Ancient Runes
Professor Bathsheda Babbling had the appearance of someone who had spent so long looking at small, precise things that her eyes had permanently adjusted to that scale — sharp and focused, moving across surfaces with the quick, cataloguing attention of someone who read everything they looked at, including things that weren't meant to be read. Her classroom had the organized density of a specialist's space: stone tablets propped against the walls, reference charts layered over each other on every available surface, a smell of chalk dust and old parchment that had settled into the room deeply enough that it had become part of the walls.
She greeted the third-years on the first morning of Ancient Runes with a short, direct speech about what the subject was and what it wasn't. Not a humanities subject, not a history subject, not something you took because it sounded interesting and then coasted through on general literacy. It was a technical discipline with a specific grammar and a body of literature and a set of practical applications that required both precision and intuition, and the students who did well in it were the ones who understood that neither precision nor intuition alone was sufficient.
She looked at them with the assessing eye of someone sorting a new intake and making preliminary judgements that she would revise as evidence required.
She handed out the introductory workbooks, which contained a diagnostic exercise to be completed in the first lesson: a set of basic Elder Futhark runes to identify, a short inscription in standard runic script to translate, and three runic sequences to analyse for structural pattern.
Ron opened his workbook, read through the diagnostic, and felt the curious sensation of opening a door he had walked through already.
Not from Ron's memories — Ron had not studied Runes. From his own. The Burrow, in the evenings through July and August, with the third-year theory texts he had ordered from Flourish and Blotts and which had arrived in three separate deliveries, organized by subject on the desk in his blue room. The Egypt trip and the pre-Ptolemaic site and the hours with Bill working through the survey texts in the evenings on the roof in Cairo. The survey text itself, which he had brought back in his trunk and which had occupied the better part of three weeks of careful work. The foundational grammar he had taught himself in the gaps between everything else, with the focused thoroughness of someone who had identified a subject as genuinely interesting and had done what he did with genuinely interesting things.
He worked through the diagnostic at the pace of someone for whom it was straightforward, which was faster than anyone else in the room.
He kept his attention on the workbook rather than on the awareness. The point was not to demonstrate the speed. The point was to do the work correctly, and to use the remaining time to go further into the structural analysis than the diagnostic required, because there was no reason not to.
He finished the identification, the translation, and the structural pattern questions. He went back and added annotations to the structural analysis — not because it was asked for, but because the sequences had an underlying logic that the basic question didn't require you to articulate, and he found himself wanting to articulate it anyway, in the precise way that made sense to him.
He was writing the third annotation when Babbling stopped beside his desk.
She looked at his workbook. She looked at it for longer than the passing assessment of a teacher checking that a student was on task. Then she picked it up.
He sat back and let her.
She read through it with the focused attention of someone who had just found something unexpected in a place they had not expected to find it, moving through the translation and then the structural analysis and then the annotations the way someone read when what they found kept changing what they'd thought.
"Mr. Weasley," she said.
"Professor."
"Where did you learn to read the Elder Futhark?"
"Over the summer," he said. "My brother Bill is a curse breaker in Egypt. I spent July working through the third-year theory on my own at home, and then three weeks in Egypt with him. He guided the Runes work specifically." He paused. "I also brought back a survey text from the Cairo magical district. Pre-Ptolemaic. I've been working through it since August."
She looked at him over the workbook. "A pre-Ptolemaic survey text."
"Bill found it for me. He thought it would be useful background."
She set the workbook down on his desk with the careful precision of someone who had decided to think about what they had seen before saying anything further. She looked at the annotations again, briefly. Then she moved on down the row.
She came back at the end of the lesson, when the other students were filing out, and set a different text on his desk — not from the third-year stack but from the shelf above it.
"Chapter four of this," she said. "Come and find me when you've finished it."
He looked at the text. It was a fourth-year supplementary reader. He recognised it — it was on the Room of Requirements' bookshelf, and he had worked through it in the first week back at school, in the two evenings he'd managed before the term's rhythm had fully established itself. He looked up at her.
"I've already read it," he said.
She looked at him. "This term?"
"First few days back," he said. "I ordered several texts from Flourish and Blotts before term. The fourth-year supplementary reader was among them — I worked through it in the first couple days before I knew the term's curriculum properly.
She looked at him with the expression that was not quite scepticism and not quite what came after scepticism, but the point in between. "Chapter four concerns the structural grammar of compound runic sequences. It is a prerequisite for the fourth-year curriculum for a reason."
"The Elder Futhark diagnostic touched the edges of it," he said. "The third annotation — the pattern in the third sequence breaks down if you read it as simple sequential grammar. It only works if you treat the middle three runes as a compound construction with a modified root."
She picked up his workbook and looked at the third annotation.
She was quiet for a moment that was longer than the previous ones.
"Come to my office tomorrow morning," she said. "Before breakfast."
He went to her office the following morning. The conversation lasted forty-five minutes, which was thirty-five minutes longer than either of them had planned, and covered the compound grammar he had annotated, the survey text from Egypt — which he had brought, because it seemed relevant — and the specific differences between the British runic tradition and the pre-Ptolemaic system that he had begun to map during the trip. Babbling asked questions with the focused urgency of someone who had found a discussion they hadn't expected and wasn't letting it end before they were finished.
At the end of it she sat back and looked at him with the expression of someone who had revised their assessment several times in the course of forty-five minutes and had not yet arrived at the final version.
"You're thirteen years old," she said.
"Yes," he agreed.
"Who taught you the Egyptian system?"
"Bill started me on it," he said. "The framework. But the survey text is where most of the depth came from. I worked through it systematically." A pause. "The mathematical structure maps onto the Arithmancy framework in ways that made some of the grammar logic more legible than it might otherwise have been."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she picked up the survey text, opened it, and began reading. "Leave this with me," she said. "I'll return it at the next lesson."
He had a second copy in the trunk. "Of course," he said.
He took a photograph of the runic reference charts on the classroom wall on his way out — the layered density of them, the specific way the older inscriptions were framed against the newer analytical diagrams. It was a good room. He thought he was going to enjoy it considerably.