Chapter 20: Chapter 19: Runes!
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"You know, it never occurred to me before, but that makes a lot of sense. Those things are much cheaper than the magical equivalent." She looks at her own parchment. "I wonder if parchment is easier to enchant than Muggle paper made from wood pulp?"
"Well they make wands out of normal wood found in Muggle forests, don't they?"
"I don't know much wandlore, but I guess they do, since my wand is made of vine wood, Harry's is holly, and Ron's is willow. I don't know if the trees have to be magically treated or something, though."
"Hmm, well maybe there's an idea for after graduation: introduce wood pulp paper to the wizarding world, undercut parchment prices, make tons of money. There must be something holding the wizarding world back from accepting it, though. I'm sure somebody else had to have thought of that before."
Hermione looks shocked. "I wouldn't be too sure, I mean, look how quickly I just accepted that quills and ink wells and parchment were the proper way to write in the magical world. You might be on to something there, William."
Her use of my new name makes me smile. "Well we can't recreate the magical world in our image in only our Fourth Year. I'll just get used to this for now."
The ink comes out uneven for a while, but I'm not doing too badly practicing the runes and making my own reference paper.
After I've copied all of them, I look up and Hermione is going through the extra, more advanced books she brought over.
Or rather, the books that I brought over; she just picked them out.
"Can you look at my runes? I practiced them on this scrap sheet first, but I'm not confident about a few of them."
"Sure, let me see...the lower tail of eihwaz should be a bit more prominent or else it looks too much like laguz—" she pauses to flip back and forth between the sheets of parchment. "What order are these in?"
"Oh, this first sheet are the runes I thought might figure prominently in defensive wards and enchantments, and possible supporting runes. Then on the second page are the other runes I wasn't so sure about."
"That's...but why would you...I would have never thought to do that."
I shrug. "I learn better when the material has practical applications, like with our little potions experiment last night. It's why I didn't want to take Divination or Muggle Studies. I don't have a drop of Seer blood in me, I'm sure, so I highly doubt I would get anything out of Divination at all, and I've heard you can learn more just by going out and being among Muggles than you can learn in the Hogwarts class."
Hermione looks surprised. I figure she just learns what's in the book because that's what's in the book.
It's almost like one fanfiction said: what's the point of even having a Ravenclaw House when the most Ravenclaw student in the school is in Gryffindor?
Of course, she's a hell of a Gryffindor, too. She shakes her head and smiles at my notes. I'm just happy she can read them.
"Some of these things are brilliant. Are you looking to be a cursebreaker or something? Let's check out books on warding and runic enchantment, see if some of your observations are on the mark."
"Are we still on schedule?"
She checks the clock – hers is much prettier than the one I conjured – and purses her lips. "Well we can slip a little bit...I've figured in some extra time before lunch. I want to see if some of these ideas have merit."
"You don't think so?"
"I do, they make a lot of sense. But like I said, we don't talk about this stuff until upper years. Here..." she says, handing me a book off the pile that she hadn't yet gotten to, while she grabs two from the ones she'd already perused.
Mine is entitled Basic Warding Schemes for Defence and Safety of the Home, which sounds promising.
In it I find ward schemes for an intruder alarm, protecting the outer walls against the elements and stray magic, protecting the interior of a room against accidental magic, along with a similar but much more complex version for hardening a training room against duelling magic.
Not surprisingly, eihwaz figures prominently in many of these, as does ansuz which I correctly surmised might be used for control.
Odal is also used frequently since we're talking about protecting the home. One thing I missed was that the simpler wards get by with sowilo for power; only the more complex wards use thurisaz.
The chaotic nature of the latter means those ward schemes have a much smaller margin of error, even with balancing ingwaz.
"Wow, why don't they teach us this stuff first?" Hermione asks, breaking the silence.
"Find some good stuff?"
"Yeah, it looks like you were right on target with some of these. It's amazing! And to think I keep having trouble with eihwaz and ehwaz just because they sound similar. The use cases are completely different!"
"Glad I could help," I say with a smile. "How are we on time?"
Hermione frowns. "We're behind now. I don't suppose Arithmancy was a required course, was it?" My grimace was all the answer she needed.
"We should at least have enough time for reviewing the previous material and previewing this upcoming work, though we won't get to look ahead any further than that."
"Well that's the practical part of it, right?"
Now it's her turn to grimace. "I guess it would be."
"Tell you what, we'll see how far we get, then we can keep at it a bit longer after lunch."
"But at this rate we won't finish by tomorrow night!" She looks sadly at what I assume must be her meticulously planned schedule.
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