Crabbe and Goyle snored like rolling thunder. Harry genuinely couldn't imagine how their dormitory roommates over in Slytherin managed to put up with it night after night without resorting to some kind of Silencing Charm on their own beds out of pure self-defence.
But what surprised Harry even more than the snoring itself was Professor Rahansen's reaction to it.
He didn't seem the least bit annoyed by the interruption. He simply gave a wry, unbothered smile and shook his head slightly, as though this were the most unremarkable thing in the world.
"This happens often enough, in my experience. Mr. Crabbe and Mr. Goyle's snoring won't disturb your ears any more than the ordinary clutter already crowding your own minds is currently disturbing you. So, I'd like all of you to keep trying regardless of the noise around you."
Now that, Harry thought, was a novel way of framing the disruption.
No other professor at Hogwarts would tolerate a student sleeping straight through their lesson—none, that is, except Professor Binns, whose own droning delivery arguably invited the behaviour.
But even Binns, notoriously oblivious as he was to most things happening in his classroom, wouldn't stand for it if the resulting noise grew disruptive enough to actually interfere with his own monotone recitation.
Crabbe and Goyle weren't the only ones who'd succumbed, either. After a short while longer, Harry noticed his dormitory roommate Seamus propping his chin up on one hand, his eyelids drooping steadily lower, clearly fighting a losing battle against sleep himself.
Harry glanced over toward Ron, curious.
Ron sat there quietly enough, outwardly, but his eyes had gone dull and vacant in a way as if he was somewhere else entirely, his attention drifted off into some bleary middle distance.
'Was simply zoning out the same thing,' Harry wondered, 'as achieving perfect stillness of mind? Surely there had to be some difference between the two.'
"Ohh, find a state, find a state—"
Harry heard Hermione groaning quietly in evident distress somewhere just ahead of him.
"Stay focused, Hermione. Oh, no—I can't not think about something, that's the whole problem—"
That even Hermione's famously sharp, disciplined mind couldn't seem to manage this particular exercise was, in some small and admittedly petty way, a genuine comfort to Harry, watching his own attempts fail in parallel.
"I don't understand, Professor!"
Draco seemed to have grown thoroughly tired of the whole pointless-feeling exercise by this point.
He raised his hand sharply to catch Professor Rahansen's attention and asked, his tone was clipped and impatient, "Just sitting here like a bunch of idiots—what exactly are we supposed to be gaining from this?"
"When your mind settles properly into stillness, Mr. Malfoy, you begin to notice a great many things you would ordinarily overlook—"
Professor Rahansen said calmly, unbothered by the sharpness in Draco's tone.
"Everything around you, at every moment, is in constant motion, whether you're paying attention to it or not. The air stirs. Grass and trees keep growing. Sunlight shifts its angle by the hour.
All things in the nature surrounding you are conveying information to you constantly, in their own particular way—it is only that a mind cluttered with its own internal noise has been rendered effectively blind to all of it."
Malfoy seemed to find this explanation faintly ridiculous, his expression was sceptical.
"But you—you still haven't actually explained. If our minds do settle into calm, somehow, what do we actually get out of all this sitting around?"
"You will become considerably more perceptive, Mr. Malfoy—"
Professor Rahansen smiled at the persistent question.
"With a properly tranquil mind, you will sense changes in your surroundings with far greater clarity than you currently manage. Put in terms you'd likely understand better—you'll become considerably harder to catch off guard, in almost any situation.
In a duel, specifically, you'll be able to clearly perceive the small signals your opponent gives off in the instant before they actually attack. Oh, unless, of course, your opponent happens to be a skilled Occlumens, in which case those signals become rather harder to read."
That sounded, Harry thought, considerably more sophisticated than what Professor Watson had taught them about reading an opponent's body language during their sessions in PE.
Harry's interest sharpened at that comparison. His interest was piqued and he watched Professor Rahansen with real attention now.
Watching Malfoy frown in thought over what he'd just heard, Professor Rahansen continued.
"There's something else you should understand, and perhaps some of you already sense this intuitively—the growth of magical power within a person is a gradual process. To put it more precisely: it increases slowly, in step with your own natural growth as a whole person, body and mind together.
To be even more specific: while you sleep at night, your soul does not sleep alongside your body. Your soul, in its own wondrous and largely unexamined way, continues interacting with the natural world around you during those hours, drawing a kind of nourishment from that ongoing exchange, and growing steadily stronger as a— which, in turn, allows your physical body to hold ever more potent magic as the years pass.
So—if you are able to actively enter a proper meditative state, what that ultimately means is that you gain the ability to consciously influence the pace of your own magical growth."
A wave of astonished, overlapping murmurs swept through the entire clearing at that revelation. The students were genuinely stunned by what they'd just heard.
Even Malfoy, for once, had nothing sharp or dismissive to say in response.
A rising buzz of excited noise filled the clearing!
Hermione raised her hand again through the general commotion.
"Miss Granger?"
"I recall reading, in certain older historical texts—"
Hermione took a deep, steadying breath, her eyes were bright with genuine intellectual intensity now.
"That meditation of this general kind existed among wizards for a considerable stretch of history, but it was eventually abandoned as a formal practice somewhere along the way. If it's genuinely so useful then why would —?"
"I imagine you've all seen for yourselves, just how difficult it actually is to hold the mind properly still."
Professor Rahansen said knowingly.
"Wizards, historically, wanted very much to attain a tranquil mind specifically in order to accelerate the growth of their own power and that very desire, that hunger for the benefit, is precisely what undermines the tranquillity required to achieve it in the first place."
'Another paradox,' Harry thought.
"Then what mindset are we actually meant to hold, if wanting the benefit defeats the purpose?"
Malfoy's brow stayed furrowed, genuinely working through the logical knot of it now.
"You should want a tranquil mind because you desire tranquillity itself, for its own sake not because of whatever downstream benefits it happens to bring you afterward."
Professor Rahansen's answer left a considerable number of the young witches and wizards scratching their heads in visible confusion.
"I expect that over the course of my teaching career here at Hogwarts, for the vast majority of students I'll ever have the privilege of instructing, simply managing to grasp this much—this basic paradox, and the discipline required to work past it will already represent the limit of what most of you are capable of achieving in this subject.
But for those among you who genuinely can settle properly into that receptive state—"
Professor Rahansen crouched down low beside the nearest row and brushed his fingertips lightly, across the topmost leaves of the seedling in front of him.
"—you may then attempt, while resting in that empty, receptive state, to consciously listen for the particular message given off by a specific living thing nearby. These oak saplings, for instance."
"And if we can actually manage that much, Professor Rahansen, what happens then?"
Cedric raised his hand to ask.
The question seemed, in fact, to touch on something significant.
Professor Rahansen who had answered every single question so readily until now, hesitated visibly for the first time, and then gave only a vague, evasive answer in response.
"When you communicate with a living thing while holding a particular kind of feeling toward it, you can draw a certain special power from that exchange.
But that, of course, belongs to the more advanced coursework, reserved for those who progress that far—I think it's best, for now, that we not get ahead of ourselves on a first morning."
With that, the lesson proper concluded, and Professor Rahansen clapped his hands together once briskly.
"Right, then. I'd like all of you to keep trying, in your own time, between now and our next session. Do your best with it, however slow the progress feels."
Honestly, Harry found the whole system of knowledge he'd been exposed to that morning genuinely fascinating, turning it over in his mind even as the class began to break up around him.
The trouble was, actually reaching that empty, receptive state Professor Rahansen kept describing so calmly remained genuinely, frustratingly difficult in practice.
Most of the gathered students, it turned out, had dozed off entirely within the first half hour of actual attempted meditation.
Professor Rahansen didn't seem remotely bothered by the quiet chatter and light snoring that had gradually filled the clearing in place of focused silence, though he offered, notably, no particular praise to the handful who were actually making genuine effort—Hermione prominent among them.
Just before the class ended, though, Professor Rahansen paused and watched with evident interest as Luna used a small stick to help a line of relocating ants navigate across a gap in the ground, constructing a makeshift bridge for them and he gave an approving nod in her direction.
By the time the sunlight filtering down into the Forbidden Forest had shifted gradually from pale, thin gold to properly golden, Professor Rahansen finally announced that the class was over for the day.
A crowd of young witches and wizards, legs gone thoroughly numb from sitting cross-legged on hard, damp cushions for the better part of two hours, groaned and grumbled their way up and hurried back toward the castle without any further delay.
Most of them, by this point, had stopped thinking about how to calm their racing minds altogether; all any of them genuinely wanted now was to get back to the warmth of the Great Hall and fill their thoroughly empty stomachs with something hot and delicious.
Fifth-year Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs had two Herbology lessons scheduled back-to-back next on the timetable, so there was, at least, no particular need to bolt down breakfast in a rush and race upstairs afterward to find some distant classroom as Herbology's greenhouses were conveniently close to the Great Hall itself.
Harry, Hermione, and Ron—the last of the trio finally granted a brief taste of freedom now that Lavender had drifted off toward her own friends and regrouped together as the crowd thinned.
As soon as they stepped clear of the Forbidden Forest's treeline and back onto the more familiar grounds proper, Harry noticed at once that smoke was still rising steadily from Hagrid's cabin chimney, thicker now than it had been earlier.
That wasn't quite normal, on reflection—Hagrid had already been well into preparing his own breakfast by the time they'd all first headed into the forest together, hours ago now.
"Let's go see Hagrid—"
Harry said it suddenly, decisively, and took off at a run before either Hermione or Ron could raise any objection about the time or their own growling stomachs.
Fang was out in the pumpkin patch—the vines were grown thick and healthy now with the approach of proper autumn—chasing enthusiastically after a scattering of garden gnomes.
The door to Hagrid's cabin itself was shut tight but there was clearly considerable movement going on somewhere inside.
Knock, knock, knock—
Harry rapped firmly on the wooden door.
"Who's knockin'?"
Hagrid's familiar, gruff voice called out from inside, sounding somewhat distracted.
"It's me—" Harry said, raising his voice. "—and Hermione and Ron."
"Oh, you three—sorry, but I haven' got time for visitors just now!"
The three of them exchanged puzzled looks at that response. Hagrid never turned away a visit from the three of them, whatever else was going on in his life.
Thud—crash!
A heavy pounding sound came from somewhere inside the cabin, immediately followed by the sound of something breaking.
Right after that came a wild, furious roar.
"Who's in there with you, Hagrid?" Harry called out with concern.
"None o' your business—get off to class, the lot of yeh! I've still got t'—oh, don' open that door, Freodom! Get back t' work—if you don' fill him up properly, you're what he'll be eatin' next!"
Hagrid shouted back.
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