She slipped out from under her covers, her bare feet silent on the carpet. The house was deep in slumber, a quiet, sleeping giant, leaving her to her work. She stood in the center of her room, the faint moonlight painting silver stripes on the floor.
She didn't need to close her eyes. She didn't need to meditate or meticulously craft a void in her mind. The power was simply there, a part of her now. It was a silent, powerful undercurrent just beneath the surface of her skin, waiting to be called upon.
She reached for it, not with effort, but with a simple act of will. The familiar stillness answered instantly, and the cold rose to meet her like an old friend. The air in the room grew heavy, goosebumps erupting on her skin all over as the temperature dropped by a few sharp degrees as the invisible presence of her magic made itself known.
She held up her palm, facing the ceiling. She focused on the energy, with intent, guiding the chill to where she wanted, drawing it out. A fog began to gather in her palm, a swirling mist of deep indigo and rich violet. It wasn't inert; it looked strangely, wonderfully alive, crackling with faint, internal pulses of light, like a miniature storm cloud holding captive lightning.
She didn't know how long she spent just staring at it.
This was something so utterly foreign, a sight torn from the pages of comic books or the large screens of a movie theater. It was the stuff of fantasy, of special effects and childish dreams. It was unnatural. Unbelievable.
Yet, it was happening. Right here. In the quiet of her room, in the palm of her own hand. The logical, scientific part of her mind, the part that understood physics and the conservation of energy, screamed that this was impossible. Light and matter did not simply manifest from will alone.
But the evidence was irrefutable, swirling just inches from her face. It was real. And it was hers.
She decided on a simple first task. Light.
She knew the word for this. Lumos. But a word was just a key, a mnemonic device to focus the will. She had a more direct path now.
She didn't speak. She simply willed it.
Light.
And the fog in her obeyed her will. It ignited yet didn't explode. It bloomed, the swirling violet-blue mist flaring into a soft, steady, silent luminescence.
For a moment, she just breathed, staring at the impossible glow. The light it cast was cool and clear, painting her room in ethereal shades of blue and purple, making the familiar shapes of her desk and bookshelf look alien and wonderful. It was a violation of every law of physics she had ever known, a quiet, beautiful miracle held in the palm of her hand. A part of her, the logical, skeptical survivor, was still reeling, struggling to accept the reality of it.
But the scientist in her, the part driven by curiosity and the need to understand, quickly took over, completely itching to test this. See what it was made of, its limits, her limits, how much could she push it.
Brighter
The light intensified, sharpening, casting crisp, defined shadows that danced on the walls. She pushed it further, and further still, until the small glow was a miniature, silent sun, so brilliant it forced her to squint. Then, she pulled back. Dimmer. The light receded, softening into a gentle, hazy glow, and then fainter, until it was barely more than a whisper of light, a single mote of dust catching the moonlight.
Colour
The default hue was the familiar, complex indigo-violet of her magic. She focused, pushing a new instruction into the light. White. The colour bled away, replaced by a clean, simple white light. She tried others – a bright emerald green, a warm yellow, a deep red. Each one manifested as easily as the last, shifting instantly at her command. She found that as soon as she relaxed her specific intent, letting her focus soften, the light would naturally revert to its base state.
And finally, shape. This was a real test of control.
The formless glow obeyed her will instantly.
A ball.
It coalesced, pulling inward until it formed a perfect, silent sphere, hovering an inch above her skin.
A cube.
The sphere's edges hardened, its curves flattening into precise, geometric planes.
A line.
It stretched, elongating into a thin, sharp thread of glowing purple that bisected the air before her.
Then she let her imagination, honed by years of scientific visualization and abstract thought, run wild.
The line twisted upon itself, coiling into a perfect, glowing spring that bounced silently in the air. The spring then unwound, flattening into a two-dimensional, razor-thin disc that spun like a coin. She willed it to become more complex, and the disc sprouted delicate, crystalline arms, branching out with impossible, fractal detail until it formed a perfect, six-sided snowflake, unique and utterly silent.
She pushed further, into the realm of the abstract. She imagined a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube, and the light obeyed, folding in on itself in ways that seemed to violate the very laws of space, creating a shifting, paradoxical hypercube of pure energy that was both mesmerizing and deeply unsettling to look at.
She made it spin, then dissolve back into the silent, swirling fog of her magic.
That was enough for now. The potential was staggering, but this was just the first test. There would be time to grow, to explore the limits later. She let her focus go, and the swirling indigo mist in her palm dissipated into nothingness, the chill in the room receding with it.
The moment the magic was gone, the world tilted violently.
A wave of profound dizziness washed over her, so sudden and overwhelming it stole her breath. Black spots danced in her vision, and her legs felt like they'd been replaced with water. The energy that had been thrumming through her just moments before was gone, leaving behind a bone-deep, cavernous exhaustion.
Her last coherent thought before she stumbled forward and crashed face-first onto her bed was a silent, groaning curse.
Shit... Pushed myself way too much for a first try.
---
She was a light sleeper by nature, a trait carried over from a life where deep sleep was a luxury one couldn't always afford. So it wasn't the knocking on her door that woke her, but the cacophony of sounds that preceded it. The cheerful chirping of birds outside her window sounded like shrill, metallic scraping. The distant rumble of a passing car was a low, grinding roar that vibrated through her bones. From downstairs, the clatter of plates and the murmur of the radio were a chaotic symphony of noise, each sound amplified, grating on senses that felt raw and exposed.
And then there was the headache.
It wasn't a normal headache. It was a vicious, pulsing agony that sat behind her eyes, a direct and brutal consequence of the previous night.
Damn. Pushed myself way too hard for a first try, she thought, the words sluggish in her foggy mind.
Yet, as she pushed herself off the bed, beneath the bone-deep exhaustion and the throbbing pain, there was a profound, unshakable sense of contentment. She had magic. Real magic. And the results of her first experiment had been spectacular. The level of fine control she possessed, the intuitive way the energy had responded to her will—it was more than she could have hoped for.
The question, then, wasn't about her control. It was about the cost. Was this exhaustion the result of running out of a finite resource, like draining a battery? Or was her young, unprepared body simply not ready for the stress of channeling that kind of power? Like working a muscle to its breaking point.
By the time she had to get out of bed, the vicious, pulsing agony had thankfully receded, leaving a dull, heavy throb in its place. It was a slow, grudging recovery, a constant reminder of the price she'd paid, but it was manageable.
She didn't get an answer to her question, though. The mundane reality of the morning intervened before she could even begin to form a hypothesis. She had school.
Grudgingly, she slid out of bed, each movement careful. All the while, a silent, bitter grumbling echoed in her mind. School. Why do I have to go to school? I have a university-level education, for God's sake. The sheer absurdity of having to go sit in a classroom and practice her letters when she could be home mapping the very laws of magic was almost laughable.
Downstairs, she acted her part perfectly. She ate her breakfast, responded to her parents' cheerful questions, and packed her school bag, all while a significant portion of her focus was dedicated to simply not grimacing. The last thing she needed was another round of worried looks and hushed phone calls to the doctor.
---
The school day was a tedious, droning affair. The lingering throb of her headache finally faded by lunchtime, leaving behind only the profound, wearying boredom of primary school education. She sat through lessons on arithmetic and grammar, dissecting the events of the previous night.
Her opportunity came during the last period of the day: silent reading. The classroom settled into a quiet hum, the only sound the soft rustle of turning pages. Hermione was seated at the back, in a corner, her position offering a relative degree of privacy. It was perfect.
She wanted to experiment. Push what she was capable of. But she couldn't. Not here. The most dangerous thing about her magic right now wasn't its power, but its visibility. That signature, beautiful glow was a beacon – and she needed to learn how to snuff it out.
Keeping her book propped open on the desk, she lowered one hand into her lap, hidden from view. She reached inward, calling on her magic.
It met her halfway, answering her call eagerly, waiting to be used and unleashed. The familiar fog surged from her hand, with its signature indigo and violet glow.
She tried the obvious first. Make the glow itself invisible.
She willed the light to vanish. Focused on smothering the glow. But the result was immediate: the magic resisted. Not violently, not even stubbornly. It simply wouldn't. The glow wasn't a byproduct.. It was part of its identity. It wanted to be seen.
She tried again, with more finesse – focusing on the light itself. She imagined bending its path, redirecting it away from any observer like water around a stone. The strain of the attempt hit her instantly. Her focus splintered under the pressure, and the glow wavered, flickered, and died.
She didn't try again. Instead, she waited, her thoughts turning inward. If she couldn't change the magic's nature or bend its light, then the solution had to be more complex. The blueprint for it formed instantly in her mind, a moment of absolute clarity. A two layer construct: Layer one contains the emission. Layer two projects a false image. She thought.
It was incredibly easy to imagine. She could see it vividly in her mind's eye, every detail of the energy matrix, every subtle interplay of light. The theory was flawless.
The execution, however, was another matter.
She reached for her magic again, her right hand glowing. Then she drew a second strand from her left. She commanded this new power to wrap around her right hand, and as she began to impose the complex, two-layered design upon it, the strain hit her.
It wasn't just a mental pressure. It was physical. A sharp, almost electrical friction hummed through her arm. Her body, the living conduit for this power, was struggling to process the intricate command. The design in her head was perfect, but the physical means of manifesting it was being pushed to its limit. She finally got the answer to her question from the morning: It was her body, the conduit of her power into the physical realm, that was holding her back. It was not prepared to handle such power.
The resulting illusion flickered into existence, unstable. The image of her hand was there, but it wavered, and a faint shimmer at the edges betrayed the immense power being forced through an unprepared channel. Still, she held it, wrestling the construct into a semblance of stability through sheer force of will.
She tested it. One minute. Two. The throbbing in her temples grew, and a faint tremor started in her fingers—not from lack of focus, but from the raw, physical effort of acting as the conduit.
Now for the final test, she thought, her teeth gritted.
While maintaining the two-layered illusion, she tried to command the concealed magic to form a simple ball of light.
It was too much. The conduit overloaded.
The entire construct didn't just shatter; it felt like it short-circuited. A jolt of painful, static-like energy shot up her arm, and the magic imploded. The glow flared brightly before vanishing.
Her vision pulsed, a sharp, stabbing pain behind her eyes. The physical backlash from pushing her body too far was immediate and intense. As inconspicuously as she could, she lowered her head onto her propped-up book, closing her eyes against the sudden, painful sensitivity to the classroom lights.
Despite the pain, a quiet feeling settled in her chest. Not exactly happiness, but contentment. She had found the true bottleneck. It wasn't her mind or her magic. It was the physical channel. And that, was something she could train with time.
And time, she had loads of it.