I began to see where wizards had their troubles when using spells of this type. The local school of magic does not teach direct control over one's own magical energy. Here, everything is tied to indirect influence on it through the wand, combined with the required mental imagery. Even acts of will are applied more to the wand and the spell than to one's own magic. And so spells of this kind can only be approached after one has accumulated considerable experience in spellcasting. Even if the local school of magic doesn't account for direct energy control, that control comes with experience — imperfectly, perhaps, but at least at the level of unconscious understanding.
Focusing my will on the magic within me and on what had already powered the wind, thereby binding it to me, I began bringing everything under control. I wouldn't call it enormously difficult, but if I hadn't already had this skill, nothing at all would have worked. What was also amusing was that the wind brought with it its own imagery. Wind imagery, naturally. And these images knocked insistently at one's consciousness: blow, it must blow.
Having achieved control of the spell, I began to play with the wind, driving dust motes, grass blades, and whatever else lay to hand across the stone platform. Having played enough and satisfied myself that everything remained under control, I cut off the wand's supply of magic entirely, and with it stopped the ambient magic that had been feeding the slowly circling air. Everything fell still.
"It seems Narcissa was not mistaken," Amber said, smiling, while the girl standing behind her chair watched me with complete indifference. "Control of magic is not something you have never encountered, Mr Granger. I'm curious — how do you perceive it? Do you see it? Hear it? Feel it as an extension of yourself? Or in some other way?"
"I simply feel it. Like… I don't quite know how to put it. It's there, I know where it is, how much of it, what form it's in — and that's all," I answered honestly, as I always do with questions of this kind, since I see no reason to keep such things secret.
"You are candid, which I find agreeable."
"Why?"
"It makes observation simpler."
Amber made another gesture, and her assistant stepped out from behind the chair and held out to me yet another sheaf of the finest parchment sheets, covered in handwritten text.
"Fiendfyre, as you wished," Amber said, as I reached through the barrier around the stone platform to take the parchment. "Study it, and apply it."
I absorbed this new portion of knowledge faster than the previous one. The reason was simple — conceptually the spells were almost identical, and all the differences came down to a couple of gestures and the incantations.
"Be aware, Mr Granger," Amber said quietly. "Fiendfyre is somewhat harder to control. It is considerably more aggressive than the wind."
"And if it doesn't work?"
"Don't worry," she smiled, magically adjusting an errant strand of her red hair. "Not even ash will remain of you, so there'll be no difficulty with clearing the area."
"Reassuring," I said with a smile, and swept my wand, simultaneously holding in mind all the required formulae, imagery, and everything else. "Inferno Flamia."
From the tip of my wand a jet of red-orange flame erupted instantly, emitting a dangerous roar — like a chorus of voices. I paid no attention to the spell's dramatic effects, focusing on the magic and on what I was feeling.
It truly was like the wind spell — except where the wind had been soft, this flame was hard, uncompromising, demanding ever more and more to feed on, and it had no use for air. It needed nothing of the sort. It burned as though it were napalm.
The same spatial puncture at the wand's tip — immeasurably small, a single point. But this point devoured magic to operate at a staggering rate, and with every second it demanded more and more. The flame itself was no ordinary fire — it was more like a substance, flooding everything with its magical plasma, shifting forms wildly, in which terrible images could momentarily be made out. This orange-red flame sought to consume everything it could reach, including me — the flame did not care what it burned. It seemed as though it could devour space itself, converting it into a part of itself. Those were precisely the sensations and images that rose unbidden in the mind, involuntarily feeding the flame with ever greater quantities of my magic.
Control — that is something I can boast of, not without some pride. And now I had to work hard at several things at once: limiting the flow of magic into the wand, and through it into the spatial puncture; detaching myself from the images conjured by the flame, clearing them from my consciousness so they would not drive the magic's flow; and controlling the magic that had already become flame but, like the wind before it, remained a part of me. I managed it. The flame began to take the shapes I wanted it to take, to occupy the space my will had assigned it.
In the few existing descriptions of this spell, the authors claimed that the flame had a will of its own, which was what made it so hard to control. It might very well seem that way if one was unversed in controlling one's own energy and thoughts. This flame had no will — but unlike all the physical phenomena we are accustomed to, and which we invoke through spellwork, Fiendfyre had only one thing, in the abstract: to burn everything. Can space burn? No — but here it would burn, converting into flame. Can a soul burn? No — but it would burn, becoming flame. Only the flame, and nothing beyond it. It was precisely this absolutely dominant aggressive drive that was reflected in the wizard's consciousness through the persisting magical connection, creating the impression that the flame possessed will. And the greater the volume of flame, the harder that drive pressed upon the mind.
Cutting off the flow of magic to the wand entirely and cutting power to the spatial puncture, I halted by force of will the process of the flame that had already entered our world, and everything ceased. Only the dust burned — and, it seemed, the air itself, which immediately replenished itself from the surrounding atmosphere.
"Interesting," Amber's voice reached me. "You did not use Dark Magic to create the flame, Mr Granger."
"I had sufficient power without the conversion."
Amber's smile widened.
"It seems you truly have no need of consultations on the minor nuances of Dark Magic."
"Don't I?"
"Trust experience — far from every wizard grasps that Dark Magic is nothing more than ordinary magic distorted by emotion. I confess I had expected you to alter your magic through emotion to lend it greater force, but you had no need of that. Commendable."
"Does the effect of Fiendfyre change when Dark Magic is used?"
"Why don't you try."
Why not? This woman wouldn't be placing herself in unnecessary danger… although — given that she cannot see, and moves about in a magical wheelchair, one might have some reservations about her judgement. One might have — but I didn't. These are wizards; one should not expect high standards of prudence from them. Nor from me, for that matter.
Sweeping my wand, I deliberately, methodically, and with purpose distorted my neutral energy, converting it to dark along the principles used by local wizards, and repeated the spell, this time using Dark Magic.
Someone might have expected some extraordinary effect, an alteration in the spell's mechanics, or something of that sort. But no. It simply became approximately five times more powerful, and I had to move quickly to bring it under control before I levelled the entire area into oblivion.
"Unexpected," Amber said without smiling, as the briefly erupting fury of the red-orange flame subsided at once. "You somewhat overdid the darkening of the magic, Mr Granger."
"Did I?" I said, surprised. "I acted as I normally do."
"You needn't darken all of your magic. Given that you showed no emotional change whatsoever, I take it emotions play no role for you in this — is that right?"
"I simply grasped their purpose in the matter of Dark Magic, and make use of the mechanism directly."
"Commendable. And no residue of Dark Magic remaining in the body."
"No," I said — what else was there to say.
"In any case — in your view, how did Fiendfyre change when Dark Magic was applied?"
"It didn't," I replied.
The protective barrier fell. Had thirty minutes truly already passed? Or had the fact that Fiendfyre had licked the barrier once or twice affected its longevity?
"It simply became stronger," I said, pocketing my wand and approaching Amber.
Her assistant remained as composed and impassive as ever. She gave the overall impression of some kind of combat chambermaid — though her clothing was different. No less severe and closed, however.
"Indeed."
"But then why is this spell considered Dark?"
"For the same reason much is considered Dark these days. Either it's dangerous, or complex, or destructive, or difficult to defend against — or any number of other possible reasons. Politics, with all its modern democratic pretensions, is fundamentally incompatible with magic. But that is a conversation for entirely different circumstances, Mr Granger."
"Yes, I rather think you're right. Thank you for your help in mastering this demanding spell."
"From the way you performed, one wouldn't say it was demanding at all," Amber smirked faintly. "Now then — allow Rebecca to take you back to… where exactly did she collect you from?"
"Diagon Alley, essentially. I thought you were arranging the meeting."
"The time and place," Amber nodded. "The other organisational details are Rebecca's domain. I look forward to hearing of your future achievements, Mr Granger. Good day to you."
Amber, without any assistance from Rebecca, wheeled herself in the direction of the gardens. Rebecca simply held out her hand without a word. The moment I took it, I felt again that wholly uncompromising magical pull, which, without a hint of gentleness — like being struck by an oncoming train — yanked us into the Apparition vortex and immediately deposited us right on the threshold of Mr Borgin's shop.
"Good day," Rebecca said with a respectful nod — and vanished into the Apparition vortex at once, though so powerfully that a faint shockwave rippled through the air.
The girl was clearly formidable, knew it perfectly well, and couldn't care less about such trivialities as fine energy control in situations where it wasn't necessary.
"Oh look, a little lordling's dropped in," sneered some villain of distinctly bestial appearance.
His associates — two equally scrawny specimens — also hastened to arrange expressions of menace on their faces and an evident desire to relieve me of everything I possessed, up to and including my undergarments. Possibly also my internal organs, with a few bites taken out of my ribs along the way for good measure. And against the backdrop of everything else, this situation irritated me so profoundly that I simply waved my hand at them, darkening my magic and embedding the right imagery into the discharge. The werewolves — or whatever they were — were flung into the nearest wall, while thin streams of blood and spray decorated the surrounding area. Well, a Cutting Curse came to mind, what can I say — it's not my fault. And besides, nothing serious would come of it for them. Even if I despise animals wearing human form, that was no reason to tear them apart at every encounter, least of all here, in Knockturn Alley.
Someone might take issue with my reasoning, but in Knockturn Alley of all places one shouldn't be causing chaos without solid concealment — in times as difficult as these, the area was undoubtedly under heightened scrutiny. And even if nobody has any love for werewolves of that sort, some Aurors might materialise round the corner — law enforcement has a habit of appearing from nowhere at the most inconvenient moment.
Pulling the hood up over my head, I headed to Diagon Alley, and from there, without delay, to the back yard of the Leaky Cauldron, from which I Apparated to one of the groves I knew. Trees, grass, roots protruding from the earth. The smell of damp everywhere after the rain. Damp and earth, all of it laced with faint notes of plants and fungi. I knew with certainty that for dozens of kilometres in every direction there was no ordinary or magical settlement. But that was no reason to neglect security, so I erected around myself the full complex of concealment and masking that I knew.
Removing the rucksack from my shoulder, I set it on the ground at my feet and began taking out my forging equipment — I leave nothing at home, unlike at Hogwarts, where things sometimes end up stored in my corner.
Having laid out the anvil and hammer before me on the ground, I simply sat down on the earth and, drawing my wand, Transfigured the hammerhead, using the scheme I'd already refined — the same one I used to make arrowheads. Another wave of the wand, and ten arrowheads appeared from the air — perfectly smooth, perfectly sharp. Pointing my wand at the hammerhead, I began constructing the Fiendfyre spell and embedding it into the head, but stopped at the last moment — I only needed to activate it. I fitted the head to the hammer, holding the spell back from triggering, swung, and struck the first arrowhead blank.
The familiar sparks and hum in the ears, and before me lay an arrowhead covered in the finest lines of magical enchantment. Turning it over in my mind, I fashioned a couple more hammerheads, but with small variations in the pre-engraved runic chains, intended to affect the area of the spell's effect, the magic supply, and other such details. Plain Fiendfyre is quite a hungry piece of magic. Even the fact that, once embedded in an object through my forging method, it should considerably temper its appetite — that wouldn't have much impact on the ongoing need for an external magical energy source. So I introduced a few adjustments, and a pair of additional runic circuits were intended to create something on the blank resembling a short-duration reservoir.
Not the sort of reservoir that many wizards from my shards' lives would have coveted — merely a construct capable of holding a small but not negligible volume of magic for around ten seconds, after which it dispersed if the magic was not put to any use. Entirely useless in the realities where my shards had lived, and even more useless here, where every wizard is themselves an unlimited source of energy. But for solving a specific problem — it would do well enough.
Having made several more different blanks, I fashioned arrows for the heads, assembled everything together, packed up my things, and went to run tests. For this, I simply Apparated to the edge of the grove, from where a view opened out over fields and hills.
Converting the bracelet into the elven bow by force of will, I exhaled, and in the space of a few seconds loosed all the prepared arrows, aiming into a field of grass five hundred metres away, shifting each shot from left to right. A couple of seconds passed, and then it began.
The earth where the arrows landed swelled up, almost instantaneously becoming a fiery hemisphere. The orange-red flame within them spun in horizontal vortices, shifting and changing, but did not pass beyond the bounds of the spheres. The spheres varied in size and lasted different lengths of time — though none for long. Minimum: half a second. Maximum: one and a half. But absolutely every one of the ten arrows left behind a perfect hemispherical crater. Some were around four metres in diameter; the smallest was a metre.
Having drawn my conclusions as to the optimal formula for constructing the arrowhead, I wasted no time clearing out — what if some Aurors came snooping? They'd talk my ears off, and the whole thing was rather too obviously in contravention of the Statute of Secrecy. To hell with all of them. But at least now, should the need arise, I had in my hands a means of eliminating unwanted Voldemorts from a safe distance, with a full guarantee of effectiveness. Whether I would actually do anything — that depended on how these various Dark Lords chose to conduct themselves. Because it simply wasn't on, the way my peaceful and ordered life was turning into some sort of whirlpool of events putting my loved ones in danger. Entirely unacceptable. And tense.
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