Chapter 18.2- Doom Days

He looked around us, probably finding that my words were broadly correct and nodded.

“So how do I do this? Just give each one a wave and see what happens?”

“Exactly” I said with a smirk building and just waved my wand once to pick up all the wands and gather them into a pile.

“You’re getting better at that” Sirius said, and I resisted the urge to preen at the praise. Two-Thirds of my person was made out of attention starved teenagers who absolutely craved positive reinforcement from authority figures, so it was much harder than I made it seem.

“Of course I am. I’ve been working at it for a while”

“I see. That’s good then. I don’t think either James or I got to the level where we could start messing around with stuff like that until we were well out of Hogwarts” what he was referring to was spell-less spell casting, which as an art had one of the most counterintuitive and complicated names out there. What it was, in truth, was simply using one’s magic to influence reality without using something as specific as a spell. The wand was still necessary for me but I knew that for wizards like Voldemort and Dumbledore, telekinesis without a wand was the bare minimum.

“Like the two of you are a standard to follow” I said, still feeling sullen at the day’s revelations.

“I’ll have you know we were completely awesome wizards in our time. We even became animagi, unlike a certain someone here” He said.

“1 in 10 wizards are incapable of the transformation” I quoted the stat with invisible shame building.

“Know what else 1 in 10 wizards struggle with?”

“You’re gross and I’m fourteen” I pointed out, but he had already headed off to the pile of wands.

“Just give each one a wave. Don’t actually try to cast anything or you might blow both of us up. Some of those are probably really temper-“ I hadn’t even finished when he dropped one wand with a jolt like he had been shocked.

“emental” I completed.

“Go do your ritual while I work with this” Sirius said, picking up another wand and probably feeling uncomfortable with me being present for what was an intimate process to most wizards.

I nodded and walked to the other end of the room. Sirius’ blood replenishing potion was red just as the book required, with the only difference being that where the book stipulated a deep red, his was so light that it was almost pink. Still, my senses told me the potion was good enough to drink and the book also said that failure to meet the colour requirements wouldn’t be fatal with this particular potion. I chugged it down in one gulp, doing my best to ignore the coppery taste in my mouth.

Next, I moved towards a silver bowl and picked up the silver knife next to it. I hesitated for a brief moment at the thought of the pain to come before I drove the knife down, slicing across my palm in a smooth movement and placing the bleeding palm into the bowl.