At last, the real schedule for the year was put up in the common room early the next morning. Since Julian had already asked the twins about it, he and his friends knew beforehand that it matched last year's schedule, only with the time slots rearranged. Potions, for instance, which had been first period on Monday, had now been shifted to second period, while Charms, which used to be second, had been moved to first. This pattern continued through the first three years. Starting in fourth year, however, the required classes were pushed later in the day because the professors spent the first three periods teaching the younger students.-
Those earlier openings were instead filled by whichever electives students had chosen at the end of second year. Most of his classmates would probably pick their electives based on whatever career they hoped to pursue later, but Julian had entirely different intentions. He fully intended to take Arithmancy, of course, but also Divination and Study of Ancient Runes. Even so, he knew he would need to reduce his workload by the end of the year or risk burying himself under too much work. With that in mind, he did not spend Sunday with his friends and instead joined Helena in the Room of Requirement, where she had been reacquainting herself with magic ever since receiving her new wand.-
Ghosts might not lose the memories of their lives, but that did not mean they could not lose their sense of what certain things actually felt like after enough time had passed. It was similar to how a person knows what it is like to eat or breathe, yet does not really think about those sensations anymore. You do those things almost automatically and gradually stop noticing the feelings attached to them. Ghosts were like that too, except their situation was far worse because they could not remind themselves through actually performing the actions.-
For someone as powerful as Helena had once been, magic had been as natural as breathing, something she barely needed to think about at all. Unfortunately, that meant that after nearly a thousand years, she had lost touch with the proper feel of controlling magic once she got a wand again. Because of that, she had been taking full advantage of the fact that she no longer needed sleep and had been relentlessly training her mastery over personal energy until it returned. Julian happened to benefit from this as well, because it meant she was probably the ideal person to teach him how to improve his own control.-
Unfortunately for him, she was a brutal teacher who did not hesitate to use the stinging hex every time he slipped up. "No, no, you pulled too much again. You are only trying to light the candle from here, not burn the whole thing to ashes!" she scolded after leaving yet another red welt on his side. Taking a sip of wiggenweld to dull the pain running across his body, he tried once more to channel only enough mana to create a thin strand of flame from the wand in his hand and light the candle positioned on the far side of the room.-
It sounded simple at first, until you realized that the farther the strand extended from the body, the more mana was needed throughout its full length to keep its strength even. Julian had to do more than merely fuel the spell. He also had to feed it in such a way that an ever-growing amount of mana was spread evenly throughout the whole thing. This type of training was absolute hell, but it was equally rewarding where control was concerned. Even though he had failed every single attempt during the last four hours, his control had still improved tremendously.-
At the beginning, he could hardly even start the spell before Helena struck him with a stinging hex, but now he could extend the thread of fire halfway across the twenty-foot distance before his control began to falter. He had also discovered something interesting about his fire manipulation because of this training. His flames behaved like something semi-solid rather than pure energy like ordinary fire. To be fair, he had only figured this out after growing annoyed and attempting to blow up the candle. At first he assumed the stand had been thrown back by the pressure of the blast, but the spell itself had not been strong enough for that explanation to hold.-
Only after repeating the spell and stopping it just before it reached the candle and stand did he clearly see that the air pressure was barely enough to make the stand shift at all. It was only when he started manipulating the flames more gently that he noticed the fire itself had a semi-solid quality. If he concentrated hard enough, he could even use the flames to grab objects and lift them, though they would still burn in the process. He could only imagine how terrifying it would be for someone to be seized by a hand made entirely of fire.-