The grand ballroom of Malfoy Manor was an expanse of cold, polished white marble and towering mirrored walls, completely cleared of furniture. It was the only room in the estate large enough to serve as an indoor firing range without risking Narcissa's priceless tapestries.
In the center of the vast floor stood Orion. His hands were empty, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his dark blue eyes completely unfocused as his consciousness fractured into five distinct, synchronized streams.
Floating in a wide, orbiting perimeter around his body were four perfectly spherical orbs of roaring, crackling fire.
Each orb was roughly the size of a cannonball, burning with a ferocious, bright orange heat that painted the mirrored walls in violent gold. They did not drift aimlessly.
Thread One sent the first orb rocketing upward toward the vaulted ceiling, before looping it down in a tight, screaming dive-bomb trajectory.
Thread Two commanded the second orb to elongate, snapping the flame outward into a twenty-foot, crackling whip that laved the air with a vicious CRACK, before snapping back into a tight, spinning ball.
Thread Three wove the third orb in a dizzying figure-eight pattern around Orion's legs, skimming inches above the marble without scorching the wax.
Thread Four kept the fourth orb humming in a high-speed spin directly above his outstretched left palm, acting as an active kinetic shield, ready to intercept incoming spells.
Orion had cast multiple instances of Lumos before, but this was a completely different beast. Lumos was a passive, low-yield illumination charm—you cast it, anchored the ambient frequency, and it lingered with minimal cognitive maintenance.
Incendio, conversely, was an aggressive, volatile transfiguration of oxygen and magical heat. It had an appetite. The moment a wizard stopped feeding active, focused intent into the spell, the flame starved and collapsed into smoke. To wield four independent, dynamic manifestations of active fire wandlessly, without a single one flickering or misfiring, was a feat of sheer, staggering mental geometry that would have reduced an ordinary wizard to a drooling, migraine-addled mess.
And yet, Thread Five sat comfortably in the corner of his mind, completely detached from the pyrotechnics, casually batting away Sparkle's frantic nagging.
"I am asking you a very basic, very realistic logistical question, Orion!" Sparkle's interface buzzed frantically inside his fifth partition, her digital waveform practically pulling its hair out. "Where in Merlin's saggy left sock are you going to keep a forty-foot Ukrainian Ironbelly?! In your bedroom wardrobe?! Under your bed?!"
The Room of Requirement has infinite space, Orion replied smoothly through Thread Five, while Thread One flawlessly redirected the first fire orb through an aerial loop. Or I can simply construct a localized expansion reserve inside the Manor's cavernous cellars. We have acres of underground tunnel areas.
"And what are you going to feed it?!" Sparkle shrieked. "Do you have any idea how much meat a fully grown dragon consumes daily? It eats whole cows, Orion! Whole herds of cattle! Are you going to send Dobby on midnight rustling raids across the Scottish Highlands?!"
Dobby would find it entertaining, Orion countered, entirely unbothered, while Thread Two snapped the fire whip across the ballroom floor. And failing that, Gringotts manages to feed them subterranean scraps. I have vast financial reserves. Buying livestock through shell companies is trivially easy.
"And for what?!" she demanded. "What is the tactical utility of a blind, scarred, subterranean dragon?!"
Rule of Cool, Sparkle, Orion smirked internally, while Thread Three spun the third orb into a blinding blur. Plus, having an apex siege beast under absolute, unquestioning mental subjugation solves approximately ninety percent of all structural problems. It is the ultimate deterrent.
Deciding the cognitive benchmark had been thoroughly met, Orion exhaled a long, steady breath.
He closed all five threads simultaneously.
The mental partitions snapped back into a singular, unified consciousness. Instantly, the four blazing orbs extinguished without a sound, their flames collapsing into wisps of grey smoke that vanished into the cold air. The ballroom plunged back into quiet, frosty shadows.
Orion rolled his shoulders, working out a faint, dull ache at the base of his skull. Five threads sustained for twelve minutes. Minimal neural drag. Acceptable.
He walked over to the tall arched windows, looking out over the frozen grounds.
Over the past week, Bellatrix had been slipping in and out of the Manor like a ghost. She was proving to be an exceptionally disciplined operative. Rather than acting on her manic, violent impulses, she had taken Orion's warning to heart; she was spending her days silently stalking Dolores Umbridge, mapping the Senior Undersecretary's private commute routes, her daily entourage, and her shopping habits in Diagon Alley.
Good, Orion thought, watching a lone peacock strut across the frost. I despise sloppy field operations. When the snatch happens, it must be completely untraceable.
With the operational parameters progressing smoothly, Orion had spent his afternoons buried back inside The Grimoire of Old Magick.
He had moved past the foundational philosophy of sentient magic and its three linguistic dialects. He was now deep into the third chapter: The Architecture of the Focus.
Modern wizarding society suffered from a bizarre, deeply ingrained arrogance regarding wandless magic. European wizards viewed the ability to cast without a stick as the ultimate, supreme display of power, mocking African and Native American traditions as primitive while simultaneously putting wandless casters on an untouchable pedestal.
Merlin, predictably, completely dismantled that stupidity.
A wand, the ancient archmage wrote, was not a "crutch" for the weak. It was an optical lens.
Magic, by its very nature, required personal stamina. When a wizard cast wandlessly, their magical aura bled energy into the surrounding air in a wide, diffuse wave. It was terribly inefficient. A master like Albus Dumbledore could duel wandlessly for an hour or two on sheer, monstrous core capacity, but even a titan like him would eventually face catastrophic magical exhaustion as his reservoir drained.
A magical focus—be it a wand, a staff, or an inscribed ring—acted as a precision funnel.
It took that wide, bleeding aura of magic and concentrated it into an infinitely dense, needle-sharp focal point. It amplified the kinetic language of the spell while drastically reducing the core expenditure required from the caster. With a properly bonded focus, a wizard could unleash continent-cracking curses with the same energy cost it took to light a candle wandlessly.
Furthermore, Merlin detailed that the concept of a "wand" being a thin, twelve-inch stick of wood was a relatively recent, Romanized invention designed for domestic convenience. The ancients wielded massive oaken staves, engraved bone scepters, runic iron rings, and channeled power through broadswords. The shape of the focus was irrelevant; the resonance of the core and the outer casing was everything.
Orion drew his primary Hawthorn wand from his forearm holster. He twirled the pale, polished wood between his fingers, feeling the familiar, warm, eager hum of the dragon heartstring inside. It was perfectly bonded. It was an extension of his arm.
He slid it back into its leather sheath.
Then, Orion paused.
A sudden, sharp memory flickered in his mind, echoing up from his first year at the Manor.
A rough-hewn stick of dark wood. Violent, crackling indigo sparks. Rejection. Pure, unadulterated hostility.
Orion went very still in the center of the vast ballroom.
"Inventory," he commanded softly.
He navigated down through the digital grid, bypassing the potions, the books, and the buried subjugation collar, until his eyes landed on a dark, thorny icon that had sat neglected in stasis for nearly two and a half years.
[Blackthorn Wand (Volatile)]
He had refused to return the ancestral heirloom to the vaults, even after getting his new wand. It had rejected him violently back then, twisting his spells into railgun kinetic blasts, blinding flashbangs, and corrosive acid because it viewed an eleven-year-old aristocrat as soft, pampered, and unworthy.
Ollivander had told him the truth: Blackthorn requires a master who has walked through the storm. And a Thunderbird core demands danger.
"Retrieve," Orion whispered.
In a flash of digital blue light, the rough, thorny, pitch-black wand materialized in his right hand.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The moment Orion's fingers clamped around the dark wood, the wand violently revolted. A massive, jagged arc of crackling, violet-indigo lightning erupted from the tip, discharging straight into Orion's palm with a deafening SNAP.
The static hit his nervous system like a sledgehammer, trying to blow his fingers open and force him to drop the weapon.
Orion didn't drop it.
His eyes flashed with cold, dangerous indigo light. His newly matured core—deep, hardened, and vast—roared to life, surging down his arm to meet the lightning head-on. The Universal Sense mapped the internal voltage, while his grip, bolstered by the Brawler's Bracelet, clamped down on the wood like a vice of solid steel.
He didn't flinch. He didn't blink. He simply squeezed the rebellious stick, crushing the static beneath his grip.
The violent lightning shuddered, trapped within his palm, before being forcefully shoved back down into the grain of the wood.
Orion looked down at the blackened, smoking timber resting in his hand, a slow, predatory smirk curving his lips.
"Long time no see," Orion murmured softly, his voice echoing in the vast, empty ballroom.
"You piece of trash."