technique end up losing control of their brooms and crashing hard," Tracy said, her voice grave.
Julian snorted. "Bah. Harry's a natural on a broom. I'd sooner expect to see Snape in a tutu than see him lose control of his broom over something he did." He spoke like it was obvious, defending Harry without hesitation, while quietly implying that if Harry's broom ever went rabid, it would be because someone was attacking him.
Nobody caught that last part, and no one bothered to argue with him about Harry's talent either. They had all seen it for themselves. Still, they managed to talk Harry into holding off on trying the technique until he could actually practice it first.
...
After an hour or so of hanging around, Julian peeled away from the group, the same way he usually did, and made his way toward the workshop at an easy pace. By now he'd finally adjusted to the heavy saturation of magic in Hogwarts' air, to the point that he practically never shut off his magical senses anymore.
He still hadn't done the ritual of reflex, not after the unexpected issue tied to the far end of his elven transformation. A minor physical tweak, something like the ritual of night eye, had been fine since it barely impacted him.
...
The ritual of reflex was another matter entirely. It optimized his entire reaction system from top to bottom, and as it turned out, that counted as a massive change. Nerves, muscles, signal speed, everything about the way his body responded was rebuilt by the ritual. If that overhaul clashed with the effects of his ongoing physical transformation, the outcome could range from agony at best to death at worst.
That was not a risk he had any interest in taking. So he'd shoved the ritual back, postponing it until his transformation finished.
...
Julian pushed the workshop door open and stepped inside. Helena was there, carefully painting on a canvas using his hammer, with a brush fixed to it.
"Evening, Helena," he said.
She only lifted her free hand in a casual wave, never taking her eyes off what she was doing.
This whole situation had happened because she'd pestered him over and over to attach a paintbrush to the hammer, determined to return to a hobby she'd loved back when she was alive. Julian had been skeptical. A paintbrush on a hammer felt wrong on principle, and she'd been a ghost for nearly a thousand years. In his mind, she should have been basically a beginner again.
...
He'd been wrong.
Once he'd managed to get her proper supplies, courtesy of the ever-useful house elves, she'd shown him exactly how wrong. And that was also when she told him something he hadn't known. Ghosts didn't go insane over time, unless they were already unstable when they died, because their minds were effectively locked in the state they'd been in at death. Whatever skills they'd had in life didn't erode the way a living person's might.
As an extra bonus, Julian learned the spell that could turn pictures into moving versions of themselves, since Helena considered her work unfinished if it stayed still. Those "living" paintings, though, were still different from the ones truly brought to life in the deeper sense, because the fully living portraits had the subject's memories and personality embedded within them.
...
Julian sat down against the wall, folded his legs, closed his eyes, and returned to his mindscape. It still irritated him how the facets that actually worked never seemed to have much connection to one another. It made everything feel scattered and obnoxious, because he couldn't just follow a single pattern from start to finish.
This attempt started out the same as always, with him drifting through different options and failing one after another, almost without thinking about it.
Then something changed.
One of them suddenly held.
Julian froze, startled enough that he almost moved on out of habit, even though he'd found the correct environment. The scene itself was strange too, the kind of strange that didn't even pretend to make sense. He'd just been running down the list when he landed on it.
The overall theme of the mindscape was disorienting in the purest sense, chaos made real.
...
Beyond the nearby facets, everything blurred into a warped landscape of floating islands, inverted trees sprouting from the sky, and liquid fire that flowed and rippled like water. Lightning crawled slowly through the air, changing shape and shifting as if it obeyed rules he couldn't grasp, except for one undeniable truth: it was all wrong. Illogical. Broken.
Julian didn't even move on to the next stage of occlumency. He was too busy being lost in whatever the hell he'd just stepped into.
Even gravity didn't behave. He could walk up the sides of the islands without effort, and he could stride straight across the fire-water as if it were solid ground.