Felix had his first private lesson with Flitwick on Thursday evening.
He arrived at the smaller Charms classroom at seven o’clock, tired from the day but awake in the way he had learned to be awake — the kind of awake that came from having something to do.
He had spent the afternoon in the library with Andros’s notes.
He had spent the hour before dinner practicing footwork in an empty corridor.
He had eaten quickly and excused himself from the common room before Fred and George could ask him where he was going.
The door to Flitwick’s classroom was already open.
Felix stepped inside and closed it behind him.
Flitwick was standing in the middle of the room.
He was small — smaller than Felix remembered from the regular lessons — but there was something about the way he held himself that made the room feel smaller than it was.
He was not standing still.
He was moving, slowly, through a sequence of movements Felix did not recognize.
His wand was in his hand, and his feet shifted in a pattern that looked almost like a dance.
He stopped when he saw Felix.
“Come in,” he said.
“Stand there.”
Felix stood where he was told.
Flitwick looked at him for a long moment.
Then he spoke.
“You have will,” he said.
“I told you that last time. Will is the rarest of the three things a duelist must master. Power can be taught. Speed can be taught. Will cannot. You have it, and you have it in a way I have not seen in a student in a very long time.”
He walked to a shelf against the wall and picked up a book.
“This is yours,” he said, holding it out.
Felix took it.
It was not a book, exactly.
It was a notebook — thick, leather-bound, worn at the edges.
It was heavy in his hands, heavier than it looked, and when he opened it, he saw that it was filled with Flitwick’s handwriting.
Page after page of it.
Diagrams.
Notes.
Sequences.
Names of techniques Felix had never heard of.
“That is everything I know about dueling,” Flitwick said.
“Everything I learned as a champion, everything I taught as a professor, everything I have developed over fifty years. It is arranged in ascending order of difficulty. The first techniques are simple. The last techniques are not.”
Felix turned the pages slowly.
There were dozens of entries.
Hundreds.
He did not recognize most of them.
He recognized none of them, actually, except for the first few, and even those were described in ways he had never seen before.
“You will not learn them all at once,” Flitwick said.
“You will not learn them all this year. You will not learn them all in seven years. Some of them will take you a decade to master. Some of them you may never master at all. That is not the point. The point is that you will have them. You will know what is possible. And you will practice what you are ready for.”
He walked back to the center of the room.
“Open to the first page.”
Felix opened to the first page.
At the top, in Flitwick’s small, precise handwriting, was a single entry.
Speed Casting.
Below it was a description.
The ability to cast a spell faster than your opponent can react.
Not faster than they can think.
Faster than they can react.
This is the foundation of everything else.
A duelist who cannot cast quickly cannot cast at all.
Felix read the entry twice.
There were diagrams beside it, showing the angle of the wand, the position of the wrist, the timing of the cast.
There were notes below the diagrams, explaining what to practice and how to practice it.
There was a section at the bottom titled Common Mistakes.
“This is where we begin,” Flitwick said.
“Speed casting is the first technique every duelist must learn. Without it, nothing else matters. You can know every spell in the world and it will not help you if your opponent casts first.”
He raised his wand.
“I will cast at you. Slowly at first. Your job is not to dodge. Your job is not to block. Your job is to cast back before my spell reaches you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then begin.”
Flitwick cast.
The spell was slow — deliberately slow, the kind of spell a first-year could have dodged without trying.
Felix raised his wand and cast back.
His spell left his wand after Flitwick’s had already passed him, and Flitwick dissolved it with a flick.
“Again.” This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
They went again.
And again.
And again.
Felix was fast.
He had always been fast.
But he was not fast enough.
His spell left his wand a fraction of a second after Flitwick’s, every time, and Flitwick dissolved it every time, and after twenty repetitions Felix’s arm was aching and his pride was aching more.
“You are thinking,” Flitwick said.
“That is the problem. You are deciding to cast, and then casting. The decision takes time. The cast takes time. Together they take too long.”
“How do I stop thinking?”
“You don’t. You practice until the decision is not a decision anymore. You practice until your wand moves before your mind does. That is speed casting. It is not a technique. It is a reflex.”
He raised his wand again.
“Again.”
They went again.
And again.
And again.
By the end of the hour, Felix had not managed to cast before Flitwick’s spell reached him a single time.
But he had gotten faster.
He could feel it.
His wand was moving sooner than it had at the start.
His arm was reacting before his mind had finished forming the thought.
Flitwick lowered his wand.
“That is enough for tonight. Practice speed casting every day. Not for long — ten minutes, twice a day. The notebook will tell you what to do. When you can cast before my spell reaches you, we will move on to the next technique.”
Felix nodded.
His arm was shaking.
He did not care.
“One more thing,” Flitwick said.
He walked to the shelf and picked up a second notebook — thinner than the first, but still substantial.
“This is a training log. Every day, you will write down what you practiced and how it went. Every week, you will show it to me. I will know if you are lying.”
Felix took the second notebook.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
Flitwick looked at him.
For a moment, the small, precise man who had been correcting his wand angle all evening was gone, and in his place was someone older, someone who had been where Felix was standing and remembered what it felt like.
“Because someone did it for me,” he said.
“When I was your age, I was small. Smaller than everyone. I was told I would never be a duelist. I was told I should focus on Charms and leave the fighting to the people who were built for it. And then a professor — a professor who is long dead now — gave me a notebook. It was his notebook. It was everything he knew. And he told me to practice.”
He paused.
“I won the European Junior Championship three times. I sat on the International Dueling Commission for twenty years. And I have never forgotten that notebook. I have never forgotten the man who gave it to me. This is how it works, Mr. Falker. The ones who come before teach the ones who come after. That is the only reason any of us get anywhere.”
He held out his hand.
“Give me the notebook.”
Felix handed it back.
Flitwick opened it to the first page and picked up a quill.
He wrote something at the top of the page, in the margin, and then closed the notebook and handed it back.
Felix opened it.
In the margin, above the entry on speed casting, Flitwick had written a single line.
For Felix Falker.
May you go further than I did.
Felix looked at it for a long moment.
“Go,” Flitwick said.
“You have other lessons tomorrow. Practice speed casting tonight before you sleep.”
Felix closed the notebook and tucked it under his arm.
He walked to the door and stopped with his hand on the handle.
“Professor.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
Flitwick did not answer.
He simply turned back to the center of the room and raised his wand, and Felix walked out and closed the door behind him.
He did not go back to Gryffindor Tower.
He went to the seventh floor and walked past the wall three times, thinking about what he needed.
The door appeared, and he stepped inside, and the Room of Requirement gave him exactly what he had asked for.
He sat down at the table and opened the notebook.
He read the first entry, then the second, then the third.
He read all eight, one after another, and when he was finished he sat back and looked at the ceiling of the Room and thought about what he had been given.
1.
Speed Casting — The foundation.
Cast faster than your opponent can react.
2.
Expelliarmus, Petrificus Totalus, Impedimenta in one straight line, in three short bursts.
Overwhelms shields.
3.
Chain Casting — Link spells together without pause.
Cast for minutes without stopping.
Flitwick could only maintain a chain for ninety seconds.
4.
Environmental Casting — Cast spells off objects in your surroundings.
Includes reflection casting — bouncing a spell off a wall, floor, ceiling, or shield to hit an opponent from an unexpected angle.
Cover becomes useless.
5.
Zigzag Casting — Send a spell along an erratic trajectory.
A zigzagging spell changes direction mid-flight, making it nearly impossible to predict where it will land.
6.
Charge Casting — Hold a spell in your wand and release it whenever you choose.
Charge Fiendfyre, cast ten other spells, then release it at the exact moment it will do the most damage.
7.
Anchor Casting — Cast a spell that delays its effect.
Anchor an Impedimenta to an opponent with a ten-second delay.
They won’t know it’s there until it hits.
8.
Dual Casting — Cast with both hands at once.
Two spells, two targets, simultaneously.
Felix read the last entry twice.
Then he turned the page, and found that there was one more.
It was not a technique.
It was a note, written in Flitwick’s small, precise handwriting, and it took up the whole of the final page.
Dual casting is the hardest technique in this notebook.
I attempted it for years and never fully mastered it.
I believe it is possible.
I believe Andros Falker could do it.
But there is one thing I never had the chance to test.
Dual casting requires a wand in the dominant hand and a hand free to shape the second spell.
That is the limit of the technique as I understand it — one wand, one hand.
But what if a duelist could cast wandlessly?
What if the off-hand did not need a wand to shape its spell, and the dominant hand did not need one either?
Two spells at once.
No wand in either hand.
Nothing for your opponent to watch.
Nothing for them to disarm.
Nothing for them to predict.
I do not know if this is possible.
I have never seen it done.
I have never met a wizard who could cast wandlessly under pressure, let alone while dual casting at the same time.
But if it is possible, it would be the most powerful form of combat magic I can imagine.
Two spells at once, from nothing, with no warning at all.
If you are reading this, and you think you can do it — practice.
Practice until you can.
And then write to me, because I would very much like to see it.
— F.F.
Felix read the note three times.
Then he closed the notebook and set it on the table and sat there for a long moment in the quiet of the Room.
He had a path now.
A clear one.
A long one.
Flitwick had given him more than a notebook.
He had given him a map of everything he would need to learn if he wanted to become what Andros had been.
And at the end of the map, there was a note from a man who had never reached the final destination, telling Felix that he believed it was possible.
He opened the notebook to the first page and began to read.
He practiced speed casting until four in the morning.
He did not get any faster.
Not yet.
But he understood now what he was trying to do, and understanding was the first step.
The rest would come with time.
He closed the notebook and went back to Gryffindor Tower and slept.