Amber Dreams

The thick curtains of the dormitory were pulled back, and crisp autumn coldness crept into the room. Each boy awoke to the chill air, wondering where he was, before the knowledge of the previous night returned to him. In the light of day, the dormitory was more austere than they remembered, the wooden floor cold and the stone still colder, and they put on their robes. They found that on each of their capes, a Gryffindor badge had been deftly sewn on, some time during the night; it gave them a sense of belonging, and they could truly feel like Gryffindors.

In the Common Room, they found their timetables, class after class, stretching through the week. Breakfast next, and the Great Hall once again coughed from the Headmaster's smoke, but not even that could curb the eager enthusiasm of the first years. The food was filling, though perhaps not so spectacularly opulent as the feast the previous night. Nevertheless, there was porridge, sweetened with honey, and there was bacon, and eggs, and kedgeree. With full stomachs and empty minds, the new Gryffindors made their way to their first lesson.

Getting to Charms was not as easy as they might have expected. Lizzie, looking rather cleaner, stepped on a staircase to find that it moved in the opposite direction of where they had been told to go, and a number of doors led nowhere, or were simply walls pretending to be doors, whose doorknobs sniggered at them when they walked off. Eventually, though, the little groups of first years managed to reach the Charms classroom.

A corpulent, pox-marked man walked in to the room once they had all sat down.

"Good day, good day. My name is Professor Maudlin, and I will be teaching you Charms. For those unfamiliar with the term, Charms are those spells that alter the physical or mental properties of a person or object, whilst retaining their basic composition. Many people do not feel that Charms is a particularly illustrious discipline. They are, of course, wrong. Every day, you will use charms. Charms to summon, charms to dispel. Charms to lighten the darkness, charms to hide secrets, to grow a tail, as one of my colleagues once decided to attempt."

He flicked his wand, and a chalk flew to him from the other side of the room. "Now, I hope that you've all read the first chapter of your Anthology of Modern Charms. You'll find that a Charm is dependant on a number of factors, from your emotional state to the inherent will of the subject. Distance, proximity and your will all have their effect. To begin with, we will try something practical. If you would all like to take out your wands?"

They took out their wands from the pockets of their capes, and then the Professor passed round a bundle of white feathers.

"Take one each, please." He scribbled a few diagrams on the blackboard. "We will begin our education in charms with the levitation of a feather, and then progress on to pins. Feathers are admirable for the purpose of levitation; they come from birds, creatures of the air, and are themselves light in weight. You will attempt to convince the feather that its natural element is in the air; the wand directs, and your mind shapes its properties, in this case the ability to fly. Charms are so called because they are the attempts of the wizard or witch to convince the world to work the way they want it to. Language is essential; the phrases are in Latin. Wingardium Leviosa will be the incantation."

He spoke the words again, and flicked his wand at the feather in front of him; it raised above the desk a few inches.

"Does everybody understand?"

The class nodded. If there were any who did not, they didn't say.

"Very well. In your own time."

It was silly, thought Albus, as he flicked the wand and said the words. Why would a feather suddenly leap in the air? It needed to be attached to something that would make it fly, he decided, a duck, as there was on the pond at home, and he muttered the words again, and flicked.

There was a sudden quack, and Albus found, to his surprise, that there was no longer a feather, but a duck on the desk in front of him, as white as the feather had been.

"Good God, boy!" exclaimed Professor Maudlin, as the rest of the class laughed at the oddity. Albus blushed. "I didn't mean to! I just thought it would fly better like this!"

The duck quacked again, and the harsh sound seemed like a mocking jeer to Albus.

"Of course you meant it. That's half the magic. You've obviously rather a talent for transfiguration, I must say," and the Professor chuckled, before turning the duck back in to the feather. "See, class. An excellent piece of lateral thinking. Five points to Gryffindor. Nonetheless, it's not quite what I wanted. Now, let's try it again, shall we? And this time, let's all concentrate on lifting the feather, rather than making the duck do the work! Remember your Latin, children, stress the penultimate vowel. And one, two, three, Wingardium Leviosa!"

One or two feathers levitated. Geoffrey concentrated hard on the feather, and on the words, and found that it raised quite simply, though the effort it took to hold it there was tiring. He realised he was holding his breath, and the feather dropped back to the desk.

"Oh, well done! See, everybody! Geoffrey has managed it. Well done, five points to Gryffindor. Very good. Now, let's try it again. It gets easier as you practice, and you learn how to make the words flow. In your own time, then!"

They spent the rest of the lesson trying out the spell. Albus was quite unnerved by the incident with the duck, although Pellinore congratulated him on gaining the House points. By the end, though, all of the class had managed the task; all, that is, save for Lizzie.

"I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'm saying the words and I'm flicking the wand, ain't I?" she shouted out, when Professor Maudlin asked her whether she knew.

"Five points from Gryffindor. I'd suggest you show a little decorum when you're speaking to a teacher."

At that point the bell rang.

"Very well, class dismissed. I'd like you all to practice the Levitation Charm for homework, and read Chapter Two of Theoretical Magic, please. Elizabeth," he said, as they turned to go, "would you mind staying behind?" She walked over to his desk. Albus and Geoffrey had already left.

"I can't believe you transfigured a duck, Albus. That's fourth year magic."

"I told you I didn't mean to do it. Well, I didn't try to, if you know what I mean. You were good, though. You managed it straight off, once you got the words right."

Geoffrey smiled. "Thank you. What do you think went wrong with Lizzie? Is it just because she's a Muggle?"

"I really wouldn't know. Here, what have we next?"

A brief look at their timetable showed that Theory of the Dark Arts was their next subject. They hurried down the steps to the first floor corridor, where the other Gryffindors had gathered already, along with a number of Slytherins.

"The door's locked," explained Pellinore, "And we think we heard growling inside."

The lock clicked just then, and quite a few of the assembled students moved back from the door. Beyond the threshold, the room was dark, but for a little candle, which gave off a scarce flicker of light. A voice spoke from the darkness.

"Do come in, please. Quickly now, we haven't got all day."

The voice was that of Professor Crouch; he was sitting at his desk, his stern features illuminated by the candle. There was a growl as they walked in, a rough, snarling sound.

"No need to be afraid, children. At least, not in your first year." Professor Crouch chuckled at his own joke. When everybody had been seated, with Lizzie running in just as the last Slytherin had sat down, the door slammed shut of its own accord, and the candle flickered and died.

"Welcome to Dark Arts Theory. Rather a misnomer, I've been told, as I prefer to give you all a good hard grounding in the practical side of things, but nevertheless the ideas and principles behind the Dark Arts are far more important than actually dealing with individual cases. You will be studying the spells and creatures commonly described as Dark Magic, from Pixies to Vampires, and from Hexes to the most heinous curses known to the Wizarding World."

His voice echoed in the darkness, and each pupil hung on his every word. Even the growling that had filled the room a few moments before had settled to a grizzling rumble.

"You will have noticed that there is a beast in this room, and you were no doubt intimidated. Magic is like that. The creature itself is a Gwyllgi, as the Welsh know it, or the Dog of Darkness. It stalks the roads at night, and shuns the light. In the dark, it can assume often monstrous proportions, yet when confronted with bright light it shrinks physically to the size of a Krup, which, of course, is of little significance to the grown wizard. Does anybody see the solution to this?"

Albus raised his hand, and then realised that in the gloom, the Professor would not be able to see him do so. To his surprise, Professor Crouch seemed to have noticed, as he then asked him what he suggested.

"Well, we would need a way of producing light, sir."

"Excellent, Master Dumbledore. Five points to Gryffindor. Now, does anybody know the correct spell for this? Miss Bode?"

"Lumos," replied a girl from the back of the room.

"Excellent. Five points to Slytherin. There's no wand movement needed here, simply say the spell, and your wand will light up, Lumos, light. Very good. Now, the Gwyllgi will never be affected by a single light, but as a class we should be able to defeat it. I'd like you each to perform the spell, starting at the back of the class, and then, moving to the left, please cast the spell. Has everybody got that?"

"Yes, Professor Crouch," replied the class in unison.

"Very good. Now then, Master Fletcher, if you'd like to begin."

A boy at the back muttered the word, and a little spark glowed in the darkness. The next person provided more light, and soon the darkness was forced back, though sometimes it seemed to lunge back as someone stuttered the spell or seemed particularly weak. The growling had turned to snarls and barking, and the in the lessening gloom Professor Crouch had left his desk and walked into the light. The outline of a hound of great stature could now be seen, but as each pupil said the spell, and their wands lit up the darkness, and the darkness seemed to ebb and decay, until, at the front of the class, the Professor added his own wand to the class, and there, with the room now lit as if in the light of day, was a black dog, that whined and pulled against the restraining bonds.

"Excellent, class, very good," said the Professor, who waved back the curtains with a flick of his wand. Quite a few of the class had not been able to sustain the spell, and one or two had not managed it at all. Lizzie, though, bore her wand as if it were sacred. "I understood!" she whispered jubilantly to Geoffrey, and he smiled back.

"Calm down now, class, thank you. Very well done. Very good. Now, for your prep work, I would rather like you to record three other examples of Dark Creatures that fear the light, and a brief description of each. That will be all, thank you," he concluded, and the class wrote down the prep work, and put their wands back in their cape pockets, and shuffled happily out of the classroom.

The rest of the day was perhaps diminished by the novelty of the first two classes, and Professor Scrubb, who taught Herbology, hardly made it much more exciting; he droned on in class, and they were all rather relieved by the time they had listened to his talk on basic herbs and magical plants, and let them water the contents of Greenhouse One. The humid atmosphere did little to help them from yawning. By the end of the lesson, they were all rather glad to be allowed to rest in the Common Room before starting prep, and then came dinner. The food wasn't perhaps as lavish as it had been at the feast the day before, but it was substantial nonetheless. The headmaster smoked almost continuously, partaking of only bread and water, but the other teachers ate heartily.

By the end of the first day, the first years collapsed happily into their beds. Night fell fast and cold, and the moon had begun to wax full, leaving the dormitory between darkness and light, shadows behind the curtains of their four-poster beds falling and shifting. The Dark Arts lesson came back to each of them, and the shadows took on more threatening forms, though no growling or sniffing of dogs in the gloom could be heard. They slept uneasily that night, and neither Albus nor Ollivander dreamed.

Tuesday passed slowly, with a return to Herbology, and they started Unnatural History, taught by Professor Barnacle. He was a broad, muscular man with a thick beard, and he claimed his family had cared for sea-dragons in the North Sea since the before Britain had been invaded. Geoffrey wasn't sure that was true, though he supposed the name was like his own, and had survived in forms that were never recorded in his book of the family, even far back to when he could no longer tell the language they were written in. Professor Barnacle had them feeding lettuce to flobberworms, which squelched happily in their wooden caskets, and then they trooped back to the classroom where he gave a short lecture on their digestive system. After that came Latin. Lizzie, however, did not join them; it turned out that she barely learnt how to write, able only to scrawl her name and a few simple phrases, let alone Latin.

"That's why the spells won't work, innit? I don't know what the teacher wants me to do. That Charms Professor, Maudlin, 'e explained it all to me, an' 'e's giving me lessons an' all."

Albus was a little shocked that someone might not learn Latin, as was Geoffrey. They had both learnt no small amount, although they soon found that, as they had been told in Charms, the intent and feel of the language was more important than the accuracy of what they were saying. Lizzie took lessons in Latin with Professor Maudlin from thereon, though she found herself often unable to perform the more complex spells, or shape them to her own ends.

On Thursday morning, still weary from the Astronomy lesson that had taken place at midnight the evening before, they returned to Charms. Professor Maudlin was rather stricter this time; he took points from a few latecomers, and then distributed the feathers again. This time, nobody had any real trouble with the feathers, and even Lizzie managed to hover hers a few inches above the desk.

When the Professor was satisfied that they were all able to perform the spell adequately, he summoned them all back to his own desk with a flick of his wand, and then gave each person a pin.

"Now, the pin is made of iron, which is a metal, and is instinctively opposed to lightness. Metal on water will sink, in the air it will fall, and a heavy piece of metal will sink even into the earth. To levitate the iron, you must persuade it to take on the properties of air, so as to raise it up."

Behind him, the chalk sketched diagrams by itself, as the Professor talked. The drawings showed a set of little circles, each attached to the other by lines.

"If you have read your textbooks, you will know that the world is made up of elements, that the smallest substances that the world may be broken down in to. There are no less than 365 elements, one for each day of the year. The first 361 are known as the Minor Elements. These in turn are made up of the four Greater Elements, each in opposition to each other, that is air, fire, water and earth. Now, these elements cannot be destroyed or unbounded from each other, for to do so would create a void, which magic abhors. Wizards have indeed proven that these elements cannot be destroyed, simply changed in quantity for any given material. Iron is from the earth, but it is refined by fire. To make the pin levitate, you must be able to control these elements, and change just enough so as to be able to make it lighter than the air, without changing the basic form of the pin itself. Approximately two per cent of the pin's elements can be changed to emphasise air in order to do so."

He paused, and looked around the room. Seeing nobody had lost him entirely, he continued.

"Now, the words that will allow you to do this are Metallum Leviosa, you will accompany it with a flick of the wand, like so!"

He flicked, and the pin in front of him rose several inches in the air.

"Now, repeat after me. Metallum Leviosa!"

They each flicked their wand at their pins. Some people overdid it, and their pins fell in half, or dissolved entirely, others seemed unable to change the pin at all. Pellinore managed to raise his up to eye level, as had Geoffrey, who seemed to have set up a fierce rivalry. Albus had managed to raise his pin half a foot above the desk. Pellinore and Geoffrey had sent their pins at the other, and seemed to be ineffectively duelling. Spotting them as he walked around the desks and correcting the grip and pronunciation of the people who had not managed the spell, Professor Maudlin looked rather amused at the little fight, though he took five points from each of the duellists.

By the end of the lesson, they were exhausted with the effort of changing their pins, and they still had Unnatural Biology and their first Transfiguration lesson to go. Albus found he was particularly good at transfiguration; they were changing lucifers into needles, and the teacher, Professor Kharmoun, a fellow of Arabic appearance, had heard of his exploit with the duck in Charms. "A prime example of the principles of Transfiguration, Master Albus," he had said after he had taken the register, and then he turned the table into a crocodile, bound by chains made from the floorboards. Transfiguration had many aspects of Charms, they found, but those who managed to turn the lucifers shiny found that adding the point and eye of the needle often resulted in them reverting to wood and sulphur. Maintaining the change was beyond them all, although a few had got the hang of it by Friday's lesson.

After the first week, they began to settle in to a comfortable routine, although the vagaries of the castle kept them sharply aware of their surroundings, as they never knew when a stairway might decide to take them to a different floor, or a room shuffle up the corridor and swap places with a different door. Rumour and keeping a network of friends who knew what was going on elsewhere swiftly took up a great deal of their free time, though there was very little of that after prep work, meals and simply resting from long days of hard work.

By the third week of the term, talk had changed to their first flying lessons. If talk had been of families and the few spells they knew in the previous weeks, then exploits of flying dominated the third week. To Geoffrey's disgust, Pellinore seemed to have gained quite the audience for his tales of flying around the tors of Dartmoor. Lizzie was the only person who didn't talk about flying, preferring to sit in a corner of the Common Room and read her books. Considering how little she had known at the beginning of the term, she had made a prodigious advance, though her letters were still shaky, her essays short and ink-stained, and her Latin was still rudimentary. Albus had heard rumours that she had got in to a fight with one of the other girls in the dormitories, but she wouldn't say anything about it.

Thursday morning couldn't come soon enough for most of Gryffindor, though, and the Slytherins they would be sharing the lessons with seemed to be just as excited. Their Astronomy lesson was punctuated by whispers and snippets of hasty conversation, whilst the Professor pointed out the minor constellations, and as they sleepily changed into their nightshirts the talk was all of how fast they could go, and how unfair it was that first years could not play on the House teams.

After a nervous breakfast, they trooped out to the Quidditch pitch, where twenty-eight brooms were laid out in three rows. A tall woman, who reminded Albus of a heron, clad in grey and black, was waiting for them. She gestured to the brooms.

"Line up by a broom, please. Quickly now, the faster you go, the longer you'll have in the air."

They lined up eagerly, Geoffrey and Pellinore careful to stand next to each other, determined to out do the other. Albus stayed with Lizzie, who had seemed rather contemptuous of the whole thing. The brooms had quite a few bent bristles, and they looked rather rough. When everybody was standing by a broom, the woman addressed the two Houses.

"Everybody, please place your wand hand over the broom, and say 'Up!' firmly."

The broom leapt immediately into Geoffrey's hand, and he felt a thrill of satisfaction, though Pellinore had an equally firm grip on his. Albus had found his didn't jump so much as vaguely drift upwards, but when it did he gripped it firmly. Lizzie's broom, though, hadn't even moved, and her plight was shared by quite a few people around her. The teacher walked around the rows, telling those who had managed the task to mount their brooms, and getting the less successful ones to command the broom more sternly. Lizzie said something under her breath when the teacher suggested she was scared, and the broom shot upwards into her hands almost immediately afterwards.

When everybody had managed to mount their brooms, and she was satisfied that they were grasping their brooms correctly, she told them to kick off the ground and hover there. Albus found that it was essential to grab the broom firmly between the thighs and feet the moment he pushed off, and quite a few people slid off their brooms, hanging in midair. Pellinore and Geoffrey were still level with each other, slowly nudging the front of the broom upwards, until they were both several metres off the ground. The teacher told them to stay there, whilst she darted around showing the less successful fliers the correct way.

The rest of the lesson passed swiftly, as they began to advance from just hovering to darting a few feet forwards and turning in a rough formation. There were a few collisions, and one or two people fell from their brooms, but they were no more than winded by the drop. They were grateful to return to the ground by the end, though, for the task of flying was surprisingly exhausting, and they traipsed off to the cold showers gratefully, before settling down to a hearty lunch.