Chapter 50.3- Doom Days

“Okay, okay. I’m leaving. You’re one mean kid, you know that right, Harry?” He asked even as he backed out of the room. I just watched him leave, making sure not to blink as I watched him leave. It wouldn’t be the first time that he’d pretend to leave only to sneak back in and play a prank or two. Only when I was certain he was gone did I fully relax. I turned back to the work. A shield charm was a good test of concept, I thought.

For one, it would be possible to mathematically quantify how much better my runic magic was than regular wand magic— if it was better at Alright then. For another, a shield charm had only a fixed amount of ways it could go wrong. If a shield failed, the worst it could do was not work, yeah? Even if it did decide to blow up in my face then I was still pretty sure that the explosion would be relatively tame.

So I left the drawing room and made my way to the training room. I’d already tried the Yoruba words for protection. Thay hadn’t worked. More like because they did not fit with the concept of a temporary shield charm. The chant earlier had worked because it was based on a real song, a real battle song beseeching the nature gods themselves to help restrain the enemy. After trying all the Yoruba I knew, I figured that the secret was not in the West African language itself. That would have been random— for Elder Furthrak to react to a random African language.

I had a feeling the runic script was drawing on the fundamental concept behind the words I used. So I thought about something else. When you imagined a shield, what did you think of first? Just a shield to be honest. There was only one shield across all mythology I could think of that had any reasonable level of notoriety.

So I slashed my wand through the air, starting with algiz for protection, layering it with uruz for strength to represent the shield being strong and isa for ice and stasis— nothing shall affect anything protected by this shield, I put these concepts in my mind as much as possible as I drew the runes together and spoke in best greek, “Aegis, I call upon thee, protect me from all who would do me harm” I intoned, feeding the rune with my magic. It flashed, before fizzling out. Okay, I had something there. Definitely more than I had before today.