The days after Halloween gave him more room than he expected. With the castle still shaking off the feast and most of the corridors quieter than usual in the evenings, Aegeus found his way back to the fourth-floor room most nights, the book McGonagall had left him now heavily annotated in the notes crowding out whatever the original author had intended as white space.
Scale came first. He pushed the desk-stack further than he had before Halloween— six pieces of furniture had been the previous ceiling; he moved it to nine, then twelve, laid out in front of him, and worked the wave through all of it at once.
It dragged harder than anything he'd attempted, the concentration stretching thin enough by the end that he had to sit down afterward to catch his breath, but it held. No cracks, no flare, no desk left half-transfigured and groaning under its own instability.
He didn't push past twelve. The book had been clear enough on that point— control was only the threshold, but it was not enough on its own.
He turned from the scale chapter to the section he had skimmed past the first time through: precision. It was a smaller, less dramatic section, tucked between two chapters on structural resistance, almost apologetic in how briefly it treated the subject— as if the author assumed anyone attempting Bulk Transfiguration in the first place had no real use for delicacy.
But Aegeus reread it three times anyway, because it described exactly the gap he'd started noticing in his own work: he could move a wave of intent through an entire stack of furniture and get a slab of stone out the other end, uniform and solid— but utterly incapable of producing anything with any sort of precision.
He started with a single teacup, transfigured not into another solid object but into two distinct halves— handle one material, body another, the wave deliberately split rather than allowed to settle evenly.
It fought him. The first attempt produced a teacup that was uniform, disappointingly, the same material throughout, his intent collapsing back into a single wave the moment his concentration wavered. The second attempt cracked the boundary between the two halves entirely, leaving him with two ruined pieces instead of one cohesive object.
The fifth attempt held— a hairline seam, where the handle was different, darker material than the body, both correctly formed.
It wasn't impressive by any reasonable standard. It was also considerably harder than the stone slab had been.
It seemed like the wave method didn't work very well with precision. If he had done it the normal way, he could have made all sorts of shapes with his eyes closed.
He didn't chase more progress that night, mindful of the same lesson the book had already taught him about scale— that pushing before the control underneath had caught up was how people lost eyebrows, or worse.
He sat with the teacup a while instead, turning it over in the wandlight, calculating exactly where the seam had held and where the first four attempts had failed. The hairline boundary was subtle— almost invisible, but under his thumb, he could still feel the raw transition between the two materials.
He had time. He reminded himself of that, closing the book and getting to his feet, his wand hand aching in the now-familiar way.
Across from him, Marcus was attempting to coax a piece of toast nonverbally to float using a subtle flick of his wand, only for it to move around the edges and drop onto the table outside his plate with a dull thud.
"You need more training; there are also some books I would advise you to read first before attempting to do the spell nonverbally," Aegeus murmured without looking up from his notes.
Marcus scowled, poking toast with his fork. "No, thank you! Not everyone is like you, treating magic like the ultimate life goal, Aegeus. Some of us just want their breakfast without having to reach across the table."
Rosalind, sitting beside Marcus with a piece of parchment covered in her own small, careful handwriting, didn't look up either. "You won't die from a little studying, Marcus."
"I might! You don't know that!"
Marcus jabbed his fork at the toast again, and gave up on the charm entirely in favor of buttering his toast. "I also have Quidditch practice to do in an hour; I simply have no time!"
"You're not even part of the team." Rosalind pointed out dryly.
"And I never will be if I don't practice!"
Aegeus let the argument run without joining it further, though he found himself listening more closely than usual. The match was two days off now— Gryffindor's first of the season— and the common room had spent most of the past week buzzing with strategy talk late into the night.
"Are you going to be there?" Rosalind said, glancing at him. "At the match?"
"I will think about it."
Marcus perked up at that, his earlier indignation forgotten. "You should've seen them at the pitch yesterday. Charlie Snitch in four minutes flat—"
"Anyway. When you go, and believe me you will, try not to. I don't know, analyze wind resistance or something, and try to really enjoy the match for a change."
"I make no promises."
"Rosalind, you tell him, he will listen to you; tell him he can't!"
"I'm not telling him anything," Rosalind said, not looking up from her parchment. "If he wants to spend the whole match analyzing the wind or even quaffle trajectories, he can do as he pleases."
Aegeus closed the book he had been half-reading through breakfast and set it aside.
The first Quidditch match of the season was Gryffindor against Hufflepuff, and by breakfast the Great Hall had already split itself into two competing volumes of noise, red and gold on one side, yellow and black on the other, with the rest of the school treating it as a reasonable excuse to shout about nothing in particular.
_________________________________________________________________________
TO BE CONTINUED
~~~
If you like the story, please leave a stone.
And if you can, leave a review; it doesn't have to be 5 stars, just share your honest opinion.
Support link: www.patr eon.com/n740
15 advance chapters