AN: Finally we are getting some more advanced magic, sheesh! Wanted to build up to this point more realistically, hope I succeeded.
-/-
The bloodlines so often spoken about in the magical world are magical, not genetic. My research and comparison between magical and Muggle sciences has shown a worrying divide where logic should have shown a connection.
It is almost like magical beings are beings of metaphor. Someone is more likely to receive the parseltongue ability if their parent more closely identifies with the ancestor who exhibited it last than they are if they are more closely linked to that ancestor genetically.
Magic changes a biological being into a being of counter-logic, or at least it seems to impact with its symbolistic thinking the genes that get picked out to express certain traits.
But if magical creatures are beings of symbolism, then which entity is providing the symbolism? Is it the magical being in question? Could complete madness be the way to complete power? Or are the symbols and metaphors which rule reality provided by humanity, by sentient species at large?
The literature seems to point to the latter, as people become expressions of symbols they are not directly manifesting. It is rather that they themselves represent an imprint of some larger cultural conglomerate.
If that is indeed the case, then it might be possible to speak of a will of the world. A sort of aether carrying symbols and beliefs all over the planet, propagating and manifesting a culture's own metaphors. Is neo-platonism the most fitting belief system for magicals??? If this aether, this magic, this connectivity truly carries cultural symbolisms, then deciphering these akashic records might be the way to access the deeper mysteries of magic without holding up one's failures as reflections to improve.
The one thing I wish to accomplish with my rituals seems almost simplistic and unrefined compared to the things I could accomplish. Eliminating the genes of the father, may he rot in hell, and leaving only my own, multiplied, mirrored so as to avoid incest.
Child's play. And afterwards, after the birth, I shall focus more on these mysteries I am beginning to glimpse behind the cloak of.
There is something there, I can feel it. A secret waiting to be uncovered.
Sometimes, in the dark of night, I find myself thinking of it and in return…
I feel that it is thinking of me as well.
-/-
Harry put down the dairy with a frown. The entries towards the end had grown progressively more esoteric and unhinged. Lily spoke of metaphors and symbols as if they had a mind of their own.
He was beginning to see that mother and son had a severely different view of cosmology. In his opinion, these symbols were simply being manifested by the collective subconscious will of humanity as it was perpetuated through millennia of evolution and cultural progress, biologically and memeticelly.
But one part of what she'd written was interesting, how magic would affect this faceless god representing the formless gestalt of humanity's cultural code.
Magic was will made manifest. Did humanity's manifested will, as channeled into a singular prototypical point through cultural similarities and biological interactions, have the ability to enforce metaphors onto the world?
He sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. Red. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds, illuminating once more his little spot in front of the castle.
No other students were out, it was too cold in February, but it was weird that they didn't even think to simply brave the outside with their warming charms.
Speaking of warming charms, he pulled out his wand and flicked it, quickly reapplying his.
"She's going insane," Harry said listlessly, thinking back on the diary. The poor girl was going crazy from grief, hormones and fear over the impending birth.
Her writing was, too put it mildly, becoming slightly schizophrenic. Meaning was found in number associations that had nothing to do with each other. The void was looking back, and the truth behind reality was only one perception adjustment away.
He twitched his wand and cast the Mists of Moria, the area of effect enchantment. The space around him suddenly fogged up, becoming heavy to his senses. Then, slowly, as he observed the tightly woven net he'd created, he felt it fray as the harsh February wind slowly started carrying it away, thread by thread, until a minute later there was once again nothing left.
A realisation had come to him recently when practising the mist. He'd been doing so inside, where it didn't have to fight the elements to survive, being protected from the winds by the strong castle walls.
Taking the enchantment for a ride outside of the castle had disabused him of how far ahead he'd thought he was.
It was good he'd discovered his oversight now, rather than right before the tournament.
"You need to become heavier," Harry muttered at his wand, thinking of the spell. "If a simple wind can dispel you, won't a finite suffice as well?"
Symbolisms.
Mist.
Loss of vision.
The labyrinth.
The minotaur.
The mountain.
The ghosts.
Fear.
He raised his wand again. "Nebuale Moria."
Something changed with the spell. A thick fog, thicker than before, emerged from his wand. It fell harshly, clinging to the grass he was sitting on before spreading out further.
The wafts of mist dissipating into the air took on forms he couldn't quite make out. He thought he saw skulls, shades and minotaurs. He shivered.
"My warming charm," he muttered confusedly and extended his magic senses.
The mist was more compact, more present, in a way. More prototypical rather than evocational.
It hung lower, not filling up the entire space because he hadn't put in enough.
"Enchanting an area is the step after enchanting an object," Harry said. "The step after is to enchant a conceptual boundary, which is how you make a ward."
The mist clung to the floor as the wind slowly stripped it away.
Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes.
"That is by far the most emo thing I've ever seen anyone do," a female voice suddenly said a few steps behind Harry. The boy who'd been concentrating on the effect of the mist turned his head to see that Tonks had made her way over to him as had been planned for a while now; she was also holding the two broomsticks they'd discussed.
"I just shoved in some metaphors. It's not my fault it came out like this," he said with a roll of the eyes as the mist finally dissipated. He'd been working on the bloody thing for months now, and a simple revelation had extended the time from a few minutes to twenty. It was just like this sometimes.
"That was an enchantment, right?" Tonks asked as she ruffled his red hair and plopped herself down next to him. She was obnoxiously chewing on a pink bubble gum and popped it next to his ear. Then she shivered. "A bit chilly innit…" she muttered uncomfortably, adjusting herself.
"Just use a warming charm," Harry muttered, "You're a witch, aren't you?"
Tonks pulled out her medium-length brown wand and waved it over the two of them. A comfortable warmth suddenly descended on the pair, allowing them both to relax.
"You know, area of effect enchantments aren't anything to joke around with," she said. "Flitwick said in the NEWTs class that if anyone can show off one, they can get an O+, assuming everything else is up to par."
Harry paused. "I never actually asked how difficult it was supposed to be," he said.
"So what, you've just been working on post-Hogwarts material without a worry in the world?" Tonks asked with a sigh. "Merlin's beard, Harry, get a life."
The red-haired boy looked at his friend, then up at the bright winter sun. His right palm went up to cover it, before he closed his hand to enclose the celestial object into a fist.
"Who cares. It's all binary anyway, you can either do it or you can't," he determined. By the way things were going, he'd get the mist down in time for the duelling tournament; that was all that mattered.
"What else have you been working on then, oh binary one?" Tonks asked.
Harry thought to his wasps. In the duelling tournament, he'd made a little swarm. Ever since McGonagall had told him to just keep perfecting the conjuration like he had his disarming charm back then, well. He could do a pretty good Skitter impression if she only controlled wasps.
"You wanna see it in a duel?" he asked.
Tonks looked at him suspiciously.
"One last duel after the exams. My ego is too fragile right now, aqua eruptio has been kicking my ass. You can show me what you're so proud of today, though."
Harry hesitated. "Maybe after we get a bit away from the castle, I don't want to cause any concern."
Tonks glared at him before sighing. "What godless abomination am I about to witness?" she said more to herself than him before standing up and offering a hand.
Harry used it to pull himself up before taking one of the brooms.
He wasn't the best flyer, but to cross the lake, it would do. "They're cute, ok," he said mysteriously as Tonks joined him in the air and they zoomed off towards the lake.
The schoolbrooms were free to borrow, and even though they weren't any good, they were still popular enough that it was hard to get them on days with good weather. That was partially why they were doing what they were about to do today.
The lake's surface moved with small waves as they flew over it, the imposing castle growing smaller behind them. The forbidden forest beckoned in all its mysterious shade, but their destination was the craggy hill to the left of the lake.
It was a short journey, only a few minutes. Technically, it is still within school boundaries, but not really. They touched down on the barren shore and looked at the castle that was only as big as a fist now.
"You practiced your fire?" Tonks asked excitedly.
Harry nodded with a hum of agreement, thinking of the reading he'd done on the book on Fiendfyre he owned, back at the clearing. He wouldn't cast the cursed fire, of course, but considering it was the elemental opposite of the non-banned spell Tonks would be attempting, it had been somewhat fitting. Some of the principles on how to control and strengthen the cursed fire were universally applicable, so it wasn't that he hadn't gained anything from it either.
"Yeah, but let me show you the other thing," he muttered and looked out at the placid lake. "I'm sort of excited," he admitted.
Ever since he'd refocused purely on the mist and the wasps, progress had improved considerably.
Tonks looked at him with his own green eyes and grinned. "Show me what you got then," she challenged.
At this, Harry pulled out his wand and breathed in deeply. A twitch up, a slash down, a twirl and a diagonal drag finished in a cup. An unnecessary amount of wand movements, but it helped him improve the output even further. "Animacreo," the incantation also helped. The middle-finger-sized pure black wasps he'd decided to create burst out of the tip of his wand as if it were a professional-grade water hose.
A car-sized swarm of wasps emerged from his wand to angrily buzz in the air in front of him.
Harry started sweating and made another car, and another, and another. Just when his hand started shaking, he shakily pulled his wand to the size and let the animation charm do its work. The house-sized swarm of wasps blackening the sky like a thundercloud came under his control.
"Merlin shit fuck Harry." He heard Tonks whisper next to him. He could barely hear her through the buzzing of the wings.
Harry didn't reply; all his focus was being used to control the swarm. He put away his wand and raised a palm up to the sky.
He'd recently found out that if he learned to increase the size of the swarm and then cast less next time, he reduced the strain of animating. The plan was thus to make it big, bigger, biggest, control, and then, in a duel setting, use a swarm more suited for fast animation.
The palm he was holding up closed and the swarm compacted itself as much as it could without breaking the wings of their neighbours. What was left was a lorry-sized sphere of angry black murder hornets.
A sweep of the hand and the swarm reformed from a perfect sphere into the shape of a human face. Through Harry's will, a skull emerged from the head and hovered ominously in the sky above them. A thick rope, almost like a snake, suddenly emerged from the skull's mouth before opening its maw and hissing at them with a forked tongue of wasps.
"Harry, this isn't funny anymore," Tonks said shakily. It was at this moment that Harry dramatically opened his fist again and threw it down. The swarm suddenly surged to the ground to smash against the lake's surface and take off in all directions. An ever-growing flat circle of wasps trickled down to cover an ever-larger surface of the lake.
The coverage of a house, a basketball court, a football court, that was when it started getting difficult and just before Harry extended the circle further, he lost control and the shape disappeared, leaving a blob. Frustrated Harry clapped his hands together, causing all the wasps to suddenly combust in a bright flash of fire, which sizzled and hissed against the surface of the lake. The football-field-sized black blot turned fire-red, before disappearing, leaving behind a placid lake surface.
"Harr-"
A titanic tentacle as thick as a sewage pipe and as long as three suddenly emerged from the lake and violently struck the surface on the way down.
A watery crash assaulted Harry's ears, and he watched as the huge wave created by the giant squid fell against the shore, but thankfully, it didn't reach them.
A minute passed.
Two.
Three.
"I'm taking back that offer of a duel, not touching that, nuh-uh," Tonks suddenly said shakily.
Harry saw the opportunity to use his favourite quote.
He tilted his head to look at the pale girl next to him.
"Do you think that God stays in Heaven because He, too, lives in fear of what he has created?" he asked sardonically, making his friend snort out a giggly laugh.
"I see you've fully entered your emo phase today. Let me guess, your fire spell will also have skulls forming in the flames?" she asked.
Harry tightened his lips and awkwardly looked away.
"Harry!" Tonks exclaimed, putting her hands together in prayer. "Please no!"
"I was trying to make it more motivational for you to snuff it out," Harry quietly admitted.
Tonks palmed her face and sat down on a grey rock next to her.
"Let's just get this over with," she eventually said in a tired voice.
That day, on the other side of the Hogwarts lake, chimeras and skulls made of fire clashed against dragons made of water.
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350/200 followers on my new original story, which means another quick update, yay! It also means there will be another one tomorrow! This is a time of joy, a time of celebration, the best of times, and the worst of times…
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