Time, Orion concluded, was not linear. It was a sadistic rubber band that stretched infinitely thin when you were waiting for something interesting to happen, and snapped back with violent force when you were trying to avoid a lecture from your father.
The month of June was, by all accounts, the longest decade of Orion Malfoy's life.
The waiting was agony. The Hogwarts letter—that piece of parchment that symbolized freedom, a new start, and the ability to finally buy a wand that didn't hate his guts—was three weeks away. Three weeks. Twenty-one days. Five hundred and four hours.
"It's psychological torture," Orion muttered, staring at the grandfather clock in the hallway, which seemed to be ticking slower just to spite him. "I am aging in reverse out of sheer boredom."
But the boredom was only half the problem. The other half was currently vibrating in his pocket like an angry hornet.
The Blackthorn wand. The Heirloom. The "Gift."
Orion had named it The Stick of Spite.
After the initial disasters of the birthday week, a sane person would have put the wand away and waited for Ollivander. But Orion was not entirely sane; he was an engineer at heart, and he refused to believe that a piece of wood could outsmart him. He was determined to find a workaround, a frequency, a method of channeling his magic that wouldn't result in a catastrophe.
He was wrong.
The wand didn't just resist him; it actively trolled him.
It began on a Tuesday. Orion had decided to start with something harmless. Something soft. Spongify, the Softening Charm. It was a spell designed to make objects rubbery and bouncy. It was used for safety mats in Quidditch training. How dangerous could it be?
He stood in the center of his room, facing his bed. The silk duvet was perfectly made.
"Okay," Orion whispered to the wand. "We are going to make the mattress softer. That's it. No explosions. No lights. just... comfy."
He focused. He visualized the texture of a marshmallow. He moved the wand in the correct 'S' shape.
"Spongify!"
The wand jerked in his hand, delivering a shock that felt like licking a nine-volt battery. A stream of magic shot out—not the usual pink mist of the charm, but a sickly, neon-green sludge.
It hit the bed.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then, the structural integrity of the bed simply... gave up.
It didn't become bouncy. It didn't become rubbery. It liquefied.
The expensive mattress, the goose-down pillows, the silk sheets—they all simultaneously lost their solid state. The entire bed collapsed inward with a wet gloop sound, transforming into a pool of viscous, shimmering beige slime that dripped slowly onto the mahogany floor.
Orion stared.
"Well," Sparkle's voice chimed in, sounding delighted. "You technically made it softer. Liquid is softer than solid. Task failed successfully?"
"My bed is soup," Orion whispered, horrified. "I turned my bed into soup."
He stepped forward and poked the goo with his finger. It was sticky and smelled vaguely of ozone and wet dog.
"Dobby!" Orion screamed.
CRACK.
"Master Orion calls—OH!" Dobby stopped dead, his eyes bulging as he looked at the puddle of what used to be a four-poster bed. "Master... why is the bed... melting?"
"I don't know, Dobby," Orion said, wiping the slime off his finger. "I tried to make it soft. The wand decided to rewrite the laws of matter. Fix it. Please. Before Mother sees it and asks why I'm sleeping in a puddle."
"Dobby will fix!" The elf snapped his fingers, and the goo reluctantly reformed into pillows and sheets, though Orion swore the mattress felt a little damper for the rest of the week.
Two days later, Orion tried again.
He reasoned that Spongify was a Transfiguration-adjacent charm, and perhaps the wand didn't like altering the state of matter. He decided to try a simple Utility Charm. Reparo. The Mending Charm. It was the bread and butter of wizarding life.
He took a crystal water pitcher from his nightstand. He placed it on the floor. He smashed it with a heavy book.
CRASH.
Shards of crystal scattered across the rug.
"Perfect," Orion said. "Broken. Now we fix it."
He pointed the Blackthorn wand at the debris. He visualized the pieces flying back together, sealing into a whole.
"Reparo."
The wand hummed. It felt... heavy. Like it was sucking the magic out of him rather than channeling it.
A grey beam hit the shards.
Instead of flying together, the shards began to vibrate. They buzzed like angry bees. And then, with a sound like a grinding stone, they disintegrated.
They didn't just break further. They were reduced to their atomic components. In the span of three seconds, the pile of sharp crystal shards was reduced to a neat, circular pile of fine, white sand.
Orion lowered the wand. He looked at the sand.
"I made dust," Orion said flatly. "I tried to fix a pitcher, and I accelerated its entropy by a thousand years."
"Achievement Unlocked: The Destroyer," Sparkle suggested. "No? Okay. But seriously, if you ever need to hide a body, this wand is fantastic."
"I don't want to hide bodies, Sparkle! I want to drink water!" Orion shouted at the air. "This thing is a menace! It's an entropy machine!"
He kicked the pile of sand. It scattered like... well, sand.
"Dobby!"
CRACK.
"Master calls?"
"Clean up the sand, Dobby."
"Sand? In the bedroom? Did Master go to the beach?"
"No, Dobby. I tried to fix a pitcher. The pitcher is now sand. Don't ask."
The final straw came on Friday.
Orion, desperate for any kind of success, dug through his books for a charm that didn't involve altering matter or fixing things. He found Tarantallegra, the Dancing Feet Spell. But there was a variant for objects—a charm to make an object "dance" or wobble. It was often used to entertain toddlers.
"Toddler magic," Orion growled, placing a quill on his desk. "If I can't do toddler magic, I am resigning from wizardry."
He pointed the wand.
"Locomotor Wibbly."
The wand didn't buzz this time. It didn't shock him. It felt... strangely compliant.
Orion smiled. "Finally."
The spell hit the quill.
The quill did not wobble. The quill did not dance.
The quill launched itself into the air with the speed of a railgun projectile, bounced off the ceiling, ricocheted off the mirror (which screamed "My face!"), banked off the wardrobe, and zoomed around the room like a trapped hummingbird on caffeine.
Whiz. Bang. Thwack.
"Shit!" Orion yelled, diving behind his bed.
The quill was moving so fast it was a blur. It was shredding the curtains. It was chipping the plaster. It was essentially a lethal weapon fueled by a "dancing" charm.
"Make it stop!" Orion yelled, waving the wand blindly over the bed. "Finite! Finite Incantatem!"
The wand ignored him. It seemed to be enjoying the show.
Eventually, the quill embedded itself deep into the solid oak door with a terrifying THUNK, vibrating like an arrow.
Silence fell over the room.
Orion slowly raised his head from behind the mattress. He looked at the quill. It was buried two inches deep into the wood. If that had hit him...
"Okay," Orion said, his voice trembling slightly. "That's it. I'm done."
He stood up, walked over to his bedside table, opened the bottom drawer, and threw the wand inside. He didn't just close the drawer; he slammed it shut.
"You stay there," he hissed at the drawer. "You stay there and think about what you've done. You homicidal twig."
He collapsed into his chair, rubbing his temples. The phantom pain of his headache from the library incident seemed to throb in sympathy.
"So," Sparkle said softly. "No dancing?"
"Shut up, Sparkle."
The rest of the month was a study in academic retreat.
Orion had spent hours in the library, not just reading about spells, but researching wandlore. He needed to understand why the universe—or at least, his great-aunt's wand—hated him so much.
He found the entry in Geraint Ollivander's Guide to Wand Woods.
Blackthorn:A very unusual wand wood, which has the reputation, in my view well-merited, of being best suited to a warrior. This does not necessarily mean that its owner practices the Dark Arts (although it is undeniable that those who do so will enjoy the blackthorn wand's prodigious power); one finds blackthorn wands among the Aurors as well as among the denizens of Azkaban. It is a curious feature of the blackthorn bush, which sports wicked thorns, that it produces its sweetest berries after the hardest frosts, and the wands made from this wood appear to need to pass through danger or hardship with their owners to become truly bonded. Given this condition, the blackthorn wand will become as loyal a servant as one could wish.
Orion read the passage three times.
"Hardship," he muttered. "Danger. Warrior."
He looked around the library. He looked at his velvet robes. He looked at the tray of tea and biscuits Dobby had just brought him.
"I am a rich, pampered boy living in a manor protected by ancient wards," Orion sighed. "I haven't faced a hardship greater than lukewarm tea. No wonder it hates me. It thinks I'm soft."
"Well, you are soft," Sparkle pointed out. "Your skin is moisturized daily. You sleep on silk. You've never been punched in the face."
"I was hit by a book!"
"That was comedy, not combat."
"And the core?" Orion wondered aloud. "Lucius didn't know. He said the records were lost. That particular cousin—was apparently a recluse."
He flipped through a book on cores. Dragon Heartstring? Unicorn Hair? Phoenix Feather?
"It feels volatile," Orion analyzed. "Unicorn hair is consistent. Dragon is powerful but prone to accidents. This... this feels spiteful. Maybe it's something weird. Basilisk skin? The heartstring of a particularly grumpy badger?"
"Maybe it's just a bad wand," Sparkle suggested. "Maybe the wandmaker was drunk. It happens."
"Whatever it is," Orion closed the book with a snap. "It stays in the drawer. I am not risking my life or the structural integrity of the manor anymore. I will wait for Ollivander. I will get a wand that understands me. A wand that appreciates finesse, sarcasm, and the occasional need to turn a teacup into a tortoise without creating a nuclear explosion."
So, the strategy shifted.
With practical magic off the table, Orion threw himself into theory. He became a fixture in the library. He read until his eyes burned. He memorized the wand movements for every first-year spell until he could do them in his sleep. He studied the arithmancy behind the Levitation Charm, breaking down the vector equations of lift and drag.
He tried to drag Draco into his studies, but that was a lost cause.
"Why read about it when we can just do it in September?" Draco had whined, tossing a Gobstone into the air. "Father says the teachers will show us."
"Because, Draco," Orion had replied, nose deep in Magical Theory, "when we get there, I want to be able to do it on the first try while you are still trying to figure out which end of the wand produces the sparks."
"Nerd," Draco had scoffed.
"Peasant," Orion retorted.
As for achievements, the well had run dry.
The Manor was a closed loop. There were no new variables. Sparkle spent most of her time floating in the corner of his vision, playing a game of Pong with herself using the pixels of her own interface.
"We need a change of scenery," Orion told her one evening, watching the sun set over the peacock-infested gardens. "We need Diagon Alley. We need Hogwarts. We need chaos."
"I know," Sparkle sighed, missing a pixel-ball. "My energy levels are dropping. I haven't had a good dopamine hit since the Apple Juice incident. I'm bored, Orion. I'm so bored I actually considered reading one of your history books."
"Don't do that," Orion warned. "The authors of those books write like they died a hundred years before they actually died. It's lethal."
"Just a few more days," Orion promised, more to himself than to the system. "July is coming."
And indeed, the calendar on his wall—the one he marked with a large, red X every morning—was running out of squares.
June 30th arrived.
Orion went to bed early that night. He checked his inventory, admiring his deck of self-shuffling cards and his empty slot where the juice used to be.
"Tomorrow," he whispered to the darkness. "The owl comes tomorrow."
"Unless it gets lost," Sparkle offered helpfully.
"If the owl gets lost, I will hunt it down and eat it," Orion threatened.
"Achievement: Predator?"
"Goodnight, Sparkle."
"Goodnight, Orion."
He closed his eyes, the hum of magic in his blood singing a song of anticipation. The tutorial was dragging on, but the main quest... the main quest was about to begin. And Orion Malfoy was ready to break the game.