Spells in Silence

Chapter 28: Weird Wizards

The sunlight cresting over the horizon and streaming between the rooftops stung Hazel's eyelids, and with a silent sigh she gave up any additional sleep as an impossible dream. She blinked her eyes open and looked around at the space she had claimed the night before.

It was not the most comfortable place ever, just the corner between two buildings in a dead-end alley, nor was it hers alone.

She had found it when she noticed several other people, all in ratty clothing, shuffling in as the cloudy day turned into true night.

While she got a few suspicious looks for being an unfamiliar face, no one had told her she could not stay here for the night.

Interestingly, she had noticed that they lit a couple of fires in large metal can with matches, not using any kind of magic. Wizards without wands, she had to wonder, like the Compiègne werewolves? Or were they Squibs, the children of wizards who were born either without magical powers or the means by which to use wizard magic? Either way, it made her glad to be a druid instead.

That was something she had spent not an insignificant amount of time thinking about the previous night after her conversation with Mr. Ollivander. For a year and a half, she had been convinced that she and her mother were something different, a conviction that was only proven more right with every example of wizards' dependence on wands. She did not need one; her mother, at least according to Aunt Petunia's memories, did not need one either. And yet, Mr. Ollivander had sold her mother a wand. There was no deceit in his words, and nor was there a reason for him to lie. It left her with a conundrum: why did her mum get a wand when she did not need it?

The possible conclusions she had come to were the only ones that made sense to her, and yet they still left a small pit in the bottom of her stomach. The first possibility was that maybe there was magic that wizards could use that druids could not, and her mother had a wand because she had learned both styles of magic. That gave Hazel pause because all this time she had been chasing after the skills her mother had possessed, and if her conclusion was right she would only ever be half the magician her mother was. To make matters worse, this was honestly the more pleasant of the two possibilities.

The less pleasant? It was entirely possible that she had misinterpreted Aunt Petunia's memories. She assumed her mother had continued to push on with what she could do without a wand, and that had been a driving force in her own experiments. What if her mum hadn't, though? What if her mum heard the same things Hazel herself had been told, that humans needed wands to do any real magic, and as a result got a wand and went to witch school because it was the only offer she received?

Despite her own abilities, Hazel had yet to hear from a druidic school wanting to take her as a student the way Hogwarts school had. Were the druids even more reclusive than the wizards and did not reach outside their society? Perhaps did the druids simply no longer exist, so there was no school to invite children to and that was why no one in France or Germany had heard of them? This was the possibility that sent shivers down Hazel's spine. She had assumed for months, a year even, that when she was old enough to go to a magical school in her home country that she could finally get answers on how to advance her abilities. Could that knowledge, the knowledge of magical humans that were not wand-wavers, truly be lost?

Could she in fact be the only one of her kind left, the only human who both did not need a wand and was pushing the limits of what she could do with nothing but her own mind and will? It seemed impossible that this could be the case, that no one did anything the way she did, that she was the only person who had set out to discover or rediscover magic that needed no wand. And yet, it was hard to argue with the facts sitting in front of her face.