As soon as I got back to Hogwarts and split off from Potter, I headed straight for the Room of Requirement — I needed to do the preliminary preparation of all the ingredients, and it would probably only be tomorrow that I'd get the chance to start actually brewing a couple of potions. Good thing they brew quickly.
Moving swiftly through the dark, empty corridors of the castle, climbing to the seventh floor to the tapestry of trolls, I turned over in my mind the thought of the room I needed. Three paces back and forth, and I was already stepping through the doors that had appeared.
A small room, almost like a Potions classroom, but meant for one person. The difference was an additional table, smooth as a mirror and just as level. Tables like this had been described more than once in old books on working with runes and the objects those runes were meant to affect.
Walking up to that very table, I drew a line with my finger — the perfectly smooth surface yielded to my fingertip like sand, leaving a perfect groove-line, like an engraving. Running my hand along the table's edge, I restored it to its original state.
"Just like in the book," I thought aloud, nodding to myself.
However inventive I might be, there's always someone who put my ideas into practice long before me, if in a different form. Whoever created this table had taken as his starting point the free inscription of runes on a flat, two-dimensional surface. Well, yes, I'd gone further and used an artefact resembling a hologram for three-dimensional runic inscription in open space, but the essence was the same.
Moving over to the neighbouring, long table with its array of perfectly clean, empty little bowls, flasks in stands, and a host of other containers and vessels, I began taking out the ingredients I'd gathered.
Into one of the stands I fixed a large flask of acromantula venom, into another — the nectar I'd collected. A number of little dishes I filled with various herbs, roots, and mushrooms picked up along the way. Bineshii's feather went onto a special round stand designed to isolate the feather from outside influence, and everything around it from the feather's own magic. Now it was time to think for a moment.
Just in case, I conjured slips of paper with materialised notes on all the manipulations, effects, and potions needed for working with the wand, and suspended them in the air with magic. After a second's thought, I decided not to keep "broadcasting" magic around the lab unnecessarily — even though my spellwork is practically flawless, with no leakage or "excess" magic — so I didn't bother being lazy about it: I went over to a wide, wheeled chalkboard, rolled it up to the tables, and stuck the slips onto it instead with a Sticking Charm. There, much better.
Funny thing — right now, standing alone in the lab, preparing not just for mental experiments but proper material ones, I feel the urge to start rubbing my hands together and cackling villainously. Amusing, really.
Taking out my wand, I laid it on the mirrored table. Time to get on with the analysis.
Tracing three runic circles around the wand with my finger, I poured neutral magic into them. A soft bluish light filled the chains of runes, and the wand slowly rose a couple of centimetres, settling into a vertical position. Freeing my brain of all background load — the horde of little spiders and other devices — I left only an "alert" mode running just in case, and braced myself to receive information from this multi-layered diagnostic, which combined both the old techniques of wandmakers from the books and more modern equivalents.
A dense stream of data from the diagnostic immediately flooded into my mind, and it was so saturated and voluminous that the only thing I could compare it to was some wildly shifting fractal space. Part of that stream my brain interpreted in line with my own knowledge and understanding of various concepts, but there was also a great deal of other imagery and data.
Strictly speaking, runic chains and diagnostic circuits like this ought to be connected not directly to the brain and consciousness, but to some sort of visualising spell or charm — but I'm confident in myself, aren't I? Right. So here I am with a mild headache. Though if I were an ordinary wizard, "white smoke" would be coming out of my head right about now — as everyone knows, the whole apparatus runs on white smoke, and once it escapes, the thing stops working.
Ten seconds — that's how long the diagnostic complex operated before shutting itself off. The wand settled back onto the table, the runes vanished, and I wiped away a couple of drops of blood from my nose. A simple self-diagnosis showed no critical injuries, and no ordinary ones either — whatever had cracked or burst inside my head had already been repaired courtesy of the life magic in my body. But in exchange for that thoroughly minor risk, I'd gained exhaustive data on my wand, both its physical and magical structure.
What can I say… The unicorn-hair core really is degrading from having Dark magic passed through it, small as the doses were. And no, I've almost never cast with the wand using dark energy — the reason lies elsewhere. The wand is bound to me, "grown together" with me energetically over years of use, and I'm bound to the phoenix, and as a consequence, the wand is bound to it too. The circulation of energy is minimal enough to be negligible, but it's also absolutely constant, and that's what's degrading the unicorn hair.
Setting the wand back down among the ingredients, I picked up Bineshii's feather and placed it on the mirrored table, tracing out the diagnostic scheme once more. A minute later, I was drowning in another vast stream of data — this time entirely about the feather.
Wiping away another couple of drops of blood, I took the feather out of my bag, conjured a stack of parchment out of thin air, and sat down at the writing desk to begin working out compatibility formulas, running calculations, and so on. Yes, I could do all this in my head — visualise it, store it there, the lot — but working with quill and parchment has a calming effect on me, it relaxes me, lets me settle into a working rhythm and focus on being productive.
Two hours of calculating various compatibilities later — trying to work out what would need to be leached out of the components using the venom and a potion based on it, what needed reinforcing with other potions, and how and in what way to fuse the two cores together and set them into the wand's wood using an essence, not yet calculated, based on the nectar… In short, I came to the conclusion that I needed to analyse my own blood and add it into the "equation," so to speak. That would speed up the stage of, let's call it, re-adaptation between me and the wand, and more importantly, it would make the wand supremely individual — mine alone.
Which brings up the question of individuality in modern wands. All modern wands — leaving aside strictly individual or specialised commissions — are made for users of neutral energy, the only energy this world's human wizards have access to at all. Yes, an inexperienced wizard is better off picking the most closely matching wand, since such a wizard has no experience working with magic, and the body and mind, however slightly — vanishingly slightly, I'd even say — do alter the magic on its way out. But an experienced wizard doesn't give a damn whether the wand suits him or not, whether it's his own or someone else's, or any of that.
I, however, given my changes in terms of energetics and my affinity with other kinds of energy, am an entirely different case. I can use any wand made for the wizards of this world, but if I make one tailored specifically to me, then only I will be able to use it.
Weighing it all up in my head, I set my notes aside and went over to the mirrored table. With a light effort of will, I used magic to open a small cut on my finger, dripped some blood onto the table, healed the wound, and traced out the diagnostic circle again. And once more my consciousness was flooded with information. And once more I had to deal with a couple of drops of blood from my nose — I think that's enough abusing my mind and brain for one day.
And now I sat back down to my calculations, but this time it only took forty minutes rather than two hours, since the groundwork was already laid.
"Tempus," I said aloud for no particular reason, waving a hand through the air.
Morning was approaching, and I still hadn't slept. Time to get up soon by my schedule, but… I was sorely tempted to say to hell with it and at least finish the preliminary preparation of all the ingredients. Yes, that's what I'd do.
Gathering up the pile of sheets covered in formulas and diagrams, from which I picked out the results I actually needed, I pinned them to the second half of the chalkboard and, shrugging off my robe and jumper, rolling up the sleeves of my white uniform shirt, I stood in front of the table full of ingredients.
"Venom…" I muttered a few words to myself thoughtfully, picking up the flask of venom and pouring around a millilitre into a small open dish. "Right concentration… But… needs purifying, yes. There's excess in there."
Traditionally, purification like this is done by brewing a potion based on acromantula venom, though it's an old technique, dating from the days when people tried to combine more components into a wand than just wood and a single core. Back then, though, they had no means for such precise diagnostics… Actually, no, that's not quite right — they had no methods to fully and completely interpret the results. I, on the other hand, can skip the lengthy process of brewing that particular potion, since I know exactly what I need down to the smallest detail.
Taking a few herbs and the stem of one of the mushrooms, I crushed them on the perfectly smooth little board and mixed the paste with the venom in the dish until it was uniform.
"Excellent."
With a wave of my hand, I made the mixture rise into the air in front of me down to the very last drop, hanging there as a small sphere of a rather unpleasant colour.
Drawing my hands in on either side of the sphere, I began pouring storm energy into it, which filled the room with the faint smell of ozone, but nothing beyond that — I had the situation under control. The sphere began to glow faintly.
"Now… concentration."
Focusing on the process, I used the storm energy to make the herbal mixture absorb the unwanted components out of the venom — both material and magical — replacing them with that very storm energy. The sphere not only began to glow but started shifting in texture. From the outside, it might have been compared to some sort of gas giant — multilayered swirls of different shades, currents, everything slowly turning, mixing, or thickening.
But that alone wasn't enough, since with this single spell I was effectively recreating a complex brewing process that should normally take a week, so one more manipulation was needed. With an effort of will, I conjured small, sparkling runes in the air, clustering around the sphere like satellites round a planet — an elven technique, "localised" implementation.
Activating the spherical runic circuit sent the reaction inside the sphere into incredible acceleration. In a matter of ten seconds it changed from wavelike to mottled, its colours now taking on clear, sharp boundaries, crisp rather than blurred.
"And-and… second circuit," I said, activating the second built-in function of the circuit — separation.
An instant later, the sphere burst apart into a dozen small black and dark-green droplets, leaving behind at its centre only a small, bright emerald drop. Merlin willing, the volume there was about half a millilitre, but that would be more than enough. Probably. At least according to the calculations.
Getting rid of the "rubbish" with a nonverbal, wandless Evanesco, I moved the emerald drop by sheer will and magic into my own clean little flask — anything conjured by the Room of Requirement can't be used for storage, since it's a hyper-realistic illusion. The one exception to that is the Room of Hidden Things, where everything is genuinely real.
"First one's done," I summed up, marking the outcome of my first successful attempt at creating acromantula venom purified specifically for my own needs. "And here I was collecting so much in case it went wrong…"
My eyes flicked, without quite meaning to, towards the large flask of venom — there was half a litre in there, at least. Well, it'll come in handy around the place.
Broadly speaking, if you sum up everything involved in wandmaking by the modern method, and by the old one too, it can be divided into three stages: purification, unification, and synchronisation. You could spin endless verbal lace around those stages, but the essence comes down to exactly those three terms. That, however, applies to a situation where only two components are used — wood and core.
In my case things are somewhat different, though the difference is slight. I'll have two cores, joined together as one. What does that mean? More stages. The point is that unifying two cores requires the same three stages, after which they count as a new "raw" core, but then, after re-purifying that "new" core, the wood also needs purifying to match the parameters of the now-purified core, and the idea of adding blood requires purifying the blood as well, plus two additional preliminary synchronisations — wood-to-blood and core-to-blood.
It sounds tedious, and it's every bit as tedious as it sounds, but it's necessary if you want a top-class instrument rather than another mystery contraption. I used to want to add an affinity for some other kind of energy to myself, but by now my greed on that front has noticeably faded, and the reason is fairly simple — this world's school of magic is very universal, and virtually any direction of magical self-development isn't limited by affinity the way it was in the elf's life, or the dwarf's.
Which means… it means I'll have to run the recalculations another couple of times after fusing the feather and the unicorn hair, secure the fusion with a potion based on a single drop of the grave-flower's nectar, purify everything again, and so on…
What can I actually do right now? Well, that's no mystery — I need to brew one potion, and it'll have to be a proper brew, since there's no exact recipe, and no detailed description of the effect either. Brew the potion, and prepare the essence for securing the fusion, for the synchronisation. And while the potion needs some thought as to where I'll brew it, in what, and how, since my cauldron — the student one — is sitting in our professor's storeroom, the essence, though…
The essence, which is meant, in essence, to unite the magic of the unicorn hair with the magic of Bineshii's feather — a creature capable of being Dark, even while being neutral in its essence, yet a Storm elemental in fact…
The amusing part is that once I've prepared the essence, I'll need to dilute it in absolutely distilled water. On the other hand, the flower's nectar remains nectar, however magical it might be — far from every part of it carries the magical effect I need, in the amount I need. Working with a concentrate is difficult, both for a potioneer and for a wandmaker, but it's compensated for by the final result. On the other hand, I could skip the purification entirely, skip making the essence, and it would make life a great deal easier, at the cost of a slightly worse product — worse, and tainted with unaccounted-for extra properties. But if I can do it properly, why do it half-heartedly?
Picking up the little flask of nectar, I looked it over, checked its viscosity, and measured out that same one millilitre into a small clean dish. The process would be similar to purifying the venom, except now I didn't need any impurities added in — this was a purely magical process, and everything in it would be stimulated, controlled, and separated by me alone, with no intermediaries.
Using purely and solely neutral magic, I lifted the drop of nectar into the air, where it turned into a small sphere, wrapped it in that neutral magic, and began applying pressure, drawing out resonance of one strength or another in different regions of the drop. It's precisely by sensing those resonating or non-resonating regions that I can make the drop separate, filter itself, with the unwanted magical "resonances" dragging the matter along with them, since it's part of them.
I had to close my eyes to avoid the distraction of sight, since it eats up a fair amount of brain resource, though in my case the emphasis really needs to be on consciousness.
A minute — that's how long it took me to separate the needed from the unneeded and end up with a small drop glimmering with some otherworldly light. Returning the drop to my own flask, I finally allowed myself to relax. I sat down on a stool and looked over the diagrams and equations on the board — everything done correctly so far, in line with the calculations. All that was left was the potion, but… but for that I'd either need to borrow someone's cauldron or have a word with Slughorn — the work itself would only take about an hour, no more. At least, that's how it ought to go by the recipe.
Gathering up all my things, I left the Room of Requirement with a clear conscience and headed for the House common room. Just about time to start my daily morning exercises and training. Ugh, looks like it'll be a bit of a rough day, given I haven't slept — but the power of habit is strong, and there's no sense breaking from the schedule.
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