Harry Potter : Chapter 14: Base I

In the middle of the night, I awoke with a tortured groan that perfectly managed to encapsulate the sheer agony that my sleep cycle currently represented.

In the dark of my room, with my eyes still closed and encrusted with sleep, my hand fumbled on my nightstand until I found a vial that I had previously prepared, and before I could snuggle once more into the heavy, warm blankets, I uncorked it and downed its contents.

Just as the last drop was gulped down, a crisp coolness seemed to surge through my body, and I felt as if I had just splashed my face with fresh spring water, and my body shivered with unexpressed energy.

Potions are awesome. I smiled to myself as I tossed the covers away from myself and stood, grimacing for an instant as my bare feet landed on the chilly stone of the floor. My fingers found then my wand, and I expertly cast a 'lumos'.

The white light washed coldly and unfeeling over my room, shining upon the few adjustments I had made since my second week into the castle. The small desk had been transfigured into a tall bookshelf, where all of my books rested quietly, while the small chair I had once eyed mistrustfully was now a comfy armchair large enough to host me.

My eyes trailed longingly over the stacks of parchment that awaited me, but I forced myself to perform as many stretches as I could, for my body as well as for my fingers, which I feared would eventually lose mobility because of my half-giant nature.

Sure, eventually I could probably purchase a series of tools in silver, which was an inert material as far as it concerned potions, but the idea of spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with clamps and whatnot to perform what any normal-sized wizard was capable of sat ill with me.

While I moved in the coldness of my room, I started to shift my stretches into what little I remembered of yoga positions, occasionally tilting my frame in order to not fall.

While my body heated up because of the effort required by my movements, and a light sheen of sweat manifested upon my skin, I let my plans and thoughts about this life of mine fade away, slowly but surely quieting my nervousness about pretending friendship with Tom Riddle.

Allowing my guilt regarding the relationship between Hagrid and his father to be smothered by the moment, and for a while, I thought about nothing.

Once I had completed my routine, I took a quick shower, trying to cling to that particular feeling of thoughtlessness that marked my first steps on the road of the Mind Arts.

While the exact mechanics of magic were simply not explained in the books I had read in my previous life, almost everything I remembered about the world was on par with my metaknowledge, so I had decided that until I managed to figure out how to trick Slughorn into teaching me Occlumency without him peering into my head, I would try to 'empty my mind', as Snape would one day tell to Harry Potter.

How to raid the Restricted Section? I asked myself as I walked quietly in the empty halls of Hogwarts. Secrets of the Darkest Arts and Magic Most Evile were going to disappear from the shelves as soon as I could manage it.

I didn't know if Tom had already spotted the tomes, to be truthful, I didn't know f he had already gotten started on his quest for immortality, but if I could avoid that particular clusterfuck by doing something as minor as removing two books, well, how could I ignore such opportunity?

Entering that particular area of the Library was easy enough: besides Slughorn general giddiness at seeing me proposing outrageous stuff like preparing a Polijuice Potion that would turn someone into an animal.

Which I used as an excuse to research the Animagus transformation, using such a topic to bring into the fold Minerva McGonagall and a reluctantly engaged Tom Riddle, the problem wasn't reading the material in the Restricted Section, the problem was outright removing it from the school.

Hiding a book was stupidly easy: transfigure a hidden compartment into the shelves and dropping there the offending tome.

Finding such an offending tome was complex. Because while navigating the ordinary shelves was somewhat possible after a bit of practice, the Restricted Section was a clusterfuck of epic proportions, organization-wise.

While the shelves closest to the divide between the two areas of the Library contained the least dangerous topics, such as The Shape Within or Moste Potente Potions, the successive shelves followed their own order.

Some books were alphabetically ordered by their author, some didn't have an author, and were thusly dumped in blocks with topics of the same genre, but keeping them in order was an impossible task, especially given the fact that they moved.

Turns out that there were reasons why some books were chained to the shelves, who knew?

So, while I had a solution of sorts in order to prevent Tom from learning about Horcruxes, I still had no idea about how to find them.

I returned from my shower with a determined glint in my eyes, and after dressing myself in the pale light of my 'lumos', I walked immediately towards the candle on which I had been practicing for the past weeks.

I lit the wick simply by tapping it with the tip of my wand, before levitating the candle in front of me as I walked into the desert Common Room.

I seated into an armchair in front of a fireplace where only the embers survived, and I twisted my wrist, having the candle follow my movement and drop molten wax on the stone floor. Once I created a large enough smidge, I lowered the lit candle, leaving it upright in front of the dying embers of the fireplace.

"What is fire?" I asked myself, letting my eyes focus on the wavering flame. In Charms, fire was a cornerstone of sorts, it represented a change in its most primal state, it was instinctive to rely on the symbology of fire in order to perform a charm.

Languages came in symbols after all. And to talk with magic, ergo to do magic, meant being able to grasp at the same time the final result one wanted, the intent at the start of the spell, and a symbol that managed to act as a bridge between the two.

It is Change given form. Power at its most primal. I tilted my head as I stared into the small flame of the candle, my mind focusing on my memories of stars and nuclear explosions that I had witnessed in movies. 

But that isn't quite it. I frowned as my memories of Fawkes from the Harry Potter books surged forth in my mind. Destruction and rebirth?

"Incendio works well enough I guess." I muttered as my perspective of Fire slowly shifted until I could see into the small candle's flame both the shining sun, the reassuring lit hearth, and the wavering licks of flame that attempted to chase away the dark.

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