An Uncomfortable Realization
Harry's Room, Durmstrang, May 11 th
Harry,
To answer your question, no, I can't become an Animagus. I don't have the ability. Your father tried to help me find my animal near the end of the war, thinking that it would be a good way to escape from Death Eaters in case I was ever cornered and couldn't Apparate. I was never able to develop the talent, though that's not very surprising. Becoming an Animagus is an exceptionally rare talent amongst wizards and witches. I think it's less than 10 percent of all witches and wizards who have the ability. The fact that your father and Sirius were both able to become Animagi is a slight statistical improbability.
Why the sudden interest in Animagi? You're not thinking about becoming one, are you? Please tell me you're not. It is a very dangerous process, Harry. Your father didn't want to tell you and your brother because he was afraid of scaring you, but your uncle Sirius had a very bad accident when practicing the transformation during his fourth year. He was too full of himself and tried to force the transformation before he was ready. Had your father not been there to return him to human form, Sirius could have died.
How are your projects going? The idea of a final project is very interesting, and your uncle Remus and I agree that if Hogwarts had something like that, we would have been terrified that our projects weren't good enough. I hope you're handling everything alright. Your father and I think a spell chain would be a very impressive project for your Defense class. I didn't even find out about them until my fourth year, but Professor Snape was apparently familiar with them at your age. When I told him that you were trying to make one, he asked if he could see a copy of the chain when you finished it.
As far as your Charms project is concerned, I think a Space-Enhancement Charm is a very good idea. I'm sure with enough practice, you'll be able to successfully cast it. While I didn't learn the spell until the start of my fourth year, I remember it wasn't very hard to master.
Your father and Uncle Sirius say hello, and Uncle Remus is wondering if you could tell him anything more about the Durmstrang library. He's very curious about how students know to avoid the dangerous or cursed books. I admit I'm a little curious about that as well. I remember Madam Pince telling me about a particularly nasty book that Hogwarts had in the Restricted section that made someone's eyes bleed the longer they read, and the book was charmed to keep the reader's attention. Please tell me you're being careful.
All my love,
Mum
Putting the letter down on his desk, Harry was slightly surprised that Calypso was right, and his mother couldn't become an Animagus. He hadn't realized just how rare Animagi were in the wizarding world. Harry just assumed that his uncle Remus hadn't become one since he was a werewolf. But less than ten percent had the ability? That wasn't a lot at all. When one considered that it takes a lot of work to become an Animagus, Harry suddenly realized why not all the professors at Hogwarts were transforming into cats like Professor McGonagall.
As he read over his mother's warning about not trying the transformation, Harry chuckled slightly. He could just see his mum yelling at his father for putting ideas in his head, and that he shouldn't have told Nathan and him all those stories about how he would sneak into the Forbidden Forest with Sirius and Remus when they were at Hogwarts.
The bit about what had nearly happened to Sirius was shocking. Harry knew that the transformation was difficult, but to actually die attempting it? Harry was very glad his father had been there. Sirius could go overboard with pranks sometimes, but Harry couldn't imagine growing up without him there. Uncle Sirius was always able to cheer him and Nathan up when they were younger, and to not have him around would have been horrible.
Taking out the spell chain that he had perfected the night before with Calypso's help, Harry cast the duplication charm on it. He'd send it to his mother so she could give it to Professor Snape. Spell chains were a series of spells where the last wand movement of the first spell flowed into the next spell's first wand movement. The result was a near endless stream of spells that immediately put one's opponent on the defensive.
That wasn't to say they were an unbeatable tactic. All an opponent had to do to stop a spell chain was to throw the caster off at one point and the entire chain would be ruined. When Calypso was explaining them to Harry, she demonstrated how they were used in a duel. Harry had been very impressed, and the fact that spell chains weren't taught until the very beginning of third year Dark Arts meant that the project would be advanced enough to let him skip the second year class.
Harry was pleasantly surprised that his mum thought he could easily do the Expansion Charm. His Charms project was proving to be more difficult than he thought, even though the charm itself wasn't that hard to cast. The problem was keeping the room that size indefinitely. A simple finite would cause the room to shrink back to normal, and Harry knew Professor Kosarev would test to see if the charm was resistant to the simplest canceling spell.
Unfortunately, permanent charms, or enchantments, were well beyond anything Harry could do. He had tried to practice casting an enchantment to expand a room, just to see if he was capable of it. He had chosen an out-of-the-way storage closet on the first floor to practice, and the results were spectacular… in a very bad way. The closet walls that Harry had tried to enchant somehow managed to grow teeth, and the closet started constricting to chew the things inside of it! Harry had left as soon as he realized his error, and Viktor had casually mentioned the next day how the Durmstrang caretaker was now swearing revenge against a student that tried to kill him.
After the debacle of the storage closet, Harry had abandoned his enchanting efforts. He did not want to screw up again and get into trouble. The Durmstrang caretaker made Mr. Filch at Hogwarts look like a harmless puffskein. He also wasn't sure, but he was suspicious that Calypso might have figured out that it was him who was responsible for what happened to the caretaker. She had looked right at him and started to laugh after Viktor told his story. She also seemed to have a knowing smirk on her face for the rest of the day whenever she looked at him.
Still, since he couldn't enchant the walls, Harry only had one option left. There was a way to tie a spell into an object so that the finite incantatem had to be directed at the object in order to cancel the spell's function. It was used by wizards who, like Harry, found enchantments to be very difficult and easy to mess up. They were also used when someone only wanted a charm to be in effect for a certain amount of time. While an enchantment could be removed, it was difficult to do so.
The problem was that preparing an object to hold a charm was difficult. Most often, people just bought pre-prepared objects beforehand and then just worried about casting the charm. Harry was tempted to just do that. After all, making a receptacle that could be used to hold a charm was far more difficult than the actual Enlarging Charm Harry was going to use for his project. After reading a book on their creation in the library, however, Harry felt that it was a challenge he could do. While not advanced enough to be on the Charms N.E.W.T. examination, the spell was frequently used as a bonus question on the Charms O.W.L. Harry enjoyed the challenge, but he had ordered a few pre-prepared receptacles just in case he didn't manage to succeed.
Working on creating a receptacle was what Harry spent most of his free time doing now. It was a very complicated process. There were a half-dozen spells that needed to be cast on the object, and if one of them failed or was cast incorrectly, it wouldn't work. Viktor had found the entire process fascinating, and had asked several questions about how it was done. Harry had tried to explain it, but it seemed like the process was just a little beyond his Bulgarian friend's grasp of Charms.
Harry chuckled nervously at the last part of his mother's letter. Just how did students know not to touch certain cursed Dark Arts books? It turned out that a list was provided to every student at the start of the year, and it included the names of all the cursed books in the library. Due to an administrative oversight, Harry was never given the list, and the amount of time he spent in the library, or talking with Lady Doktor, made everyone assume that he had received a copy. A few weeks ago, Calypso had commented to Viktor about how next year the list was supposed to grow by several books, and Harry had asked what they were talking about.
They had explained and shown him a copy of the list, which Harry immediately duplicated. Viktor and Calypso then seemed to bond while simultaneously calling him a complete and total idiot for browsing through the Dark Arts section without knowing which books could cause him serious harm. When Harry pointed out that Calypso had stopped him from reading Sonnets of a Sorcerer, Calypso had bitterly responded that she just assumed he wasn't paying attention to the title or had forgotten it was on the list. Needless to say, both Viktor and Calypso left the room sometime later after making sure Harry knew he was an exceptionally lucky but very stupid Englishman.