"Thank you," the embarrassed boy nodded, and we headed to our tables.
As soon as I took my seat among my classmates, Justin immediately bombarded me with questions.
"Something interesting? Here, take some potatoes," he slid a shared dish toward me. "The cutlets are amazing, and the salad's decent too. So?"
"Are you bribing me, my friend?"
"Mmm, and what a gravy… So what? What kind of bush did you grow that you needed the help of the chief herbologist?"
"Chief herbologist?"
"Well," Justin shrugged as if that explained everything and my question was silly.
"Just," Hannah decided to explain, setting her fork aside, "Neville is the best at Herbology. So good that it fully compensates for his almost complete inability to understand anything else."
"Your words are harsh, Hannah," Ernie shook his head, earning her displeasure. "But fair. Fair, I say—don't look at me like that."
"Nothing special," I piled food onto my plate. "I just had trouble understanding the needs of a bush. So I turned to someone who clearly feels such things."
"Clever. Smart. And you even made a friend, one might say," Justin nodded. "The guy doesn't have many friends, and he doesn't dare approach anyone himself."
"You could help with that."
"Well, you know our House policy—we don't go chasing friendships, and we won't force them either. Even if the problem is obvious."
"I noticed. Let's eat, or we'll still have homework for tomorrow."
Night is the time for adventures.
With that motto I left the common room at two in the morning. In the evening, when everyone had gone to bed, I spent about three hours making a dozen arrowheads, simultaneously "forging" into them the very construct for banishing the undead that I had intended to use on a Dementor during the encounter near the castle walls. It was not easy. I had to forcibly hold it with my will in the sledgehammer head while simultaneously sending the correct magical impulses through the hammer during each strike. That was closer to dwarven smithing skills. Good enough for a clumsy kid who'd never really held a blacksmith's hammer in his life.
In short, taking my backpack with everything necessary, including the arrowheads, I left the common room. Of course, I didn't neglect stealth, wrapping myself in neutral energy with the intent of invisibility and silence. Sneaking quickly through the gloomy dark corridors of the castle was thrilling, and I felt like some kind of saboteur infiltrating enemy territory. I remember loving sneaking around as a child in my past life, hiding, inventing unknown adventures in huge abandoned buildings. The adrenaline, with almost zero danger!
Here, too, the danger was imaginary, amounting only to punishment. But for the impressions you get here and now, you can set aside common sense and immerse yourself in the atmosphere.
Without a single problem or encounter with patrolling teachers or prefects, I managed to reach the very top of the Astronomy Tower.
Stepping out onto the wide open platform where our astronomy classes usually take place, buffeted by all the winds, enjoying the view of the starry sky and the half-moon, I wrapped myself a little tighter in my winter insulated hooded cloak, took out my wand, and transfigured a large wooden beam at my feet. The beam had grooves prepared, into which I began inserting the arrowheads.
Standing at full height, I looked around once more. Beautiful. The lake, hills, distant mountains, all dusted with snow. I stood at the highest point of Hogwarts, and perhaps one of the highest points in the surrounding area at all, not counting the mountains whose foothills begin a couple of kilometers from the castle.
Extending my left hand, I wished to see the bow in it, and the bracelet instantly transformed, settling into my palm as a grip. With a flick of the wand in my right hand, I transfigured a number of arrows without heads but with a simple attachment mechanism. Sliding the wand into the sheath on my left arm, I pulled the bowstring to its limit with two fingers.
"No, that's not it…"
The sensations were wrong. That was logical and understandable. The body had never done this, no matter how deeply ingrained the skill was in the elf shard's memory. I released the string and drew it again. And again. And again. The dull irritation from the mismatch between sensations and what they should be, and from the inability to perform a simple action correctly, began to recede. Receding with each repetition.
If needed, I would stand here until morning, but I would restore the correctness of the sensations, the proper habit, the proper sequence of actions.
I drew and released the string again and again. When the stars and moon had traveled a considerable distance across the sky, the irritation had almost gone, leaving only a faint reminder. I could say for sure that standing still I could perform quite a few shooting techniques, but in motion—unlikely. Now it was time to repeat it with an arrow…
That part was much easier, and fifty repetitions were enough for confidence to appear. Gesturing to summon an arrow from the floor, I set it into a head in the beam and peered into the surrounding space. The Dementors hid in the night sky, but that didn't mean they were invisible. The moon illuminated distant silhouettes over the lake, hovering there in a wall. Sometimes Dementors appeared far above the forest, in the mountains.
My gaze caught on one Dementor lazily drifting above the distant treetops. Someone might have laughed, seeing me draw a bow with an arrow and aim at a target a kilometer and a half away. Someone who doesn't know a couple of magical tricks.
Feeling a light gust of wind on my skin, I drew a few crumbs of energy from that natural phenomenon, pouring them into the arrow.
"Find… the target…"
My fingers released the string. A light chime and the characteristic whistle of the arrow followed. Without waiting for the effect, I began at a very fast pace to grab arrow after arrow, infuse them with wind energy, and send them into flight, now high into the sky. The intent was the same. Where the Dementor had been drifting above the forest, a white streak flashed. The Dementor left behind only a pale column of light, in which tiny fireflies could be seen flying upward and disappearing.
Without waiting for the result, I dispelled the transfigured beam, returned the bow to bracelet form, and headed back to the common room. The arrows, transfigured without anchoring, would soon turn into air, and the arrowheads would be destroyed by the magic within them.
The door of the Astronomy Tower closed behind Hector. A moment later, "stars" rained from the sky, cutting through the darkness with swift white vertical streaks. Each of the dozen found its target—Dementors fell apart into columns of dim light, and the souls doomed to eternal torment and to being energy sources for the creatures rushed upward.