"Maurise, did you see your parents in the Mirror of Erised?"
Harry's voice held a note of genuine concern, the kind that only an eleven-year-old orphan could offer another.
Maurise tore his gaze away from the magnificent, towering reflection in the mirror and turned to look at the Boy Who Lived. He shook his head slowly.
"No. I just saw myself with a lot of Galleons. A pile so high it looked like a mountain."
"G... Galleons?" Harry blinked, his face a mask of utter bewilderment.
Even Dumbledore, who had been standing silently in the shadows with that perpetual, gentle smile, felt the corner of his mouth twitch involuntarily.
It was certainly... a realistic desire.
Harry took a moment to process this information before his curiosity got the better of him. "But Maurise, don't you want to see your parents?"
Maurise spread his hands in a pragmatic shrug. "Harry, why would I waste energy hoping for something that doesn't exist? Even if I wanted my parents to appear in that mirror, I couldn't even begin to imagine what they should look like."
It was the truth. Not just in this life, but in his previous one as well, parents were a foreign concept. He had no relatives, no family tree. He was used to the solitary life of an orphan. It was his baseline.
Harry opened his mouth to argue, but no words came out. The sadness on his face was palpable.
Maurise let out a dry chuckle and patted Harry on the shoulder. "Don't give me that look, Harry. Do you really think I walk around feeling sad about not having parents at this point? You can't miss what you never had."
Loss was often harder to accept than never having owned something in the first place.
"Well said, both of you," Dumbledore's voice drifted over them. "This mirror is indeed magical, but it provides neither knowledge nor truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen. I speak from experience when I say that staring into it for too long does you no good."
The old wizard's blue eyes twinkled behind his half-moon spectacles. "After tonight, the mirror will be moved to a new home. Harry, and you as well, Maurise... do not go looking for it again."
After bidding Dumbledore goodnight, Maurise and Harry walked side-by-side through the dark, drafty corridors of the castle.
"We were lucky," Maurise said lightly, breaking the silence. "No detention, no points deducted. It could have been much worse." He glanced sideways. "Harry, why the long face? You aren't still thinking about the mirror, are you?"
Harry kept his head down and sighed. "I suppose I am." He hesitated for a moment before asking, "Maurise, what was life like in your orphanage?"
Maurise didn't break his stride. The question didn't surprise him.
"It was decent enough," he replied. "The matron wasn't cruel. At the very least, she ensured we were fed. The staff mostly ignored us, but frankly, being left alone is often better than the alternative."
Harry nodded thoughtfully, seeming to find some comfort in that.
"Oooooh! Ickle Firsties!"
A shrill, malicious cackle shattered the silence of the corridor. A poltergeist wearing a bright orange bow tie and a garish hat swooped out from a tapestry, floating in mid-air with a wicked grin.
"Peeves!" Harry gasped, instinctively taking a step back.
"Look who it is! Potty Wee Potter!" Peeves zoomed around Harry in dizzying circles. "Naughty little midgets. What are we doing out of bed so late, hmm?"
Maurise stepped forward, his expression calm. "Peeves, if you want to go tattle to a professor, be my guest. However, we just left Headmaster Dumbledore, so I doubt we're in much trouble."
Peeves wasn't deterred in the slightest. Instead, he swooped down until his face was inches from Maurise's nose.
"Lies! Hah!"
He shot up toward the ceiling, cupping his hands around his mouth to bellow at the top of his lungs.
"STUDENTS OUT OF BED! STUDENTS OUT OF BED DOWN THE CHARMS CORRIDOR! POTTER IS LOOSE!"
Harry's face went pale. Regret washed over him immediately. He really should have brought the Invisibility Cloak. While Dumbledore might have let them off the hook, Argus Filch would not be so forgiving.
Maurise frowned as he watched the poltergeist doing victorious somersaults in the air. This was becoming a nuisance.
"No choice then," Maurise muttered.
He drew his wand. To an observer, it looked like he was preparing a standard spell, but the magic he channeled was something else entirely.
"Xul... Noth... Vras! Qwa... Zinth... Oor." The Weakening Curse. The Wailing Curse.
Two faint wisps of grey fog, almost invisible in the torchlight, shot from his wand and sped toward the poltergeist.
Harry started to warn him. "Maurise, magic doesn't work on gh..."
But the words died in his throat.
Peeves's eyes suddenly bulged. His spectral legs seemed to seize up, and with a look of pure shock, he dropped out of the air like a stone. He hit the stone floor with a dull, surprisingly solid thud.
"What?" Harry whispered.
Maurise's curses were unique. Unlike standard spells that passed through ghosts, his necromantic-adjacent magic could interact with spiritual entities. In fact, for reasons Maurise hadn't quite figured out yet, they worked better on ghosts than on the living.
He had tested a minor Weakening Curse on Nearly Headless Nick a few weeks prior. The Gryffindor ghost had complained of feeling "terribly faint" for days. Against a poltergeist like Peeves, the effect was catastrophic.
Peeves lay on the floor, twitching but unable to move or speak.
"Come on," Maurise urged, grabbing Harry's arm. "That screaming is going to bring Filch any second."
The two boys sprinted away, their footsteps echoing off the walls, leaving the paralyzed poltergeist behind. The corridor returned to silence, save for the crackling of torches.
About ten minutes later.
A figure, head wrapped in a thick purple turban, emerged from the shadows. He stopped a few feet away from where Peeves was still struggling to regain his motor functions.
"Interesting," the man murmured. Or rather, Quirrell heard his Master murmur it inside his head.
The Christmas holidays evaporated quickly. When term started, Hogwarts bustled with life once more, though the weather remained miserable. A cold, relentless rain battered the castle walls for half of January.
During this time, Maurise dedicated almost all his energy to two things: brewing the Draught of Living Death and condensing Gap Crystals.
He had discovered a slight problem with his resource gathering. In the "Gap World" that grey, foggy dimension he could access mentally, the magical energy manifested as white mist. However, the mist in any given area was finite.
After weeks of harvesting the energy to create crystals, the magical fog around the castle's reflection in the Interstice had thinned dramatically. The accumulation speed had dropped from a torrent to a trickle. Eventually, there wasn't a drop left.
Maurise was forced to project his mind further out into the grounds to gather energy, which significantly reduced his efficiency.
Mid-January. Saturday Morning.
Maurise sat cross-legged on his four-poster bed, deep in a meditative trance. He remained motionless for two hours, regulating his breathing until finally, he exhaled a long breath and opened his eyes.
His legs were completely numb.
Everyone had a posture that suited them best for focusing magic. While he could meditate sitting in a chair, the cross-legged position helped him center his mind the fastest. He grimaced, slowly unfolding his limbs and waiting for the pins and needles to subside.
Recently, he had come to understand the true purpose of this meditation. It wasn't just about rest; it was about heightening his sensitivity to mana.
This was why his spell success rate skyrocketed immediately after a session. He could now clearly sense the magic around him in his body, in his blood, and the free-floating magic in the air. Unfortunately, he couldn't yet manipulate raw magic directly; he still had to channel it through spells, whether they were from the Hogwarts curriculum or his own mysterious Book of Magi.
Tap. Tap.
A sharp noise at the window broke his train of thought.
Maurise slid off the bed and opened the latch. A blast of freezing, wet air swept into the dormitory, followed closely by a miserable-looking owl.
"Rough flight, Cinder?"
Maurise smiled at his pet. He quickly cast a Drying Charm on the soggy bird, fluffing its feathers back up, before untying the small leather pouch attached to its leg.
He weighed the bag in his hand. It was heavy. A delightful, rhythmic clinking sound came from inside.
It was his share of the profits from Frick, his business partner who had been selling the skeletal dogs Maurise created.
Maurise hummed a cheerful tune as he dumped the glittering gold coins into his trunk.
He would never, ever get tired of Galleons.