The Birds and the Bees

The Birds and the Bees

It's hard to say exactly what it was that Hermione Granger was searching for in the bowels of the musty old library... knowledge, yes; everyone saw that she sought knowledge, positively yearned for it. Stretched her soft white fingers out to touch the pure joy of knowing. That little jolt in the belly when it all fell into place. It formed a marvellous, spinning, three-dimensional entity in her mind's eye. She remembered everything she had ever learnt, when other people could only hold facts so tentatively at the front of their minds; straining to hold on to them for a while. She felt knowledge in a way that others could not even comprehend.

Harry didn't, couldn't understand. His view of her must always be that of an excitable and anxious little witch trotting off to the library because she simply couldn't bear to let anyone down. He saw her earnestness and her dedication; and to be sure, this was no illusion. She was earnest, sometimes embarrassingly so. Certainly she was dedicated and hardworking. But there was more. More than knowledge; it was wisdom she really sought. It was that gentle intuitive knowing that shone out of Albus Dumbledore.

...And so she spent her hours in the library, searching and searching for anything that kindled the spark in her belly. Occasionally she would find something, and this she would add to the shining web of pure understanding that she was spinning inside herself. In the end, though, it wasn't a book that showed her the light. She was practicing a new Charm, and became mesmerised by the sight of her wand swooping through the air...and she wondered.

She was so close to understanding this world, this strange universe where wands and words could achieve almost anything. This strange enigma where nature was no longer passive and compliant, but had to be wrestled with and beaten into submission. It was when she had this thought that she realised that maybe she had understood all along...

It was no wonder that she had always mastered spells quicker than the rest of them; a part of her had always understood that working magic wasn't just a matter of trial and error; practice making perfect. It was about realising that you were battling the force of nature - a formidable foe that rarely complied without a fight. After all those hours of searching she finally realised that this simple fact pretty much explained everything.

Nature is a proud and dignified woman. She resents young witches and wizards ordering her around with just the swish of a stick. She little appreciates their casual power over her. Hers is not the sort of power able to resist them directly, but she can and does make magic as hard for them as possible. However, there comes a day when even the weakest of them can bend her according to their will, and this she accepts. She will never help them, though. There are only a select few who she will help, and these are the rare few who realise that she is present at all. Those who bother to consider her feelings when they wave their little sticks around.

And so that was how Hermione figured it out. Or, at least, she had figured something out. All it really was at this stage was an hypothesis. Luckily there was nothing else that her logical little self liked more than testing an hypothesis using an orderly, scientific process. There was something a little different about this situation, though. Her intuition told her that she might be about to start messing with something pretty huge. She was surprised to receive this piece of advice, as her intuition had been fairly quiet until recently. Or maybe it had always been loud, but she had never really listened...

In any case, what her intuition told her in this situation was that the best course of action would be to have a little play around and see what happened. After all, intellectually she was stumbling around in the dark with her fingers stretched out. This was a place her brain had never even thought about visiting: the realm of the purely speculative. No experts to refer to, no case studies to pore over, nothing she could question Professor McGonagall over. So, feeling just a teensy bit silly, Hermione got out her wand.

Using a meditation technique that her mother had taught her, she cleared her mind and started to breathe more deeply. Focussing entirely on her arm, the wand in her hand and the words she spoke, she cast a few basic spells. She tried to focus more on how the spell felt, rather than the outcome, and subsequently she began to feel her own will swirling around her when she waved the wand and said the incantation. Her own intention-the essence of magic.

But there was something more... She felt the resistance as usual, but she began to see an identity behind it. Another will. Another...intelligence? She wondered, feeling foolish even as she had the thought, if it might be possible to...communicate...with this force that her magic was ordering about.

She sat for hours in the empty common room that Saturday night, practicing a simple summoning spell. Over and over again, the book flew from the floor into her open hand, with the usual amount of resistance. It was this resistance from nature that made wizards tired when practicing magic. It requires concentration and force. Hermione very tentatively began to add a mental 'please' and 'thankyou' at the end of each summoning spell. It felt somewhat absurd, but she figured it couldn't hurt. On the next try, however, she felt a bit of resistance lift. The book flew in a perfect arc, needing no direction from her in its flight. The spell took less effort this time.

A feeling was forming itself in her mind. It was small, but boundless like a candle's glow in the half-light. It was a soft green, and it tasted like rain on the breeze. She felt a reply: it whispered 'you're welcome'. Slowly she lowered her wand and placed it on the table. Concentrating hard, she held that sweet, green presence in her mind until it flooded her, closed her eyes and said the incantation. "Accio book". A few seconds of prickling silence...and then...something hard hit her in the chest. Her eyes flew open and there it was. The book was no longer on the floor in front of her. It had fallen into her lap.

Wandless magic! She was so overtaken by shock that she fell off her chair and lay, dazed, on the rug for a few moments. Without her even realising it was happening, sleep overtook Hermione like a tidal wave. She was washed off to a place where wild vines grew into blankets, sweet winds stroked her back and bees buzzed round her mind singing lullabies about pollen.

*******

It's hard to walk around and act normally when you are carrying around a secret that is so BIG that it becomes like trying to hide an elephant up your jumper. Of course, Hermione normally would have shared any secret with Harry and Ron, but she just couldn't think of the words to explain this one. How about :

"Ron, Harry, I've made a new friend."

"Oh yeah, who is it?"

"Erm, I'm not sure, but I think it's a manifestation of nature itself. It speaks in my head and, oh, that's right, I seem to be able to perform wandless magic."

Yep, that one would go down a treat. She would have dearly loved to have discussed it with one of her professors, but first she needed to ascertain that what she was dealing with was real. After all, Ron had been right when he had said, 'Hearing voices no one can hear isn't a good sign, even in the wizarding world.' Also, as far as she knew, wandless magic was none too common.

She might have tried to ignore her new knowledge for a while, but it seemed that listening to this strange presence was like thinking about blinking - once you tuned into it, it was hard to tune out again. The magic surrounding them in the castle became almost like noise to her. When it only drifted by, down corridors and out of doorways, it was simply faint hums; yet in a classroom it became a jarring, discordant symphony as spells rushed round the room. The transfiguration classroom was the worst. Ron and Harry gave her a headache. Their spells were all force and resistance, like stubborn thumping on a closed door. She looked up to the teacher's table. Professor McGonagall was demonstrating the transfiguration of a desk into a pig. Hermione heard the strength of the Professor's spell. It moved smoothly through the air, encountering little resistance from the desk or anything else. The new pig squealed in confusion and tried to run out of the room. The students clapped.

There was still something wrong with the professor's approach, though; Hermione thought. It was still working against nature, not with it. She looked at the table in front of her and closed her eyes, mentally feeling her way around the hard edges and straight lines. She willed the lines to become soft and rounded, yet here she found the usual resistance. Changing directions, she felt around in her mind for that powerful presence that she had felt before. She found it, and gave it a cheery greeting. Together they pushed the lines of the desk to become round and happy and pink and muddy and piggy. Opening her eyes, she smiled in satisfaction at the pig in front of her. It smiled back as it regarded her through muddy little round eyes. "Mud" it said in her mind. "Mud. Warm sun. Green grass." She scratched it behind the ear and it snorted happily.

Hermione looked up, and there she met the eyes of a very shocked looking Professor McGonagall. Both sets of eyes moved to Hermione's wand, lying unused on the desk.

Oops.