The students stirred at Professor Rahansen's blunt words, a low murmur of discontent was rippling through the clearing.
"Sounds pretty mystical, doesn't it?"
Beside Harry, Justin crossed his arms over his chest, looking thoroughly unconvinced by the entire premise of the morning so far.
"If you genuinely think we're incapable of grasping the profound knowledge of this subject, then why does the school bother offering it at all, Professor Rahansen?"
It was Katie Bell, Harry's teammate on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, who raised her hand to actually voice the question.
"That's a good question, Miss Bell—"
Professor Rahansen got Katie's surname exactly right on the very first attempt, without hesitation; it seemed, whatever else might be uncertain about him, he'd done his proper homework on his students before the term ever began.
"Meditation—let's continue calling it that for now, since we haven't a better word available—"
Flomide paced slowly among the neat rows of saplings as he spoke, his hands were clasped behind his back.
"You may not know this already, but it was, in fact, Professor Watson who personally invited me to Hogwarts specifically to teach this course. Much as I am delighted to pass this ancient tradition on to all of you vibrant young people, I did, in fact, raise with Professor Watson the very same question you've just put to me, when he first extended the invitation.
This particular subject demands certain very specific qualities from those who wish to study it properly. Even if I were entirely willing to give everything of myself to the teaching of it which I am—I'm afraid that few of you gathered here would ultimately be capable of truly mastering it, however hard you tried."
"What did Professor Watson say to that?"
Ernie, standing on Harry's other side, asked eagerly, leaning forward slightly with curiosity.
"After hearing my rather thorough and, I should say, entirely honest account of the course's difficulty, Professor Watson still insisted that I go ahead and teach it regardless—"
Professor Rahansen said.
"His view on the matter was that this is an extremely practical subject for any working wizard, regardless of how far any individual student ultimately progresses in it.
Even if you cannot master its deeper knowledge, every small advance you do manage to make will feed back into you in a genuinely powerful way. That is to say: it will improve your strength."
'Improve our strength?'
Those students who had, until this point, been only half-interested in the entire conversation suddenly perked up considerably at that particular phrase.
If a wizard of Professor Watson's extraordinary calibre could speak so highly of Meditation, that surely meant there was genuine substance buried somewhere beneath the mystical language—certainly more substance, than flimsier subjects like Divination, or Muggle Studies, or Astronomy.
Even the ever-calculating, ever-scheming Malfoy's eyes had gone wide at the mention of Professor Watson's endorsement.
The students' abrupt, near-universal shift in attitude was plain for Flomide to see rippling across the clearing, and it left him feeling something close to wistfulness as he watched it happen.
'Just look,' he thought, 'at what Bryan Watson's standing in this world must actually amount to, to provoke a reaction of this magnitude with nothing more than his name second-hand.'
"Does anyone else have a question they'd like answered before we properly begin?"
Flomide asked again, looking out over the now considerably more attentive crowd.
"Professor Rahansen, what exactly are these saplings you've got planted here?"
The question came from Cedric, who had been eyeing the neat rows of young trees with evident curiosity since they'd first arrived at the clearing.
"They're oak saplings, Mr. Diggory—"
Flomide said calmly, gesturing at the rows around him with one hand.
"The oak within our ancient tradition specifically holds a particular, special significance. It isn't, strictly speaking, a magical plant in the sense your Herbology classes would classify one. But it possesses excellent magical compatibility—fine material for wandmaking, as I understand many of you already know.
What's more, its soul is remarkably active. Far more active, in fact, than most of the magical plants you're already familiar with from your other coursework, which makes it comparatively easy for to sense its thoughts."
"Its… soul? Its thoughts?"
Cedric asked, looking thoroughly puzzled by the phrasing.
"Professor Rahansen, an oak tree is just a plant, isn't it? I'd always understood that only people, or animals, or things along those lines actually possessed souls and thoughts of their own."
"I see the matter rather differently than you do, Mr. Diggory—"
Professor Rahansen said gently, without any hint of correction or condescension in his tone.
"Everything in this world—every living species, without exception possesses a soul. Every blade of grass. Every tree, however old or young. None of them are exceptions to this. Of course, I recognise that this particular idea may lie well beyond what any of you currently consider common sense.
But if you genuinely wish to study this discipline seriously, you must learn to accept that premise as a starting point and, from the bottom of your heart, look upon all living things as equals."
'Equals?'
Harry gave a slight, crooked smile at that, feeling as though he'd finally caught a glimpse of exactly where the real difficulty in Professor Rahansen's teaching was going to lie for most of the students gathered here.
Never mind treating all life as equal—plenty of people over on the Slytherin side of this very clearing couldn't even bring themselves to treat all wizarding bloodlines as equal to one another.
"So then—"
Hermione struggled to make proper sense of what she was hearing. This was a subject that lay entirely outside the framework of wizarding knowledge she had spent years constructing for herself.
"These oak saplings—we need to… hm, sense their thoughts, somehow?"
"Very clever, Miss Granger—"
Professor Rahansen said with a smile at the quick deduction.
"Though that's something you'll need to work toward through practice later on. Before we can get anywhere near that point, there's a certain preliminary state we first need to reach, all of us together."
'Another strange, unhelpfully vague description,' Harry thought privately. But Professor Rahansen didn't move to explain it right away. Instead, he clapped his hands together a few times to call the students to quiet down.
"I've set out some cushions round behind the cottage, for exactly this purpose. Would the Prefects present be so kind as to fetch them and hand them round to everyone gathered here?"
The resulting commotion lasted a good twenty minutes, students were shuffling and jostling as the cushions were distributed unevenly through the crowd, until pale gold flecks of morning light had finally begun scattering mottled, shifting shadows across all of them through the thinning canopy, and everyone present had finally received their own hard, slightly lumpy cushion, each one woven from dried vine.
Professor Rahansen clapped his hands together once more.
"Now, if you'd all sit yourselves down, please—anywhere at all within the clearing is perfectly fine, so long as you can still hear me speaking clearly."
Another stir went through the crowd at this instruction. No one, notably, set foot inside Professor Rahansen's sapling patch itself; instead, the vast majority of students settled themselves down in a loose ring around its outer edge.
A few of the more adventurous Hufflepuffs went and claimed spots on the raised wooden platform in front of the cottage door itself, and Professor Rahansen didn't seem to mind the liberty in the slightest though he did have to firmly stop Fred and George from attempting to climb directly up onto his newly built roof.
Ron had clearly wanted to settle down somewhere near Harry and the others, but unfortunately for him, Lavender had him thoroughly tied up on the opposite side of the clearing.
Harry ended up settling himself into the grass just behind Hermione and Ginny.
"Why couldn't they have given us something a bit softer to actually sit on…"
Ginny muttered the complaint under her breath, though reluctantly, she still tucked the woven cushion carefully beneath herself as she sat—if nothing else, it kept the worst of the ground's lingering damp from soaking straight through her robes.
A sudden, entirely reckless urge rose up in Harry to ask Ginny to come sit in his own lap instead, and the sheer madness of the thought hit him so hard that, before he'd properly registered what he was doing, he'd smacked himself across his face with an open palm.
"What are you doing, Harry?"
The two girls in front of him both turned at the sudden sound, staring back at him in astonishment. Hermione asked it, clearly taken aback by the self-inflicted.
"Oh, it's nothing, Hermione—"
Harry was profoundly grateful, in that particular moment, that the dim forest light wasn't quite bright enough for either of them to properly see his own face burning red with mortified shame.
"There are mosquitoes in these woods."
Harry mumbled the excuse and busied himself with adjusting his own cushion to avoid further eye contact.
The rest of the students settled down one by one across the clearing, the general murmur of conversation was finally dying away as everyone turned to watch Professor Rahansen with expectant attention.
"Now, I need everyone here to be calm—"
Professor Rahansen said.
'Calm?'
The young wizards stared back at him, visibly baffled by the instruction.
"The very first thing that true inner calm requires of you is emptying your mind entirely of every thought currently occupying it. Think of absolutely nothing at all, and allow the magic naturally present within your own body to settle as well, alongside your thoughts—"
'Let the magic in our bodies settle?'
Harry frowned without quite meaning to.
Magic flowed through the body the way blood did—naturally, on its own, without any conscious direction required from the person carrying it.
Controlling that flow deliberately, shaping or stilling it through will alone, was a skill that Hogwarts had never once actually taught any of them.
"How exactly does one do that… Professor?"
Malfoy asked, his tone carrying a touch of visible impatience.
"Perhaps you haven't yet had occasion to realise this, but magic can, in fact, be governed by the mind—"
Professor Rahansen didn't seem remotely bothered by Malfoy's faintly disrespectful tone, and gave his answer in the same even, patient voice he'd used throughout the morning.
"If you're genuinely unsure what I mean by this, think back to every single night, just before you actually fall asleep—that hazy sensation of your own thoughts gradually emptying themselves out, right before sleep finally takes hold of you. In that specific state, suspended between waking and sleep, you are calm. And your magic, in that same moment, is steady alongside you."
Plenty of students around the clearing scratched their heads in confusion at the comparison.
Hermione, too, wore an expression of genuine, unusual difficulty.
Of all the classes currently taught at Hogwarts, even including Professor Watson's notoriously demanding Physical Education sessions—none had ever managed to feel quite this abstract!
"Bringing your heart and your magic to a state of complete stillness together—that is the very first step every one of you must master in this course—"
Professor Rahansen said it calmly.
"Don't underestimate how difficult this first step actually is. I daresay that even by the very end of this school year, there will be a great many of you still sitting here who haven't yet managed it."
'Think of nothing at all. Empty the mind completely, just like that hazy moment right before sleep finally takes hold.'
It sounded simple enough, stated like that. But the moment Harry actually attempted it, closing his eyes and trying to still his own racing thoughts, he realised just how genuinely, maddeningly hard the instruction truly was to follow.
Harry did his level best to clear away every stray thought crowding his mind, only to quickly discover something deeply frustrating: the very act of consciously trying to clear away his thoughts was, itself, a stray thought demanding his attention, feeding directly back into the exact problem he was attempting to solve.
What Professor Rahansen was asking of all of them amounted to demanding that they fall properly asleep while simultaneously remaining fully, alertly awake—it was a flat, irreconcilable contradiction that no amount of effort seemed capable of resolving.
Many of the students, Harry very much included, closed their eyes in the attempt regardless.
But within that formless, private darkness behind his own eyelids, images kept leaping up without warning.
The corridor from his recurring dream, and that same door that never opened. Malfoy's strange, increasingly suspicious behaviour around his own left arm. How Sirius was actually getting on, back at the Ministry. What Voldemort might currently be plotting, somewhere out beyond the castle. Professor Watson's calm, unreadable face. And—
Once everything immediately around him had gone properly quiet, the faint, sweet fragrance drifting into his nose from somewhere nearby grew almost unbearably strong and specific.
Damn it, Harry, what exactly are you thinking about right now—Ginny is Ron's sister!
Harry cursed himself privately but the image had already lodged itself stubbornly and thoroughly in his mind regardless of the internal reprimand: back over the summer, at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, Ginny in her soft, matcha-green nightgown, day after day, her hair loose and damp about her shoulders, baring a stretch of skin in the low evening light of the kitchen.
So caught up was he in the frantic, escalating effort to shake off this particular, shameful line of thought that he entirely failed to notice his own heart rate steadily climbing, his pulse growing more and more restless beneath his ribs.
Snore. Snore—
Suddenly, amid a wood otherwise filled with nothing but the chirr of insects and the calls of birds, a sound like rolling thunder rose up.
Harry's eyes flew open at once.
"Ah, Mr. Crabbe and Mr. Goyle—"
Professor Rahansen looked over toward the two hulking boys, now slumped against a tree stump, and said with a wry smile:
"—already asleep, I see. Well. I suppose that's one way of achieving an empty mind."
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