Charms that week had moved on to the Fire-Making Spell. Flitwick perched on his stack of books at the front of the room, demonstrating with the kind of enthusiasm that made even the least interested students sit up a little straighter.
"Control is everything with this charm," Flitwick said, flicking his wand at a small heap of kindling until a neat, contained flame sprang up and held steady, no bigger than a candle's. "Too little power and you'll get nothing more than a wisp of smoke. Too much, and you'll get considerably more fire than you have bargained for. I would rather none of you repeat last year's incident with the curtains."
Aegeus watched the demonstration with a serious expression. He still remembered, with perfect clarity, exactly what happened when a flame got out of control, swelling past anything he had meant to make, indifferent to how badly he had wanted it to stop. Since then, he had been very cautious when producing flame.
When he felt he was ready, he raised his wand and spoke the incantation quietly.
"Incendio."
The flame came up small, contained, and steady— no flicker, no swelling. It simply sat there burning at exactly the size he'd intended, as if it had never considered doing otherwise. He watched it for a long moment, but he still could feel the old familiar wariness sitting just beneath the relief of it staying obedient.
Flitwick, making his rounds, paused beside him a beat longer than he had at the other desks. "That," he said, peering at the flame with open approval, "Is an excellent first attempt, Mr. Granger."
"I have some past experience with flames," Aegeus said, and didn't explain further.
"Evidently." Flitwick moved on, still smiling to himself.
Marcus, at the next desk, produced something closer to a small explosion than a flame, singeing the edge of his own kindling pile black before smothering it hastily with his sleeve.
Rosalind's flame, a few seats down, came up smaller than Aegeus's but held with the same steadiness, hers built through visible concentration rather than instinct. She caught Aegeus watching and raised an eyebrow. "What are you looking at? Some of us actually need a moment to think."
"I didn't say anything!"
"Hmph." She turned back to her own flame, adjusting it smaller still with deliberate control, and said nothing further, though Aegeus noticed she kept the flame lit a good while after the exercise— testing exactly how long she could hold it before her own concentration gave out.
He went to the library straight after dinner rather than the common room, the way he had most evenings, and found his usual low-visibility corner near the back, half-hidden behind a wall of defensive theory.
A History of Fire Charms. He wanted to understand the thing that had nearly taken his arm off.
The chapter on its origin was shorter than he'd hoped. The early root of Incendio had actually been a defensive charm designed to absorb and diffuse incoming cold or liquid-based hexes.
For over a century, wizards used it strictly as a wall of intense heat to evaporate incoming projectiles. It wasn't until a fourteenth-century wizard cast the spell wrong in the heat of a siege that the modern Fire-Making Spell came to be.
It was a clean, tidy little piece of history— and it explained absolutely nothing about what had happened to him when he was eight years old.
He read the chapter twice more anyway, looking for some line that might bridge the gap—some mention of live flame, or a fire that refused to be extinguished by any amount of water. There was nothing.
Every example in the text assumed fire was a well-behaved element: obedient to intent, proportional to input, and easily doused by standard means. Nothing in its pages described a spell that turned on its caster and tried to consume them.
Whatever he'd made in his room that night hadn't been this. It had been something else entirely, nothing in the book so much as gestured toward, let alone named anything similar, and he found that deeply frustrating.
Instead, he turned his attention to the more practical section further in— a short passage on shaping fire charms, which the book treated as an advanced technique but described in terms simple enough that he thought he understood the underlying principle well enough to try.
Shape was different, and harder: the flame followed the caster's mental image of it as much as the wand's physical motion, which meant an unfocused image produced an unfocused fire.
He didn't think the librarian would appreciate him setting fire to the library, and he wasn't about to test the book theory in a room built almost entirely of paper. But he copied the relevant passage into his notes anyway, word for word. He'd take the trial to a fourth-floor classroom instead— somewhere with stone floors and no books.
~~~
The fourth-floor classroom was cold at that hour, the single window black with night, and he set a shallow stone dish in the center of the floor before lighting a small, contained flame inside it— no bigger than Flitwick's demonstration, well within anything he trusted himself to hold.
Shape came easier than he expected. He'd done this before, after all, just with a different element— water folding itself into the shape of a bird, a fish, whatever shape he'd held clearly enough in his mind to impose on fire. It turned out to be much easier than he expected.
He pictured a bird first, wings spread, and watched the flame stretch and bend to something roughly resembling it, orange light guttering at the edges of the shape.
He tried a fish next, simpler, and got the same result— recognizable, if he was being generous with himself, but soft at every edge, the flame flickering in and out of the shape as though it kept forgetting what it was supposed to be and had to be reminded every half-second.
He sat back on his heels, watching it burn.
Water held a shape because it was, in some sense, content to be— to settle, level out, and stay there until told otherwise. Fire didn't try to keep its shape. It was ever-moving. Asking it to hold a fixed shape was asking it to stop being fire for as long as the shape needed to last, and it seemed to only ever half-agree to the deal.
It was more a control test than power. Fire won't burn hotter just because it's shaped like a bird. Well, at least this kind of fire won't.
_________________________________________________________________________
TO BE CONTINUED
~~~
If you like the story, please leave a stone.