Harry Potter : Chapter 10: Rising Star III
bluebell flames calmly shimmering between the cauldron and the stone floor, and a wide, curved shape of glass hovering just above the potion.
The student's eyes jumped up at the interruption, but he didn't stop his movements.
"Good night for a stroll, professor? Even if we're almost at dawn." he tilted his head toward the East, where the sky was starting to abandon the black of the night to become deep blue, slowly but surely tilting towards purple.
...
"Mr. Hagrid!" Horace stepped forward after having closed the door, conflicted between reprimanding the first year and expressing his curiosity about his student's endeavour.
"I've thought a lot about our first lesson, professor." Hagrid spoke without giving the Head of Slytherin a chance to answer.
"And I've asked myself, can I use one story as an ingredient for another, greater one?"
"Using a potion in order to enhance another is possible only in a handful of cases. Poisons, for the most part." Horace strode forward with an interested gleam in his eyes, quickly undoing the charm that allowed him to see in the dark in order to discern the situation without magic to mess with his refined potion maker's senses.
"That's what I had thought too at first, but then I rethought about the whole 'Story' concept you showcased for us."
Hagrid's eyes remained pointed East, like he was waiting for something, "And it makes sense, a Story doesn't need another in order to be 'complete', then I thought about the refining of ingredients, and what it could signify."
"And?" Horace prodded, his hands held behind his back, forcing himself to not interfere with a potion he could tell was not going to be harmful anytime soon. Once he's done we'll have a stern talk about the risk of experimental potions.
He decided, postponing the more obvious reaction to a student blatantly ignoring the rules in order to satisfy his own curiosity.
"And if a single ingredient can be refined, I don't see why a small 'Story' cannot be brewed in order to obtain a very specific sum of properties." the tallest first year to ever grace Hogwarts' halls explained: "A story that is nothing more than a 'definition' of sorts."
"What did you do?"
"Well, I started with the idea of capturing sunlight in a liquid." he gestured with his head towards a thick stack of papers that Horace grabbed delicately, "But then I thought, 'Go Big or Go Home', and decided to capture 'Dawnbreak' itself."
"You used mostly Fungi here." the Head of Slytherin House observed, receiving a nod as an answer. Then the professor finally glanced inside of the cauldron, seeing only what looked like the uppermost layer of an impossibly deep well, which nevertheless seemed to shimmer softly when he observed it with the corner of his eye.
"I needed something to act as 'containment for the dawn break, you see. So I've chosen an iron cauldron, to act as a cage.
But then I needed to turn the simple iron into something capable to not only withstand but contain the first ray of sun. Hence the Dark Amanita, desiccated and ground..."
"Because it grows best in dark environments?"
"Yes!" the first year smiled widely at the professor, "and goes into some sort of hibernation when exposed to direct light. So I lined the inside of the cauldron with it, using only a little water to turn it into a paste.
Then extract of Nyx's Delight, and limestone dust to coat the pine branch I'm using to stir clockwise."
"Because you want the mesh to happen orderly? Following the natural motion of time?"
"Exatcly, I'll only add one counterclockwise stir before the last passage, in order to turn the potion into a 'reactive' state of sorts."
"Seven leaves of White Ivy? Which instead thrives with sunlight? And no less than 21 Lustre Bat's eyes. I see you modified the bluebell charm too?" the Head of Slytherin inquired, only to receive a sly smile in return.
"Well, yeah, the Ivy will keep the cauldron from exploding, the bat's eyes instead I've added one per minute since the sunset. A Lustre Bat's eye symbolizes the animal's ability to roam the dark, to capture even the faintest direction.
Even if biologically speaking, normal bats use echolocation, not sight, and that threw me for a loop." Hagrid's eyes seemed to shine in the dark with unrepressed glee.
"The eyes are to capture the starlight, you see, I needed starlight in order to actually prepare the cauldron."
"Like a muggle smith warming the iron before striking it with a hammer, I'd guess?" Horace found himself captivated by the extremely original line of thought thatb had brought the first year to spend the whole night tending to an experimental potion for which, he could readily admit, he had performed an incredible amount of research.
Even if the importance of the timing and the importance of Astronomy for the brew pointed towards Ritualism a bit more than Horace would have wished for a First-Year, there was no denying the brilliance or the sheer ambition of the project.
"More or less, it was also to prepare the glass, it will be the 'epilogue' of the story, just after the dawn, you'll see. As for the bluebell flames... I've lit an ember with the last ray of sunset, and only then I've cast the bluebell flames."
Before Horace could keep questioning him, the tall first year shook his head.
"Now's the moment." Rubeus Hagrid suddenly stood from his stool, retreating the straight and freshly pruned pine branch that he had been using to stir his concoction, and placing himself with the cauldron between him and the imminent dawn.
"If you blink, you'll miss it." he warned with a suppressed bout of laughter.
The Sky had lost his pitch like darkness, turning into shades of purple and pink that seemed to punch clean through a small cluster of clouds, and the eyes immediately burned as they were pointed exactly where the sun was about to surface.
With a cautious movement of his wand, Hagrid tilted the curved glass above the cauldron until it rested with its centre pointed exactly towards the incoming rising star.
When finally the sun poked up from beyond the horizon, for a single instant, nothing changed.
The shadows remained still, the stars didn't disappear, the colours of the sky didn't change, and the warmth of the favourite star of the planet didn't wash over the two wizards.
Instead, the curved glass glinted impossibly in the dim light that came just before the actual dawn, and the dark pit of water present in the cauldron shone with the same impossible bright light of the dawn break.
Casting upwards a funnel of white warmth that shattered what was left of the night, accompanied by a wooshing sound caused by air being displaced by the change in temperature.
"Here comes in effect the powdered limestone, to bleed off the warmth." Then the curved shape of glass tilted backwards and fell into what had once been the dark water of the cauldron, which now shone of a pale gold, the shimmer over the water looking like the glinting of sunlight over polished silver, and only then the bluebell flames were extinguished.
Horace slowly lowered the wand that he had raised in order to be able to defend himself and his student with a moment's notice, and looked at the final result with blatant awe.
It wasn't an excessively complex potion, only one that required a lot of constant care, and it wasn't surprising, after all it wasn't something to be consumed in order to grant properties of any kind upon the drinker.
"It will be either a powerful agent to kick off a much larger reaction, or a veritable flash of actual sunlight, and a concentrated one at that." Horace mused with eyes that shone with interest as he went over the detailed notes of his now favourite first year.
"I was thinking that in a pinch it could kill a vampire." Hagrid laughed, and if he had looked a bit unhinged for a moment, Slughorn missed it completely, busy as he was with ogling the 'liquid dawn breaks.
"If I used 'Reducio' on the cauldron, would it concentrate the dawn break even further? No, it wouldn't make sense. But what if instead, I had turned into a liquid the light from an instant of the midsummer sun?"
"It would be far more likely." Horace replied distractedly, finally finding again his proper role, "I guess we can talk more about this during your detention for being out after curfew and experimenting with an original potion without a professor to oversee.
And also for stealing ingredients, those eyes were worth a pretty galleon, I'll have you know!"
The annoyed groan of the tall student brought a smile to Horace's face. Mr. Hagrid was unusual in many ways, from his size to his attitude, and he wouldn't fail to entertain any time soon.
=========================
if you want to read ahead of the public release, you can join my p atreon :
p atreon.com/Darkness013