A week had passed since his chat with Daphne, to say it was eye opening would be an understatent. He knew that magic could be used to make different types of magical oaths, as well as to bind others to another from his conversation with Bloodmoon during the sumr.
But he had never realized that magic would create debts by its own unwritten rules of seeking a balance. Fortunately for him, Daphne was willing to fill in the gaps that Bloodmoon missed or had overlooked the previous sumr, and had explained that magic itself was more like a primal force. That it always worked to create a balance, that it was neither living nor dead, not good or evil, it just simply existed.
Therefore magic, by its own unwritten laws of seeking a balance, creates 'life debts' between individuals as a reward for saving another person's life at the risk of their own life without any thought of reward. Of course, by this magical law you couldn't create or engineer a dangerous situation in the hope of gaining a reward; the possible debt under those circumstances would be forfeited due to your own involvent and culpability. Naturally, you could lie and trick the individual to achieve the sa results, but magic itself would not enforce the debt.
In short, youcouldn't have any role in setting the events into motion and your actions had to be selfless and pure in the saving, hence making a true 'life debt' a rather rare thing.
A natural extension of this is that a healer couldn't receive a life debt for treating the dying or the sick, due to it being their job to heal. The sa went for aurors since they were charged with the duty of protecting their fellow magicals from danger, it was what they were paid to do after all. Both positions, by their very nature, invalidated the selfless and pure motivation required for the saving.
Naturally this led to him having dozens of questions on the subject, trying to gain a greater understanding about life debts and the complex magic behind them. In short, he lived up to his Ravenclaw reputation quite well, however Daphne knew better than to allow him to get on a roll with his questioning, and had instead pointed him towards the bookshelves of the school library and stated rather coldly, "Look it up for yourself, I'm not an encyclopaedia," thus ending any thoughts he had of quizzing her endlessly.
Letting the matter drop for a bit, he carried on reading before asking several careful questions testing the proverbial waters. Eventually Daphne reluctantly admitted that she didn't really know, "This is all mainly speculation, wizards and witches from the start of ti have tried to define exactly what magic is, before the druids finally settled on the general idea of it being a balancing force. And this idea and concept behind the life debt, was accepted as the best answer available to them."
The only real thing he could say to that was, "interesting," but that was an understatent in itself. After all it was a bit like the debate surrounding the big bang theory for the creation of the universe, no one really knew for sure, it was just based on the visual evidence available. In the end, it was just like all other theories floating around trying to explain away sothing beyond our current understanding, all designed to give people so asure of comfort and semblance of control.
"Most wizards and witches just accept that magic exists, without question," Daphne added, whilst at the sa ti giving her own viewpoint before suddenly adding. "It's a bit like whether you believe god exists or not, you just don't know for sure, so the best thing you can do is get on with your life the best you can and not worry about it overmuch."
Smiling at Daphne's argunt, he quite agreed with the slytherin for a change, "Yea, I know what you an." Harry voiced in agreent, having already thought over the issue of religious faith, before suddenly rembering the witch hunts. "So what is the main faith then of the magical world?" he probed, wondering just what magicals believed in, because he hadn't encountered any texts on the subject of magical faith, and from what he knew of the Christian bible, witches were considered to be in league with the devil.
"Everyone is different," she answered back carefully, surprisingly diplomatic. "But most magicals don't believe in God like the muggles do. The witch hunts and being burnt at the stake saw to that, but most follow a mixture of Pagan and Christian beliefs and see magic as a primal energy, a Force, just like how muggles see their monotheistic God."
'A bit like Star Wars then,' he thought, imdiately seeing the similarities in her explanation, whilst rembering Obi-wan's talk about the force binding all living things together in Episode 4. Naturally this led to him asking about ghosts and spirits, since the castle was full of them.
He watched how the slytherin rearranged herself at this question, her shoulders becoming straighter, showing that Daphne felt far more confident and sure about this particular subject. "Ghosts are just imprints of a soul's magical energies, like an echo. These echoes remain for so unknown reason, though oftentis it's believed that they stay due to an uncompleted task that they failed to complete in life, sothing terribly important to them, consciously or unconsciously. Like a murder victim's echo staying behind, until its murderer was caught, or they received so type of justice."
Of course, this just gave him more questions to ask, but Daphne stopped him before he could get started "You have to learn for yourself what you believe in, I can't tell you. All these things are just theories that past wizards and witches have passed on. If you wish to debate this, find a theologian, or read a book'. He acknowledged this as a fair point, after all she couldn't tell him what to choose to believe, nor would he let her.
He only had one more question that he wanted to ask her, and it was about her own personal beliefs, however he resisted the urge to just blurt it out since it was a rather personal subject. Her answer was short and to the point, "I follow the beliefs and practises that my ancestors did; you could say I am a druid or a naturalist, this is one of the reasons why my family is considered dark by so. Because we don't follow the modern ideas, and still partake in traditional druidic rituals which are considered dark by so of the 'lighter' families."
He nodded in acceptance, it was a reasonable explanation. After all no one ever had the definitive right answer when it ca to these things like this. This was probably the reason why he leaned more towards cold logic and science to dictate his actions, even if that had been thrown significantly off balance with the discovery of magic this past sumr, which defied rational logic and reasoning most of the ti.
Now he was faced with the problem of what to do about Penny and Hermione, and their respective life debts. After all based on how Daphne had explained it to him, it would appear both of them had a debt to both him and Neville, and possibly Ron as well in Penny's case.
Since he wasn't the reason why Penny was there and thus her life threatened, it was possible a life debt had been created; Penny was there trying to calm Hermione down due to her duties as a school prefect. He wasn't too sure if Neville had his own life debt with Hermione, since his actions or lack thereof, could have caused Hermione to be put into that dangerous situation in the first place.
Sure, Ron was the source of the problem with his bullying of Hermione, which had lead to Penny being in that bathroom in the first place to comfort the Gryffindor, but the issue was magic didn't think that far ahead. It was simple, Ron had, in so small part, saved her life. aning he had so type of hold on her, even if it was only a partial one at best. Even then, that debt could have been forfeited when he refused to get her help that night, but there was no way to know for sure.
'Damn,' life debts were so awfully confusing and nebulous things, he ntally ranted.
He could just forget about it and hope for the best, but as Daphne had explained, the 'debt' being left unfulfilled could influence the person in many unforeseen ways. Such as Penny being incredibly helpful, far more than what normally would be expected from soone. It also ant that if he was ever in a life or death situation, Penny would be compelled to risk her own life for his.
Simply put, she would take a killing curse for him without hesitation, simply due to the debt demanding equal paynt. Therefore debts could be very dangerous if left unresolved. And he didn't particularly like the idea of one of his good 'friends' endangering themselves for him, due solely to so magical debt influencing their judgent and actions.
Thankfully, previous generations of wizards and witches, through trial and error, had developed ways to cancel out such debts, since money fails to solve this type of problem.
After all, pureblood wizards didn't want their children staying indebted to other families of lesser stock and 'breeding,' especially rivals ones as the debt could be easily turned against them. A son or daughter with such a debt could be compelled to betray their own family's secrets if their 'saviour' demanded such action in paynt.
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