Two days after his midnight encounter with Dumbledore in the underground chamber, Morris found himself sitting in Defense Against the Dark Arts class, experiencing what could only be described as educational torture of the most exquisite variety.
"A-alright... today we... we will be... covering Chapter... Chapter Three..."
Quirrell's lectures had been deteriorating steadily throughout the term, declining from merely poor to catastrophic. At first, back in September when the school year began, it had been just an unfortunate stammer—a speech impediment that made his lessons slower and more awkward than ideal but still technically functional.
Now, four months later, he couldn't get through a single complete sentence without losing the thread completely, his words were fragmenting mid-thought, his voice was trailing off into confused silence before starting over with a different incomplete phrase.
Listening to him attempt to teach felt like being trapped in a submarine that had run out of oxygen. a slow, suffocating experience where time stretched and every breath became more difficult than the last.
Morris, slumped at his desk with his chin propped on one hand, had nearly forgotten what fresh air tasted like.
The overpowering smell of garlic that hung over the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom was also stronger today than usual, sharper, more pungent and suffocating.
Some students near the front were breathing through their mouths to avoid the worst of it.
"I absolutely can't take this anymore," Kyle whispered from the seat beside Morris, pinching his nose dramatically with thumb and forefinger and leaning over.
His voice was muffled but audible. "Morris, you never actually listen in this class. How far along have you gotten in Defense Against the Dark Arts on your own?"
Morris gave a casual, dismissive wave toward the thick fifth-year Defense textbook lying on his desk. "Fifth year material currently. Just browsing through it, nothing too serious yet."
Kyle fell into stunned silence for several seconds, staring at the textbook with something between admiration and resignation.
Right. There was absolutely no point in comparing yourself to Morris Black. That way lay only madness and damaged self-esteem.
Back when they'd first started school together in September, when Kyle was still naive and confident, he'd lost to Morris in their first Transfiguration duel and had consoled himself with a reassuring belief that it was an exception.
Looking at the pattern of the past four months now, Kyle had to acknowledge that it made perfect sense. At least when it came to studying, Morris was exceptional even by Ravenclaw House standards which themselves were already considerably elevated compared to the other houses.
Honestly, Morris thought privately as he turned another page of his fifth-year text, the lower-year Defense textbooks aren't particularly useful for actual magical combat or protection. They're mostly just glorified catalogs, lists of identification methods and basic countermeasures for dealing with vampires, werewolves, hinkypunks, boggarts, and other dark creatures.
Useful information in theory, certainly, but hardly the kind of practical combat magic that would save your life if you actually encountered danger.
Anything even remotely practical, any actual defensive or offensive spells beyond the most basic shield charms, only appeared in the upper-year volumes starting around fourth year.
Though according to older Ravenclaw students Morris had spoken with in the common room, Professor Quirrell didn't actually teach any real spells in those advanced classes either. He apparently just read directly from the assigned textbook in his halting, painful manner while students fell asleep or did homework for other classes.
A well-paying professional position at one of Britain's most prestigious magical institutions that required absolutely nothing in terms of competence or effort. Morris had to admit: it was actually quite impressive that Quirrell had managed to secure and maintain such a sinecure despite his obvious unsuitability.
The bell finally rang with sweet, merciful finality, releasing them from their suffering.
Morris immediately gathered his belongings and slipped out of the classroom like someone escaping confinement.
"Oh, were you waiting for me out here?"
His undead cat, Tin-Tin, was crouched just outside the classroom door like a small black shadow, its distinctive cool presence was immediately recognizable even before Morris looked down properly.
Morris knelt down on the floor and gave the cat a gentle scratch on its chilled little head.
Tin-Tin let out a small, pleased meow and immediately leaped onto Morris's shoulder, curling its tail around his neck like a very cold, very dead scarf.
"That's a bit too chilly for comfort, actually," Morris said, the unnatural coldness of undead against his skin was creating an unpleasant sensation.
He carefully lifted the cat and set it back down on the floor.
He'd tried once, weeks ago, casting a warming charm on Tin-Tin to simulate a living cat's normal body heat and make the creature more pleasant to hold.
The result had been simultaneously cold and warm in the same space—flesh that was frigid to the touch but radiating heat magic, creating a wrongness that defied comfortable description and was profoundly unsettling. He'd immediately cancelled the charm and given up on that particular experiment.
Some things were better left alone.
Just then, as Morris was straightening up from setting Tin-Tin down, Professor Quirrell stepped out of the classroom behind him, arms filled with a wobbly stack of textbooks and loose parchments that looked likely to spill at any moment.
Tin-Tin's head immediately spun with focus toward him. The cat seemed intensely, unnaturally interested in the purple turban wrapped around Quirrell's head.
Before Morris could react, Tin-Tin launched itself up and batted at the turban's dangling cloth with one small paw.
"Don't touch that!" Morris lunged forward desperately, his hand was reaching out, but it was already far too late to prevent contact.
Quirrell gave a violent, convulsive jerk as if he'd been struck with a stunning spell.
The books and papers he'd been precariously carrying went flying in all directions, scattering across the corridor floor. He lurched sideways like a drunk, his face was draining of all color until he looked pale as chalk, and then he simply crumpled to the cold stone floor in a heap.
Morris stood frozen, staring at the collapsed professor with shock.
That was... an extreme reaction to a small cat pawing.
"Professor Quirrell!" Several students who hadn't yet dispersed from the classroom cried out in alarm, their voices were overlapping in concern.
Tin-Tin demonstrating unusually sophisticated comprehension for a cat and clearly well aware that it had caused a significant disaster, bolted back to Morris's feet with remarkable speed and tucked itself behind the hem of his robes, becoming as small and inconspicuous as possible.
"No, no, it's perfectly fine, don't help me—" Quirrell gasped out, scrambling with trembling hands to gather the scattered books back into some semblance of a pile.
He was barely looking at what he was grabbing, just snatching up items at random with panicked urgency. "I'm f-fine, just startled, p-please don't—"
He lurched back to his feet with the unsteady movements of someone recovering from physical trauma, clutching his haphazard stack of materials, and hurried away down the corridor before Morris could even give a proper apology or explanation.
In the confused aftermath of the incident, with students murmuring about Quirrell's bizarre behavior, Morris noticed a small notebook lying face-down on the floor near the wall. It had clearly fallen from Quirrell's pile and been overlooked in his panicked flight.
Morris's first instinct was to simply leave it where it lay. Someone else would inevitably pick it up and return it.
But Tin-Tin, apparently feeling guilty and wanting to make amends for causing the disaster, picked the notebook up delicately in its mouth and carried it over to Morris, dropping it at his feet with the pride of a cat presenting a caught mouse.
Morris stared down at the offered notebook.
"...Fine," he sighed in resignation, unable to resist.
He bent down and picked up the notebook. The cover was smooth, expensive dark leather, completely unmarked by any title or identifying information.
Morris flipped it open to a random page in the middle.
Notes on Effective Spellcasting Methodology, read the neat handwritten title at the top.
When casting the Cruciatus Curse, it is essential to maintain a sustained state of genuine pleasure and desire to cause suffering, rather than mere anger—
Wait.
'What?'
Morris felt his eyebrows climbing toward his hairline. He glanced around quickly to ensure no one was watching him, then turned a few more pages with alarm.
This wasn't lecture notes or teaching materials. It was a comprehensive, practical guide to casting Dark Magic.
All three Unforgivable Curses, the most heavily restricted spells in wizarding law, covered in meticulous, comprehensive detail that could only come from wide practical experience.
Morris felt the corner of his mouth tugging up.
A one-way ticket to Azkaban if anyone caught you with this, he thought. Possession of this notebook alone would probably earn you five to ten years. Actually using the spells described would get you life imprisonment with Dementors.
Very nice. Very dangerous. Very illegal.
Then again, Professor Quirrell having something like this in his possession wasn't exactly shocking when Morris thought about it logically. The man was almost certainly working with Voldemort. Of course he'd have detailed notes on forbidden magic.
Morris glanced around the corridor once more, confirming that the remaining students were distracted by their own conversations and gossip about Quirrell's strange collapse. No one was paying attention to him.
With smooth, casual movements that hinted at nothing suspicious, Morris quietly pocketed the notebook, slipping it into his robes' inner pocket where it settled against his chest.
The students around him were still murmuring about Quirrell's bizarre behavior, their eyes were fixed on the direction the professor had fled. No one had noticed Morris taking the notebook.
"Come on, Tin-Tin," Morris said in a perfectly neutral tone, as if nothing unusual had occurred. "Let's head back to Ravenclaw Tower."
There was absolutely no question of returning this particular item to Quirrell.
Back in the privacy and safety of his dormitory room, Morris carefully spread the stolen notebook open on his desk and began reading through it with thoroughness.
The handwriting throughout was far too precise, too mechanical and uniform, to be Quirrell's own shaky script.
The content went far beyond just the three famous Unforgivable Curses that everyone knew by name. There were dozens of other curses and hexes annotated throughout the pages, nearly all of them classified as Dark Magic by the Ministry.
A comprehensive education in how to hurt, maim, control, and kill using magic.
After half an hour of careful study, absorbing the theoretical contexts and emotional requirements, Morris finally set the notebook down and sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers in front of his face while he considered his next move.
Should he actually try casting these spells?
The incantations themselves weren't especially complex or difficult—just Latin phrases, some of them quite short. The real requirement for successful casting was achieving the correct emotional state, a particular kind of focused intensity pushed to an extreme that most people couldn't or wouldn't access.
Morris made up his mind.
He would try it. At least experimentally, to understand the mechanics and confirm whether he could actually cast these spells if circumstances ever required it.
Dark Magic had always been part of his long-term educational plans eventually, something to study and master as part of becoming a truly complete wizard rather than someone with arbitrary self-imposed limitations.
This opportunity was simply earlier than he'd originally anticipated, a fortunate acceleration of his timeline.
Besides, he genuinely didn't see Dark Magic as the catastrophic, inevitably corrupting force that most wizarding society treated it as; some kind of spiritual poison that would automatically damn your soul and transform you into a monster through mere contact.
As long as he didn't become psychologically dependent on it, didn't use these spells habitually or as his default solution to problems, didn't let the ease and power corrupt his decision-making, there was no inherent reason it had to be permanently damaging.
Magic was a tool. Dark Magic was a particularly sharp, dangerous tool. But tools didn't have morality, only uses and users did.
Morris left the dormitory and came back less than a minute later with a large spider he'd caught from the dusty corner of the staircase leading up to the astronomy tower. The spider was perhaps an inch across, brown and hairy and very much alive.
He set it carefully on his desk, drew his wand from his robes, took a slow steadying breath, and began the internal process of achieving the correct emotional state described in the notebook.
'This spider must die. It deserves death. Its continued existence is wrong and must be corrected. It is nothing, meaningless, and its death is simply the natural order asserting itself.'
He let that conviction settle into his mind.
"Avada Kedavra!"
The words emerged from his mouth with surprising ease.
A faint, sickly greenish light shot out from his wand tip and struck the spider in its body.
The spider continued walking across the desk without incident, completely unharmed and apparently unaware it had just been targeted with the most infamous killing spell in existence.
Morris was quiet for a moment, staring at the still-living spider.
He'd expected this result, had known intellectually that successfully casting an Unforgivable Curse on the first attempt was almost impossible. And yet he was still a bit disappointed on some level.
Casting the Killing Curse correctly was clearly not a simple matter of saying words and making wand movements. The emotional component was crucial, and he apparently hadn't achieved the necessary depth of conviction yet.
The attempt hadn't been entirely without result or educational value, though.
In the precise moment he'd cast the spell, channeling his will through his wand and into the incantation, Morris had felt something distinctly unusual—a strange, intrusive sensation, as though a voice somewhere in the deep parts of his mind were insisting that the spider had to die, that this was simply the way things needed to be, that death was the only correct outcome.
It was profoundly unsettling, like having someone else's thoughts temporarily occupying space in his consciousness. But crucially, it was still within the boundaries of his conscious control.
He caught the spider again as it tried to escape off the edge of his desk and tried the killing curse several more times, each attempt incorporating adjustments to his mental state and emotional focus based on what he'd felt during previous castings.
On the final attempt, after nearly twenty minutes of practice, the spider finally cooperated in its own demise.
The green light that emerged from his wand was brighter this time, more solid, and when it struck the spider the effect was instantaneous. The creature's legs curled in toward its body in a death spasm, and it toppled over onto its back, dead.
Weakly, reluctantly, but genuinely dead.
Morris exhaled slowly, releasing tension he hadn't fully realized he'd been holding in his shoulders.
His natural aptitude for Dark Magic was, evidently, not particularly strong compared to what the notebook suggested was normal for practiced dark wizards.
Still, he'd succeeded eventually.
However, he was aware of something else that concerned him more than his mediocre performance: it was a fact that any use of Dark Magic, regardless of outcome or target, left a detectable mark on the caster's soul.
That grey impurity Dumbledore's spell could reveal.
Morris needed to verify the extent of the damage immediately.
"Magicam Revelare," he cast clearly, using the spell Dumbledore had taught him just two nights ago in that underground chamber.
The soft glow of his magical aura materialized around his wand tip.
The luminous energy that appeared was different from what he'd seen before when Dumbledore had first demonstrated the spell on him. It still looked recognizably like his own magical signature but now there was a tiny, barely visible grey point like a speck of ash mixed into clean water.
Morris studied the grey impurity, examining it from multiple angles as it floated within his aura.
He honestly didn't know with any certainty what this impurity might do to him over long time, whether it would grow or spread, whether it had psychological effects beyond the obvious marking.
But Morris didn't think the corruption was necessarily permanent or irreversible which was crucial for his risk assessment.
After all, when Dumbledore had used this exact same soul-revealing spell during their recent midnight meeting, demonstrating it on himself to show Morris how it worked, his aura had appeared completely clear and pure.
Which suggested one of two possibilities: either Dumbledore knew some method for actively removing or cleansing such impurities from the soul, or else the marks faded naturally on their own with sufficient time between uses, gradually absorbed away by the soul's inherent self-repair processes.
As for the third theoretical possibility that Albus Dumbledore, the man who had spent decades fighting dark wizards, had somehow simply never used Dark Magic himself even once in his entire long life, Morris found that explanation completely unconvincing to the point of being laughable.