"He who would gather all knowledge must first build the vessel to hold it,lest he carry water in his hands and wonder why his palms are always dry." — No attributed source
The day after the tournament finals, commendations were made to the victors. At breakfast, Headmaster Gamp stood up and approached the center of the risen platform, gesturing for silence.
Once everyone's attention was upon him, he calmly spoke in a deep, aged voice, "Verily, commendations are most due, I deem. We have witnessed a great many duels, and it doth hearten us, the Professors, to behold how much ye have profited this year in your studies. To Mister Alaric Thorne, our fifth place finalist: a pass unto the library's Restricted Section and ten Galleons. To Miss Elowen Hart, our fourth place finalist: a pass unto the Restricted Section and fifteen Galleons. Our third place finalist is Mister Cedric Vale, and unto him shall be granted a pass unto the Restricted Section, fifteen Galleons, and materials valued at a further ten Galleons. To Mister Rowan Blackwood, who standeth as our runner-up: a pass unto the Restricted Section, twenty Galleons, and materials worth twenty Galleons of his own choosing. And lastly, unto our champion, Mister Damian Blackwood, he shall receive a pass unto the Restricted Section, thirty Galleons, and—" with a flourish of his wand, "a dragon's egg from across the way." In front of him appeared an egg more then half a man's height, with a red and brown color scheme.
"Woah…"
Many students, including myself, were breathless at the absurd generosity given out for the finalists. Chatter, applause, and cries of shock sounded all at once. These exclamations rose the further the headmaster went through the list. You have to understand, a Galleon was worth more than half a month's wages. Kinda makes me wish I could time travel to 1991 and take some. Though, now that I think of it, why were galleons not worth more than 5 pounds? Was JK Rowling just bad at math and lazily made her system a multiple of five, or did the future galleons not have 100% gold? I mean, galleons are literally the gold standard. The only time gold lost value is with Mansa Musa, who gave out so much gold on his journey, people couldn't get rid of it enough.
The champion was a Slytherin, Gryffindor was the runner up and fifth place, Ravenclaw third, and hufflepuff was the fourth place finalist. After they had gone up to receive their awards, the fifth, fourth, third, and second year top placers were called up to receive our restricted section passes. Getting off the bench, my fellow Hufflepuffs clapped and cheered as I made my way to the front.
"Congratulations young Nicholas, we look forward to your future performance.'
"Thank you, headmaster."
After everyone had settled down a bit, Headmaster Gamp raised his hands once more. "Now, I have one final proclamation, which some amongst you mayhap have anticipated. Once in a span of years, Hogwarts doth contend in a most esteemed contest, the Triwizard Tournament. We are matched against two other great institutions of magic: the French school of Beauxbatons, and the eastern school of Durmstrang."
To say the response was sensational was an understatement. For a time period where going across the waters and countries was a long venture, and something you only did once in a lifetime, to get to compete in another land was truly momentous.
A minute passes with no sign of students quieting down, so the Headmaster took it into his own hands. Using Sonorus, a loud "Silence!" resounded through the hall, causing my ears to ring. "If all be well, Hogwarts shall hold a tournament to determine its champions once the harvest season hath concluded this autumn. Any may enter, though ye would do well to take most grave heed, for few there be who are known to survive the trials of this contest. Upon the melting of the snows, the champions and I shall journey unto Beauxbatons to partake in the Triwizard Tournament. This is all."
Some older students started to clap, and gradually more and more until everyone was joined in applause for that announcement. Now, I know what is expected of me as someone from a different world and life: to join the Triwizard tournament. But that's assuming I'm the main protagonist of some story, and let me tell you I am not. I'm just your everyday guy who was fortunate, or unfortunate depending on how one views these things, to have been thrown into my current self. If Harry Potter had to face a dragon in 1991, what do you think medieval wizards have to face? Let me tell you, there ain't no chance I am trying out that retarded magical hunger games. No siree, I ain't gonna do it.
Days marched onwards as the wheel of time continued to turn. The noise that had filled it for a while, arguments over scores, judging, rules, and whether that one foul during the third round ought to have cost a student the match, had gone. In its place was a quieter sort of busyness. I heard parchment being shifted from hand to hand. Quills scratched well after they ought to have been put away. In one corridor, two second-years stood over a Potions text and drilled one another in a voice loud enough to carry through a pair of shut doors.
The end-of-year tests were five weeks off, by the count pinned above the Hufflepuff fire. Someone had written the number beside it in red ink and changed it each morning. I saw it often enough that it began to sit in my mind like another clock.
Professor Graves' lesson that afternoon was on post-harvest preservation. I took notes, mostly decent ones, and meant most of what I wrote (meaning I ended up doodling in boredom). Still, while I walked back to the tower, my thoughts had already drifted elsewhere.
The restricted section. Yes, that very one. I still can't figure out how exactly to… copy it? Does copyright even exist yet? Is it piracy? Oh well, I've done my fair share of movie and textbook pirating so no guilt over here.
I had gone there often enough to know it held somewhere between two and three thousand books, though that was only a rough count from memory and habit. Some were duplicates, though not many. Wait, did I say thousand? I meant ten thousand, though it's just a rough estimate having counted the books on a shelf and multiplying it out by the number of shelves. Which meant if I wanted to pirate properly, I either need to determine which ones are worth the most or find a way to take it all.
What is strange to me is that the layout is different from both the new Hogwarts game that had come out and the movies of the canon story. I guess headmasters preferred different layouts or something. Some of the books were written in Latin, Greek, or a form of English so old it made my head ache. But a fair portion of what sat on those shelves was not to be found anywhere else in the castle, including the Room of Requirement (barring the room of hidden things of course). And unlike the books in the general library area, I could not simply borrow them and copy them out at leisure before I left Hogwarts.
By the time I reached the corridor outside the Hufflepuff common room, the castle had settled into that late-afternoon hush that comes before supper. I could hear the small, practical sounds of the place: a door shutting somewhere below, the clink of a tray, a burst of laughter from farther down the passage, then silence again.
The quiet should have been restful. It was not. It only made the thought I had been carrying all day more stubborn.
The restricted section was full of answers. Not all of them, perhaps, and not all of them useful, but enough to matter. If I was going to understand this world, and more importantly understand magic well enough to do something with it, I needed those books. Needed them badly enough that pretending otherwise had become foolish.
I stopped in the corridor and looked at the wall for a moment, as if it might offer some easier plan.
The thought had been turning over in my head since I first started taking runes seriously. I kept at it all the way back from supper, hands tucked into my coat pockets, following the corridor down toward the Hufflepuff basement while I weighed the two ideas against one another. How to copy speedily, secretly, and most importantly, how to get said books to be readable.
A book would be the sensible place to start.
An ordinary book, charmed to hold more than it should, with a runic system built to copy nearby text as I worked. It would be simple enough by comparison. The charm work was already known, and the runic logic was no great leap from what I had been studying since first year. More to the point, it would be useful at once.
The other option was the sort of thing I could lose myself in for months. A device made entirely of runes, no charm work at all, just inscribed logic holding the whole thing together. Elegant, perhaps. Properly elegant. It would also take ages, and I could already picture three or four versions of it catching fire before I got anything worth keeping.
"Hmm, the device would need to have some sort of screen or holographic display to interface with. Also, I would need to make it in modular parts in case of mishaps when carving. Uhhh... I guess the scanning and copying would be functionally the same between the two…." I idly talk to myself (not a good indicator of mental health, if you believe in that stuff) as I write out my thoughts. "Well, a book would be simple to copy on to as it's already in the format needed to read. How can I make it infinite in pages….. endless…. What if I use the same principle Scamander's trunk had and expand the space between the covers of the book? And if I use some spacial extension to make the pages between said covers so vast it would be so large, it might as well be endless. But would an extension charm affect the pages oe just add more space for the pages?"
Walking up some stairs, I had my head down talking to myself, and passed a couple of first years who gave me a look and added more room between us. Ignoring them, I come up with a rough draft and go to check on a book I had read in the restricted section about spatial charms.
There quiet a good amount of spells you never saw in canon and the theory was quite interesting. The book explained that one should think of the space around them as if you could see it from above. And in order to alter the space around oneself, you first have to… how do I put it…. As a god in said space? That's about the most accurate interpretation I could give you. Though it had so much math and theory that I didn't really bother to follow. It made me think of a rendering used to describe a spatial theory of some famous scientist who I also couldn't be bothered to commit to memory. The image for space is like a sheet of fabric which bent in waves and could fold, etc. If you could somehow get a tunnel or string to connect from one point to another, it would allow you to skip the sheet and head straight, and maybe instantaneously, from Point A to Point Z without having to go through everything in between.
Some of the charms did nearly the same thing, like expanding the interior space of something or increasing and decreasing distance between points. But one of my must learn was a spatial cage that prevented any alterations to the space within said cage. Though I was disappointed in the lack of teleportation spells as it would have been really handy. Which reminds me, the description of apparition, or maybe it was portkeys, was like being squeezed through a tube, so perhaps whoever invented that was ahead of the times.
By the time I reached the Room of Requirement, I had settled it in my mind. I walked the corridor three times, holding the thought of a workshop and a heap of old things I would not mind ruining, and on the third pass the door appeared as it always did. I paused only long enough to draw a steady breath before I pushed it open.
The room beyond was larger than I had expected, irregular in shape and stacked with oddments from every corner of the castle. Broken chairs leaned against the wall, a cracked wardrobe stood half open, and old trunks and travel bags were piled in one corner in various states of wear. Dust lay over everything. The whole place looked as though it had been forgotten by three generations and then brought here by force.
Useful, though.
I crossed the room and began sorting through the trunks and bags. Two of the trunks still had latches. One bag had a seam that had been stitched once and given up on after that. I pulled three trunks and two bags into the centre of the floor and lined them up in a rough row.
"Right," I said under my breath. "Let us see what I can do."
Capacious Extremis, on paper, was not difficult to understand. The charm created a spatial partition within an object, then anchored an extension lattice to the inside boundary without changing the outside shape. The exterior remained the same while the interior became larger (space was increased). How much larger depended on how intricate the lattice was and how stable the binding held, and most importantly how much magic was pumped into the thing.
The problem was the failure mode.
If the binding broke, whether from damage, poor maintenance, or the object being destroyed, everything inside would return to natural size at once. The book had described the result with maddening caution, as though politeness might make it less awful. It had used the word violently.
That word had been underlined.
I looked at the first trunk and took out the scraps I had brought with me: a few lengths of cut wood and some useless parchment. Nothing valuable, so without further ado, let the explosions begin!
I laid one hand on the trunk and drew the rune pattern I had planned in my head, keeping it as simple as possible. The charm settled cleanly.
I frowned, tested the edge with my fingers, then opened the trunk and dropped one of the wooden scraps inside. It landed with a dull sound, and when I peered in, the inside looked about twice the size it ought to have been.
Though I was a bit underwhelmed, kind of hoping for something a bit more dramatic, but it's a good problem to have I suppose.
"What is the little master doing?" A high pitched voice sounded from behind.
I turned so fast I nearly slipped on the stone.
A house elf stood a few paces away, wringing her hands. She had large, dark eyes and ears that hung low beside her face. I had seen enough to know she was no apparition and no illusion, though I still blinked once before answering.
"Sorry," I said. "I did not hear you come in."
"Nobody ever doth," she said, though not unkindly. "I am Wibsy. The room knew you wanted things moved, so I came to see if you meant harm."
"I am not doing anything dangerous on purpose," I said. "Only testing."
She gave me a long, assessing look and then, to my surprise, sat down on the floor opposite me with the solemnity of someone joining a prayer. "What sort of thing are you making?"
I hesitated, then decided there was no reason to lie. "A book. One that can hold more pages than it should, and copy text using runes."
Wibsy's ears perked. "A book that remembers?"
"Not quite. A book that copies."
Continuing my work with an audience now, I moved to the second trunk and repeated the process. The second charm took without difficulty and I put the next scrap of wood inside and closed the lid.
Wibsy leaned forward. "What will happen if you stop the charm?"
"That," I said, "is what I am about to find out."
Her eyes widened. "You mean to break it?"
"Yes."
"Why would you wish to break a perfectly good charm?"
I glanced at her. "Because I would rather break it on purpose than discover its limits by accident."
She opened her mouth, thought better of arguing, and shut it again. "That is a sensible answer, though I do not much care for it."
"I do not much care for it either."
I moved the third trunk a little farther from the others, then checked the room once more. If this went badly, I did not want to destroy half the workshop with it. The wood scraps were enough. I had no interest in storing anything expensive inside a test object until I understood exactly how the charm behaved.
Wibsy drew her knees up and watched me with grave interest. Fearful I would catch a sight that would scar my innocent youth, I turn away from the house-elf and ready myself for an explosion. The room gave me a crystal wall to see through.
I took out my wand. "Ready?"
"No," she said promptly.
"Fair enough."
I pointed at the first trunk, whispered the counter-charm, and watched the binding give way.
Nothing happened for a fraction of a second.
Then the trunk shuddered.
The lid burst upward with a crack that snapped through the room like a whip. A length of wood shot out hard enough to strike the far wall. A second piece came after it, then a third, all of them flung clear with such force that one struck the ceiling beams and spun down in a splintering spray. I was hopin… I mean anitic… expecting it to burst out in all directions, yet another anticlimactic ending.
Wibsy made a high, strangled sound. "Oh, botheration."
A few stones fell from the ceiling, though I wasn't worried. If it can handle fiendfyre, it can handle this. Wibsy slowly turned her head to look at me. "That was your test?"
"Yes."
"Did it pass?"
I looked from the broken trunk to the ceiling and then back to her. "I think the room may have concerns."
She stared at me for a second, then gave a tiny nod. "Yes. I think it does."
I let out a breath through my nose and rubbed my face with one hand. "Right. So. That version will need some work."
"Help me with the mess," I said.
"I shall," Wibsy replied, as though this had been her idea from the start.
The next four attempts were more cautious. I kept the expansion ratio modest, little more than a half again the object's natural interior volume, and gave most of my attention to the binding itself. Size mattered less than the way the charm took hold of the material, at least that's what I kept telling myself. A binding that followed the grain of the wood held better than one forced across it. One that matched the object's own structure lasted longer before it began to fray.
By the fourth attempt, I had a bag with a stable two-to-one expansion that held for forty minutes without weakening.
By the sixth, I had a small trunk with a steady five-to-one expansion and a binding that answered properly to a deliberate release charm instead of falling apart of its own accord. I could open and close it as often as I pleased, and the structure did not shift.
I set down in my notebook: Boundary alignment is critical. Follow grain or structural seam. Expansion above eight-to-one grows unstable under ordinary conditions without active maintenance. Stable range appears to lie between three-to-one and six-to-one for wood-framed objects. Leather behaves differently. Test separately.
The room had gone cold by then, and the hand I used for writing ached. I rose, rolled my shoulders, and looked over the row of test objects spread across the floor.
Six failures. Two partial successes. One proper working prototype.
A standard Thursday night, really.
Friday morning was Charms. Professor Ashford went through a review sequence before the end-of-year tests, covering the illumination charm, the binding thread charm, and a heating application I had already met in my rune work. I sat through it, took notes, and answered when called upon, which happened once, and I answered correctly.
When the lesson ended, I walked back with Eleanor. She had her psalter tucked beneath one arm and her Charms notes beneath the other, and she kept giving me the same careful look she used when she meant to ask something and was still deciding how. Also, what a weird way to carry books, but girls will be girls.
"Thou hast not been in the common room these evenings," she said.
"I've been working on something."
"Thy runes again?"
"Related to them."
She waited.
"I'm trying to build something that copies books."
Her brow furrowed a little. "A copying charm?"
"More like a copying machine. Something that can work by itself, without my standing over it every time."
She considered that, then gave a small nod. "That soundeth a useful thing."
"It would be, if I can make it work."
"Aye." She glanced down at the books under her arm. "Books are dear enough without one having to pay for every copy twice over."
"That is part of the thought."
She did not press me after that. Eleanor was good that way. She asked one question, took the answer as it was given, and did not pry for the rest. I had come to think that was one of her better qualities.
Saturday I spent in the Room of Requirement from morning until supper.
I had gone in before breakfast with my notes under one arm, the blank book under the other, and the sort of resolve that only comes when you know a thing must be done properly or not at all. The Room had answered me at once, as it often did when I asked for work space and silence. It gave me a broad table, good light, a steady chair, and a floor that did not force me to think about the cold. That alone made it better than most places I had known since coming here.
The carving device I had built in my second year was set on the table beside the book, its levitation frame already aligned and ready. It held both the volume and the knife in suspension, each one moving by directed thought instead of by my hands. I had made the thing because my fingers were not steady enough, back then, for fine work. Now they were better. Not perfect, but better. My rune work had improved with them as well. Even so, the device still gave me a level of precision I could not trust myself to keep by hand when the work became small, cramped, and exact. The Codex Infinitas needed exactness. It was no use pretending otherwise.
Before I touched the book, I laid out my notes again and checked them line by line.
Fehu first. America first, Fehu first; simple really.
That had been true since my earliest experiments. I had never found a reason to depart from it. Fehu drew in ambient magic and set the current moving through the carved channels. Without it, the rest was just pattern and hope. From Fehu the intake led into the transcription chain: Ansuz to catch symbolic information, Laguz to smooth and regularize it, and Kenaz to convert it into a stable encoded form. That was the part that made the Codex possible at all. It was the bridge between raw input and legible storage.
I traced the chain with my finger once more and muttered, "No mistakes."
A voice from the doorway answered me.
"Thou sayest that every hour, and yet thou dost still make thyself labour as though thou wert at war."
I looked up and saw Margaret standing there with her arms folded, her hair already tied back and her sleeves rolled to the elbow. She had the expression she always wore when she meant to be useful and expected to be listened to.
"I am at war," I said. "With my own incompetence."
She snorted softly and came farther into the room. "That is a tedious enemy, then."
"It is a stubborn one."
"Like thee."
"I will take that as a compliment."
"Thou hadst best."
She crossed to the table and looked over the notes I had spread beside the book. Her eyes moved quickly across the runes. She was not as fluent with the theory as I was, but she had learned enough by now to follow my explanations without complaint, which was more than could be said for most people I met.
That drew a brief smile from her. She leaned over the table, careful not to disturb the knife's suspended position. "And what cometh after?"
"The control chain."
She nodded, waiting.
I pointed as I spoke. "Ansuz captures the symbolic form. Laguz smooths it so the structure does not arrive jagged or broken. Kenaz makes it stable enough to remain as an encoded pattern. If the transcription breaks, the rest of the system does not matter."
"Like a copied letter with half the words smudged?"
"Exactly like that."
She glanced toward the blank book. "And this heavy thing is to hold all of it?"
"It is to become all of it."
That made her look at me more closely. "Thou dost say such things with a calm face, but it soundeth like a dangerous sort of work."
"It is dangerous work."
"Then why dost thou grin as though it pleaseth thee?"
I looked down at the notes and did not answer at once. The truth was simple enough. I liked difficult work when I could see the shape of it. I liked the way a problem could be broken apart and rebuilt into something that behaved. I liked that better than pretending magic was a matter of luck, instinct, or whatever else people used to excuse their ignorance.
"Because," I said at last, "if this works, it will be worth the trouble."
She gave me a long, dry look. "That is a very Nicholas answer."
"That may be because I am Nicholas."
"That is likely."
I set the notes aside and lifted the knife with a small pressure of thought. The levitation framework held it steady in the air above the back cover, edge aligned with the line I had marked the night before. The book itself floated in the matching frame, turned so the surface lay flat and easy for the cut. I had measured the depth three times already. A hair too shallow and the channels would not hold. A hair too deep and the board would split or weaken under stress. The spine gave me the hardest work. Dense material. Small margin for error.
Margaret watched me for a moment and then said, "Dost thou mean to work all day without rest?"
"Yes."
"That was not a question thou shouldst answer so swiftly."
"It was, for me."
She shook her head, but there was no true disapproval in it. "Thou art impossible."
"I prefer determined."
"Thou mayest prefer what thou wilt. The result is still that I must fetch thee down to supper before thou dost turn thyself into a corpse from overwork."
I glanced at her. "That is dramatic."
"It is accurate."
That won a small smile from me. "If I collapse, you may drag me."
"An unkind prospect."
"Then do not let me collapse."
"I shall do my best."
I turned back to the book and began the first cut.
The knife moved with a thin, careful scrape through the board, following the line I had marked for the intake path. The sound was quiet in the empty classroom, almost delicate, and I found it easier to think when the room held only that sound and the low hum of my own concentration. Fehu came first, then the paired channels fanning outward into Ansuz, Laguz, and Kenaz. The intake point had to be exact. Every curve mattered. Every angle decided how well the magic would move once the circuit was live.
I worked in silence for a while. Margaret stayed near the table, sorting my notes into neat piles when she thought I was not looking. Once, after a long stretch without interruption, she said, "Why doth the first rune ever begin there and not elsewhere?"
"Because Fehu is the beginning of motion," I said. "If you start with another rune, you are asking the structure to move before it knows how."
She considered that. "And the closure?"
"That comes at the end. Without closure, the energy has nowhere to return. Nothing runs stably."
"Thou dost speak of it as though it were a mill wheel."
"In a way, it is."
That seemed to satisfy her, or at least to exhaust the line of questioning for the moment.
By late morning the intake side was taking shape. The channels ran clean across the back cover, and the first set of runes sat in the board without rough edges. I paused only long enough to stretch my hands and flex my fingers. The levitated knife hovered patiently where I left it.
"You should eat something," Margaret said.
"I did."
"That was yesterday."
"Was it? Oh well, I'll be fine."
She gave me a look.
I held up a hand. "I know. I shall eat at noon."
"Thou wilt, or I shall sit upon thee."
"And on that note, I shall see you at noon."
I returned to work and did not stop until the ache in my hands told me I had been at it too long. Noon came and went. I went down to eat, came back, and set to the storage structure in the afternoon with a bowl of soup still warm in my stomach and the taste of bread lingering on my tongue.
The Jera loops took longer.
The storage lattice had to repeat, branch, and preserve without collapsing into a tangled mess. The structure was meant to append each completed copy into a new branch, not overwrite what was already there. That meant space planning and no crossovers. I had learned early that a crossed channel could ruin an entire circuit, and the lesson had been expensive enough that I still remembered the mistake whenever I looked at a fresh surface.
I marked the first branch carefully, then the second. Each completed loop needed enough room to hold its own runic sequence while still connecting back into the larger system. If I misjudged the proportions, one branch would crowd another and the whole thing would fail in a way that would be tedious to repair and humiliating to explain.
Margaret came back after a while with a mug of water and set it beside me.
"I thought I told thee to eat," she said.
"I did."
"Drink, then."
She watched me for a second, then looked at the half-finished lattice. "That many loops?"
"Yes."
"Why so many?"
"Because the Codex is not meant to store one thing. It must keep receiving new copies without losing the old ones."
She frowned. "Why not simply write them in order?"
"There isn't any simple order, the whole thing has to encompass the object, as well as interconnect to related runes. It's complicated"
That made her go quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Thou art always making things more difficult than they must be."
"If you say so," I replied. I looked back at the board and found I had gone still without meaning to. The afternoon light had shifted through the room's windows, falling lower across the table. The work surface was crowded now with notes, shavings, the levitated knife, and the book itself, which was beginning to look less like a blank volume and more like the skeleton of something far more complicated.
By evening I had the primary intake and storage systems inscribed and the closing loop connected.
I sat back in my chair and let the knife lower itself onto the table. My shoulders ached. My wrists felt tight from holding the same careful posture for hours. The book lay open in front of me, its back cover marked with clean channels and the beginnings of a structure that might, if the rest of the work went well, become something worth keeping.
Margaret came to stand beside me and looked down at it.
"Well?" she said.
"Well," I answered, "the hard part is not yet done."
"That is a very cheerful thing to say after a day's labour."
"It is true."
She pointed at the interior pages, or rather at the empty space where the interior lattice still needed to be integrated. "And that part?"
"That is the next stage."
She let out a slow breath through her nose. "Thou art impossible."
"I have been told."
What I did not yet have was the Capacious Extremis lattice integrated into the interior. That part would take the charm first, then the rune overlay to stabilize and anchor it. The charm would create the expansion. The runes would keep it from collapsing under the strain of its own shape.
And that meant I was only halfway done. Yippee…
On Sunday, I applied the extension charm to the inside of the book. Enchanting was exceedingly neat. To be able to imbue an object with a charms effect blows my mind. More so for enchanters who master the craft, being able to use a levitation charm to make things fly or the sorting hat enchanted to have a modicum of intelligence. Oh the things you can do.
Regarding my own efforts on enchanting, I kept the ratio low on purpose. Four to one. Enough to make room for a useful amount of copied material, but not so much that I would wander into the unstable range I had already seen during trunk testing. I worked the charm into the binding in careful passes, laying it along the spine and the inner edges of the covers. Wherever the board would allow it, I followed the grain instead of fighting it. The book itself gave no sign of resistance. The charm settled cleanly, the way a well-fitted part settles into place when the measurements have been done properly.
Then I added the stabilizing rune overlay.
Small support sigils went into each corner, with more along the spine line. I connected them with narrow channels that ran parallel to the edge of the extension field, keeping the whole thing locked into a fixed shape. They were not active in the way a casting rune was active. They did not perform a task on their own. They held the structure. That was the entire point. Without them, the boundary would drift over time. With them, it stayed where I put it.
I closed the book.
Then I opened it again and checked the interior.
It held.
I stood there for a moment with the book in my hands, looking at the pages and waiting for some sign of failure I would have to repair. None came. The structure remained sound. The interior space was there, hidden where it ought to be, quiet and steady and ready for use. I set the book down with more care than I had used in any of the earlier steps, then pressed my fingers to the cover and let myself breathe out.
The first proper test came with a library volume I had brought up in my coat. It was a slim text on historical ward construction, one I had already read through and did not mind losing if the experiment failed. I set it on the floor about two feet from the closed Codex. Then I opened the Codex and placed my thumb against the Fehu rune.
For the first six seconds, nothing happened.
I counted in my head.
Seven.
Eight.
Then the pages of the ward text began to turn.
Slowly at first, then with more confidence, the book moved on its own from front to back as if some unseen reader had taken hold of it. At the same time, a faint warmth spread through the board surface of the Codex, starting near the Ansuz position and moving outward in a thin band. It was not heat in the ordinary sense. It was closer to the warm pulse I had learned to associate with a transcription sequence that was actually functioning. The pages in the ward text came to rest at the end. The book stopped moving.
I picked up the Codex and thought about ward construction.
The text was inside it. Not laid out in neat page form, because I had not built a retrieval display into this version, but present all the same, held in the storage structure in a way I could feel once I focused. That was enough for now. More than enough, really. It meant the core system worked. It meant the book could receive, hold, and preserve information without the whole thing collapsing in on itself or drifting out of alignment.
I leaned back against the wall of the Room of Requirement and let out a breath I had been holding since Thursday.
Below is a cleaner, longer rewrite of the passage, with the dialogue tightened and the prose made more natural while keeping the same scene and facts.
The refinements took three more days.
I spent most of that time testing the Codex's limits and writing down what it would and would not do. The working range proved narrower than I had hoped. When I moved the source book farther from the Codex, the transcription rate began to fall off after about eight feet and stopped entirely at twelve. Ten feet seemed to be the safest distance, the point where the copy still ran cleanly without hesitation, so I marked that as the limit and left it there.
The duplicate-detection test was simpler. I tried to copy the same ward-text twice. The second time, the Codex did nothing. The pages did not turn. That meant Isa and Perthro had held as intended, and I did not need to waste another hour doubting my own work. Hah, I cannot begin to describe the pleasure and satisfaction for something to work on the first try.
The copy speed was easier to measure. Over a dozen trials, the Codex averaged just under one text every two seconds when the source was short and clear. Denser material slowed it down, but not by much. At that pace, ten thousand books would take something like five hours. The Restricted Section held far less than that, maybe two thousand texts by my rough estimate. If I could get the Codex close enough to each volume, it ought to work through the lot in under ninety minutes.
On Tuesday evening, I copied the Codex into two smaller blank books, using what I had learned from the first version. The second copy worked on the first attempt. The third did not. There was a channel fault in the Jera loop, and I spent two hours tracing it before I found the mistake and re-cut the line. The first version remained the cleanest, the most reliable, so I kept it as my main copy.
Wednesday afternoon, I gave Thomas one of the spare bags I had extended during trunk testing. It was not one of the Codex versions, just a plain extended bag with a stable three-to-one interior expansion. He took it, weighed it in one hand, and looked inside with a serious expression. Then he shook it once, hard enough to test the seams, and said nothing for a long moment.
"How much doth it hold?" he asked at last.
"About three times what it looks like it should."
He turned the bag over, studying the stitching and the mouth of it. "Doth it weigh more?"
"No." Duh, why would I make an spatially expanded object and not include a feather-light charm? I definitely remembered to do that on my first attempt. Definitely.
"Hm."
He slung it over one shoulder and crossed the common room, then came back again in a wide loop, as if he wanted to see how it sat in motion. When he returned, he gave it another look and nodded once.
"That is useful," he said. Jeez, tough crowd.
Eleanor received one of the later trunk iterations, the one stable at four-to-one. She accepted it with a quiet nod, then opened it at once and checked whether her psalter would fit inside. It did, and now I'm worrying if these two are part Somali.
Margaret took hers more slowly.
She stared at the trunk for a long while without speaking, then opened it, looked inside, shut it, and looked back at me with that careful, assessing expression she wore whenever she was thinking three steps ahead.
"How long doth it hold the charm without breaking?" she asked.
"Three weeks on the best version. I have not tested longer."
"What breaks it?"
"Damage to the frame. Or a cancellation charm cast directly on the binding."
She nodded as if she had already expected as much and was only confirming the details. "I shall keep it from Thomas, then."
Across the room, Thomas looked up at once. "I am right here."
"I know," Margaret said, already turning back to her notes.
That got a brief look of outrage from him, which only made her mouth twitch faintly before she bent over her revision work again.
Thursday was ground maintenance.
A section of the outer ward drainage channel had silted over the winter and needed clearing before the spring rains started in earnest. Owen Thatcher put three of us on it: myself, a third-year Hufflepuff, and a second-year Ravenclaw whose name I had not yet caught. The channel ran along the base of the curtain wall for about thirty feet, stone-lined and narrow, and the winter had packed it full of heavy gray clay. It was the sort of work that looked simple until one tried to shift it.
In first year, I would have gone at it with a trowel and my hands, one miserable scoop at a time.
I was not in first year any longer.
The third-year showed me the charm Thatcher allowed for this sort of job, a directed pressure spell that pushed loose material away from a surface without scouring the stone itself. It took a few tries before I had the angle properly set. Once I did, the silt came free cleanly, rolling outward in thick clumps and leaving the channel beneath it visible at last. What had looked to be two hours' labour went to forty minutes.
Thatcher came to inspect the work when we were done. He stood with his hands behind his back, looked the channel over from one end to the other, and gave a single nod.
"Adequate," he said.
It was the sort of praise Professor Graves reserved for work she actually approved of. Meaning it was no praise at all and the woman was just a sour lemon, never a smile on her face. Hey lady! Maybe if you weren't single at age fourty, you'd be doing better but what do I know? Complaining about the medieval feminist, I continued with my magical child labour.
Friday evening found the restricted section quieter than it had been in months. Most of the students were in their common rooms, bent over test notes, and Mistress Forrest was occupied at the main cataloguing desk in the outer library. I signed the ledger, took my usual chair, and opened the Codex on my knee. I may have forgotten to mention but I recast the extension charm a few times to the point of magical exhaustion (something I do ot recommend). So now I have no clue how many books this thing can copy but here's to hoping.
I set it open, face down, on the arm of the chair.
Then I spent the next hour reading a text on historical ward lattice geometry, making notes in my notebook while the Codex handled everything within ten feet of where I sat. I did not bother to watch what it copied. There was no need. Anything it took in would remain there for later use. The duplicate detection dealt with the volumes I had already brought near it on earlier visits. The Jera loops kept branching as intended, each completed entry set down cleanly, one after another.
My handy dandy pirate book could copy a book about one every four seconds, requiring a little over an hour for a thousand books. Meaning, I need upwards of 40 hours in the restricted section alone to copy everything. Split between days, that comes out to nearly three hours a day; no rest for the weary.
And so I passed the time reading an intriguing compilation of necrobiographies. In other words, someone spent their professional life finding ghosts and writing their biographies. Did you know that Sir Nicholas was beheaded after having cast a faulty teeth straightening charm on a noble? Or the Fat Friar who was a monk for the church, caught and executed for magical healing. There was one that really through me for a loop. Its excerpt read as follows:
In the first Years of my Life, which I, Dame Euphemia of the Highlands, do here set forth for the Edification of such Readers as possess the Courage to behold them, I was given to a Temper most contrary to the Customs of my Sex and Station. For though my Father, a laird of modest Holdings, sought to raise me in the Manner befitting a Christian Maid, I found no Delight in the spinning of Wool nor in the quiet keeping of Household Matters, but rather in the chasing of wild Creatures, the climbing of perilous Crags, and the striking of any who presumed to instruct me without my Leave. Many have said that I was born with a Spirit too large for my Body, and I do not deny it, for I felt within me a Fire that no Counsel could quench, nor any Rod correct.
In my Youth I did commit sundry Acts which the timid might call Misdeeds, yet I hold them Proof of my Vigour. I once struck a Bishop upon the Mouth for daring to rebuke my Understanding of the Trinity, and though he fell into a Rosebush and emerged much scratched, I maintain he departed the Encounter a wiser Man. I attempted also the taming of a wolf, which did not proceed as I intended, for the Beast, being of a stubborn Disposition not unlike my own, sought rather to tame me. Yet from this I learned that even the fiercest Creature may be met with Courage, though not always with Success. In these Days I composed my famed Book of Cookery, The Scullion's Doom, whose Recipes consist chiefly of Threats, Admonitions, and dire Warnings to any who should scorch a pot or over‑salt a broth.
My Death, which I recount here without Shame, befell me in the Year of Our Lord 1319, when I undertook the proving of my newest Invention, a Catapult designed for the Advancement of Women in Warfare. The Engine, being over‑zealous in its Operation, did seize me with great Enthusiasm and cast me bodily into a peat bog, where I sank with a sound most unbecoming a Lady of my Rank. Yet though my Body was lost to the Mire, my Spirit rose unbroken, for Death found me no more obedient than Life had done. Thus did I enter my second Estate, not as a silent Shade, but as a Ghost appointed to the Rebuke of Folly.
In the After‑Life I discovered a Talent most singular: the Ability to haunt Mortals before they committed their Errors. Many a drunken Youth, reaching for a third Cup of Ale, hath heard my Voice cry "Nay, thou art already two Cups past Wisdom." Many a hot‑headed Knight, eager to challenge a Windmill or a Weather‑Vane, hath felt my cold Hand upon his Shoulder, bidding him reconsider. I have prevented Duels, Accidental Marriages, ill‑advised Inventions, and one Attempt to ride a cow into Battle. Some have called me a Nuisance, others a Blessing, but all agree that I am persistent beyond Reason.
I set these Matters down not for my own Glory, for I have ever possessed enough of that, but that the Reader may profit from my Experience, though I confess I hold little Hope he shall. For Mankind is a stubborn Beast, slow to heed Counsel whether from the Living or the Dead. Yet if any Soul, upon reading this Account, should pause before leaping into a Bog, striking a Bishop, or constructing a Catapult without due Consideration, then my Labours shall not have been in vain. And if he heeds me not, then let him proceed, and learn as I did - by Catastrophe.
Mistress Forrest called the hour from the front room just before nine. The light in the stacks had gone thin and gray by then, and the lamps did little more than hold back the dark. I closed the Codex, tucked my notebook under my arm, and walked out through the shelves toward the door.
Three thousand texts, perhaps two thousand of them in the restricted section alone. Five hours of passive work could cover the whole collection if I was patient enough. All I needed was time near the books and a chair that did not make me fall asleep in it.
At the window by the end of the stacks, the last of the evening light had turned blue-gray against the stone. Below, in the outer ward, a guard paced his circuit, his boots striking the flags at a steady, unhurried pace.
Summer was two weeks away and I had no time to spare before my pass expired.