Chapter 49.3- Doom Days

Apparating over from Britain was just a matter of crossing the channel. Going from Greece wasn’t all that bad either. I just needed to visit a few places in this world so I had more than a few apparition points to pick from. Beyond that, there was nothing that would present much of a barrier to my coming and going.

“Superb” She said, leaning down to plant a kiss on my cheek before she practically skipped from the room. And then it was just Sirius and I for the last days of my custody. Dumbledore was still with my newly acquired wand so there was little I could do with the time beyond reading books and talking with the my godfather. No offense to Sirius, but the latter proved to be the more entertaining of the two options. And Sirius was more than willing to get me whatever I needed from the Black library. Well, whatever I needed within reason.

While he was nowhere near as prejudiced against the dark arts as most— he kew that with the right amount of skill in the mind arts then someone could master the dark arts without having them master them in turn, he ws still far from comfortable furnishing me with the truly abhorrent things in his family’s library. And to be honest, I was pretty certain I could do without them. My mastery grade in the dark arts meant something. It wasn’t a true mastery like what one would get after years of study under an apprenticeship. In fact, most of the truly competitive apprenticeships required Master grades from the AWLs as a minimum entry point. Still the fact that I could get one told me that I was probably all good when it came to dark arts for the time being and the truth was that I now had my enemy on my mind. Advancing further in the Dark Arts would matter little. Voldemort had half a century of study when it came to the dark arts over me. I needed to do what Dumbledore did, find my own niche and focus on it so thoroughly that I would be able to match Voldemort’s dark arts skill with my own focus.

My first thought had been transfiguration. The only issue was that I was on my third transfiguration book so far and I was yet to find anything that truly excited me. Turn this into that and whatnot. I could probably accomplish most transfigurations I wanted if I put in the time, magic, and brainpower, but that was the issue. I didn’t think it would ever be truly instinctive for me. If someone sent a spell at me, my reflexes were dodge, deflect, or shield. Conjuring a block in my way was the kind of thing that only came to mind after the spell had passed.

I didn’t have the time to fight my nature to learn new skills and dependencies. If I wanted this to work, I ha to play to my strengths. The question then became, what were they?