"Good." McGonagall leaned forward, resting against the edge of her desk. "You've clearly been practicing, and thinking for yourself. What's on your mind today?"
Regulus lowered his wand. The diamond and graphite stopped shifting and settled back to their original states.
He took a few seconds to organize his thoughts.
"Professor, can Transfiguration only be applied to physical objects?"
McGonagall's eyebrow rose. "Meaning?"
"Natural phenomena, for instance." He set the words out carefully. "A bolt of lightning. A flame. A gust of wind. Can those serve as targets for transfiguration? Or magic itself. A spell already in flight. Could it be transfigured mid-air?"
McGonagall was quiet for a moment. Her fingers tapped the desk twice.
"Yes," she said, voice certain. "But it isn't easy."
Regulus heard the subtext. Beyond most wizards. But well within her reach.
That much was obvious. She was a Transfiguration master. He'd asked the question to open the door, not because he doubted the answer.
"The core of Transfiguration is change." McGonagall continued, her voice level and clear. No hesitation, as though the answer had been waiting, fully formed, for him to ask. "Changing an object's form, its properties, its function. In theory, anything that exists, including magical constructs, can be changed. The difficulty varies."
She pulled a sheet of parchment from a drawer, dipped a quill in ink, and began writing.
"Transfiguring a concrete object, say, turning a desk into a pig, requires understanding the material structure of the desk and the biological structure of the pig. Transfiguring a natural phenomenon, turning flame into water, requires understanding the energy structure of fire and the material structure of water, plus managing the conversion between energy and matter. Transfiguring a spell itself, turning a Stunner into a Wingardium Leviosa..."
Her quill traced a complex symbol on the parchment.
"That requires understanding the magical structure of the spell, grasping the fundamental difference between two distinct spells, and completing both analysis and reconstruction in an extremely short window. The number of people in magical Britain who can do that is small."
Even framed that way, Regulus could hear what she wasn't saying. She was one of them.
He studied the symbol. It was the Ancient Runes word for change, its strokes twisted, carrying a sense of motion even on static parchment.
"You're asking because you've been thinking about combat applications." McGonagall set down her quill and looked up at him, cutting straight to the point.
"Partly." Regulus conceded it with a respectful nod. "I've been wondering whether, in a fight, I could transfigure an incoming spell directly. Turn an attack into harmless light, or reshape it into a shield."
"Theoretically possible," McGonagall said. "Practically, nearly impossible. Spells travel too fast. The reaction window is too narrow. Unless you can predict the trajectory, or..."
She didn't finish. She didn't need to. Unless the power gap was overwhelming, or the caster had a particular gift.
He could already intercept spells with spells, and since gaining spatial awareness, he could detect a curse's trajectory earlier than most. That was a form of prediction, in its own right.
He could even calculate flight paths in his head.
But against a skilled opponent, none of that would hold. Even if he could pull it off, the cost-benefit ratio was terrible. One miscalculation and he'd be on the back foot. That same effort spent dodging or shielding would serve him better.
"Transfiguration does have other combat applications, however." McGonagall shifted direction. "Altering the environment. Turning the ground to swamp, walls to spikes, air to solid mass. Or targeting the opponent's equipment. Wand to twig. Robes to rope. Spectacles to barbed wire."
As she spoke, her wand flicked. A quill on the desk began to change. The shaft elongated, split, sprouted leaves, and became a small branch.
The branch contracted, thinned, and became a length of fine cord.
The cord shifted again, reshaping into a tiny pair of round-framed spectacles.
"These applications don't require split-second execution. They can be prepared in advance, or you can create openings for them mid-fight," she continued. "The prerequisite is deep enough mastery that you can maintain precision under pressure."
Regulus nodded. These tactics aligned with his own thinking: use Transfiguration to reshape the battlefield and force the opponent into a rhythm you'd already planned for.
But he also knew this was foundational, far from advanced. Anyone with a decent grasp of basic Transfiguration and a flexible mind could arrive at the same conclusions.
His real question lay elsewhere.
Everything McGonagall had said and demonstrated today had already gone well beyond the normal scope of instruction.
Combat applications of Transfiguration, even directional guidance, had no place in a first-year curriculum.
A professor known for rigor and proper foundations would not normally share this kind of practical combat knowledge with young students, especially not first-years.
Yet she had. Not just explained it, but demonstrated, and broken down the theory.
Regulus thought of Professor Sprout.
The Hufflepuff Head of House had done the same. When he'd asked about opposing magical plant properties, she'd shown him the Sunlight Ebony Bush directly, explained concepts reserved for N.E.W.T.s-level study.
He'd initiated every one of those conversations. But the professors hadn't dismissed him for being a first-year. Hadn't deflected because he was a Slytherin, or because his name was Black.
A figure flashed through his mind. Dumbledore. Those blue eyes behind half-moon spectacles, warm yet carrying something deeper. Expectation that stretched far ahead.
Regulus set the thought aside. If the professors were willing to teach, was he going to be afraid to learn?
And as for the future?
Every worry traced back to the same root: not enough power.
He looked up at McGonagall.
The question turned over in his mouth once before he chose the most direct version. "Professor, can space itself be transfigured?"
He stayed quiet after that, waiting.
What followed was half a minute of silence.
McGonagall sat behind her desk, leaning slightly forward, hands folded on the surface, eyes lowered behind her spectacles, fixed on some point on the table.
The air in the office seemed to thicken. The crackle of the hearth became unnervingly loud. On the wall, the painting of the cat chasing a butterfly had gone still.
Regulus could feel her thinking. Deciding how to answer, whether to answer, how much to give.
He was on the verge of a polite goodbye when McGonagall stood, crossed to the open space in the center of the office, and raised her wand.
A turn of her wrist. Nothing more.
The office began to change.
All four walls started moving. Space itself stretched. The front and back walls receded into the distance while the side walls pressed inward.
The room shifted from a square to a long corridor. The ceiling climbed. The floor sank.
Then space flipped.
Regulus's sense of direction scrambled. Gravity seemed to shift. The hem of his robes and strands of his hair drifted upward, though they were actually falling down.
Books stayed on their shelves. The fire still burned upward in the hearth. But the picture frames on the wall had tilted thirty degrees.
Last came distortion.
Space warped like dough kneaded by invisible hands. Portions bulged outward while others collapsed inward. The area near the door compressed. The area near the window expanded. Light bent along the twisted geometry, casting strange shadows on the walls, shapes that shifted and reformed without end.
Ten seconds, start to finish. Then McGonagall swept her wand again, and everything snapped back.
Walls returned to their positions. Ceiling and floor resumed their proper height. Direction righted itself. Light fell in straight lines.
The office looked exactly as it had before, as though nothing had happened.
But Regulus knew what he'd seen.
McGonagall had used Transfiguration to alter the structure of space directly. Not the way an Extension Charm expanded an interior. This was genuine transformation of space's own shape.
He sat in the chair, mind racing through analysis.
Transfiguration could alter matter. It could alter energy. And now, it could alter space.
The implications were enormous.
It meant Transfiguration's scope was far broader than he'd imagined. Its ceiling, far higher.
He recalled what McGonagall had told him once: "Transfiguration is one of magic's most direct expressions of reshaping reality. A powerful will can remake matter."
Now he understood. It wasn't just matter. It was reality itself.
"Spatial transfiguration is one of the advanced applications." McGonagall returned to her chair and sat down. "The underlying principle is similar to material transfiguration.... understand space's structural properties, then guide its transformation through magic. But the difficulty is far greater. Space has no fixed material basis. Its structure is more abstract, more dependent on the wizard's perception and understanding."
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