— Clara POV —
The next few weeks passed in a flash of learning, end of year tests and teaching the fast track class. Everyone in the fast track class could sense, read and infuse intent at the most basic level, which meant that they could practice for themselves whenever they wanted.
The real highlight in this time was the amber on Mosaic's shell, being completely absorbed after two years of waiting, now appearing as another part of the shell, the socket in the middle now bare again. I had already anticipated something like this, having prepared a green emerald, inlaying it next, the indent forming a tight fit around it. What I did not expect was, that he would grow a new head, now having six, his hunger spiking dramatically for the next few months, as the heads development caught up with the other heads. Still no split personalities luckily.
In these more mundane part of these few weeks I had already studied:
Tacitus - a germanic runic/sign system used for divination,
Epigraphy - runic system used by vikings,
Adulruna - a runic system based on the Kaballah,
Elder Futhark - an old germanic runic alphabet and
Gobbledegook - the commonly used language of goblins, though the name was lost in translation and was influenced by bigoted wizard, with the real name just being: Goblin Speech.
My reasoning behind these were:
Tacitus because of its assumed simplicity (I was wrong),
Epigraphy out of curiosity,
Adulrune due to their religious significance,
Elder Futhark as a solid foundation,
Goblin Speech out of necessity to communicate with goblins in the future.
The currently last ongoing one was Mermish - native language of merpeople - so I could practice it at Hogwarts in the great lake.
Meanwhile I had also refined my mindscape to near symmetry and was currently working on the overall structure of it, without breaking the fragile equilibrium.
Now, summer break had just started, though my plans would hardly give me anything like peace and quiet. I say plans, though I had only one. Tireless practice for a minimum of sixteen hours a day of writing, etching and carving runes, while also learning calligraphy. Over the next two months, Henry would only see me neck deep in my room, filled to the brim with small wooden, paper and stone boards, talismans and balls of different sizes and forms together with their corresponding tools, including brushes of varying sizes, small knifes, different deburrers, hammers and chisels made out of different though mundane materials.
At the end of these two months, every single sheet of paper was densely filled with letters of more than 700 different languages and any other object was either filled, carved or etched with runes and even a few simple wardschemes, though their only use for now was looking very nice, as they would just violently disintegrate their medium if you tried to power them. I checked (and nearly set my whole room ablaze). This was due to the simple fact, that I used none primed materials for my practice, as everything else would be too expensive, wasteful and multitudes more dangerous.
But the last project of the summer break was a small primed and hollow iron ball, which I myself made. It had a diameter of exactly ten centimeters with the outer wall being two centimeter thick. I opened the ball through a commonly used spell for wandcrafting, which split the material, wood or iron in this case, while also retaining its integrity as a singular object: „Non Structuris Scindo".
Then I went to work, carving thousands of Elder Futhark runes on the inside of the ball, mixed with a few tacitus signs serving as major nodes of the 4 cardinal directions and their vertical counterparts. Afterwards I canceled the previous spells and started decorating the outer shell of this ball with basic calligraphy, which was the extent of my current abilities. At the end, I naturally triple septuple checked my work, before under Henrys supervision starting the ward. Good news was, that it didn't explode. Bad news, it was horribly inefficient. My first project for a wards was a kind of filter, so that it could attract and purify environmental mana. This was already done thousands of time with different languages, philosophies etc., but I did it without reference work, relying only on my own understanding of the topic and necessary knowledge.
The current degree of purification was a measly 10%, which was 15% less pure mana than Hogwarts environmental mana. The end goal for this project was a three walled object, the outer shell would attract energy, while depriving it of any charges it had, making the magical particles neutral. The inner shell would filter out other stray energies, while the core would negate elemental properties of the remaining mana particles, storing it in the middle of the construct, where the mana would slowly be compressed. Then, after I had made a working prototype, I would scale it up to room size, so that I could place it in the center of my pocket dimension. A makeshit cultivation room. Future plans for this idea were a greenhouse, pet space for Mosaic and workshop. That was far in the future though, as I barely started with the outer layer, which needed a lot of improvements before I could even start with the inner or core one. While one part was the still subpar material, I would not upgrade anytime soon, as this was the smallest factor. If I could get it to work with iron, any other material would also work with different advantages and disadvantages.