The instant Grindelwald's curse left his wand, or perhaps even a beat before it, Joan was already moving, a sidestep so precisely timed it carried her clear of the streaking spell by the barest margin.
Grindelwald's eyebrows lifted, and he loosed a string of curses in quick succession, each one growing stronger, all of them blindingly fast.
Still nothing changed. Joan dodged each one with the same spare, economical movement as before.
"Let's see you avoid this, then."
Grindelwald seemed to have worked out exactly what ability she was drawing on. He raised his wand skyward, summoning his signature Fiendfyre, a towering sea of flame crashing down toward Joan.
This time Joan didn't dodge at all. She murmured a quiet prayer, and a suit of radiant, holy energy settled over her body like armor, and with it, the whole air about her shifted entirely.
The simple country girl who'd looked like she could be talked into anything a moment ago transformed, in an instant, into something closer to a battle-hardened commander.
Grindelwald still drove the pace of the fight, and on the surface Joan looked to be losing badly, but underneath it the contest sat far closer to even. Whatever Grindelwald threw at her, nothing broke through her defense. Joan, for her part, seemed to lack any real offensive technique, relying instead on crude, brute-force detonations of raw energy that, while far from weak, could be sidestepped with a single well-timed Apparition.
That was only true, of course, against a wizard of Grindelwald's caliber.
Put Snape in her place, and the mere shockwave from one of those blasts would have made Apparition impossible, forcing him to eat the hit head-on. Surviving even one of those would already speak to considerable strength; a second or third would kill him outright.
Tom, however, wasn't satisfied with what he was seeing.
That's all?
"Joan! Jeanne d'Arc!"
His voice cut clean through the storm of battle, reaching straight into the girl's ears. "Holding back now isn't courtesy, it's disrespect toward Grindelwald. Fight at your full strength. Understood?"
Joan's face went pale, and she drew in a slow breath.
A banner materialized in her grip, and she drove its staff hard into the ground.
"Fire of Judgment!"
The earth shuddered. Several pillars of flame, each more than ten meters across, erupted from the ground at once, and the moment Grindelwald's Fiendfyre bird made contact with them, it was torn apart instantly.
"Impressive..." Andros, who'd been yawning through the whole exchange, finally perked up, his tone edged with real interest. "Grindelwald's flame was completely overwhelmed. That fire... could it actually be a manifestation of spirit and will?"
"What do you make of it? Do you think she's a wizard?" Tom turned to Ravenclaw.
Ravenclaw answered with a question of her own. "If she isn't a wizard, then what is she?"
"Overwhelming magical power, deep, sustained emotion, an unshakable will. Of every spellcaster I've observed, hers ranks among the very finest. Genuinely rare."
"But the nature of that power..." Tom still looked uncertain.
"The character of one's magic bends toward the shape of the wizard's own personality and heart, you know that better than most." Ravenclaw considered it a moment before explaining further. "Think of this girl as something like a mirror image of Tom Riddle, entirely inverted. She's been the most devout believer imaginable since the day she was born, and over years of that devotion, her magic naturally grew to reflect exactly what filled her heart."
"That tracks." Tom nodded, then added, with a touch of envy, "Being that single-minded really does make success easier, doesn't it? Andros only ever thinks about fighting, Voldemort is pure rot straight through, and now here's a country girl who got talked into believing she's some kind of prophet..."
"A sixteen-year-old master of that tier? Honestly... I can't even claim I'd have accomplished half as much at sixteen."
Tom felt a genuine pang of frustration. His own cheats kept stacking up, growing more absurd by the week, until reaching that same tier no longer felt like some distant fantasy at all. He might get there himself tomorrow, or the day after.
Ariana, though, was a different case entirely. Andros and Grindelwald, and Tom and Ravenclaw besides, had all praised her considerable talent.
But set beside Joan, that talent suddenly looked almost worthless.
The Obscurus curled inside her recoiled in something like fear. That radiant, light-soaked magic pressing down around them might as well have been poison to something built from darkness.
BOOM—
The battle banner swept forward, unleashing a blade of fire, and Grindelwald's endless dodging finally showed a crack. Every avenue of retreat sealed shut, he had no choice but to wrench the earth itself up as a makeshift shield, only for another pillar of flame to erupt beneath it, and the barrier his magic threw up a half-second too slow, leaving most of his robes burned clean away.
Satisfied he'd seen enough, Tom used his authority over the space directly to pull the two apart.
"That's enough, Joan. You did very well."
The praised country girl broke into a smile untouched by guile, bright and utterly unspoiled.
"Would you tell me about your life, back then?"
Tom asked, genuinely curious. Countless versions of Joan's legend existed, and the differences between them ran deep, especially the strange fact that a master of this caliber had ever been condemned by the Church at all. Had the Church of that era truly counted stronger hands among its own ranks?
Joan clearly wasn't just some pretty face standing around for decoration, and her talent and history alike had likely been given their own share of magical embellishment along the way. More than a few of Rowling's characters, after all, drew straight from myth and legend to begin with, so a witch Joan of Arc hardly seemed like much of a stretch. wink