The second task of the Triwizard Tournament I… missed entirely, along with all my friends. Or rather — we did go to the Great Hall to watch the magical projection screen and whatever spectacle it had on offer, but that was the extent of it. Nobody wanted to sit in the stands, even with free seats for students. The weather was simply not cooperating.
And yes, the runes embroidered into our clothing, along with basic warming charms, could have easily dealt with the damp wind and light drizzle. But none of us had any particular motivation to leave the warm and familiar castle. Even the restless, hyperactive Ginny Weasley didn't push for the stands, and about the rest of us I won't even bother — we were busy going through a new batch of books that had just arrived by post.
Even the laziest viewing of the match didn't really help me stop thinking about an extremely fascinating volume on Scandinavian runic magic. An exclusive new release — the Scandinavians' latest research, and they'd always been ahead of everyone else when it came to runes and their applications. Here they'd managed something close to a minor breakthrough, refining and creatively reframing a long-established method of weaving runes directly into standard spells.
The technique of weaving runes into spells, incidentally, is considered genuine higher magic, and ordinary wizards rarely attempt it. The mental strain involved in fusing the "essence" of any given rune into even a relatively simple spell is simply too severe. It demands far too deep an understanding of runes and how they interact with other forms of magic — which was, unfortunately, precisely what I lacked for mastering anything of the sort.
Power, will, imagination, and control over my magic — those were all in reasonable shape. The problem was the runes themselves, and the understanding of them. Nothing was going to help me there except years of study and practice. Or at least that was how our mentor had explained it, knowing my strengths and my weaknesses better than almost anyone.
So yes — the Scandinavians' signature higher runic techniques were beyond me for now. But reading about this kind of magic was still utterly fascinating, especially since I had hopes of using runes to improve the stability of the permanent magical shields I kept running at all times. Against that backdrop, the three champions' performances and their swim through the Black Lake didn't strike me as anything particularly remarkable. Fleur and Cedric showed nothing extraordinary in terms of magic or technique.
Krum stood out somewhat more — his partial self-transfiguration was genuinely interesting to watch. I couldn't have done it myself; I wouldn't even know where to begin with that kind of magic. But in the end, beyond one intriguing technique, I took nothing new away from it. Flat, dull, and not especially spectacular.
Though the crowd was impressed regardless, and some people were going on about what great wizards were currently studying at Hogwarts and Durmstrang. Nobody said anything like that about Beauxbatons or its champion. Fleur had failed her task — she'd been overwhelmed by too many underwater creatures, who had apparently reacted with excessive aggression to her not-entirely-human nature. Veelas were creatures of fire, after all. Direct contact with water monsters in the heart of their own element was strictly inadvisable.
Bad luck. It happens. Fortunately, it didn't end in any serious consequence. The younger sister of the French girl — the hostage that the champion was supposed to rescue under the terms of the task — was recovered immediately once Fleur was out of the running, along with Fleur herself. The small, blonde little girl, whose name I never did learn, spent the next two weeks trailing after her older sister all across Hogwarts, trying to cheer the blonde up, providing involuntary entertainment for anyone who happened to witness the display.
After that, the castle sank back into its usual chaotic and bustling routine, which held almost no interest for me personally. Like any self-respecting Ravenclaw worth the name, I had completely and irrevocably focused on myself and my own circle — pressing forward at a pace that was frantic but, surprisingly, entirely comfortable for me, continuing to study magic and prepare for whatever trials the future might bring.
And no, my training schedule looked nothing like a panicked boy's desperate attempt to sprint through a marathon. My life had taken on a certain monumental steadiness — ordinary lessons giving way to intense magical practice, then to something almost like evenings at home, gathered in the library or somewhere in the Great Hall whenever a topic called for discussion or nothing particularly demanding was on the schedule, meaning that some socializing beyond our own circle was permissible.
Regular dance "practice," whispered conversations and quick kisses in dark corners of the ancient castle with one girl or another, and regular dates outside the castle — roughly once every two weeks — had all settled firmly and permanently into my schedule as well.
And the strangest thing — once I'd fully adjusted to that rhythm, it became, I don't even quite know how to describe it, just… finally, completely comfortable. Easy. Simple.
Yes, my pace of study and training could have made even the most hardened workaholic howl in despair. Every minute of my free time was laid out in advance, limited in practice to dancing with the girls, occasional dates outside the castle, and broom rides that sometimes turned into dates of their own with Ginny.
Everything else was occupied by something genuinely important, necessary, or at minimum required — like classes and homework. Even the dancing could, objectively, be counted as a kind of training in endurance, agility, and physical coordination.
That all sounds rather grim and joyless as a dry summary of how I was spending my time. But that impression would only hold from the outside. In reality, I spent close to half my day in the company of my friends, enjoying good company, the soft glow of adolescent romance, and small acts of cheerful mischief — whether we were in class, grinding through homework, sitting in the library, or training magic together.
All of it passed, somehow, with surprising ease and lightness — and with real results. Yes, I still needed some personal time for working through genuinely difficult material, for mental magic practice, or for the periodic deep-dives into questions that interested me. Not to mention sleep, which claimed a third of every day, and which twice a week I replaced with special meditations that supplemented my Occlumency training.
But on the whole, I didn't feel any particular weight pressing down on me. Instead, I kept noticing rapid progress in my magical skills — and in something harder to name, something about my own perspective on life. The latter was very difficult to put into words or express clearly through any emotion, but I was changing. Undeniably. In how I saw the world, life, magic itself. The very shape of my thinking was shifting, however blunt and self-important that might sound to say aloud — but it was true.
I couldn't say whether it was adolescence and the raging hormones in this body doing that to me. Or whether it was the fact that I had completely and irrevocably accepted my new reality — the society and culture of wizards — and learned to genuinely enjoy all the advantages of my position, while calmly and habitually preparing for the problems that same position was guaranteed to bring. I couldn't identify the root cause of the changes happening inside me.
But looking back, I resembled less and less with every passing day the frightened coward in a child's body who had first arrived at Hogwarts. And yet I couldn't honestly say I'd been entirely wrong at that time either. After all, existence shapes consciousness in powerful ways. When you're trapped in a child's body, thrust for the first time into an unfamiliar and dangerous world of magic, unable to defend yourself even in the smallest way — that is deeply, deeply crushing.
Looking back on it now, I remembered my own helplessness in first and second year with something close to a shudder. The sticky, clinging fear for my new life had seeped into my very soul during that time, driving me to seek strength anywhere I could find it. And it worked — but the state of permanent tension and fear had begun to wear on me in ways that weren't entirely healthy.
Not too severely. I'd met Sirius at exactly the right moment, and the third year had given me a much-needed moral reprieve. And the ability to influence my own mood and emotions had awakened in me at just the right time as well. But I had only now, finally, rid myself of certain deeper fears and complications.
Precisely now — when I could see my own progress in magic with my own eyes, when I could fight Sirius Black on equal terms without any qualifiers, even after he'd fully reclaimed his form. That was when I'd found some peace. When I'd forced myself to look toward the future with a slightly more steady gaze. Not to the point of any overconfidence — honestly, the prospect of one day coming face to face with the most powerful dark wizard of the modern era, the one who had once terrified the entire magical population of Britain into a collective panic, still made me tremble a little. But still.
Analyzing my own state and mapping the changes in my own character through mental magic, I could say with something almost like pride that a certain feeling had finally left me. A feeling of being hunted. Of having no way out.
I was no longer the helpless boy who could do nothing but run at the first sign of danger. I wasn't yet a truly powerful wizard who could dictate his own terms to others through sheer force. But I had something in my arsenal now. And that something did a great deal for my peace of mind.
Which was why life felt more comfortable and easy than it ever had before. I even allowed myself to hope that this school year might pass relatively quietly, without any unnecessary incidents.
And then, of course, it didn't.
Because I am, goddammit, Harry bloody Potter.
The moment I let myself relax — a lie, there was nothing relaxed about me, especially as the end of the school year approached and the third task of the Tournament drew closer — trouble arrived. One raving lunatic showed up to remind me that this wretched life simply could not be so straightforward or so calm.
"What a perfect time they picked, the bastards. I couldn't have caught myself any better myself," I snarled, sweeping a fast look over the trio of wizards in heavy masks and robes who had effectively cornered me several kilometers from Hogwarts.
They'd jumped me on my way back to the castle after an intensive training session with my godfather. What a lovely surprise.
I'd suspected something like this was possible. If our current Defense Against the Dark Arts professor really was Moody — the genuine article — then a resurrected dark lord, should one have returned to the world of the living in any form, would inevitably try to get his hands on me and my blood.
As far as I could recall from the film I'd once watched, without my blood that bastard simply couldn't reclaim a proper body. And while I'd hoped he might choose some other sacrifice for the ritual — he had enemies enough — I hadn't gone to all that trouble for nothing, drilling myself until it was reflex, keeping a permanent shield against Stunning and Paralysis spells running even in my sleep.
That shield was what saved me in the first moments of the fight.
I had noticed something — a foreign awareness, a strange shimmer of magic bleeding into my perception from what felt like empty air. I noticed. But I still hadn't managed to do anything meaningful in time. The enemy had materialized in my senses far too suddenly.
What saved me from immediate and inevitable defeat was the shield — and, in fairness, the protective artifacts as well. They couldn't boast anything too impressive — in this world, defensive artifacts weren't particularly effective against direct magical attack — but they'd done their part.
I'd survived the first wave from whatever riff-raff were masquerading as Death Eaters.
And after that — it was time to give them something to remember.
No matter that I had no more than a third of my magical reserves left after the recent training session. I had made a conscious habit of keeping a small reserve after sparring with Sirius. Precisely for something like this, one might say.
And then the adrenaline hit — slamming into my head, driving my already instantaneously sharpened mental-magic-enhanced consciousness toward something truly decisive.
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