As he found himself once again inside the Room of Requirement - this time alone, having arrived before the hour set by Dumbledore - Gabriel couldn't help but think the old man was insane. There was simply no other explanation for the Headmaster's magical style besides madness.
Thankfully, unlike Dumbledore, Gabriel felt no need to integrate Transfiguration into every aspect of his spellwork. His own focus was far more grounded in Charms. That was why his first task at this moment was to transform his favorite spell - the Bluebell Flame Charm - into something actually viable for combat. Not merely by feeding it more and more magic until it condensed into a denser form in the vague hope of mimicking something faster and more practical, but by mixing it with something else. His goal, in short, was to merge it with another pre-existing spell.
Once again, thankfully, Dumbledore had already made many of the mistakes Gabriel would have blundered into himself had he walked this path unguided 0 and had recorded them all in journals filled with almost excessive detail, philosophical rambling, and allegory. The Headmaster had also, as he'd told Gabriel, created a number of fire-themed charms over the decades - collected in a grimoire that had been faithfully copied and given to him.
Sadly, Gabriel would not begin with Dumbledore's so-called Dragon's Breath Charm, which the old wizard had devised in his thirties while studying the properties of dragon's blood alongside Nicolas Flamel at a dragon reserve in Portugal.
No - Dumbledore had instructed him to begin with an already established spell in common use, one Gabriel was already familiar with.
To understand why he'd been told to do this was to understand how Gabriel intended to merge different magics - an act that, contrary to popular belief, required far more than simply casting two spells at once. And despite what Dumbledore had said about teaching him Alchemy, this experiment inevitably brushed against that very subject - specifically, the World Egg Theory.
To understand that, one must first understand the origin of the world, and the hypostases that compose it.
It begins like this:
Before there was time, before there was space - before there was anything - there was nothing. This nothing had no concept of hot or cold, far or near, short or long, finite or infinite. This is called the Monad: pure, perfect, unrealized potential. But potential must eventually become something. Its Divine Act is Generation - and from the perfection of the Monad arose another principle, one that covered it: the Nous.
The Nous is the Divine Mind, whose function is Definition. It contemplates the perfection of the Monad and dissolves it into lesser emanations - Ideas. Thus, the Nous becomes the great archive and architect of existence. This is what Plato named the Hyperuranion, the Ideal Realm, where reside the primal composite forms of all things. It is also known as the Library of Akasha, upon whose pages are written all events - past, present, and future.
This hypostasis is further divided into the layers of Concepts, Ideas, and Forms.
Through the generative power of the Monad - the yolk - and the definitive power of the Nous - the albumen - arises the Khôra, the Divine Body, whose act is Actualization. This is the phenomenal world, the Universe, the shell of the World Egg, where existence truly unfolds. It is further divided into Soul, Mind, and Body.
This cosmology has been recognized by countless wizarding cultures across the world and reflected in both religion and philosophy. It also underlies the mystical power of the numbers three and seven - the three hypostases, and the seven layers of reality.
An act of Magic, in essence, is the repetition of this process: drawing upon Ether - the non-substance that composes the Monad; defining it through the Nous in Concepts, Ideas, and Forms; and finally actualizing it through the Khôra.
Needless to say, simulating Genesis is no simple task. Much of the recorded History of Magic is, in fact, the chronicle of how wizardkind learned to reproduce this process - first through long, elaborate rituals involving many casters, and later refined into something safer and more reliable through the invention of spells.
But what are spells, truly?
Spells are not, in fact, funny words and odd gestures that somehow "hack" reality. Rather, a spell is a recipe - a process. It is the crystallization of the path a wizard once took to bring about a magical effect in the world, given both a name and a key so it may be accessed again. Through this, the same effect can be reproduced without the caster needing to rediscover the entire process from the beginning.
The more a spell is cast, the more it solidifies - its path through the layers of reality becoming clearer, safer, and easier to follow. In a sense, spells grow "heavier" the longer they exist, accumulating centuries of repetition until they are second nature even to children.
There is much to be said about how wands interact with these paths, and how each generation of wizards has it easier than the last, yet loses a measure of the raw control and magical sensitivity that their forebears were forced to possess. There are also countless ways different individuals and cultures have sought to commune with the higher layers of reality through other means.
But none of that, Gabriel thought, was immediately relevant to him.
What was relevant was the question of how one might unite two separate spells into a single whole, when each one is, by nature, a different path through existence.
His task was to increase his awareness of the process behind each spell he wished to merge - in this case, Glacius and Blauflammer - to map the path they carved and truly understand it. This had been the focus of his last several months under Dumbledore's tutelage - the theoretical groundwork.
Incidentally, mastery of this stage also allowed a wizard to cast a spell without its incantation - or even without a wand - since they were no longer recalling the mnemonic shortcut, but repeating the original act of creation. Of course, this approach was slower, more exhausting, and far more dangerous, lacking the safety nets that standard spellcasting provided.
The second step - the one Gabriel had been laboring over for weeks - was to trace both spell paths simultaneously, forcing the Æther, the raw magical current he commanded, to mingle where those paths intersected. It was like drawing two looping lines on a sheet of parchment, each beginning from a different point, and then marking every place where they crossed.
Once those intersections were clear, the next step was to erase the unnecessary sections until the two lines merged into a single, coherent path - a new spell.
Easier said than done, of course.
Until now, his efforts had mostly ended in failure - either one path collapsing into the other, resulting in a burst of harmless blue flame, or coughs of cold air; or both simply dissolving into nothing at all.
At least, that had been the case - until now.
Gabriel watched as the cup of water provided by the Room froze solid under the crystalline azure flames of the spell he was casting - the spell he had created.
Surprise, elation, and pride flickered through his mind, only to be calmly discarded one by one in the practiced discipline of Occlumency. He could not afford distraction - not now, not when he had finally succeeded in performing the magic he'd been laboring over for months.
So instead of shouting in triumph, punching the air, or laughing like a madman, he focused even harder on maintaining the stability of the spell. The flow of power had to remain smooth and steady, or the entire construct might unravel - or worse, detonate - in a manner far more catastrophic than his previous failures.
'Now… to crystallize it,' he thought.
To achieve that, he needed to see the path - the shape of the magic he had forged - and commit it to memory. He had to burn its structure into his mind. A difficult task, considering what he was trying to perceive wasn't a line on parchment or even a three-dimensional figure.
If Legilimency was the sixth sense, then what he was using now to feel the thaumaturgic weave was a seventh. He couldn't describe it in a way that directly correlated to either sight, or sound, or touch, or taste, or scent. The closest comparison he could make was proprioception: the sense of one's own movement through space. Except in this instance, it wasn't his body that was moving - it was his soul, tracing the contours of a path through a space that felt four-dimensional, perhaps even beyond that.
... Or something of the sort. He wasn't a mathematician or a physicist, and he knew his analogies were likely woefully inadequate.
A flicker of distraction made the flame sputter, and his eyes widened in alarm before he forced his will back into the flow, steadying it once more.
He resumed tracing the path, again and again, familiarizing himself with every curve, every branching current, until the shape of the magic felt as natural as breathing. Time lost meaning. By the moment he stopped, not only had the cup frozen through, but the table beneath it - and the section of floor under that - had turned to a glittering sheet of frost. The air of the Room had grown so cold it burned to inhale.
It didn't help that he had dismissed the warming Bluebell Flames he usually kept around himself to focus solely on this experiment.
By the time he felt ready to proceed, his fingers were stiff, his breath visible, and his heartbeat slow with the chill. Somewhere between fifteen minutes and fifty could have passed - he couldn't say which.
Only then did he move to the next step.
Naming.
As his mother had told him more than once - and as Dumbledore himself had emphasized - there were several considerations to make when naming something. A name had power. It had to be appropriate, or the magic might refuse to obey; and it had to carry symbolism strong enough to reinforce the path it described. At the same time, it couldn't be too simple or too common a word, lest he risk using it accidentally—or diluting the "weight" of the spell through overuse.
Fortunately, he'd had plenty of time to consider and discard hundreds of options until he found one that wasn't necessarily the coolest - heh - but one he was satisfied with.
"Flamma Borealis," Gabriel intoned firmly.
The stream of crystalline blue fire flared brighter, freezing the air and deepening the frost across the floor before settling again. This time, the magic felt stable - alive - as if it had accepted the name and become real.
He could have stopped there. Spells didn't require wand movements; many were cast with nothing more than intent and direction. For Gabriel, it wouldn't have made much difference. If he had been less gifted at manipulating magic - if he'd needed to labor for years with layers of symbolism, numerology, astronomy, and arithmancy just to create a viable prototype - then a defined gesture would be useful, a mnemonic anchor.
But he hadn't. He had done it all in less than a year. And now that he had named the Flamma Borealis, he knew - instinctively, absolutely - that he could cast it again at will.
…Still, he wanted others to learn it someday. And besides, it couldn't hurt to give the spell its own signature.
He dismissed the flames, the structure still imprinted within his soul, and raised his wand. Starting from the top, he drew a rhombus clockwise, then pulled the line straight down through its center so the wand's tip ended pointing forward.
"Flamma Borealis," he chanted again, smiling as the spell burst forth once more - beautiful, sharp, and his. The construct felt even more solid this time, as if the act of repetition had etched it deeper into reality.
He dismissed it again and took in the frozen landscape around him. Then the laughter broke free.
"Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! YES! I DID IT!" Gabriel shouted, jumping and punching the air in sheer delight.
"Yes, you did," said a joyfully clapping Dumbledore, stepping out from behind a frozen pillar where he'd been watching unseen.
Gabriel's eyes widened. Startled, he slipped on the ice and landed flat on his back.
He stopped laughing for half a second - then burst out again, louder than before.
"I DID IT!"