30. This is halloween

The day after I woke up disoriented. Having the memories from both perspectives made reviewing them weird, like walking through a room full of mirrors. It took a while but I managed to put everything together with my budding occlumency. Something they didn’t tell you about that branch of magic is that the longer you spend without learning it, the harder it becomes. 

To be more precise, the first task of a new occlumens is to sort and catalogue their memories to create their mind palace. Therefore, the more memories you have, the more time consuming the task becomes. To make matters worse, the mind palace doesn’t solidify until you have finished the task. This means that any mistake may unravel the whole thing forcing the practitioner to start from zero. 

With eighty extra years of memories, besides those of this world, it is an understatement to say getting my mind palace up and running was a pain in the arse. Thankfully, I had finished the task a couple of days ago. Now I needed to start on the defence part of the art. That however, isn’t important at this very moment. 

Instead I wished to focus on my new spell. I decided to go for a simple name like twin minds. Taking a moment to cast the spell I was assaulted with a sharp headache and the feeling of vitality being used. 

“Ow, that hurt.” It hurt really bad, meaning I had probably fried my brain with the attempt. Reviewing the flow of both magic and vitality I understood what had happened. The spell had a few components that made it extremely dangerous. For starters, it forwarded all information from the new magical mind onto the brain. A brain mind you that was already working at its optimal capacity. 

Thinking about it, it made sense why it didn’t affect me as much while being a werewolf. Although my body, and therefore my brain went through changes, said brain didn’t diminish in size. This coupled with the reduced mind capacity of my wolf self meant that the magical mind’s pressure on the brain could be easily handled. 

Now, as it is, the spell is unusable and would kill anyone besides me trying to use it. I wouldn’t die but the price in vitality, and headache, would be prohibitive. Then again, there are parts I simply didn’t need my magical mind to have. For example, all the bits and pieces needed to control the body and even more so the unconscious parts were simply put redundant. 

I didn’t need my magical mind to make my heart beat, or receive pain signals, diminished as they are. I didn’t need it to have recreations of hormone glands like the pituitary gland either. With that in mind I began by creating a copy of my brain’s blueprint inside my mind before starting to shave bits and pieces off it. 

I did all this while going through my morning routine, cuddling with sleepy Sophia in the common room included. Hell, I kept it up through most of my classes seeing as they were kind of boring. With my mature mind and comprehension of magic, learning from the book was more than enough to become outstanding in most classes. 

Either way, by the time classes ended I had managed to remove most of what I felt comfortable with removing. Afterall, the brain is an extremely complex organ and all parts have more than one job. Booting up the spell again, I once more felt pain, although this time it was the mildest of migraines imaginable, something easily ignored. 

There was still a drain on my vitality but it too was minimal and could be ignored should the benefits I expect come to be. With the spell now active I once again felt my mind split into two threads of thought. It took a while to get used to it but in the end I easily managed.   

“Well, this is very useful.” I commented to myself as I got to work on something else. Now that my wolf problem is under control, I needed to find a way to either undo it or harness it. For that, I needed to figure out how the hell the thing worked. Thankfully, my magic mind had taken a lot of notes on the events of last night. From there it was a matter of reverse engineering the mathemagics from the data of the transformation. 

“Bloody imbecile.” I huffed in annoyance. A week went by without much ado. Even with an extra mind to work on the problem it took this long to reverse engineer the mess that is the werewolf curse. I didn’t know who had messed up this badly but I wanted nothing more than to chew their head off. 

The whole “curse” was nothing more than an attempt to use the animagus ritual with vitality instead of mana. The thing with vitality is that it’s the essence of life and anything affected by it tends to come to life. Ergo, a ritual meant to turn magi into animals turned into a living curse that does just that. 

No wonder werewolves were so damned ugly. The curse used their own vitality for the transformation, a physical transformation. To fully explain this I will need to explain transfiguration and dip a little into transmutation.  

So, transfiguration works by bending reality. I know, it sounds fancy and it is very fancy indeed. The reason transfiguration isn’t permanent is due to reality not liking being changed. Therefore, a constant supply of magic is needed to keep reality’s corrective force from undoing the changes. The normal animagus ritual imprints an advanced and complex transfiguration spell onto the magi’s magic. While transformed, the magi supplies magic to the spell turning into an animal. 

With all that being said, here comes the fun part of the ritual. Due to reality wanting to correct it sort of saves a blueprint of what SHOULD be. The spell hijacks access to this blueprint to keep the mind of the magi working even with a whole different brain structure. All of this is to say that in reality, the magi never experiences a real physical change per se. 

The problem with using vitality for this spell is that vitality plays by a whole different set of rules. Performing transmutation with mana is almost impossible, requiring unholy amounts of the stuff. Vitality on the other hand is the complete opposite. Transmutation is the bread and butter of vitality while transfiguration is a completely foreign thing to it. 

Because of this, the werewolf curse went from a transfiguration to a transmutation, one that consumes the infected’s vitality. Because the human body isn’t supposed to go through such a process it runs out of free flowing vitality mid change resulting in the ugly werewolves known by the magical community. Me having vast reserves of the stuff not to mention no limiter on consumption allows for the transformation to take full effect. 

All of this is to say that the imbecile that messed with this is a bloody moron. The whole thing is held together by hopes, dreams and the stubbornness of life refusing to go out. Thankfully, if my maths aren’t wrong, I could already see a way to fix it… kind off. It would make most of my preparations for the animagus ritual go down the drain but whatever. 

“It’s getting late.” I murmured to myself while checking the time with the tempus charm. I had been so lost in my work I had left time to flow by me. Not to mention that nagging feeling I was forgetting something. Shrugging my shoulders, I finished encoding my findings in my notebooks before leaving the RoR. 

Once outside realisation hit me like a punch to the gut. Today is the thirty first of October, Halloween night! Even worse, it’s late and the feast should be starting soon! I had been so distracted I had completely ignored Ron’s comments towards Hermione, after all, the git had been caustic for the whole month now. 

Running full sprint through the castle I began thinking of the plans I had made. I wanted to keep an eye from afar and only get involved IF things went to shit. Afterall, my early stunt with Nevil had already earned me a bit of unwanted fame, not to mention my over average smarts even for ravenclaws. 

Turning the second to last corner to the bathroom I could hear the scream of Hermione as well as those of Ron and Harry. Even worse, I could Hear Sophia’s screams as well. My veins got flooded with adrenaline as a mixture of worry and rage coursed through my mind. 

Sprinting at full speed with the aid of vitality I turned the corner to see the troll about to smack its club against a prone harry. To the side I could see Sophia screaming something as Ron looked pale as a corpse from fear. 

Thoughts went through my mind a mile a minute. Taking out my wand and casting would take too long, wandless casting wouldn’t have enough power to stop the club. In a moment of brilliant stupidity I accelerated further by casting mini bombardas on the soles of my feet. Like a bullet I moved far faster than should be possible as I got in front of harry arms crossed to block the blow. 

Was it smart? Hell no, but I could heal from the damage as long as I lived. The impact felt like a house fell on me. I could feel the bones on my arms crack and break. Thankfully, my reinforced bones were enough to halt the attack before it could do any further damage. 

The whole thing had taken a single second and my insides felt like chunky salsa from the forceful acceleration and deceleration needed to pull it off. What followed was a confused grunt from the troll seeing a little girl halting his club instead of turning into a bloody smear. 

By this point however, my patience for the dumb git had run dry. Wasteful as it might be I infused my whole body with as much vitality as I could. My broken arms cracked back into place as they healed in the blink of an eye. I could feel my blood boiling with power right under my skin. 

With quick motion I took my wand from my holster as I spoke the necessary incantation. Although normally necessary, it helped whenever I wanted to overpower whatever spell I was about to cast. In this case that was…

“Bombarda Directa!” The spell flew out of the tip of my wand impacting the troll’s chest. A modification of the bombarda spell I made. Instead of blowing up akin to a grenade dispersing the force in all directions, this version concentrated the full force of the explosion in a cone towards the point of impact. Tough as nails may the troll be but being hit by the equivalent of an anti tank missile would still be more than enough to turn it into a smear. 

The explosion was loud, and I could hear the others screaming, first from the sound and then from the gruesome painting of guts I had made against the bathroom’s wall. The spell had outright destroid the troll's chest, sending its head bouncing against the ceiling while its arms and club went flying in opposite directions. The legs remained standing for all of two seconds before they fell forwards as if finally realizing their owner was dead. 

In other news, I felt tired and sore. It was a sort of metaphysical soreness as I had drawn far more mana than what my undeveloped magic circuit could handle. Add to that the screaming from the others and I am starting to develop a nasty headache. Even worse is the realization that now I had to explain how the hell I had managed to explode a troll.

“Oh! Merlin! What happened here!?” Fucking great, the teachers are here and look horrified to see four children covered in troll blood and the corpse of said troll. I turned around to speak, however as I did, a wave of dizziness hit… looks like I overexerted my magic more than I thought. That was my last thought as everything went black and passed out.