Troll: 37. Mind Over Matter

Chapter 37: Mind Over Matter

Blaise Zabini
Zabini Manor, Great Britain

I turned in that night with complicated feelings. I was exhausted.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d drawn the attention of a predator, a big cat with absolutely zero sense of remorse or shame, and a deep-seated craving for “interesting” things. She’d be watching me like her favorite soap opera.

I had carte blanche to do as I pleased with Violet. Broadly speaking, Valencia Zabini had no interest in the Girl Who Lived. She lacked any sort of political ambition in Magical Britain and I considered that to be a good thing. I’d have to work to make sure that she kept the same attitude moving forward.

Or, if not that, perhaps I could “stake my claim.” Mother seemed to be under the impression that I was “hunting,” cultivating a connection because I felt Violet could be useful later on. So long as she thought I was grooming the Chosen One for a specific purpose, she likely wouldn’t intervene, kind of like how a big cat allowed her kittens to play at stalking prey.

Hell, in that context, I was fairly sure I could convince her to lend me her assistance on occasion. I was loath to use her as a resource for fear of changing her mind, but it was certainly an option to have in my back pocket. Whatever else might be said about my mother dearest, no one ever accused her of incompetence.

X

The next morning was as calm as every other morning. And that felt wrong to me. I felt a quiet unease, like the way the air buzzed before a storm.

Mother didn’t have political ambitions, she was a huntress who delighted in the thrill of the chase, but that didn’t mean she had no questions for me. The fact that she’d yet to try to use my power for her own gain unnerved me somewhat.

Feeling troubled, I headed out to the garden to meditate. The occlumency lessons contained in To Be as Nothing had started out as a means to an end, but I’d learned to appreciate the moments of silence. They offered me respite from all the planning and insignificant squabbling of my yearmates.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Slowly, I sank into myself, isolating myself from the world around me. Occlumency wasn’t typically like this.

Conventional occlumency was all about a masquerade. Yes, there was a “empty your mind” step, but that exercise was used as a means of focus, not a defense in itself.

Conventional occlumency was akin to building a castle wall around your core memories, then painting that wall into a facade of what the intruder was looking for, presenting them a false profile of your own mind. Dario Zabini, my ancestor, had done something a little different. He stopped at the “empty your mind” stage and took it several steps further.

There was no wall around my mind, not in the rigid, structured sense. Instead, I could best liken it to the Hogwarts Forbidden Forest. It was a deep, foggy space with intentionally ambiguous borders. The fog masked my emotions and thoughts, blending reality and imagination together until it became “as nothing.” Ideally, it would fool any attempt to detect emotions or sentience, such as the homenum revelio charm or even dementors.

This method suited me better than the one Snape used to teach Harry in Order of the Phoenix. I excelled at the obscure, subtle disciplines that favored finesse over strength; that was what a silver lime wand meant.

And yet, there was a flaw in my occlumency training: I’d never been tested. I had an inner “forest.” I had a fogbank that no one could see through, at least theoretically. But I had no way of knowing if my defenses were functional.

The easiest way to check would be to walk up to a dementor like dear ol’ Uncle Dario, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled to try that. Not that I could even if I felt like doing something particularly stupid today. The days of loose dementors were gone and Azkaban was warded to hell and back.

My only other option to stress test my occlumency was to find a practice partner. And here, in Zabini Manor, there was only one other person: mother. It was… not quite as risky as it sounded, but only because of that stupid CYOA that led to my arrival here in the first place.

That CYOA guaranteed that my past life, as well as any meta-knowledge I possessed, would be protected from all means of detection. No amount of legilimency nor veritaserum, or anything else that would compel the truth from me, would work.

The question was, did I trust it? Everything else about my CYOA was true to form. I was a divination prodigy. My wand was exactly as I’d customized. I had a spell ring and Fate took an interest in me. I was so hilariously bad at herbology that Professor Sprout half thought I was a budding arsonist. 

I sighed. I was nervous, and for good reason, but… but I could trust my build. Either I was delusional and had dreamt the entire CYOA, in which case I was fucked anyway, or I hadn’t and those choices now shaped my life in concrete ways. To distrust those same choices would be tantamount to distrusting myself.

So reasoned, I stood to find the black widow.

X

I found her in her room, getting ready for the day. Unlike me, she didn’t suffer from Somnolent, and so didn’t have to maximize her morning hours.

 When I asked for occlumency training, her face lit up with a radiant smile that would have made angels fall from envy. It sent a shiver of dread down my spine but I was committed now.

“Oh! It’s about time, dear,” Valencia Zabini beamed as did her makeup. Or rather, had a charmed makeup kit float around and fuss over her like she was a Disney princess. She was the kind of woman who had to look absolutely perfect even in the comfort of her own home. “What brought this on?”

“It struck me over the semester that I’d allowed that aspect of my magical development to fall by the wayside.”

“You used to hate occlumency lessons.”

“I suspect I still will, mother,” I replied with a glib smile. “I’ve simply decided that I hate being lacking even more.”

“Then of course I will help you, Blaise.” She dismissed her semi-autonomous makeup kit with a wave of her hand and stood. “Come, let’s have breakfast. We can continue afterwards.”

Pooky served us toasted slices of baguette with crushed tomatoes and garlic. Mom had strong coffee while I favored a glass of pulpy orange juice. After that, she ushered me into a sitting room, where she sat across from me with a distinctly predatory smirk.

I set Dario Zabini’s memoir on the table between us. She’d gotten it for me from our primary residence in Sicily at my request so she knew that my self-training had not been normal.

“Shall we begin, mother?”

“Of course. It’s a pity. I’ve never been good enough to do this wandlessly,” She twirled her wand teasingly. She pointed it square between my eyes and I had to suppress the instinct to duck. “I will browse your school life; keep me out as best you can, oh son of mine. Legilimens!”

Learning occlumency from my mother was an experience that was both novel yet familiar. While I had memories of old-Blaise, I’d dropped into his mind this summer.

It wasn’t like I’d grown up with Valencia Zabini; there was a certain distance between my current self and Blaise’s fucked up childhood. I considered that a good thing. It was what allowed me to think and plan like an adult, not an attention-starved teen raised by a serial killer.

Which was perhaps why this training session caught me off guard. Though I had the right memories, I hadn’t been the one to experience those lessons.

Conventional occlumency training involved the legilimens battering away at the occlumens. The idea was that if the legilimens intruded into a person’s mind enough, the mind would naturally work to kick them out, kind of like an autoimmune response. And then, the prospective occlumens could work to gain control over the mental muscles they’d now become aware of.

It was crude, unpleasant, and potentially deeply intimate. The mind was the final bastion a person could trust. Having a stranger repeatedly violate it was akin to drinking vodka to “develop a tolerance.” There was a reason occlumency was a subject left to parents and relatives.

As I’d found, Valencia Zabini was not the typical witch. The world did not fade. There was no “mind palace” for me to retreat to, at least, not at my level. I doubted many people had that kind of control over their own minds. So I sat there, staring down her wand, as my mother crawled inside my head.

The experience was honestly a little dull. The pain I’d expected from my knowledge of Snape’s methods was absent. If I had to draw a comparison, it was as if my mother had pried my mouth open so she could stick her finger inside and play with my tongue. It felt uncomfortable, intrusive, and weirdly intimate, but not outright painful.

In that sense, I was better off than Harry had been. As I recalled, there was a great deal of screaming and cursing involved when Snape did it.

Then again, nothing about Harry’s lessons were normal. Harry was introduced to the discipline late in life, and the boy had zero interest in learning. At the time, he thought he could use his connection with Voldemort to outmaneuver him. The fault wasn’t entirely Harry’s of course, Snape was a douche-nozzle, but simply put, you couldn’t teach an unwilling student.

Honestly, I was starting to suspect that Snape made it hurt on purpose. Maybe out of hatred for James Potter’s son, maybe because he thought pain would be a good motivator. Or maybe those lessons were crude, rush jobs that Snape had to resort to because of the Dark Lord’s looming presence.

Not so with Valencia.

Valencia Zabini was no master of the mental arts, nothing compared to Snape, but she never was one to rely on brute force. Even with most other branches of magic, I never knew her to be particularly gifted. Better than many perhaps, but likely just north of average.

No, her gifts were in social manipulation, seduction, and poisons. Her legilimency probe reflected that. I could feel her touch caressing my mind, almost as if she was trying to entice me into giving up my secrets of my own accord.

I did my best to repel her, to limited success. As good as I was at “becoming nothing,” I hadn’t had to directly repel a mental attack since this summer. It was like learning to use a muscle I didn’t know existed and even mother’s relatively slapdash mental probe felt oppressive.

Still, when she pulled back, I knew my long hours had born fruit. She looked at me with a puzzled expression, as if she didn’t know whether to be annoyed or pleased.

“I cannot find your dorm,” she mused. “No matter how far I delve, it is as though Slytherin does not have a dorm in the dungeons.”

“The book was very useful, mother,” I told her. If she couldn’t find the Slytherin dorm, it also meant she couldn’t see all the readings I did in my suite. In that regard, I considered my training successful. “I think hiding my memories suits me more than a direct confrontation.”

“Yes, you do seem to excel at the subtler disciplines. However, this obscurity is insufficient. Dario Zabini used this gift to go where he was not wanted and escape detection. If you are ever interrogated and the legilimens knows what they want, being unable to find it in your mind will only invite more… creative… methods.”

“That’s true. Presenting a false memory is difficult when I don’t have anyone to train with though.”

“We’ll have to correct that this winter.”

I swallowed thickly. “Yes, mother.”

We repeated this exercise several more times. As though gaining control over muscles I didn’t know I had, I slowly improved in keeping her out. 

I wasn’t the only one learning. Mother quickly figured out that crafting memory was the hardest part of this exercise. Rather than browse my school life in general, she focused on the Slytherin common room, which she knew as well as I did.

I was told to give her a new password each time. When I could do that, she moved on to changing the location of the entrance. Then, I had to recreate the common room completely, with only a few details changed each time. If I could sneak a change past her, or convince her that it was always this way, I passed.

Lastly, she said that I should be able to recreate one of those duels I’d seen in the pit. This kind of dynamic imposition of a memory was far more difficult. When I could do this perfectly, then I could consider myself a master of conventional occlumency.

X

No matter how much I wanted to keep practicing, I couldn’t occupy Valencia’s time forever. After a light lunch, she headed out to do her day job: hanging off the arms of rich men.

Well, that wasn’t entirely fair. As a socialite and widow of seven husbands, she had quite a bit of wealth in her own right. As far as I knew, House Zabini had a handful of businesses in Knockturn Alley. Not many, mother preferred to sell businesses and store up assets rather than run them, but keeping a few income streams was only logical.

In this case, it meant going to a luncheon with the board of Saint Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. Lowell was an honorary board member there and had gotten her through the door. He’d been the head of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes back during his cousin’s administration and had joined the board so that the ministry could foster better relations with the hospital.

I wondered if that had been a conflict of interest. Saint Mungo’s was not a nonprofit, though they did have provisions for patients under financial hardship. I supposed it didn’t really matter now that he’d retired from the government. 

With my afternoon free, I realized just how boring Magical Britain was. All the things I used to do as a man of the twenty-first century were gone: D&D 3.5e wouldn’t be out until 2003; 5e wouldn’t be out until 2014. Japan was just starting to catch its stride in the anime and manga industries. Pokemon and the video game industry was only barely starting to take off. And none of it mattered because Magical Britain was a literal goddamn century behind in entertainment anyway.

The sheer lack of entertainment options made me question what other wizards did. Not everyone had house elves to take care of chores, but there were household charms that condensed hours of labor to a few minutes at most. It seemed to me that wizards had way too much time on their hands.

Looking back, old-Blaise used to read, practice a few basic spells with a relative’s wand, make potions, and… that was about it. There was the wizarding wireless, but you could only listen to the radio for so long. When he wasn’t making social calls to other pureblood children, he was a very lonely boy.

With nothing better to do, I knocked out my winter assignments in record time. Most professors didn’t see fit to burden us over the holidays, but there were always exceptions. Snape and McGonagall were as demanding as ever, but to my surprise, so was Sinistra.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been. The astronomy curriculum was the most predictable in Hogwarts. No matter how talented she was, it wasn’t as if she could make the sky show us something different. There were star charts, but if she wanted us to “witness the heavens in all their natural splendor,” she had to stick to the guide rails the “heavens” decided on.

She had us writing about the Greek constellations that could be seen above the British winter sky. We were to choose one and follow its course throughout the night sky, taking note of its position and what it might mean for the world. There was also an eight inch report on the constellation’s history and cultural significance that was due on the first day back.

I did as I’d always done. I picked a constellation, Orion, and scried the position it would be in each night. The report took a few hours, it was meant to be done all throughout the holidays, but it was worth it to get it out of the way.

X

The next day, after occlumency practice, I stepped outside into the freezing cold of a London winter to jog. Hogwarts had the Room of Requirement, but there just wasn’t enough free space in the manor to exercise so I used that as an excuse to step outside.

The Zabini Manor in Britain was not unlike the Black family’s Grimmauld Place. It was situated in the outskirts of the London metropolitan area and took up no more room than a three-bedroom house, just like any other in the suburb. It didn’t used to look like this, but times changed, and my stepdad’s family changed with them.

Inside, heavy use of space expansion charms ensured it could house three times that number, with an indoor garden thrown in for good measure. Mom had to get her stock of poisons from somewhere, and she liked to grow some of her favorites by hand. She was a creature of passion, and it gave her hunts a more personal touch.

If I remembered right, the manor that wasn’t technically a manor anymore had belonged to stepdad number two… or maybe three…? I wasn’t sure, but it had become our main residence in Great Britain ever since his tragic, yet predictable passing. 

Once upon a time, this little house, much more manor-like back then, had been a solitary building in the countryside, nearly a day out from the city. As the years passed, the city expanded and the marshy valley that used to surround this place was swallowed up by buildings and cobbled streets, only for those same streets to be replaced by paved roads.

I was glad for it. Being so close to London now gave me the chance to reinsert myself into muggle society. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the sound of automobiles or the smell of subpar street food before today. So long as I was discreet about it, I doubted Valencia would care overmuch.

I breathed heavily as my feet pounded the pavement. Each breath misted into white crystals in front of my face. I was dressed in nondescript, gray trousers. They looked pretty old-fashioned as far as muggle-wear went, but they were as passable as I could find in my wardrobe. I’d have to get decent workout clothes later, maybe a few pairs of sweatpants for comfort.

As I jogged, I kept track of my surroundings. I’d made a to-do list of things I’d like to get done over the winter and one of them was to pick up proper fencing lessons. I’d have to settle for a well-written manual during the school year, but that was better than nothing.

If push came to shove, I could adopt a dual-wielding manual for my personal use, maybe one of those that advised a parrying dagger. I’d need to learn to cast with my left hand, but that wasn’t impossible. And with my precognition, I’d hopefully be able to use both weapons equally well.

The idea came to me when I used my cane to deflect Peeves’ water balloons. And then there was that duel with Terence. The more I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me. Maybe it was a bit silly and old-fashioned, but what kind of man said no to becoming a magic swordsman?

I knew I wouldn’t find a good fencing studio anywhere near me; fencing was a niche hobby and those were quite rare as a result. What I did find was a library. And this being the early 90s, I was able to coax a phonebook from the librarian.

After a bit of searching, I found a fencing studio within four miles of my manor. I used a public phone booth to give them a call and, five minutes later, had lessons scheduled all throughout winter.

Now if only I could convince the goblins to turn my cane into a rapier…

Author’s Note

As far as I’m aware, legilimency is not easy. It’s not something most people can do wandlessly and nonverbally. The only examples we get of master legilimens in canon I think are Dumbledore and Voldemort, and maybe Snape. I’m still not sure how good he is at it besides “good enough to teach Harry occlumency.”

Tree Fact: Silver lime trees are symbols of longevity and fertility in Slavic mythology because they are associated with the goddess Laima, whose domains include luck, destiny, and birth.

Sometimes, you will find many dead bees surrounding a flowered silver lime tree. This has led to the misconception that silver lime pollen or nectar contains poison. This is false; there is no poison.

In reality, the nectar contains minor amounts of caffeine. It's thought that bees drink it, consume caffeine, and the stimulant tricks them into thinking the nectar is more energy-dense than it actually is, causing the bees to make sub-optimal foraging decisions, tire, and eventually fall out of the sky.