Hermione sat in her sequestered cssroom, away from the prying eyes of cssmates and faculty alike, having found a rudimentary albeit inefficient method of enchanting and draining her core so the ritual would give her the full benefits. At a dead end without more information on how to proceed safely, Hermione had turned her attention to more esoteric knowledge not taught in Hogwarts.
This shift in focus had brought her to a new question, one that had wormed its way into her mind through countless observations in magical texts and traditions: Why was the number seven so powerful?
“Seven is everywhere in magic,” Hermione muttered, her quill tapping absently against the parchment. “Seven years at Hogwarts. Seven core subjects. Seven as the maximum division of a soul for a Horcrux. What makes it different from six or eight?”
Her notes sprawled across the table in an untidy script, littered with diagrams and hastily drawn references from magical texts. Numerology had long held that seven was the most magical number, but the expnations she’d found in her studies cked depth. Hermione wanted something concrete—something rooted in the fundamental ws of magic itself.
Hermione’s thoughts turned to numerology’s use in spell-crafting. It wasn’t just a tool for divination but a framework for understanding magic’s structure. Spells often relied on specific numerical patterns, their success tied to the vibrations those numbers supposedly emitted. Numerology theorized that numbers resonated with unique frequencies, shaping reality through unseen harmonics.
But what did “vibration” mean in practical terms?
“Things that vibrate,” Hermione murmured, “do so at set frequencies. Sounds, light, even matter itself vibrates. So, if numbers corresponded to frequencies, could the number seven’s importance be tied to its resonance?”
The question made her pause. Vibrations implied a physical or metaphysical property—a frequency embedded in the fabric of magic itself. Was seven special because its frequency aligned with something fundamental in the magical world?
Hermione closed her eyes and occluded her mind, drawing on fragments of her past life. Her memories were incomplete, but a faint recollection stirred: fractals.
“Fractals,” she said aloud, the word clicking into pce like a key in a lock. Fractals were infinite patterns that repeated on smaller and smaller scales, their structure defined by mathematical equations. The idea of recursion—processes that repeated within themselves—seemed almost magical in its elegance.
Hermione grabbed a clean sheet of parchment and began sketching.
Fractals relied on simple equations to create infinitely complex structures. In one of her university csses, she had learned about the Mandelbrot set, defined by the equation:
Zn+1 = Zn2 + C
where z and c were complex numbers. The results of the equation repeated endlessly, creating self-simir patterns that were simultaneously infinite and finite.
“Could magic work the same way?” Hermione wondered, her quill scratching against the parchment. If fractals described infinite complexity in mathematics, perhaps the number seven described a simir process in magic.
She began to connect the idea of fractals to the dimensions of reality:Hermione drew a new diagram, belling seven points in a recursive loop.
Height (Dimension 1): The vertical axis. Magic occupies space, stretching upward.Width (Dimension 2): The horizontal axis. Magic spreads outward, creating barriers or zones of influence.Depth (Dimension 3): The z-axis, penetrating into objects or spaces, yering effects.Time (Dimension 4): The temporal dimension, allowing magic to persist, adapt, or decay over time.“These are the physical dimensions,” Hermione murmured, underlining the first four. “They anchor magic in reality.”
But the remaining dimensions transcended the physical.
Intent (Dimension 5): Magic as an extension of will. The caster’s emotional resonance and focus determine a spell’s form and potency.Energy (Dimension 6): The raw magical energy fueling spells, drawn from the caster’s reserves or ambient magic in the environment.Essence (Dimension 7): The universal constant of magic—the connection between individual spells and the greater magical field.Or was essence the soul? She knew souls existed, for a couple of reasons—for one, ghosts existed, so therefore so did the soul. And let’s not even get into how she was here. Was the essence described in magic the same as in philosophical and religious traditions, or was it a separate entity? Essence doesn’t grow; it just is, while a soul can grow but houses the essence. This raised some questions: if the soul was the container for essence (which made more sense considering how she came to be Hermione), did Voldemort think they were separate and that the essence was stored within the mind? Is that why he delved into splitting his soul, or did he not grasp this concept?
She chewed her lip thoughtfully. Voldemort had fragmented his soul so carelessly, so violently. Did he truly understand what he was doing? Psychopaths cked empathy, but that wasn’t enough to expin such profound disregard for his own being.
Her quill hovered over the parchment as a new thought struck her: what if he didn’t believe in the soul at all?
Hermione's mind fshed to an old text she had read in her past life: The Dark Side: The Dark Tetrad of Personality, Supernatural, and Scientific Belief. The study had shown that religious belief predicted reduced psychopathy. The more someone believed in higher powers or metaphysical consequences, the less likely they were to exhibit psychopathic traits.
“Voldemort didn’t believe in anything beyond himself,” she muttered. “No gods. No consequences. He rejected death and connection, treating the soul like a trinket to be carved up and hoarded.”
It made sense. Without belief, there was no fear of consequence—no higher order to answer to. Voldemort’s rejection of moral and magical ws stemmed not from strength, but from emptiness. The only thing he believed and feared was Death.
The thought chilled her. If Voldemort truly believed the soul was just an extension of his mind, then he would see no issue with splitting it. To him, the soul wasn’t sacred. It wasn’t him. It was expendable.
Hermione wrote furiously:
Did Voldemort disregard the distinction between soul and essence?If essence is immutable, does it remain intact when the soul is split?Did his ck of belief allow him to act without fear of spiritual consequences?She stared at her notes, her hand trembling slightly. Voldemort hadn’t just defied the natural order—he had denied it.
This expined a lot. People who read the phrase in religious texts, especially Christianity, which would have been the predominant religion when Tom was a child in Britain, believe that essence is immutable. But this referred to God’s essence, as described in Exodus 3:14.
What if, in his hubris, he believed all religions held the same belief and that previous wizards who had dabbled in dark magic had fallen in line with these views? He might have never considered the philosophical interpretations from other cultures: “Essence is immutable, meaning it cannot be changed or broken down into its parts while remaining the same essence.” The key phrase was “while remaining the same.” It was possible to break it, but it would change and warp into something else.
Voldemort was no longer Tom Riddle, not as he had been, but a broken, warped version of himself.
Hermione considered the way the Headmaster talked about Tom in the films she could recall—it was always with pity, as if he knew the terrible consequences that Tom had suffered from his hubris. She thought of Dumbledore’s words, of how he had described Voldemort’s transformation: “He was no longer human enough to die.”
“It’s like he didn’t think it mattered,” Hermione whispered, “as if he knew the terrible consequences he would suffer from his hubris... and chose to ignore them.”
Or, a cold voice in her mind suggested, “Perhaps he believed the consequences made him stronger.” followed by another even colder thought "How easy his Hurbis destroyed him, what will yours do?"
