Like a child the night before a school trip, Zack hadn't managed a single hour of proper sleep, despite the exhaustion dragging at his limbs. The sheer anticipation of finally studying real spells had kept his mind spinning in restless circles, too wired for rest, too excited to care.
At one point, he gave up on sleep entirely.
Zack wiggled his fingers in the dark. A book sailed from the nightstand and slinked into his palms.
Adamous Gray's Basic Spell Repertoire (1926).
He turned it over, studying the aged cover with fresh eyes. The name Adamous Gray rang no bells from any of the films, but that meant very little to Zack because he now understood that the movies had only ever scratched the surface of this world, showing a carefully curated sliver of something that clearly ran far deeper.
Gray had presumably been a serious practitioner, meticulous enough to document his craft with lasting detail. The word "Basic" in the title also caught his attention. It implied continuations. Perhaps there were more advanced volumes that might contain material well beyond what sat in his hands tonight.
Setting that thought aside, Zack cracked the book open and scanned its contents.
Fifty spells in total. A modest number at first glance, but each one commanded its own full Chapter. Each chapter had detailed wand movements, incantations, effects, historical origins, and the theoretical foundations behind its creation.
The depth was impressive, frankly excessive for a supposed beginner's text. At least to Zack, history and etymology held little appeal, so he moved through those sections briskly, fixing his attention on incantations and practical execution. The spells had been arranged in ascending difficulty, which suited him perfectly.
The first spell was, predictably, Lumos.
Created in 1772 by Levina Monkstanley, the spell served to illuminate the tip of a wand with a sustained white glow.
He skimmed past the origin notes and landed on the caution.
The light conjured carries thermal properties and risks igniting nearby flammable materials.
Zack frowned at that. Casting without a wand meant the conjured flame would sit directly against his fingertip rather than at the safe end of a twelve-inch stick.
He flipped through the subsequent chapters with restless speed. Many of these spells were familiar to him. Zack recalled that Flitwick had demonstrated them in classroom scenes with that infectious, bouncing enthusiasm of his.
Nox. Alohomora. Wingardium Leviosa. Diffindo. Flipendo. Campanis Ignis.
The list continued well beyond his patience to read through. The excitement was already pooling at the back of his throat.
He raised one finger in the dark.
"Lumos."
Nothing happened. Not even a flicker.
He closed his eyes and shifted his approach. Rather than simply speaking the word, he revolved his thoughts around it and imagined how the spell would work.
I want a flashlight, a bright and focused flashlight
A single point of warm concentrated light held steady in his mind until it felt almost physical. Then he tried again.
"Lumos."
A speck of light materialised at his fingertip. It wavered, dimmed, and dissolved into the darkness after barely a second.
That was close.
He took a deep breath and reset his focus to cast once more. Magic channelled deliberately through his arm, intention sharp and unwavering. The light that bloomed this time was steady and warm, holding for nearly a full minute before fading quietly into the dark.
Thrilled at his progress and emboldened by the ease of it, he pointed his finger directly at the bookshelf across the room.
"LUMOS."
A burst of white light erupted from his fingertip, flooded the room in an instant, and seared directly across his unshielded eyes.
Zack winced sharply, blinking against the afterimage burned across his vision. As the light faded, he palmed his eyes and hissed.
That was incredibly stupid.
Once the spots in his eyes cleared, a legitimate question surfaced.
How did anyone use Lumos without blinding themselves in the process?
He sat with the problem for a few minutes before the answer arrived with humbling simplicity. Wand users positioned their wands above eye level or aimed away from themselves entirely. As such, the light projected outward toward darkness ahead, not backwards into the caster's face. He'd conjured the glow directly on his fingertip and aimed it straight at his own eyes.
Zack shook his head and tapped his temple in annoyance.
Beginner's mistake. Won't happen again. I'd almost forgotten that wizards are not immune to their own magic.
The realisation seemed almost counterintuitive to him at first.
Surely one's own conjured power would recognise its creator. But the evidence sat right there in the spots still fading across his vision. Fire didn't spare the arsonist. Light didn't filter itself for the caster's comfort.
A spell performed its function regardless of who happened to be standing in its path.
He thought back to the films when he'd watch students catching their own spells, backfires, and classroom accidents. He'd dismissed most of those as simple incompetence at the time.
But the picture looked more complicated now. Magic was indifferent. It did precisely what it was told, nothing more, nothing less. Which meant every future casting required deliberate spatial awareness from the very start.
He adjusted his posture, extended his finger above eye level, and cast again.
"Lumos."
Warm light spread across the ceiling at a comfortable distance, wrapping the room in its amber glow.
Zack held it steady for a long moment, then whispered.
"Nox."
The light snapped out.
Zack stared at where the light had flowed, and something quietly satisfying clicked into place. He'd cycled through the full thing. Ignited and extinguished a spell at deliberate will. That was the standard he intended to hold himself to going forward. Not just casting, but owning every inch of what he cast.
He turned to the next chapter.
Wingardium Leviosa—the Levitation Charm.
He glanced at the dandelion petals still resting in the vase across the room. A familiar exercise. He flicked his fingers toward them.
"Wingardium Leviosa."
The petals lifted exactly as they always had. Smooth, responsive, effortless.
Zack set the book down slowly and stared at the floating petals as another realisation unfolded overhead like a slowly drawn curtain.
He had already been casting this spell.
Not with the incantation, not with any conscious knowledge of its name, but functionally, mechanically, in every way that mattered. The levitation, the directional control, the simultaneous coordination of multiple objects.
He'd been performing Wingardium Leviosa for days without ever knowing it existed. This raised an interesting question about what the incantation was actually doing in the first place.
The answer assembled itself with quiet inevitability.
Words weren't really instructions. They were anchors, mental shortcuts that summoned a precise image into a caster's mind, giving the imagination a clear and specific target to aim toward.
The incantation for Wingardium Leviosa didn't make things levitate. It made the caster think of levitation in a particular, reliable way, which then translated directly into execution.
In short, if he stripped away the words, preserved the mental image, the magic would still be performed identically.
This explained wordless casting. It explained why a skilled witch or wizard could invent entirely new spells with entirely new incantations, provided the intention behind them was resolute enough.
It also explained how Snape had created Sectumsempra as a teenager, an invisible blade that cut and cursed the wound simultaneously so it couldn't be healed by magic.
He hadn't borrowed those mechanics from any textbook. He'd built them from imagination and sheer force of will, which was either brilliant or deeply unsettling, depending on how one judged the achievement.
Zack himself felt that it was a remarkable achievement. Had he not already known about Snape's creations from the movies, he wouldn't have particularly thought about weaponising a spell like that.
He mulled over his brewing thoughts and contemplated the deeper meaning behind creating a spell. If the ceiling of any spell was fundamentally the ceiling of the caster's imagination, then mental discipline wasn't merely a tactical advantage, but the bedrock of everything.
A sharp mind produced stronger imagery. Stronger imagery produced stronger, more precise magic.
In the end, it's mind over might.
Zack's eyes widened. What if there were a way to strengthen the mind? Wouldn't that indirectly strengthen one's magic?
Then, he gasped in disbelief.
There already is one. Occlumency.
Mind magic was definitely interesting. Occlumency would allow him to accomplish a lot, but this realisation was followed immediately by the frustrating caveat that always accompanied his discoveries: he needed a teacher.
His Legilimency operated on raw instinct rather than conscious will. It was a passive sensitivity that fired without input, like a nerve that flinched before the brain had finished processing pain. Developing it deliberately, or learning to construct any real defence in return, required guidance he simply didn't have access to yet.
He thought about the three people he'd instinctively tested.
Sophie had blocked him cleanly, without apparent effort, without even seeming to notice she'd done it. Which was somehow more unsettling than if she'd reacted.
Dalton's mind had been something else entirely: not a wall, but a labyrinth without exits, the kind of construction that implied not just practice but obsession. Earl had felt like pressing his thoughts against an immovable wall with absolutely nothing on the other side.
Three seemingly ordinary people. Three extraordinary defences.
Sophie ran a pub and brewed growing potions that smelled like a compost heap. Dalton wore the same black suit every day and disappeared before the sun came up. Earl ran a dusty bookshop and napped through his business hours. None of it added up.
Layers. Every single one of them has too many layers.
He shelved the curiosity and redirected back to the book. If his theory about intention and imagery applied broadly across different spells, it was worth testing rather than speculating about.
Zack extended his finger toward the ceiling, closed his eyes, and built the image carefully.
No words this time. No incantation to shortcut the process. Just the clearest, most detailed mental picture of concentrated light he could hold together. He thought of the specific warmth of it, the direction, the intensity. He held it until it felt almost tangible, then pressed his magic through it.
Minutes passed. Then a faint, pale glow appeared at his fingertip and washed softly across the ceiling above.
He opened his eyes and looked at it without speaking.
There it is.
The wordless version was dramatically slower. The incantation collapsed the image-building process into an instant, which explained precisely why most wizards never bothered dropping it.
Without that shortcut, every detail had to be constructed manually from scratch. But the result was functionally identical. Same light. Same warmth. Same spell, arrived at by a longer road.
The gap isn't capability. It's efficiency. And efficiency is trainable.
He worked through the book's first section methodically, after that, moving spell to spell with patient repetition. By the time pale grey light had begun bleeding through the gap in the curtains, he'd successfully executed the first ten spells.
Zack was easily able to use the spells, but he couldn't credit talent alone. Half the work was being done by his mindset. He wasn't truly this young. If the mind was a cornerstone of magic, he already had a significant advantage. The second thing was his age.
He was young, about eight years of age. Which meant that he was growing every single day. In essence, using magic was becoming easier by the minute.
Zack revelled in his progress, but soon the excitement that the magic brought about slowly faded away, and the zeal flushed from his face. His mind turned to other matters.
Namely, thoughts he'd intentionally shelved away.
This is 1970.
Those words loomed in his mind.
The First Wizarding War would break out.
It was a clock, already running, with a very specific endpoint that was eleven years away from this exact moment. He knew that there was nothing he nor anyone else could do to stop it.
The war would quickly turn brutal. There would be mass killings, and a regime would gather itself at the shores of the British Isles. A regime that would undoubtedly begin to claw away at the magical world.
And it would only stop on a random evening in October of 1981, when a child would redirect a killing curse through sheer luck and the protective power of a mother's love.
Zack couldn't help but laugh bitterly. One of the strongest dark lords would be brought to his knees by a child.
In hindsight, it would be a fitting end to a Wizard that claimed strength above all, to be defeated by a powerless boy.
But that day was eleven years too far.
Eleven years of war.
His gaze drifted toward the window, where the early morning light was pressing against the curtains in thin grey lines.
His thoughts drifted.
Where would life take him in those eleven years?
Right now, he was sitting in Romania.
The country represented one of the largest concentrations of vampires in the wizarding world, a fact common enough to appear in any decent reference text. Zack knew that in the movies, Voldemort had already bent giants to his cause.
He'd recruited spiders. The idea that he would simply overlook an entire nation of Vampires while assembling an army was an optimistic thought.
Eventually, he snapped out of his rotten thoughts.
If Dumbledore himself couldn't stop the expansion of Voldemort's powers, what could he do? This was a problem he wasn't yet qualified to think about.
Zack's mind snapped, and his thoughts rolled back to his conversation with Dalton.
The man had used the word "unstable" to describe Romania on the first night they'd met.
Did he already know about the war?
Zack set the spell book on the nightstand and lay back against the pillow, staring at the ceiling. He felt a strange itch in his chest.
Strength wasn't optional anymore. It never really had been, but the urgency of it felt different now that he'd thought his situation through.
He had years. Not many, and not guaranteed, but enough. Zack closed his eyes, not quite to sleep, but because thoughts needed somewhere quiet to settle.