The throbbing of my hand woke me the next morning. Moving my body I deduced that my ankle was doing ok and my shoulder wasn't in danger of being dislocated by a sneeze anymore.

The wounds on my hand clearly showed someone or something had tried to bite it off, sighing I took out some bandages and wrapped both my arms to the shoulders.

"This actually looks cool," I remarked to myself after looking in the mirror I had protruding from my closet door.

Satisfied that no one would get a heart attack by bursting into my room I sat on the circular window still and started practising fire.

After I was done I didn't really know what to do. Before this, there had always been just one more magical item to grind my skill on and I didn't feel comfortable going out to run for physical training yet. My ankle still wailed in quiet agony whenever I walked on it.

I took out my journal and a pencil set the tip on the paper and.

Couldn't decide what to draw.

I closed my eyes and got a sudden flashback of the redcap lying dead on the floor unrecognisable face staring into the forest canopy.

A fleeting smile flickered on my face, that would do.

-/-

Moving everywhere using stealth was annoying, but worth it.

In just three weeks the level of the skill had risen by two.

The experience gain of my other skills, fire mastery was glacial at best though.

I grinned at my pun and started running.

Percy was gone visiting a friend or something, he had left Scabbers in his room with the window open. It had been fairly easy to get my grubby little hands on a certain potion, my twin brothers had been secretly brewing it in their room after all, I had simply walked in and taken it.

In the future, doing so would be much harder since they would receive wands, ward and trap their room, especially after this theft.

But I had needed the confusion potion for my plan.

A plan that was about to be put into action.

Percy really should be more careful about where he left his rat's water bottle, some insidious individual could lace it with something uncomfortable.

I entered Percy's room imposingly and spoke in my best imitation of the dark lord.

"Wormtail, come out!" The rat froze in its tracks and looked at me, looking ready to bolt.

"I have marked you as my servant even if you run, you cannot hide." I put on my most impressive sneer. Suffice to say it wasn't very impressive, having a boys face didn't help in that regard.

Seemingly willing to go along with my acting Wormtail went through his transformation and tried to kiss my feet, good survival instincts. I was impressed that he was able to make such a clear decision even through his confusion addled mind.

I kicked him away harshly, I may not be strong in this body but Peter had lived his last years as a rat he hardly had the strength to contest me.

He glanced at me confusedly, not only from the potion, but from my actions as well. Voldemort probably enjoyed having his feet kissed, it might explain why he had no heirs.

Ignoring the apparent oddity Peter started to babble.

"My lord you survived, I am ashamed of not recognising you. I always believed you were alive please let me serve you once more!" he said while not looking into my eyes, trying to stop his nose from dripping blood on the floor.

"Serve me by giving me my wand fool." His eyes widened and he started shaking in fear, probably thinking he had committed some sacrilege by daring to take my wand from the Potter home. Ahem. Voldemort's wand.

"Do not worry, I am grateful that you kept it safe, you shan't be punished, you will be rewarded even." My consoling voice didn't really sound good, but I was fairly sure the man was scared shitless and wouldn't notice.

His trembling hands reached into his frayed muggle clothes and almost reverently took out a bone white wand. For a second I was afraid he was going to point it at me and kill my ass, but he simply held it aloft and handed it over it.

I only felt a minor feeling of warmth from the wand as I clasped it in my palm, I imagined this meant we weren't really suited to each other.

"Turn back into your rat form and do what you have done for the last years, you will receive further orders tomorrow," I grinned down at the wand in my hand, evilly! "There are some things that need to be done now that I have access to my full power again."

I didn't wait for him to acknowledge my orders, I simply left the room and shut the door behind me.

I was fairly sure I didn't imagine the sounds of crying.

Later at night, I used my eleven levels in stealth to sneak into Percy's room.

I halted momentarily before Wormtail's sleeping form, asking myself if I really wanted to do this, then I plunged the knife down.

The elaborate plan to get the wand had been necessary because when an animagus died while in their animal form, they stayed that way and the items they had with them were lost to the void.

I opened the window and leaving the room took the rat corpse with me, I checked for blood stains, none whatsoever, good.

Percy would think Scabbers had escaped through the window that he had forgotten to close. It wasn't really an impressive murder, but I was fairly proud of myself for planning it out so well.

I had been fairly uncertain but then I realised something.

I wanted the wand, no, I needed the wand, once I had unlocked the fire sorcery skill I had tried to wandlessly summon something.

It didn't work, I tried lifting something with magic.

It didn't work.

I don't know if I had an affinity with fire or a negative one with telekinesis but I had a theory.

Wizards could learn wandless magic, after a bit of research I found out that most wandless magic was obtained through mastering a spell to a degree that one could use it without a wand.

What I had been doing with my fire was sorcery, manipulation of magical energy without the help of a medium.

What a wand did in response to an incantation and wand gesture was interesting and debatable, the strongest theory available was that it produced a weave.

Once you become practised at a spell you could cast silently, the step after that was casting without a wand gesture, the step after that was to forsake the wand in the entire process.

I didn't know if a spell could be done without an incantation at all.

What I wanted to learn was a wandless accio so that if I ever lost my wand in a fight or something it wouldn't be an automatic death sentence. And for that I needed a want to learn the spell with in the first place.

"accio"

The pebble I had wanted to summon wobbled a bit and I felt my magic deplete to a low never felt before.