[1988 Pt.1]

[12 Kennington Road, London]

[1988]- [Nathan Alexander Grey Turns 10]

It had been a year since Nathan involved his family in his studies, and the results were beyond his expectations, leaving him wishing he had done it sooner.

Before, he had been on a solitary journey of discovering magic, but now, thanks to his family's guidance, he had a clear roadmap.

In just one year, his practical proficiency in Arithmancy and Runecraft had surpassed the level of a seventh-year student.

Some might consider it an empty boast, but Nathan had invested three years, dedicating five hours each day to these subjects, with only occasional time allocated for Occlumency and Magical Law. He knew that, given his mature mindset, aiming for anything less than a seventh-year level would be a disappointment. After all, he approached his studies with the dedication of an adult, not a teenager who could afford to be less focused on such matters.

[A|N: Remember that students begin these two electives in the third year as thirteen-year-olds. Nathan is an adult in mind, so his out-performing children by about one to two years isn't that unrealistic.]

Despite being Post-Newt level, however, Nathan had in no way mastered the two fields of magic. It would take about at least a year and a half more of dedicated study to become a master in either field. And such dedicated study would hamper his efforts to delve into wanded magic which would become available to him soon. So Nathan was sure that he would not be becoming a master of arithmancy or runes until the end of his fourth or fifth year in Hogwarts if he wanted to study other branches of magic as well, not that he was worried by it. After all, things like transfiguration and charms will be far more important in the coming times in comparison to Arithmancy.

Thankfully, the 'coming times' were still a few years away allowing Nathan levy to do something that he had always wanted to do.

Spell crafting was honestly the sole reason that Nathan had picked Arithmancy as a useful field of study at all since he had not been interested in predicting the outcome of magical events.

The magical world was in some ways very advanced while in certain ways very backwards. Nathan had never understood the reason for the stagnation, chalking most of it up to human nature. Wizards were, after all, still affected by things like greed and pride.

But after years of spending his time here, Nathan had realised that wizards weren't solely responsible for the state of their society, no, there was another larger problem with magical society. A very tangible issue that if not seen by an outsider with a very different perception of magic would be ignored quite easily by any insider, magic in the wizarding world was very restrictive and rigid.

Nathan did not mean it in a societal way or an individual way. No, he meant it in a literal way, all magic was very restrictive. If he told a normal wizard this they would laugh at him before saying something philosophical like- "Hahaha! Magic makes the impossible possible."

Wizards manipulated space whenever they wanted to apparate just by willing the magic to take them where they wanted to go. And yet it was all they could do, they could not tear holes in space to protect themselves. A person could cast an incendio to summon a jet of fire from the tip of their wand and yet they could not manipulate the flames in any way. It required them to use another spell to control the flames which could not produce their own flames. If they wanted both of those things, then the size of the flames would suffer. If they wanted both the power in their flames and the flames to ignite with their spell then the control would suffer and a spell like Fiendfyre would be born, a completely sentient fire of which the sole purpose was the destruction of everything.

Nathan had asked this question many times to himself over the years: Why is it that magic is so damn rigid? It was recently that the answer had come to him, and what a simple answer it had been.

Humans aren't really good at magic. It is only their wands that make them stronger and wands were made out of magical beasts that could kill hundreds if not thousands of people if they rampaged. There was a reason that the possession of wands had been a cause of wars between humans and other humanoid beings. It is what made us the dominant magical species on the planet.

And the wand, despite it being the epitome of human ingenuity, was limited to what it could do. It was not like wandless magic where one could manipulate the world itself in doing their bidding at the cost of some focus and will. Humans were limited first by Ancient Spellcasting where they borrowed the intent behind myths like Gods and spirits to act as the base of their spells.

Modern Spellcasting was no different as it used an intent and base created through arithmancy which was based on an octal number system.

Sadly, Nathan had no solution to the problem, he had no idea how he could make the use of magic more flexible. He knew for one that the answer did not lie in wandless magic, why? Because the human mind was simply incapable of certain things. The human mind had no true understanding of something as vast and broad as space let alone its manipulation. The human mind was also incapable of understanding the depth of a spell like Fiendfyre- Humans could not understand the way their own mind works and they certainly could not understand a sentience so foreign to their own that its sole purpose lay in destruction. How could a human understand the true depth of something like a dragon?

Magic was not a thing, it was an event. And wandless magic allowed a wizard to simply will change into reality, the problem was that things like mechanics of pushing and pulling were simple enough for a human mind to imagine and will into existence but as the thing they wanted to influence became either more intangible or more conceptual the more difficult it became for the mind to grasp the mechanics behind it.

Wands allowed one to bypass the limitations of one's imagination and intent but made the whole process far more rigid in turn due to the intent being created with mathematics which had set laws and rules that could not be broken. These laws were not inherent to magic itself but to the modern method of using magic.

Why was this important? Because no matter how amazing a Wizard Voldemort was, Nathan had found a loophole when it came to spellcasting though he would still master the ways of modern spellcasting.

Ancient Wand magic might be too rigid, but it had its uses. For example, Neptune's Trident he found out was a very powerful spell. It shot out a golden-coloured water construct in the shape of a trident that had the strength to tear through large boulders easily if being used by someone with medium competency over the spell, a mastery of the spell would allow a user to tear through a wall of Hogwarts, and with how much magic flowed through the castle it was a monumental feat.

The problem with such magic? It was too recognizable for anybody who has studied such magic and most spells that could be used under this category were powerful, took a lot of time to truly master and said magic was not unparalleled.

A good comparison between Modern Spell-casting and Ancient Spell-casting would be Fiendfyre and Neptuene's Trident, both were spells of massive power but even a normal wizard could cast Fiendfyre with the same potency as Voldemort, control is a completely different issue. Neptune's Trident, however, required one to have mastery of the spell to a massive extent to do the same damage.

It was a simple difference between intent and meaning created by the use of Arithmancy and intent and meaning borrowed from the memory of languages and myths stored within magic itself.

Nathan wished to master both forms of spell casting since both methods were rigid and yet held completely different ways of using magic. One was a magic that derived its power from arithmancy, the other searched for the meaning of words and sounds from history itself.

And thus he found himself looking in his Arithmancy notebook, words scribbled over its pages.

He had been working on a spell for months now. He had written down the multiple spell incantations he thought suitable for his spell.

'Invicta Divisio, Limitis Arma, Arcessere Infinitum.'- These were the three possible incantations for the spell that Nathan had devised after about two to three months of hard work of solving for equations on the syncograph before matching different variables to the veracity table so that the spell is a stable and safe one. Though he had succeeded in creating the base intent behind the spell, there was still no guarantee that he would be successful in using it.

'Now I just need to get my wand tomorrow, and start with learning actual magic that can be used in a fight.'

*******************************

A|N: Guess the use of the spell with the available incantations :)

Hope you lads like the work I did in defining how magic actually works in here compared to the previous version.

Support me on P@TE$ON, I go by the name of dukeofvirtue there.

Kudos to my new patreons(AJ, Cajun and Ducan) for the support.