When Harry went downstairs on Monday morning, a bit after eight, there were already several students from all four Houses in the Great Hall having breakfast – including Dominic, who was sitting a little nervously at the Hufflepuff table and fidgeting.

"All right?" Harry asked.

"Oh, um…" the manticore began. "I'm just a bit… overwhelmed?"

"I think everyone feels like that," Harry told him. "Have you got yourself a typewriter yet?"

Dominic shook his head, shrugging, and his wings flicked up a little before he pulled them back down again.

"Talk to Professor Sprout about it when you get your schedule this morning," Harry advised. "She'll be able to help."

That seemed to help, and Harry gave him some advice about broomstick flying before going over to the Gryffindor table to actually get his breakfast. There were sausages and rolls, so Harry buttered a roll before heating the sausage with his breath and folding the roll around it.

He wasn't going to have a big breakfast so soon after such a big feast, but it was nice to get started.

The rest of Harry's friends straggled in around quarter past, and they were just finishing up their breakfast when Professor McGonagall approached.

"Since you're all here, I may as well go through your subjects at once," she said. "Mr. Potter, Miss Granger, I see you both applied to take the Alchemy NEWT."

"Is that okay?" Harry said, a little concerned. "I know it hasn't been on for the past several years."

"That, Mr. Potter, is because we have never had enough applicants," Professor McGonagall replied. "To my shame, this has not been because people were intimidated but because Albus forgot to let anyone know it was an option."

"...okay, that is peak Dumbledore," Dean sniggered.

"Fortunately, this year there are enough students participating that I can report Alchemy is available," Professor McGonagall went on. "And with an O in both Transfiguration and Potions, you are more than qualified to take Alchemy; I can also see no problems with your applications to do Runes, Defence, Charms or Transfiguration."

She tapped a piece of parchment, and then gave it to Harry – it was still shifting around a bit when he took it, but once it stopped it told Harry his schedule for the year.

After three years doing his OWL subjects, Harry felt sort of unsure what to do with a schedule that had so many blocks of free time on it. Monday afternoon was clear, and so was Tuesday after break and Thursday until the late afternoon; Friday afternoon was clear, and Wednesday – which was the day with Alchemy – was the only day where the schedule looked anything like it had for most days in Fifth Year.

Because Astronomy had been on Wednesday, even that day was clearer now than it had been before.

As for when his lessons actually were, it looked like Runes was straight after breakfast on Monday, then Defence. In fact it looked like his first Alchemy lesson was going to come after his first NEWT lesson in all four other subjects he was doing.

"Miss Granger," Professor McGonagall was saying, as Harry looked up again. "Your OWL results included the highest score on record for a subject you are not even doing. Your only result that was less than an Outstanding was Divination, and you have not even applied to do Divination. Yes, you can do all the subjects you have applied to do."

"...can I apply to do another one?" Hermione asked. "It doesn't feel right unless I'm doing so many subjects that someone tries to stop me."

"I'll try and stop you!" Ron volunteered.

Professor McGonagall's lips twitched. "Seven NEWTs is quite enough, Miss Granger."

She moved on to Neville. "Professor Vector is accepting students with an Exceeds Expectations into her class, Mr. Longbottom, so there are no problems there."

"Oh, that reminds me, are we all on the same class schedule?" Ron checked. "I know sometimes they have to shuffle things around."

"As it happens, you are, Mr. Weasley," the Professor told him. "If you had been doing Muggle Studies that would be different, however."

"I wondered if I should," Ron confessed. "But it felt like the other subjects all mattered more."

"Even Transfiguration?" Dean said, then glanced up at their head of house. "Um, no offence, I just mean for what Ron wants to do…"

"It's for making bits of the rocket," Ron explained. "It's either Transfiguration or Alchemy, and my Potions mark wasn't acceptable."

"It was in fact an Acceptable, Mr. Weasley," McGonagall corrected. "Though, yes, it would not be acceptable to Professor Snape and I believe the Headmaster would wish to discuss with you if you were to do Alchemy."

Ron looked torn for a moment, then shook his head. "Nah, Transfiguration is better."

"Like you were going to pick something else with Professor McGonagall right there," Dean joked.

Hermione got her schedule then, and so did Neville, and Harry had a look at both of them to see what was different.

Neville's Herbology turned out to be Tuesday afternoon, and Potions was Monday afternoon, while Arithmancy was just after lunch on both Thursday and Friday. That meant Hermione had a lot less free time available than Harry did, though Neville's was the same amount just shaped differently.

"I am sure Professor Sinistra will be pleased to see you return, Mr. Weasley," McGonagall said, as she handed Ron his schedule. "If you would like my advice, I recommend that you spend some of Monday afternoon asleep – unlike with previous years we have not been able to arrange for the morning after your Astronomy class to start with a free period."

"What about if it was on Wednesday evening?" Ron asked, checking his schedule, and Harry leaned over to look as well.

The funny thing about Ron's schedule was that almost everything was in the morning. He had only one lesson in the afternoon on any day – Charms on Thursday – and in fact that was the only thing he was doing on Thursday.

"Unfortunately, Thursday morning is when we find Divination in your block of classes," McGonagall explained. "Since so many students who do Divination also do Astronomy, we have had to prioritize them."

"I'll manage," Ron decided. "I'd be up late other days anyway because of Quidditch stuff."

"Is it a problem that I'm not doing Astronomy this year?" Dean checked. "I am aiming to do Divination."

McGonagall looked down her nose at Dean for a moment, then smiled slightly. "While I would normally disapprove of Divination in general, Mr. Thomas, I happen to know that some lessons in Divination this year will be handled by a guest. Even with the astrological focus they will doubtless bring to their lessons, you should be quite all right with an E in Astronomy."

Dean thought about that for about ten seconds.

"So… Firenze, then?" he asked. "Or Ronan, it could be Ronan, but I'm guessing it's Firenze."

Seeing McGonagall's surprised look, he shrugged. "I'm doing Care of Magical Creatures, too, and centaurs qualify unless they say they don't. I thought it was worth a guess."

"I can see it will be hard to keep secrets around you, Mr. Thomas," Professor McGonagall mused. "In any case, you have applied for your best subjects for NEWTs and so I see no problem in you doing all five of them."

Since Harry (and Hermione, and Ron) had Runes first thing, they said their goodbyes to Neville and Dean and went upstairs to get their textbooks and supplies.

"We'll probably have homework from this," Ron said, rummaging around for his copy of International Runic Alphabets. "Mind waiting to do it until I'm around?"

"I know Hermione's got Potions this afternoon," Harry replied. "Accio International Runic Alphabets."

Ron whistled as the book flew out of Harry's collection and into his paw. "Forgot we could do that now. Hah, forgot that I'll never be unable to do magic again – Accio book."

Harry gave Ron a slightly disappointed look, as the book in question duly emerged from Ron's trunk.

"What?" Ron asked. "Oh, don't look at me like that, I was thinking of the right book."

"If there was any justice, you'd now be buried by copies of the book flying in from Ravenclaw Tower," Harry informed him, then sniggered.

Ron considered that.

"Fair point," he admitted. "Which room is it again? No, wait, you'd be buried in copies of the book, I'd be buried in books in general."

"...you're right," Harry conceded. "Now let's get to Runes before we waste all the time we saved. It's on the second floor."

Harry's first NEWT lesson wasn't quite as bad as he'd been worrying it might be.

It felt a lot like an OWL lesson, though it was a bit emptier – there were only eleven people doing Runes at NEWT level, and that was apparently everyone in the entire year who was doing it rather than it being half of the people who were taking part like last year – and Harry wondered how the numbers worked out for that before putting it to one side as Professor Babbling led them through an introduction to what they'd be studying.

There were two parts to it. The first part was about runes from around the world rather than just the easier-to-handle Norse futhark – it seemed that the very term 'Runes' was actually a catch-all term for any magically active writing system, like Egyptian hieroglyphics or Minoan Linear A or the intensely complex Nahuatl writing from ancient Mexico.

"Of course, you may be wondering why it is that there are so many magical writing systems, and why it is they all work the way they do," Professor Babbling said, tapping her wand on the board and making half-a-dozen examples appear. "All of these runic sequences, for example, will cause the object to emit light, and they are all very different."

Harry put his paw up.

"Mr. Potter," Professor Babbling invited.

"Is the reason why going to make me regret not doing Arithmancy this year?" he asked.

"Hopefully not," the Professor said. "You are correct, Mr. Potter, it is related to Arithmancy, but we will cover what is relevant when we get there. More generally, it is rather like with Magical Creatures – and magical people – as compared to non-magical creatures and Muggles. There are several versions which can be magical, but not all of them can be."

Harry nodded, taking a note about that.

"So…" Ernie began. "Is it like how magical people can do anything that Muggles do if they learn it, but Muggles can't do magic? So, um, English writing is like a Muggle language, and these other ones are Magical languages but Muggles can still use them?"

"Exactly," Professor Babbling told him. "Very good, two points to Hufflepuff."

She began writing on the board, with a piece of chalk this time instead of simply tapping it with her wand. The first thing she chalked out was a Futhark sequence Harry recognized from fourth year, one which was about protection, and then she wrote something else in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

"These two runic spells do the same thing," she told them. "What do you notice that's different? Miss Davis?"

"The Egyptian one's got three more letters in it," Tracey said.

"Well spotted," Professor Babbling nodded. "Yes, unfortunately all the rules you have learned about Runic meaning and interactions are for Futhark only, and any other runic writing system has a different set of rules."

There were a few groans at that, and Harry had to work hard to suppress a sigh.

"However," their teacher went on, "This is also the same runic spell."

She chalked down something different, and Harry leaned forwards a bit to see.

"Wait, hold on," Ron muttered, and Hermione's hand went up.

"Those are the same letters, but written in a different way," Hermione said. "Or, arranged differently and written in a different way."

Professor Babbling nodded. "Quite right. The different arrangement modifies the magical interactions, and the different letters also change their properties – in this case the effect is the same. For another example, this one in Nahuatl, please open your textbooks to page one hundred and twenty-seven."

Harry came out of Runes with a few things to think about.

One of them was whether one of the languages Tolkien had included in The Lord of the Rings was actually a proper magical runic language and nobody had properly noticed, because you had to get the shapes just right for a runic thing to have an actual magical effect instead of just looking interesting and there were those other things (like the One Ring, which was clearly a Horcrux and also in a funny way a bit like one of the Hallows) which made it seem like he knew something about the magical world – and that was before you got to the Dementors.

On the other paw, Tolkien had clearly invented the languages himself, so either he was just making up a fictional language or he was a secret Runes expert who'd invented a whole fictional universe to disguise having invented a real Runic language.

...actually, now that Harry said that that did seem like the sort of thing that an eccentric wizard would do. Especially if that wizard was Tolkien.

The other thing he had to think about was the homework, where Professor Babbling had asked them to give three examples of non-Futhark runic sequences from the book and write their translation into English and into Futhark – plus the upsides and downsides of writing them in both the original language and in Futhark.

It didn't sound like a lot, unless there were funny rune interactions going on, in which case it did sound like a lot. Harry wasn't sure which it would be.

There was enough time to drop off the Runes book – and homework – up in Gryffindor Tower, and Harry grabbed his copies of the whole set of books they had as Defence textbooks this year.

He also grabbed Dean, and Neville, because all five of them were going to be doing the next class (Defence Against the Dark Arts) and they went down to make sure they were all outside the classroom door in good time.

"Potter," Draco said, as they arrived. "Do forgive me if I don't greet all your companions, it would take a terribly long time."

Harry didn't think it would take quite so long as that, but it was probably a joke.

"Any idea what the Defence teacher is like?" he added. "I suppose it's not possible to be worse than Umbridge, but last year I would have said it wasn't possible to be worse than Lockhart, and that's before getting into Quirrell."

"I remember being told that Quirrell wasn't actually the worst teacher they'd had in the last few years, back in first year," Harry said.

Draco shuddered. "I can't believe that the mixture of teachers we've had is us getting lucky."

"Well, if he does turn out crap you can always teach the class yourself, right?" Ron asked.

"That's a good point, Weasley," Draco said, nodding. "I never would have thought of that myself, except for the way I did."

"Hold on," Dean requested. "I want to start keeping score."

He took his bag off his shoulder and started rummaging for parchment, but then the door opened.

"Wonderful!" Professor Diggle announced. "I'd say you're all here, but I haven't taken the register yet. Please come in!"

When Harry entered the room, the first thing he really noticed was that everything had been pushed to the side.

The Defence classroom had looked different under different teachers, and he'd been wondering what Professor Diggle would do with it – and the result was certainly different, he had to admit that.

There were still about as many tables as usual, but they were lining the outer edge of the room with only a little bit of spare space for students to walk along the back. Professor Diggle's desk was in the usual place, at the front next to a blackboard, but the other half of the front of the room was covered with a solid slab of oak marked with a series of concentric rings.

That left a large space in the middle of the room, in which three posed wooden dummies were stood. There were pictures on the walls, as well, mostly colourful abstract art, though there was one fine depiction of an armoured knight.

"Oh, Mr. Potter – such a delight to meet you again – perhaps you'd better stay over here until everyone else has taken their seats," Professor Diggle suggested, seeing Harry contemplating the walkway for people to take their seats. "Already had this problem with some fine girls in fourth year. Yes, in you go, in you go… and there."

Harry took the seat on the end, which happened to be next to Neville – the rest of his friends had delayed taking their seats a bit so they'd all end up together.

Professor Diggle then went up to his desk. "All right," he said. "According to my register, there should be twenty-two students doing Defence Against the Dark Arts in Sixth Year… and there's twenty-two of you, splendid. No need to go through the names."

Su Li put her hand up.

"Go ahead?" Professor Diggle invited her.

"If you want to call on someone, Professor, how will you know our names?" she asked.

"Excellent question," Diggle told her. "I'm sure I'll manage. Let's get to the interesting stuff!"

He picked up a piece of chalk and wrote the name of the class on the board. "Defence. Against. The Dark Arts! It's something we study here at Hogwarts, and there are lots of ways you can think about it. Who can think of one?"

Hands and one paw went up.

"Mr. Malfoy, you first," Professor Diggle invited.

"Casting hexes and jinxes at someone trying to cast hexes and curses on you, I would hope," Draco said.

"Excellent answer," Diggle agreed. "It's one that's a lot of fun, too! Miss Li?"

Su said it included counterspells for jinxes, and then Dean added that it was also making sure you knew what would come after you, and that sort of answer kept going for several minutes.

It turned into a sort of competition to see how many answers they could come up with, with Harry's contributions being the Patronus Charm (which was a spell that defended you against two very dark creatures) and that it was Defence Against the Dark Arts because the Dark Arts themselves were a lot more dangerous than Defence against them was – if someone wanted to learn the Dark Arts for a good reason then it was better if everyone knew how to Defend themselves against them, and if someone wanted to learn the Dark Arts for a less-good reason then he hoped everyone knew how to Defend themselves.

The second one was a bit more long-winded than the first.

"Very good!" Professor Diggle told them all, once the answers had finally stopped coming.

He doffed his purple top hat, placing it on the table and tapping it with his wand, and then pulled a rabbit out of it.

"This is of course what Muggles think wizards do all the time!" he said. "And when you think about it it's really quite pleasant – harmless and eccentric, which is a good thing for Muggles to think about wizards. Of course they don't know we exist, but I find that if a Muggle does see a wizard out and about then they usually just think the wizard they see is a harmless eccentric."

Putting the rabbit in a little cage by the side of the desk, he started asking what spells they'd learned – asking people to raise their hands if they knew how to cast the Stunning Spell, or the Disarming Charm, or that sort of thing.

Harry kept his paw up for the whole of that bit because he really did know all of the spells, and he wondered why Professor Diggle had done the bit with the rabbit.

"Never thought I'd see someone actually do that," Dean admitted.

"A fine collection of spells, all of you," Diggle said, after he'd gone through a list of twenty or so. "My congratulations especially to Mr. Malfoy, Mr. Potter and Miss Granger, who I believe were chiefly responsible! Now, we will be learning new spells this year, but most of our attention for practical purposes will be on casting existing spells better – silently casting spells, and in some cases even casting them without wands. This is because casting spells silently is much safer when out and about in the Muggle world – even though Muggles imagine we can cast spells without words, it is much easier for them to notice when we say something."

Some of the things they did in the rest of the lesson were the sort of thing that Harry had already done in the Defence Club last year, probably because Professor Moody had mentioned the same sort of thing during the sixth-year of someone like Cedric, but it was good to be doing them as part of an official lesson – Professor Diggle told everyone how you sort of got used to casting a spell the more you cast it, and that meant you could get away with using less effort to have the same effect.

He started explaining what he called the Six Rules of Incomplete Casting, going into a lot of detail about the first two, then said they didn't really need to know all the details and just summarized the other four. What particularly caught Harry's fancy was that – as shortened – one of the rules was 'If you try hard enough with a spell you're not ready for, you'll cast something but you won't have a clue what'.

Then it was on to the practical bit. Professor Diggle started, by showing them the Stunning spell cast the proper, say-the-words way – then he did it again, but silently. Then he demonstrated what was called point casting, as well, which was where you either made no wand movement or made such a small wand movement that it looked like the wand didn't move at all.

"So you're just pointing your wand, you see?" he asked. "And what sort of advantage do you think these have in a duel? Mr… yes, Mr. Malfoy?"

"Your opponent doesn't know what you're going to cast," Draco said.

"For me, it means I could cast the spell with my breath more easily," Harry answered.

Padma Patil pointed out that with point casting specifically your wand was always pointing at the person, so you were less likely to miss, and then there was a bit of a pause until Professor Diggle smiled.

"And, of course, casting the spell is faster," he pointed out. "Once you have enough practice you can cast a spell extremely quickly – you will find that the simple Levitation Charm will turn up more than once in our lesson, because while it is eight syllables long and quite hard to cast in a hurry it is much easier if you can think the words instead of saying them. While the complicated wand movements for some spells go quite well when skipped."

Harry wrote that down, then Professor Diggle told them all to come out onto the main floor and take out their wands.

What followed was half an hour of trying to cast and shield spells entirely without saying a word, which was hard – they were spells Harry already knew, of course, but even though he'd even done some silent casting last year in Defence Club it was just really hard to switch between one spell and the other.

Harry supposed that that was one of the things they had to learn – it wasn't as if in an actual duel it'd work to just cast one spell over and over, after all – but it was so much easier when you could say the words to remind yourself.

Ten minutes from the end there was a whoosh as Oliver Rivers accidentally conjured a cloud of birds, which flew around until they'd all been Stunned or hit with other spells, and once the chaos was over Professor Diggle told him that if he could do that silently he'd have quite a nice trick for if he ever got properly in a fight.

"Not many people expect to suddenly be surrounded by a cloud of birds!" he told Oliver, and by extension the class. "Remember, in a real fight, there are no rules. Except for that one, and of course… well… the law, and so on and so forth."

He paused. "There are, however, some very good guidelines."

When Defence let out – accompanied by homework, which was to read three chapters of one of their textbooks so they didn't have to bother with it in class – it was on to lunch.

Harry was able to assure people that Professor Diggle was not much like Umbridge at all, which was nice, and then he found himself with most of an afternoon and not entirely sure what to do with it.

"Well, we could read the book?" Dean suggested. "I know you and Ron have that Runes homework, and really it's that or the Defence homework at the moment… Hermione, which would you rather not miss?"

"Either is fine, so long as you lot aren't going to bugger off entirely when I'm doing my version of the Runes one," Hermione answered. "Or my Potions homework."

Neville was the one to reply to that. "Depends when you're planning on doing it, I think."

"Why's that?" Hermione asked.

"Busy schedule," Neville explained. "I've got big plans to not do as much homework. I might be fully booked."

Hermione snorted.

"Let's do the Runes one together," Harry suggested. "We can do the Defence reading this afternoon, because if I know Hermione she's already read any book that stood still long enough."

"Well… not quite," Hermione replied. "The books in the library mostly don't move and I'm still working my way through them."

"You made a pretty big dent after exams last year," Ron contributed.

If there was a word Harry could use to describe the afternoon, it would be 'surreal'.

Most of Gryffindor was at class, so it didn't feel like the evening did when there were dozens or hundreds of students sitting or walking around the common room. It wasn't a holiday, so it didn't feel like one of those, and anyway when there was a holiday on it was a bit different because there were younger students just as much as older ones.

In the end, what Harry did was read through those chapters of his Defence textbook again, jot down a few ideas for if he started up the D&D club again, and go down to say hello to Nora and the others (who were very pleased to see him).

That still left him with a couple of hours before dinner, so he read through the bit in the Runes book about both Linear A and what was thought to be the oldest magically potent language in the world – the Sumerian Cuneiform language, which was made up of marks with a stylus.

"Must be how Bill got that new girlfriend," Ron muttered, at one point. "After deciphering some of this stuff, French must be easy…"

With the way Harry's schedule had worked out, Charms was the only lesson he had on a given day – both for Tuesday and for Thursday. Ron could say the same thing, which was sort of a help given that Ron went into the Charms lesson looking a bit bleary.

Apparently he wasn't used yet to the midnight Astronomy lesson not being followed by a morning's lie-in. Or maybe it was just the getting-up-early at all, compared to the holidays when you could get up whenever you wanted.

Professor Flitwick's first lesson for the new year was focused on some theoretical details about Charms and how it was that a magical person turned wanting something to happen into something actually happening, along with how the words and the wand movement shaped what happened. A bit of that was familiar from Arithmancy, but in Charms they were less focused on the mathematics and more on the concept (and went into greater detail than there had been at OWL Arithmancy), and it sort of gave Harry more of an idea of how it was that removing bits from the spellcasting could make the same effect happen as if they were still there… or not.

The way he thought of it was that it was a bit like cooking. Doing it with wand movements and words was like following a recipe with all the measurements provided, and you could certainly still mess it up but if you got the steps right and the measurements right you'd probably end up with what you were going for. But you could still get better at it with experience, doing the same thing faster and making fewer mistakes.

Doing it without either the wand movements or the words, it was more like missing some of those things – like a recipe without measurements, or with the measurements but without the steps. If you already knew how to make the recipe, then you might be able to make it work, but it was much more likely that you'd mess something up than if you had the whole recipe.

And casting without the words or the wand movement was like coming into a kitchen and making a cake, entirely from memory. Which you absolutely could do, if your memory was good enough, but if it wasn't then you'd end up with something else entirely.

The only place the analogy broke down was that if you made a mistake when making a cake you'd end up with a bad cake, while with magic you might end up with a quiche. Or a car.

Or a fire, but you could get that if you made a mistake with a cake.

Wednesday morning saw their first Transfiguration lesson, and once more silent spellcasting got mentioned.

Harry wondered if maybe the idea was that anyone who was taking any of the spellcasting classes would hopefully pick up silent casting from at least one of them, because of what Professor Diggle said about how it was useful to not be noticed by Muggles.

The other thing that Professor McGonagall said was that they were going to be covering Human Transfiguration in earnest. That was one of the things where Harry wasn't entirely sure whether it counted for him – because he wasn't a human, because he was quite resistant to magic, and so on – but he supposed that he could still learn the theory and it might at some point become necessary to Transfigure someone else.

Harry could think of all sorts of reasons why it would be helpful to Transfigure someone, though admittedly a lot of them were the sort of thing that you mostly ran into in fantasy novels. Like needing to sneak someone out of a building, or stop someone in a fight without hurting them – though magic did give a lot of options for that – or have them able to swim underwater, like Viktor Krum had done during the Triwizard Tournament.

Come to think of it, that one had come up in real life.

"I wish to make one thing very clear," McGonagall said, towards the end of the lesson. "Human Transfiguration is something which can be done safely. It is not, however, something you can ever think of as safe."

She looked across everyone in the class. "You may recall that in your first Transfiguration lesson I said that anyone who messed around in my class would leave and not come back. Anyone who messes around with Human Transfiguration will meet the same fate, along with worse problems if someone is actually hurt."

After an appropriate pause, Neville put his hand up.

"Is Human Transfiguration any safer for someone who's become an Animagus, miss?" he checked.

"Partly," McGonagall conceded. "Since the Animagus transformation is the way it is, someone who has been Transfigured into a different shape can adopt their Animagus form and thus clear away the effects of their Transfiguration."

She fixed Neville with a glare, then swept it across the rows of desks. "However, this requires that the person who has been Transfigured be still able to both remember that it is an option and decide to use it, and it is a little hard for someone Transfigured into a bat, with a bat's mind, to realize they can change shape – let alone if someone has been turned into a block of wood!"

Harry winced at the thought – not the only person who did – and Dean said something about wanting to get good at silently and wandlessly casting the Anti-Transfiguration spell.

And maybe casting it on himself at random.

"I thought maybe I'd do Quidditch tryouts on a Tuesday evening," Ron said, at lunch. "Not this week, because Tuesday's already happened, but next week."

"Is that afternoon or evening?" Neville asked.

Dean started sniggering.

"Only, in Herbology, it's evening when evening plants open," he explained. "But that differs depending on the time of year."

"Same for Astronomy, only we don't use plants," Ron replied. "I was thinking more about what's good for making sure I'm able to pay attention, and what's good for making sure I can see what's happening."

"If it's after dinner, around this time of year, I think it's evening," Harry contributed. "But evenings are still kind of light this time of year, so I think you can get away with it. Maybe it depends how many people sign up, though – you could do it Saturday afternoon."

Ron nodded. "Good point."

He tutted. "I keep trying to plan to put it in an afternoon off, like Wednesday afternoon, only – well – not much point doing that if basically nobody else has Wednesday afternoon off."

"Is that afternoon or evening?" Neville asked.

"Prat," Ron snorted. "Unless you want to be a Beater or something, I could fit you in for an afternoon trial?"

"Don't forget we've got Alchemy after lunch," Hermione reminded Harry, as Neville started saying he didn't like the idea of being a Beater and Dean pointed out that Neville did have all that sword practice he'd been doing.

Harry hadn't forgotten, but he was grateful for the reminder anyway.

He sort of wondered if Mr. Flamel would be turning up at some point to give a talk.

The classroom for Alchemy was on the fourth floor, in one of the towers at the edge of Hogwarts, and there were small windows like arrowslits almost completely encircling the circular room – the only exception being the door into the rest of the castle.

A few people had already arrived, Blaise and Morag (from Ravenclaw) among them, but more than half of the class filtered in after Harry and Hermione had, and it was about five minutes after the class should have started when Dumbledore opened the door and walked in.

"Good afternoon," he said, pleasantly. "I do apologize for my lateness, it seems that being the Headmaster does nothing to prevent me from getting as lost as anyone else."

The door closed behind him, and he smiled. "Welcome to Alchemy class. Since this is my first time teaching a class in at least a decade, please do have a little patience while I get used to the whole process again."

He walked over to the chair, and sat down. "Let me see, now… Miss MacDougal?"

"Here, sir," Morag answered.

"Ah, my apologies, I didn't see you there behind Mr. Zabini," Dumbledore admitted. "Well, I believe that is everyone, so we should begin with a brief explanation of what alchemy is."

He tapped the board with his wand, putting the word ALCHEMY in the middle of it, surrounded by other words like POTIONS, TRANSFIGURATION and CHEMISTRY.

"Potions is about combining magical ingredients to produce a magical result," the Headmaster reminded them. "Transfiguration is, of course, about turning something into something else. Alchemy is a little like both of those things and also a little like Muggle Chemistry, and because it combines all three it makes it possible to do things which no other magical art can allow."

Reaching into his pocket, Dumbledore pulled out a small bottle and uncorked it before tipping it out onto the table. What came out looked like water, but rather than splashing on the table into a puddle like water would it formed a pile – one which was made up of distinct cubic crystals, about as big as a human fingertip.

Dumbledore picked up a handful, crushed them in his hand, and opened his fingers again to reveal a single and much larger crystal of the same shape.

"This is water which has been given the crystal properties of iron pyrites, also known as fool's gold," Dumbledore explained. "A combination which could never happen naturally, and which would require magic to sustain if it were done by the use of a charm. But as an alchemically created material, this is now the basic state of the water – I could remove the crystal properties from it by alchemical means, but if I did not then it would simply be that way forever. There is no spell to wear off."

There was almost complete silence. Harry could hear the tink of one of the cubes rolling down the pile.

"Now, then," Dumbledore went on, sweeping the crystals back into the bottle with a flick of his wand – some of them breaking apart into smaller cubes to fit. "I could tell you all that this was quite dangerous, because we will be working with hot and sometimes volatile materials, but I'm quite sure that Professor Snape has adequately impressed on anyone able to achieve an Acceptable in Potions that you should be quite careful. Instead I will tell you a little about the fundamentals of Alchemy, and then we can get started on a comparatively simple bit of practical alchemy involving the transfer of properties between glass and metal."

The words on the board disappeared, replaced by a crude chalk drawing of a window pane on one side of the board and a metal ingot on the other. Dumbledore tutted, swished his wand, and the window pane vanished to be replaced by a much better drawing of a bottle.

"That's better," he announced. "Now, what properties do you associate with glass? Ah, I see a hand from behind Mr. Zabini, so it must be Miss MacDougal."

"It's see-through," Morag contributed.

"And it's sort of fragile," Sally-Anne Perks said. "Or, usually it is, but there is some quite strong glass out there."

"It's strong, but it's not tough," was Harry's contribution.

"Very well put, Harry," Dumbledore praised him. "Glass is strong, but it is not tough! This means that it is quite hard to bend but it is comparatively easy to break – which is quite unlike most metals, those being tougher than they are strong. That is why when Muggle strong-men wish to show how strong they are they will bend iron bars, rather than snap them in half."

Harry supposed that that was a fairly reasonable way to put it, though he did wonder how many strong-men Dumbledore thought there were in the Muggle world.

Dumbledore went on to explain how much of Alchemy was about the properties – physical and metaphorical – of what you were doing, and how it was to some extent subjective rather than objective like Potions was.

That specific bit was a bit that Harry had heard from Dumbledore before, during their impromptu lesson last year as part of Harry's Runes project, but it was good to get another description of it in case the two were different.

Dumbledore went on to explain how chalk dust was one of the materials used as a sensitization agent for colour, because of how chalk was often used in many different colours such as on a chalkboard, while one of the things used to transfer properties relating to toughness and strength was a mixture of charcoal and iron filings simply because steel was so very mutable in what toughness and strength it could have depending on things like carbon content.

It was when they were moving on to doing a practical demonstration – Dumbledore asking them to set up their alembics and pick whether they wanted to add a property of glass to tin or a property of tin to glass – that Harry realized something rather uncomfortable about his old Potions equipment.

"Professor?" he asked. "Um… I didn't realize this before, but instead of dragon-hide gloves I've got manticore-hide gloves. But I didn't really know that manticores could talk as well, so…"

"Not to worry, Harry, though I understand your concern," Dumbledore told him. "I can assure you that neither manticores nor dragons are ever set upon for their bodily parts; it is a common practice though a somewhat unpalatable topic for manticores to permit their hides to be repurposed after they have passed away, and I believe it is likely that the same sort of thing will be established for those dragons who choose to do the same."

He nodded towards Harry's pair of gloves. "If you still do not wish to use them any more, then I believe I will be able to make a run of alchemically forged aluminium steel with the additional properties of Muggle oven-glove cloth and which has been sensitized to being melted by the focused light of the sun, so that your paws will remain quite protected during your coursework."

Harry almost wanted to say that, yes, that was something he'd prefer. But that made him wonder about how uncomfortable he felt, and whether it was him feeling uncomfortable because he felt he should or not.

Then he started wondering if he was overthinking it, which was a terrible thing to start wondering because at that point you more or less couldn't stop.

"I'm sure it will make an excellent demonstration," Dumbledore decided, after Harry had been silent for a few seconds. "Fortunately you should be able to get by without any gloves for this particular practical lesson."

He raised his voice a little. "Would anyone care to tell me what they think is the biggest single possible pitfall for this alchemical transmutation?"

"Glass is one of the things we're changing," Blaise said. "And it's also what someone inconsiderate made most of our equipment from."

"Very good, Mr. Zabini," Dumbledore told him. "Which is why, before we begin, we will be using some copper to protect the alembics..."

Copper seemed like an odd choice, at first, but Dumbledore explained that Muggle ships – especially wooden ones – used copper plates to protect their hulls from damage.

It seemed that there was a saying about 'the copper-bottomed guarantee' as a result of that sort of thing, which was sort of charming, and Harry duly followed everyone else in heating up his glass retort before adding copper chips mixed with the filings from a bolt made of an alloy of copper and zinc.

"The bolts are of the type used to attach the copper, you see," Dumbledore explained. "And so the protective properties of the copper attach to the materials."

Hermione put her hand up, and Dumbledore nodded to her. "Miss Granger."

"When was the copper protection discovered?" she asked. "Was it before Muggles started using copper to protect their ships, or while they did, or after they stopped?"

"A perspicacious question," Dumbledore told her.

He tapped his own alembic, which made a faint ringing noise. "One of the more peculiar aspects of alchemy is the extent to which the properties we manipulate are the properties which materials are felt to have, or thought to have; this is one reason why Alchemy is such an enlightening subject to learn. And in this case, it would be more correct to say that the alchemist who first tried it did so with the knowledge of coppering ships in her mind."

Hermione's hand was up again.

"So how much of this works only because you think it does?" she said.

"About as much as any magical discipline aside from Potions and Arithmancy," Dumbledore told her, after consideration. "Which is to say, quite enough to prove it is real, but not enough to be careless. Alchemy is a very individual topic, after all, and it is influenced by such factors as the shape of the glass used in a reaction and the origin of the reagents… much as we might say a wand is good for Charms work, or for Transfiguration."

He smiled. "I hope that that has answered your question, or at least left you confused enough you think it has."

"I think it's done at least one of those," Hermione replied.

"Excellent," the Headmaster pronounced. "And now that your reaction vessels are appropriately coppered, we can begin."

It would have been nice if the little Alchemy demonstration had gone the same for everyone, but it hadn't – not really.

Harry was mostly focused on doing his one, while it was being done, and made sure to add the charcoal and iron filings to the reaction vessel in the right proportions. It was iron first – twenty grams of it – then a light dusting of charcoal, only about a gram, and a piece of tin folded into the shape of an envelope went into the vessel.

The instructions said to leave it for a minute, and then that was followed by twenty more grams of iron filings and another dusting of charcoal.

Then in went the glass sample – a glass bottle, in this case – and Harry added a third set of iron filings followed by a third sprinkle of charcoal. If he remembered his textbook correctly, the use of the rule-of-three mattered in some alchemical formulations and so did splitting the application.

It all seemed to go quite well for Harry, at least as far as he could tell, but when he was done adding the reagents and it was simmering for ten minutes Harry had a look around – and it seemed as though some people had made mistakes somewhere.

Blaise had apparently managed to transmute the glass of his reaction vessel into tin, which was a bit unfortunate, while Mandy Brocklehurst was standing back a bit from a fire that had developed in her alembic.

"Ah, yes, I know what has happened here," Dumbledore announced. "Mr. Zabini, I am afraid it appears your coppering was insufficiently integral, and that you have applied chalk dust instead of charcoal. While the alembic is still glass, it has taken on the appearance of tin – we shall have to revert the process in order for the equipment to be of any use next class. Miss Brocklehurst, in your case I think the problem is an overabundance of charcoal, which is flammable."

"The glass is on fire, too," Mandy said.

"Indeed, it has transferred the property of flammability into the glass," Dumbledore told her. "Fortunately your coppering is clearly top-notch, or else you would most certainly need new equipment."

He clapped his hands, to be sure he had everyone's attention. "I must confess, I thought something like this would happen, and it is not a problem if you have had that or another less visible error happen. You see, many of the discoveries in Alchemy are what we could call happy accidents, and the best way to ensure a happy accident may be repeated is to keep notes about every action you take."

Dumbledore strode over to the front of the room, and picked up a much-battered book. It was bound in leather, but there were patches of it where the leather seemed to have gone white or turned to brass.

"An alchemist's personal notebook is their list of what does work, what does not work, and what goes entirely differently to what they were expecting," he informed them. "It would be an excellent idea to write all the steps of the reactions you perform in an appropriate notebook in future."

Fortunately, most of the alchemical reactions worked out fine.

The transparent tin that came out of Hermione's one was really kind of fascinating, because it could be folded by hand just as easily as normal tin, but Harry was quite proud of the bottle that had come out of his own.

It was the first bottle he'd seen which was clearly made of glass, and yet where if you bashed it really hard against the side of a table it would end up with a smooth dent in the glass rather than shards everywhere.

"Alas, we appear to have finished early," Dumbledore said, with a sigh. "In that case, your homework for next time is firstly to obtain a notebook, and secondly to write an essay at least fifteen inches long about why it is that three of the transmutations found in chapter six of your textbook work the way they do. I hope to see you next week, or sooner, if you intend to eat dinner in the Great Hall."

AN:

This one ended up long to showcase as much of the NEWTs as possible.

Homework allocations are not exactly the same as canon, partly because I actually do sort of remember the workload from A levels and while this is harder it's not so much harder that you'd be disallowed from doing seven of them.

Writing Mr. Diggle as a Defence teacher was fun. And for that matter so was writing Dumbledore as a teacher full-stop!