Don't Panic When Things Go Wrong

"When something happens, don't panic. Take a photo and post it to your feed first."

Gavin stood atop the Astronomy Tower, his face pale. He made the joke to himself with a straight face, trying to steady his sanity.

Of course, there was no phone here, and no social media feed.

There was only the cold wind of a Scottish winter before dawn, the sky above Hogwarts not yet awake, and the black Obscurus he had just brought into being with his own hands, which was currently devouring his Life Force in a rather rude fashion.

"Great," Gavin murmured. "Things are getting a little troublesome."

But only troublesome.

They had not spun completely out of control.

Not yet, at least.

By Gavin's reckoning, as long as things had not spun completely out of control, there was still room to analyze and deal with them. Panic achieved nothing. It only introduced more chances for error, and he had been certain of that in both his lives.

Besides, this was the outcome he had expected. It had deviated somewhat from his predictions, but that was not a major problem.

An Obscurus came from emotion, so emotion should also be the way to deal with it.

That was one of the approaches Gavin had considered beforehand.

In a sense, the experiment had only just begun. He could hardly let both the test subject and the researcher fall apart at the start.

So he took a deep breath.

Then slowly let it out.

"Okay. Keep going."

Gavin sat cross-legged again on the stone floor at the center of the tower. He closed his eyes and gradually slowed his breathing.

The most important thing now was to see exactly what state he was in.

Meditation took effect quickly.

More quickly than before, in fact.

Almost as soon as Gavin closed his eyes, he entered that clear, empty state. It was like a pebble dropping into a deep well, with none of the usual resistance. The transition was remarkably smooth.

The ease of it startled even him.

Before, when he began meditating, he had needed to gather in his stray thoughts little by little. Only after several rounds of breathing could he reach this state.

Now, it seemed he could enter it whenever he wanted.

There was no warm-up anymore.

Then Gavin discovered that this was not the only good news.

Most noticeably, the heightened, volatile emotions were gone.

Positive, negative, uncontrollable—all of them had vanished.

For the past month, all kinds of emotions had clung to him like barnacles. Now they had all been stripped away. He felt like a boat restored to factory condition, its hull unusually clean and smooth, with nothing attached to it.

Mentally, he felt extraordinarily light.

More interestingly, his control over his thoughts and emotions had clearly reached a new level.

Stray thoughts arose in a person at every moment, and it was easy for the mind to be swept along by them.

But Gavin now felt as though, even while those thoughts kept flowing, a protective film covered him. They left no trace.

"...That works?" Gavin was stunned.

After thinking it over, he gave himself an honest summary:

"What does that make me? Weaker and stronger at the same time?"

Jokes aside, he understood why.

For the past month, he had fought himself almost every waking moment.

Countless emotions had festered throughout that month. It was like trying to control a whole herd of wild horses: just as he managed to rein one in, another would break loose and bolt. Day and night, he had struggled against his emotions to keep himself steady. From time to time, unexpected events had tested his nerves, too.

In itself, it had been a form of intensive training.

Now the burden was gone, and the results of that training were showing.

Interesting, Gavin thought.

Then he explored deeper into his consciousness.

Before long, he "saw" it.

Not in any physical sense.

The sensation was strange.

But he really did "see" it.

Deep within his utterly still consciousness, a mass of blackness coiled, pulsed, and slowly turned. It was neither fire nor smoke. It looked more like a shadow that constantly collapsed and expanded, with fine, wispy tendrils around its edges and a core like a breathing black hole.

The Obscurus.

Gavin knew what it was the moment he saw it.

The feeling was hard to describe.

He had heard people say that, as they grew more adept at meditation, some began to see all manner of bizarre visions and demons of Lust. He had always been skeptical, suspecting that at least half of it came from imagination coupled with a desire to tell a good story.

Now that it had happened to him, he realized those things really could appear.

Before, his "gaze" had found nowhere to settle inside his consciousness. Everything had been an empty, uniform expanse of white. Now it was as though a drop of ink had fallen onto a vast field of snow. Or as though a fly had landed on a spotless white urinal.

It was hard not to look.

"Interesting," Gavin said again.

He lowered his "gaze" slightly.

And saw more.

Beneath the black Whirlpool was a river.

Or rather, something that appeared as a river would in the real world. It came from an unseen distance and flowed toward another, broad and quiet, without waves yet always moving. The black Whirlpool hung above that great river like a nail, constantly drawing something from it and pouring something back in.

Gavin hovered in midair like an observer who did not belong there.

He followed the river with his eyes and finally, far, far away, saw another Whirlpool.

Very small.

Very white.

So white it was almost transparent, with soft edges. It turned quietly, like a counterpart deliberately reduced in size but identical in nature.

The instant he saw it, Gavin almost instinctively wanted to move closer and examine it more carefully.

But the moment the thought arose, stray thoughts surged up.

Meaningless associations and sudden emotions muddied his attention, as though someone had thrown a handful of ash into clear water.

Gavin stopped.

The stray thoughts began to fade.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He turned toward the black Whirlpool beside him, as if asking it a question.

"You don't want me to go?"

The black Whirlpool did not answer.

Or perhaps it had no ability to "answer" at all.

The thing seemed conscious.

And yet it also seemed not to be.

It was as though it was instinctively trying to stop Gavin from leaving.

"Heh." Gavin gave a soft laugh.

Then he tried to leave a second time.

This time, the stray thoughts came on harder.

The negative emotions he had previously suppressed, dissected, and controlled burst out like the rotting contents of an old trunk suddenly thrown open. Irritation, disgust, exhaustion, a cold gloom, pointless anger—even associations that had nothing to do with his present circumstances—rushed at his consciousness all at once, trying to seize him.

But—

Gavin felt nothing at all.

Like a nimble fish, Gavin swam through the black torrent of emotion without taking on any of its color. Those negative emotions flowed over his smooth surface and left not a trace.

A month of training had taught Gavin to deftly avoid stray thoughts and keep them from tainting or pulling him along.

So he easily shook off the black Whirlpool's interference and approached the white one.

The closer he got, the more familiar it felt.

It was not something foreign.

Quite the opposite. It was something he had used every day, though he had never truly "seen" it like this.

Pure.

Steady.

Flowing quietly.

He knew what it was before he even reached it.

The next moment, Gavin opened his eyes.

Cold wind. Snowlight. The tower.

Everything came back into focus.

He raised his hand and, almost without hesitation, spoke softly.

"Lumos."

Magic flowed out.

A familiar, pure, soft white light that he had not seen in far too long shone from the tip of his wand, blooming quietly atop the Astronomy Tower.

Warm and gentle.

Gavin looked at the white glow, and his lips slowly curved into a smile.

"Heh. A little Obscurus like you? I've got you figured out."

Gavin was rarely this happy.

After all, this was the first time he had seen real results after a month of torment.

He had succeeded.

He had successfully recreated an Obscurus.

And he had found a path deep within his consciousness that connected him to his normal magic again.

At his lowest point, he had carved out a way forward.

If only he had some wine.

This called for a good, long drink.

The problem was—

Happiness was also an emotion, and this was genuine joy straight from his heart.

His control over emotion-driven spellcasting was nowhere near as precise as he had imagined.

The instant that flicker of joy arose, Gavin felt something was wrong.

But it was already too late.

A month without casting spells had left him out of practice. That Lumos had been more of a test, a way to reconnect, and his control over his magic was far from as effortless as it had once been.

So that tiny emotional fluctuation was like a grain of rough sand falling into a finely tuned machine.

First came a thin streak of black.

It was very fine and very short. It seeped from the back of his hand and between his fingertips along the channel his spell had just taken, like a line of ink that had no place in the white light.

Gavin's smile froze.

"Oh no."

The next second, more black magic, thick and clinging, somewhere between smoke and fire, began to pour out.

It was not so much leaking

as bursting through.

A great beast was breaking out of its cage.

The reopened channel for his magic connected to the white magic at one end, but at the other, it had also given the black Whirlpool an outlet. The violent black magic, bearing the Obscurus's distinctive corrosive, destructive power, erupted along the path of his spell. It swallowed the white light first, then spread wildly in every direction like black flames.

The sound of the wind was torn apart.

At the same time, a thunderous crack of splitting stone rang through the tower.

Gavin struggled to point his wand toward open space. Before he could make another move, the black torrent swept violently across the stone floor and pillars at the center of the tower. Like a beast that had finally found an exit, it smashed straight through half the Astronomy Tower's wall.

BOOM—

Stone bricks, snow, wooden beams, and shattered astronomical instruments flew outward together.

The whole tower shuddered as though a Giant had punched it squarely through the middle. Even from Gryffindor Tower opposite, the movement was faintly visible. Violent black magic churned amid the wreckage and cold wind, like fire but colder, like smoke but heavier.

Gavin only had time to raise a hand to shield his face.

Then the tremendous impact and an overwhelming sense of exhaustion swept him into unconsciousness.

Just before he blacked out completely, one last question surfaced in his mind:

They won't make me pay for this, will they?

Then he knew nothing more.

The first to reach the scene was Dumbledore, dressed in his nightclothes.

A nightcap sat crookedly on his head, a thick dressing gown was thrown casually over his pajamas, and even his beard looked a little disheveled.

When he appeared in the tower, the sight before him gave him a rare moment's pause.

Half the Astronomy Tower was gone.

It looked as though some extraordinarily violent force had blasted it open from within. Walls, masonry, and supporting structures had all burst outward. Snow and dust billowed together high above, and the remains of astronomical instruments lay scattered everywhere.

Over at Gryffindor Tower, students awakened by the noise were already leaning out of their windows wrapped in blankets, staring across the gap. Shock was written all over their young faces, as if they had woken up in an entirely different world.

And at the center of the tower, Gavin lay among the rubble. Black magic that had not yet fully dissipated still coiled around his arms, shoulders, and body. Like black flames or living shadows, it slowly contracted and pulsed.

As Dumbledore looked at it, his expression gradually changed.

First came shock.

Then disbelief.

Only then did he dare believe what he was seeing.

He stood there, the hem of his morning robe stirring gently in the wind at that height. His deep blue eyes stared at the dark shape. Several seconds passed before he spoke slowly, his voice full of disbelief:

"Mo... Moran?"