Unicorn hair cost ten Galleons a strand.
Everything else in the Elixir to Induce Euphoria—the shrivelfig, the porcupine quills, the peppermint essence—came to about one Galleon combined.
The math was insultingly simple.
Master the brewing, and profit margins stopped being margins and started being a door you could walk through.
Elias had bought three sets of ingredients.
The first attempt curdled halfway through, releasing a smell like burnt sugar and regret.
The second separated into layers that refused to merge no matter how many clockwise turns he gave it.
He stared at the ruined cauldron, jaw tight, then scoured it clean and started again.
The third attempt worked.
The liquid caught the light like liquid sunlight, and when he bottled it, the yield came to just under ten ounces.
He set the vials in a neat row on his desk and did the sums.
One ounce sold for four Galleons.
Brewing a full batch cost nine Galleons in materials—assuming he paid retail for the unicorn hair, which he had.
Ten ounces at four Galleons each meant forty Galleons gross, twenty-nine net.
More than triple his investment.
Even if he only succeeded one time in three, each sale still put seven Galleons in his pocket.
The numbers were beautiful.
The problem was everything else.
He had no sales channel.
His parents weren’t about to rent a shop in Diagon Alley, and walking into Slug & Jiggers with a satchel of homemade euphoria elixir and a hopeful smile wasn’t a business plan.
The shops would want consistency, volume, a name they recognised.
He had none of those things.
So he needed to cut costs, raise his success rate, and expand his repertoire.
And the first of those problems had a solution with trees and teeth.
The Forbidden Forest was a potion ingredient goldmine.
Unicorn herds roamed the deeper clearings.
If he could find even a few shed hairs, the cost of brewing the Elixir would collapse to a single Galleon.
He could drink one vial, throw another into the lake for the giant squid, and still turn a profit on the third.
He started walking the forest’s edge every afternoon.
Three days later, his eyes ached from scanning the ground, and he’d found precisely zero unicorn hairs.
What he did find: a cluster of porcupine quills caught in a bramble, a patch of feather grass that glowed faintly in the dusk, a sluggish procession of caterpillars with iridescent stripes, and more spotted groundsel than he could carry.
Useful.
Not profitable.
On the fourth day, pushing a little deeper than he probably should, he nearly stepped on it. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Fluxweed.
Mature, healthy, its leaves the exact bluish-green that meant it had survived at least one full moon cycle.
Harvested properly under a full moon, a single plant could sell for hundreds of Galleons.
Harvested a day early, it was compost.
He marked the spot with a stack of stones and a mental note sharp enough to cut himself on, then walked back to the castle before the light failed.
The letters to Diagon Alley went out that week.
The replies came back polite and useless.
We require suppliers who can deliver in bulk.
We test every batch individually.
Your current output does not justify the time investment.
They were saying his skills weren’t good enough.
They were right.
He’d been arrogant.
An eleven-year-old with a handful of successful brews and no reputation wasn’t a supplier; he was a hobbyist.
If he wanted shops to come to him, he needed something they couldn’t ignore.
Papers in Potion Weekly.
A name that meant something.
The idea felt either visionary or completely delusional, and sitting alone in the Slytherin common room with his dwindling purse, he genuinely couldn’t tell which.
The practice sessions had eaten through his savings.
He tipped the remaining coins into his palm—Sickles, Knuts, a single Galleon that looked lonely.
The pile of copper stared back at him.
[Greed +1]
He pocketed the coins and checked his status.
Potions: level three.
Barely.
Nowhere near level four, despite everything he’d poured into it.
Something wasn’t adding up.
So he set aside his pride and went to find Severus Snape.
“You’re telling me,” Snape said, “that you failed precisely twice, and now you can competently brew an elixir most students don’t touch until fifth year—and you believe your progress is slow.”
It wasn’t a question.
Snape’s eyes narrowed, and the silence in the office gathered like a held breath.
The man’s robes didn’t rustle so much as seethe.
Elias didn’t flinch.
“Yes, Professor.”
Snape studied him. The source of this chapter is g.com.
The boy wasn’t posturing.
He’d seen the type before—the quiet ones who absorbed everything and performed competence like a second skin.
Elias Sorenson kept his head down in class, answered only when called upon, and had somehow become the subject of staffroom murmurs without appearing to notice or care.
A carbon copy of someone Snape had once known intimately.
“Very well.” Snape rose from his desk.
“I will not pretend to false modesty. There is no better potions master currently teaching in this school, and precious few outside it who surpass me.”
He began to pace, slow and deliberate.
“Before I started at Hogwarts, I worked in a potions shop. That was where I first learned what a cauldron was for. By the end of my first year, I had brewed every potion in the standard curriculum. By my second, I had done it again, faster, with modifications. Third and fourth year, I was altering formulas according to my own understanding. Fifth year—” A pause, barely perceptible.
“—I invented something that had never existed before.”
He stopped and turned to face Elias.
“If your goal is a certificate and a high mark on your final exam, your current approach is adequate. But if you want to excel—if you want to understand potions the way a composer understands music—then expanding your repertoire matters more than perfecting any single brew. You will see the interplay of ingredients across different processes. You will notice that the method for stabilising an infusion in one potion is nearly identical to the method for preventing separation in another. Once you have brewed every high-level potion in your reach, do you imagine you will still need to practise a first-year boil cure?”
Elias shook his head.
“Good.” Snape reached into a drawer and withdrew a book.
Bound in dark leather, pages yellowed, no title on the spine.
He held it out.
“Take this.”
Elias opened it.
The handwriting was a crime against parchment—letters jagged and lurching, ink blots like bruises, whole words reduced to smears.
It looked like a troll had been given a quill and a grudge.
He looked up, one eyebrow raised.
“That was copied by a student in detention,” Snape said, irritation flickering across his face.
“The contents are sound. If you successfully brew every potion in that book before the end of term, and if the results are of acceptable quality, I will grant you special admission to my Potions Club.”
“Potions Club?” Elias had never heard of any club at Hogwarts, let alone one run by Snape.
“Ask someone.” Snape turned away, the conversation clearly over.
“You may go.”
“Yes, Professor.”
The door clicked shut behind him.
Elias stood in the dungeon corridor, the book heavy in his hands, the handwriting already giving him a headache.
Potions Club.
A handwritten book of unknown brews.
A professor who had just compared him, however obliquely, to himself.
What else was Snape not saying?