The Wandmaker

Frustration, Frustration and Frustration

C H A P T E R e l e v e n

The headmistress of Hogwarts was not happy.

How many times had she looked out over the lone tree on the quiet side of Hogwarts? How many times had she longed to climb its limbs and just sit in the peace and quiet, forgetting the stress of running a school for just one moment?

Enough times to know that brat of a girl was interrupting the tranquility outside her office window. She had no right to such a place.

Although it was quite a way down, Lampurn could make out the girl's brunette head poking out the top of the tree as it swayed in the wind. How she knew it was the rude second year with the powerful ex-wand, she wasn't quite sure, but she was confident in her own judgement. It had yet to fail her. Lampurn had half a mind to go down and personally shove her off the tree. Obviously, that was impractical, and involved exercise, so she settled for an icy glare in the young girl's direction and tried to continue with the mounds of paperwork in front of her.

However, her concentration was broken and she found she was unable to get back into the steady rhythm she had before the girl had interrupted her frame of mind. After twenty minutes of aimlessly sifting through pieces of paper and scowling at Symbida, the headmistress strode over to the window and pulled the thick curtains closed aggressively.

"Incendio," she muttered, and with a swish of her wand the fireplace leapt to life. Trudging grumpily to her chair again, she sat down and immersed herself in her duties.

That little brat, she thought, forcing me to compromise the way I was working! I'll teach her, sooner or later.

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Ollivander sat at his desk at the back of the workshop with his head in his hands. Scattered across his desk was empty chocolate frog wrappers, wood shavings, various pieces of wand cores, and mounds and mounds of paperwork with detailed research notes into many topics ranging from wand lore, cores, and wand wood, to legends and myths about wands that moved without their owners.

For the last two months, Ollivander had desparately searched hundreds of volumes of wizarding books, from the well-respected to the frowned upon to the illegal, frantically searching for an answer to the unfathomable, unbelievable, impossible occurrence that had happened in his shop.

It was baffling, mind-blowing, even, to even try to comprehend the enormity of what had happened. Ollivander knew that the young second year couldn't have performed the magic with the accuracy it had. The first time, maybe. Then, she had been holding the wand in her hand. But the second time, when the letters had came from the wand he had been holding? No. It was impossible, unthinkable.

So how had it happened?

Such an easy question, he had thought. All it needed was a bit of research and then the answer would leap out at him, and he could sleep a full night's rest again. When the first couple of papers hadn't helped, he had turned to the wand in the hopes that he could experiment to find the answer. Of course, the wand had remained irresolute and still in his hand. There was no spark, no quiver, no letters shot into the air. It wouldn't even perform ordinary magic for him. Disappointed, but not discouraged, he had turned back to the books.

After a month, he had finally arrived at the ugly truth. In reality, nothing, absolutely nothing, had helped. Not one word in one paragraph of one of the hundreds upon hundreds of books he had spent time poring over. Not one tiny note squeezed into the margins of an exciting research paper. Not one tiny piece of expertise from his own renowned and vast knowledge of wands.