Chapter 6
"I wonder, can this really be considered a proper Lumos?" I stared thoughtfully at the small point of light glowing at the tips of my index and middle fingers... It had taken me almost three months to master this "spell" to the point where a random flash of irritation no longer threatened to blind me with a burst of brilliant white light.
And lately, my Lumos had almost stopped going out on its own, which meant I could now freely work as a flashlight... Not much of an achievement, honestly, especially since I still could not call it a true spell. It was more like another... prolonged magical outburst that I had managed to shape into the form I wanted through sheer force of will.
If the Houtmit textbooks were to be believed, ordinary spells did not require such intense concentration and mental effort. And Lumos was considered the most basic magic of all, something even some Squibs were supposedly capable of... Though that last part seemed to be more exaggeration and rumor than fact, but that is beside the point. The important thing was that a spell which usually took students at a not particularly prestigious magical school no more than two lessons to learn had cost me three bloody months.
At the same time, I had made no real progress in mastering the other spells from the school curriculum. No matter how much I tried to imitate wand movements with my fingers, recite incantations, and focus on the desire to produce a given effect, nothing worked. Without a wand, all of it was completely useless.
And when I brought up buying my own magical focus to Krusho Zhelov, he immediately crushed any hope I had of quickly mastering local wizardry.
"Harry, you shouldn't rush so much... Wizards don't start their training at eleven for no reason. By that age, mmm... the magical body finishes forming and becomes... more physical, which is what makes it safe to use a wand," the man with Bulgarian roots explained to me awkwardly at the time, desperately trying to simplify complex magical terminology as much as possible.
He was not especially good at it, but I caught the general idea and promised myself that I would look more deeply into such a specific subject in the future... For now, I had to calm my curiosity a little and redirect my extra enthusiasm into training with magical outbursts and trying to master the list of supposedly simple spells and transfiguration exercises I had copied down on paper.
Oh yes, I had done a lot of note-taking, and very quickly too, because Krusho had only lent me the textbooks for a few weeks, after which I had to return them whole and undamaged. And after that, I was no longer able to squeeze any new magical literature out of the Bulgarian. He simply did not have the books I needed, and he was certainly not going to buy rather expensive books for the sake of a barely acquainted boy.
And even though he never said that aloud, I understood him perfectly and was not offended in the slightest. Krusho had already told me a great deal during our meetings and conversations, giving me many hints about information I would not even have suspected existed under normal circumstances. Just the hint that powerful wizards, with the right kind of training, had a chance to preserve their youth for centuries was already giving me a great, great deal.
And as far as I understood, that knowledge was not some kind of super-secret in the magical world either. It was not exactly displayed for everyone to see, of course, but if you knew what to look for, it should be possible to gather information. The bigger issue was the questions and demands placed on a wizard's personal power, which was exactly what I had been working on almost every day.
True, I had no real confidence that I was doing everything correctly, but with every month of training, magical outbursts were becoming a more natural and regular process for me. It had reached the point where I now had to do some kind of magic every morning. Simply so I would not accidentally do something during the school day later...
And I had noticed one amusing pattern: emotions had a fairly strong influence not only on producing spontaneous magical effects, but also on the speed at which my magical strength recovered... That part had been far less obvious, and it even made me run proper experiments to test the theory.
But in the end, it turned out that strong emotions really did speed up the recovery of magical power. The horror-movie experiment had fully justified itself... Never mind that the experience of the film itself had been badly diluted by Dudley's ridiculously funny reactions, since without him I would never have been allowed near the television. The important thing was that I could now consciously accelerate the recovery of my reserves.
"Well, more precisely, I can try," I smirked, already having learned in practice how exhausting that kind of thing could be. It was not easy to force strong emotions out of myself from nothing. Especially considering that the emotions needed to be truly intense and sustained... but not so intense that they triggered an accidental magical outburst. I had to bend my brain quite a bit to get any visible effect.
Still, life was not made of magic alone. I simply could not spend all my time doing one thing, no matter how useful, necessary, or interesting it was. And my ridiculous childish energy demanded an outlet, so between school, my pitiful study of magic, and the occasional hours spent in the music club, I was almost always outside somewhere, with one group of local kids or another.
Active yard games were an excellent way to burn off excess stress, while the occasional rounds of Mafia at someone's house helped satisfy at least a little of my need for company... That was how I lived, meeting the only wizard I knew from time to time, no more than once a month.
At some point, of course, the information and stories Krusho Zhelov gave me lost most of their usefulness. He had already told me all the basic and commonly known things about the magical world, and he had also explained a great deal about magic, even if only in broad terms. Beyond that, the only thing left would have been actual instruction in specific practices and spells...
But the Bulgarian did not want to go that far, especially since, without practice, any theory he gave me would most likely be forgotten. That was how the outwardly young wizard justified his unwillingness to teach me anything... It was a little irritating, but I had no intention of pressing the matter too hard. I understood that in some situations Krusho could be astonishingly impenetrable. It was as if the wizard simply clammed up, and once that happened, getting anything interesting out of him became completely impossible.
Against that background, any progress I made at all in mastering school spells felt more like a miracle and a stroke of luck than any kind of natural result. By my tenth birthday, I had managed to gather only three full-fledged spells in my arsenal—Lumos, Leviosa, Muggle-Repelling Charms, and the Summoning Charm. At the same time, Leviosa and the Summoning Charm, though different in difficulty, seemed to me to be very, very similar...
"Which only once again shows that all my attempts at magic still don't qualify as proper spells. They're more like... my own techniques, reproduced on the basis of spells already known to wizards," I smiled to myself, though in practice I still had no idea whether that counted as a good result or a frankly underwhelming one.
A certain uncertainty in everything connected with magic suggested that, under the circumstances, I could definitely not be called a genius... The only comfort was that these techniques based on magical outbursts were not limited to crude imitations of real spells. In nearly three years of experiments, I had managed to learn and refine a great many tricks.
Not all of them were especially useful, but I could easily conjure a little water, start a fire, improve Aunt Petunia's garden, clean the dust and trash out of my cupboard, and create soft lighting there as well... And that was not even mentioning hiding from other people's eyes, hauling around a dozen books with my version of Leviosa, or detecting any magic nearby. Those abilities had practically become my trademarks.
With that same "Leviosa," I had even learned to push people back quite effectively... Though at first, those experiments had been fairly frightening. But a certain instinct and a surge of wild emotions in one of my fights with local street brats had done the trick... After that, I deliberately practiced that bit of magic on Dudley, training from time to time with my sturdy, pudgy cousin in wrestling. Or rather, in something vaguely resembling wrestling...
"In any case, Dudley doesn't have the brains to realize that some of my throws are physically impossible without magic... So what difference does it make what exactly we're doing? The important thing is that, if it comes to it, I won't feel completely helpless in a school full of underage wizards armed with wands," I smirked sarcastically, worrying more with each passing month about my future admission to Hogwarts.
Remembering the adventures of that movie boy who shared my name and surname, I did not feel especially eager or confident about walking a similar path through life. Harry Potter cheated death far too often, and only through the sheer arbitrariness of authors and screenwriters. In real life, my cinematic counterpart should have died in his first year.
And that is terrifying, damn it! I do not want to die! Even the second time, death is horrifying, especially since I have no guarantee at all that I would be reborn again. To hell with risks like that! If I could, I would have already run as far away as possible from Magical Britain and all these Hogwartses.
But unfortunately, even saying that out loud still sounded too unrealistic and unlikely. No one would leave a magical child without an education. It was simply against the law. And that law would be especially strict in the case of the world-famous Boy Who Lived... And yes, I really did have that canonical fame, damn it!
Back in the day, Krusho had told me the story of Harry Potter in full detail. He had even shown a certain reverence toward what was supposedly my identity, claiming that I ought to thank Potter someday for the death of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named... Pure nonsense and absurdity, the kind that made my head ache a little.
But I had no intention of dwelling on it, and continued pretending to be just some ordinary wizard boy who definitely was not Harry Potter. Fortunately, our very rare meetings and the truly impressive mop of hair on my head made it possible to hide the famous scar on my forehead. And as for our identical names...
Well, Harry was a very common name in Britain. There was even a Prince Harry... He had been born a full four years after me, but his mere arrival in the world had already pushed what was now my own name into the top ranks of popularity across the islands... So aside from the scar, nothing should be able to give me away.
That scar, by the way, was supposedly some kind of Horcrux of the Dark Lord... But to be honest, I had noticed nothing of the sort about it. No matter how intensely and desperately I concentrated on my forehead, the scar remained nothing more than a scar. Fairly large, obvious, and attention-grabbing, but not ugly. Just a few lines of pale skin arranged in a strange pattern...
It was hard to believe that because of this thing on my forehead, I might someday have to go through a mountain of trouble... Really, what kind of Dark Lord could possibly be living in my frontal bone? It sounded insane.