[1989 Pt. 10]

A|N: This fic isn't going to be a dark magic or custom-tradition wank where the muggleborns are just trampling on the customs of the wizarding world nor will it be a muggle wank where all purebloods are idiots and muggles are geniuses that can use magic better than a race that has been using it for millennia. Politics is complicated just like morality is and both sides have some relevant points and neither of said sides is completely right about most subjects.

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[ROR, Hogwarts Castle.]

Nathan had been at Hogwarts for over two months, and he had made significant progress in his study of the Dark Arts. He had underestimated the sheer depravity of dark wizards, whose methods made even the most depraved No-Maj serial killers look like children.

Cannibalism, murder, rape, burning people alive, eating them alive, feeding them to rodents alive... These were just a few of the common methods used to perform the more ritualistic forms of dark magic. Nathan had even found a book on soul magic, and the experiments described within it still sent shivers down his spine.

Dark magic, he had discovered, was a field of magic that relied heavily on emotions. Negative emotions strengthened dark spells, such as curses and hexes. While Nathan was still mastering the fundamentals of ritual magic, he would never venture into its darker rituals. He could kill someone if he had sufficient motivation, but he could not stomach cannibalism, rape, or torture.

So Nathan had decided to focus on the spell-casting aspect of dark magic while staying away from dark rituals, soul magic, Necromancy, etc.

However, Nathan was also interested in a few other branches of magic, such as blood magic, poison arts, illusion arts, and dark enchantments.

Blood magic was perhaps the most useful branch of the dark arts to Nathan since it could be used in conjunction with a lot of skills he already knew. Arithmancy would also help in the creation of curse objects through dark enchantments.

During his various training sessions, Nathan also figured something out about his proficiency in the casting of the dark arts. He was not particularly talented at curses that needed murderous intent to work.

Nathan could easily get spells that required emotions like wrath, mischief, cruelty, or morbidity to work as they were intended. But spells that needed hate against someone were difficult.

Nathan guessed that since he was incapable of being a remorseless murderer against a dummy from the ROR, such spells would be difficult to cast successfully against said dummies. However, he also hoped that he would probably be able to cast such spells on the Death Eaters because he would actually feel enough hatred to end them remorselessly.

As he stood there in the room of requirements with a small pile of magically destroyed dummies after a light training session, Nathan was sure that he was improving at a pace that would make him better than most combatants in the upcoming war.

The question however remained the same: Was this enough to take on  Lord Voldemort?

Sadly, Nathan was perfectly aware that any normal wizard would be slaughtered by Voldemort and he needed a distinctive advantage against Voldemort that the man could not trump, even with his superior knowledge. Harry Potter's sacrifice at the end of the Second British Civil War allowed all combatants safety from the man and even then the wizard had to be held back by three very talented wizards.

Nathan needed something on the level of Ancient magic that could provide absolute protection against an opponent like Lily and Harry Potter's sacrifice.

And he knew that magic like that was not something a person could call upon at a whim but such a piece of magic would allow Nathan to level the field against  Voldemort. And he was perfectly aware of a few branches of magic that allowed for things like that. Branches of magic that the unspeakable dealt with. Things like Love, Will, Space, Time and Death.

And Nathan was very interested in the ability to manipulate space-time to his whims. The problem was that wands were very limited in free manipulation of things and Nathan did not have very high hopes when it came to finding reading material about something as forbidden as Time magic.

"I don't think the room has anything about using Time magic, does it?" Nathan was disappointed when nothing in the room changed to help him.

Nathan looked at the flare gun that he had enchanted as insurance until he could use magic without invoking the unreasonable restrictions on the use of underage magic.

Nathan contemplated how he could access information related to such magic. And the only people he knew could offer him such knowledge was the Unspeakables but Nathan was not sure he wanted any contact with those mysterious-acting weirdos.

"If I can't find the knowledge, shouldn't I just recreate it?", Nathan was not sure that he could work around the rigidity of wands but Nathan also believed that with the use of Arithmancy, he could create new spells to manipulate both space and time.

"But I can't create a spell for each application. That would take ages to create and test." To truly use something like Space-Time, Nathan would need at least ten spells for it to be useful in prolonged combat. He could not create a single spell and then become the magical equivalent of a one-trick pony because all magic could be countered and his one trick getting countered would be devastating.

"Or I can use fixed word of power for Space and Time along with modifiers that can be added and subtracted freely into the spell to create various effects through combinations."

Maxima, Minima, Locomotor, Horribillis, Tria and Duo were some of the most popular spell modifiers. Words of power that could be used to change the functions of a spell slightly while Prefixes or Suffixes were fixed words of power that worked as a base that was being modified by the modifier.

It would increase the casting time if the spells were used verbally and increase the casting difficulty non-verbally but it would also allow a far more flexible method of casting that could be used for casting.

"I need to get my notes on when I was creating the Zeno charm."- His first spell was a branch of Space manipulation after all.

[12 Kennington Road, London.]

Nathan had started developing space-time manipulation spells a few days ago. It was a slow process, but he believed he would have a trump card beyond anything the wizarding world had seen by the time the second wizarding war truly began.

His attempt to create a well-indexed system of spells was not a new idea, but no one had ever put in the time to revamp the whole way arithmancy and spell-creation were done in modern times. Nathan believed that tying modifiers to base spells would allow wizards to overcome the rigid nature of wands and make their magic as flexible as wandless magic, where it would seem like the wizard was shifting the world around them with their mere thoughts.

However, this idea also presented the problem of slowing his personal progress in other branches of magic, such as transfiguration, charms, dark magic, and divination.

Nathan had after all also picked up divination as a passing interest. He was mostly interested in prophecies and how most of them played out in the wizarding world but he still practised some divination spells that could actually be cast using a wand.

On Christmas Day, during family dinner, his family found out about his new interest in divination from Nathan and their reactions were mixed. His grandfather believed that one needed to be a seer to perform the type of divination taught at Hogwarts. His grandmother and father believed the subject to be nothing more than a half-hearted attempt by Dumbledore to allow an alternative to care for magical creatures and arithmancy, both subjects being either not very safe or very difficult for most students. His mother surprised Nathan when she told him that the divination teacher was a fraud in an ice-cold tone.

"Nathan, what do you want to do when you get older?" his father asked.

The question caught Nathan off guard. He liked reading laws, government policies, and history so that he could find loopholes and inconsistencies in them.

"I'm not sure, Dad," he said before continuing in a more thoughtful tone,"Though, I'll probably join the ministry, or maybe I'll become a historian and perform an exorcism on Binns so that someone can actually teach history rather than buzzing about it like a mosquito that doesn't even let people sleep properly, or maybe I could join you all in running the shop."

Everybody chuckled at his words and Nathan cracked a smile at the successful joke before saying, "If I do join the ministry, I will probably go for the position of the minister." What was left unsaid by him was that after the war, people would beg him to take his position as the minister of magic. The question would be how to strip away power from the Wizengamot and centralize it around himself.

"You certainly are smart enough for it," his mother chimed into the conversation with a smile and his father and grandparents gave affirmative nods with smiles of their own.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence Mum, but I don't think being smart is a requirement. I mean look at Fudge."

Nathan knew that Bagnold would not win her re-election and would be replaced by Fudge who was being funded by the traditionalists and opportunists in the wizengamot and the ministry who were trying to curry favor with the man in hopes of recovering damage they incurred during the first fall of Lord Voldemort.

His father couldn't help but say, "That's fair," even as he smiled wryly.

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A|N: Hope you all liked the chapter and if you did, drop powerstones so that others can read this too.