Adrian spent the morning after Diagon Alley at the kitchen table with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them open beside his breakfast.
Marisol set a mug near his elbow.
“Drink that before it gets cold.”
Adrian picked it up and took a sip.
Coffee.
Mostly milk, because his mother refused to give an eleven-year-old coffee at anything close to the strength he preferred, but it still counted.
Edmund looked over the top of his newspaper.
“You know most children your age would rather have something sweeter.”
“I like coffee.”
“You like something vaguely associated with coffee.”
Marisol sat down with her own mug.
“There’s coffee in it.”
“Somewhere.”
Adrian ignored them and turned another page.
Newt Scamander’s writing was more useful than he’d expected.
His memories from his first life weren’t worthless, but they weren’t complete either.
He remembered the Harry Potter films well enough to know Hogwarts, the Houses, the broad events surrounding Harry Potter and the name Albus Dumbledore.
That didn’t mean he knew Dumbledore.
He knew the man he’d seen on a screen, along with the younger version connected to Newt Scamander and Grindelwald.
A film showed pieces of someone’s life.
It didn’t tell you everything they’d done, everything they’d known or what they’d been thinking outside the scenes that mattered to the story.
Adrian had always been more interested in the creatures anyway.
Now they were real.
That still felt strange.
His notebook lay beside the book, already filling with names, classifications and references to other sources he wanted to find.
One name had been underlined twice.
Zouwu.
He remembered the enormous catlike creature clearly.
Something that large shouldn’t have been able to move the way it did, crossing huge distances in a bound as though the space between one place and another barely mattered.
Adrian wanted to see one someday.
From a sensible distance at first.
Edmund lowered his newspaper.
“You’re not going looking for one of those.”
Adrian looked up.
“I didn’t say I was.”
“You underlined it twice.”
“I’m researching.”
“You’ve been home from Diagon Alley for less than a day, and you’re already making lists of dangerous creatures.”
“That seems like the best time to start.”
Edmund folded the newspaper and looked toward the wand box on the counter.
“Bring your wand.”
Adrian’s attention shifted at once.
“Now?”
“While I’m here to make sure you don’t do anything stupid with it.”
Adrian closed the book.
Edmund moved a lamp and several framed photographs before clearing space in the sitting room.
Marisol stayed nearby with her coffee.
“I thought you weren’t letting him use it yet.”
“Not alone.
I’d rather he learn properly than wait until we’re not looking and try something from one of those books.”
Adrian opened the wand box.
“I wasn’t going to do that.”
Neither parent answered.
Adrian looked between them.
“Okay.
I was thinking about it.”
“That,” Edmund said, “is why we’re doing this now.”
Adrian took out his wand.
Vine.
Eleven and three-quarter inches.
Unicorn hair.
He’d spent most of the previous evening resisting the urge to handle it.
Edmund drew his own.
“We’ll start with Lumos.
It’s simple, useful, and if you manage to make a complete mess of it, you’re unlikely to damage anything.”
“Comforting.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be.”
Edmund demonstrated the movement.
“Lumos.”
Light appeared at the tip of his wand.
Adrian had seen the spell performed before, but watching his father from a few feet away was more useful than remembering it from a film.
He watched Edmund’s wrist, the angle of the wand and how little force he used.
Edmund extinguished the light.
“Go on.”
Adrian copied the movement.
“Lumos.”
Nothing happened.
Edmund didn’t react.
“Again, and loosen your grip.
You’re holding the wand as though you’re afraid it’ll escape.”
Adrian adjusted his fingers and tried again.
Still nothing.
Edmund stepped closer and moved Adrian’s wrist slightly.
“Less from the elbow.
You’re making the movement bigger than it needs to be.”
Adrian repeated it.
A spark appeared at the tip and vanished.
“There,” Edmund said.
“The wand responded.
Do the same thing again instead of trying to make it brighter.”
Adrian did.
The next spark lasted longer.
Two attempts later, a weak point of light appeared at the tip of the wand before fading.
He looked at it.
“That was worse than I expected.”
“You’ve owned the wand since yesterday.
If eleven-year-olds could pick one up and start casting properly, Hogwarts wouldn’t need seven years to teach them.”
Adrian raised it again.
“Lumos.”
The light returned.
This time it stayed.
It wasn’t bright, but it was recognizably the same spell Edmund had demonstrated.
Adrian started to try again.
Edmund held out his hand.
“That’ll do for today.
You’re starting to tense your wrist, and practicing badly won’t help you.”
“I can keep going.”
“I know you can.
That’s not the same as saying you should.”
Adrian looked at the wand for another moment before handing it over.
Edmund returned it to the box.
“How long did it take you?” Adrian asked.
“To learn Lumos?”
“Yeah.”
“A few lessons before I could do it reliably.
I was eleven, and like nearly everyone else in my year, I wasn’t particularly impressive when I started.”
That helped.
Adrian knew first-years weren’t supposed to arrive at Hogwarts already knowing how to cast.
Knowing that in theory and failing at a spell himself were different things.
Edmund closed the box.
“We’ll do more tomorrow.
Until then, leave the wand where it is.”
Adrian went back to the kitchen and reopened his book.
His first attempt at wand magic hadn’t gone especially well.
For now, that didn’t mean anything.
His first strange magic had appeared years earlier in Arizona.
Adrian still remembered the storm.
The sky had darkened long before sunset, and his parents had been trying to get him indoors when something moved between the clouds.
At first he’d thought it was a bird.
Then lightning spread across the sky around it.
The Thunderbird had been far enough away that Adrian never saw much more than its shape, the sweep of its wings and the storm moving with it.
He hadn’t approached it, spoken to it or even known what it was until Edmund explained afterward.
But he’d watched.
He remembered the pressure in the air before each flash and the way the electricity gathered around the Thunderbird.
Then something answered inside him.
Static crawled over Adrian’s arms.
He looked down just as a thin arc of electricity jumped between two of his fingers.
For a second he forgot about the storm.
Another spark followed.
His parents noticed almost immediately.
Edmund pulled him back from the window while Marisol demanded to know what was happening, but Adrian barely heard either of them.
He was staring at his hand.
The Thunderbird was still moving through the clouds.
And somehow, something about it had stayed with him.
A few days later, Adrian shocked himself on a metal doorknob.
That wasn’t unusual.
What caught his attention was the electricity that remained between his fingers after he pulled his hand away.
The ability developed slowly from there.
Adrian learned that electricity could pass through him more safely than it should, that he could hold a small charge for a short time, and that he could release it when he concentrated.
He also learned that there were limits.
The first time he tried holding too much, his arm went numb almost to the shoulder.
Edmund stopped any further experiments for a month after that.
Adrian didn’t argue much.
The experience had answered an important question.
Whatever he’d taken from the Thunderbird hadn’t made him one.
He still had a human body, and whatever magic had passed between them had adapted itself into something that body could use.
He eventually gave it a name.
Blue Magic.
There hadn’t been a system telling him what had happened, and no convenient voice had appeared to explain the rules.
The name came from his memories of Final Fantasy because the comparison was too close to ignore.
He’d encountered a magical creature, understood something about what it could do, and somehow learned a human version of that ability.
Calling it Blue Magic made sense.
The name stayed.
Moving to Britain gave Adrian more opportunities to find out whether the Thunderbird had been a one-time accident.
His childhood still wasn’t filled with magical creatures.
Most days involved school, Cedric, trips into town, bad weather and whatever his parents were doing.
Magic was simply part of life around the edges.
Wizarding families sometimes kept magical animals.
Small magical communities attracted creatures that Muggles rarely noticed.
Amos Diggory’s work also meant Cedric occasionally heard about something unusual, although that didn’t mean the boys were allowed anywhere near anything dangerous.
The next important encounter was with a Kneazle owned by a witch the Diggorys knew.
Adrian had already spent years learning how to approach ordinary animals, so he treated it much the same way at first.
He watched its ears, tail, eyes and posture, then changed his own behaviour depending on how it reacted.
The Kneazle wasn’t an ordinary cat.
Some familiar signals worked.
Others didn’t.
Adrian adjusted.
He spent most of the afternoon around it, trying different sounds and movements and watching what changed.
At one point a visitor entered the room and the Kneazle’s behaviour shifted.
It moved away, kept watching the man and refused to approach while he was there.
Nothing appeared wrong with him at first.
Later, after several drinks, he became loud and started an argument.
Adrian remembered the Kneazle’s reaction.
More importantly, something had happened while he’d been studying it.
He had felt the same unease.
At first he assumed he’d simply picked up on the animal’s behaviour.
Then the feeling happened again several days later when there wasn’t a Kneazle anywhere nearby.
Someone felt wrong.
Adrian couldn’t have explained why.
There were no words, no thoughts from the other person and nothing telling him whether they were good or bad.
It was closer to an instinct telling him to pay attention.
He tested it whenever the feeling appeared.
Sometimes it warned him about someone angry or deceptive.
Sometimes it reacted to an object or place instead.
Other times he couldn’t work out what had caused it at all.
It wasn’t mind reading or lie detection.
It was suspicion.
Danger.
The sort of instinct a Kneazle possessed naturally, reduced and reshaped into something Adrian could use.
That made two.
The Niffler came later.
One escaped during a visit to a small wizarding market and immediately turned the place upside down.
Three adults tried to catch it while the creature darted beneath stalls, climbed through boxes and emerged carrying anything valuable enough to attract its attention.
Adrian stayed out of the chase and watched.
The Niffler often reacted before the object it wanted was visible.
Its head would turn toward a pocket.
Then a purse.
Then a closed box.
It disappeared beneath one stall and came out with somebody’s watch before anyone had realised the watch was missing.
Adrian started following its attention rather than its movement.
Coins on a counter.
Jewellery beneath a sleeve.
A silver buckle.
Something inside a handbag.
The Niffler knew where valuable things were even when it couldn’t see them.
That was the part Adrian concentrated on.
By the time its owner finally caught it, he could feel something himself.
Faintly.
Adrian turned toward one of the nearby stalls without knowing why.
There was a locked case beneath the counter.
Something inside it pulled at his attention.
He couldn’t see what it was, but the sensation was there.
Adrian smiled.
He knew this feeling.
Not the ability itself.
The process.
Another creature had left something behind.
Over the following days, Adrian tested the new sense whenever he could.
His mother’s earrings drew his attention from another room.
He found coins that had slipped behind a drawer.
Edmund’s wand stood out even when it was hidden inside his coat.
The ability wasn’t limited to money.
Rare objects, magical items and things with some kind of value could attract his attention as well, though Adrian didn’t always understand why.
It wasn’t precise enough to tell him exactly what he was sensing.
Most of the time, he got little more than a direction and the feeling that something nearby was worth noticing.
Adrian called it treasure sense.
That made three Blue Magic abilities before Hogwarts: the Thunderbird’s lightning, the Kneazle’s sense for danger and suspicion, and the Niffler’s instinct for valuable things.
He’d encountered other magical creatures without learning anything from them, which told him that simply seeing one wasn’t enough.
There had to be something about the creature’s ability that Adrian could understand well enough for his magic to reproduce.
His body mattered too.
He’d spent years around owls without learning to fly.
Seeing magical insects hadn’t given him wings, and no amount of observation could provide organs or anatomy he simply didn’t possess.
Even when Blue Magic worked, what Adrian gained was a human version of the original ability.
He could conduct and release electricity, but he couldn’t command storms like a Thunderbird.
His danger sense warned him when something felt wrong, but it wasn’t as reliable as a Kneazle’s instincts.
Treasure sense pulled his attention toward things of value without giving him the certainty of a Niffler.
The more an ability depended on magic, the better his chances seemed to be.
The more it depended on anatomy his body didn’t have, the less there was for him to copy.
Adrian didn’t know all the rules yet, but he’d learned enough to stop assuming every interesting creature could teach him something.
The Thunderbird had also taught him what happened when he pushed an ability beyond what his human body could handle.
Three days after his first wand lesson, Edmund let him try again.
Adrian had spent most of the time between lessons reading because Edmund had kept the wand somewhere he couldn’t reach without asking.
Adrian thought that was excessive.
He also understood exactly why his father had done it.
They worked at the kitchen table while Marisol made dinner.
The smell of burgers kept drifting over from the stove and stealing Adrian’s attention.
He raised the wand.
“Lumos.”
The light appeared faster than it had during his first lesson.
Better.
It still took more concentration than he expected.
Adrian repeated the spell, paying attention to his grip and wrist the way Edmund had shown him.
The light came again and lasted longer this time, but the magic still felt awkward.
Edmund noticed his expression.
“Something wrong?”
“I don’t know yet.
It just feels harder than I thought it would.”
“You’ve practised twice,” Edmund said.
“Give yourself more than a few days before deciding something’s wrong.”
Adrian nodded.
That was reasonable.
He cast the spell several more times.
By the end of the session, he could produce a usable light more often than not, and Edmund seemed satisfied with the improvement.
Adrian wasn’t.
Not because the spell was weak.
He was a beginner, and weak was expected.
It was the way the magic felt.
His lightning didn’t fight him like this.
Neither did the warning sense he’d learned from the Kneazle or the pull of his Niffler ability.
Once he understood how to call on them, they responded.
Sap had been different from those, but not in the same way as wand magic.
That one hadn’t come from a creature at all.
Years after the Thunderbird, Adrian had started wondering whether copying creatures was the only strange thing his magic could do.
His memories of Final Fantasy gave him somewhere to start.
He remembered magic that weakened enemies, strengthened allies or changed the conditions of a fight without relying on direct damage.
So he’d experimented with the idea.
Could he make someone tire faster without actually hurting them?
Could magic interfere with how efficiently a body worked?
He hadn’t owned a wand then, and Edmund certainly wasn’t teaching him curses, so most of the work had been concentration, observation and repeated attempts to make his own magic respond to the idea.
For months, nothing happened.
Then, eventually, something did.
The effect was weak.
It didn’t drain life or make anyone collapse.
It created a gradual drag on the target, as though strength and stamina were leaking away faster than they should.
Adrian called it Sap because that was the closest thing in his old memories.
Later, once he needed a way to distinguish magic he’d worked out himself from the abilities he’d learned through creatures, he borrowed another Final Fantasy term.
Green Magic.
He had no proof that the name meant anything.
It was just his own classification.
Blue Magic came from creatures.
What he called Green Magic began with an effect he wanted, followed by enough study and experimentation to figure out whether his magic could reproduce it.
Sap had taken months to work out, but once he’d found the right approach, casting it felt natural.
Wand magic didn’t.
Adrian wasn’t ready to decide what that meant.
“Can we try something else?”
Edmund glanced at the Charms book beside them.
“Something simple.
I’m not explaining to your mother why there’s a hole in the kitchen wall.”
From the stove, Marisol said, “You’d better not be.”
Adrian smiled and turned a few pages.
They chose another beginner spell.
He struggled with that one too.
During the next session, Edmund showed him another.
That went worse.
Over the following days they worked through several basic exercises.
Adrian improved with repetition, but the improvement came slowly, and some spells resisted him far more than others.
By the end of the week, he had enough examples to stop blaming everything on being new.
He could use a wand.
That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was how much work ordinary spellcasting demanded for such small results.
Edmund could demonstrate a movement once and get exactly what he wanted.
Adrian might repeat the same movement several times before producing anything useful, even when his pronunciation and technique were right.
Some spells worked weakly.
Others barely worked at all.
Edmund still wasn’t ready to call it abnormal.
Adrian was starting to think it might be.
He knew what his magic felt like when something fit.
Conventional spellcasting didn’t.
It was possible, but awkward and inefficient, like trying to do everything with the wrong hand.
That didn’t make it useless.
It meant there was something he didn’t understand yet.
Adrian liked problems he could study.
One afternoon Edmund demonstrated another spell, then lowered his wand and turned back to the book.
Adrian watched him.
For a moment, an old instinct from his previous life surfaced.
He’d grown up with a simple rule about weapons: if someone threatened you with one from close enough to grab or hit them, standing still and waiting was a bad idea.
A wand counted.
Adrian had no trouble separating practice from a threat.
Edmund could point a wand during a demonstration and it meant nothing.
Someone pointing one at him because they meant to hurt him was different.
If they were across the room, he’d move.
If they were within reach, he probably wouldn’t wait to find out which spell they planned to cast.
Money, family name or social rank wouldn’t change that.
He’d deal with whatever came afterward.
“Adrian.”
He looked up.
Edmund was watching him.
“You stopped listening.”
“I was thinking.”
“That usually worries me more.”
Adrian smiled.
Edmund tapped the open book.
“Pay attention.
You’re the one who wanted to learn another spell.”
“Right.”
They returned to the lesson.
By the end of August, Adrian could manage several basic spells well enough to know the problem wasn’t going away.
Practice helped, but ordinary wand magic still took more effort than he expected and gave him less in return.
Edmund thought he needed more time.
Adrian thought he probably did too.
Hogwarts would give him a much better comparison.
The night before September first, Adrian sat cross-legged on his bed with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them open in front of him.
His wand lay beside the book, and his Hogwarts trunk was packed against the wall.
He should’ve been thinking about school.
Instead, he’d spent the last twenty minutes reading about dragons.
Adrian turned another page.
Tomorrow he’d finally see Hogwarts for himself.
That thought carried more weight than it had when the letter arrived.
He remembered the castle from the films: the Great Hall, moving staircases, the lake, the Forbidden Forest and enough of the larger story to know that some very bad things would happen there eventually.
But memory wasn’t knowledge.
He knew the version of Hogwarts that had mattered to Harry Potter’s story.
He didn’t know every corridor, every student, every professor or everything happening outside the scenes he’d once watched.
Dumbledore was much the same.
Adrian remembered the older headmaster from the Harry Potter films and the younger man connected to Newt Scamander and Grindelwald.
He knew Dumbledore was brilliant, powerful and far more dangerous than his grandfatherly manner suggested.
That didn’t mean Adrian knew the man.
Tomorrow would be the first time he’d meet the real one.
That was probably worth remembering.
His eyes drifted back to the creature book.
There were creatures in the Forbidden Forest.
Definitely not available for casual visits.
Adrian smiled.
He could already hear his father’s opinion on that particular line of thought.
Marisol called from downstairs.
“Food’s ready!”
Adrian closed the book.
“What are we having?”
“Chicken!”
That was enough information.
He set the book beside his wand and headed downstairs.
Hogwarts would still be there in the morning.