Spells in Silence

Chapter 15: Lessons

"Exactly what were those ghosts?!": The spirits (technically a singular chthonic spirit) weren't anything in canon. The kinds of spirits attracted to/created by the ritualist murder of over a hundred children don't tend to be FRIENDLY ones. I wouldn't say that it is evil, per se, but only in the sense that a spider hunting insects isn't evil.

It's also worth noting that canon never exactly dealt a whole lot with spirits in the first place. When my muse decided to throw those into the mix, I knew I was going to be creating a lot of new things with little guidance but folklore, so be prepared for that.

I'm going to experiment a bit with the formatting since I currently use italics for EVERYTHING. We'll see how it goes.
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The sun had set and stars had taken its place hours ago, but still Hazel sat on the roof of Simone's cottage and looked up to the sky as though it might hold answers for her. As the initial terror of her encounter that afternoon with a bunch of hungry ghosts slowed to a simmer, other concerns had raised their heads. This was the first time she had been trapped in a dangerous situation since she escaped Privet Drive, but it was not the first dangerous situation she had ever been in.

The red cap. Running into transformed werewolves. The magical police back at the library in Greater Whinging, in a manner of speaking. Even the very existence of open doorways to Otherworlds. Magic made scary things real. If she was really going to spend her time around folklore come to life, she needed to be able to do more than run away.

She needed to be able to defend herself.

The idea itself was just one of the problems facing her. Back when she had to go to school, Dudley and his cronies had always been the aggressors. They always got away with it, and she had only made the mistake of lashing back one single time. The punishment she received when she returned to her aunt and uncle had been enough to teach her that fighting back was never the way to go. She was much better served by running away and hiding. It was why she had fallen back on her jumping as her first means of dealing with danger, she realized now, and why the idea of using magic to hit back had never crossed her mind until jumping just was not an option. Overcoming that mindset would be a challenge all its own.

She lifted her hand and turned it over, holding the empty air as though she would a cup. How was she supposed to do that, even? She had tried to start fire to keep herself warm the night she left Greater Whinging, technically the very start of her grand journey. Tried and failed. Somehow, she doubted conjuring a fireball would be any easier. What other ways did she have to fight off something intent on attacking her? Her mind spun fanciful ideas one after another, ranging from streams of fire and ice to beams of bright green light to snapping her fingers and blowing up whatever would hunt her. The longer she thought, the more impossible dreams came to her, but eventually she breathed out and let her hand drop.

Some of her ideas would be great... if they were possible. They just weren't. On a lark, she decided she might as well try out something basic. Closing her eyes, she shoved her worries away to the back of her mind where they could bother her later and focused on the memory of heat in her hand from holding the head of her torch or stretching her hand out towards a fire. Of how the heat reaching into her palm danced on the edges but never overtook the cold of the back of that hand. The smell of wood smoke, the crackling of the flames.

She imagined how it would look, a thin layer of fire licking upwards from her cupped palm, and Hazel breathed out low and long before opening her eyes.

Her hand was still empty.

With a snort she let her arm fall back to the thatched roof. So much for that idea. There had to be something she could do. For a long minute she considered the pros and cons of returning to the shopping center in Paris and stealing some books from the bookstore. Surely wizards had to have some way to defend themselves! It would take her hours and hours to translate all the titles of the books to find the few she needed, and longer still to read the book itself, but would it take her less time to figure out how to do this on her own?