Chapter 344: Troubleshooting

Garrick Ollivander, the best wandmaker in the British Isles, usually spent the majority of his time in his little shop on Diagon Alley, but on Hogsmeade outing days, he'd quickly pop in to visit his franchise in the village for the weekend, as there would usually be a student or two in want of wand repairs or replacements.

After all, before being a school of magic, Hogwarts was most of all a school for children. Give a child a fragile wooden stick and then tell them to wave it about, and you'd be lucky if they hadn't already snapped it in half by the time they got off the Hogwarts Express for the first day of school.

And since Oleandra had been experiencing technical difficulties with her wand, her first stop after leaving the Hog's Head was naturally the Ollivander's branch in the small village.

The door chime tinkled gently as she pushed the door open, attracting the wandmaker's attention to the three girls who had just entered his shop.

"Good morn—" he began, but upon seeing Oleandra, he had to bite his tongue to avoid completing his sentence with a disparaging, 'it's you.'

As a rule, Ollivander did not approve of customers who did not use his wands. Oleandra's old wand had been made by Gregorovitch and as far as he knew, she had bought a rival's wand to replace her broken one, since she had never shown up to his shop to buy a replacement.

(Before losing the ability to lie completely, Oleandra had told him the previous year during the Weighing of the Wands that Mr. Crouch had got her wand incinerated)

"Good morning," said Oleandra politely, giving the shop's interior a once-over.

This branch was much less cluttered than Ollivander's main shop on Diagon Alley, but her Mystic Eyes still detected the creepy spiderwebs of magical strings crisscrossing the room, connecting each of the boxes in which the wands had been stored.

"Miss Astoria Greengrass and Miss Tracey Davis," said Ollivander, following his usual script. "Hawthorn with a core of Unicorn hair, seven-and-a-half inches; ash with a core of Unicorn hair; seven inches, quite bendy?"

Astoria and Tracey nodded.

"I've got a new wand," Oleandra explained, "but I've been having a few issues with it."

Ollivander shook his head slightly, wearing an 'I told you so' expression on his face.

"This is what happens when you purchase wands from less reputable vendors," he said with a hint of smugness in his tone. "Well, go on, give it here."

Oleandra produced her wand and put it on the counter.

"What seems to be the problem with this wand of yours?" Ollivander inquired. "Ah, and please do keep in mind that repairs for non-Ollivander brand wands will cost extra…"

"Actually, this wand is Ollivander-made, or so I've been told," Oleandra explained, as the wandmaker examined her wand closely. "It'll refuse to perform certain spells, with no rhyme or reason that I've been able to suss out. It's been getting better lately, but I still thought it'd be safer to have a professional give it a look."

As he inspected the wand, Ollivander's face went through a series of different facial expressions: doubt, shock, then anger for some reason, followed by astonishment. How he was able to divine anything just by touching her wand, she had no clue; to Oleandra, Viviane's wand looked like any other.

Her Mystic Eyes were showing her that man and wand were interacting together on a deep level, but it was like nothing she had ever seen before…

"Can you name a few of the spells you've been unable to perform?" he said distractedly. "That you were able to perform with your previous wand, of course."

Oleandra rattled off a short list of spells, but after a while, Ollivander raised a hand to make her stop. He then pulled out an extremely thick and dusty book from under the counter and began flipping through it. It turned out that Oleandra wouldn't have to wait for too long to find out what he was doing, because Ollivander found the information that he was looking for within the first pages of the thick volume.

"I believe I've got the gist of it," he said. "You are correct; this wand is indeed the work of one of my ancestors. The fourteenth generation Ollivander of the British Ollivanders made this particular wand, over fifteen hundred years ago."

"Which generation are you, Mr. Ollivander?" Astoria asked curiously.

"The sixty-sixth," he answered succinctly. "The first-generation member of this branch of the Ollivander family having emigrated here from the island of Crete in Greece, a little under two thousand years ago."

Oleandra looked at her wand worriedly. Viviane's wand was over fifteen hundred years old; it was a wonder it hadn't already turned to dust simply by being touched. Ollivander must have caught Oleandra's anxious glance, because he quickly launched into a secondary explanation.

"No need to worry about your wand's age," he confidently declared. "This wand has very obviously been well maintained, and the problem you have brought up can very easily be remedied. You see, Miss Greengrass, wands and Wizards have a symbiotic relationship; the wand learns as much from the Wizard as the Wizard learns from the wand."

Ollivander gestured to the countless boxes sitting on the shelves all around them.

"This is a well-known fact among Wizards, though precious few ever regard wands as being more than tools; as partners to be cherished," he said, a hint of sadness creeping into his voice. "Wands possess sentience; which means they can also communicate with each other on levels even we wandmakers can scarcely begin to comprehend. You see, wands possess the cumulative knowledge of generations of Wizards, which they share among each other. Given the proper incantation and movements, a Wizard could theoretically use any spell, without even having to know about its function beforehand."

He coughed.

"Let's take one of the spells that your wand couldn't perform, for example," Ollivander remarked. "Wingardium Leviosa, the Levitation Charm, was created in 1544 by Jarleth Hobart, based on Levioso, the Hover Charm; more than a thousand years after this particular wand was created. You see, even a newly created wand would have learned this spell after a night with the master wand in my shop, which means that yours must have been sealed away from the world for a very long time, where it could not have interacted with its fellow wands."

"Then, my wand is just out of date?" Oleandra asked.

Ollivander nodded, before leaning over the counter and looking straight into Oleandra's eyes.

"If you don't mind my asking, how exactly did you come upon this wand?"

"Er…" said Oleandra hesitantly, as she didn't exactly want to be known as a graverobber. "It jumped out of its previous owner's tomb and… landed in my hand?"