The Patronus Charm had a reputation.
Highly advanced, notoriously difficult, far beyond the reach of ordinary wizards — the kind of magic that separated the exceptional from the merely competent.
Which, naturally, meant every book in the Hogwarts library described it in exhausting detail.
Elias found a thorough breakdown in The Advanced Guide to Practical Charms without much trouble.
What did give him trouble was Madam Pince.
“A first-year,” she said, looking at him as though he’d asked to borrow a sword.
“Requesting a Restricted Section text.”
“I only need a few pages.”
“Denied.”
She didn’t even pretend to consider it.
Elias held her gaze for three seconds, then turned and walked to a reading table without another word.
He spent the next hour copying every relevant passage into his notebook by hand, his quill scratching with enough force to leave impressions three pages deep.
Frustration had its uses.
It kept you focused.
When he’d drained the book of everything it could give him, he returned it to its shelf — pointedly, without Madam Pince’s assistance — and made his way to the seventh floor.
The corridor opposite the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy was empty.
Elias paced three times, holding a single thought in his mind with the clarity of a blade.
I need a room where only Elias Sorenson can practice duelling.
The door materialised, and he stepped through into silence.
He spent the first hour doing nothing but think.
The Patronus Charm, stripped to its essentials, was an emotion conduit.
The caster concentrated on their happiest memory, drew power from the pleasure it produced, and that power shaped the guardian.
The memory wasn’t the fuel — it was the match.
The emotion was the fire.
Which meant the spell didn’t actually require a happy memory.
It required a sufficiently potent emotional surge, channeled with intent.
Elias set his notebook aside.
Lust, as the system measured it, wasn’t desire in isolation.
It was a specific quality of experience — the spiritual pleasure of release, of gratification in the present moment.
Not the hollow laugh at a joke, but the deeper satisfaction of indulging an impulse and caring nothing for the consequence.
If he could catch himself in that moment — the exact instant the system registered an increase — and channel it into the incantation…
He raised his wand.
Lowered it.
He didn’t actually know what his happiest memory was.
His life before Hogwarts had been ordinary.
Not tragic, not remarkable — a series of small troubles and smaller comforts, the kind of existence that would place him firmly in the background of anyone else’s story.
His first use of magic?
He could barely remember the feeling.
His first formal lesson?
Satisfying, but not happy.
Not in the way the charm demanded.
His Lust stat didn’t move.
Elias set his jaw and changed tactics.
He transfigured a cushion and a blanket from a nearby training dummy, spread them on the floor, and lay flat on his back.
The stone was cold through the thin fabric.
He didn’t care.
The Seven Deadly Sins?
Let them be.
The world ending?
Let it end.
I don’t care about anything.
I just want to sleep.
The thoughts settled through him like warm honey, thick and slow.
His muscles unknotted.
His breathing deepened.
A pleasant heaviness spread from his chest outward, and with it came a sweet indifference to everything waiting beyond this room.
[Sloth +1]
He let the feeling expand, pushing past the boundary of simple laziness into something richer — a blissful disregard for duty, for consequence, for the entire exhausting architecture of being human.
[Lust +1]
The words tore out of him before the sensation could fade.
White light burst from his wand tip — and died.
Nothing.
Elias stayed flat on his back, staring at the ceiling.
“Latency,” he muttered.
“The notification appears after the stat changes. I’m already too late.”
He tried again.
And again.
He imagined glutting himself without restraint — his Gluttony rising as he pictured the feast — and cast the moment the stat increased.
He imagined riding Norbert above the castle, lazy circles in cold air, the wind a dull roar beneath the pleasure of flight.
Cast.
Fail.
Cast.
Fail.
Somewhere in the repetition, understanding crystallised.
Lust didn’t need memory.
Memory was a window.
Lust needed imagination — the ability to conjure a moment of gratification so vividly that his mind accepted it as real.
The spell didn’t care whether the pleasure came from something that had happened or something he could make happen.
It only cared about intensity.
He shifted his approach.
Instead of reaching backward, he reached forward — constructing images of release so detailed, so sensorily complete, that his body nearly believed them.
Silvery-white mist began streaming from his wand tip.
Thicker than before.
More substantial.
His Lust stat climbed past 100.
Past 110.
At 118, the mist stopped dissipating.
It hung in the air before him, coiled and waiting, and Elias understood that he was standing on the edge of something.
“Expecto Patronum!”
His voice cracked on the second word, but the magic didn’t care.
The mist surged forward, churning and folding in on itself, coalescing into a sphere that pulsed with internal light.
His Lust stat plummeted — 100, 80, 60 — bleeding away as the spell drank deeply.
Elias watched the sphere and thought, Not enough.
A true Patronus had form.
It was corporeal.
Every witch and wizard produced something unique, shaped by their nature, their memories, their inmost self.
An animal.
Always an animal.
A sphere was none of those things.
So what made a Patronus unique?
The answer arrived cold and certain: he did.
His mind was not a standard-issue wizarding mind.
It carried the detritus of another life, another world, another set of stories.
If the Patronus drew its shape from what lay deepest within him, then feeding it a standard happy memory would produce a standard result.
To make it his, he needed to give it something no other wizard could replicate.
He reached into the half-buried memories of his previous life and pulled out an image from old mythology.
A creature that had never walked English soil, never appeared in any Hogwarts bestiary, never been imagined by any mind but his.
Tiger’s head, set with two curved horns.
Lion’s body, massive and predatory.
Dragon’s tail, and folded wings along the spine.
The Bai Ze.
He pushed the image into the churning sphere, and the sphere responded.
It elongated, split, reformed — limbs extending, head shaping itself from the mist, wings unfurling with a sound like silk tearing.
The transformation was not graceful.
It was violent, almost painful to watch, as though the magic itself was fighting the unnatural shape he was forcing upon it.
But it held.
Fifteen feet from nose to tail.
Ten feet at the shoulder.
His Lust stat bottomed out at 15.
Less than half his Envy.
Elias stared at the creature and felt nothing.
Not joy.
Not triumph.
Just a flat, grey exhaustion, as though someone had opened a tap at the base of his skull and drained all the colour from the world.
One powerful casting.
That was all it took to transform him into a hollow-eyed adolescent with nothing to look forward to.
He made a mental note to visit the Hospital Wing.
Madam Pomfrey probably had Elixir to Induce Euphoria in stock, and a persistent low mood was practically an invitation for Pride and Wrath to start spiking.
He didn’t need a second personality collapse this semester.
A chime sounded in his awareness.
[Guardian Charm LV.5 — 312 EXP]
He’d done it.
One of the objectives he’d set for himself at the start of term, crossed off the list.
The level jump made sense — this version of the Patronus Charm was barely recognisable from the original.
Half his own creation.
His understanding of it should be deeper.
The Bai Ze — his Bai Ze — lowered its head and pressed against him.
Its skull was larger than his entire torso.
The fur beneath his hand felt like cool silk, smooth and faintly cool, and the sheer physical reality of it brought him up short.
He could touch it.
That wasn’t supposed to happen.
He met the creature’s eyes and found intelligence looking back — bewilderment and warmth, shifting in those luminous depths.
This wasn’t the blank obedience of a standard Patronus.
This was something closer to Peeves, hovering in that strange space between illusion and reality, given substance by the specific quality of the power that had birthed it.
Lust.
A force that transmuted the intangible into flesh.
Elias dismissed the guardian and summoned it again.
This time, the spell consumed barely a trickle of Lust — the heavy cost had been paid in the initial solidification.
The Bai Ze reformed in seconds, bright and present and utterly real.
He spent the next hour testing its limits.
In ethereal form, walls meant nothing to it.
Spells passed through its body without resistance.
It moved like thought given direction.
In corporeal form, it drew on his own magical reserves to sustain itself.
It understood commands — spoken and unspoken — and could retrieve objects with a precision that suggested problem-solving intelligence.
It was vulnerable to attack, losing mass and power with each hit, but it healed as quickly as he fed it magic.
And it could carry him.
Elias climbed onto its back, settling between the wings, and the Bai Ze rose smoothly into the air.
Two low circuits of the room, the wind of its passage stirring his white hair, the stone floor passing beneath them in a silver blur.
More importantly: while the Patronus existed independently, he could cast other spells.
The guardian required no ongoing concentration.
It simply was, until he dismissed it.
He couldn’t summon two at once, but one was already more than any wizard alive had managed.
The torches in the corridor had been extinguished.
Moonlight fell through the high arched windows in pale columns, striping the flagstones silver and black.
Elias realised, with the particular annoyance of someone whose stomach had been quietly emptying itself for hours, that he had missed dinner entirely.
He quickened his pace toward the stairs.
The Room of Requirement was on the eighth floor.
The Slytherin common room lurked in the dungeons.
Between them lay the entire vertical spine of the castle, and he still needed to shower before collapsing into bed.
The corridors were not empty.
He passed students moving with the particular furtive grace of those who had no business being awake — solitary figures hugging the shadows, pairs pressed into alcoves.
He exchanged hand signals with a Ravenclaw prefect who gestured the location of the night’s patrol, then with a Hufflepuff fifth-year who silently indicated which direction Filch had taken ten minutes ago.
Information traded without words.
The currency of the nocturnally disobedient.
He was passing the fourth-floor corridor when a voice shattered the silence.
“RUN!”
Elias’s wand was in his hand before the echo died.