Chapter Text
Deep within the maze of the dungeons below Hogwarts Academy of Proper Magic, there was a room few students ever had cause to venture into. It was large—rather larger than it seemed should fit in such a maze, in fact. It was large and cold and mostly taken up by a sheet of depthless, glistening ice.
All along the walls and embedded deep within the stones of the ceiling was a thin, tangled web of glittering runes. This was one of the most heavily-warded rooms in all of Hogwarts, and not for no reason. It was a room for high-level magics and experiments, and those could always, always go wrong—the castle could not risk being exposed to such failures. Skated spells were often grand in scope and scale; as such, their failure too was felt more keenly, and so the wards had to be strong.
So that was the Skating Room, and one late afternoon in early May found two people in it: the Hogwarts Skating Master, and his apprentice.
Severus laced up his skates as, nearby, Rigel finished his off-ice warm-up. His was rather more involved than Severus’s had been, but to be fair, Severus wasn’t the one about to freeskate a spell.
“What’s the spell for this time?” asked Rigel, coming over to the bench to put his own skates on. At the level his apprentice skated at, every part of them was customized in some way or other; subtle runes were stitched into the leather of his boots, and the blades were faintly etched with them too. Someone who knew nothing about skating magic might not have noticed them at all. The runes had to be custom to function properly—they perfectly matched the pale blue runes snaking around his arms. Severus’s own runes were in glittering black and ran down his spine.
“A spell to alleviate homesickness,” Severus said after a long moment. “Something you might skate for a place where first-years congregate.”
“All right,” said Rigel, frowning slightly as he got to his feet. He went out on the ice without saying anything else, and skated laps to warm up, seemingly lost in thought. His runes remained fully inert, something that Severus remained quietly impressed by—most people, even at the top levels, couldn’t actually skate on runed skates without calling on magic at least a little bit, but Rigel had never seemed to find it difficult. Severus followed after him, skating a handful of warmup laps himself; he didn’t think he’d have to intervene, but if he did, it wouldn’t do for him to be entirely cold.
Rigel had moved from his basic warmup to warming up his jumps and spins, and Severus leaned on the boards to watch as he went through a variety of positions for his spins and a somewhat scattered assortment of jumps, gradually increasing the number of revolutions. He didn’t go above triples, which Severus raised an eyebrow at; Rigel’s quads were solid, and while the number of revolutions rarely affected a spell’s functions, they frequently correlated with more magic being poured into the spell. Still, this was his time to experiment, and decreasing a jump’s difficulty wasn’t exactly a dangerous behavior.
He came over then, his runes, poking out of his warm-up jacket on the backs of his hands, briefly flaring as he stopped next to Severus.
“I’m ready,” he said, grabbing his water bottle from the side of the rink. He drank from it, then set it back down and pulled his jacket off. Underneath he wore a short-sleeved shirt, which would have been too light an outfit had he been moving less. Severus himself had no intention of shedding his long black coat any time soon.
“Very well,” said Severus, and Rigel nodded sharply before skating out to the center of the ice. Severus, for his part, activated the shields around his part of the room. If anything went too terribly wrong, he would be less impacted by it than Rigel would be out in the center of the spell and therefore better able to help control it.
For the space of several breaths, Rigel stood still there, head bowed, one toe crossed behind his other foot to rest on the ice. And then, in the cold silence, he began to move.
He started with a figure, his blades whispering against the ice. Almost all freeskated spells began with figures; most skated spells in general began that way. The first time he skated his figure—it was difficult to tell exactly what it was from where Severus stood, but he thought it was a variant on the heart-knot figure—his arms, though bare, were still dark. He hadn’t yet started channeling magic. It wouldn’t be strictly necessary until the third time through, though Rigel had a habit of picking it up sometime in the second. Heart-knot made sense as a base for this spell; it was an elaboration on a rune that meant calm combined with one that meant gentle.
Rigel waited unusually long to begin the actual casting. At the very start of the third repetition of the figure, the runes on his arms and the runes on his skates blazed to life, shining an eerie pale blue, and his eyes lit up that same shade as well. Under his skates, the figure lit up as he skated it again, and Severus could tell that it really was heart-knot, augmented with a looping ring around the outside that certainly wasn’t any sort of standard figure you could find in a textbook.
The figure’s glow grew stronger as Rigel skated it again, faster this time, and then he broke away into a complicated step sequence. As he did, the sound changed. No longer was the only sound that of his skates on the ice; added to it was a faint, reed-thin melody which came from nowhere. Severus’s shiver on hearing it had nothing to do with the cold.
Most spells did not create their own soundtracks, and music like that —Severus knew where it came from, though even after all these years he’d not realized how close Rigel truly was with his aunt. The last time he’d heard music like that, it had been trailing after Lily, clinging to her skin when she came back from the Summer Court with faerie marks on her cheeks and her eyes a poison-bright green they’d never been when they were children.
He shook his head. He couldn’t afford to get distracted, and in any case Rigel was not his aunt; this music was thinner and softer than Lily’s had been, a weaker thrum against the pulse of magic that was filling up the room. And his apprentice skated on, seemingly unaware or unfazed by it all.
The step sequence only lit up a little, and only in some places. Severus could see the structure that Rigel was laying out for his spell now; it was a little delicate, but then again the boy was used to sensitive structures. It was an appropriate base for the actual casting, or at least it would be if Rigel skated the spell right.
When most of the rink had some sort of mark on it, Rigel stopped skating. The music faded away into the silence as he stood there, back at the center of the heart-knot, breathing deeply. His eyes had stopped glowing. The runes on his arms pulsed with the beat of his heart. He could afford to take a few minutes to stand still and catch his breath before he layered the spell atop his base.
That was one of the things that very few people, even some teachers Severus had had the misfortune of encountering, seemed to understand about skated spells. They required, above all else, endurance. One could be an excellent caster of most skated spells, even without knowing any jumps to augment and shift the amount of magic going into the spell, if only they had the endurance for it. Rigel had come in with a good amount of it, but he would never have allowed him to continue on without a proper break in his first year.
But Rigel wasn’t a child anymore, and Severus trusted him to know his limits. Besides, he had a fair assessment of Rigel’s limits; he was well within them at this point.
After a few minutes, Rigel took a deep breath and spread his arms. The runes’ light steadied and his eyes lit up again, and he began to skate the spell proper. Around him, the music faded in again, louder and livelier than before.
No more lighted lines cut into the ice. At this stage of things, the magic lit the air itself, more visible than it would have been outside of a warded space, for the wards captured any stray magic and reflected it back in a glow of their own. Rigel spun and danced and jumped across the ice, his every movement filled with a surety and confidence that could only aid his spell. Hesitancy was not a look becoming to magic.
He anchored the edges of his spell with triple toe loops, and double Salchows outside his looping ring from the base figure. Then he skated out again, past the boundary of his toe loops, and reached out to trail his hands along the spell-threads, picking out the ones he needed with the ease of long practice.
Rigel returned to the center of the heart-knot, lit by the blue-gold glow of the threads of his spell he’d wrapped around his hands, and did a single axel there. He returned to the center again immediately after landing, and spun himself into a cocoon of silken spell-threads.
In the glowing cocoon, he finally stilled.
The music stopped.
The air was charged with magic; even behind his wards Severus could feel it plenty well. It hung there, prickling across his skin, clearly desperate to go somewhere, but it stayed in the bounds of the spell. Rigel remained in the cocoon for several long minutes while the spell settled into its construction. Then slowly, carefully, he peeled it apart and stepped out, reweaving the cocoon into a cylinder.
He came over to Severus, face alight with exhilaration, skin flushed red from the cold and exertion.
“I think it’ll work,” he said, coming to a stop beside Severus and grabbing his water bottle from the boards.
“I am certain it will,” said Severus slowly, eyes roving over the spell once more. It was not at all like how he would have approached the problem, but Rigel was not him, and all the better for it. “I do not believe I have ever seen a freeskate go so smoothly. You never stumbled, and you never had to reweave the spell either. What were you thinking of while you skated?”
“Hmm,” said Rigel, who had finally left off drinking his water to come up for air. “I’m not sure. It was… I was aware of more than I usually am. I was making up the spell as I went, but I put more weight in my instincts than I think I ever have. And it just all fell together.”
“Indeed.” Severus was still looking over the spell; try as he might, he couldn’t see a single thread out of place. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of Rigel reaching out to collapse the spell. “Wait,” he said, and Rigel blinked.
“Don’t I need to collapse it?”
“You put a temporal stabilizer in,” Severus pointed out, “and I brought a spellstone with me. There’s no reason to let a perfectly good anti-homesickness spell go to waste.”
“— oh,” said Rigel. “Oh. You’ve got it—do you want me to—”
“Go on,” said Severus, placing the spellstone into his apprentice’s hands. “You’ll know better than I what thread is best to pull for this.”
“Right,” said Rigel, and he skated out away from Severus, slowly this time, going first around the perimeter of his spell in the opposite direction from the one he’d last skated in and then spiraling in towards the center, catching some threads of the spell as he went, leaving others behind. In the center of the heart-knot, he placed the spellstone under the cylinder, and gently pressed it down so it collapsed into the surface of the stone.
Once the cylinder was gone, the rest of the threads swirled in, passing harmlessly through Rigel, and when the boy stood up the ice was dark again and so were his runes and eyes. In his hands, the spellstone swirled with blue and gold lights.
If they occasionally fused together to make a bright, poisonous green, Severus did not see fit to mention it.