That evening, at precisely eight o'clock, Alister stood before the door to Snape's office. He knocked once—firm, rhythmic, respectful.
"Enter," came the oily voice from within.
Alister stepped inside. The office was dimly lit, the walls lined with shelves of glass jars containing slimy, floating things. Snape sat behind his desk, grading essays with a vicious red quill that seemed to be scratching wounds into the parchment.
"You are late," Snape said without looking up, though the clock on the wall chimed eight exactly as he spoke.
"I am on time, Professor," Alister replied evenly, closing the door.
Snape looked up, his eyes narrowing. He pointed a long, yellowed finger at a bucket in the corner that smelled strongly of swamp water and decay. "There is a barrel of Horned Toads. They require disemboweling. The nervous systems must be extracted intact for use in Nerve-Regenerating Potions. You will not leave until the barrel is empty."
It was a task designed to be disgusting, tedious, and physically repulsive. A punishment meant to break the spirit of a pampered first-year.
Alister walked over to the barrel. He didn't complain. He rolled up his sleeves, put on the dragon-hide gloves, and picked up a silver scalpel.
"System," he thought. "Overlay anatomy of Horned Toad. Highlight central nervous system."
["Anatomy overlay active. Trajectory calculated."]
Alister began to cut.
For the next two hours, the only sounds in the room were the scratching of Snape's quill and the wet snip of Alister's scalpel.
Snape watched him surreptitiously from behind his curtain of hair. He expected the boy to crush the delicate nerves in frustration. Instead, Alister extracted the spinal cords with the cold precision of a darker, more experienced wizard. He placed them into a jar of preservation fluid one by one—perfect, white threads of biological material.
By ten o'clock, the barrel was empty. The jar was full.
Alister stripped off his gloves and washed his hands in the stone basin.
"Done, Professor," Alister stated.
Snape stood up and walked over to the jar. He inspected the nerves, looking for a tear, a nick, anything to criticize. There were none.
"Acceptable," Snape muttered, seemingly disappointed by the perfection. "Do not expect such simple tasks tomorrow. You may go."
Alister didn't move immediately. He looked at the preservation fluid swirling in the jar.
"Professor," Alister asked, his voice sounding genuinely curious. "Why use a brine solution for preservation? Wouldn't a stasis charm be more effective for maintaining potency?"
Snape paused.
"A charm," Snape said softly, unable to resist the urge to correct ignorance, "freezes the state of the object artificially. It makes the ingredient dormant. Brine keeps the biological connection active, allowing the nerve to react immediately when introduced to a boiling base. If you had read Libatius Borage, you would know that magic requires a living conduit."
"I see," Alister nodded, filing the information away. Living conduit. That was a key concept for his Blood-Forging. "Thank you, sir."
He turned and left.
Snape watched the door close. He felt a strange sense of dissonance. He had intended to make the boy suffer. Instead, he felt as though he had just conducted a private tutoring session.
____________________________________________
For the next two weeks, this became Alister's routine. Every night, he went to the dungeons. He sliced caterpillars, squeezed bubotuber pus, and scrubbed cauldrons that had been encrusted with failed potions.
And every night, he asked one specific, high-level question.
"Does the lunar phase affect the volatility of Wolfsbane, or just the potency?"
"Can Dragon blood be used as a stabilizer if the catalyst is metallic?"
Snape, despite his hatred for the name Potter, found himself answering. He couldn't help it. He was a master starved of intellectual equals in a school full of dunderheads. Alister's questions were sharp, insightful, and dangerous.
Alister absorbed it all and applied them in practice using the materials Hagrid provided. His Potions proficiency ticked up steadily.
He was close. He was nearly ready to brew the Catalyst.
Meanwhile, during the days, the Aerial Gauntlet continued to grow. Zone 3: The Blind Descent was taking shape around the base of the Astronomy Tower.
Alister spent his afternoons weaving massive Nebulus charms, creating a permanent, swirling fog bank that obscured the drop to the lake. He added Ventus jinxes into the mist, creating invisible wind shears that would knock a careless flyer off course.
It was mid-November.
During a detention involving the preparation of Bicorn Horn—a rare and expensive ingredient.
"Professor," Alister said, pulverizing the horn into a fine dust. "If one were attempting to bond two incompatible magical essences—say, a beast's inherent magic and a human's core—would the friction be reduced by a catalytic agent, or would it require a blood-medium?"
Snape froze. His quill stopped moving. The air in the dungeon grew instantly cold.
He looked up, his black eyes boring into Alister. That wasn't a school question. That was Dark Alchemy. That was the kind of theory that got wizards sent to Azkaban or killed in their own basements.
"What are you reading, Potter?" Snape whispered dangerously.
Alister didn't flinch. He met the gaze. "I am reading about the limits of the human body, sir. And how to surpass them."
Snape stared at him. He saw the ambition. He saw the hunger. And in the deep recesses of his mind, he recognized the path the boy was walking. It was the path Snape himself had walked—the pursuit of power through knowledge that others feared.
Snape stood up and walked to his private stores. He unlocked a cabinet that shimmered with protective wards. He reached inside and pulled out a small, dusty vial of a dark red liquid.
He placed it on Alister's desk.
"Re'em blood," Snape said quietly. "It acts as a universal binding agent for high-potency transmutations. It creates a bridge between incompatible magics."
He leaned down, his face inches from Alister's. "Do not blow up my school, Potter. And do not let me catch you dying."
Alister looked at the vial. Re'em blood. It was the missing variable for the Catalyst Potion. It was incredibly rare, sourced from the golden-hided oxen of the wilds.
"I won't," Alister said, taking the vial.
______________________________________________
November dissolved into a blur of ink, steam, and magic. Alister became a permanent fixture in the offices of the Heads of Houses.
With Professor Flitwick, he debated the theoretical limits of charm decay. He learned how to weave spells that didn't just sit on an object but saturated it, creating enchantments that could last for months rather than hours.
With Professor McGonagall, he refined the art of structural permanency. She taught him the "Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration" not as a rule to be obeyed, but as a boundary to be navigated. Under her guidance, he completed Zone 4: The Hydra's Trench.
He transfigured the surface of the Black Lake into semi-sentient water tendrils that snapped and twisted like serpents, and froze the air above it into a jagged, treacherous ice tunnel.
With Snape, the relationship remained cold, silent, and incredibly productive. Alister didn't use the Re'em blood yet; he locked it away in his base, a trump card for the future. Instead, he absorbed Snape's philosophy on efficiency—never using two stirs when one would do, never wasting energy on flash when substance was required.
By the last week of November, the physical structure of the Aerial Gauntlet was complete. It was a masterpiece of magical engineering, a sprawling, four-zone nightmare suspended over the Hogwarts grounds.
But there was a problem.
The Gauntlet was a beast that needed to be fed. The hundreds of active animation loops, the weather charms, and the structural transfigurations consumed a staggering amount of magical energy. Alister found himself having to fly the course every evening just to recharge the fading runes. It was unsustainable. If he stopped, the Gauntlet would dissolve within forty-eight hours.
He needed a battery. A heart that beat on its own.
Alister retreated to his base and opened the silver-bound notebooks Dumbledore had given him—the personal correspondence of Nicolas Flamel.
He spent three nights deciphering Flamel's spidery, archaic handwriting. The alchemy described wasn't about potions; it was about the manipulation of the "World Soul," the ambient magic that permeated reality.
On the fourth night, he found it.
"The Aetheric Resonator," Flamel wrote. "A construct designed not to generate power, but to siphon the excess bleed from a ley-line convergence."
Alister looked up from the book, his eyes gleaming in the dark classroom. Hogwarts wasn't just a castle; it was built on one of the most powerful magical convergences in Britain. The air here was thick with wasted, ambient magic.
He drafted a new schematic. He didn't need to pour his own magic into the Gauntlet. He just needed to build a funnel to catch the magic Hogwarts was already bleeding.
___________________________________________
The morning of December 1st arrived with a biting frost. The Black Lake was a sheet of steel-grey iron, and the grass crunched underfoot.
Alister stood in the center of the Quidditch Pitch. He was not alone. Professor McGonagall stood by the stands, her tartan scarf wrapped tight against the cold. Professor Flitwick was bouncing on his toes beside her. High up in the Headmaster's tower, a window was open, implying Dumbledore was watching.
In Alister's hand was the object he had spent the last three days crafting in the alchemy lab. It was a dodecahedron (a twelve-sided shape) carved from the high-quality Ashwood Hagrid had given him, inlaid with silver runic channels. It was heavy, dense, and lifeless.
"Are you ready, Alister?" McGonagall called out, her voice carrying over the wind.
"Ready," Alister replied calmly.
He knelt and placed the Aetheric Resonator into a small, stone receptacle he had transfigured into the center of the pitch.
He drew his wand. He didn't cast a spell to power it. He cast a spell to open it.
"Aperio Aetheris."
The silver runes on the wooden block flared with a blinding white light.
For a moment, there was silence. Then, a low, thrumming sound began to emanate from the ground. It was a deep, resonant hum, like a massive cello string being plucked.
The Resonator began to pull. Alister could feel the hair on his arms stand up as the ambient magic of Hogwarts—the wasted energy from thousands of student spells, the ancient wards, the very history of the stones—was drawn toward the center of the pitch.
The energy hit the Resonator, spiraled through the Ashwood, and then shot upwards in a beam of pure, invisible power.
Zone 1 lit up first. The cloud rings above the pitch flashed white, their rhythmic expansion and contraction syncing instantly with the hum of the Resonator. Thump-thump.
The energy arc traveled higher. Zone 2, the Clockwork Tower, groaned to life. The massive stone pendulums swung with renewed vigor, the shifting brick walls sliding faster, powered by the castle itself.
The beam arched over the Astronomy Tower and plunged down. Zone 3, the Blind Descent, thickened. The fog bank turned opaque and swirling, the wind shears howling as they stabilized into a permanent storm.
Finally, the energy hit the lake. Zone 4, the Hydra's Trench, erupted. The water tentacles lashed out, snapping at the air, and the ice tunnel gleamed with a reinforced, diamond-hard sheen.
The entire course was alive. It was humming, moving, and breathing, independent of Alister.
Alister stood up, brushing the frost from his knees. He looked at the professors. Flitwick was clapping frantically. McGonagall looked stunned, her eyes tracing the beam of energy that now connected the school grounds.
The Aerial Gauntlet was fully operational. It was no longer a project; it was a permanent feature of Hogwarts.
"It works," Alister said softly as he opened the status panel.
___________________________________________________
[Status]
Name: Alister Potter
Age: 11
Race: Human
Tier: 2 (Magister)
Magical Attributes:
Magic Power: Tier 3
Beast Tamer: Tier 0
Potion-maker: Tier 1
Alchemist: Tier 1
Astrologer: Tier 1
Transfiguration: Tier 2
Physique: Tier 1
Magic learnt: Tier 1[.....], Tier 2[...]
Skill Proficiency:
Runes: Tier 2
Language Master: [English, Ancient greek....]
______________________________________________
(End of Chapter)
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