Chapter 220: Observation and Learning
Hermione Granger slipped out of the Room of Requirement, the heavy oak door clicking shut behind her.
Tamara stood perfectly still in the center of the vast space, her dark eyes fixed on the polished wood. A familiar, rhythmic throbbing began to pulse at her temples.
'Every single one of them is more mentally ill than the last,' Tamara sneered inwardly, her lip curling into a faint, disdainful arc.
Still, she smoothed her expression into one of placid calm. As long as the pathetic neuroses of these fools could be weaponized for her own gain, she supposed she didn't mind occasionally indulging their madness. After all, broken people with glaring emotional flaws were always the easiest puppets to string up and control.
The following evening.
The bustling noise of Hogwarts Castle gradually bled away as curfew approached, the majority of the student body retreating to the warmth of their respective Common Rooms.
Harry Potter stood before the hidden entrance of the Room of Requirement. He dragged a deep breath into his lungs, his fingers trembling slightly as he pushed the heavy door open.
The space had transformed to accommodate them. It was now a spacious, brightly lit practice room with high ceilings and bare walls. Tamara sat elegantly on a high-backed mahogany chair, her slender fingers carelessly turning the yellowed pages of an ancient tome on advanced mental defense.
At the sound of the creaking hinges, she lifted her eyelids. Her bottomless black eyes swept over Harry with the chilling indifference of a predator assessing a particularly unimpressive meal.
It was just a casual glance.
Yet, before Harry could even twitch his fingers toward his wand, he felt a brutal, invisible spike drive straight through his skull.
A chaotic torrent of noisy, vibrant images flooded directly into Tamara's mind, offered up instantly and without a shred of reservation.
The dusty interior of the Shrieking Shack. Sirius Black tearing into a greasy meat pie like a starved dog. An old, worn piece of parchment bearing the names Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. And Sirius's gaunt face, flushed with manic excitement and pride...
"It seems..." Tamara withdrew her piercing gaze as if she had merely been admiring the wallpaper. She snapped the ancient book shut, a cold, mocking sneer playing at the corners of her mouth. "...while you were busy delivering dinner to your escaped convict of a godfather, and eagerly listening to him boast about the grand, sweeping history of that ragged piece of parchment, you failed to master the basic concept of time management."
She tilted her head, her voice dropping to a soft, dangerous whisper. "You are two minutes late, Potter."
Harry's entire body went rigid. His green eyes widened to the size of Galleons.
"You... you looked into my mind again?!"
His hand flew up to slap against his lightning-bolt scar, a purely instinctive gesture driven by a volatile cocktail of anger and raw fear. Standing under Tamara's dark, unblinking stare, he felt entirely transparent. It was as though he had been stripped bare in the middle of the Great Hall, utterly incapable of hiding even his smallest, most pathetic secrets.
"Let me correct your flawed perception, Potter."
Tamara rose slowly from her chair. The heavy, suffocating pressure of her magic expanded into the room as she closed the distance between them with measured, predatory steps.
"It is not that I actively chose to look. It is that your funnel of a brain is currently broadcasting your godfather's classified secrets to the entirety of Hogwarts like a blaring megaphone."
Harry stumbled back a step, his face burning a violent, humiliating shade of crimson.
She was right. When he had sneaked out to deliver food earlier that day, Sirius had indeed unfurled the Marauder's Map with immense pride, jabbing a dirt-stained finger at the names and boasting that it was the ultimate masterpiece of his youth alongside James and the others.
"Alright, put away that pitiful, stupid look." Tamara pivoted sharply, the hem of her robes snapping in the air, and stopped less than two paces away from him. "I did not summon you here to listen to you recount your touching, tear-jerking family history of rule-breaking glory."
Her exquisite, porcelain-pale face leaned in close.
Harry's heart kicked into a frantic, uncontrollable rhythm against his ribs. His Adam's apple bobbed hard as he swallowed dry air. The humiliating memories of being caught red-handed by Tamara in the corridor just yesterday surged back to the forefront of his mind, impossible to repress.
'Don't be nervous... don't think about it...' Harry chanted desperately in his head, his fingernails digging into his palms.
However.
Just as his anxiety peaked, throwing his breathing into a ragged, shallow mess—
"Legilimens!"
There was zero warning. She did not even bother to draw her wand.
A sharp, blinding light flared deep within Tamara's obsidian eyes.
Harry felt as though a Bludger had slammed directly into his frontal lobe. The flimsy, unlocked door to his private thoughts was violently kicked off its hinges!
A rapid-fire sequence of memories flickered wildly across their forcibly connected consciousness, spinning out of control like a broken projector.
Sirius chewing loudly on a roasted chicken leg, rambling about the map's origins.
Ron Weasley shooting him a jealous, icy glare, ignoring him for yet another day.
And then, Tamara's own familiar, beautiful face, staring back at him from his own embarrassing memories.
"Enough!"
Tamara severed the mental link with the brutality of a falling guillotine.
She took a sharp step back, her delicate features twisting into a mask of pure, unadulterated disgust and unbearable irritation.
"I brought you here to teach you Occlumency, Potter, not to have you hurl these worthless, trashy images at me like some sort of pathetic defensive weapon meant to turn my stomach!"
Her jaw locked, her teeth grinding together in genuine anger. "Your brain isn't setting up a defense at all. It is practically rolling out a red carpet and screaming at me, 'Come look at how incredibly stupid I am!'"
Harry clutched the sides of his head, his face contorted in agony. The brutal, unshielded intrusion had left his temples throbbing as if thick needles were being driven into his skull.
He glared up at her, his face flushed with indignation. "I... I don't know what to do at all! You didn't teach me a single thing! You just smashed right in!"
"This is real combat, Potter," Tamara shot back, her voice dropping to a glacial chill. "When Severus Snape decides to rip into your mind, do you honestly believe he will be kind enough to offer you a polite three-second countdown?"
She stared him down, her dark eyes flashing.
Internally, however, she calculated the situation. Unilaterally torturing this foundationless, bumbling savior was incredibly satisfying, but it wouldn't actually achieve her goal. She needed him to keep his mouth shut and his mind sealed. Venting her irritation was a luxury she couldn't afford right now.
She dragged a slow, measured breath through her nose, forcibly strangling the overwhelming urge to hit the boy with a Cruciatus Curse just to watch him twitch.
"The core principle of Occlumency is not for you to desperately wrestle with those thoughts and suppress them," Tamara instructed, her tone remaining icy, though it now carried the sharp edge of a strict mentor. "It is to clear them entirely."
She paced a slow circle around him. "Clear all emotion. Do not think about the people you care about. Do not think about your petty little fears. And above all, do not even think about the fact that your mind is currently being invaded."
Harry watched her with a dazed, half-comprehending gaze, still rubbing his aching forehead.
Tamara stopped and looked down her nose at him, offering a rare, frigid sliver of encouragement. "Your willpower is not entirely pathetic. Gather your scattered focus and try again."
For the next twenty minutes, the Room of Requirement transformed into a localized theater of unilateral mental devastation.
Tamara shredded through Harry's nonexistent defenses with Legilimency time and time again, showing zero mercy.
With every breach, Harry staggered. Sweat poured down his face, soaking his collar, his knees buckling as he swayed precariously on his feet. The phantom pain in his skull was blinding.
Yet, under Tamara's highly unorthodox teaching method—a brutal mental slap followed by a cold, instructional word—the Gryffindor actually began to grasp the concept.
During the final, sweeping intrusion.
The moment Tamara's consciousness brushed against the outer edges of Harry's mind, she pierced through the barrier just as easily as before. But this time, she felt it. A faint, almost microscopic layer of friction. Resistance.
Harry did not immediately vomit his messy, stray thoughts into her mind. Instead, his face tightened in concentration, and he actively applied the method she had drilled into him, forcibly shoving those vibrant images down into a blank, suffocating darkness.
The defensive layer was laughably fragile. It shattered like thin glass under her pressure. But at the very least, his mind was no longer a broken cupboard with its doors swinging wide open to the wind.
"That is enough for today."
Tamara cleanly severed the connection. She looked down at Harry, who was currently hunched over, hands braced on his knees as he gasped greedily for air. For once, her tone lacked its usual biting mockery.
"Consider that a microscopic fraction of progress. Now get lost and go to your Quidditch practice."
Harry exhaled a shaky breath, feeling as though he had just been handed a royal pardon from the executioner's block.
Surviving this half-hour with Tamara felt infinitely more exhausting than Oliver Wood forcing him to fly a hundred laps around the pitch in the middle of a freezing thunderstorm.
He snatched up his Invisibility Cloak from a nearby bench, his legs wobbling like jelly as he dragged himself toward the exit.
His hand had just closed over the cool brass of the doorknob.
"Wait, Potter."
Tamara's voice cut through the quiet room, halting him in his tracks.
"Is Lupin currently teaching you the Patronus Charm?"
Harry paused, glancing over his shoulder in confusion. "Yes... why?"
"Cast it on me. Once." Tamara crossed her arms over her chest, lifting her chin slightly. Her dark eyes reflected a haughty, arrogant demand that brooked no refusal.
Naturally, she would rather swallow broken glass than admit the truth: she was asking her destined arch-enemy for a demonstration because the great Dark Lord could not summon a simple Patronus.
If she, in her true state of mind, had actively begged Potter for magic lessons, she would have cut this body's tongue out herself.
But if this was a mandate from that wretched, parasitic entity in her head...
[Ding! Side quest triggered: Observation and Learning!]
[Task Requirement: Please feel Harry Potter's Patronus Charm with your heart and comprehend the essence of White Magic from it!]
[Task Reward: Love +1, and a perfect way out for the host's self-esteem.]
Harry blinked, thoroughly bewildered by Tamara's sudden, bizarre request.
However, noting the dangerous, impatient narrowing of her eyes, he decided it was best not to argue. He obediently drew his holly wand.
"I... I haven't mastered it very well yet," he muttered defensively.
Harry took a deep, steadying breath. He squeezed his eyes shut, his brow furrowing as he began to search desperately through the archives of his mind for a suitable memory.
A few heavy seconds ticked by.
"Expecto Patronum!"
Harry slashed his wand through the air. A thin, wispy stream of silvery-white gas erupted from the tip.
It did not condense into the solid, physical form of any animal. It was merely a shapeless cloud of aimless silver mist, floating gently in the mid-air for a few fleeting seconds before it dissolved into nothingness.
Tamara stared coldly at the fading white light, her expression unreadable.
"What exactly were you thinking about when you cast that spell?" she demanded, her voice flat and chilling.
"I thought about..." Harry scratched the back of his head, looking a bit sheepish. "I thought about the very first time I got on a broom and flew into the sky. That feeling of being completely free... and just happy."
Hearing this utterly mundane answer, the corner of Tamara's mouth twitched violently.
'Flying into the sky on a piece of broken wood?!''Just this kind of pathetic, ridiculous, childish emotion...''Could actually condense a cloud of resistant silver mist?!''Then why in the world did I suffer an agonizing magical backlash when I tried using the ultimate, supreme pleasure of torturing an enemy to death?!'
"Stupid beyond belief," Tamara hissed, waving her hand in a sharp, dismissive gesture. "Get out."
She felt a headache building just looking at the boy's face.
Harry was entirely baffled by the sudden scolding, but having grown somewhat accustomed to Tamara's volatile mood swings, he didn't linger to ask questions. He shoved the door open and slipped out into the corridor, eager to escape.
Tamara was left alone in the vast silence of the Room of Requirement once more.
She stood rigidly in the exact center of the empty space, her face so dark and thunderous it looked as though it might actually drip black ink.
'Since Potter can trigger the magic with such a low-level, simplistic form of happiness...'
Tamara closed her eyes. She drew a long, measured breath into her lungs, raising her own yew wand.
She forced her mind to pivot, violently discarding the intoxicating pleasures of slaughter, domination, and absolute power. She dug through her memories, trying to find something... less drenched in blood, and perhaps more constructive.
'The deep sense of accomplishment when I successfully forged my first Horcrux?''No,' she reasoned coldly.'That was a literal desecration of the soul. The underlying mechanics would surely be completely incompatible with the nature of the Patronus Charm.''Then... the pure ecstasy of discovering I was different? The moment I realized I possessed magic and stood as a god above those filthy Muggles?''This shouldn't count as a purely Dark Magic emotion, right? It was a moment of pure realization.'
Tamara snapped her eyes open. She seized that specific emotion—the very feeling that had served as the ultimate turning point in the life of Tom Riddle—and channeled it violently down her arm, injecting it straight into the core of her wand.
"Expecto Patronum!"
With a crisp, sharp incantation, the tip of her wand flashed with a sudden, bright light.
The horrific, agonizing magical backlash from her previous attempt did not repeat itself.
However, the grand response to the emotional core of the greatest Dark Lord in history was... merely a pathetic, anemic wisp of white smoke.
It was not even a tenth of the volume of Potter's shapeless silver mist.
It failed to last for even a single second before it sputtered and died completely in the empty air.
Tamara stared blankly at the tip of her wand, the wood now entirely devoid of light.
An unmatched, suffocating sense of frustration—like a bone-deep, corrosive poison—began to slowly crawl its way into the dark, twisted heart of the former Dark Lord.
Her unmatched, proud magical talent. Her supreme ecstasy of standing above all living beings. Was it actually inferior to the simple-minded joy of a foolish boy when faced with this magic that symbolized light and protection?!
'This is simply a direct insult to my very soul!'
Tamara squeezed her eyes shut, her chest heaving with violent, suppressed rage.
Finally, standing alone in the cavernous expanse of the Room of Requirement, she let out a low, unwilling curse.
"...Damn Patronus Charm."
Her pale fingers slowly tightened around the handle of her wand, her knuckles turning white. The burning frustration in her dark eyes was rapidly swallowed and replaced by a terrifying, paranoid desire for absolute conquest.
Tamara raised her chin, her posture radiating pure, unadulterated arrogance as a dangerous, determined light flashed in the depths of her obsidian eyes.
"I do not care what kind of magic it is," she whispered to the empty room, her voice dripping with venomous resolve. "As long as it is a form of power, it must ultimately kneel at my feet."
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