A Degree in Sorcery (HP/SI)

[Eternal Yujin]

To those not in my discord, I've decide to press pause on updating until my exams are over (on the fifteenth of June). Till then, I'll slowly be releasing my stockpiled chapters for both my fics on a bi-weekly basis. I'll probably release chapters sporadically over the next few months too.

A bit of a side-note. I'm grateful to everyone expressing as much interest in this story as they have already. Functionally speaking, it's my first fanfic that I've persisted through, despite wanting to drop it and start over fresh. For all it's downs (and perhaps ups as well) this has been a pretty enlightening experience thus far. True, I could've sped up the pace as well as have done a bazillion other things that I wish I could go over and do. However, this is a learning experience and I think sticking through this story and seeing to the end will do something for me that dropping it and starting from scratch will not.

 

[Eternal Yujin]

After the Great Harry Potter Burnout of... I actually don't remember the last time I posted anything on here. But it's been years, and due to likes on this story (I'm looking at you, @GrimmNight et al. Thank you, truly), I've found my thoughts coming back to this old thing. More than ever now that I've graduated. I don't have a degree in sorcery, unfortunately. It's just boring old English & Creative Writing I'm afraid. And, in the nights leading up to that graduation, the idea for a somewhat intriguing rewrite settled into my brain.

Let me preface this with the fact that I've got two main stories already. A Life Kept Simple and Willful Thinking. I'm also writing a DBZ fic infrequently though it's at the halfway mark. Readers are also looking forward to an infant Jujutsu Kaisen fic by the name of Cherry Blossom Canvas. All of that to say I don't think this rewrite will be started anytime soon. Not only due to the aforementioned stories but the antagonist really stumps me.

Voldemort. I want to write him interestingly and not as some plot device to overcome or a 2D madman. I'm not gonna delude myself into thinking I can do something masterful. I just want him to be interesting, and to that end, I need to understand what he's doing. It's been a while since I've immersed myself in the Harry Potter fandom kek. Maybe I ought to host a Harry Potter watch party in October, and reread the novels in the meantime.

What I don't want him to be is some shadow on the wall that suddenly appears completely fully fledged. I want there to be run-ins with Death Eaters and a plot beyond Hogwarts even while he's a student. How I'll do that, I don't know at this point. The pairing for this one is set in stone and not someone any of you will expect either. The pairing isn't even the focus of the story, which sounds funny but it really does make sense, even if his romantic partner will be a rounded-off character.

Anyway, I think I've improved somewhat marginally as a writer in these years. So, here's my sales pitch to revive and revamp this dusty old thing:

An undergraduate student dies at his desk from overwork and wakes up as Owen, a sixteen-year-old Hufflepuff on OWL results day. Unfortunately, Owen has just bombed most of the OWLs he needed to continue into NEWTs, and his first introduction to his new life is his single mother tearing into him over his results. Fortunately, the original Owen was a good kid. His professors liked him, his grades before the exams weren't nearly as bad as the results suggested. Professor Sprout in particular isn't willing to write him off over one disastrous set of exams. Hogwarts agrees to let him spend part of the summer at the castle studying for his resits under the professors. With Dumbledore, the caretaker, and Hagrid living in the castle year-round, it's simply a matter of asking the librarian, who lives in Hogsmeade, to pop up to the castle and live there for a bit.

There's also a much bigger problem. It's 1976. Owen is in the same year as James Potter, Sirius Black, Lily Evans, Severus Snape and the rest of that generation, and Voldemort is already well on the rise.

Owen knows Harry Potter, but most of what he knows isn't especially useful yet. For one, no prophecy. Some of Voldemort's horcruxes may not even exist yet, and even for the ones that do, Owen has no idea where they are at this point in time. He remembers how the war eventually ends, along with plenty of important people and events, but not a convenient year-by-year account of the 1970s. So, on his first day back at Hogwarts, Owen goes straight to Dumbledore and tells him everything about Voldemort, the horcruxes, and to prove his point, even things about Dumbledore himself that Owen really shouldn't be able to know. Dumbledore doesn't immediately accept "I came from another universe where your life is a series of children's books" as the obvious explanation, but Owen isn't trying to deceive him and makes no effort to keep him out of his head because he can't.

That leaves Dumbledore with the rather strange problem of what to do with him. At first, the answer is simple: get Owen through his resits. He's effectively lost five years of magical education overnight and while his body remembers the feeling of magic, he needs to relearn enough theory to keep up with his yearmates. Of course, they need to make use of a time turner, which Dumbledore goes to great lengths to acquire after coming around to the entire situation and things really do go well in this opening training arc.

Except Dumbledore keeps teaching him after the resits are over. Eventually, it becomes something neither of them really set out to establish: Owen becomes Dumbledore's apprentice. The sixth year begins, Voldemort becomes a shadow over Britain, and Owen has to live alongside people whose futures he already knows without actively making things worse.

So... thoughts?