The final ritual was on the twenty-second of March.
He had been preparing it since January, which was when he had finished the relevant sections of the Black library and had cross-referenced them against the Book of Ravenclaw's notes on foundational magical strengthening. The two sources did not agree on every point — they had been written in different centuries by people with different theoretical frameworks — but they agreed on the fundamentals, which was that core strengthening at the level he was designing required three things: the correct working, the correct intention, and someone conducting it who was themselves operating at sufficient magical depth to hold the space while the participants worked.
He was the third thing.
The four of them — Harry, Hermione, Neville, Luna — had agreed in February, after he had explained the design and the mechanism and the realistic outcomes. He had been specific about the outcomes: core strengthening meant increased magical capacity and improved precision, which meant everything they already did would be incrementally more effective. It did not mean they would be transformed. It meant the baseline would move.
'How much?' Harry had asked.
'Depends on the person,' Ron had said. 'Depends on what's there to work with. For the four of you — more than the baseline rituals. You've been building since those.'
'Will it hurt?' Luna had asked, which was the most useful question.
'Briefly,' he had said. 'In the way that things expanding hurt briefly. Not the other kind.'
They met in the Room of Requirements at ten o'clock on the twenty-second — the Room producing, at his request, the specific configuration he had described: stone floor, clear of furniture, the specific dimensions that gave the working room to breathe. He set the ward boundary himself, which took twenty minutes of the careful layered work that warding required, and checked it twice, and then went over the working one more time in his head while the four of them settled into their positions.
Luna was reading something. Neville had his eyes closed with the quality of someone doing a specific mental preparation. Harry and Hermione were talking quietly about something that was not the ritual, which was how they both managed the specific quality of waiting for something — by occupying the waiting with something else.
He looked at the four of them.
He thought about what they had been in September of first year — the versions of themselves that had existed before the accumulation of five years of this, before the training and the rituals and the Witness letters and the specific quality of people who had chosen each other — and thought: they are extraordinary. Not because of the magic. Because of the choosing.
'Ready,' he said.
They were ready.
The ritual took two hours. It was the most technically demanding thing he had done since the deep ward work with Dumbledore — not because the individual components were complex but because holding the working while four people were moving through it simultaneously required a kind of sustained multidirectional attention that was the specific skill of someone who had been building it since third year and was now using it at full extension. He held the space and watched each of them and maintained the working and felt, in the specific way that very large pieces of magic were felt rather than seen, the four cores responding to the working — not instantly, not dramatically, but with the gradual quality of something deep and fundamental shifting toward a new position.
At the end of the two hours, when the working completed and the ward dissolved and the four of them opened their eyes and returned to the room's ordinary register, the silence lasted for approximately four seconds.
Then Harry looked at his hands.
There was a haze around them. Not dramatic — not visible from across the room, not the kind of thing that would draw attention in an ordinary space. But present, the specific quality of magical power that had increased past the point of easy containment and was waiting for the containment to catch up. A faint luminescence at the edges of his hands, his forearms, diffusing outward slightly at the margins the way heat diffused from something warm.
Hermione looked at her own hands. Then at Harry's. Something in her expression had the quality of a scientist observing a result that was consistent with the prediction and finding the consistency more satisfying than the drama of surprise would have been.
Neville stood and the haze moved with him — around his shoulders, diffusing at his outline, the specific quality of something that was larger than the shape it was contained in. He looked at it with the quality he had been developing since the first ritual: not alarmed, not performing calm, simply present with the fact of it.
Luna was looking at her hands with the expression she had for things she found genuinely interesting. 'I can feel the edges of the room,' she said.
'You'll be able to for a few days,' Ron said. 'Until the control catches up. Don't extend your senses too far — the range will be wider than you're used to and you'll get tired quickly.'
'How do we manage it,' Harry said. Not asking whether management was possible — asking for the specific method.
'Conscious compression,' Ron said. 'Not suppression — that creates pressure. Just: attention to the boundary. Where you end and the room begins. Practice it until it's automatic.' He looked at the four of them. 'You'll have it controlled within the month. The haze will disappear when the control is solid. After that you'll just — have more to work with.'
Harry looked at him. The haze around his hands was steady, not fading, the particular luminescent quality of something settling into a new baseline. 'You've done this for yourself,' he said.
'Several times,' Ron said.
'Is this what it looks like? Afterward?'
Ron considered this honestly. 'Briefly,' he said. 'Then you get used to it, and the haze goes, and it's just — how you are.'
Harry looked at his hands again. Something in his expression had the quality it had been developing since January — the specific expression of someone who had lost something he had been carrying all his life and was discovering, in the space the loss had left, what he actually was. 'Right,' he said.
The next month was the honing.
He worked with each of them individually on the compression — the specific technique of conscious awareness at the boundary of yourself, not suppressing the increased capacity but containing it correctly so that it did not leak into the environment. Harry got it fastest, which was not surprising — he had been managing the relationship between his own magical output and his environment since he was eleven months old, and the muscle memory was there even if he had not known what to call it. Luna got it in a way that was entirely her own and which Ron could not fully trace, which was also not surprising. Neville worked at it with the steady patience of someone who had learned that the things he was good at came from repetition rather than sudden mastery, and by the end of the month his control was impeccable. Hermione's approach was methodical — she made notes, she identified the points where the compression was weakest, she targeted those points specifically — and the result was the most precisely controlled of the four.
By April the haze was gone.
What remained was simply what they were.