In late September, at Professor McGonagall's suggestion, Skyl submitted a Transfiguration paper to the journal Transfiguration Today. In it, he proposed two entirely new laws, which he named the Law of Essential Transfiguration and the Law of Eternal Transfiguration. These shattered the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration, long regarded as ironclad, and caused a huge stir in the wizarding world.
Every day, hundreds of letters poured into Hogwarts. Some writers approached things in a spirit of inquiry; others accused Skyl of simply grandstanding.
Professor McGonagall was Skyl's staunchest supporter. She took the issue of Transfiguration Today containing his paper and used it directly in class as supplementary teaching material.
With her explanation, the students all came to understand what the "Law of Essential Transfiguration" meant; its content matched the ideas Skyl had already mentioned in lessons. Essential Transfiguration meant analysing and coming to know the object you wished to transform something into. The deeper your understanding of the form in which that object existed, the more "real" the transfigured object became, until, once you crossed a certain threshold, you could transform one substance into another at its very root.
The best example was the Philosopher's Stone, which could turn any metal into pure gold.
Skyl, however, believed that this supreme feat of alchemy could be achieved through Transfiguration alone.
That law won him enthusiastic praise from many self-confident witches and wizards, who felt that wizards were born different and therefore ought to have the power to turn stone into gold. Most of the compliments Skyl received were aimed at this law. The Daily Prophet commented: though mad, it is feasible. This is the answer a genius has given the world.
Many witches and wizards, once they understood the Law of Essential Transfiguration, couldn't wait to try it out. For the next year, discussion and experiments relating to this law took up most of Transfiguration Today's pages. Very few people could truly achieve what it described; the breakthrough success came five months later, when a witch living temporarily in Equatorial Guinea managed to transfigure a ball of yarn into a chocolate chip biscuit, which she then ate and digested normally, thereby breaking Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration.
Not everyone could grasp Essential Transfiguration, but even so, a great many witches and wizards borrowed from Skyl's ideas about natural philosophy and made huge strides in their study of Transfiguration. As a result, the thank-you letters sent to Skyl multiplied by the day, and quite a few had actual Galleons tucked inside as a very tangible token of gratitude.
Some of the thank-you letters were downright bizarre. On the seventeenth of November, for instance, his owl Kaia brought him an unsigned pink envelope with a set of women's underwear inside. Then, on the third of December, he received a large parcel from an anonymous wizard "travelling in Egypt." In his letter, the man said that thanks to Skyl's inspiration, he had managed to use Transfiguration to escape pursuit by the local Aurors; the parcel contained some of his "local specialities," sent along as a token of his appreciation.
Honestly, what exactly was the British Ministry of Magic even doing? They hadn't managed to intercept a small-time thief smuggling Dark artefacts into the country from abroad.
Amid the turbulence and debate, the scholarly community of the wizarding world gradually came to accept Skyl's proposed Law of Essential Transfiguration. Rumour had it that he would be awarded the Order of Merlin for it; whether it would be the highest First Class or the slightly lesser Second Class was still under discussion, but barring surprises, this Hogwarts transfer student was set to become the youngest recipient of the Order of Merlin in history.
Strictly speaking, Skyl's name was already on everyone's lips before he had even left school. For a young man, that was an enormous honour. Yet there was always a shadow hanging over that honour: Skyl's second law—the Law of Eternal Transfiguration.
Public opinion on this law was almost unanimously negative. Every witch and wizard felt that Eternal Transfiguration was pure fantasy, because it involved a "time paradox."
In his paper, Skyl had declared the following: once an object has undergone Eternal Transfiguration, all traces of its existence in the past will also vanish, effectively changing the object's history.
In other words, the past could be altered; history could be rewritten.
The vast majority of people simply could not accept such a claim.
Faced with the Law of Eternal Transfiguration, not even the most deranged witches and wizards dared to trust it lightly. Professor McGonagall was evasive about it as well, and refused to discuss it in depth.
Among the students of Hogwarts, only Harry believed firmly in the Law of Eternal Transfiguration. It wasn't just because he had always supported Skyl; more importantly, Harry had a vague sense that Skyl had already cast Eternal Transfiguration once—and that he himself had seen the thing that had been transformed.
He had simply forgotten.
…
Time slipped unnoticed into October. Autumn leaves carpeted Hogwarts, and the temperature dropped sharply.
After a month of adjustment, the first-years were already used to life here and had gradually become quite adept at getting around all the magical oddities of the castle.
Life settled into a steady rhythm, and everything seemed to be moving in a good direction.
But Harry noticed that Skyl seemed troubled.
He first picked up on it during their morning runs together; Skyl always looked absent-minded.
Encouraged by the transfer student, many other students had started getting up early of their own accord to jog along the shore of the Black Lake behind him. Gradually, a sizeable running group formed; even Professor Flitwick would sometimes join in, trotting along on his short legs—though in the end, he just couldn't keep up.
People came and went from the group, but overall its size kept growing. Harry had paid close attention and noticed that ever since Skyl started substituting as a teacher, lots of older witches had begun orbiting around him. They would dress to the nines, as if attending a court ball: wearing hoop-supported, puffy dresses, painting their lips with colour-changing magical lipstick, layering their eyelids with thick colourful eyeshadow, teetering along in high heels, and pulling on over-the-knee woollen socks. They even dosed their eyes with some sort of magical drops so they would always look dewy and bright—one Hufflepuff girl accidentally used too much and spent the entire day unable to stop crying.
Harry had no idea what those witches were thinking. They never put any real effort into the morning run; they were either twisting their ankles or falling flat on their faces, and when they got hurt, they would put on an exaggerated performance of sobbing to de Lin. And the moment they turned up, a flock of wizards would immediately swarm over to them. All the chattering completely ruined the atmosphere of the run—they were clearly just there to make a nuisance of themselves.
Later on, the older witches even formed a fan club called the Three-Year Fever Dream Sisterhood, and spent all day gathered together researching de Lin's likes and dislikes. For such a frivolous, good-for-nothing club, their entry requirements were actually quite strict. At least according to Ron, Hermione had wanted to join, but had been turned down; the little girl was upset about it for days.
De Lin was always lukewarm towards his classmates as a whole, but he did rather enjoy chatting with witches. Harry understood even less what was going on in de Lin's head. In the evenings in the dormitory, when the boys talked about it, Ron would bring up his three older brothers—all of whom were wildly jealous of how popular the transfer student was with the girls. Most of the other roommates didn't get it at all. What was so great about witches? They were all so strong, not particularly friendly, and you couldn't exactly call them cute.
Dean Thomas, however, voiced a different opinion. This young wizard from a mixed-blood family had, like Harry, grown up in the Muggle world, but he was a bit more mature than the rest of the dorm. Very seriously, he said, "Girls are wonderful. They smell nice, and their laughs sound lovely."
Ron held up Hermione Granger as a negative example. "Witches are terrifying. Think about that Granger girl—when she talks, she stares straight at you, and her mouth spits out dozens of words every second. Before you can even figure out what she's saying, she's already barreling on to the next thing."
Neville muttered, "She's very clever."
That was true enough. Everyone agreed that Hermione was very clever. Not only clever, but hardworking as well. She was the first-year who'd won Gryffindor the most points and was a particular favourite of Professor McGonagall. By comparison, Harry and Ron were both walking point-deduction machines—one was constantly targeted by Snape, and the other was always getting into trouble.
Listening to his friends' light-hearted chatter, Harry still couldn't smooth the frown from his brow. He had his own worry these days: the strange dreams he had every night. He dreamed of terrible things—screams, roars, and wavering flashes of green light.
Although every time he woke up he could barely remember any details of the dreams, the chaotic pulses left behind in his network of nerves still weighed on his mood. The lingering frenzy of the dreamscape left him distracted in lessons, and, for some reason, whenever he walked through the castle of Hogwarts, he kept having a feeling of déjà vu—"I feel like I've seen this somewhere before."
Strangely enough, even though Harry drifted off in class again and again, his studies didn't fall behind at all; if anything, things were becoming easier and easier for him.
He couldn't tell whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Harry wanted to ask de Lin for advice, but felt that something so trivial really wasn't worth bothering him over. If he could see him more often, he might be able to slip it into the conversation.
But the transfer student was always coming and going like a ghost; it wasn't easy to track him down.
Meanwhile, in his dormitory, Skyl opened his eyes, stared up at the canopy of his four-poster bed, and sighed.
"Why am I still not having any dreams?"
TN: For those who didn't read the clarification about the names, I'll repeat it: "To clarify when they call him "de Lin": they are not addressing him by his first name but by his surname. "de" is sometimes used in surnames in Spanish, Catalan, or Occitan as a connector (like Ana de Armas), similar to "van" in Dutch".
Thanks for the stones :D .
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