Harry Potter: Raised by Wolves.

Harry looked down at the invisibility cloak, then back up at his professor. "You know what this is?" Lupin laughed.

"Know what it is? Harry, I spent half my school career hiding under that thing," he replied ruefully. "That cloak got the four of us out of many a sticky situation. It's reassuring to know you have it, but that doesn't mean it's okay for you to be out after dark. Let me walk you back to your common room. Put the cloak on."

With a sigh, Harry didn't bother arguing. He swung the cloak over his shoulders, noticing how amused Lupin looked as he disappeared. "You're not entirely Lily's boy, then," the professor remarked, leading the way out of the classroom. "Plenty of James in you yet. Not sure if that's a good thing."

It was the first time someone had told Harry he was more like his mother than his father, and it made a warm, fluttery feeling appear in his chest. He smiled, obediently following Lupin all the way back up to the Fat Lady, bidding the man goodnight before he murmured the password. One person in his life knew about his friendship with Draco, and hadn't condemned him for it.

Harry slept better than he had in weeks.

"…And Jones whacks a banger of a bludger right at Mayweather, nearly takes his head off! Mayweather drops the quaffle— and Greengrass has it, Harpies are back in possession…"

Harry's lips curled in a faint smile, his attention half on the quiet commentating of the quidditch match drifting from his Wizarding Wireless. He was up in the dorm, the curtains around his bed drawn and warded, his password-protected notebook in his lap while Never Unarmed: The Theory of Wandless Magic lay open on his left.

Hermione was off in the library, as always; Ron was either with her, helping with Buckbeak's case, or had given up and sought out Dean and Seamus. Harry had been with them for a while, but when their bickering became too much he made the excuse of needing to talk to Lupin about his Patronus lessons. The pair may have banded together in the face of the Ministry's stupid creature laws, but that didn't quite make them friends again.

Either way, it meant that he had at least an hour of free time, and it was perfect timing for the Holyhead Harpies match against the Ballycastle Bats. It was also perfect timing for Harry to go over some of the notes he'd been making the last few months.

It was a good thing his notebook was charmed to add pages as it became necessary; it was full to bursting with scrawled notes and diagrams and half-hearted attempts at family trees as Harry tried to figure out the complicated world of British pureblood families. If he were more like Hermione, he'd have some sort of organisation system to separate his spell-related research from his history-related notes — but he wasn't, and chaos seemed to suit him perfectly fine, so he continued to write on whichever page he pleased.

Currently, he was comparing notes he'd made from reading Reaching Your Core: A Guide to Understanding Your Magic to the text within Never Unarmed, quill tapping thoughtfully against his lower lip. Since he'd entered the wizarding world, wandless magic had been spoken of as the absolute pinnacle of magical power and talent — only extraordinary people could manage it, like Albus Dumbledore.

But why then did children have so many bursts of wandless magic?

Many of the books he read talked about how the immature core was more volatile, and training it with the focus of a wand helped to direct it, with the downside of making it harder to access without a focus. They explained that for all but the most powerful, the trade-off for control over your own magic was the need for a wand to use it. Sure, in times of great stress or need, a person could perform wandless intentional.

magic,

but

it

was

rarely

That made little sense to Harry, when all the books on inheritance magic suggested that many talents inherent to certain families were innate and wandless; metamorphmagi powers and soothsaying, an affinity to mind magics or animagi magics. Some were bloodline-only, but many were available to any wixen willing to work for it, and family magics just made it easier.

A wand wasn't needed for Occlumency. A wand wasn't needed for an animagus to transform, once they'd mastered the initial transformation process. They channelled magic directly from a person's core. That had to be the connection. Never Unarmed talked about being in tune with your magic, about using your fingers instead of your wand, learning to push the magic through your body rather than your focus. Even to Harry, whose magic had been buzzing under his skin since the moment the goblins had released the blocks, that felt exhausting. He'd tried all the exercises the book offered, holding his wand in his off-hand and trying to cast through the fingers of his dominant hand, but it just felt like trying to push concrete through a sieve.

The book was wrong, he was sure of it. Reaching Your Core had taught him a lot of things, as had the books on core blocks and family magics. Wandless magic wasn't about turning your fingers into your focus — it was about bypassing your focus entirely and just letting your core breathe.

"…And the Harpies score! Owens had better hurry up, or even the snitch won't save the Bats today! Quaffle is back with Fawley, and to Kinnock…"

Harry tuned out the quidditch match, shutting his eyes and taking a steadying breath. Between all the various meditation exercises he'd been learning, it was easy to sink deep into the corner of his consciousness that housed his core, the magic humming softly. He wondered absently if it was like that for everyone, or if he was an exception. He was only thirteen, surely he couldn't be that powerful? None of his teachers had ever said anything about focusing inward on your magic, or any sort of humming or buzzing sensations. Perhaps it was just an uncommon practice, and if everyone tried it they would feel the same. Maybe he'd talk to Neville about it sometime, see what the other boy thought.

He delved deeper, surrounding himself in the humming, the warmth of his magic like rays of sunlight against his skin. Even now, months after the blocks had been removed, it felt… unsettled. Like it was housed in a space too small, crammed into his body like he had been crammed into the cupboard under the stairs at the Dursleys'. Harry hoped he'd grow a few inches, maybe put on some muscle; that might make his magic feel better. Dumbledore was pretty tall — was that because he needed to contain more magic?

Drawing his focus back to the task at hand, Harry kept breathing, raising his right hand slowly. He opened his eyes. His fingertips were glowing.

•

🚀New updates on my Ko-fi!🚀

Support me and read the novel, now available in PDF, with the advanced chapters.

•

https://ko-fi.com/cmrowling