Cassian pushed the door open with his shoulder and stepped into the Sixth-Year classroom. Four houses packed the room, all pretending not to stare in case he gave them work. Colin waved like he'd been waiting since dawn. Luna was smiling at him. Or at something behind him. Ginny grinned. Harper slouched, trying to look unimpressed and failing because he kept glancing at Luna's radish earrings.
Cassian waved back. "Morning. Ready?"
Half the class mumbled something that might've been yes.
Luna raised her hand.
Cassian pointed at her. "Yes, Lovegood?"
She tilted her head, a strand of hair sliding across her cheek. "I wanted to ask about dark shields," she said. "I remembered your lessons last year... about light bending spells and dark bending spells... and how they behave differently if you nudge them wrong. I thought dark shields must work the same way. Only with curses. And shields."
Cassian stared at her for a second. "You've asked three questions that sound innocent but are, in fact, not at all in disguise."
She smiled, because she knew that.
He sighed. "Fine. Very well. This week we're studying dark spellwork."
Ginny perked up. Most stopped pretending not to listen.
Cassian held up both hands. "Not curses. I'm not teaching you to hex your cousins into frogs. I mean normal spells that've been tainted by dark magic. Everyday work turned poisonous."
Colin frowned. "Like... what? Someone shouting 'Stupefy' but evil?"
Cassian pinched the bridge of his nose. "Historically speaking? Yes, actually."
He hopped up to sit on the corner of his desk.
"Right. Quick history. The first recorded case of a regular, harmless spell being warped into cursed work dates back to, brace yourselves, early Mesopotamia. Roughly four thousand years ago. Give or take a century, because their record-keeping was... optimistic at best."
A few quills scratched at parchment.
"Picture this-" he said, then shook his head. "No. Actually, I'll picture it."
He flicked his fingers.
The illusion stretched above them. Students leaned forward as the view settled into sun-baked mud-brick streets, copper ingots stacked in uneven piles, and one very harassed man trying to look confident while tripping over his own sandals.
"This," Cassian said, "is Ea-nāṣir."
Colin squinted. "Isn't that the bloke people wrote angry clay tablets about?"
"The very one," Cassian said, pleased. "History's first customer service disaster. Son of a copper merchant dynasty, destined for lazy and rich life, except he inherited the business when everyone more competent inconveniently died. And his copper..."
He flicked his fingers. The illusion zoomed in on an ingot so pitted it looked like it had survived a duel.
"...was rubbish."
Ginny snorted.
"Rubbish," Cassian repeated, pointing. "Full of impurities, brittle, half-rotted before buyers got it home. And let me tell you, Mesopotamian Magicks did not handle bad copper well. Copper was magically conductive, not just decorative to them. Essential. You brew, cast, carve, channel through it."
The illusion shifted again. A wizard in a linen robe bargained, badly, with Ea-nāṣir. The merchant beamed at him with the confidence of a man who absolutely knew he was selling trash and absolutely planned to do it again tomorrow.
"Now," he said, "here's where the story goes wonderfully off-script."
The image slid sideways to another day, a wiry wizard in a travel-cloak, pockets bulging with notes, scrolls, and something that looked suspiciously like pieces of a broken device he had no business owning in 2000 BCE.
The man slammed a copper ingot on the table.
Students leaned in.
"This fellow," Cassian said, tapping the figure's head, "needed good copper. The sort you don't smelt in a puddle and pray over. Because, according to several very irritated clay tablets, he was trying to power a spell that would, and I quote, 'restore his path home.' Very poetic phrasing for someone one mishap away from crying into river mud."
Luna asked, "Home as in... a different place?"
Cassian pointed at her. "See, she pays attention. Yes. He wanted to go back. Where back was... the tablets get vague. Probably because the scribe stopped listening halfway through the rant... or because the man sounded mad."
He flicked the illusion again. Ea-nāṣir handed over another misshapen bar with the pride of a man unloading cursed goods on a desperate customer. The traveller took it anyway, muttering furiously.
Cassian pointed at the traveller frozen mid-rant in the illusion. "This poor sod tried again and again, every attempt worse than the last. At one point he blew up half his workshop, scorched off his eyebrows, and still marched back to Ea-nāṣir demanding 'proper copper' as if shouting would magically improve metallurgy."
A few students snorted. Harper hid a grin behind his sleeve.
Cassian flicked his fingers, and the illusion jumped through a series of scenes... the traveller hauling ingots home, trying to refine them, checking rune-charts, muttering at the sky, then failing spectacularly. A small crater bloomed in one of the images. In another, a clay tablet caught fire.
"Each failure made him more desperate," Cassian said. "His project mattered. He needed conductive copper of a purity Ea-nāṣir absolutely refused to supply. And because Ea-nāṣir was, historically speaking, a menace, the man kept selling him scraps fit for doorstops."
The illusion shifted again. The traveller stood beside a makeshift casting circle, copper rods arranged in neat spokes. He whispered, breathed in, aimed, then the circle sparked, hissed, and spat him across the floor.
Cassian pointed. "See? That's the moment he snapped. Years of work undone because one merchant refused to stop selling metal that crumbled like stale bread. You can practically feel the breakdown approaching."
The traveller staggered upright in the illusion, wild-eyed, furious, and shoved the ruined ingot aside. He planted himself in the centre of the circle and gripped his staff with both hands.
Cassian hopped off the desk. "And here's where the dark spells gets interesting. He didn't invent a new curse. He didn't summon demons. Nothing flashy. He grabbed the oldest spell in his repertoire, a basic force-push, Meš-gal, for enthusiasts."
Luna scribbled happily.
Cassian raised a finger. "Except he cast it while furious enough to bite through a slab of clay. And his magic, already overloaded by repeated failures, latched onto that state like a starved animal."
The illusion froze on the moment before release.
Cassian looked round the room. "And that, children, is how the world ended up with the very first recorded case of a normal spell becoming cursed. A simple shove-charm twisted by a cocktail of rage, exhaustion, and very, very bad copper."
He tapped the illusion again.
The spell burst out, not as a clean ripple but as a serrated shockwave. It tore straight through the stall where Ea-nāṣir had been standing. Shelves exploded. Copper rang across the street. A stack of clay tablets shattered into dust.
Some students jumped to their feet, some watched in shock.
Cassian held up a finger, freezing the illusion in mid-explosion.
"Before anyone panics, Ea-nāṣir survived. Tragic, I know. History confirms he lived long enough to keep ripping people off for years."
A few students groaned on principle.
"As for our poor traveller..." Cassian tapped the air, letting the illusion shift to a scene of guards dragging the man through a narrow street. "He was caught. And, do you remember my lesson on early Sumerian justice? Obliviate before Obliviate existed?"
The whole room gasped.
Terrence, from the Slytherin side, leaned forward. "Professor... did they clear his mind?"
Cassian nodded. "Completely. Ea-nāṣir was rich, well connected, and very loud. An attack on a merchant family didn't get you a polite talking-to. People decided the traveller must've been wicked, because even simple spells warped in his hands."
He let that settle. A quill dropped somewhere in the back.
"And when his memories went, so did every secret he'd been trying to protect. Why he needed that copper? Gone. Whether his project worked? Gone. Why he thought he could brute-force himself home with half-melted ingots? Gone. We'll never know."
Luna's hand floated back up. "That's sad," she said.
Cassian sighed. "History's full of sad. But it's full of fascinating, too."
He flicked his wrist. The ruined market dissolved into drifting light.
"Because that incident, our grumpy traveller and the world's worst metals salesman, is the first recorded case of a normal spell becoming cursed. Not invented dark magic. A regular spell twisted by emotion, circumstance, and magical stress."
He pointed at the class. "And that opened the floodgates. Once witches and wizards realised everyday spells could warp, the rest of magical history followed with the enthusiasm of people who definitely shouldn't have been allowed to cast magic."
He paced along the front row.
"Take the Sand-Scream Charm from Old Assyria. Started life as a simple alarm spell. Farmers used it to scare off wolves. Then some bright spark cast it while terrified for his own life and, poof, half the village passed out from the pitch of it. Or the River-Break Hex in Egypt. Began as a water-diversion charm. Someone cast it during a drought and it gained a nasty habit of collapsing irrigation canals if the caster panicked."
Ginny winced. "That sounds awful."
"Oh, wait till you hear about late-Roman wandwork." Cassian gave her a sympathetic nod. "They cursed the Summoning Charm by accident and spent a decade living in fear of being hit by flying household objects every time someone sneezed."
Colin raised his hand hesitantly. "Professor... can any spell become cursed?"
"Technically? Yes. Realistically? Most won't unless you pour enough emotion into them to crack the foundations."
He stopped by Grace, who was pretending very hard not to take notes. "And some people," Cassian added, "have a talent for overloading foundations."
Cassian pushed on. "This brings us to more modern examples. The nineteenth century gave us the Silver-Harmonic Disaster, some idiot combined a tuning charm and a Sonorous Charm while panicking about stage fright, and we got an enchantment that shattered glass for three miles."
He walked back to the desk. "And then... the twentieth century gave us Grindelwald."
Half the class straightened.
"You wanted to know about Dark Shields right?" He turned to Luna. Who gave a nod.
"You know Fiendfyre. You know Protego. Separate, both dangerous in their own ways. One burns everything. The other blocks it. The spells behave like opposites."
He raised his wand and the air rippled into two glowing symbols, one fiery, one shield-bright.
"Grindelwald merged them."
Colin's jaw dropped. Ginny muttered something that sounded like "bloody hell."
Cassian tapped the fiery symbol. "Fiendfyre, raw, consuming, barely containable." He tapped the shield. "Protego, structured, defensive, anchored."
He pulled his hand through them. The symbols twisted, caught, and fused into a ring of dark blue flame that flickered in the air like a living bruise.
"Protego Diabolica," Cassian said. "A shield made of cursed fire. It protects those the caster chooses... and devours everyone else."
The class stared at the flames.
"It's one of the rare cursed spells that didn't happen by accident. Grindelwald wasn't angry or frightened, he was innovative in the most horrifying way. He used Fiendfyre's hunger and told it to behave like a wall. And magic listened."
Luna's voice floated up. "So cursed spells aren't always born from mistakes."
"Exactly," Cassian said. "Some are engineered. Some are inherited. Some, like the Mesopotamian meltdown, erupt when magic snaps under pressure. But the key point-" he dispelled the flame illusion with a flick "is that curses don't always start as curses. They start as intent gone sideways, or purpose pushed too far."
He dropped his shoulders with a huff.
"And next lesson, we'll look at a few cursed spells that tried to kill their inventors. Which, frankly, is what half of them deserved."
Ginny grinned. Luna was humming in delight. Colin whispered "This class is the best" under his breath.
Cassian clapped. "Books out. Let's write before the excitement fades."
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