Chapter 39.5- Doom Days

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“Mr. Harry James Potter for the Advanced Wizarding Levels” I said to the man at the reception desk. He took hold of my wand, placing it in their scanner before humming as it told him something.

“11 inches, Holly and pheonix feather. In use for four years?” He asked. I nodded.

“Good, you can go in. Good luck, Mr. Potter. Those things are a nightmare” He said, and I nodded, taking the warning seriously. There was a reason I’d delayed my exams to this point after all. While the International Ordinary Wizarding Levels and the regular OWLs were somewhat comparable, even Britain’s famous Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests failed to match up with what the Advanced Wizarding Levels brought to bear. According to Sirius and what I’d seen, the AWLs were more comparable to mastery tests, only falling shy of that by some small margin than school graduation exams.

It was why the IOWLS were enough to secure most jobs in the ICW. The few jobs that required AWLs usually only required one, or at most two of them in extremely rare cases. In contrast to the IOWLS which I’d completed over two days, my AWLs were going to take ten. For one, where most people only ever took one course, I was going to be taking a whole five: Charms, Dark Arts, Transfiguration, Potions, and Ancient Runes. This would be a statement. My statement to the world. My IOWL results were impressive, but they just marked me as another prodigy, another smart British wizard good at magic. We made like a dozen of those every century. This would tell the world that I was cut from a different coat. A different breed of monster. Not a Crouch Junior, but a Dumbledore, as much as that comparison irritated me to make.

The exam halls were the same place I’d taken the IOWLS in, but where the hall had previously been populated by at least some people, there was only one other woman in the hall for the Charms written exam. She looked to be in forties, which in the wizarding world could mean anything from actually forty to eighty, was heavyset, and had a frantic look on her face as her eyes traveled the room, looking from object to object.

I did not bother saying hi, suspecting that it would not be much appreciated at this point. Not while she seemed to be going through a nervous breakdown before even seeing any questions or before the exam was even due to start, I thought looking at the clock. I’d come about twenty minutes early as planned. I took my seat and began to stretch, searching for a comfortable enough position to wait in.