[1987 Pt.1]

[1987]

Nathan was sitting in his room after finishing yet another 'test' from his grandmother, who was assisting his father in helping Nathan study. They were now giving him tests for someone two-three years older than Nathan to challenge him. It still felt silly for him to take tests for things he could do instinctively in his previous life.

Thankfully, true to their word, Nathan's family left him to his own devices, allowing him to accumulate a vast amount of knowledge over the past two years. He made satisfactory progress in Occlumency, thanks to a mail-ordered book he had acquired along with Arithmancy and Runes. His growth in wandless magic had completely stopped about a year ago and Nathan was sure that he had mastered the branch at his current level.

Nathan discovered that Occlumency was a frustrating field to pursue. Although it seemed deceptively simple in theory, applying its concepts was incredibly challenging and often mind-numbing.

Legilimency, on the other hand, involved the spell of imposing one's mind's edge on another's mind's edge, creating a connection between the two. This allowed the exchange of memories, emotions, and thoughts between the target and the user. According to the author, the spell was simple to perform but required mastery in occlumency to master since after the connection was established the legilimence had to avoid detection from the victim or try to overwhelm his victim with emotions, memories and thoughts.

Occlumency, developed to protect against Legilimency, required controlling and limiting one's reactions to emotions, as they were impossible to control. Reactions here did not represent physical cues but rather things like memories or thoughts and that was the most basic part. The next step was to learn to veil memories as a reaction to a specific emotion, so that say, if you were nervous then a specific set of memories that you wanted to show your enemy would appear.

A person would do the same with thoughts before they start to try to manipulate the memories and thoughts they are showing to the enemy in a believable manner. And once one does that, they can finally be said to be competent in the field of Occlumency. But for one to achieve mastery, they would have to be a competent legilimence as well as be capable of manipulating their emotions through the use of their memories to fool a legilimence trying to look into their heads.

Nathan even after practising it for nearly two years was still only barely a competent occlumence and had no idea about legilimency due to the lack of a wand.

The lack of a wand was something that was becoming a limitation upon him very quickly but Nathan was not sure whether he should try to ask his family to get him a wand earlier. The main problem with getting a wand early was the supervision that would accompany it-- His family might allow him to study non-magical and theoretical subjects on his own but as soon as magic like transfiguration was involved the hands-free approach would finally break.

'It might not be as bad as I am making it out to be,'--- A help from his family in magical subjects would not be unwelcome.

Nathan nodded deciding that he would aim to get his wand at the age of ten but to do that he needed to show his parents how well he was doing in his personal studies.

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It had been a week since he decided to slowly get his family involved in his studies. It had started with questions from his mother about the inscription of runes into objects, Nathan had been extremely pleased to see that she was very happy and surprised by his progress in runecraft.

Nathan had told her without any lies that he had been learning ancient runes, especially the ones that were common to Western Europe and Britain- Runes like Elder and Younger Futhark along with symbols of the Norse and Celtic people. She had quizzed him about the meanings of runes and their design. He easily answered as he had already studied and memorised the runes. That also led to his mother getting excited and telling everybody in the family how her little Nathan was a genius in magic.

It had been something that had reminded Nathan of his life as Jason, his performance as a student had always been something that his family in both lives had praised.

He had over the week with his performance convinced his mother that he was ready to actually learn to inscribe runes. And thus he found himself on a table of his own in the workshop of his parents, which they used for their part of the business that was the Beholder's eyes.

His mother was sitting beside him looking at him with a serious face that looked quite uncharacteristic on her. Nathan shook his head before asking, "So how do we start, Mum?"

His mother looked thoughtful for a second before she said, "I have never really taught someone, so let us see...Nathan, do you know why runes do what they do?"

Nathan nodded before saying slowly, "We know that some languages, after centuries of existing, slowly turn magical in nature. They might exhibit this magical nature in two ways- That being, showing magic either when they are written or when they are spoken. An example of written magical language is Elder Futhark while the example of a spoken magical language is Latin."

His mother nodded before asking, "If being old is what the requirement is for a language to turn magical, then why is English a non-magical language by nature?"

"Because being centuries old is one of the requirements, the other is being used for magic over the generations, so that magic seeps into the very sounds or symbols of the language. Not that anybody would use new languages, with how weak the older languages are despite their age, the newer ones would be even weaker."

His mother smiled before saying, "Exactly. In essence, the language gives off a very minuscule amount of magic and a lot of meaning. For example," she pointed her hand towards the wall and said, "Neptune's Trident."

Immediately, Nathan felt something about to happen but nothing did. His mother looked at Nathan before saying, "Felt it, did you?"

Nathan nodded, he had seen spells being used but what he had seen was not a spell, it felt less than a spell and yet vastly more than a spell at the same time somehow. Nathan knew his mother had used magic but he was not sure what had happened.

"Those are what you call Words Of Power, words that have a meaning in them that has been engraved in magic itself due to magical beings using them. This is what made the Romans so great, they could imbue intent into words and with the new invention of wands."

"They created the method of Modern Spellcasting," Nathan had never really thought of how spells actually worked since he did not have a wand himself.

His mother, however, shook her head, "They created what we call 'Ancient Spellcasting'."

Nathan was confused by that, "But what they did, wasn't it how we cast spells now?"

She shook her head before asking, "No. The words of power as I called them are very redundant in the fact that they have to be old words with meaning to work. Do you know what made Merlin such a great wizard Nathan?"

"He was the one who invented the field of Arithmancy from the ground up using the 0-7 octal number system. He also created the Veracity table and invented the syncograph. The syncograph is what allows for modern arithmancers to determine the probability of events even after the addition of magic into the equation."

Nathan might not know much about performing wanded magic but the magic he knew he could learn safely like Occlumency, Runes and Arithmancy, he had tried to study as diligently as he could in the past two years. His superior mental age granted him a great advantage to him which Nathan would hate not to use.

His mother chuckled before saying, "I still don't understand how someone your age can wrap your head around Arithmancy, your studies are too advanced for your age, I was the second-best in my class when it came to Arithmancy and even then I had trouble understanding some of it, my little prince. And yes, you are correct, Myrrdin Emrys, also known as Merlin, was the one who practically created the branch of Arithmancy- a branch of magic that allows one to predict future events with great reliability. But why did he invent it? What problem did the branch of magic work as a solution to, according to Myrrdin?"

Nathan drew a blank, he had never questioned what Merlin needed to predict in the first place. What was it that required the creation of a whole new field of magical study? Nathan closed his eyes slowly- the question was an important one and Nathan immediately started listing in his mind things that were solved in the modern day using Arithmancy and he immediately came to a realisation.

"He invented the branch of modern spell-crafting itself," Nathan said slowly.

His mother gave him a genuine smile as she nodded before saying, "The words of power, as useful as they were, had a fatal flaw. They drew their power from the intent they could draw out from a language's history, making them too rigid. Merlin created a way for wizards to create words with their own intent. Britain thrived to an unimaginable degree when Merlin had joined the court of King Arthur. Britain had nearly conquered Rome itself during Arthur's invasion of the Roman empire, and the only reason that Rome was safe from Arthur was due to the betrayal of Mordred because of which the invasion was halted. And now, since you understand well how it works, we can begin your first lesson on inscribing runes on a parchment."

Nathan nodded as his mother got him started on writing runes on parchment.

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A|N: I am trying to mesh canon as much as I can together so that magic doesn't become too simple like in most fics where all a Gary Stu needs is the power of imagination and willpower to surpass the unimaginative antagonists while also providing reasoning on how magic was used in the past and the limitations said methods had. It was a good way to explain the reason for the respect Merlin got for his

I also introduced the limitations and differences between wand magic and wandless magic. One is rigid yet vast while the other is flexible yet difficult.