Chapter 50.6- Doom Days

“Thank you for asking, Sirius. So shieldbreakers, on an arithmantical level work by dismantling the protective intention integrated in shield spells. That’s why they don’t need to be so powerful that they break the shield. They simply ‘nope’ them out of existence. Thy don’t target the shields, just the intention to protect” I said leafing him to the next question with my explanation. Teaching was fun. I wondered why I didn’t go out of my way to do it more in my past life.

“But doesn’t your shield spell have the same intention to protect?”

“Yes, but it’s much harder to expunge because it’s grounded by the rune, you see. Runes work because they are basically stamped on the fabric of reality. Guaranteed to work by magic itself. The intention, when grounded by a rune becomes much harder to nullify. A powerful enough shieldbreaker cast by someone who puts a lot of power into it would probably work, but no one is going to do that” I said.

“A shame that the spell takes so long to cast. It seems almost perfect” He said.

“Indeed”

XXXXXX

Sirius’ words set me down a different path for weeks on end as I focused on trying to cast the shield as quickly as possible. I’d managed to cut down the incantation to just the word, “Aegis” focusing on the intention in my mind’s eye was enough to let the spell snap into place. The only bottleneck then became drawing the runes. I had tried cutting out one or two of the runes, but every change I made t that bit seemed to make the spell weaker by.a significant degree. So I was essentially stuck with a great spell but not one that I could use in a duel or fast paced combat because it just took too damn long to cast.

That setback sent me back to the drawing board. This whole form of magic would not work without modifications. But even beyond that, there was another issue— making more spells. A shield was good and all, but it was not going to deliver a dead Dark Lord to me anytime soon. With the net group of spells, I tried using as few runes as possible but I quickly found out that I needed at least two runes. One to provide the base intention, and the other to shape and narrow it down enough to become useful in a spell. KENNAZ symbolized a torch, but did nothing when I tried to concept of needing a light through it. Only when I met it with DAGAZ, which primarily symbolized dawn but also meant illumination with a bit of stitching, did the spell to create a glowing torch that lit up my surroundings work.

The more specific the effect, the more runes I needed to stack up. In a lot of ways, creating the spells felt like solving a puzzle. I had the tools. I just had to bring them together in a way that produced the image I saw in my mind’s eye. Of course, not every spell was possible with this method. The more runes I stacked, the more likely it was that the spell failed for irreconcilable differences between the concepts being played with. ISA and KENNAZ did not tend to work well together, one symbolizing ice, and the other symbolizing creativity, vitality, progress, and a torch. It was interesting— playing around the concepts like I did. Eventually, I would figure it out more thoroughly, I had a feeling in my belly that this was it. It would work.

A/N: Yeah, Harry is going to have to spend a lot of time ironing out the kinks in this one. I also am going to spend a lot of time looking at runes and trying to put things together in a way that makes sense. How fun.