章 45: Chapter 42: Singed chest hair
Harry leaned back in his seat in the DADA classroom as people around him whispered about the lesson to come. The werewolf attacks had been growing exponentially more horrific with each retelling in the halls of Hogwarts and Professor Potter had given a lesson on the creatures to the older years yesterday. Now everyone was excited to hear what the man had to say on the topic.
"It's not like we'll be able to do much if faced with an actual werewolf, we can't apparate and they're resistant to most spells," he said to Penny, who only shook her head.
"Stop complaining about being given a lecture by a successful Auror about how to defend yourself from one of the magical beasts that you may actually meet." She huffed at him, from his right.
Harry leaned on his hand as he looked at her, "I'm not complaining, just saying. Even if the werewolf attacks have been covered so much by the media, it's still more likely we'll be attacked by something else. I guess I just find it weird that the professor is pushing forward material due to public consensus. I've never felt that professors bargained with students like that before."
"They do adapt to the situations, though. Like how Flitwick is teaching your spell now," Penny whispered, looking around shiftily "What's up with you? You've been so grumpy recently."
Harry sighed, thinking of the seemingly fruitless nights he was spending on magic-sensing practice this year. At least his spell development last year had had a sense of progression. Sticking himself into the void provided by the Room of Requirement to develop a skill that he still only had the basics of was straining his motivation. It didn't help that the practice itself could only be described as pure suffering. Duelling wasn't going that great either, with the dummy still handily beating his ass all around the room. He had another date set up with Tonks in a bit, but it wasn't exciting enough to distract him from the bad feeling that had been slowly building up inside his stomach. He felt like he was doing something wrong by withholding from all figures of authority the information he had, which might still be relevant. It was becoming more and more clear to him that this world wasn't going to be something he could predict. It was hard to stay forcefully ignorant and cling to imagined certainty when a dead man was teaching your DADA class.
"Is it the article?" Penny asked empathetically.
Harry shook his head. While the article was something that needed fixing. And he would fix it, he'd never cared so much what other people thought. And if the Wizarding World was filled with the same idiots that had thrown the original Harry Potter under the bus every time the kid had even dared to breathe, then he wasn't much predisposed to care about their opinion.
"I guess I feel stuck in some of the endeavours I've been undertaking. It's not a pleasant feeling." Harry eventually answered.
"The thing you've been doing while gone all the time, like last year?" Penny asked.
Harry cracked a brittle grin, "Yeah, like last year."
"And you still don't want to say what you're working on?" she asked dubiously, at which point Harry sighed. If he could tell Penny about the Room of Requirement then he could tell her what he was using it for. But the way things were now he simply couldn't. The diadem was still there.
"Still duelling," he muttered. "Everything, for duelling. I just can't say how."
"Whatever then," Penny said while rolling her eyes. "Keep your secrets then. You'll have to tell me someday."
"Thanks, Penny," Harry said, just as a constipated-looking James Potter came fluttering inside with his black robes billowing. Harry smirked at the resemblance to the man who would have been Potions professor in another world. The professor's frown deepened as he came to a stop in front of the students. He began pacing back and forth as the second-years tittered excitedly in their seats.
"I've decided to give a lecture about werewolves for almost all the years, disregarding the usual curriculum," he said brusquely. "I'm not particularly happy to do so, considering that it's not something most students are ready to face. But, safety of mind is safety of heart or something, so let's get started." He clapped his hand and twitched his wand. A shadow started gathering from the air around it, a large black silhouette about seven feet emerging next to the professor before coalescing into a fully realistic statue of a werewolf. Harry grimaced as some of his classmates shrieked and Penny clutched at his thigh with a clawed hand.
The werewolf standing there in front of the desk and glaring at the class with yellow eyes and a snarled mouth full of sharp teeth was nothing like the caricatures that the boggart had produced. Harry realised that if anyone had the experience to create a hyper-realistic werewolf it would be James Potter and Sirius Black. They had, after all, spent their entire school time playing around with one such creature and witnessing it from up close. Pettigrew would similarly have the needed experience, but considering the man's supposed skill with a wand then a conjuration, or transfiguration of this size would likely be beyond him.
"So, does anyone want to tell me something about werewolves, before I inevitably correct you." The professor said as he levitated the statue, mannequin, construct, into the empty corner of the room where students generally practised their spells.
Harry looked back at the rest of the class and saw that nobody was raising their hand, obviously leaving it to him to answer the question, unless he wanted to wait here for another few minutes while James awkwardly locked eyes with one student after another. It was also an opportunity to score some brownie points. He raised his hand.
"Mr. Evans."
"Well, rather than talking about werewolves it's important to first note that they are just the symptom of the underlying disease. Lycanthropy is a magical disease, or a curse, rather, which causes the carrier to transform into a mix of human and wolf on nights of the full moon. Werewolves generally lose their rationality while transformed and are manipulated by their curse into a sort of abject rage and aggression which causes them to attack humans on sight. This is an expression of the disease wanting to spread itself, which it does if a non-carrying human gets an open wound from a werewolf. A small wound may cause a less severe case of lycanthropy, but even a scratch suffices to essentially ruin your life as werewolves are discriminated against and find it hard to survive in normal society. There is a potion that helps a werewolf retain their sanity after transformation, but in my understanding, it is prohibitively expensive," Harry said as James nodded along slowly before he stopped at the last part with a frown.
"Well said, I will correct something however before anyone writes it down. There is no potion to alleviate the symptoms of lycanthropy. There is no cure and there most certainly is no hope." He finished bitterly, before shaking his head. "You get bitten, you're cursed, for life. No cure. Just a loss of mind and humanity once a month. The fact that there is no cure is why the only thing I can really show you in regards to werewolves is how to fight them off, considering neither negotiation nor any other peaceful method to deal with them exists."
Harry mulled over the fact that the wolfsbane potion apparently didn't exist here and cursed his so-called foreknowledge once again for being effectively, in most situations, useless.
"Werewolves are highly magically resistant," the professor continued, "and to mimic that, I will cast a powerful protection on my conjuration. You can all see if you manage to somehow harm the "werewolf," before I tell you the proper method to do so," he declared, before raising his wand at the conjuration and slashing it down. "Inexpugnabilis magica," was the incantation. A bright golden beam hit the conjuration and seemed to overtake it and cover it like a second skin, or in this case, a second fur. "Form yourself in a line, everyone gets two spells, if you succeed in dropping the barrier you're exempt from home-work. After you've cast, just move to the back of the line," he said and the students hesitantly started lining themselves up to face the statue.
Harry joined in the back and decided to analyse the situation, whereas the first student peppered the statue with two completely ineffective knock-back jinxes.
The line quickly dwindled as weak and paltry spell-fire pattered like rain against the conjuration and disappointed students moved to the back of the line after seeing their most angry attempts fail. All the while Harry considered the protection that James had cast. He knew that werewolves were very resistant to magic, which James' defence likely mimicked. If he had to think of a strategy against them he would likely transfigure a spear from some object lying around before banishing it at the creature. However, he wasn't good enough at Transfiguration to do something like that. The best he could manage would probably be a small metal spike. He watched absent-mindedly as Cedric, whose turn it was much before Harry, wasted his two spells on the petrification and the jelly-legs jinx. This was also an opportunity to test his mettle against an experienced Auror's shield, however, so maybe it wasn't wise to go to the most efficient solution immediately.
A swirl of orange fire suddenly gained his attention and he saw that an industrious student had decided to skip effect-oriented spells entirely and just burn the shield away with incendio. Unfortunately, the boy's beam of fire was only as wide as a bottle and simply tickled away at the werewolf's hairy chest for a few seconds before dissipating. The boy decided to cast the spell again, to no effect. Before he knew it, it was Harry's turn against the conjuration. He noticed that people were whispering about his chances. The Hufflepuffs were rather optimistic and he didn't want to disappoint them. He looked critically at the corner that the challenge was situated in and decided that he could focus a beam of fire enough to not have it splash to any objects he was better off not harming. Taking a stance almost instinctively at this point Harry thrust forward his wand.
"Incendio!" he bellowed, trying to eke out every iota of potential from the formula. A single spark emerged from his wand at first, as he held his magic, letting it build up inside him. He heard some laughs from behind him, but he was too busy working on creating the perfect spiralling bottle-neck for the spell to escape from. He glanced at the professor, who was tilting his head at his efforts when he released the build-up. He saw the man's eyes widen as a proper column of fire, half as tall as the werewolf erupted at high pressure from Harry's wand and struck the werewolf with a sheer physical force that fire in itself was not supposed to have. The flames were tinted yellow and the heat radiating from his attack made Harry sweat. His argument for the dilemma of the werewolf was simple. Either he would make the protection run out of magic, or the magical fire would heat up the air around the conjuration to a damaging extent. The heat wouldn't be the result of magic, and therefore the spell shouldn't protect its target from it, probably. The drain on his magic was immense as he threw out what he had. Seconds passed by. Professor Potter had erected an additional shield to protect the surroundings. The werewolf was glowing an ominous orange and all but the sputtering of the fire was silent. No whispers, no nothing, Harry almost wanted to close his eyes and meditate. However, all good things came to an end and eventually, perhaps after 13 seconds or so Harry had to stop funnelling magic into the spell. The fire sputtered to a stop and he had to wave his wand at the ground to get rid of the last few flames that lazily fell from it.
The werewolf was glowing an other-worldly orange, but the only thing different about it was the fact that its hair appeared a bit more curled. Harry grimaced and put a hand in his pocket, gripping onto a muggle pen.
"Very impressive, Mr. Evans," James said cautiously from his position of looking at the students. The man shook his head. "However, a werewolf won't be defeated by such a straightforward tactic. Perhaps if you'd used…" he trailed off.
"I'm not done yet," Harry bit out as he pulled the pen from his pocket and ran his wand over it, transfiguring it not as much into a metal spike, but rather into a gigantic needle. As long as his hand and as thick as his pinkie. "Wingardium Leviosa," he cast to float the metal spike in front of his wand. It was here that all his telekinesis practice came into handy as he held the needle in place with the help of the spell and prepared to repel it away from himself at the same time. He let the tension build up and noticed that technically the combination he was using consisted of two spells. He idly thought that this was perhaps what James had wanted them to realise on their own when he'd given them a two-spell limit. He released and the needle shot forth in a blur and slammed straight into the werewolf's chest with the sickening sound of a car accident. The conjuration rocked backwards from the sheer force. Harry and all the students squinted their eyes as they tried to make out what had occurred.
The professor floated the statue back in position, revealing that the remnants of a muggle pen were embedded about an inch deep in the werewolf's chest and that the orange glow surrounding the conjuration was gone.
"Well done, Mr. Evans, well done," Professor Potter said thoughtfully, while stricken silence spread out its wings behind Harry, framing him as if he were a fallen angel.
-/-
Harry leaned back on his chair in the library as he idly flipped through the book "Wandlore throughout the winding winds of time," by Bork Stavenot. Penny sat beside him and was flipping through the newest edition of Potions Monthly, a subscription-based journal that had apparently been gifted to her by her parents for her academic accomplishments in the subject.
What Harry would have done instead of reading the book and what he had done in the last two weeks whenever he had any free time was to go to the Room of Requirement to practise either against the duelling dummy or against the void. However, after having beaten Professor Potter's challenge of harming the werewolf statue he'd decided to take a short break. He'd been running himself ragged and he did feel a small amount of pride for his accomplishments in piercing the protection created by a high-ranking Auror. If he went to the Room of Requirement he wouldn't be able to enjoy the pride for any amount of time, because it would be crushed by his current two projects.
He flipped forward a few pages in the book as he idly rolled his elderwood wand in the palm of his unoccupied hand, he'd already confirmed the qualities of the wand as described by Ollivander, but now he was looking up wand creation.
The results were disappointing. Wand-making seemed to be mostly a family enterprise and while Stavenot had managed to deduce a few common practices, such as a form of magical skill that allowed one to fuse wood back together as if it had never been parted, after the insertion of a core, Stavenot was amongst the uninitiated.
However, the man had travelled as far as India and he had some observations that were interesting. Namely, wand-makers always preferred specific cores, refusing to use any others. Stavenot hypothesised that while the wand-makers expounded the virtues of their chosen materials, they were actually hiding the fact that the complex creation of a wand sometimes mixed badly with their magical affinities, thus making them only able to process certain cores.
Overall the book was oddly critical of wand-makers and their traditions, albeit admitting the fact that they were indispensable. Harry wondered what had made Ollivander recommend this book to him, especially as he reached the last chapter, where Stavenot prophesied the soon-to-come irrelevance of the job.
Wand-makers will be unable to continue their practices after it becomes apparent to the average witch and wizard that they can create their own wands, out of personally significant and magically powerful material. Such a creation is made not to cater to the public, but to bond with its creator, and thus the bond is much stronger and the magical symphony more harmonious. Soon magical schools will discard their first-year curriculums and lead their students in the process of creating a wand. Picking the wood and the magical core that fits best for every one of the students, and then teaching them the skills necessary to combine the two.
Considering that Stavenot had made the claim almost 200 years ago there was probably something preventing magicals from just making their own wands. After all, if it was that easy the goblins and the other repressed magical races would have figured it out by now. But, while Harry liked the wand he had now, it was nice to dream of perhaps making one's own. Perhaps it had been this very romanticism that had led Stavenot to make a prediction that had not come to fruition in the end.
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