Skyl sent Hermione back to her seat.
"You all saw it just now. If you want to speed up your spellcasting, the most straightforward way is to simplify the process. For you, wandless casting might still be a bit difficult, but silent casting is necessary. How do you cast a simple Stunning Spell without speaking the incantation? The answer is: belief."
Belief? Harry watched Skyl speaking so confidently and felt a strange emotion stir inside him.
Even for adults, belief is a rare and precious quality—let alone for a group of children.
"Don't underestimate yourselves. Magic is the power of belief. It is the power of emotion." Skyl walked slowly to the open space in the middle of the desks. "Let's say I believe flowers will bloom all over the mountains in winter. I believe stars will fall into the forest at night. I believe clouds are little white dogs. I believe the sea breeze will carry a mother's thoughts to her child. What do you think I'm doing?"
The children looked at one another. Some thought Skyl sounded a bit mad, some thought his words were fun, some believed him completely.
"You're… reciting poetry?" Ron muttered under his breath.
Skyl's ears were like a pair of antennae. He smiled at the red-haired Weasley. "Yes, I'm reciting poetry. No—I'm not reciting poetry. I'm making prophecies."
He raised his right arm and snapped his fingers.
The lush grassland was instantly buried under heavy snow. A bitter wind cut through them; the children shivered with cold.
He lifted his left arm and snapped his fingers again.
The earth beneath their feet heaved, and a volcano spewing fire thrust itself straight up into the sky. The little witches and wizards screamed. Their desks now ringed the crater's edge; they could see the sheer drop of the cliff below and the lava churning in the depths.
Skyl floated in mid-air. Billowing pyroclastic clouds formed a towering throne beneath him. His voice boomed like thunder.
"Let there be flowers!"
The volcano erupted. Rivers of lava burst in mid-air into countless seeds, which drifted down onto the snowy slopes.
The sky changed in an instant. Clouds fell to the ground and turned into countless white dogs bounding between the students' desks. The sun curled all its light into itself, and stars fell like raindrops all over the plains. The earth split open; seawater surged in from every direction. A blue bay formed, and a gentle sea breeze blew up toward the mountaintop—by the time it arrived, it had turned into a woman's soft, murmuring voice:
My darling, I miss you so much. How are you doing at Hogwarts?
Harry went rigid. Curled up in his seat, his mind was blank with the rush of marvels, and then he heard an unfamiliar woman calling out.
He had never heard that voice before. But his first thought was: That's Mum.
"Mother?"
He slowly stepped away from his desk and stumbled toward the direction the wind was blowing from. Other students called after him.
"Harry! Come back!"
Harry heard nothing. He slipped on the steep slope and tumbled into a sea of flowers; petals and slush covered him from head to toe. Only one thought remained in his mind:
I'm going to the sea!
The absurd, out-of-nowhere idea somehow spurred him on. Harry yanked out his wand, pointed it at the snow and shouted, "Turn into a sled!"
No. The snow answered him with silence.
Harry cried out, furious and bewildered: Why not?
Because you're not sure, came the wordless reply. You've never even seen a real sled, child. You only heard about them in stories about Father Christmas. Now stop making me laugh and say something real. Talk about something you've actually seen, touched, smelled—something whose colour, scent and texture you know by heart. Come on, say it.
The first thing Harry thought of was a door. The cupboard door under the stairs. Like the bars of a cell. For the past ten years, this little prisoner had memorised every detail of that door.
"Turn into a door."
The snow let out a sigh of relief. Yes. Exactly that. A door it would be.
Children from both houses rushed to the mountaintop's edge to watch the Gryffindor boy standing on a door, sliding down the slope toward the sea.
Skyl clapped his hands. "All right. That's enough."
Harry was just about to leap into the water when the scene flickered before his eyes. Suddenly he was back in the classroom—that dim, ordinary classroom.
The children around him were also a little dazed.
Everything just now felt like an illusion. Like a wild, feverish dream.
Standing in the middle of the room, Skyl began to applaud. "Our Mr Harry Potter has successfully turned his desk into a door. I'd bet you anything that if Professor McGonagall saw that, she'd excuse you from Transfiguration homework for the rest of the term."
In yesterday's Transfiguration lesson, Professor McGonagall had asked the first-years to try turning a sheet of white paper blue. Very few had succeeded. Now Harry had turned an entire desk into a finely detailed door. The improvement was nothing short of astonishing.
Skyl thought back to his own days practising Transfiguration in The Tower of Tomes. He'd carried real items into that space so he could observe them, building up a detailed understanding of their physical properties. That was why his transfigurations never failed in practice. Transfiguration was a magic of "turning imagination into reality."
It depended heavily on the witch or wizard's understanding of real objects. Transfiguration couldn't create something you'd never seen before—an alien spaceship, for example.
"That is the power of belief—the wild belief that you must change the world in front of you. Transfiguration works that way, and so do other spells. The key is abundant magic, a clear understanding of magic itself, and confidence in yourself."
Many old witches and wizards were a little unhinged—appearing to others as eccentric or outright mad. It wasn't that some eldritch entity had whispered to them—it was a kind of frenzy. They didn't care about other people's opinions and were so confident they seemed to see no one else at all.
The little witches and wizards had been convinced by Skyl, but they still lacked confidence. "But… we're too young," someone said. "We might not have that much magic."
"I never asked you to do anything earth-shattering," Skyl replied. "I didn't ask you to move a mountain. I didn't ask you to sink an island. Harry's example has already shown you that even a young wizard has more than enough magic inside him to change plenty of things."
The students still looked uneasy, so Skyl kept encouraging them. "All of you have had outbursts of accidental magic before. Strange things happened around you. I know some of you have made furniture float, some of you have made glass vanish, some have walked through walls while sleepwalking. Back then you knew nothing about magic—not a single spell—and yet the things you did were that powerful. So why is it that once you come to Hogwarts, you suddenly can't even manage a simple Transfiguration?"
Everyone looked thoughtful.
"Learning magic works like this," Skyl said. "At the beginning, you didn't have any rules in your head. All you had was a raw, powerful belief—an unconscious belief that directed your magic. It was wild, and strong, like a child's doodle: bold colours, astonishing strokes. But once you started magical education and began trying to control magic with your conscious mind, everything suddenly got worse, didn't it? All of a sudden you can't do anything right. Even Lumos takes ages to learn. But that's not a bad thing—it's a natural step."
He waved his hand. A sheet of white paper and a box of coloured crayons appeared in front of each student. "Now, I want you to cover this sheet completely with colour."
The clever children seemed to understand something and got to work at once. The slower ones were still half-dazed from the illusion they'd just experienced.
Skyl gave them seven minutes, then had the papers passed up to him.
He picked out four and enlarged them for everyone to see.
"Who drew these?"
The hands that rose belonged to Hermione Granger and Seamus from Gryffindor, and Hannah and Justin from Hufflepuff.
The four pictures were each in a completely different style.
Hermione had used the colours to create a simple, childlike landscape: a sunrise, blue sky, green grass, and a little wooden house on a hillside.
Seamus—well-known as the explosion-prone boy who could make anything blow up—had produced an angry red scrawl, like something out of a cosmic disaster. A mass of red sprayed out from the orange ball in the centre of the page, as if Mr Sun had just been executed by Miss Moon.
Hannah Abbott, a classic hatstall at Hogwarts, was a gentle, timid, sensitive and kind girl. Her page was filled edge to edge with solid blue crayon. It was like Kazimir Malevich's suprematist masterpiece Black Square, only in blue. No forms, no outlines, just a pure blue field.
Justin's style was similar to Hannah's, but he'd chosen to stack coloured bars one atop another. At first glance it looked like a rainbow, but no rainbow ever had such strange colours. It looked more like an odd old flag than anything in the sky.
Skyl arranged the four paintings in order: Hannah's, Justin's, Seamus's, Hermione's. Now everyone could see how a blank page of paper evolved from a single block of colour, to a whole range of colours, then to structure, and finally to a complete, coherent picture.
"A living example," Skyl said of the four-panel set.
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