Chapter 27: Family Magic
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I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
I would like to thank my beta, Akisu, for his help in this chapter.
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13 October 1991, Hogwarts
As for the Gryffindor first years, with Longbottom being too busy with his Quidditch position, they stopped instigating things, which made Malfoy feel like he had won. It was sad that he didn't know that it was all probably designed by the teachers to stop Hogwarts from turning into a battleground. Still, things were starting to calm down, and Hogwarts was beginning to turn into a normal school.
Harry returned to the common room with his Slytherin classmates. He had come to a certain understanding with Granger but dealing with her was exhausting. It wasn't anything bad, but Harry felt more like he was indulging her than hanging out with her. She wasn't really a bad person. She just didn't know how to talk with people. To be fair, Harry didn't know how to talk with people either, but he knew how to fake it. He still didn't understand how he ended up having friends, but he was grateful for them.
When he arrived in the common room, Harry removed another book and started reading it. Tracy rolled her eyes, "How you weren't sorted in Ravenclaw, I have no idea."
"Well, it's not like I convinced the hat to put me here or something. I just let it do its thing," Harry said while looking up from his book.
Blaise responded, "Thank Merlin, it put you here. Could you imagine any other house suffering you? You would have driven them mad in a month."
The Malfoy scion seemed to have been listening to their conversation, and interjected, "Would have been a good riddance if you ask me."
Harry raised an eyebrow, "It's rude to interrupt other people's conversation, Draco. I would have hoped that your parents would have taught you some manners."
"At least I have parents. I bet you don't even know your family's rituals for the Samhain ceremony. I bet you're afraid. I heard that it hurts the more you have muggle blood running through your veins." Draco replied smugly.
Harry honestly had no idea what the hell he was talking about, but Daphne and Blaise looked furious. Tracy, on the other hand, looked as confused as he was. Choosing not to the asshole have the last word, "Honestly Draco, you were in tears when you were hit with a stinging hex by Longbottom. I doubt our definition of pain is close to one another."
The boy huffed, "You won't be as smart when you're deemed unworthy in front of everyone."
The blonde then turned and left without saying a word. Harry still had no clue what he was eluding to. He did keep his questions to himself; he didn't want any of the Slytherin to realize that he was raised by muggles. It would be the closest thing to being a muggleborn in Slytherin, and Harry didn't want to risk it.
So, he stayed silent, and thankfully, Daphne spoke up, "Are any of you scared about Samhain?"
Blaise nodded, "A bit, but I heard that while it hurts, it's worth it."
Tracy was the one that exploded, "What the hell are you on about? What's happening on Samhain?"
Daphne and Blaise's eyes widened, "Sorry, sometimes we forget that you're not from an old lineage. The Samhain after the start of a child's Hogwarts education is where the crest ceremony is held. They're sort of the unlocking of the family magic. Although don't really ask anyone about it, it's sort of taboo."
Blaise continued, "Every family sort of has a crest that is passed to their descendants. It's proof that you're a member of the family. Getting accepted to magic school is the first step to being declared a wizard member of the family. I heard that the crest hurts when it's unlocked but those were some rumours. Otherwise, crests can contain a lot of stuff inside, which depends entirely on what your ancestors put inside. Either way, you never ask anyone about their crests. You'll probably never have one since your family is so young and none of your ancestors built a crest for their descendants."
Harry nodded as if he already knew all of this. Tracy, though, looked thoughtful, "So, when Malfoy was insulting Harry about his family crest…"
"He was telling him that he was unworthy of his legacy because his mother was a muggleborn. There are a few crests like that, that won't be unlocked if they're not pureblood enough, or sometimes there are a few 'worthiness' enchantments that let someone only unlock only a part of the crest. It really depends on the maker." Daphne explained.
"But Harry has to be worthy…" Tracy protested.
"As flattered as I am by your faith in me, I won't know until Samhain. Do either of you know where we're doing the ceremony?" Harry responded for the first time.
Blaise responded, "I asked one of the prefects, and he said they had a special ceremonial ritual room where they hold it every year."
Harry simply nodded and started to think. He had never in his life heard anything about magic crests. It wasn't in any of the books he had read. It made sense that they weren't in the Muggleborn introduction books, since they wouldn't really need to know it. These books were mostly centred on how the government worked and the currencies, and so on. Old family magic was not something that they needed to know. But still, there had been no mentions of magical crests in any of the books he had read from the library, and in over six weeks, he had read enough to get a general idea about what it meant to be living in the magical world.
He needed to research this quickly, understand how they worked, and before Halloween, that's for sure. He couldn't waste any time. He sure as hell wasn't going to participate in a ceremony that he didn't understand.
He needed to get to the library, and he needed to do it quickly. The following day, which happened to be a Saturday, Harry went up to the great hall, ate his breakfast, and went to the library. He didn't even wait for his friends to get up, consumed with his search. He couldn't say to anyone what he was looking for, considering the issue was as sensitive as Blaise and Daphne made it out to be. He walked into the library, ignoring any of the casting magic sections and towards the history section.
Four hours later, he had found exactly nothing. No one had written anything about magical crests. They were probably in the restricted section, away from any curious student that might end up getting killed.
Truthfully, Harry looked at books about lineages, about entire magical dynasties and bloodlines, but while there were mentions of magical crests, they always assumed that the reader knew what they were. The book 'The Second Goblin Rebellion of the Middle Ages' said something about a Leo Black, that was able to massacre thousands of enemies thanks to the power of the crest of the Black Family.
This wasn't normal. Magical Crests were a sensitive topic, but not enough to barely mention in the history books. Someone had to be removing every book with any information about magical crests, either putting them in the restricted section or removing them outright from the library.
Harry needed to know, he needed to understand. It ate at him, that someone was actively preventing him from understanding his legacy, of what it meant to be a Potter. By the end of the day, Harry had decided that the library didn't have any information about magical crests and their unlocking. Hell, Harry didn't even know if the Potter family had a magical crest in the first place. And so, he went to the only place he knew could help him, the place that helps all Hogwarts students when they need it. The Room of Requirements.
The young Potter was honestly wary of getting there, or perhaps, he just didn't need it. There was no one stopping him from learning magic as he saw fit, not experimenting on it. He was too much of a beginner to need to practice in a specialized room to train and experiment. Harry was holding off the room to explore properly when he would have needed it.
And while the room of hidden things was a very attractive place to search for old books and artefacts, it was an endless room with things thrown away by students for centuries. He needed to have a grounding in curse breaking to avoid getting cursed by the random crap that was in the room. Harry had no wish to endanger his life for no reason, not when he could put it off when the room wouldn't be a danger anymore.
Still, Harry had no choice, and thus walked to the seventh floor right after dinner and towards the moving tapestry of a man trying to teach trolls how to dance ballet. If that was a thing then the man was either crazy or an idiot. He turned to the wall in front of the tapestry with his heart beating loudly. He sincerely hoped that the room would be there.
He walked past the room three times while thinking, "I need a place that would teach me about magical crests and family magic. I need a place that would teach me about magical crests and family magic. I need a place that would teach me about magical crests and family magic."
By his third time passing the wall, a door started to materialize from the previously empty wall. It didn't look particularly grand, just like the door of any of the classrooms. Slowly, Harry opened it and got inside.
Harry was surprised when he saw the interior of the room. It wasn't some grand magical room as he expected, just a cosy room with a comfortable sofa, a chair and a small desk. There was a single book on the desk titled, 'Sê sweotolung râd wyrt−rum lybcræft'.
Fuck, the book was written in old English. The damn book looked older than the castle. Harry mentally asked the room to translate it, but it didn't work. He tried to summon another book, to no avail. Just to make sure that the room still worked, he summoned an extra chair that materialized in seconds. He really needed to understand the capabilities of the room.
Instead, Harry asked for a book that would help him translate Old English. Luckily, there seemed to be a book on translation spells, and a few common spells that seemed easy enough to cast. And yet, after dozens of tries for many spells, even ones specializing in Old English, nothing happened. Harry felt the spells wash over the book, and yet they didn't seem to hold.
Curiously enough, Harry didn't feel any magic in the book, which should have been his first instinct that there was something wrong with it. Considering that Old English stopped being used centuries ago, the book should have looked far more told if it didn't have any preservation spells. Harry would need a dictionary to work in his free time to translate this, at least to get an idea of what the book is talking about. It would take days, if not weeks, but if he worked hard on it, Harry was optimistic that he would at least get enough information to deal with the Samhain ceremony.
Knowing that he couldn't take the book outside the room, Harry brought out one of his never-ending empty notebooks that he owl ordered a couple of weeks before. He had an empty one and used a spell on his quill to copy the book's content. He was half expecting it to fail, considering how his previous spells failed as well.
But it worked. The Quill copy spell was a spell of Harry's own creation, devised from the charms on a note-taking quill he had bought. However, instead of copying the book, the quill detected the parts of the book that were not blank and rewrote them in the target parchment. Harry had used this trick to bypass the ant-copying wards on the books in the library. The only issue was that the method was slow.
By the time the book had finished being written, it was almost curfew. Still, Harry had a complete physical copy of the book the Room had picked for him and had tinkered with his modified Contego spell a little more. Before leaving the room, Harry pointed his wand at his book and cast the translation spell. Suddenly, the words of the parchment shuffled around and turned into 'An Explanation of Family Magics.'
Harry grinned to himself as he went back to his common room before Filch would find him. It had taken him the entire day, but he had found what he was looking for.
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If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr
I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.