Chapter 13: The Architect's Logic
The Room of Requirements was no longer a makeshift library. After the euphoria of his Christmas breakthrough, Timothy had transformed her.
Now it was a command center, an architect's workshop.
A huge black slate he had conjured up covered one wall. It was already full of runic equations and conceptual flowcharts.
He was standing in front of her, a piece of chalk in his hand. It had the same feverish intensity of the night of its discovery, but now it was a controlled energy.
His first step was not to copy. It was calculating.
He needed to understand the scale of the mountain he intended to move. "How many books?" he whispered to himself.
He made a quick estimate. The main library, the Restricted Section, the personal files of the professors I had taken a look at.
"Let's say between twenty and fifty thousand unique volumes," he decided.
Fifty thousand.
A number that would have made Hermione faint.
For him, it was only the first variable in the equation.
He wrote his new metrics on the board. FILE v1.0.
Copy Rate (Scan): 1 book every 10 seconds.
Analysis (Comprehension) Rate: 1 book every 2 minutes.
It was amazing, but now I had to face it with the reality of the task.
He did the math, his chalk flying over the blackboard. Let's take the worst-case scenario: 50,000 books.
Fifty thousand for ten seconds... Five hundred thousand seconds.
Divided by sixty, and then by sixty again... "Almost one hundred and thirty-nine hours," he murmured.
One hundred and thirty-nine hours of uninterrupted copying. Only to scan the raw data. It was crazy.
And that was nothing compared to analysis.
Fifty thousand books for two minutes each... One hundred thousand minutes. He divided it by sixty.
"Sixteen hundred and sixty-seven hours," he whispered. The magnitude of the figure hit him.
One thousand six hundred and sixty-seven hours of pure mental analysis.
Anyone else would have been discouraged. They would have given up, declaring the task impossible.
Timothy smiled. It was not impossible. It was simply a long-term project.
He realized he could do it. If he spent four hours a day, religiously, just copying, he could have the entire library scanned in his mind in little over a month.
Thirty-five days, in the worst case.
And then, the analysis. If you spent eight hours a day processing information in the background, you could have the entire library read and understood in about two hundred and eight days.
The rest of the school year. It was doable.
Far from being discouraged, he felt elated.
The vague, obsessive hunger that had been consuming him finally had a tangible goal.
I was no longer just a student reading for pleasure. He was an archivist with a deadline.
The vagueness of his obsession had crystallized into a project. He turned to the door of the Hall of Requirements, which led to the library of physical books.
"Okay," he said. "Day one."
…..
The next few days of the Christmas holidays became a productive blur.
Timothy barricaded himself in his seventh-floor sanctuary. His life was now governed by the routine that he himself had calculated.
Four hours a day, without fail, he spent in the Room of Requirements, copying. His hand rested on one book after another. Archive. Ten seconds. Following. Archive. Ten seconds.
Hundreds of books a day flowed into his mental library.
The eight hours of analysis were spread throughout the day. As I ate, as I walked through the empty aisles, as I watched the snow fall.
His conscious mind enjoyed the silence of the castle, while a part of it devoured treatises on defensive enchantments.
But he remembered his obligations. His agreement with Flitwick and his promise to Hermione.
He went up to the milkman's shop. The air was frigid and smelled of straw and owl droppings.
His brown owl, Leo, looked at him with an almost human indifference.
"Hello, old friend," Timothy whispered, stroking his feathers. "I have work for you."
He held out a scroll he had written. It was for Professor Flitwick.
The message was short and professional, wishing her happy holidays. Attached, meticulously rolled up, was his essay on Charms, delivered a week in advance.
It was written with a brilliance that would ensure its qualification of "Extraordinary". The agreement was maintained.
Leo ululted softly and accepted the scroll.
Timothy then pulled out a second scroll. This one was for Hermione. He hesitated for a moment, his pen suspended on the paper.
He didn't want to look like a mere academic rival. But I also didn't want to look... whatever I was starting to feel.
He opted for honesty.
Hermione
I hope the Muggle world isn't too boring. I've been reading about the theory of conceptual transfiguration and found a problem I can't solve.
If we assume that Gamp's Law is fundamental, how do you explain the creation of food from nothing?
Is transfiguration just transportation? I would like to know your opinion.
The castle is much quieter without you scolding Ron. It's almost depressing.
Tim.
Smiled. It was the perfect mix of intellectual challenge and casual friendship. He tied the letter to Leo.
"Go get her, Leo. This one is important."
The rest of his days he took on a comfortable rhythm. Obsessive work in the morning, and in the afternoon... socialisation.
The nearly empty Great Hall became his living room. He joined Harry and the Weasleys at the Gryffindor table.
"Ha! I've got you!" shouted Ron, as his magic chess queen leaped over the board and shattered Timothy's bishop. "You can't beat me, Hunter!"
"Not yet," Tim replied, looking at the board. "But I'm learning the rules."
He spent his afternoons playing chess, laughing at the Weasley twins' jokes, and eating Christmas sweets.
But it was the quiet nights, after the Weasleys went to bed, that mattered most.
He and Harry were often left alone in the Gryffindor common room, sitting by the crackling fire.
Their friendship was forged in that shared silence. Two strangers, two orphans, who had found the first true home of their lives in the most unlikely place in the world.
…..
Aside from his interactions with the Gryffindors and his obsessive work, Timothy found a new pleasure in the empty castle: the main library.
Without the usual murmur of stressed students, it was a vast, silent ocean of knowledge.
He was sitting in a secluded corner near a window overlooking the frozen lake.
The magic books were stacked to his left, but the one he had open on his lap was different.
It was a Muggle book. One that I had "requested" from the Hall of Requirements: A Brief History of Time. His mind remembered the title of his past life, but now he read it with new eyes.
I was trying to find the connections. Understand the "why" of gravity and the "how" of a levitation spell. To him, they were the same question.
"A fascinating read, without a doubt."
The voice was quiet, old, and full of barely restrained amusement. It appeared so quietly that Timothy was almost not startled.
Albus Dumbledore stood by his table, his midnight blue robes embroidered with stars. His blue eyes shone with intense curiosity behind his half-moon glasses.
"Stephen Hawking," Dumbledore said, looking at the cover. "A brilliant, brilliant theoretician. His ideas about black holes are quite ... magical, in their own way."
Timothy closed the book, marking the page. He didn't feel intimidated, just... Observed. "Good afternoon, Director. I was just doing a light reading."
"I notice," Dumbledore said, his smile widening. He sat down in the chair across from Timothy, a gesture that took him by surprise.
"Few freshmen, even from Ravenclaw, choose to spend their holidays reading Muggle theoretical physics."
"I guess I'm a weirdo," Timothy replied with a shrug.
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," Dumbledore said. "I would say you're... thorough. Tell me, Timothy, now that you've been here a few months, do you find magic interesting?"
The question was casual, the typical question from a principal to a student. But Timothy felt the weight behind her. It wasn't a question about Charms or Potions.
It was a question about his soul.
Timothy looked at the old man, the wizard who, according to his memories, was the most powerful in the world. He decided to be honest.
"Interesting is not the word, Director," he said quietly, his voice losing all its adolescent arrogance.
"So what word would you use?"
"I love her," Timothy confessed, and the word rang strange and true in the silence of the library. "I'm obsessed with her."
He saw Dumbledore's gaze intensify. "It's... the underlying language of reality. It is the grammar of the universe. Muggle physics tells you 'what' is a thing. Magic allows you to ask 'why', and sometimes... it allows you to suggest a different answer."
"It's the most beautiful system I've ever encountered," he concluded, his voice filled with a passion that Dumbledore rarely saw.
The Director was silent for a long moment, his gaze no longer funny, but deeply analytical.
I had seen that spark before. I had seen it in Gellert Grindelwald. I had seen it, although in a different way, in Tom Riddle. He was the spark of genius that borders on obsession.
"That's one way to look at it," Dumbledore said finally, his voice now deeper.
"But such an obsession, no matter how pure, carries its own dangers."
"Knowledge is power, Timothy. And power, as I have discovered at great cost, is a seductive drug."
"There are magics you shouldn't look for," he continued, his tone now that of a gentle warning. "There are doors that are better left closed. The magical world is not just light and wonder. There is darkness. A deep and terrible darkness."
"I'm not sure I understand it, Headmaster," Timothy said, though he understood it perfectly.
"I'm talking about Dark Magic," Dumbledore said. "The magic that seeks to dominate, to hurt, to control. The magic that feeds on pain and cruelty."
"It's a path that starts with simple curiosity, with the idea that 'all knowledge is valuable.'"
"But it corrupts you. It changes you. It makes you see others not as people, but as tools. Like stepping stones."
His blue, sad, ancient eyes seemed to be staring at a distant memory. "It's a path that promises power, but in the end, it only leaves you empty and alone, with nothing but your own terrible greatness."
…..
Dumbledore's warning, weighed down with the weight of experience and barely concealed pain, hung in the silent air of the library.
Timothy listened with an attention that bordered on bow. He did not interrupt. He let the old wizard's words settle down.
When the director finished, a long silence settled between them. Timothy didn't take his eyes off the director's blue eyes.
"I don't agree, Director," he finally said. His voice was calm, firm, and devoid of all arrogance. It was the simple statement of fact.
Dumbledore raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised. It was not the answer I expected. "Don't you agree that Dark Magic corrupts?"
"No," Timothy replied. "I don't agree that 'Dark Magic' exists. Or the 'Magic of Light', for that matter."
The director looked at him, puzzled. "Timothy, there are spells designed with the sole purpose of hurting, of killing..."
"And there are scalpels designed for cutting," Timothy replied. "But you don't call a scalpel 'evil.' It is a tool. The magic is the same."
He leaned forward slightly, his passion for the subject now apparent. "For me, magic is neither good nor bad. It just is. It is a fundamental force in the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism."
"Gravity is not 'evil' for making a man fall off a cliff, nor 'good' for keeping the moon in orbit. It is a law. Magic is a law that we still don't fully understand."
"The people are the ones who decide," he continued, his voice gaining strength. "A healing spell, the purest 'light' magic, used to prolong the agony of a tortured man... is that act 'good'?"
"A blood ritual, 'dark' magic to be sure, used to link a mother's life to that of her dying son, saving him from certain death... is that act 'bad'?"
Dumbledore fell silent, his face now a pensive mask. The logic was impeccable.
"Avada Kedavra is considered unforgivable," Timothy said, taking his argument to the extreme. "But it causes an instantaneous, clean, painless death."
"Is that inherently more 'malevolent' than the Cruciatus, which does not kill but inflicts unimaginable pain? Or that a simple Slashing Charm, neutral 'magic', used to dismember a living person?"
"Magic is just a tool, Director. A language. And judging the language instead of the speaker... it is a dangerous simplification."
Timothy's thesis was left floating in the dusty air of the library. He had dismantled Dumbledore's philosophy of life in less than a minute.
Dumbledore fell into a deep, thoughtful silence. He looked at the fifteen-year-old boy in front of him, who was watching him with the calmness of an ancient philosopher.
He saw in Timothy's eyes not the darkness of Tom Riddle, nor the arrogance of Gellert Grindelwald. He saw a terrifying clarity. A pure logic.
Finally, a smile, genuine, sad, and deeply impressed was drawn on the old wizard's face.
"That, Mr. Hunter," he said, his voice barely a whisper, "is a prospect that most magicians, myself included, take a very long and very painful lifetime to learn."
He slowly stood up, his eyes never leaving Timothy. "And many... many never do."
"Enjoy your vacation, Mr. Hunter. And of his physics. I have a feeling that we will learn a lot from each other."
Dumbledore turned and walked away down the hall, his footsteps silent.
Timothy watched as he left. The conversation had been stimulating. He had defended his philosophy and had been understood.
He reopened his physics book, his mind already working, his own philosophy now more solid than ever.
- - - - - - - - -
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