Chapter 32: Merging Spells and Creativity
The witch then gave them a severe frown, "I will provide each of you with a match. Using the information, I just gave you, you have until the rest of the class to transform them into needles. The first to accomplish such a task will gain a personal lesson from me, on any transfiguration topic you want, that is valid until the end of your schooling. If you don't realize it, it is not an opportunity I grant easily. Now, get on with it. Let's see what you can do."
With a wave of her wand, dozens of matchsticks levitated from her desk and were divided between the students, each with a small pile to use.
The entire class stared at the matchsticks in front of them waiting for more instruction, but the professor gave them a glare, "Are you waiting for the matchsticks to turn by themselves?"
Hurriedly, everyone started to try casting the two spells, while Harry was simply flabbergasted by the fact that no instruction beyond the name of the spells and the wand movements. He had read a few magical theory books during the previous month, and there hadn't been a single explanation why waving your wand in a certain pattern and muttering a few words in Latin could result in a spell. The only guide was a reference to arithmancy, which he still hadn't started studying.
Curious about the effects, he picked up his wand, waved it at one of the matchsticks with the correct wand movement and muttered the spell, "Verto".
Suddenly, he could feel the magic travel throughout his body to the wand, then be expelled by its tip. The magic was different than any of his bastardized wandless spells. Its melody was a paradox of order and chaos that seemed to work, and yet the match stayed unchanged.
Seeing that something was different, he retraced the steps to casting the spell while making sure to picture the change of the matchstick to become pointier. The melody changed again with the same frequency and organized chaos, and the magic travelled through his body to his wand and the matchstick slowly became pointier.
He redid this process until it looked more like a wooden needle than a matchstick. It was baffling. There was no reason why the magic worked. When he tried using his wandless spells, he needed to convince his magic towards his arms and shape it, imbue it with intent, to get the result he wished for, and even then, it was chaotic. And yet with a few movements of his wand, everything was so automatic. The magic was absorbed by his wand, the movements did the control for him, and the intent was put in the incantation. It was just wrong that weeks of effort could be completed with a wand in seconds.
No wonder wands were so commonly used in the magical world.
Well, back to the assignment at hand, Harry decided to try his hand at changing the material of the spell, "Muto."
As expected, the spell worked immediately, and the matchstick started to turn silver. Harry, though, listened to the spell's melody. It was very similar to the alteration spell, but it was more robust, more fundamental, in a way. For lack of a better explanation, the chaos was more influential than the order. It was very hard to put into words, but McGonagall wasn't lying when she said that Transfiguration was the magic of change. In a way, its melodies felt more like transitions between order, chaos, and then order, battling each other yet fitting perfectly.
It didn't take Harry long to master the two spells. He could turn the matchstick pointy with a single spell, and then change its constitution with another. He even decided to add decorations a few times to make things more challenging. Although Harry couldn't make it so the needle could have multiple materials.
Harry looked around to see how his classmates were doing, and they seemed to be absolutely stuck. No one was able to do anything, except for Seamus Finnigan that exploded one of his matchsticks. Even Hermione Granger and Neville Longbottom were looking at their matchsticks with frustration on their faces.
Seeing that he didn't have any competition, Harry chose to make it interesting. He was going to try to turn the matchstick into a needle in one go. At first, he started to use the two spells in successions, with both the wand movements and the incantation, "Verto Muto."
It worked. The matchstick had turned into a needle, but the spells weren't really in succession. There were two distinct spells, but they sort of merged into each other. He could feel it in the song. The final order stage of the first spell had slightly merged into the second one, and in a way, the final melody became longer.
This was new. He had never known that spells could merge like this before. Frowning, he remembered that the magic he had listened to all over the castle was not sequential. It was not a single melody, but a veritable symphony where every stage was working together.
And so, he tried to find a way to combine the two spells. After all, wouldn't it be better to use one spell instead of two?
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