Blindness

Chapter 8: Orange Scales and Ridges

The days before the first task passed quickly for Harry; there was always more books to listen to, more parts of the castle to explore, more things to learn.

A few professors in particular quickly became close to friends in their shared love of learning and exploring new ideas. Filius Flitwick, whose expertise in both Charms and Dueling made him a valuable teacher in converting wand-based spells to use in a staff, was visited on nearly a daily basis. With him Harry began to experiment with moving his staff in ways other than simply down or out from himself. Flitwick, in turn, was interested to learn Harry's experiments on using the light and patterns he saw to cast spells instead of wand-movements and in some cases, words.

Septima Vector, a stern woman who taught Arithmancy, was hardly interested in his sight at all besides the potential benefits in seeing the mathematical correlation between the patterns he saw and the basic algorithms she taught. Instead, she was more than willing to spend hours with Harry and Hermione talking of numbers, geometry and calculus, some of the few muggle subjects that had a common language in magical society, even if few studied them.

Harry was fascinated by the idea of using magical numerical equations to predict the future, and compared it at length to muggle Game Theory, which muggle economists had been perfecting for years.

"Though, they call it decision science, or interactive decision theory, not predicting the future." Harry finished, while Hermione quickly continued to explain further upon seeing Professor Vector's stunned gaze.

"It's relatively basic and short-term, of course. They set it up as a zero-sum game, with each person having a set positive or negative number for each possible decision..."

The third was, surprisingly, the professor of Ancient Runes, Bathsheda Babbling. Though Harry, without the ability to read or write runes, could hardly learn the subject she taught, she was also interested in the use of ancient runes in warding schemes, in particular the ancient wards of Hogwarts that mostly still remained a mystery.

As soon as she confirmed that Harry could, in fact, see magic as light and patterns, she practically overtook the task of escorting them around various portions of Hogwarts herself, as avid as Hermione on his hypothesis of an underground warding chamber, and his descriptions of the wards and how they were shaped led to her confirming several of her own theories on the scripts used to ward the ancient castle.

He also made friends with the gamekeeper and entered the Forbidden Forest, spoke to centaurs about the stars he had never been able to see and the connection with the forest's magic and their own, watched thestrals graze and fly, observed the multitude of magical flora and fauna, always entering new colors and patterns into his internal directory and Hermione's written notes.

And on the day before the first task, Neville Longbottom passed Hermione a note with an apologetic glance, and within the paper was written a single word.

Dragons.

And Hermione abruptly decided that the Headmaster's plan for Harry to simply forfeit was indeed a good one.

But Harry, in a abrupt change of heart at the thought of encountering live dragons, fervently disagreed. So that night was spent reading about dragons and how to survive encountering them.

-O-O-

The task was to obtain a golden egg from a clutch guarded over by an angry mother. Durmstrang conquered the challenge with expert use of transfiguration to distract the angry dragon. Beauxbatons' work was choppy, the elder Delacour spending more time guarding her younger sister than searching out the egg. Hogwarts' Champions obtained their egg with flawless teamwork, the Hufflepuff and Gryffindor working together to duplicate the eggs and draw the dragon away from its original nest.