(Arcane Tinker) Chapter 10: The Paved Road

Chapter 10: The Paved Road

1st September 1991, Willowbrook Village

Dean had a surprisingly good time ever since the trip to Diagon Alley. The rumours of him being a Pyrokinetic seemed to have put off most of the other bullies in the orphanage. Matron Kara did scold him for hurting other residents, but he could tell that her heart just wasn’t in it.

Nevertheless, he had spent the entire summer without a single person trying to harass him. He even got to go to Diagon Alley again to register his wand, and no one batted an eyelash afterwards. He had even saved enough to buy some actual, real writing supplies, specifically a set of quills that were enchanted to be resistant to damage and not need ink to write.

Honestly, most of the summer was spent reading through his schoolbooks. Funnily enough, it was History of Magic that fascinated him the most. The book they were asked to bring was more of an introduction on how the magical world was run than anything else. It explained how the ministry worked, its different departments, and its most important laws.

It was surprisingly modern, at least compared to what Dean imagined it would have been. He expected everything to be run as some kind of House of Lords, each with thousands of years of magical ancestry to join. He expected people to have to bow to each other in greeting, and introduce themselves in very long sentences that probably described each of their great-grandparents’ lineages.

Well, magical nobility was absolved when the Statute of Secrecy was put in place, meaning that Lords and Ladies who held territories lost them in a day, getting hereditary seats in the Wizengamot as compensation. Those were the only seats in Magical Britain that could be passed down with every generation, but with how old families slowly went extinct, there were barely more than twenty-eight today, which were nicknamed the ‘sacred twenty-eight’.

Funnily enough, something else that baffled Dean was the fact that blood purity wasn’t exactly a thing people cared about. Only the sacred twenty-eight did, to make sure they still held their seats. But half-bloods were normally just as well regarded as purebloods. It honestly depended on the ancestry, really. If someone had a wizard or witch somewhere in the family tree, then that was enough. It was muggleborns, really, who were persecuted. For one, they were pretty rare to begin with. Every year, Hogwarts gets around five muggleborn students. They tended to be bitter teens who had been traumatised during their magical activation, and more often than not, kept lashing out at everything and everyone around them.

They were also what Voldemort’s propaganda was centred around. He wanted to kill or imprison muggleborns the moment their magic activated, especially if it’s late in their lives. It was a surprisingly popular movement, which he capitalised by attempting a violent revolution, which, when it failed, turned to a form of guerrilla warfare to pressure the rest of the country to give him control.

Until he was stopped by Neville Longbottom, that is.

That was all there really was in the book, really. He could understand why most kids his age would hate reading this. It was such a dry book that it was unsuitable for eleven-year-old students. If Dean hadn’t really read dozens of far worse tomes when he was in that weird illusion after his mother died, then he would have been bored, too. Unfortunately, or fortunately if you squinted, he would have gone insane if he didn’t have anything to preoccupy himself, and reading books alongside his doppelganger, even dry ones, did the job, and stopped him from going mad.

Thankfully, the other spell books were far more interesting. They were obviously geared toward younger readers, but the instructions were pretty clear. So far, Dean has learned a new spell every couple of days. The repairing charm has already proved its usefulness many times, and so has the shrinking charm, and a few cleaning charms.

Funnily enough, just replicating the wand movements, the incantation, and whatever extra instruction was in the books, just got him to cast a spell. He had no idea why it worked, only that it did.

Spells were also really specific, as in extremely so. Dean didn’t know why, but people just couldn’t modify spells on the fly. The power, the energy in every spell, had to be a certain range to work, and they had some very weird limitations that shouldn’t really work. For example, the cutting charm couldn’t cut organic materials. And there was a special one that only worked on plants. That’s not to mention one that was only for duelling, but couldn’t really be underpowered to cut something small or overpowered to cut a boulder in half.

It was just so odd, and he couldn’t find an answer to it anywhere. No, he would wait until he went to Hogwarts and ask the professors there. They probably know a lot about the subject. Not that he’d have to wait for too long; after all, tomorrow would be his first day in Hogwarts.

Dean had packed everything and was ready to go to the train station. Well, almost everything. His painting. His first painting. The young wizard smiled at his mother’s image, and she returned it softly. She wasn’t like most portraits in the wizarding world. He asked around, and painters somehow got people to imprint their own personalities into the canvas before they even started painting. Dean just did it through memory, something that he couldn’t find any mention of anywhere. His theory was that it probably had to do with his own personal magic, but that was barely more than guessing.

Still, even if it wasn’t her, waking up to see his mother’s smile did more than enough to calm him down. When he touched the painting, he could practically feel the warmth of her hugs. He was tempted to leave the painting in the orphanage since it would have been weird to have a large painting of his mother in his dormitory, but he just couldn’t. And he ended up paying an older resident for the instructions for the shrinking charm and spent almost two weeks learning it.

He pointed his wand towards the painting and murmured, “Reducio.”

Just like that, the painting started to slowly shrink down until it fit the palm of his hand. Yes, that would do. He put it in his trunk and slowly closed it.

With that done, he slowly walked downstairs to meet up with his friends, like they agreed the previous day. He saw Jack giving them a wide grin, with Lisa and Sally-Anne waiting for him impatiently, “You’re late!”

Dean rolled his eyes. “I’m so sorry. There was this old lady who needed help with her groceries. Such a nice woman.”

Jack was snickering, but Lisa was glaring at him, “Stop lying! This is an orphanage! There aren’t any old women walking around with groceries.”

“That’s very weird. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree,” he replied with a smirk on his face.

“There’s nothing to agree about. There aren’t any old ladies here. You’re obviously lying.”

Dean smirked once more, “And I respect your opinion.”

Lisa was slowly turning red, and Jack interrupted her coming outburst, “As amusing as this is to watch, and believe me, it is, we need to get going or we’re going to miss the train.”

And so, the three of them followed Jack to the inn and used the Floo to get to King’s Cross Station, disappearing in a burst of green flames. They appeared in a designated floo station in King's Cross and walked towards platform number nine, and slowly walked through the hidden entrance between it and platform number ten. They were then met with a large red and gold train that had the words 'Hogwarts Express' written on it.

Jack gave them a small smirk, “Alright, do you remember the tickets that came in a few days ago. Well, taken them out and put them right here.”

The older boy put his own ticket inside a small latch on the side of the train. Suddenly, the ticket was swallowed up, and a door appeared out of thin air. He entered the train without any issues. Dean tried to follow him, only to be stopped by some kind of invisible force. Jack snickered, “You need to put in your tickets first.”

They did just that and followed him onto the train. They quickly found an empty compartment and they sat down inside it. With them settled down, Jack gave them a soft smile, “Well, I’ll be off now. I want to catch up with my friends. I haven’t seen most of them for months. Don’t worry, just wear your uniforms when the train conductor announces that we’re near Hogsmeade and you should be golden.”

They barely had time to even process what he said before he left the compartment. Lisa rolled her eyes at the closed compartment door. “Well, that’s one way to ditch us.”

Dean simply shrugged, “To be fair, he obviously has other friends his age.”

Sally-Anne was the one to interject this time, “He could have been nicer about it.”

The shy girl got closer to them since their first trip to Diagon Alley. It didn’t take long for him to realise that Sally-Anne was just extremely introverted. To be fair, Dean himself also found hanging out with people to become tiresome after a while, which was completely the opposite of Lisa, who relished socialising and meeting new people.

Anyway, the conversation progressed from being annoyed at Jack, to the Hogwarts Houses, “So, where do you think you’ll be sorted?”

Dean didn’t really know how to answer that. He didn’t really have any idea where he even wanted to be sorted. According to the book series, he was supposed to go to Gryffindor, but that wasn’t him. It was never going to be him.

He didn’t know if he was brave or noble. He wasn’t exactly hard-working, since he rarely needed to exert any effort for most things. He wasn’t wise since he was a child. He didn’t understand why anyone would have made that a requirement for a house. If it were for older students, maybe people in their twenties, it would have made sense. But for eleven-year-olds, it was pretty unreasonable. He also didn’t really have any grand ambitions.

Deciding not to commit to anything, he simply smiled back at her, “I don’t know, really. I didn’t really think about it much.”

Lisa took that in strides, “Dean, you’re a pyrokinetic, you won’t need to really worry about this stuff. Even if you end up in Slytherin, most people would be scared of being burned alive.”

Dean gave her a cheapish look, “Well, I didn’t say anything before, but I’m not exactly a Pyrokinetic.”

That seemed to stun both of his friends, “How? I saw you set things to fire without a wand.”

He removed his silver ring and gave it to them, “It’s the ring. I bought it at a second-hand store in Diagon Alley.”

Lisa grinned at him, “Oh, I know about those. They’re rings that can send fireballs. They ran out of style since they need to be recharged by whoever enchanted them, and the magic inside them is pretty limited. I think it can hold three or four blasts of fire. How did the magic not fade away then?”

That stunned Dean to no end, “The magic was supposed to run out?”

“Yeah. It’s the reason why people don’t use them much, and only the enchanter who made them could recharge them. Are you telling me that yours just don’t run out?”

“I don’t know,” he hesitated. He remembered feeling compelled by the ring when he found it in his shop, and it made sense for the thing to be so cheap when he bought it. The shop owner probably thought that he was scamming him, essentially buying an empty ring.

Sally-Anne gave him an incredulous look, “How can you not know?” Then she brightened significantly, “Oh, that has to be your magic. You can charge enchanted items without you making them? I haven’t heard of anything like it before, but it’ll make you very popular with enchanters, that’s for sure.”

Dean didn’t blame her. It was rare to have a form of magic that was this passive. The ability wasn’t bad, it meant that he could use enchanted items for as much as he wanted to, but he could instinctively know that it wasn’t it, “I’m not sure. We’ll have to test it when we get to Hogwarts.”

Lisa frowned for a minute at his reply before giving him a wide smile, “Hey, at least we won’t have to worry about you snapping and burning us all alive. I guess you’re an enchanter now, even if you’re a pretty weird one. It’s kinda obvious now that I think about it. Clairvoyants and Enchanters are often the ones who need more time and effort to recognise what their personal magic is.”

His reply was cut off by a loud whistle, and the train slowly started to move. They were officially on their way to Hogwarts, and Dean would be lying if he said that he wasn’t excited about going to magic school.

AN: And that’s the second chapter from this batch. I hope I didn’t drag out the pre-Hogwarts stuff too much, but I wanted to introduce the world a bit. I know that it’s been a bit of an information dump, but things should slow down on that front a bit, and the actual plot will start. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions, and I’ll see you all tomorrow for the next EM chapter.