21 Harry Potter : Chapter 21: Routine II

"Very delicate." I immediately commented as I skimmed the recipe. 

Two month-long process, necessity to simmer under the moon, usage of a crystal lens to enhance the light of Polar Star, which I'm guessing is used as a guiding tool for the potion... Fucking hell, this bastard applied my method to brew sunlight to the stars! I now know why he was telling me to keep doing whatever I wanted.

...

"It's revolutionary." I smiled thinly at the professor, and maybe for the first time, I was reminded that there was some worth to Slughorn's name.

Potions were extremely complex things, an underpowered potion wasn't a Polijuice that transformed only your hair, it was a poisonous attempt at your life. And not quite for the first time, I reminded myself that he was a fat-bastard of an opportunist.

Returning to the Daunt-Dimming Brew, as Slughorn had explained in my very first lesson, a potion was a story. A broken story wasn't a potion, was a mess, and considered that potions were mostly brewed in order to be drunk, the consequences were quite dire.

Obtaining a potion capable of targeting a very specific thing was a thing, Fred and George had managed that much with their sweets to cause and stop nosebleeds, Skelegro had an exact target.

The Daunt-Dimming Draught was a potion that not only targeted bad memories, but that simply scrubbed them a little, removing the edge of traumatic experiences.

It was something that would not remove memories, for that sort of thing there were several options, no, this was... truly extraordinary. And I licked my lips wondering what effects it would have on me.

...bloodied coughs that echoed wetly within the circle of stones...

"There are less than ten people in this castle capable of recognizing the complexity of the effects of this potion, Mr. Hagrid, six of those are members of the staff, and I assure you, no 12 years old student has any business in understanding something of this magnitude." Slughorn's smile was outright predatory.

"So I'll spare us the effort of pretending that you didn't notice my use of your solution to concentrate the properties of sunlight in this potion."

The Daunt-Dimming Draught would make my memories of the summer feel... in black and white, for lack of a better comparison.

...roots piercing the skin, eyes shattering like glass...

I shrugged, not seeing Slughorn's point while I tried to focus. Yeah, he was somewhat a cunt because he blatantly made use of something that should have been my intellectual property, but that would teach me why wizards were so damn secretive.

"You turned my detentions into lessons, professor, I guess that the least I could do was sharing my reasoning."

"Quite." the Slytherin in front of me replied, "Nevertheless, Saint Mungo ordered a rather large amount of this particular brew, and I was wondering if you'd be interested in joining the other student that will be giving me a hand. It would be an invaluable learning opportunity."

So you get to sell shit brewed by me and another poor sod, while I have to bite my tongue and say thank you? Fuck you. "I'm honored professor, but I'd rather experiment on my own..."

I'd appreciate a dose of this Draught. I forced down the shiver that the horrific death of my 'father' brought me.

"The ingredients for this particular brew are quite rare, I'm afraid that purchasing them is quite beyond your means." the professor replied, letting the 'I'll catch you if you try to steal them' unsaid.

"But I understand that you wouldn't do nothing for nothing. So if you're curious about a particular potion, I guess that I could spend the time your work would free for me to instruct you."

"That's... surprisingly fair of you professor." I blinked in surprise.

"Mr. Hagrid, we both know that you'll likely grow to be an exceptional potion Master, why wouldn't I nurture that talent now that nobody else would give you the time of the day?" Slughorn didn't even pretend to not have secondary objectives while helping me.

He declared outright that he was lending me a hand in order to be kept on my 'good books' if I ever became a big voice in the larger world of potion-making. Or in the world at large. I corrected my previous statement.

I had accepted at the moment he had made the offer, but that didn't mean that I couldn't take a moment to balk at the sheer balls that Slughorn had to have in order to say such a proposition out loud: "Felix Felicis." I simply replied, remembering my frustrations in being unable to find the relative recipe during my first year at Hogwarts.

"Oho!" Slughorn laughed openly: "Nobody could ever doubt that you're a Slytherin! The old Felix, extremely difficult to brew, outright disastrous with the slightest error. But a deal is a deal, if you manage to make your colleague agree with this choice, then we'll brew a batch together."

Oh, right, another student. I sighed, preparing myself to having to deal with yet another no-name with a mental maturity that, to be fair, was on par with his or her age: "Who is this other student?"

"One Tom Riddle, an older Slytherin."

In hindsight, I don't know why I'm surprised.

...

A few days later, I was sitting in a comfortable armchair next to a fireplace in the secret room that Minerva, Tom, and I spent so much of our free time on during the previous year. It was still somewhat bland, but personality would come with use. Personally, I was eager to see what was going to happen.

Riddle was tapping his wand distractedly over an area of the wall while Minerva was dutifully stacking a large number of notes while sitting at her desk. I know that the idea was to have a private study room, but this silence is murdering me.

Riddle had quite readily accepted my choice of brewing Felix Felicis under the guide of Slughorn, and so we were spending much of our free tie working together as we assisted our head of house in brewing the potion he invented with the aid of my discoveries.

But as a consequence of our prolonged closeness, we were both a bit less tolerating of the other. Personally, I was starting to get twitchy after a few minutes spent near him when I didn't strictly need to.

"How do you enchant musical instruments to play?" I asked distractedly as I finally gave in to my impulses and selected one of the potions I had brewed for recreational purposes. Getting tipsy will make this more bearable. Fucking hell, it's 1941, acceptable music isn't around yet.

While I tried to console myself with the idea that there was a rather large number of live concerts in my future, Minerva took pity on me and deigned herself to answer.

"With your wand?" Oh fantastic: sarcasm.

"So runes have nothing to do with wards?" I watched carefully as Tom waved his yew wand over the bare rock: he was attempting to figure out how to build a secret entrance that wouldn't require us to travel each time to the 4th floor, but it was a work in progress.

Hogwarts was quirky, but didn't allow just anyone to rearrange it: we had pushed it by walling off an entire corridor, and my working theory was that we needed the Rùnda to become a bit more set in its ways before we could consider it an entity like the Common Rooms. I only hope it doesn't require 1000 years.

"Were you sleeping while I placed the notice-me-not on the Rùnda's entrance last year?" Tom rolled his eyes tiredly at me.

"More or less." Minerva replied distractedly, trying to stop me and Tom from bickering.

"Once you're capable enough you can ward something without the need for runes, in the same way you can enchant or curse an object."

"Because you understand the symbols enough to use them only in your head?" I wondered, thinking about 'muffliato', a spell that Harry Potter used willy nilly even while he was on the run. But this explanation from Minerva actually erased several questions I had been unable to answer.

It was the same principle behind my workings with fire during the previous academic year and my ritual in the summer.

Keeping in mind the collection of meanings associated with fire had made me capable of simply bending the flame of the lit candle to my will, and the ritual... bone and wand and blood... I shuddered, and I didn't know if it was because of disgust or elation, forcing myself to focus on the environment around me.

"The difference between enchanting and warding are more in the classification of their effects than in anything else. Wards are placed over an area, and the most long-lasting tend to be tied to a fixed element within said area.

They're anchored to a fixed element, and their effect is turned outwards, affecting something in their proximity." Riddle's tone had turned pedantic than, smirking subtly even as he didn't turn to face me.

"Egyptians didn't bother hiding their wards, and displayed their hieroglyphs freely, but that was before Rome and the diffusion of wand-wavers."

"Rome was where wands actually got started?" I asked surprised, taking another sip from my chosen beverage, luxuriating in the taste for a moment. Rome is responsible for the diffusion of wand-lore across the world. 

That actually made sense, before the Statute of Secrecy, the supremacy of a country had to be somewhat intertwined with the local magical population, be they creatures or wizardkind. Still, this doesn't explain why nobody mentioned this.

"How could they conquer the world otherwise?" Minerva actually stopped whatever she was studying to look at me with something akin to disbelief: "You have the most curious lacunes in your knowledge, Rubeus."

"Well, there have been a lot of conquerors in history, Alexander, Temujin..." I frowned ignoring her gibe while slowly coming to a stop.

The great conquerors were single people, it wasn't impossible that their charisma dragged in their wake some wizards willing to help them.

Rome was a whole different thing: it was an empire that lasted through the generations, indicating some strong magical presence among the Romans' ranks. It was like comparing a single wave to the slow mounting of the tide.

"In the vast planes of Asia, witches and wizards were more focused on a tribal-like use of magic, rituals to the Sky and other such half-religious things.

And while the priests that followed Alexander's army were wizards, they mostly believed their power to be given from the gods, and so far away from Greece, they didn't feel capable of much.

Besides, Alexander's bouts of madness are well documented, from the curse he unleashed when he cut the Giordan Knot to the Fading Curse that killed him in the end. The local wizards broke the greek priests' wards over the army around the time fo Bucefalo's death." Riddle explained again.

"Why couldn't Binns talk about this stuff instead of goblins?" Minerva's rhetorical question did nothing to hide her academic interest, and spurned another question out of me.

"Because before Hogwarts there wasn't an actual sense of community of wizardkind, was it?" the realization struck me like lightning, children growing together, learning together, was bound to have massive effects on society.

Before Hogwarts, magic was likely either self-taught, passed from master to apprentice, or kept within a single bloodline. But it was a fragmented knowledge, likely intermixed with half-baked ritualisms that didn't actually affect the magic itself, or that outright limited it.

Riddle's youthful face turned towards me with something akin to respect plastered on his features.

"There was not."

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