Chapter 3: So it Begins

London, Great Britain

I did it. I managed something people have been attempting ever since we had two brain cells to rub together: I talked to Fate.

Sort of. At least, I received a letter from Fate, which was more than most could say.

It was terrifying. I talked about defying Fate as an ambition, about "being my own man," but now that I was faced with the potential prospect… I felt like an ant who had been shown just how wide the world was for the first time ever.

And yet, the possibilities were enticing. This golden liquid guaranteed me a day without Fate's interference, without Fate's correction. I could alter the course of human history, if that was what I wanted.

"I can kill Voldemort," I spoke aloud. I could take Violet's place, be the Man-Who-Conquered. I scoffed and let the vial slip from my grasp onto my pillow. Standing, I committed the letter to memory before tossing it into the fireplace. I'd only had the vial for a minute and I was already thinking about playing a major role in canon events. "No way. No way in hell. Becoming the Chosen One stand-in won't make me happy."

How could it? The fame that became suffocating. The blind worship of the wizarding sheeple who would turn on me with a single Daily Prophet article. The tactless envy of my so-called friends. The increased scrutiny and enmity of the "light" faction.

No, Violet could keep her crown. I had no intention of breaking Fate's machinations on that front.

As ever, the better question then was, if that wouldn't make me happy, what will?

Books. Esoteric knowledge. Secrets untold. I wasn't sure about any spiritual or emotional fulfillment, but these things could make me happy, at least superficially. So, lying in bed and staring at my plain brown ceiling, I declared:

"My ambition is to build the greatest library in both the muggle and magical world, so great that Ashurbanipal himself would weep with envy. I will live this new life without regrets, pursuing my own dreams without regard for Dumbledore, Voldemort, or even Fate, and should the day come that I stand as Fate's equal, I'm going to punch her in the mouth for this bullshit."

Silence greeted me.

I breathed deep and allowed my body to fade off into sleep. It was no grand declaration made on board the Going Merry as she sailed for Reverse Mountain. It was certainly no Oath of the Peach Garden. There was no one to hear my words to give them weight but I felt that weight anyway.

I was here. I heard. And that was what mattered in the end. It was unlike me to torture myself with what-ifs. So, I wouldn't.

I would step forward each new day towards my own ambition, casting aside all other concerns.

"After this nap," I yawned as my drawback lulled me to sleep.

X

The first step to living for myself was learning more about my power. To that end, I decided to seclude myself in the family library.

The Zabini family library of today was a Frankenstein's monster cobbled together from the corpses of many others of its kind. Father, my real one, was a dark wizard who'd worked under Grindelwald. He'd carried on a long family tradition of being absolute cunts to everyone lacking the "right" blood. The core of the Zabini library was therefore appropriately dark, if not particularly rare, expensive, or numerous. It contained a wealth of knowledge on dark curses and forbidden magics, all of them effective in their own right.

Mother had only added to this from the libraries of her many victims. She sold most of her husbands' possessions but kept the choicest bits for herself like a dragon hoarding gold. She wasn't a big reader, certainly not someone who treasured knowledge, but she was savvy enough to recognize that grimoires were themselves a form of power, and power was what she was all about.

All that to say, as far as non-noble houses went, our family library was probably among the largest and darkest. It contained a great breadth of works on esoteric knowledge, especially pertaining to Fate and Time, as mandated by my CYOA. I looked forward to adding to it in time.

But for now, I could only take and learn from the treasures of seven families.

In front of me was a book titled Divination through the Ages: A brief exploration of the art throughout history. It wasn't a grimoire, a magic book, but it was an excellent primer on what the art could be when its potential was fully realized.

It detailed the different ways the Sight had been used across the millennia, from Egyptian priests who made predictions using the entrails of sacrificial animals to the centaurs who looked to the stars for guidance. It taught me about the lives of the most famous seers in history, from Cassandra of Troy to Michel de Nostredame. Admittedly, it seemed somewhat lacking in eastern divination practices, but it was just one book among many.

The big takeaway seemed to be the lack of a distinct medium. Tea leaves? Fine for vague premonitions. Crystal ball? It was among the more reliable mediums. Corbin picked up one of those from the CYOA and it was lying around the manor somewhere. Tarot cards? Great for more personal fortunes, though admittedly open to interpretation. Entrails? Messy, but the value of a blood sacrifice couldn't be disregarded entirely. Planetary alignments? Excellent for global events and heralding grand climaxes in the play woven by Fate, but not so much for individuals.

Seeing how I actually had a crystal ball and the journal of the man who made it, I decided to start with that. I found it rolling around in what used to be my father's office, mine now. It had belonged to some unknown master perhaps centuries before my time.

It was one of the items that Corbin had saved from the CYOA, an orb which could be used as a medium for traditional fortune-telling and also had the unique ability to see into the dreams of anyone who was sleeping, provided the user knew who they were looking for.

According to Divination through the Ages, the hardest part of divination was starting out. No one was quite sure how to "open the eye" as it were. The Greeks drugged priestess-hopefuls with potions, a few magic and most just narcotic, to try and hear the voice of Apollo. Other cultures could be even more brutal, with dangerous fasts and self-flagellation in the name of letting go of mortal attachments being quite common. Hell, details were sparse but the book even touched upon the spirit-walks that prospective shamans went on in North America.

Suffice to say, the process of opening the inner eye could be extremely dangerous, especially for children. And that was if a prospective seer had the Sight in the first place. Since there was no real way to be sure until it happened, the whole trial could be a colossal waste of time. It certainly explained why divination was described as "wooly" at best even by accomplished witches and wizards like McGonagall. It wasn't that they dismissed its existence, but that they doubted anyone's ability to truly master the Sight to any usable degree.

Thankfully, I'd already awakened the Sight, and in a way that was on par with some of the methods explored by those ancient cultures. I grimaced as my nerves reminded me of the magical burns that had yet to heal. If there was one silver lining that came out of my Worst Day Ever, it was a pre-awakened Sight.

My readings on the subject taught me that there wasn't any single surefire method to learning the art, which explained why Trelawney's class felt so scattered in the movies and books. Some people had an easier time with tea leaves, others with tarot cards or oracle bones.

So, seeing how there wasn't a strict study guide available to me, I decided to start as sequentially as possible. Contrary to common misconceptions, divination was not fortune-telling. Fortune-telling was just one aspect of a much broader branch of magic. Divination was in fact the art of gathering information via magical means. Both the point me and homenum revelio spells were examples of wanded divination. Hell, Dumbledore's pensive was a divination artifact much like my crystal ball.

I tossed out any notion of seeing the future; the complexities of divining countless futures for the most likely outcome wasn't worth it. A mere three seconds could give me a migraine with enough use. Anything long-term was out of my reach until I got stronger.

Instead, I chose to approach this by looking to the past. Postcognition, or psychometry if you bought into ESP terminology, was the art of reading the "history" of an object. Shirou Emiya's structural grasp was an example. I figured that if the future was wooly because there were too many variables, pericognition, knowledge of the present, would be more complicated than postcognition for the same reason. Things that already happened were set in stone, there could be only one answer, while things that were still ongoing could be influenced by outside factors I either hadn't taken into account yet or lacked the ability to perceive.

I stared deeply into the crystal ball and tried to trigger that same feeling of seeing. On the table beside it was a deck of chocolate frog cards, old-Blaise had taken to collecting them for lack of anything else to do. At first, I failed to use my power. Or rather, I succeeded but only in seeing a few seconds into the future. Since there was no one else in the room and nothing was in motion, all I accomplished was to slightly slow my perception of the passage of time.

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I kept at it for hours, taking a BLT in my room thanks to the helpful little bugger that was Pocky the house elf.

Then I felt it. The sensation of my magic connection to the crystal ball was impossible to put to words. It was no wonder divination instructions sounded so haphazard. The best analogy I could make was that I was now aware of something that wasn't directly connected to my body yet still resonated with me as well as my own hand.

See? It sounded stupid.

But regardless of my own tenuous grasp on the English language, I now had a tether to the crystal ball. I peered into its core and tried to visualize the deck of cards right next to me. The crystal began to fog up, filling with a silvery-white mist that obscured its center. I wondered what it was. The pensive drew silvery memories. The patronus likewise manifested as silvery mist. Was it a coincidence or was the crystal being filled with the magical manifestation of my own memories?

I tabled the question for now. The fog began to clear as I envisioned the deck of cards. One by one, I began to guess at the top card, then the next.

"Agatha Hopkirk," I tried. She was a sorceress who established the very first news outlet in the British Isles according to her chocolate frog card, the very same that would eventually rebrand as the Daily Prophet.

I flipped the physical deck next to me, only to find a copy of Meriwether Lewis, the famous explorer of Lewis and Clark fame. Turned out, guy was a wizard and magizoologist who did much to catalog the magical beasts found in North America. There were loads of rumors about him, from him having a thunderbird familiar to discovering ancient tombs and treasures. Ilvermorny apparently counted him as one of their greatest alumni, their very own, real-life Indiana Jones.

"Fuck," I swore. As interesting as his chocolate frog card was, I'd been guessing, not relying on my power.

This had seemed like an excellent way to practice postcognition. A math professor at my college told me once that there were more permutations of a single deck of playing cards than there were known stars in the universe. I wasn't sure whether that was really true or not, but it was certainly more than I could count and that was enough. Old-Blaise had far more than fifty-two unique chocolate frog cards.

I mixed the deck again. There was nothing I would do from this point to alter the permutation. Therefore, by using the crystal ball to determine the sequence of these cards, I was effectively looking into the past, the "history" of these cards.

I pulled out some quill and parchment and began again. This time, I did my best to strengthen the connection and imagined the cards flipping over. In response to my desires, the top card on the deck reflected in the fog lifted itself, revealing the face of a world-famous alchemist. Nicholas Flamel, a particularly rare card. I scribbled my answer.

Then Oliver Cromwell, an idiot with delusions of grandeur whose card was more a mockery of his life than homage to it. Samuel Longbottom. Monica Avery. Sophia Bones.

One by one I drew from the hazy illusion until I had nothing left to draw. Then I took the physical deck and flipped the top card. The solemn face of Nicholas Flamel brought a smile to my face, perhaps the first since Portugal.

Oliver Cromwell. Samuel Longbottom… One by one, I checked the accuracy of my postcognition.

I wasn't always right. Out of the seventy or so cards, roughly a quarter of my predictions were wrong. The deeper into the deck of cards, the more frequent my mistakes.

I leaned back into my chair after marking my answers. "Question is, is it because my connection to the orb fluctuates like radio static? Or am I running out of magic? Maybe my inner eye isn't open fully yet and I can only look so far?"

I gathered the cards and split them in two piles before forming a riffle bridge. The college librarian life was quiet and I'd taken to practicing a lot of different hobbies during the late night shifts, card tricks just happened to be one of them. After a few rounds, I cut the deck and began again. If Healer Alvarez was right and magic was like a muscle, I'd be sure to exercise it as much as I could.

X

I did nothing else but work on my burgeoning Sight for four days. The crystal ball was a godsend, the beginner's guide and crutch to an otherwise deeply metaphysical art. By the end of my little training spree, I could more or less observe any material so long as I could envision it. If it existed, and lacked any ongoing variables, it was a simple matter to obtain the information I desired.

I'd also taken to practicing my precognition, limited as it was, as often as possible. The brain of a human child was filled with neurons. As the child learned, the brain pruned itself, strengthening and focusing connections that were frequently used while discarding those that were not. This process of growth and optimization was called neuroplasticity. I had no idea if magic worked in the same manor, but I did know that magical affinities were a thing. If at all possible, I wanted to strengthen my affinity towards divination in any way I could.

In order to not be bored out of my skull, I came up with a number of different exercises such as trying to catch a butterfly with my bare hands using foresight alone. That particular challenge was especially difficult considering I'd shiver and seize up from my recovering nerves every few minutes. I hoped that with time, what was currently an active ability would become a passive warning system.

I wanted my own haki, damn it.

I was learning too fast, far faster than anyone should when exploring such a wooly art without a single teacher to guide me. I attributed my growth rate to my Fate and Time affinities, as well as the Esoteric Knowledge perk.

My stay in Zabini Manor wasn't all sunshine and rainbows however. I'd yet to see my mother even once since coming home. I wasn't sure what a professional socialite and infamous black widow did to pass the time, but it sure as hell wasn't spending time with her son.

"No, this is a good thing," I told myself. There was the teenage son in me who sorely longed for a relationship with Valencia Zabini, even knowing what she was. There was also the detached reincarnator in me who couldn't be happier. Money, space, a house elf to cater to my whims, and the freedom to pursue my own interests. Those should have been fair trades.

So why did old-Blaise insist it felt hollow?

The crystal ball had a secondary function beyond acting as a general divination medium. It was a masterwork created by some ancestor of mine, the same man who'd go on to study the effect of magic on subconscious memories, impressions, and emotions. Or to be specific, dreams.

The ball had the power to scry dreams. According to my ancestor's journal, a true master-such as himself of course-humility was a foreign concept in my family, could use it to directly influence the dreams of others, or simply to pass them messages or flashes of "inspiration."

When I got to reading that bit, I just had to try it. So, I soldiered on despite my increased need to sleep, told Pocky to not wake me in the morning, and tried to scry the dreams of the only other person in the house.

Never. Again.

I learned a great deal about my mother and step-dad-number-two. I learned that Valencia Zabini remembers her husbands fondly, enough to dream about them. I learned that step-dad-number-two liked to be tied up in bed. I learned that the eighty-two year old man needed some… enhancements… to perform. And that, yes, it was in fact possible to overdose on said enhancements and orgasm so hard you died of a heart attack.

I learned my mother wore the prettiest smile as she watched her husband froth at the mouth and release inside her one last time.

That was how I found out that Valencia Zabini didn't just kill because she craved power. No, my mother was a base creature and talks about power and realpolitik were but a cover for her psychotic proclivities. Like any true spider, she enjoyed the kill. She felt alive in her husband's final moments. The sheer, unadulterated delight and fond reminiscence filled her dream like a gunshot in the silence as she came on a dying man's cock. The smile of pure rapture was likely the single most genuine expression I'd ever seen on her.

Valencia Zabini was a monster.

Never. Again.

X

Pocky, the cherubic house elf that she was, allowed me to sleep in. I retired at roughly two in the morning so I woke up after a full twelve hours well into the afternoon. The first thing I did was take a long shower. I felt dirty having seen that, not because I had any compunctions about privacy, if I did I wouldn't have tried to scry dreams in the first place, but because Valencia Zabini was a truly revolting existence. Gilded and beautiful, but irredeemably evil.

When I stumbled downstairs into my new study, Pocky appeared with the crack of poprocks and sank into a bow.

She was a short, thin creature, as all house elves were. It was impossible to tell her age beyond "not as old as Kreacher," and that only because she didn't look like a shriveled scrotum with eyes. Mother saw fit to give her a longer pillowcase with floral prints that she wore as a knee-length dress.

She remained in that bow and in my recently awoken haze it took me a moment to remember why. Mother was one of those rich bitches who believed "the help" should not be heard, preferably not seen either unless strictly necessary. She wouldn't speak at all unless I addressed her first.

"Good morning, Pocky," I greeted her as affably as I could. "Please stand."

"Good morning, Master Blazey," she said. She stood but made sure not to look me in the eyes, another of mother's rules. "Does Mastery Blazey be needing lunch?"

"Yes, I'll take my meal here, please."

"What does Master Blazey be wanting?"

"Just a sandwich is fine." I told her. She remained and I realized I hadn't specified what kind. "Turkey, provolone, gherkin, onion, and watercress. Thank you, Pocky."

"Yes, Master Blazey, right away."

I chuckled as she popped away. She'd been calling me "Master Blazey" for as long as I could remember. One of these days, I'd figure out where that ridiculous quirk of house elves came from.

I ate and went about packing for school. Like every other first year, Blaise had of course received a letter some weeks ago, way back before I'd landed in this body. With the formal acceptance letter came a list of materials required by the school.

One of the major benefits of not being a muggleborn was that I could ignore most of the list. Cauldron? Scales? Telescope? Glass phials? I had those lying around. Mother sold practically everything held by her husbands, but that didn't mean things didn't pile up, especially things that were just not worth the bother of selling. All I really needed at Diagon Alley was a wand, uniform, schoolbooks, and perhaps an owl for myself.

I figured that was a good thing. Mother was rich; I received an allowance. Sure, it was a respectable amount, but I didn't doubt I'd find ways to burn through it quickly. The more I could save now, the better.

I informed Pocky that I'd be eating out in Diagon someplace for dinner and made for the floo.

"Welp… So it begins…"

Author's Note

I have no idea what divination training would look like. On the plus side, neither does JKR, which means I can bullshit as much as I damn well please.

Facts... Umm... In traditional Chinese philosophy, there are five elements: fire, water, earth, wood, and metal. Out of everything in creation, it is the peach tree that is considered to possess all five elements in perfect harmony. The wood has been used as staves by traveling monks to ward off evil and the fruit features prominently in myth as the Peaches of Immortality raised in the garden of the Queen Mother of the West.

Thank you for reading. To reach a wider audience, and because I enjoy a more forum-like setup to facilitate discussion, I like to crosspost to a wide variety of websites. You can find them all on my Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/fabled.webs.