A week passed from when the Grangers and Harry visited Diagon Alley. In this week, Harry and Hermione could be seen with a book wherever they went.
In this past week, Harry contemplated telling Hermione his secret. Sure, she was only ten years old, but the same could be said to the eleven-year-old Hermione that went with him to confront the Philosopher's Stone thief, the same one that later promised to be by my side against Tom.
It was after breakfast, with Dan and Monica leaving for their work, that Harry brought up the subject.
"Hermione, I need to tell you something."
The next two hours were a Q&A session. Harry first told her of being an avatar of Death, that he worked for Death in dealing with those that tried to go beyond her concept by artificial means. Those were those that were naturally beyond her, like her brother and sisters, and that was fine. It was the one that, for example, mutilated their souls in order to live forever that he had to deal with.
It took some time to calm her down after that explanation, telling her that my job only started years from now, that Death was not expecting a ten-year-old to go around the world vanquishing semi-immortal beings.
That done, Harry told her about the ability he knew she would be most excited about. Summoning spirits, not ghosts. There was an actual difference between the two. A ghost is an imprint, an echo left behind by regrets or other strong emotions. The soul of the person had already left to the afterlife, it was just the impression of them that was left behind. Once those regrets were dealt with, the ghost faded away and the soul on the other side gained their memories. A spirit was a soul pulled from the land of the dead, when done correctly the summoner pulled the entirety of the soul, it was even possible to resurrect someone that way. But to do so had a price, a soul for a soul. For every being you resurrect, someone had to die.
Hermione being Hermione had a thousand and one questions about the spirits he could summon and some more questions for the spirits themselves.
The morning was fun, with different spirits being summoned to answer some questions, and discovering things they didn't know about said people.
Merlin, for example, was a half-succubus womanizer. A skirt chaser of the highest calibre, the very definition of a playboy. However, he was also wise and could answer every question they had for him, as was expected from the greatest wizard and mentor of King Arthur.
Or should I call her Queen Artori? That was another fact that left the duo gobsmacked. King Arthur was born Artoria Pendragon. That only made Harry and Hermione respect her more. Between the questions, they had about Camelot, Avalon, and Excalibur, Harry learned that neither Artoria nor Merlin were dead. Both were in Avalon, one waiting to be called in a time of need and the other tapped by the machinations of another. Harry told them that he would get them out of there if they wanted. After all, someone had to know how to make it happen.
Harry also was considering the idea of writing books about the people he could summon, not only for their real story to be told to the world, but also to make people rethink what they think they know. He would pay good money to see Lucius and Draco Malfoy's faces when they found out that Merlin was a 'half-breed', and that the great King they had was actually a woman.
After the Q&A, Harry once again called Marius. After the explanation of what the ritual did, Hermione reluctantly went with the idea of letting Harry open his circuits.
Harry had already brought everything he would need in Diagon Alley, not that it was much. Just some potions and salves for pain. The ritual itself was fairly simple, a couple of runes writing with the blood of the caster and some pain as the price, and done. Harry had his circuits, emerald-green lines that crossed his body, opened.
Hermione had it easier, Harry only had to put his on her back, find her magic core and let it connect to his own circuits. Once that was done, Hermione's core would 'copy' the arrangement, making the necessary modifications suit her own body and magic.
The best part about the circuits? The Ministry cannot detect wandless magic. Truly, they could only detect underage magic when done in mundane areas when wands are used, that is another reason why no one from the Ministry appears when Accidental Magic is performed by a first-generation magical. After all, they didn't detect the wizard or witches' magic, no, they detected the wand being used. That was how Tom was able to get away with murdering this father's family with his uncle's wand. Because the magic signature detected was not Toms' but that of the wand, of his Uncle's magic.
It was with that bit of information that the rest of the day passed with Harry and Hermione practicing wandless casting. Harry could tell the difference between casting with a wand and not, so he had an easier time casting. With wandless magic, there was no set of movements you had to follow, even though Harry never understood the need for the movement, after all the remembered casting Expelliarmus and Stupefy silently and with no wand movement.
With his circuits, Harry only needed visualization of the process and effect of the spell he was casting, the incantation - which could be anything, Marius explained that the word was simply a mental trigger that his mind connected to the spell and its effect so that he wouldn't need to visualize every time he needed to cast something - and the power supply, his mana.
Harry and Hermione had fun casting first-year spells, from making light to opening doors without touching them to transfiguring simple objects. Harry already knew how to cast those spells, so he only needed to translate that to wandless cast, and Hermione once she had a clear-cut, step-by-step explanation on how to do it and why it worked that way, took to magic like a duck in the water.
'Wonder if Hogwarts has an accelerated course?' thought Harry.