Harry hated Tuesdays. More specifically, he hated Professor Dolohova, and in particular on Charms practice days. Today, Professor Dolohova was, though Harry had scarcely imagined it possible, even worse than usual, swooping around with narrowed hawk eyes as she policed students' wand-waving and snarling at imagined slights.

It was with great relief that Harry left the Charms classroom, accompanied by Alvin and, to his distaste, Gretchen Schramm. She clearly returned the sentiment, and spent her time alternating between attempting to hold Alvin's hand and glaring at Harry with as much venom as an eleven-year-old girl with blonde ringlets could muster up, which really wasn't much at all. Harry thought it was kind of funny, even if her attitude irritated him. He decided just to ignore her.

"What's up with Dolohova, anyway? Does she seem worse than usual to you?" he asked Alvin. Schramm made an offended noise that made Harry wonder if she might actually like the beastly woman, or if she was just disagreeing with him on principle.

"Dunno," Alvin replied unhelpfully, shrugging, "I wasn't really paying attention."

Harry shot him an incredulous look, but said nothing further. Despite his low opinion of Professor Dolohova, Harry knew well enough to pay attention in class. Besides it being important to the continued well-being of his marks, Professor Dolohova was also rightfully reputed to give detention to anyone who so much as looked the wrong way during lecture. Harry was amazed that Alvin had got away with anything. Maybe it was those pureblood benefits again.

Schramm made a funny, simpering noise, and, perhaps unduly irritated, Harry muttered a curt goodbye and headed in the direction of Demiguise. The thought of doing the gigantic pile of homework he had accumulated made him feel ill. After a quick review of his free time for the next few days and the possibility that he would be assigned even more work, Harry decided that it would be somewhat risky, but probably still worth it, to put off being productive for a little longer.

Kicking the Abstract Tower's entrance brick with a little more force than was perhaps necessary, Harry waited impatiently for the stone door to appear and slide open before he hurried inside. The common room was empty but for a lanky upper-year in the corner scribbling on a piece of parchment, surrounded by a sea of books and handwritten pages.

Harry went up to the second door on the second floor and poked his wand tip into the place where the doorknob was meant to be before tapping his entrance code against the hard wood with his finger. The door clicked open.

"Hey," greeted his roommate Lothar, followed by the usual inquiry about how Harry's last activity went: "Wie war's?"

"Beschissen," Harry replied darkly. Shitty. He quite approved of the way such expressive words were more acceptable in German than in English. "Beschissen" seemed like an appropriate word to describe his life at the moment.

Immediately chiding himself in his head for being melodramatic, Harry walked morosely over to the bed and dumped his bookbag into the middle of the rumpled covers. The tomte, Karl, was not allowed into the dormitory proper, due to some hogwash about privacy, so the students were forced to mind their own rooms, which meant of course that no minding was done at all until it got absolutely unbearable. Harry had tried bribing Karl with porridge once to clean his room, but the little old man had apologetically told him that school rules were school rules.

Still, Harry liked Karl, and enjoyed playing games with the guardian spirit when he had the time. He considered going out to find the tomte now, but realised disappointedly that half an hour or so would not be enough to do anything fun. The tomte would have work to do in the afternoon.

"You've got post," Lothar said, glancing over his shoulder. Harry looked up in surprise and, indeed, saw that his post box was glowing a soft blue. That meant that he had received post while in class, and it had been redirected to appear in his room. Honestly Harry wished they would just do that all the time, to save the hassle of bird feathers everywhere, but knew already that the reason they didn't was so that people could easily write return letters using the owls.

Harry did not usually have this concern, since there was nobody to write him other than perhaps Kolya, the only one of his friends who had an owl. And Kolya lived in Demiguise, so any note he wanted to send could easily be slipped under the room door.

Realising that it was pointless to speculate, Harry strode over to his desk and flipped open the lid of his post box. The note was just that—a note, no envelope or anything—and looked to be scrawled on some spare bit of parchment. Totally mystified, Harry held it up and squinted at the unfamiliar handwriting.

To his surprise, it was in English. Deciphering it was somewhat difficult, but he managed after a few annoyed moments:

"Harry,

"Afternoon tea, Sunday at three. Got a little something for you.

"-Hagrid"

The first thought to flash through his bewildered mind was, "Who the hell is Hagrid?" Then there was the strange familiarity of the note despite his total lack of knowledge of anybody with a name like that (who wrote in English, no less). Perhaps the note had been delivered wrongly? There were probably multiple people called Harry, right?

But Harry was an English name, and there weren't that many students at Durmstrang who came from English-speaking countries. Furthermore, Harry's name was technically Howard Branch, so it didn't make sense that an owl would make a mistake like that... did it? Harry struggled to remember how owl post worked.

"Hey Lothar," he said, "can owl post get delivered to the wrong person?"

It was a dumb question, Harry thought, and he regretted it instantly—obviously this note had been delivered to the wrong person, so clearly it was in fact possible.

"I mean," he corrected, "I just got this letter from someone I don't even know and it's in English."

Lothar turned around in his seat, both eyebrows raised. "Never heard of something like that happening," he said plainly. "Go talk to the postmaster?"

Feeling irritation at having new responsibility piled onto him, Harry muttered an unenthusiastic, "Yeah, I'll do that. Later," and put the note on top of his box. He sat down in his chair with a quiet huff.

He had an uncomfortable feeling in his gut when he thought about owl post, for some reason. He glanced up at his post box again and frowned. It seemed like something was really strange here, stranger than misdelivered post, but Harry did not know what.

Deciding that he probably had better things to think about, he resolved to put it out of his mind for now and instead turned to thinking about his list of homework. The sheer amount of it made him groan inwardly and he reluctantly stood again to go grab his book bag and start on his assignments.

Some time later, a knock on the door startled Harry, and he looked up so quickly from the Magical Theory reading that he had been engrossed in that he strained something in his neck. Wincing and rubbing at the spot, he stood up and reached for the door, seeing that Lothar had apparently gone without him noticing.

On the other side of the door was Ivan Poliakoff. Harry was so surprised to see the older boy that he almost yelped, but he remembered himself and stepped back from the door, mumbling, "Come in."

"How did you get up here, anyway?" he asked once he had shut the door. Ivan laughed. There was a strange, tinny quality to it that made Harry uncomfortable, but he ignored it; it was stupid to judge someone based on his laugh.

"Clarissa let me in," he explained.

"Is that even allowed?" Harry muttered sceptically. Ivan nodded vigorously.

"Don't worry about that. It's not against the rules to go into other dormitories or anything. I mean, before curfew," he said, correctly guessing Harry's concern. "Anyway, I was wondering if you had time to work on some transfiguration."

"Oh," Harry said. "Uh, well, I was working on some homework. I mean, I'm not sure what you want me to do... you honestly probably know a lot more about transfiguration than I do."

Ivan shrugged. "I think it would help if you just showed me a couple of transfigurations. You have to practice anyway, right?"

Harry nodded somewhat reluctantly with a murmured, "Fine, I guess." He tugged his wand out of his sleeve, remembered that he had nothing to transfigure, and went over to his bookbag to retrieve the small potato that was part of that week's assignment. They were supposed to transfigure the potato into a cabbage. Vegetable transfiguration was meant to prepare them for inanimate to animate transfigurations in the following years. They were starting with potato to cabbage, since "Kartoffel" and "Kohl" both started with "K," which made them easier to associate, or something.

Feeling suddenly quite self-conscious, Harry glanced over at Ivan and licked his lips nervously. "I'm probably going to fail," he told to the older boy. A moment later, he added, "a lot."

"Don't worry about it," Ivan said easily, waving his hand. Worrying about it anyway, Harry turned back to the knut-sized, greening potato and prepared to prod it with his wand. He thought about saying the general transfiguration incantation, and then decided that it was rubbish and just went on with using his visualisation method. Giving it a stern poke with his wand, Harry concentrated.

Predictably, nothing happened. Harry frowned at his own thoughts, immediately catching a problem. He wasn't being confident enough and he knew it. That wouldn't do. "It's going to work," he thought to himself. A vague, deprecating, "This is stupid," floated across his consciousness, and he almost groaned aloud in frustration. Why did his mind have to foil itself?

Taking a breath, Harry turned back to the potato and tried to focus. Cabbage. Not a potato. A cabbage. Round, pale green, webbed.

He felt his wand warm slightly, and then there was a very, very small cabbage in front of him.

"You're transfiguring Brussel sprouts?" Ivan asked, interrupting Harry's moment of consternation. "But that doesn't even start with 'K!'"

Harry felt himself flush. This was an exercise in futility. Why did Ivan want to watch him fail at transfiguration anyway? There was no way the older boy could be worse at this than Harry was. It was just inconceivable. Reaching out to take his messed up tiny cabbage, Harry yelped with surprise as the surface leaves simply fell off and left a peeled potato.

"Well done, Harry, you invented a new food preparation method," Ivan told him, laughing his metallic laugh again. Harry's flush deepened, though he laughed as well, torn between amusement and embarrassment. Suddenly, a thought came to him that caused him to sober. He glanced at the yellow flesh of his now-bald potato critically.

Had he been doing surface-level transfigurations this entire time? Nothing else they had transfigured had ever had loose parts, so there was no way for him to know. Frowning, he opened up his desk drawer and rummaged around the disastrously disorganized insides until he managed to fish out a button.

He cast the spell to turn it into a spoon, and then cast a quick diffindo at it. The severing charm came easily to him, despite that it was a second year spell. However, unlike the mental image he had pulled up to cast it, one of the spoon cleanly separating into halves, the real spoon was only barely dented. Since the spell had succeeded, Harry was sure that it would have achieved its intended effect on, say, paper or wood, but it looked like the spoon was too much for it. That meant that he had transfigured the button into real metal. He turned back to the peeled potato, irritated. Suddenly, as if to add insult to, well, existing insult, the tiny cabbage leaves turned back into bits of potato skin with a cheery "pop."

"What are you doing?" Ivan asked, reminding Harry that he was supposed to be entertaining his guest with transfiguration, not charms.

"Just testing a theory," Harry replied vaguely. Why would he be able to transfigure a real metal spoon, but not a real cabbage (or miniature cabbage, as it were)? Shaking his head, he conjectured wildly that he was simply not imagining the inside of a cabbage clearly enough.

"Why don't you use the incantation for the transfiguration? Silent casting is hard," Ivan said. Harry frowned.

"With transfiguration, it doesn't seem to make any difference for me," he admitted.

"But incantations work for the other subjects? Charms? Defence?" Ivan pressed, and Harry felt somewhat uncomfortable at the questioning. Somehow, though he could not rationally justify why, he felt that the older boy had some kind of ulterior motive to his inquiry, other than academic achievement.

Still, not wanting to seem rude or strange based on a completely random feeling, Harry answered yes to both, not mentioning that he could also cast wordless spells that functioned like Charms, for all extents and purposes. He still did not really understand how that worked, and saw no point in volunteering the information.

Ivan nodded, turning back to the skinned potato. "That's actually really odd," he informed Harry. "Do you know the theory behind incantations and wand movements?"

"They're supposed to help you focus or something, right?" Harry said vaguely. They had talked about it enough in class to tell Harry that he did not want to bother with them, not for transfiguration, at least.

To his surprise, however, Ivan shook his head. "That might be true, but the main thing is that they are good shortcuts. If you really wanted to, you could do anything with magic. And I mean anything. But most people, let's put it this way, don't want that much. You have to really want something," he explained emphatically. "Begehren," was the word Ivan had used, and Harry understood that to mean true, serious desire. Ivan lightened up then, and continued, "But for doing things, well, like homework, you don't want it enough. I mean, you can't really want it that much. But with the incantation you can do it anyway, because so many people have used them that magic is used to moving in that pattern."

Harry blinked at Ivan's sudden lecture-length explanation, wondering if that was the sort of thing one learned in later years of Magical Theory. It would have been good to learn earlier. But he supposed the class couldn't teach everything all at once.

"Oh," he murmured. "That makes sense." He supposed he had already known all of that, to some extent, but had never comprehended the unambiguous sense of it all until now. Harry thought it about it for a further moment, and his mind immediately jumped back to what Ivan had implied about magic. He turns back to the older boy, "I thought they said that reviving the dead was impossible, even for magic. But surely there are people who really want that?"

Ivan looked surprised as the question, though Harry could not imagine why he would be. It was a natural thing to try to poke holes in explanations until they made sense.

"I don't know if I really want to go into that," Ivan admitted, "It has to do with identity and the soul, and such. Do souls really exist?" And now it was Harry's turn to be surprised. He blinked at Ivan incredulously. Every wizard knew that souls existed. Dementors sucked them out, for crying out loud!

Ivan certainly saw his expression, for he smiled sheepishly. "Maybe that wasn't the right way to put it. What I'm saying is that dead people aren't just floating around. You have to find a soul somehow, and to do that, you would have to understand it completely. But imagination is limited by how much you can think about at once, so do you think that can really happen?"

Harry stared at Ivan in utter bewilderment. Finally, he opened his mouth and admitted, "I don't understand what you're trying to say."

Ivan sighed ruefully and shook his head. "Forget that," he murmured, "Bringing back the dead and things like that aren't exactly established magic theory. I mean it's established that nobody's been able to do it. Never mind. Like I said, forget it."

Harry was not fully content to leave the conversation at that, but he did not want to be rude and Ivan was clearly uncomfortable, so he nodded. Idly, he glanced back over to his peeled potato. He narrowed his eyes.

"So if incantations make things so easy, why are some people better at Transfiguration than others? I mean, in class. Like you said, nobody actually wants to turn a potato into a cabbage. It's not like it would be safe to eat after that. And getting incantations right can't be that hard," Harry said pointedly.

"You'd be surprised," Ivan said dryly, but when Harry glanced over, he could see tension in the contours of the other boy's face, tension that had not been there before. He recalled that Ivan himself was one of those people who was apparently no good at Transfiguration. Perhaps he was insulted or embarrassed. Harry felt a little bad.

"Sorry," he muttered, not entirely sure what he was apologising for. Ivan waved his apology aside, but seemed to want to say something, though with noticeable hesitation, his brow furrowed and mouth half-open.

Finally, it seemed like he decided to go ahead and say it anyway: "Incantations are a shortcut, like I said, but they don't work for everyone. They work based on magic that other wizards have cast before, so you have to have a good connection with other wizards. Sympathetic magic and that sort of thing."

It was just another magic theory fact. Harry did not understand why Ivan seemed so edgy about it. Briefly, Harry considered that the older boy might be misleading him, and decided that he ought to look it up in the library, just in case. He groaned inwardly; it would be a nightmare to find this particular bit of information about something as widely discussed as spell incantations.

Then Harry looked at Ivan again and ran the words through his mind once more. Ivan was no good at transfiguration. Harry seemed to remember Ivan saying something at one point about how he wanted to truly be able to do transfiguration, which was a nice goal but in light of their current conversation, probably a lie. The truth now seemed to be that incantations did not work well for Ivan, and for some reason, he was uncomfortable having that fact known. But despite his discomfort, he had told Harry anyway, so it couldn't be anything too bad. Embarrassing, perhaps? Harry could not see how, but it seemed like the best explanation for now.

"Does that just happen sometimes, then?" Harry asked Ivan, looking down at his own wand. "I mean, they don't seem to work that well for me either."

Ivan shook his head and pointed to Harry's skinned potato. "I think I know what's wrong with your transfiguration. You're mixing styles."

"What?" Harry had no idea what Ivan was even talking about.

"Well, you're doing the wand movement by itself, but the way you transfigured that looks like free transfiguration, so your focus is all split up." Ivan paused, grunting with an air of frustration. Harry still did not understand, but waited patiently for Ivan to give a better explanation. "It's like this. When you use the movement and incantation, you need to focus on the concepts. That's why you have transfigurations like potato to cabbage. They're both vegetables, and they start with the same letter, so that's two similarities you can focus on. But for free transfiguration you need to think about what the objects actually are, so in that case potatoes and cabbages are really different."

Harry stared at Ivan, slightly open mouthed. The latest attempt at explanation had upgraded from nonsense to completely amazing.

"Why did no one ever tell me this before?" Harry cried, choking a little. Apparently, he had been hindering himself the whole time, and never even realised it. Now that he thought back to the first month of Magical Theory, he realised that it had been right there in front of him, if a little less blatantly than Ivan had presented it.

Incantations narrowed the result of the magic so that no accidents could happen. But how could completely irrelevant accidents happen when one was properly imagining the target? They couldn't! Only if the focus was on knowledge and concepts instead of reality, could a single distracting thought create an unwanted result.

"Verto Kohl!" Harry declared, giving his wand a small twirl and simply focusing without thinking much at all. The potato shuddered slightly and grew larger and flakier.

"You pronounced it wrong," Ivan told him helpfully. Harry scowled, but obligingly repeated Ivan's corrected pronunciation several times before he attempted the spell again. It succeeded immediately, and he had a perfectly archetypal cabbage in front of him.

"That's ridiculous," Harry muttered. "It feels like cheating."

Ivan shrugged "It gets the job done, doesn't it? But now I've helped you, so you should help me," he murmured, grinning.

Harry glanced up, feeling a little trepidation as well as some embarrassment. "You really have helped me a lot," he said, "but I still don't know how I could possibly help you."

Ivan held up a hand. "You managed to do transfiguration anyway, even with your messed up technique, didn't you? That means you're good at it. I know all the theory but I still can't do it, so I want to watch you again."

This reasoning made sense to Harry, given the circumstances now, but it was strange because it did not explain why Ivan had come to his room in the first place. Harry might have believed that he wanted to socialise, even if a fourth year interested in making friends with an ickle firstie was a little odd, but Ivan had straight up asked to see him do transfiguration, without first having known that Harry could even do the type that he wanted!

Still, Harry could not see anything wrong with demonstrating, now that he had been asked.

"I'll do some that I know I can do, then," Harry suggested, and Ivan nodded in agreement.

Since he had just turned a button into a spoon earlier, he decided to do a different one. Shrugging, he rummaged around in his desk drawer until he found a dusty loop of string. Pointing his wand at it, he gave it a sharp flick and imagined the string rounding out and stiffening until it glinted silvery and metallic.

On his desk sat a shiny, thin ring of metal wire. This was the first thing they had transfigured in class that Harry had not used an incantation for at all. He had got sick and tired of Gretchen Schramm mocking him for his pronunciation and given it up entirely, somehow managing to succeed anyway.

"Wow," Ivan said, sounding genuinely impressed. "Can you describe how you do that one?"

"You didn't learn this one in first year?" Harry asked him. Ivan winced.

"I didn't have any trouble with transfiguration until around second year, so I just used the incantations and wand movements. They don't work for me anymore, like I said," he explained.

"Not even the ones you already knew? That's rough," Harry murmured, though he wondered how a wizard could lose an ability like that, and apparently in the course of a few months. Without thinking too much of it, he asked, "Can that happen to anyone? Incantations just not working anymore?"

Ivan looked remarkably uncomfortable at that question, and Harry was confused again by the reaction. Something here was not adding up.

"Yes and no," Ivan finally said hesitantly. "I mean, it doesn't happen randomly or anything. It's just that certain types of magic aren't really suited to some people, and things, about people can, um, change," he continued lamely. Harry was not impressed by this incredibly vague statement.

But then the words, "certain types of magic," coupled with another look at Ivan's pasty white skin and gaunt, emaciated look, suddenly made something click in Harry's mind.

"You mean the dark arts?" Harry asked a little pointedly. Ivan's sudden grimace was enough confirmation.

A low chime from Harry's desk distracted him as he was about to press the topic. He turned around and caught sight of his post box glowing blue again. "One moment," he told Ivan as he stepped over to see what it was.

It was a slip of parchment again, without an envelope, but looking much higher-quality than the last slip. The words written on it were no less concerning, however.

"Dear Mr. Potter, please see me in my office at your earliest convenience. - Nate."

Harry felt his stomach begin to churn uncomfortably as soon as he saw the dreaded "Mr. Potter." He did not know whether to feel better at worse at seeing the signature. At least it was still Nate, and not someone else who knew who he was, but at the same time, this was confirmation that Nate really did know, and Harry could not imagine how.

This was it. He had to tell Lord Voldemort about this now. Before, it could have been a fluke, but to keep ignoring it might be dangerous.

"What is it?" Ivan asked, and Harry jumped slightly, pressing the slip of parchment to his chest to hide the text. Fortunately, when he turned, Ivan was still in the same place.

"Uh, the rector wants to see me," Harry told him, supposing that there was no point in lying about that.

"Why now?" Ivan murmured with a curious air. Harry shrugged.

"It doesn't say," he answered. He could feel his heart rate speeding up. He had to face Nate now, without knowing anything about him, while Nate could very well know all about Harry. It was unfair and a little frightening. Or maybe Harry was overreacting. He had really no idea how he ought to react to this.

"Don't worry, you're probably not in trouble," Ivan said, probably mistaking Harry's expression for something like that. Harry wished he could just worry about being in the normal sort of trouble.

"Do you know much about the rector?" Harry asked Ivan. It was worth a shot. He had asked a lot of people already, but most of them were in Demiguise or in his classes.

Ivan shrugged. "He's powerful, and he has an interesting philosophy. If he gives you any life advice, you should listen to it."

This response was completely different from the general ones that Harry usually got, so he counted it as a success, even if it hardly helped him. "Thanks. I'll remember that," he said. "Oh, one more thing. Where's his office?" Harry flushed a little.

"I'll show you the way," Ivan offered generously, stepping toward the door.

"Thanks," Harry said, putting his wand in his pocket and following. He kept his hand there, palming the warm wood, not willing to let it go entirely.

Note: So, yeah. I don't update for months and now I come out with this wimpy lame thing. Sorry. This chapter really did not want to get written, and also I've kind of lost interest in this story. But don't worry. It's not the dreaded author-abandoning-story note. I'll keep writing; it just might not be very fast. Who knows? I might get more inspiration later.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this story. Sorry I'm a terrible, lazy author. The next chapter is already in the works and will eventually be done, but no promises about punctuality. The more I make them, the more I break them. Oops.