Skyl didn't ask the young witches and wizards to explain what they'd meant by their drawings. Appreciating art—even children's scribbles—is never just a simple puzzle to be solved. It's like making an author do "reading comprehension" on their own book; their answer might be completely different from whatever the textbook calls the "correct" interpretation. When an audience looks at a work, they recreate it in their own minds. What they see and think about will inevitably diverge from the creator.
There was another reason: kids in their early teens don't exactly excel at logical presentations. Making them stammer through an "artist's statement" would be time-consuming and not very rewarding for anyone.
So at a moment like this, Skyl was going to lean firmly into his personal philosophy of: "I don't care what you think. I care what I think." He would use these four drawings to expound his own theory—and as far as the current European magical world was concerned, they might as well treat that theory as gospel.
He pointed at Hannah's blue sheet of paper. "Learning magic is like working with colour. In the beginning, you know nothing about painting. You can only use one colour to fill every inch of the page. Your strokes are chaotic and abundant and unconstrained. They aren't defined by anyone, and they refuse to be defined.
"This is what raw magic looks like. A young witch or wizard has to remain ignorant of magic itself for that magic to act freely, to fill the page, to break its bounds and burst outward. That's why most children have their first accidental magic outburst between six and eight. When it happens earlier, it's because their talent is too strong. The longer it's delayed, the less likely it is to happen at all. Once a child becomes aware of the magic inside them—even if it's just some jealous little wish aimed at the people around them—they start, unconsciously, searching inward for that magic. That awareness pollutes its original state. Under those conditions it's very easy to produce a Squib: someone with wizarding blood but no ability to cast spells."
Some of the kids understood; some didn't. Skyl glanced around. Harry's eyes were sparkling; Ron's face was a picture of confusion. Skyl didn't pause to wait for anyone to catch up. He moved on to the next drawing—Justin Finch-Fletchley's. Justin was a bright boy, and when he saw his picture in second place, there was a faint, hard-to-describe sadness on his face.
"Once accidental magic has occurred, you enter the next stage. When a single colour has filled everything, you realise one colour is too monotonous. It doesn't express anything. It's just there, alone and ordinary. People forget it as soon as they look away. And making it wasn't some great achievement, either—you just kept rubbing the same crayon across the paper.
"At that point, most people's first instinct is to bring in more colours, the way Justin has done—separating them out, letting them contrast with each other, making the image more inclusive. That's like our first attempts to control our magic consciously. More colours 'pollute' the original blue, but they also make further creation possible.
"And here I have to mention a very particular phenomenon: the Obscurus. It's a dangerous entity born inside a magical child. It appears when a young witch or wizard doesn't learn to control their magic in time and, because they're terrified of hurting others with it, begins to suppress themselves deliberately. In that pain and despair and sorrow, an Obscurus is born. It's like a monster that devours the original colour, eating and eating until the raw magic is completely polluted. When that happens, the magical child dies. Every Obscurus is the mark of a tragedy."
A heavy, frightened silence settled over the classroom. No one spoke.
But when Skyl stepped under the third picture, everyone burst out laughing again. Seamus's artistic "masterpiece" had that much impact. It was ugly enough to shake the soul. Seamus puffed out his chest and put on a proud expression; clearly he didn't mind using himself as a joke to make his classmates laugh.
"When the colours keep coming, each one starts to choose its own place. Painting is nothing more than putting the right colour in the right spot. The cave dwellers at Altamira used the simplest strokes to depict people and prey. As for Seamus's painting, well—you can see some basic structure. This hairy yellow blob in the middle might be the sun… or a ball of yarn. And all this red spraying out of it… maybe that's inspired by watermelon juice."
Seamus shrugged. He hadn't thought about it that deeply at all.
"For most spells, you only need imagination up to this level. Most adult witches and wizards never get further than this in their entire lives. They notice some patterns in nature, have a few fantasies, and then slap those ideas onto a spell. Even at that point, your magic is under control—but it still has something wild and erratic and unreasonable in it. At this stage your imagination runs everywhere, and the magic you use often looks absurd."
Skyl pulled a round boiled sweet from his pocket and enlarged it, then cast a "long-arms" charm on it. The sweet suddenly sprouted a pair of little hands. Another charm—a dancing spell—and the candy launched into an energetic street-dance routine right there on the spot.
The whole scene was eerie and comical at once.
It felt like something out of Alice in Wonderland. Every character and object could be traced back to reality, and yet everything was just off enough to feel slightly deranged.
Skyl smiled. "We've taken the long way around, but now we're back where we started. To master silent casting, you have to go one step further. You can't just understand a spell as a sequence of wand movements and syllables. You must know what the spell is for. When you cast the same spell at the same target over and over, what reaction are you hoping to evoke?"
He moved in front of Hermione's picture. "Look. I asked you to fill the paper with colour. I didn't ask you to draw any particular shape or thing. But Hermione Granger still chose to paint a landscape. She knows what she wants. She knows how to use colour to describe the story in her heart. That is the secret of silent casting. You don't need to say the incantation—the spell is already ringing inside your mind."
The more Muggle schooling someone had, the more they could follow Skyl's thinking. A scientific education trained logical thought; logical thought helped witches and wizards grasp magic. Magic didn't obey the rules of natural philosophy, but those who used magic still had to understand the objective world.
After all, if magical phenomena existed in this universe at all, that meant they were already part of nature.
Skyl thought Hogwarts really ought to offer a basic course in natural science. Nothing advanced—just enough to train students to observe and analyse the world around them. Seekers after knowledge don't throw away truth, even when it comes in the form of so-called Muggle learning.
The lesson was already more than halfway over. Skyl was about to move on to the next topic and let the children practise silent casting on their own later.
Just then, someone raised a hand to ask about the secret of wandless magic.
Everyone's curiosity was obvious.
Skyl didn't brush it off. He waved his hand and brought back the four pictures from before, rearranging them so that Hermione's came first and Hannah Abbott's last.
"Wandless casting is very simple—and very difficult. It demands more than belief. It requires real resonance with your own magic. A wand has never actually been a mandatory tool for casting. The ancient Druids who channelled the power of nature and transformed into beasts at will never used these little sticks. Magic is there whether or not you have a wand. Learning wandless casting is a slow journey back into yourself. When you can return to that original, single colour—when you can forget all the rules and constraints—that's when you've grasped wandless magic."
As he explained, Skyl found himself thinking of the classic scene where Zhang Wuji learns Taiji Fist.
Zhang Sanfeng: "Wuji, my boy—how much do you still remember?"
Zhang Wuji: "Completely forgot.jpg."
Wandless casting really was a "forget everything and let it flow" kind of state. Every witch and wizard had experienced accidental magic. In those moments, they reached out to their own magic unconsciously. If they could ever bring that same magic fully under conscious control, there would be no need for a wand to guide it.
At the end of the day, a wand was just a channel. Wand cores were bits of powerful magical creatures. Their purpose was to form a bridge between your magic and reality. And as long as something could channel your power, even a plastic instant-noodle fork could serve as a wand.
The kids were nowhere near ready to handle a theory like that. One after another, their faces broke into bright, utterly clueless grins.
Skyl blinked. "All right then. Let's throw out all the duelling club's fancy frills. It's time you saw the harsh, honest face of a wizard's fight. I need a volunteer—who's willing to come up and help me?"
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