Chapter 294 - 294
The moment I got back to the castle, my thoughts finally slipped their leash entirely, and my mind started running the numbers on absolutely everything even remotely connected to wands, their construction, and the principles behind how they work, and alongside that the "Hammer" project was stirring back to life in my head. What did that mean?
I could dash through the corridors of Hogwarts like I'd been stung, paying no attention whatsoever to the students or even professors I passed, only nodding or greeting them aloud if my subconscious decided that was warranted.
I didn't even notice, carried along by my new thoughts and ideas, when I flew straight past the two amateur uncoverers of secret "conspiracies" — Potter and Weasley. Somewhere deep in my subconscious I registered and accepted that fact, but didn't assign it even the tiniest drop of importance, even though they were surely plotting some fresh grand investigation. Incidentally, it was on my suggestion that they'd decided to focus the efforts of their phenomenal detective skills on Nott and his activities. Somewhere in those same depths of consciousness, I was pleased by the thought that these two would now specifically be causing problems for that particular young wizard.
And I just kept thinking and thinking about wands, and about how one might fuse a unicorn-hair core with one of Binesi's feathers inside one.
Having once been an elf gives me a certain understanding of personal spellcasting artefacts, even though in that world they weren't especially popular — just tools, for a specific set of tasks, nothing more. Useful, practical, and if you didn't have time to spare on drawing up elaborate magical circles in space, excellent, even! But still just a tool.
In this world, though, the wand is practically a cult object for wizards! It's been elevated to an absolute, having all but wiped out other methods of spellcasting, and only rings and staffs still cling on, more or less, and even then not in England, nor even in Europe, and that tradition of spellcasting doesn't have much longer to exist either — because of the Statute, wizards have no need for, and even avoid, overly powerful and large-scale magical workings; it's simply "not fashionable" anymore.
Reaching the House common room, I apparently nodded to everyone, or did something along those lines, quickly went into the room I shared with the lads, retrieved my kit from under the bed, where I'd stashed it out of habit, packed it into my rucksack, and set off in search of a suitable room for my vigil and research. Naturally, my feet ended up carrying me to the Room of Requirement, to which I asked for "knowledge on the making and workings of wands, along with a space for working with them and creating them."
While all that was happening "outside" my mind, I kept on musing.
Wands… Going by the records in books, monographs, and other manuscripts — which, as is well known, one shouldn't always trust — wands came to us during the age of the Roman Empire's sweeping expansion over everyone it could reach. In Ancient Rome itself, though, wands appeared as far back as the age of the Kingdom, which is a very long time ago indeed. In those days, on the territory of what is now England, an entirely different concept of spellcasting held sway, one that could be called a historical parallel to whatever it was that led to the development of staffs and cumbersome magical workings in the elf shard's world.
Why were these thoughts in my head?
That was the question I found myself asking as I wandered through the Room of Requirement past a modest number of cabinets filled with old and new books, tomes. My brain hadn't built this chain of logic for no reason, but even I couldn't tell where it was trying to lead me. Well, let's carry on then — here's a book right on the subject, conveniently — I took one of the old books down from the shelf, opened it, and began leafing through the clearly handwritten text.
What was it about the history of wands, about their development, that had caught my attention? What even is a "wand," fundamentally?
Pulling out my own acacia wand, I looked at it properly, tried letting a little magic through it, and tried to feel — not the mechanics and physics of the energy's movement, if one can even speak of magic that way, but the response…
Wands… In the history of Ancient Rome, they began as small sceptres, fairly uniform, though back then their making was less a craft than an individual approach by each wizard. Structurally they were simple, but varied in their decoration and enhancements, their "fittings," as someone well-versed in such matters might put it today.
Those early wands were made of a single material — wood. That was the conductor. The gathering of magic from the wizard was handled by the handles, carved, cast, chiselled out of something or other, and the like. Often the handle was adorned with some natural stone, precious or not — it didn't matter, the important thing was the sealing function, allowing magic to flow only towards the tip of the wand. There, at the tip, there was already something to focus the magic and direct it further towards the target as a uniform straight stream. That's precisely how wizards of that era described their wands, though of course the language, along with a degree of semantic weight in the words and their allegorical nature, gets in the way of properly interpreting the text.
So, it seemed — and this book I'd taken off the shelf was indeed talking about precisely those ancient wands. Fine, the general scheme and the essence of it were clear, which sorted my understanding of wands a little better into categories. It's no secret to me that they gather our energy and direct it… wherever we need it, that's where they direct it.
So what changed — why did wizards make this, one could say, evolutionary transition to the wands we're familiar with now?
The answer is simple — the expansion of the Roman Republic's influence, and later the Empire's.
It might seem like there's no obvious connection there, but it's entirely straightforward. As influence expanded, so did wizards' opportunities to travel to other territories. Wizards have never been fond of living within society, being introverts at heart, deep down. And in those days, wizards' capabilities were also less varied, even though their spellcasting was on a grander scale than today's. Spells took a long time to cast, and there weren't very many of them, though for their time they were just as self-sufficient as they are now, since back then wizards lived alongside Muggles and enjoyed a certain degree of respect. Or else were hated — that depended on the era and the events of the time.
In any case, wizards increasingly travelled further and further afield, discovering new magical plants and new creatures, and the further they went, the more they found. They studied this flora and fauna, encountered other wizards, and along with them, other methods of spellcasting. I seem to recall reading somewhere that there were wizards, somewhere around what's now the United Arab Emirates, or nearby, who preferred using parts of magical beasts as a kind of wand rather than plants. There, even ordinary plants were scarce in places, let alone magical ones. I suspect that's when the wizards of Ancient Rome first hit upon the idea that parts of magical beasts could be used for more than just ritual knives and daggers.
That very same Ollivander family traces its origins back to somewhere around the third century BC, and the first wand — a documented fact — with a structure and concept closest to the modern one, was produced by that family around 256 AD, or thereabouts.
The wand finally took on its modern form around the sixth century, though even then it remained, in the eyes of many European wizards, merely a tool, when what they preferred was whatever could "hit the hardest," even if that meant extensive preparation beforehand — dark rituals and lighter ones, sacrifices, dancing with drums, potions, and long build-ups of magic into diagrams drawn on floors, ground, stone, specially carved slabs. However, despite the wand rarely being used for serious business, it firmly established itself for minor tasks, and the fact that it could be used to handle any number of everyday matters — with spells for those everyday matters being churned out by various enthusiasts like hotcakes — meant the wand became more and more firmly woven into the daily life of Europeans with each passing year.
What's more, the wand became a status symbol for wizards — something you could wear openly in a holster, on a loop, or wherever, decorate without harming its functioning, and so on. That was, mind you, before the sudden wave of Muggle outrage, the persecution of wizards, and the Witch Hunts.
Roughly from around the time the decision was made to adopt the Statute of Secrecy, the wand stopped changing, at least in terms of structure and materials. The manufacturing technology progressed a little, but that was all. Why?
Before the Statute, there were enthusiasts who wanted to create a wand as powerful as the more cumbersome instruments. To replace rituals, crude staffs, so there'd be "Power!!!" Back then the question of wizards' power was still an urgent one. But after the Statute was adopted, wizards' need for truly powerful magic all but disappeared — specifically, the need to produce powerful magic within a second, since it was precisely "spellcasting within a second" that was the strong suit of wand magic. Ah, right, wand development was also hindered by the fact that, from a purely practical standpoint, they worked perfectly well, and there was nothing left to improve. What was I on about?
Does the wand gather magic from the wizard? Yes. Does it channel it through itself? Yes. Does it release it as a directed stream, a pulse, or whatever manner the wizard requires? Yes. Are there parasitic leaks from the wand itself? An absolute minimum. Meaning the wand fully meets every one of wizards' requirements, and even exceeds them by a wide margin — even the maximum throughput of wands, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is orders of magnitude higher than what a wizard is actually capable of putting out.
So why had I recalled all this?
I hadn't even noticed that I'd been sitting in the armchair for quite a while now, leafing through my third, or even fifth, book. Now here was some rather more interesting material.
To achieve that level of efficiency in wands requires making them correctly — what a revelation! It's nowhere near enough just to take a chunk of dragon heartstring and shove it into a bit of wood — that produces no result. Just a lump of meat in a stick. That's all.
Creating a properly functioning wand requires a whole series of preparatory procedures, and the use of specific techniques for forming the internal cavity in the wood is an obvious necessity.
The first thing needed is knowledge of the material. Knowing the material helps in selecting the right potions for treating it and for its subsequent use.
Wood — this is where things get complicated. You can't just grab the first piece or branch you find. The structure and integrity of the wood matter enormously, along with the magical properties dependent on them. Even once the core has been placed within properly prepared wood, it needs to be correctly treated and "sealed" from the handle end.
But what specifically interests me right now are the methods for treating cores, and what those methods allow one to draw out of the material — the end goal. Given that, as far as I know and from my own observations, local wizards work rather poorly with different types of energy and their properties, the odds of finding a coherent description are extremely low. Which means I'll have to run experiments myself — but not before I've gone through the books.
"Now this is interesting," I smiled, turning the page.
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