Eclipse Transit

[Tom Marvolo Riddle]

I hummed to myself, if a bit audibly, fingers scratching at a non-existent stubble. Bounty hunters how utterly mundane… no not even that, it was medieval. As far as I knew they had disappeared from most of the ‘civilized’ world excepting the criminal elements themselves employing such methods. But so far this world has shown an increasing amount of patch-worked quality in its promises of the future and I was confident I could succeed in taking advantage of them. My body uncoiled from the tension it had been holding even as I kept pace.

Finally after a moment of silence and rolling my wand in my fingers, I spoke, “Far be it for me to be critical of you, but it seems you are dealing with lesser minds, minds that seldom have wisdom to assess- much less judge those far more experienced in the ways of the world.” I couldn’t keep the edge off my tongue of past memories, but I did a fair job at holding the brunt of my emotions from coloring my words. But I did have one thing to add even as we passed, though I still didn’t know what this being was I had a feeling that our goals were indeed aligned and it was unlikely to find as good of a source of information and power in this universe as it was.

Few people ever took time to actually try and understand. I gave glance at perhaps my new compatriot. Maybe our discussions would yield another valuable gem of knowledge. Normally I’d be averse to being reliant on another, but in such a scenario that I found myself? Choices were limited and he perhaps was the quick means of all that.

“If you don’t mind I’ll enlist myself in your retinue at least until the situation becomes completely untenable.” I said plainly as I continued rolling my wand between my fingers. A few sparks came forth with infrequent testing of my will. Assessing how things had changed. I could feel the holes in myself and not just the gaping wound that was at the core of my being. It was one thing to know of them, another thing entirely to fill them if my growing understanding of the universe was even close to accurate.

My wand nearly fumbled from my fingers as a rather important fact played across my entire form, or rather the realization of such. How did he know that people were coming for him? Given the circumstance of my presence here it wasn’t completely impossible that a Seer of some kind were to exist. What were the chances if I had stumbled across such a valuable resource? Prophecy had always been a valuable asset of wizarding kind, so much so that some of our greatest myths had been built on the bones of such people even long after they had passed away.

“Though, I must enquire your source of this upcoming event?” I gave the entity another sideways glance but kept my forward momentum going all the same. Before long I was rolling my wand into light twirls while putting more force of will on the wand to test it further. More sparks were igniting from its tip with greater intensity and regularity.

Sparks after all are the most basic of spells taught. The first thing any prospective student ever conjures with a wand. But they were also an excellent baseline as a spell; you could pump more energy into them quickly to produce more drastic and visible effect. It made a great standard for students to learn to control how much energy they pulled into a spell without causing them to set everything around them ablaze.

Simply drawing upon the air was easy, that spell was a self-regulating matrix, too much power and it fizzled out, too little and it failed to work. Hence sparking sparkles which had a degree of flexibility that worked even if they were… well utterly ineffective for anything other than a light show. But it did work for drawing conclusions on how much power I was able to throw around and I was starting to notice a vague sense of being drained, it was only lightly noted but it was there.

Curious and very concerning to say the least.

And if I were to be combatting foes that Nealaphh had courted as enemies I could only guess at what kind of effects I’d be coming up against. Worse was that if this was a sign of my magic had taken a notable shift towards that of popular culture… it would make things tricky. Magic worked by being drawn from the environment, being channeled. It did not tire them out in the traditional sense as if they were a well of power. If I now somehow housed a finite amount of power… how would that upset my ability to craft my knowledge and alter the basis that was the very foundation of my education?

It was too soon to know for sure. But I had better figure out soon.