Ravenclaw picked it up quickly. A few hours later, a second Ravenclaw stood before Tom, equally graceful, equally arresting. The softness of her face made the avatar's slight blurring into something almost deliberate, an added layer of mystique rather than a flaw.
"If I'd had this spell back then, life would have been considerably easier." Ravenclaw nodded with visible satisfaction. Then: "How many avatars can you produce right now?"
"Three, at the moment," Tom said. "The magical distribution has to match what the mental load can carry. Push it out of balance and the whole thing destabilizes. With more practice, maybe more."
"Already stronger than me." Ravenclaw could currently split into two. Her soul's essential quality wasn't as elevated as Tom's, which made the partitioning process more difficult, and a serious injury to her soul structure could take months or years to repair.
Tom, on the other hand, had the Unicorn Spirit talent running underneath everything else, lifting his soul's fundamental grade. What would flatten anyone else required nothing more than two good nights of sleep to sort out.
The foundation mattered. That was the whole of it. People who started from nothing rarely got to fail and try again. One chance, maybe two, and the probability of climbing out of where you began dropped, and beyond the odds, the psychology changed too. When every mistake might be final, caution calcified into something that looked like cowardice.
...
Tom emerged from the learning space in good spirits. He split off three Mind Avatars and sent them into the small world with a list and a wave.
Three assignments: the bloodline fusion experiments, iterating the "Legilimency" technique, and the research into constructing a physical vessel. These were the three most pressing problems currently on the list. Below them sat the diadem and the Horcrux situation, but neither was urgent. Voldemort wasn't going to storm Hogwarts in broad daylight. After getting thoroughly humiliated by Grindelwald, he'd gone to ground somewhere and was presumably still licking his wounds.
With his thinking sorted, Tom's plans for the coming weeks felt considerably clearer. He was asleep before long.
One week passed.
Hogwarts students had completed sign-ups for the tournament. Across all year groups the total exceeded one hundred and fifty entries, roughly twenty per year on average.
Since each year group could only send one competitor, selection rounds were needed. Lupin had taken on the organization of it, which made sense given that Defense Against the Dark Arts was his.
On Tom's side, only Ginny and Hermione had registered. Penelope had briefly considered entering, but Tom had talked her out of it. Her foundations were too uneven; going in at this stage would accomplish nothing. And with his schedule now considerably more open, he had other uses for the time, including better time management across all the relevant relationships, which were becoming somewhat structurally complex.
While Hogwarts buzzed with tournament preparations, nobody noticed that Dumbledore had begun leaving the school with increasing frequency.
On the surface, the broader wizarding world had quieted. Since Christmas there had been no open conflict with the Saints faction, no flashpoints, no incidents. The impression was of a calm that had finally settled.
But the undercurrents were running deep. A man like Grindelwald, unpredictable and unwilling to play by the rules of the political game, made everyone nervous. The established powers had spent careers learning to maneuver in a world of alliances and quiet compromises. Grindelwald arrived.
There was no reliable defense against someone who simply wasn't interested in the game you were playing.
In Berlin, Grindelwald was holding a piece of parchment. A letter from the Bulgarian Minister of Magic, its language carefully deferential. A letter of allegiance.
Bulgaria had once been a loyal partner to his Berlin operation. More capable in open conflict than Italy, and punished accordingly after the war's end. Now, apparently, they were looking for a way back.
Grindelwald turned the letter over in his hands, not reading it so much as feeling the weight of it.
A trap?
He thought about that for a moment.
And if it was?
He smiled, slowly, and looked over at Vinda, who stood waiting at a respectful distance.
"Make the arrangements," he said. "In one week, I pay a visit to the Bulgarian Ministry of Magic."