A.N.: Hey guys, here's the chapter. Enjoy, send some powerstones and comments if you like it.
Also, wanted to let you know that the next chapter would be a bit delayed than usual. I am going through some things in life, so my head is not in the right place. I'll be okay, just need some time to sort things out. So, yeah. Next chapter would be a bit delayed, maybe by a week, or maybe not, depending on how things go.
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The grand ambition settled in her mind, not as a distant dream, but as a defined, long-term objective. To be truly, absolutely free.
A quiet smile touched her lips. That was the destination. But the journey started here, now, in this room. Step one on that infinitely long road was the same as it had been five minutes ago: foundational mastery.
To be free, she needed power. To have power, she needed practice. The swirling fog of magic in her hand dissipated as she shifted her focus. Light had been a good first step — it was manipulating the form of her own energy. The next logical test was to influence an object outside of herself. Telekinesis.
Her eyes scanned the room and settled on a simple target: a graphite pencil lying on her desk.
She extended her hand, not physically, but mentally. She focused her will directly on the pencil, a simple, brute-force command: Move.
Nothing happened.
She frowned. The pencil remained perfectly still. This was confusing. She knew her control was precise; why was this different? Her analytical mind began to break down the problem. A direct command was failing. Perhaps her magic needed a pathway, a visualized mechanism to follow.
She tried again. This time, she didn't just will the pencil to move. She imagined a fine, shimmering thread of her indigo magic extending from her consciousness, wrapping itself delicately around the pencil and connecting her will directly to the object.
Then, with that connection established, she thought, Come here.
It happened instantly. The pencil lifted from the desk and shot smoothly across the room into her waiting hand. There was no shaking, no wobbling. The control was absolute. A thrill, pure and intellectual, shot through her. She had found the key.
She immediately tested its opposite, picturing the pencil returning to the exact spot she had taken it from. With a silent mental push along the thread, it flew back and settled softly on the desk, not a millimeter out of place. It was a perfect, silent execution of the principles behind Accio and Depulso.
Next, she moved beyond simple vectors. She lifted the pencil again and guided it through the air, first in simple motions – a straight line, a perfect circle – then in more complex patterns, making it dance and weave a figure-eight in the space before her.
The true test came when she escalated to multiple objects. She extended two more threads of her will, connecting to an eraser and a paper clip. She lifted all three, holding them steady in the air. First, she moved them in unison, a simple, synchronized dance. Then, she gave them separate commands, creating a complex, orbiting system in the center of her room, a miniature solar system with the heavy textbook acting as its silent, floating sun.
She held the intricate pattern, her mind effortlessly tracking the multiple variables, the separate orbits, the delicate balance of her will. She could have pushed for more, added more objects, tried more complex maneuvers. The magic itself felt limitless, ready to obey.
But then she felt it.
A faint, familiar twinge behind her eyes. The first whisper of a headache.
It was the warning sign. Her body, the physical conduit for this power, was approaching its operational limit. She immediately reined in her ambition. This session wasn't about pushing to the edge; today's goal was exploration, not endurance. It was about finding the breadth of her current potential, not the depth. She wanted to know what she could do, to map the territory of her newfound abilities.
The time for limit-testing, for theorizing on how to expand the conduit's capacity and pushing her body to its breaking point, would come later. First, she needed a complete survey of the tools at her disposal.
With a final, unified command, she gently guided each object back to its exact place on her desk. She released her hold, the magical threads dissolving into nothingness.
She leaned back against the giant koala, the headache a mild, manageable throb. Still, she felt disappointment. It had hardly been 20-25 minutes, and she was already reaching the limits of what her body could handle.
A part of her mind was already running through ideas – on how to improve the efficiency of her body as a conduit for the power. Was it a matter of stamina that could be trained like a muscle, pushing it a bit more each time, to grow it, or a bio-meta-physical limit that needed a more creative, bio-magical work around?
She forcibly shelved the thoughts. Theorizing now would only lead to the restless itch to experiment further, especially when she was supposed to test other things.
Instead, she focused her thoughts on the next logical step in her survey of abilities. She had tested light manipulation and external object manipulation. What should she test next?
Potions was out of question, so it was not even considered. That left two viable choices: Transfiguration and Charms.
Her first thought was Transfiguration. The idea was enticing– the ability to change one thing into another, rewriting laws of matter itself. Her mind immediately leapt into the incredible and quite really, the impossible physics of it, the sheer, staggering amount of energy and information required to deconstruct a teacup and reconstruct it as a tortoise. It was the pinnacle of magical application, a direct interface with the atomic building blocks of reality. It was a field she knew she would one day have to master to achieve her ultimate goals.
But, logic took over soon as she dismissed it for now.
Her experiment with dual-casting had shown her the severe limitations of her body as a conduit. If simply creating an illusion caused a system overload, attempting to fundamentally rewrite the structure of matter would be like trying to run a supercomputer on a watch battery. The backlash would be immense, and the risk of catastrophic failure—a half-transfigured, permanently damaged object, or worse – something exploding with the energy output of a half-baked bomb, was too high to risk it. That would need a lot more experience, and preferably, a lot of open space.
That left Charms.
She considered the definition. Charms didn't change what an object was; they changed what it did or what properties it had. She felt it was a bit incomplete, as it didn't describe or cover other charms, that were there. Like the Incendio, or Glacius. Still, she wasn't too stuck up on the definition. She knew the distinction between different branches. And more importantly, the applications she could do with them.
She started simple.
She summoned a pencil from her desk, unintentionally casting the summoning charm, Accio. She tried the colour-changing charm. Its incantation is Colovaria, I believe. She thought, not that she needed to speak to make spells work. She focused on the pencil, and willed her magic to make it green, completely, from the eraser to the top, to the wood surrounding the graphite of the pencil.
The magic responded instantly. The pencil's colour shifted smoothly, turning from the dull yellow to the uniform, vivid green in her mind. She turned it over, and it was the same.
"But was the colour changed on the inside too?" She considered the question. She thought it was most unlikely. She had just thought of turning it surface green, not the inside it.
Oh, well. Why not confirm it. She thought with faint amusement.
She made the pencil float away from her, and then focused on break it in half. A split second later, a crack sounded in the room, as the pencil was split in two. She brought it back to her. It wasn't green. As expected.
Next, she considered repairing it.
It took a fraction more effort than breaking it—repairing meant recalling the shape, the grain of the wood, the position of the graphite, and sealing them seamlessly together. She didn't bother with the incantation; she simply pictured the pencil as it had been before, whole and unbroken.
The magic knitted it back together in an instant, the fracture vanishing so perfectly she couldn't tell where it had been. She rolled it between her fingers, searching for some flaw, but there was none. If she didn't know it had been broken, she'd never suspect it.
Satisfied, she set it down and turned her attention to something else. She saw her water bottle, still in her bag, giving her the next idea. Perfect.
Aguamenti.
It was simple on the surface, but a bit tricky if she thought about it. How did Aguamenti even work? Did it collect the moisture in the air to make water? Or was it actually conjured? If it was the latter, which it most probably was, then it didn't feel like a charm, but conjuration, an advanced form of transfiguration. And considering it was taught in the sixth year, it probably was.
Still, she decided to give it a try.
She imagined a bead of moisture condensing in her palm, no more than a drop. The magic obeyed, a listening sphere of water blooming into existence. It trembled, quivering as it hovered in midair, cold against her skin.
She willed it to grow – slowly, until it was the size of a large marble. A stream was tempting, but she wasn't in the mood to soak her room. Instead, she shaped the floating water into a flat disc, then into a thin thread, and then directed it into her mouth, and drank it. It tasted just like normal water, albeit a bit chilled.
The testing had been a success, but she could feel the creeping heaviness in her limbs again, the subtle pressure beginning to gather behind her eyes. It wasn't bad yet –but she knew it was better to stop now, rather than nursing a bad headache later.
Reluctantly, she let her magic settle back into that quiet undercurrent beneath her skin. The room felt a little emptier without it thrumming through her, but she ignored the faint pull to keep going.
Her eyes flicked to the clock. Not long before her parents would be home. That was reason enough to stop. She glanced once more at the neatly repaired pencil on her desk, the faint water droplets still on the floor, and felt a small, satisfied smile curl her lips. Today had been productive. She'd learned things—about her magic, about her limits.
There was still time for more, later.
Lots of it.