Black Castle, Scotland — July 15th, 2010
The next morning, the dining hall of Black Castle looked less like a family gathering and more like the aftermath of a siege.
When Arthur and Eileen stepped through the heavy oak doors, they found every adult already seated around the long table, nursing tea and coffee in near-total silence. In a room that contained Sirius Black, silence was itself a sign of catastrophe.
The children were absent. They had stayed up half the night turning the Pensieve memories into fuel for their own grand adventures, running wild across the castle grounds, reenacting Thor's lightning strike with prank sparklers, and debating with great passion which Asgardian warrior would win in a tavern brawl. Eventually, their parents and the house-elves had been forced to physically wrangle them into their beds. They were now sleeping the deep, untroubled sleep of children who had watched gods and monsters and decided the appropriate response was to play pretend.
The adults had not been so lucky. Their entire understanding of the universe had been cracked open and violently rearranged overnight. Nightmares of metal giants, alien armadas, and a cosmos so vast and hostile it made Earth feel like a solitary candle in a hurricane had kept them staring at their ceilings long past midnight.
Sirius looked like he'd aged a year overnight. Harry was staring at his toast as though it owed him money. Amelia sat upright and immaculate, because Amelia was always upright and immaculate, though her eyes held the glazed sharpness of a mind that had been running complex calculations all night without finding a single solution. Daniel had his forehead resting flat on the mahogany table, and had not moved it since anyone arrived.
Ariadne was the only one who looked normal. She was eating an apple and reading a book, entirely unbothered, because Ariadne had known about all of this for years and had already processed it. For her, this was just breakfast.
Arthur pulled out a chair for Eileen, then took his own. He poured himself a cup of tea with what the room collectively registered as infuriating cheerfulness.
"Morning," Arthur said brightly. "Sleep well?"
Sirius fixed him with a look that could have curdled milk. "No. No, I did not sleep well. I did not sleep at all. And it is entirely, completely, one hundred percent your fault."
"What happened?" Arthur asked, taking a casual sip of his tea.
"What happened is that every time I closed my eyes, I saw a fifteen-foot ice king getting turned into a firework display. And then I thought about the fact that there are things out there that make that ice king look like a first-year student. And then I thought about the fact that my children are growing up in a universe full of those things." He gestured broadly at nothing. "And then I'd open my eyes and stare at the ceiling for another hour."
"Relax, Sirius," Arthur said smoothly, already buttering a piece of toast. "It is not like the world is ending today. And besides, even if things look dark, remember one thing. As long as I am alive, our families will live a happy, secure life. I will not let anything touch you."
It was meant to be comforting. A genuine promise from the most powerful being on the planet. But Sirius didn't look comforted. He looked annoyed.
"That's not exactly inspiring confidence, Arthur," Sirius said, leaning forward. "When the war happens, and those things you called nuclear missiles come raining down on us, I refuse to be the damsel waiting in a tower for you to save me and my family. What if you do not make it in time? What if you are off on Asgard fighting a god and never get the message? No thanks. I want to grow stronger myself."
Arthur paused, the butter knife hovering over his toast. A slow, genuine smile spread across his face.
"That is the spirit," Arthur praised. "I was hoping you would say that. It is about time you got those old bones moving again, Sirius. I heard you were getting rusty sitting in those stuffy Wizengamot meetings."
"Rusty?" Sirius scoffed, some of his usual fire returning. "Mate, I could still hex you into next Tuesday if you did not cheat with your glowing hands and all that running around."
"I would like to see you try," Arthur chuckled.
But nobody laughed along. Harry especially. He had been staring into his black coffee for the last ten minutes, and when he finally looked up, his green eyes were deadly serious.
"Arthur, we all want to get stronger. But realistically, can we?" His voice was tight with a frustration that had clearly been building since the Pensieve. "I've been running it through my head since last night. I could figure out ways to beat Ariadne in a duel, combination spells, Apparition to reposition the way you do in your fights. Maybe. But a duel is one-on-one. In a war, when there are hundreds of opponents and nowhere to run without risking the people behind me..."
He paused, and the table was listening.
"I can maybe destroy a small army. Take down some of those jets and missiles. But all of them? Against a sustained assault?" His jaw tightened. "And that's just Muggles. When those aliens and gods enter the picture, I feel hopeless."
The table went quiet. Harry Potter, the man who had faced Voldemort, who had duelled Dark Wizards for a decade, who had never once backed down from anything, was admitting defeat.
Arthur leaned forward. "You're not hopeless, Harry. You're limited. There's a difference. And the limitation isn't you. It's your tools."
Harry frowned. "Tools?"
"Your wand."
"Wand magic has a ceiling," Arthur said.
Every wizard at the table looked at him.
"A wand is a channel," Arthur continued. "It focuses your magic, shapes it, directs it. But it also constrains it. The wand decides how much power flows through it, and every wand has a maximum throughput. Push past that and the wand breaks, or the spell destabilises." He held up a hand before anyone could argue. "For most wizards, that ceiling is well above their natural ability. They'll never hit it. But for someone like Harry? Or anyone training seriously for high-level combat? The wand becomes a bottleneck."
Harry stared at him. "You're saying my wand is holding me back."
"I'm saying every wand holds its wielder back eventually. That's why I stopped using one years ago."
"Wandless magic," Harry said. "You want us to learn wandless magic."
"In an ideal world, yes. Wandless magic has no external ceiling. Your limit is your own core, your control, and your creativity. But," Arthur paused, "for wizards who've used wands since age eleven, learning wandless magic is extraordinarily difficult. The wand becomes a dependency. Your magic learns to flow through it and only through it. Retraining those pathways as an adult takes years, if it works at all."
"So we are stuck," Sirius said, slumping back in his chair.
"Adults, mostly. Children are a different matter. Wandless magic is best learned before the dependency forms. I tried it with myself first and am now replicating my success with Elena. As you saw yesterday, it is showing great results. Any child who starts before they're given a wand has an enormous advantage."
He let that truth settle. Several adults looked highly thoughtful. Harry's expression clearly showed he was already thinking about James, Lily, and Edmund's future training.
"So for adults," Harry said, bringing the focus back to the immediate problem, "we are stuck?"
"Not entirely. There is a middle option," Arthur said softly. "A staff."
"A staff?" Sirius frowned, looking completely incredulous. "What, like Merlin in the children's stories?"
"Exactly like Merlin in the stories. Where do you think those stories came from?" Arthur replied.
Arthur put his hand out, and from seemingly nowhere, an object appeared in his grip, wrapped in worn dark leather. He set it on the table and unrolled it.
A staff. About five feet long, dark wood with a faint grain that seemed to shift in the light. No ornamentation. No runes. The air around it hummed faintly, like a tuning fork struck at a frequency just below hearing.
"A wizard's staff," Arthur said. "I acquired it years ago. I found it in some forgotten sealed vault. Or maybe it was during a raid on some dark wizard's home. I do not really care to remember the exact details."
"You mean looted," Sirius deadpanned.
"Liberated," Arthur corrected smoothly. "And it was not as though anyone was going to miss it. It was just rusting away. But the point is, a staff is to a wand what a river is to a tap. Same magic, same source, but the channel is wider. Deeper. A staff doesn't just focus your magic, it amplifies it. The throughput is an order of magnitude higher than any wand."
He held it out to Harry. "Try it."
Harry took the staff, and the moment his hand closed around the wood, something changed in his face. His eyes widened. His grip tightened.
"It is..." he started, unable to find the right word.
"Cast something," Arthur encouraged.
Harry raised the staff, pointing it toward the ceiling. "Lumos."
The room went blindingly white.
Not the gentle glow of a wand-cast Lumos. A blinding, searing flood of light that obliterated every shadow in the dining hall. Eileen shielded her eyes. Daniel yelped. Even Ariadne looked up from her book.
Harry killed the spell instantly, looking stunned.
"That was a basic Lumos," he breathed. "A first-year spell. It felt like the magic was pulling to get out, instead of me pushing it through my core."
"Now imagine what a combat spell feels like through that channel," Arthur said, a knowing smirk on his lips.
Sirius was already on his feet, reaching across the table. "Give me that."
Harry handed the staff over. Sirius weighed it in his hands, admiring the balance. He turned toward the far wall of the dining hall, took a solid combat stance, and raised the staff.
"Stupefy!"
The red bolt that erupted from the staff was not a Stunner. It was a cannon blast. A concentrated beam of scarlet light that crossed the room in a blink and hit the stone wall with a detonation that shook the floor.
The wall exploded.
Stone fragments scattered across the room. A cloud of dust billowed outward. A section of masonry roughly the size of a door had been reduced to rubble, revealing the corridor beyond and a very surprised portrait of Sirius's great-uncle who had been minding his own business.
The boom echoed through the entire castle.
Silence.
Sirius stared at the destruction. Then at the staff. Then at Arthur.
"That," Sirius said, "was a basic Stunner."
"Yes," Arthur said. "It was."
Arthur waved his hand and the rubble lifted, reformed, and slotted itself back into place. The wall rebuilt itself in three seconds, seamless, the portrait resettling with an indignant huff.
"Show-off," Sirius muttered.
But the damage was done. Not to the wall. To the silence.
Footsteps came thundering down from above. Many footsteps. The rapid, enthusiastic footsteps of children who had been woken by an explosion and were treating it as an invitation rather than a warning.
"WHAT WAS THAT?" James's voice preceded him by three seconds. He burst through the doors in pyjamas, hair pointing in six directions, Regulus and Leo right behind him. Eleanor and Lily followed close after. Elena arrived last, already dressed with her braid neatly in place, looking like she had been awake for an hour and was simply here to observe.
"Did something blow up?" James demanded, scanning the room with the desperate hope of a boy who very much wanted the answer to be yes.
"Sirius sneezed," Arthur said.
"That was not a sneeze!" James said. "That was an explosion! I heard it from upstairs! The paintings were all screaming!"
Sirius, still holding the staff, attempted to look innocent. He failed comprehensively.
"What's that?" James pointed.
"A wizard's staff," Harry said. "And your Uncle Sirius just used it to redecorate the dining hall."
"Can I try?"
"No," said every adult in the room simultaneously.